“A World of Tomorrow”: Diaspora Intellectuals and Liberal Thought in the 1950s

Abstract

This article contributes to Palestinian intellectual history by discussing the lives and writings of three diaspora intellectuals during the transitional period of the 1950s: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Abdul-Latif Tibawi, and Nicola Ziadeh. I argue that they fused a conservative acceptance of state authority and avoidance of radical politics with a liberal understanding of nationalism and scholarship, including freedom, secularism, and objectivity. Without a Palestinian nation-state, their participation in the imagined futures of Pan-Arabism and decolonization meant avoiding radical leftist political movements. Instead, they advanced literature and history, surviving in the diaspora as liberals during Pan-Arabism’s transition from a revolutionary goal to a state ideology.