Vortrag: Dr. Idriss Jebari (Beirut)

Venue: Edmund-Rumpler-Str. 13, Room B 117

A lecture in the frame of the LMU Institute Research Workshop "Paradigm Change in the Near and Middle East" (more).

North Africa represents a fascinating challenge to the theoretical literature on the production, circulation and reception of knowledge in the human sciences. Traditionally, its geographical and intellectual location between the Arab-Islamic and the Western centers has been at the source of its "peripherization" or state of inferiority. Yet, after the country’s independence in the sixties until the eighties, a generation of young French-educated professors at the humanities faculty in Rabat wrote with increasing frequency on the epistemology of the social sciences and the humanities, at the forefront of the Arab world on such questions. They argued that Morocco’s national development was invariably impeded by the state of knowledge production, by models and bodies of knowledge inherited from the colonial period that perpetuated its innate sense of backwardness.

This paper will revisit the theory of scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts from a Southern perspective by inscribing it in a grounded historical account centering around two distinct and intertwined trajectories in Moroccan intellectual and cultural history. Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938-2009) and Abdallah Laroui (born 1933) were both French-trained and bilingual academics known for their novels and presence in the cultural scene. They also embodied a new form of radical Third World scholarship in the sixties that was methodologically rigorous but committed beyond the academic sphere. They drew on the Parisian debates of the sixties and the renewal of theory in the human sciences to question whether this theoretical toolkit applied to their local contexts. Each formulated a distinct an argument in favor of appropriation through critical assessment of concepts and existing bodies of knowledge. Their call for an epistemological rupture, a "theorization from the periphery", was destined for their national academic communities and to audiences in the Arab center, with all the difficulties this ambitious call contained.

From a theoretical perspective, these two cases will serve to question whether paradigm change only occurs organically (meaning through the accumulation of scientific observations of anomalies) or can be provoked by the critical awareness of some actors within their field after thinking about this field as a whole (from the history of its formation to a critical evaluation of its structures and functioning modes). This important chapter in the Arab cultural decolonization movement needs to be read with the Indian Subaltern School and decolonial movement in Latin America as part of a generation’s epistemological concerns and their attempts to overcome it, and what type of "localism" and conception of "circulation" emerged in response. This paper will also build on the existing literature on the "indigenization" of non-western social sciences and the emerging literature on Arab knowledge production. It questions the macro-models contained in the literature on the circulation of social sciences between core and periphery for not highlighting enough the individual strategies of resistance and appropriation that characterized the intellectual relationship between Europe and the Arab world.

Key words: Travelling concepts/theory; critical and postcolonial thought; marginal thought; emancipation; Arab knowledge production.

Idriss Jebari is a Moroccan postdoctoral fellow with the Arab Council for Social Sciences in Beirut, as well as a research fellow in the LMU "The Maghreb in Transition" project (more). After completing his doctorate on the history of the production of critical thought in Morocco and Tunisia at the University of Oxford, he is now studying the dynamics of intellectual and cultural exchanges between the Maghrib and the Mashriq in contemporary Arab thought. He has published on the intellectual projects of several North African intellectual figures and on the engagements of intellectuals in public affairs from a theoretical and practical point of view.