The History department and the Crown Center for Middle East Studies hosted Yoav Di-Capua, a historian currently working at the University of Texas at Austin, to give a talk on Thursday about his latest book, “No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre and Decolonization.” The talk discussed Arab existentialism from the end of World War II until the late 1960s, Sartre’s popularity among Arab intellectuals during those times and his inability to choose a side in the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and its neighboring countries. 

Prof. Naghmeh Sohrabi (HIST), associate director for research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History, opened the talk by introducing Di-Capua, whose work “follows the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, [and] reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world by touring a fascinating selection of Arabic and Hebrew archives, including unpublished diaries and interviews.”

Di-Capua began by examining existentialism, the tradition of philosophy that attributes the philosophical theory to the human subject. Di-Capua also talked about agreement among Muslim scholars that the Arab world needed to catch up with the West in terms of ethics, political system and language. “Gradually you began to hear from European intellectuals that something is wrong fundamentally with them as colonial subjects, specifically with [Islam].” Muslim scholars, Di-Capua explained, were made to feel that they were “incompatible with science, ... incompatible with reason, ... incompatible with democracy. [They] are basically doomed.” On the other hand, they were also pressured to “become …  French, Italian or whatever. This internal contradiction is actually is a big philosophical problem in the young generation that came out of the ’40s, and they write about this.” 

“Existentialism is the beginning of an answer. … It tells you ... that there is no essence as a colonized subject, or as a Black person, or as slave, or as a woman. These are all situational conditions. You have been locked in to this position by a long process of socialization … [in] which you actually have no future because you are a Muslim.” The appeal of existentialism, Di-Capua explained, is that it “will tell you that your existence precedes the essence. You actually have options in the world. Once you understand how you became who you became as a fundamental process, you can actually become whatever you want.” 

Arab intellectuals of the time felt liberated through these ideas, which were frequently discussed by philosophers in 1940s Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most famous existentialists of the 20th century, was one of these philosophers. Sartre, according to Di-Capua, was good at recognizing the subjectivity of Arab existentialism. “No other culture at the time engaged with Sartre as intensely as Arab intellectuals,” he explained. Eventually, Arab intellectuals even persuaded Sartre to visit the Arab world, which he did along with fellow artist Claude Lanzmann and thinker Simone de Beauvoir in a trip to Egypt in 1967. 

During the Q&A session following the event, audience members focused on de Beauvoir’s role in feminism in the Arab World, whether Arab people’s culture is compatible with existentialism or not, Sartre’s views on Zionism and the orientalist nature of the Marxist philosophy. Di-Capua described the incompatibility of Marxism with existentialism, saying that Marxism is an ideology that focuses on materialism without regard for the human condition and otherness and thus is colonial and orientalist.