Thinking about liberation and civilizational rebirth, Texts by Anouar Abdel Malek, Prefaces and collated by Youssef Girard , Héritage editions

An Egyptian sociologist who carried out a large part of his research activity in France, Anouar Abdel-Malek (1924-2012) was a great name in the social sciences both at the Arab and Western level. Indeed, his groundbreaking work influenced figures as important in academic debate as Edward W. Said and Immanuel Wallerstein. Unfortunately, the figure of Anouar Abdel-Malek has been obscured in recent years. Ten years after his death in June 2012, who still remembers the name of the Egyptian Marxist sociologist?

The present collection of texts of “interventions” has the primary purpose of participating modestly in bringing to light a thinker who has been hidden from the intellectual and political scene of France for too long. Thus, the reader will be able to discover or rediscover Anouar Abdel-Malek through very “accessible” texts by an author with a keen analysis. He will also be able to better understand the nature of the debates on the decolonization of the social sciences from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s. And obviously, these debates shed light on our present.