The Political Unbound: Conservative Arab Thought after Islam

Critiques of religion in Arab political life have long been framed as a project of the left. Since the uprisings of 2011, however, the most forceful critics of theology’s presence in politics have been conservatives. This article reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari. Revisiting the intellectual and historical context of the 1990s, it advances a new genealogy of conservative Arab political thought, one that saw in all transcendental and religious identifications not only the dangers of revolution but also a forfeiture of politics itself. In decoupling conservatism from Islam, the article advances an understanding of conservatism as both contingent and structural, or permanent in its formal presence but not necessarily in content, to suggest that histories of conservatism not only provide resources for a better understanding of the present, but also can complement the task that radical and ecumenical accounts of the Arab past have long pursued in disputing the religious or cultural nature of conservatism. In that sense, intellectual history of secular conservatism is important not because it is more or less dominant than theologically inflected varieties of it today, but because of how it might help free the historian from the need to restrict her endeavour to the correction of essentialist misrepresentation and to write histories where contingency is assumed rather than histories whose burden it has been to prove it.