Opinion | Examining the Middle East Through Mansour’s Intellectual Genealogy

When Osama bin Laden declared Jihad against the United States in 1996, he didn’t complain about American freedom and democracy; he decried US foreign policy in the Middle East. President Bush’s post-9/11 framing, that Al-Qaeda’s motivation was simple hatred of American values, was wrong. What many Westerners got right, however, was the indispensable role religious fanaticism played in turning political grievances into terror. This left two competing explanations for the deeper dysfunction driving that extremism. While the left pointed to imperialism and foreign policy—artificial borders, propped-up authoritarian regimes, wars, and broken promises—Bernard Lewis pointed to Islam’s historical inseparability from the state, which he argued locked the Muslim world into traditionalism and resentment of Western progress. By being victims of modernity or backward rejecters of it, both of these narratives portray Arabs and Muslims as subjects, rather than agents of modernization. 

But what if this entire narrative is upside-down? What if the Muslim world embraced modernity, and this embrace, not imperialism or Islam itself, is the primary cause of dysfunction in the Middle East? What if the wave of Islamist terrorism that helps define the modern political era is not a fundamentalist reaction to modernity, but a manifestation of modernity itself? This innovative hypothesis was proposed by Egyptian-American intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, particularly fleshed out in his article The Enchantment of the Arab Mind. To Mansour, neither the nature of Islamic society nor the corrupting effects of imperialism adequately explain political dysfunction in the Middle East. Instead, he points to the embrace of a particular modern European philosophical framework, carefully integrated into existing Muslim frameworks by the Arab intellectual elite, as the primary culprit. This ideological tradition was therefore not traditional and indigenous, but rather modern and European, intentionally adopted by Middle Eastern actors themselves. 

This ideological tradition, German historicism, rests on the idea of history as an unstoppable process that moves toward an ultimate destiny, contending that human activity is understood through and legitimized by history. Johann Gottfried von Herder, for example, argued that each people, or Volk, has a fundamental primordial essence and shared historical destiny. Georg W.F. Hegel elevated this idea to metaphysics, arguing that history’s ultimate destiny is the spirit’s realization of total freedom. Marx replaced Hegel’s spiritual teleology with material class struggle and placed communism as history’s final objective. Despite their differences, these thinkers shared the belief that politics serves a redemptive historical destiny. German historicism, then, made politics less about achieving individual freedom or security and more about collective action for collective redemption. Democracy was sacrificed for destiny. Compromise, for revolution. The two most prominent manifestations of this philosophy were the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. Both regimes adopted idealist ideologies of redemption that transformed their defeated countries into machines of collective economic and military mobilization, reaching toward a transcendent, almost eschatological goal in which history itself was sacred. 

The intellectual elites of the Arab world saw the fragmentation and occupation of their lands at the hands of European colonizers and found historicist ideologies to be the perfect answer. Mansour emphasizes that this brazenly anti-Enlightenment philosophy appealed to the Arab world’s elites because the Enlightenment could not provide a remedy for the humiliation of the post-Ottoman Middle East. As such, these elites gravitated towards a philosophy that negated ‘Enlightened’ Anglo-French imperial dominance, validating the restoration of dignity through collective struggle rather than individualist liberalism. “Comte could not provide an answer for humiliation, nor John Stuart Mill for subjugation,” Mansour writes.

As the Arab world embraced the historicist worldview, it led to a redefinition of Arab and Muslim self-understanding. A key phenomenon Mansour explores that demonstrates this shift is language. During the Enlightenment and interwar years, language central to Arab and Muslim self-understanding evolved, taking on new meanings. For example, the Khalifa (caliphate) went from being viewed simply as a juridical/religious institution bound by Sharia to a symbol of civilizational unity necessary for the progress of Islamic civilization. The Umma (community of believers) also acquired nation-state-like connotations. Taqaddum (personal or spiritual progress toward excellence) acquired the additional meaning of linear progression toward a Westernized idea of modernity. Mansour analyzes Arabic linguistic evolution to argue that the adoption of European philosophical currents uprooted Islam from law grounded in divine revelation and re-rooted it in the philosophy of history. Religion became imbued with ideology, and history replaced divinity as the sacred organizing philosophical principle. With the powerful allure of historicism and romantic nationalism, the Muslim world applied these concepts to its own society. Muslims became a collective. A civilization bound by a common spirit and historical essence, and united by a will to struggle for progress. 

Arab nationalism, the Arab world’s defining political ideology during the mid-twentieth century, is a manifestation of European historicism and romantic nationalism. Intellectuals like Constantin Zureiq and Sati’ al-Husri asserted that ‘the Arabs’ were an organically rooted and unified historical phenomenon, a civilization with the ultimate redemptive objectives of revolution and civilizational renaissance. Symbolically embodied in and impelled by the Palestinian cause, this spiritual telos steered Arab politics through leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser and Hafez al-Assad. The ideology centred state policy around collective violent struggle against Western imperialism and Zionism, prioritizing the rejuvenation of Arab honour over political pragmatism. After Arab nationalism faded as a catalyst for transnational political action in the 1970s, idealist historicism remained a powerful motivator of non-state actors in the Middle East. Islamist radicalism, a more contemporary source of political dysfunction in the Arab world, inherited and built itself within the idealist historicist framework.

Mansour points out that Muslim Brotherhood leaders like Sayyid Qutb imbued Islam with this civilizational mission, turning religion into an instrument of revolution. In his 1964 book Milestones, Qutb contended that Islam’s moment to lead mankind had arrived, as its totalizing truth could emerge from the failures of materialist systems such as communism and capitalism. His calls for revival, however, went beyond a return to Sharia. To Qutb, religious revival was a mechanism for the purification and rebirth of civilization. He lamented the Muslim world’s intellectual stagnation and weakness as “European genius” spearheaded humanity’s progress, declaring that Muslim civilization “vanished from existence” long ago. Identity purification as a catalyst for civilizational rebirth is a historicist concept, not a traditionally Islamic one.

The intellectual genealogy Mansour traces, connecting secular European thought to what are understood now as the most fanatical, un-Western beliefs, illustrates the influence of historicism in radical Islamist thought today. While Ibn Taymiyyah’s brutal anti-Mongol fatwas of the 13th and 14th centuries, for example, were grounded in juridical and doctrinal terms, Al-Qaeda’s declaration of Jihad is full of civilizational rhetoric and a historical mission, stripping away the constraints of classical jurisprudential reasoning and glorifying death and sacrifice as instruments of redemption. Bin Laden’s portrayal of Islam as the “basis for restoring the glory of the nation” in his 1996 Declaration of Jihad demonstrates a re-planting of the religion within a secular European framework, a fundamental shift that enabled extremism and led to political violence. In this shift, Islam’s role as a legal and theological order oriented toward divine law shifted to an engine of civilizational struggle. Violence became less of a tool to defend the community or enforce religious obligation, and more of an intrinsically redeeming and purifying act, propelling history toward civilizational destiny. As Islam and Arab identity were reframed within the European vision of historicism, the ideology of collective revival and civilizational redemption through violence replaced indigenous political and religious orders, distorting political priorities and motivating radicalism. 

The value of Mansour’s theory lies in its refusal to be reduced to familiar intellectual tropes. While Bernard Lewis blames Islamic society itself, and the academic left rarely looks beyond Western boots on the ground, Mansour finds the root cause of dysfunction in the realm of philosophy, emphasizing the agency Arab and Muslim thinkers had in their own story by treating them as serious intellectual agents. Lewis’s framework ultimately reduces the complexity of the Muslim world to a civilization that failed to become Western because of Islam’s role in politics. The leftist framework is correct in its accounting of imperialism’s serious and continually relevant crimes, but struggles to explain the ideological nature of the response to those crimes. With his philosophical focus, Mansour fills that gap, combating the view of Arabs and Muslims as backward traditionalists while challenging the framework that treats them as helpless victims of foreign domination. 

The transmission of philosophy, however, does not occur in a vacuum. Mansour emphasizes post-World War I imperialism in the Middle East as a motivator for the adoption of historicist ideas, but not as a catalyst for political dysfunction itself. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain’s near-simultaneous promise of Palestine to both Arab and Zionist leaders, and Western-orchestrated coups were devastating blows of tangible betrayal, producing refugee crises, wars, and authoritarianism that have defined the region ever since. Mansour’s focus on intellectual genealogy does not deny the material factors that contributed to today’s dysfunction, but rather raises questions about the relationship between ideas and history that reach far beyond the Middle East. Whether we accept it or not, his hypothesis leaves us with an insistence that ideas have power in history. Philosophy is not just a reaction to material realities, but a force that shapes them. 

Edited by Liam Murphy and James Knechtel

Featured Image: Sayyid Qutb sits at his trial in 1966 shortly before his execution. “Sayed Qotb’s Trial” by an unknown photographer is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal.