Free Thought in the Present: A Tribute To Abdelwaheb Meddeb

The book falls within the tributary works dedicated to thinkers and creators active in knowledge domains and mainly concerned with public affairs issues. It contains the proceedings of an international symposium held in honor of the late Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946-2014), organised by the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts “Beit al-Hikma” on November 21-22, 2019.

The presentations of the symposium focus on the issue of free thinking in new contexts,  the most prominent themes in the late Abdelwahab’s writings concerning the causes of “the illness of Islam”,  his works related to comparative litarature, writing and dual genealogy, and on his contributions in the field of translation, which he considered an essential mechanism for resisting the clash of civilizations and the collision of cultures.

Generally, the contents of the work emphasise his modernising tendency, which rejects forms of intellectual fanaticism, highlighting his rebellious media message, which he particularly employed in French media to defend the progressive tendency resisting the intellectual stagnation and the fabricated conflict between cultures.