New Book: Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Relying on the hypothesis that the mental preoccupation with the subject of freedom became a core issue in the construction of all modern ideologies, this book traces the semantic inflation and the extreme politicization of signifiers that indicate the concept “freedom” in Arabic during the time between the French and the British invasions of Egypt (1798–1882). The work displays the semantic evolvement of the concept of “freedom,” its ideological offshoots, their modes, and their substance as they developed in the dynamics of the Arabic language in early Ottoman Arab modernity.