This collection of essays written in English by Sadik Jalal al-Azm, one of today's foremost Arab public intellectuals, has an ambitious aim. It endeavors to be useful. For more than half a century, al-Azm has written in Arabic and for an Arab public on contemporary problems of the Arab world. Some of his most important articles, however, were written in English and thus directly addressed to an English-speaking readership. These contributions were scattered over a long period of time in specialized and less specialized periodicals. They were published in the United States and the United Kingdom and were translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Hebrew, and, of course, Arabic. Many of these essays are at present hard or almost impossible to come by. This collection offers to a broader non-specialized public an insight into crucial issues of inter-Arab debates in the last fifty years. It also includes a number of essays that are published here for the first time. It is too early to define what the “essential Sadik al-Azm” might be. But in such a book, secularism and modernization, fundamentalism and censorship, Marxism and the Arab left would certainly have to be included. Critical thinking, lively polemics, a deep distrust of political authority, and a sharp pen make the reading of these articles not only informative but a pleasure.

Biography

Born on November 7, 1934 in Damascus, Sadik al-Azm's was a privileged youth. As a scion of the family al-Azm, he belonged to what had probably been the most important family-clan in pre-modern Syria. The Azms were feudal aristocrats in Damascus, Hama, and other parts of Syria. Under the Ottomans, Asaad al-Azm's rule over Damascus (1743-57) was widely considered an era of justice and stability. To this day, the “Palais Azem” that he built in Damascus is one of the landmarks of Damascene architecture. Sadik al-Azm used to joke that, by right, the Palais should be his home.