Self-criticism After the Defeat

The 1967 War - which led to the defeat of Syria, Jordan and Egypt by Israel - felt like an unprecedented and unimaginable disaster for the Arab world at the time. For many, the easiest solution was to shift the blame and to ignore some of the glaring defects of Arab society. Hailed as one of the fo [...]
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The 1967 War - which led to the defeat of Syria, Jordan and Egypt by Israel - felt like an unprecedented and unimaginable disaster for the Arab world at the time. For many, the easiest solution was to shift the blame and to ignore some of the glaring defects of Arab society. Hailed as one of the foremost Arab intellectuals of recent decades, Sadik al-Azm was one of the few to challenge such a view in his seminal Self-Criticism after the Defeat. In it he offered a penetrating analysis that probed deep into Arab society, and reasoned that Arabs had to embrace democracy, gender equality and science to achieve progress. A milestone in modern Arab intellectual history, the book marked a turning point in Arab discourse about society and politics on publication in 1968, and spawned other intellectual ventures into Arab self-criticism.