The Cairo-based, Palestinian writer Khayi Hammad translated Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) into Arabic only a year after it was published in English and a year before her self-translation into German. This lecture will explore the interactions between the se texts in the context of President Nasser’s 1,000-Book Project and make inferences about the wider currency of liberal thinkers like Arendt in contemporary Arab thought.

Professor Jens Hanssen teaches Arab Civilization, Mediterranean and modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Toronto . He is currently co-editing the OUP Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History and two volumes on Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age. His present research focusses on the intersections between German, Jewish and Arab intellectual histories. It has yielded two articles so far, “Kafka and Arabs”, and “Hannah Arendt and Arab Political Culture.”