Self-Criticism After the Defeat by Sadik Al-Asm

Description

Watan offers a curated selection of used Palestinian books, ranging from works of non-fiction to prose, poetry to novels, and more. This offering is an extension of our Palestinian Women's Library (available for free use at our Orland Park location). The 1967 War—which led to the defeat of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt by Israel—felt like an unprecedented and unimaginable disaster for the Arab world at the time. For many, the easiest solution was to shift the blame and to ignore some of the glaring defects of Arab society. Hailed as one of the foremost Arab intellectuals of recent decades, Sadik al-Azm was one of the few to challenge such a view in his seminal Self-Criticism After the Defeat . In it, he offered a penetrating analysis that probed deep into Arab society, and reasoned that Arabs had to embrace democracy, gender equality, and science to achieve progress. Self-Criticism After the Defeat represents a milestone in modern Arab intellectual history. It marked a turning point in Arab discourse about society and politics on publication in 1968, and spawned other intellectual ventures into Arab self-criticism. This is the first translation of the work into English.