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revues

Trends in Arab Thought: An Interview with Sadek Jalal al-Azm

Entretien de Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm par Abu Fakhr, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), p. 68-80.

 

 

Abu Fakhr: You have stated that one of the errors of the Left was that it neglected the importance of civil society, democracy, human rights, secularism, and so on. At present, many are giving up the mantle of Marxism and enlisting in the ranks of the secularists as though they believed secularism could serve as a shield against religious fundamentalism [salafiyya]. Where do you believe we are headed in the near future?

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Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm : Palestinian Zionism

Article de Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm paru dans Die Welt des Islams, Nr. 1/4 (1988), p. 90-98.


A basic maxim of Marxist socio-political analysis states that similar infrastructural conditions tend to produce similar superstructural phenomena. Some of us who have been in close and protracted contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), (particularly with its political militants, higher cadres and more outspoken ideologues), certainly have sensed something of the importance of this maxim, not as an abstract principle but as a concretely lived series of organically developing situations, ideas and experiences. I am referring, here, to the Palestinian comparisons drawn between the modern Jewish and Palestinian diasporas and the superstructural (particularly political) phenomena generated by them.

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Arno Schmitt: « Gay Rights versus Human Rights: A Response to Joseph Massad »

Article d’Arno Schmitt paru dans Public Culture, Vol. 15, No 3, Fall 2003, p. 587-591.

Joseph Massad’s article “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World” (Public Culture 14 [spring 2002]: 361–85) is a strange concoction. Although ostensibly against the Gay International (GI) and its view that always and everywhere there are gays waiting to be freed by U.S. organizations, Massad attacks scholars who oppose this assumption. To justify his attacks he distorts our writings.

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revues

Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm : Orientalism and orientalism in reverse

Article de Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm paru dans Khamsin. Journal of Revolutionnary Socialists of the Middle East, 8, 1981, p. 5-26

PART I. ORIENTALISM

In his sharply debated book, (1) Edward Said introduces us to the subject of ‘Orientalism’ through a broadly historical perspective which situates Europe’s interest in the Orient within the context of the general histori­cal expansion of modern bourgeois Europe outside its traditional con­fines and at the expense of the rest of the world in the form of its sub­jugation, pillage, and exploitation. In this sense Orientalism may be seen as a complex and growing phenomenon deriving from the overall historical trend of modern European expansion and involving: a whole set of progressively expanding institutions, a created and cumulative body of theory and practice, a suitable ideological superstructure with an apparatus of complicated assumptions, beliefs, images, literary pro­ductions, and rationalisations (not to mention the underlying founda­tion of commercial, economic and strategic vital interests). I shall call this phenomenon Institutional Orientalism.