Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday

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In this groundbreaking book, Tarik Sabry is seeking out the terrain for best understanding the experience of being modern in transitional societies. He adopts a dynamic, ethnographically based approach to the meanings of 'modernness' in the Arab context and, within a relational framework, focuses on structures of thought, everydayness and self-referentiality to explore the process of building a bridge that rejoins the 'modern' in Arab thought with the 'modern' in Arab lived experience. In bringing together modernity as a philosophical category with the bridging spaces of Arab everyday life, Sabry is offering fresh methods of comprehending the question of what it means to be modern in the Arab world today.

Reviews

'Tarik Sabry is the perfect 'modern Sinbad' navigating back and forth between different countries, cultures and languages, enriching them and himself. In the 1001 Nights there are two Sinbads: a sedentary one (al-bari) who is rather boring and not so successful. The other is a sea-navigator (al-bahri) who has an exciting life precisely because he masters the art of communicating with the Other. Tarik's book reflects this art.' - Fatema Mernissi; 'In this ambitious, wide-ranging first work Tarik Sabry examines contemporary Arab culture from a double perspective. He seeks to rescue contemporary Arabic intellectual thought from a preoccupation with its heritage and tradition and to refocus it on the profane culture of everyday life. He has written an absorbing account of the encounters with modernity for young Arabs of North Africa in market places and cafes, in queues for visas outside Western embassies, on a bridge in Cairo where lovers meet, and in the responses of young Berber tribesmen to 'Baywatch' and Pamela Anderson. It is a beautifully written, passionately engaged account of the many-sided, contradictory meanings of The West as object of desire and distrust in the Maghreb today.' - Paddy Scannell

Author Bio

Tarik Sabry is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Theory, University of Westminster. He is co-editor of the 'Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication'.