Abdallah Laroui and the Location of History

Nils Riecken is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ERC-funded project “Late Ottoman Palestinians: Social and Cultural Dynamics in an Eastern Mediterranean Society during the Age of Empire, 1880-1920” (LOOP) at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. Previously, he was a research associate at the Leibniz Center for Modern Orient and substituted for the Chair of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin. His research and teaching combine Arabic and Islamic studies, historical, critical, and political theory, postcolonial studies, intellectual history, and social history. His fields of work include late Ottoman statehood in Palestine, contemporary Arab philosophy (especially the work of Abdallah Laroui), Islam and modernity, historicity and temporality, postcoloniality, criticism, universalism, and subjectivity, as well as knowledge production in Arabic and Islamic studies in the context of „raison d’état.” His work has been published in Democratic Theory, Der Islam, Geschichte & Gesellschaft, History & Theory, Peripherie, and ReOrient, among others.

“Through a masterful reconstruction of Laroui's negative dialectics, Riecken demonstrates how this postcolonial theorist dismantles both Eurocentric narratives of progress and culturalist accounts of Arab-Islamic authenticity. Laroui reemerges as a crucial interlocutor for contemporary debates on decolonization, pluritemporality, and the politics of historicity—one who refuses to position Western modernity and the Islamic tradition as mutually exclusive foundations for political life. By placing colonizer and colonized, Islam and secularism, continuity and rupture within a single analytic field, Laroui's “activist epistemology” offers pathways beyond the impasses of civilizational discourse. This book reveals why Laroui's situated universalism remains essential for rethinking the grounds of democratic politics in postcolonial contexts and for developing a truly global critical theory.”- Jens Hanssen, Professor of Arab Civilization, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern History, University of Toronto, Canada; Director of the Orient Institute Beirut, Lebanon“Nils Riecken offers us the first study in English of one of the foremost contemporary Arab thinkers. The book draws on a remarkably wide-ranging global scholarship, producing a careful reading of Laroui’s oeuvre. We are offered new perspectives on some of the most burning issues of our early twenty-first century- like universality, modernity, and temporality.”- Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Professor at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

• Introduction Chapter 1: A Situated-Universalist Critique of Western Modernity Chapter 2: An Activist Historical Epistemology as Negative Dialectics Chapter 3: Historiography, Temporality, and the Ground of the Political Chapter 4: The Islamic Tradition and Heterotemporality Coda: Postfoundationalist Democracy