Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt in Arab Political Culture

Abstract

This essay charts the way some of Hannah Arendt's key texts travelled to the Arab world. On the one hand, it presents Arab intellectuals' engagement - translations, applications and criticisms - with her work, on the other, the essay identifies Arendt's engagement with Palestine as an important source of her political theory. The essay concludes with an invocation of Arendt's appraisal of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 to reflect on the Arab revolutionary moment of 2011 in the counter-revolutionary context of today.