[Ibrahim Abu Lughod is] Palestine's foremost academic and
intellectual.--Edward Said
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 exposed the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire to a Europe vastly different from the one known to the
Arabs of the Middle Ages. At the start of the nineteenth century, Arabs
were unprepared for the social, economic, and political progress made in
Europe.
By 1870, however, their vague notions had evolved into a fairly
sophisticated knowledge of the historic background and contemporary
achievements of various European nations. The new reform movements in
Egypt and the Fertile Crescent had incorporated into their programs the
ideological premises and political institutions of European liberalism.
The Arab Rediscovery of Europe is a pioneering work tracing the role
of the Arab intelligentsia in increasing Arab awareness of Europe and in
shaping an Arab image of the West. First published in 1963, it was
hugely influential in instigating a detailed study of Arab views and
experiences of Europe during the reign of Egypt's Mohammad Ali in the
early to mid-nineteenth century.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929-2001) was an American Palestinian academic,
writer, and editor. He taught at Smith College, Massachusetts; McGill
University, Montreal; and then spent thirty-four years at Northwestern
University, Illinois, where he founded the Institute of African Studies.
He founded the Association of Arab-American University Graduates in 1968
and the journal Arab Studies Quarterly in 1978, and held two UNESCO
posts. He later became a professor and vice president of Bir Zeit
University in the West Bank.
