Abdallah Laroui: An Intellectual in Perspective

Abstract

Shedding light on Abdallah Laroui, one of the most important contemporary Arab thinkers to date, and boasting a legacy that spans from his homeland Morocco to the Arab region as a whole, Bin Walid’s study conjures up the “grand contextual unity” of Laroui’s diverse contributions, beginning with history, his primary expertise, moving through intellectual and conceptual critique, and ending with narrative. Bin Walid demonstrates how Laroui remains relentless in his criticism of Arab intellectuals, holding them fully responsible for their conscious resignation from “saying what ought to be said” and their failure to carry out their “fundamental role” in society. Laroui, stresses the author, is steadfast in his critical approach toward the “intellectual” who fails to not only undertake the historic tasks necessary to build a modern culture that helps society live in the “era” it belongs to, but also introduce people to a “modernity” of theoretical and practical concepts that serve to link contemporary criticism with progress, rationality, freedom, secularism, and a centralized modern state. In so doing, he claims, they enable people to “cut ties with “the authenticity of jallab and couscous,” as referred to in Laroui’s book Morocco and Hassan II. The study pleads that the intellectual should not be burdened with more than he or she can bear, especially given the romantic religiosity, or rather religious romanticism, that is often attributed to intellectuals. It concludes that Laroui should not be considered an armchair revolutionary sitting comfortably secluded from the thick of it, nor merely a “committed spectator,” as Raymond Aron put it. Rather, he is a thinker who looks at things in perspective, and at a necessary distance to afford an overview of reality that is, after all, “deeply-rooted and complex.”