By Thomas Philipp

With translations by Hilary Kilpatrick and Paul Starkey of

Selected Writings of Jurji Zaidan With a Foreword by the Zaidan Foundation and a Preface by the Author

 

The central theme of this book is to demonstrate how Jurji Zaidan’s secular analysis of history and language influenced the evolution of his Pan-Arab nationalist thought. It traces the manifold relationships between Zaidan’s thinking as a historian, linguist and his views on Arab nationalism. The seminal contribution of this work is that it is the first to anlayze Zaidan’s thought on history, language and nationalism as an integrated whole.

 

Scope of the Volume

The volume consists of three parts. The first part is an essay that demonstrates Jurji Zaidan’s secular approach to the analysis of Arab and Islamic history and the evolution of language, especially the Arabic language. It goes on to assess how this approach influenced the secular pan-Arab nationalism that he spearheaded and which was the defining characteristic of the Nahda. The essay draws on articles published by Zaidan in Al-Hilal between 1892 and 1914 as well as his scholarly works. Thirty articles and excerpts from his scholarly works were translated for this book. They were chosen for their relevance to the topics covered in the essay. These translations are reproduced in the second section of this volume. The third section constitutes the first comprehensive bibliography of Jurji Zaidan’s works both in Arabic and all the other languages into which they have been translated over the past century as well as a list of the works about him.

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, New York, 2014. Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8156-3358-7. E-book ISBN: 978-0-8156-5271-7

 

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