The Challenge of Modernity: The Quest for Authenticity in the Arab World

This text aims to gain insights into the central aspects of modernity and the underlying factors at work in the process of modernisation. It begins by examining Western modernity and then uses the insights gained from this examination to study the implications of Western modernity for non-Western societies. The author also attempts to demonstrate the inadequacy of the functional approach for understanding the process of modernisation in non-Western regions. In all, the author concludes that the project of modernity emerges as a result of the activities of the universal intellectual who, being equipped with the intellectual skills to analyse, synthesise and reinterpret reality, and the psychological authenticity to resist the pressure to adapt to the prevailing social conditions, endeavours to bring order to his own internal world by redefining the relationship between the part and the whole, the universal and the individual. He then strives to extend the internally achieved peace and order to the surrounding society via discourse.