Al Majalla's Book Watch

A tour of the latest releases from Arabic publishing houses, with a focus this week on the topic of philosophy and ethics

Al Majalla's Book Watch

Khodr Al Agha

last update on 03 Jun 2026

The Arab world has a vibrant and rich literary scene. Al Majalla picks out some choice titles in our fortnightly round-up of the latest Arabic books, which aims to highlight some trends and thinking in the Arab world.

Reason and Freedom

By: Abdolkarim Soroush

Translator: Ahmad Al-Gubbanchi

Publisher: Dar Al-Jamal for Publishing and Distribution, Iraq and Lebanon

This book begins from the central premise that a person’s understanding of reason directly shapes their understanding of freedom. Reason, as presented in the book, is not an entirely independent entity. It may be vulnerable to ideological influence, or it may resist it. In either case, this determines the nature and limits of the human understanding of freedom.

From this premise, author Abdolkarim Soroush examines whether reason can produce independent knowledge or whether it is always formed within prior intellectual and cultural contexts that shape, restrict, or influence it. In this way, the book addresses questions of rationality, freedom, religion, and prophecy. Furthermore, it seeks to rethink the relationship between these concepts within a modern Islamic context.

Soroush does not offer answers so much as raise questions that encourage readers to reconsider their assumptions. At the heart of the book is an interest in the role of religion in the public sphere and in how religious faith might be reconciled with the principles of individual freedom without creating a contradiction between religious authority and the demands of critical reason.

The book is rooted in a more flexible conception of religious thought—one that allows engagement with modern intellectual transformations without losing its spiritual character. It rests on distinguishing between the essence of religious experience and the changing historical interpretations that accompany it, as well as between what is fixed and what is variable in the understanding of texts and concepts.

Soroush lands his work at the centre of contemporary debates on religious reform and the possibilities of renewal within Islamic thought. The author seeks to connect theory with the reality of Islamic societies, where questions of freedom intersect with issues of power, knowledge, and interpretation. The book also examines the limits of freedom in a space contested by religious and intellectual frameworks.

The issue of reconciling modernity with religious traditions has become increasingly urgent, so the work hits on a hot topic. Soroush’s book seems to suggest that the renewal of religious thought will not happen without reconsidering the tools of understanding themselves, foremost among them the concept of reason as it has been shaped through history.

From this perspective, the debate over freedom is not merely political or rights based. It is also an epistemological and philosophical debate, tied to the production of meaning and the movement of interpretation.

Arikaz

By: Chaker Khazaal

Publisher: Nofal, Hachette Antoine, Lebanon

Set in the late 2040s, Chaker Khazaal’s Arikaz presents a future in which technology intersects with memory. In this complex scientific and psychological landscape, concepts such as love, truth, and identity are reshaped and redefined.

Sweeping transformations caused by a cyber pandemic have destroyed much of the world’s digital infrastructure and altered the global balance of power. Amid the devastation, Sharif, a modest young Lebanese man, is drawn into a scientific experiment led by a company called Arikaz that seeks to recover human memory and rebuild it entirely from scratch.

Under the supervision of the neuroscientist Dr Jenny Atkinson, Sharif embarks on a journey into his own memory, reaching back to the earliest moments of his life. Yet what is revealed to him extends far beyond individual experience, uncovering a web of complex human and political relationships. At its centre is the love story between his mother, Nour, a Lebanese woman accused of espionage, and his father, Nadav, an Israeli professor, amid deeply fraught conflicts of identity and politics.

The novel explores the possibility of controlling human consciousness and the limits of technological intervention in shaping the human being. Here, Arikaz reveals the fragility of truth in a world where memories can be altered, erased, or reassembled. Human identity itself is vulnerable to constant change and endless stages of formation.

Although the novel belongs to the science fiction genre, it is also political and psychological. Themes of love, memory, and conflict overlap within a narrative structure centred on the relationship between the individual and technology, and between the past and its renewed digital production. The future moves beyond the technical towards a deeper human inquiry into meaning, choice, freedom, and the limits of each in a world being ceaselessly shaped by technology.

Arikaz is a new addition to the Arabic sci-fi stable, blending technological imagination with existential questioning. It opens a contemplative horizon on the future of humanity in a world where the capacities to control memory and shape reality are accelerating.

A Window into al-Ghazali’s 'The Incoherence of the Philosophers' and Ibn Rushd’s 'The Incoherence of the Incoherence'

Compiled by: Dr Saad al-Din Kulayb

Publisher: Dar Al Muheet Publishing, United Arab Emirates

This is a contemporary reading of one of the most important philosophical debates in the Islamic intellectual tradition: the encounter between Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers and Ibn Rushd's The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

The book re-engages with the major questions that have shaped the relationship between philosophy and religion, reason and transmitted authority, and the possibilities of human knowledge. It begins by deconstructing this classical controversy as an ongoing intellectual problem, both in the reception of philosophy within Arab culture and in ongoing debates over rationality and the legitimacy of philosophical thought.

From this perspective, Kulayb takes the two Incoherence texts as an entry point to a broader reading, one that moves beyond the original works towards the intellectual structure that governed the conflict between two major currents of knowledge. Kulayb does not simply present or summarise the two positions; rather, he places them within their polemical context, highlighting the nature of al-Ghazali’s objections to the philosophers and Ibn Rushd’s responses, which sought to defend philosophy and restore the status of demonstrative reason within the Islamic intellectual system.

Abdolkarim Soroush begins his book from the central premise that a person's understanding of reason directly shapes their understanding of freedom

In doing so, the book creates a dialogue between two opposing visions of truth and the paths by which it may be reached, each shaped by its own concepts and convictions. It reflects a broader concern with rereading the Arab Islamic philosophical heritage away from reductive or ideological interpretations. The book treats this heritage as a live arena of debate, rather than as a dusty archive.

The importance of this kind of work lies in its ability to raise the foundational questions of Arab Islamic thought at a contemporary moment still marked by intense debate over the relationship between modernity and heritage, and between critical thinking and intellectual certainties. Kulayb's 'window' therefore opens onto how this debate may be read today, and what tools it may offer for a deeper understanding of the trajectories of Arab thought. For this reason, the book constitutes a contribution to reviving philosophical debate around two great works of the Islamic heritage.

Identity and the Self: Theoretical Approaches

By: Jad al-Karim al-Jibai

Publisher: Maysaloon for Culture, Translation and Publishing, Türkiye

In his new book, Syrian thinker Jad al-Karim al-Jibai continues his engagement with questions of society, the state, and modernity, but from an angle more closely bound to the individual and their relationship with themselves and others. The book does not treat identity as something fixed or closed, but as a social, cultural, and historical process that is constantly formed within society, and within its conflicts and transformations.

Al-Jibai begins by examining the ambiguous relationship between the individual self and collective identity, at a time when divisions and narrower forms of belonging are intensifying across the Arab world. Through multiple philosophical and sociological approaches, he raises questions about the formation of the self, the boundaries between free belonging and identitarian closure, and the possibility of building a modern society founded on citizenship.

The book clearly forms part of the author's broader intellectual project, which is grounded in the critique of traditional structures and the defence of the values of freedom, rationality, and democracy. It therefore does not confine itself to discussing concepts theoretically, but links them to Arab social and political reality, where identity can become a tool of conflict and exclusion rather than an open space for diversity and interaction.

One of the striking ideas advanced in the book is the connection between truth and the human dimension of existence. Al-Jibai sees love as the subjective face of truth, while social labour and production represent its objective face, in an attempt to restore the status of the human being as a free social being, not as a subject subordinate to closed identities or preformed narratives. As he puts it: "Truth neither exists nor becomes complete except through these two faces: the objective and the subjective."

The book contains dense intellectual material that brings together philosophy, sociology and cultural criticism, making it a new addition to the Arab intellectual library and to Al-Jibai's wider project, which is known for its concern with questions of modernisation, the state and civil society. At a time when debates over identity and belonging are being renewed across the Arab region, this book appears as an attempt to think calmly and deeply about the meaning of the self, and about the possibility of building an open identity founded on freedom and human participation.

The book is timely. In the Arab world, social division and closed identities are worsening, both politically and culturally. Al-Jibai calls for a reconsideration of the assumptions that govern our understanding of belonging, the self, and society. He seems to want to re-establish the concept of identity on rational and humanistic bases that move beyond ideological closure towards an open vision of the human being and their relationships within modern society.

The Ethics of Health and the Philosophy of Illness: Hermeneutic Approaches

By: Al-Nasir Amara

Publisher: University Foundation for Studies and Publishing, Lebanon

In this book, Algerian researcher Al-Nasir Amara tries to rethink illness and health philosophically, and beyond the conventional medical view. His approach treats illness as an existential and ethical experience, one that reveals one's relationship with themselves, the world, and with the very meaning of life. Illness is not treated just as a biological dysfunction, but as an event that confronts someone with their fragility and with issues such as pain, time, death, and meaning.

The author begins with the duality of illness and health as an entry point for hermeneutic philosophical analysis, seeking to understand human experience existentially. The book raises questions about how a person perceives the meaning of wellbeing, the limits of the control they imagine they have over their body, and whether health represents a genuine state of completeness or merely a fragile balance liable to collapse at any moment.

It touches on the philosophy of medicine and the ethics of care by discussing the human dimension of medical treatment and critiquing the conventional view that reduces the person to a clinical case or an object of medical intervention. Discussion of illness is therefore linked to reflections on human dignity, on the meaning of pain and suffering, and on the capacity of the experience of illness to affect a person's awareness of themselves.

Amara notes that illness can change the perception of time and daily life, while raising awareness of the body's limits and the frailty of existence. Illness is therefore transformed from a medical symptom into a contemplative experience connected to meaning, mortality, and endurance. The person who is ill suffers, thinks, fears, and hopes; they are not simply an object of treatment or medical statistics. From here, the book moves beyond the field of health towards a discussion of conceptions of the body, life, and wellbeing. As such, it can be seen as an approach that brings together philosophical reflection and existential analysis.

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