Representations of Moral Paradigms in Contemporary Arab Thought: Anxiety over the Precursors to Modernity

Abstract

This paper argues that contemporary Arab thought on morality lacks independence and a productive horizon, adopting the Western model in form and content, accepting it unquestioningly as a foundational premise. This implies that Arab thought has lacked an answer to ethical questions since ancient times, and remains silent today in the face of questions over humanity and values, even as the era of science and technology makes ethical crises ever more complex and standards narrow to the point of vanishing. Arab thought has thus hit an impasse, focused on an imagined identity with two sides: a traditionalist aspect, repeating and clinging to the past, and a modernist face that presents the Western alternative with its historical weight, balanced by standards of rationality and humanity. In this context, ethical identity becomes illusory and imagined and thought takes place only in a void filled exclusively by Western ideas of ethics. This becomes more troubling and complex if we consider the ontological content of Arab civilizational history and the Western "other", as there is no substantive congruence between them, given their respective civilizational contexts. This has caused cognitive and existential anxiety within the Western periodization of self-history: pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity; these Western civilizational stages differ historically and substantively from their Arab-Islamic civilizational temporal contexts.