Liberal Renewal of the Turath: Constructing the Egyptian Past in Sayyid al-Qimni’s Works

A prominent shift in the post-1967 Arab intellectual discourse was an intensive intellectual preoccupation with the issue of turath (historical heritage) by intellectuals in various secular, non-Islamist political streams. The theoretical assumption underlying the majority of these works was the need to produce an “authentic” Arab Islamic foundation for modernity to bypass what had been labeled “imported,” “superficial,” and “Western” ideologies. The intellectual discourse around turath pursued the creation of new frames of reference for questions of legitimacy in Arab thought, and it aimed to produce a genuine interpretation and understanding of the contemporary era (mu’asara), which was perceived as being in crisis (’azma).1