Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab’s Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates examines animated intellectual debates in Egypt and Syria on the concept of “enlightenment” (tanwir). Importantly, although this concept has its roots in nineteenth-century Arabic Renaissance (Nahda) discourses, Kassab stresses very clearly that neither her (nor her sources’) focus is on the transmission of the European Enlightenment to Arab sources. The influence, or echoes, of European conceptions of enlightenment is treated, rather, as one of the problems or topics in Arab debates, rather than as the framing device for Arab intellectuals’ treatment of tanwir. As such, the debates center around a set of distinct problems related to the Arab-Islamic intellectual past, the nature and sources of tanwir, the respective political commitments of the various parties, and the stakes of secular–Islamist dialogue.

Chapter 1, “Secularist, Governmental, and Islamist Tanwir Debates in Egypt in the 1990s,” focuses on three important Egyptian intellectuals and their thought from the 1990s to the wake of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and the military coup of 2013 that removed the elected Islamist president Muhammad Mursi from office. The 1990s were a particularly fraught time, with physical attacks on writers like Farag Fuda (who was killed) and the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (who survived), and legal attacks on free-thinking intellectuals like Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, who was juridically divorced from his wife and forced into European exile. In response, some Egyptian intellectuals founded such organizations as the Society for Enlightenment and new book series on modern Egyptian history. Thus, for some secular-leaning Egyptians, the response to what they perceived as Islamist obscurantism was a boosting of the concept of “enlightenment” and an attempt to enlist both the nineteenth-century Arab Renaissance (Nahda) and earlier figures like the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) in a project of touting reason against religious fanaticism. This led to a reaction on the part of some Islamist-friendly thinkers who contested both the secular nature of tanwir and the appropriation of nineteenth-century Nahda thinkers as secularists or proto-secularists. This chapter introduces the core dilemma or paradox of secular tanwiris: how to oppose what they perceive as the intellectual and political authoritarianism of Islamists without throwing in their lot with oppressive state authoritarianism. From the crackdown on Islamists in the 1990s to the brutal counterrevolutionary coup of 2013, Kassab points out that many secularist tanwiri thinkers have too easily exonerated or even endorsed the authoritarianism of the secular state so long as it was repressing Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Chapter 2, “The Deconstruction of the 1990s Egyptian Tanwir Debates by Egyptian Critics at the Turn of the Millennium,” turns to the backlash against both “governmental and Islamist tanwir discourses” (p. 38). Kassab introduces three thinkers—sociologist Mona Abaza, literary theorist Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, and historian Sherif Younis—who in different ways denounced the hypocritical, shallow, and instrumental mobilization of the idea of “tanwir,” which often amounted to little more than subservience to state repression. Kassab notes that Abaza registered the astute point that the project of state or governmental “tanwir” often went hand in hand not only with state secularism but also with the state sponsorship of particular religious authorities (such as al-Azhar and, after the 2013 coup, even ultraconservative Salafis) and of state and social repression on behalf of religious-conservative causes; for example, in the realm of sexual and gender freedoms. In Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (the professor charged by his colleagues with apostasy and forced into exile) and Sherif Younis, Kassab finds two thinkers who engage in vigorous critiques of Islamist or fundamentalist modes of thinking but resist the alternative of nationalism or siding with the state in its repression of opponents, especially Islamist ones. But Kassab points to some underlying crises faced by Egyptian secular intellectuals throughout the twentieth century: how to cope with the demand to serve the state under Nasserism, then how to deal with ideological alienation from the liberalizing Sadat regime in the 1970s that removed some of the financial support for intellectual and cultural production while expecting continued ideological support, and finally how to deal with the fact that since the 1980s much financial support for intellectual activity has come from foreign donors with their own agendas or standards of credibility. This helps explain how the democratic revolution of 2011–13 was seen as creating the conditions for new kinds of democratic forms of enlightenment and critique in which the state, Islamists, and others could all be engaged in intellectual terms without the blackmail of having to side with the state as the bulwark against religious obscurantism. Kassab here teases a future study of the continuation of the “enlightenment” debates during and after the democratic revolutions.

Chapter 3, “Tanwir Debates in Syria in the 1990s: The Sisyphean Moment,” moves to Damascus. The Syrian context includes much of the same intellectual dynamics but in conditions of far greater repression and the near-total absence of an Islamist public sphere. Thus, the primary opponent of Syrian tanwir discourses was not political Islam (which had been completely eradicated during the 1982 state massacres and subsequent repression) but state despotism, corruption, and brutality. This occurred not only in a much more restricted space for free expression but also in a context in which the state (unlike in Egypt) had no interest in fostering an “enlightened” identity for itself beyond portraying itself as the protector of Christians and Alawis against some future Islamic tyranny. This chapter focuses on a few episodes of intellectual response to the totalitarian control of the Syrian state. One long section focuses on metaphors of “darkness and light” in the writings of eight Syrian thinkers, perhaps most noteworthy of which were the Palestinian Syrian philosopher Ahmad Barqawi (who penned an essay “What is Enlightenment?”) and the well-known Sadeq al-Azm (a onetime friend and later polemical adversary of Edward Said). Another section focuses on a short-lived journal (roughly: Issues and Testimonies) that focused on questions of rationalism, democracy, modernity, modernization, the Arab Nadha, and the philosophy of history. The constant theme here is not the intellectual war with religion but the brutality and totalitarianism of the Baʿthist state.

Chapter 4, “Tanwir and the Damascus Spring at the Turn of the Millennium: The Promethean Moment,” continues this story into the brief “Damascus Spring” period after the ascension of Bashar al-Asad following the death of his father. Unlike in Egypt, where secular intellectuals constantly shifted their target of focus between Islamists and the authoritarian state and engaged in certain critical evaluations of their previous stances or alliances, Kassab observes a continuity in Syrian tanwir discourses, clearly because of the continuity of state repression and the absence of an Islamist opposition before 2011. Examining the intellectual production of the very brief Damascus Spring period (July 2000–September 2001), Kassab finds much of it cautious and moderate in tone, focusing on concepts like civil society and gradual political reform.

Kassab portrays the tanwir debates in both Syria and Egypt as a kind of response to the darkness of their times and a grasping for a kind of political humanism in the shadow of the modern history of Arab thought since the nineteenth-century Nahda and the overwhelming hegemony of state authoritarianism. At its best, Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution provides an excellent historical context to many debates and publications that scholars of contemporary Arab thought may be familiar with only as names or symbols of the marginalized secular opposition. However, the book, as a whole, reads mostly like a Who’s Who of the tanwir debates. We are told who is engaged in these debates and quite a bit about their primary political commitments, but the actual ideas at stake are mostly presented less as original or significant in themselves than as important as moves within a long-term game between the authoritarian state, progressive intellectuals, and the Islamist alternative. Nonetheless the book has considerable value as a roadmap through the published works and other efforts of dozens of late twentieth-century Egyptian and Syrian intellectuals to create sites of cultural and intellectual autonomy. Paired with the rich notes and bibliography, this book can serve as an excellent resource for scholars looking to orient themselves in an intellectual world that often gets less attention than its Islamic counterpart.