Dream Palace of the Arabs

Ajami is writing the story of the world of ideas in which intellectual Arabs have immersed themselves û or tried to immerse themselves û during the years more or less after World War II and the great political and cultural shifts that accompanied that act of cataclysmic violence. This century has in some ways been a time when Arabs were intellectually (and often physically) on the move.

There were Arabic magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses; there were restaurants that took their old names and recipes to distant places. There were writers and journalists and storytellers who took the memory of simpler times and places and worked over these memories in new, alien settings (Ajami, 1998, p. 6).

And the reason that there was all of this intellectual movement was not simply that Arabs had the freedom to d

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, 1890-1930 although because he is writing about the West rather than the East and the beginnings of modernism rather than its height the story that he tells is of course different in fundamental ways as well. HughesÆs work is a classic of history in a way that it is hard to imagine that AjamiÆs work will ever become. This is perhaps simply the bias that the West has for stories about itself, or the related bias in the West for tales of other places told by the natives of those places rather than by Western experts like anthropologists. But there are also key differences between the intent of the two works that come into play here. Published in 1958, Hughes was continuing a series of political and philosophical discussions that had been begun by Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim among others. He both explains the theories that these thinkers put forth and explains their continuing relevance to the world in which his readers lived and also extrapolated the theories, extended the original arguments and related them to each other and by doing so helped connect the 19th century to the 20th, which seemed in the middle decades of this century to be a difficult task indeed. Hughes shows how late modernism is connected to what c
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2224
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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