Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (PhD, Philosophy, Fribourg) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Head of Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. She is the author of Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia, 2010), which received the 2013 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Contribution to the Development of Nations, one of the most prestigious and well-funded prizes in the Arab world. Kassab has been a research fellow at Columbia (2000-2004) and a visiting professor at Columbia's Middle East Institute (2008), among other previous appointments. Her interests include modern and contemporary Arab philosophy, postcolonial cultural critique, and modern European philosophy.Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is associate professor of philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. She is the author of Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia, 2009), recipient of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award for its Arabic edition.

Yoav Di-Capua, author of No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization:
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, a leading expert on contemporary Arab thought, invites us on an extraordinary journey into the inner intellectual life of a generation on the eve of revolution. Lucid, powerful, and essential.

Michaelle Browers, author of Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation:
Kassab uncovers a rich and varied debate taking place in Arabic starting in the 1990s and centered on notions of tanwir (Enlightenment) that provides important context for understanding the Arab uprisings, particularly in Egypt and Syria, as well as for gauging their inherent possibilities, even as their full outcome yet remains unknown.

Hamid Dabashi, author of The Arab Spring: The End of Postcoloniality:
In Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab does what we always needed but lacked in our understanding of the transnational uprisings the world has known as the 'Arab Spring.' She gives eloquent and precise voice to the revolutionary reasons behind the dramatic euphoria of those massive revolts. In doing so she does more than just being a responsible and deeply informed historian of ideas. She critically pushes those ideas toward the distant boundaries of their next epistemic breakthroughs. This is a work of profound intellectual integrity by a leading Arab thinker of her generation.