Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Cultural malaise and cultural identity in twentieth-century western, postcolonial, and Arab debates -- The first modern Arab cultural Renaissance or Nahda : from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century -- Critique after the 1967 defeat -- The existential dramatization of critique the day after the defeat : Saadallah Wannous's theatrical oeuvre -- Humanistic nationalism and critical reason : Qustantin Zurayq -- The critique of religious-metaphysical thought : Sadeq Jalal al-Azm -- The critique of ideology and historicization : Abdallah Laroui -- Gendering critique : Nawal el-Saadawi and the late-twentieth-century Arab feminists -- The radicalization of critique and the call for democracy : reclaiming the individual's critical faculties -- Marxist, epistemological, and psychological readings of major conferences on cultural decline, renewal, and authenticity -- The Cairo Conference of 1971 : authenticity and renewal in contemporary Arab culture -- The Kuwait conference of 1974 : the crisis of civilizational development in the Arab homeland -- The Cairo Conference of 1984 : heritage and the challenges of the age in the Arab homeland : authenticity and contemporaneity -- Critique in these conferences : the fixation on tradition and the intellectualization of the malaise -- Critique in Islamic theology -- From the unthought and the unthinkable to the thinkable : Mohammed Arkoun -- The historicity of revelation and the struggle for thought in the time of Anathema : Nasr Hamid abu Zayd -- Feminist historicization of religious traditions : Nazira Zain al-Din, Fatima Mernissi, and Leila Ahmed -- An Islamic theology of liberation : the Islamic left of Hassan Hanafi -- A Christian Arab theology of liberation : Naim Ateek and Mitri Raheb in Palestine-Israel -- On the potential for critique in traditional Islam : Talal Asad's analysis of the public criticism by Ulemas in Saudi Arabia -- Islamic critique and the cultural malaise -- Secular critique -- Critique of the exclusive monopoly over true Islam : Farag Fouda -- The importance of keeping the debate on the human level : Fouad Zakariyya -- Critique of the essentialist and romantic conception of identity : Aziz al-Azmeh -- Critique of the Islamicization of knowledge and the quest for an indigenous social science : Bassam Tibi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Hisham Sharabi -- Critique of the conciliatory pattern of thinking : Muhammad Jaber al-Ansari, Hisham Sharabi, and Nadeem Naimy -- Secularism, democracy, and cultural critique -- Recentering the historical, the human, and the partial : the secular call for democracy and human rights -- Breaking the postcolonial solitude : Arab motifs in comparative perspective -- The western debates -- The non-western postcolonial debates -- Common leitmotivs and Arab specificities -- Shifting priorities -- Conclusion: The new Nahda impulses, reclaiming the right to freedom and life.