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If tradition has often figured as modernity's other, the Islamic tradition has long played the role of the modern constitutive other par excellence. Modern secularizing practices of timing and spacing feed this grounding of the political beyond the conceptual grip of tradition. The works by the Moroccan historian and philosopher Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) put forward a concept of heterotemporality that distances itself from secularizing practices of timing and spacing, and, importantly, also from theological ones. His critique enables us to understand each of these practices as viewing heterotemporality through one master temporality, a view that represents temporality as, in Laroui's words, "absolute" time. First, this privileged temporality is the homogeneous time of secular progress, and second, it is the homogeneous time of theological truth. Laroui unsettles both practices of timing and spacing by discussing heterotemporality as governed by what he calls the antinomy of the concept of history. For Laroui, this antinomy refers to a specific temporal dynamic that results from the tension between the fundamental discontinuity and incoherence of history, on the one hand, and the production of continuity and coherence through human observers, on the other. Laroui thus reveals that the claims about continuity and coherence that sustain groundings of the political within homogeneous time—either secular or theological—must always be understood in relation to their position within the temporal dynamic of the antinomy of the concept of history. In revealing the temporal dynamic of this antinomy within the Islamic tradition, Laroui reworks the architecture of difference that keeps the secular modern and the Islamic theological conceptually separated from each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The puzzle this article examines is how one can study the concept of modernity within the history of its universalization as a process of translation. For this purpose, I look at how the contemporary Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui has critically engaged with the history, politics, and epistemology of translating modernity (Arabic ḥadātha, French modernité) into his intellectual and political setting of Morocco, North Africa, and the Middle East during and after the colonial period. I read him as making a critical intervention into existing modes of timing and spacing the concept of modernity and, thus, what I describe as the politics of historicity. In conclusion, I make a methodological plea for framing the history of concepts across political borders in terms of translational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If tradition has often figured as modernity's other, the Islamic tradition has long played the role of the modern constitutive other par excellence. Modern secularizing practices of timing and spacing feed this grounding of the political beyond the conceptual grip of tradition. The works by the Moroccan historian and philosopher Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) put forward a concept of heterotemporality that distances itself from secularizing practices of timing and spacing, and, importantly, also from theological ones. His critique enables us to understand each of these practices as viewing heterotemporality through one master temporality, a view that represents temporality as, in Laroui's words, "absolute" time. First, this privileged temporality is the homogeneous time of secular progress, and second, it is the homogeneous time of theological truth. Laroui unsettles both practices of timing and spacing by discussing heterotemporality as governed by what he calls the antinomy of the concept of history. For Laroui, this antinomy refers to a specific temporal dynamic that results from the tension between the fundamental discontinuity and incoherence of history, on the one hand, and the production of continuity and coherence through human observers, on the other. Laroui thus reveals that the claims about continuity and coherence that sustain groundings of the political within homogeneous time—either secular or theological—must always be understood in relation to their position within the temporal dynamic of the antinomy of the concept of history. In revealing the temporal dynamic of this antinomy within the Islamic tradition, Laroui reworks the architecture of difference that keeps the secular modern and the Islamic theological conceptually separated from each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui (born in 1933) develops a critique of centrist modes of representing difference. I argue that Laroui himself is situated within hegemonic, hierarchical, and centrist practices of comparison that treat the difference between "Europe" on one hand and "Islam" and "Arab culture" on the other as foundational. Despite being situated in this context, the article argues that Laroui's practice of comparison can be read differently and may open the possibility of the unsettling of such centrist practices. Whereas centrist practices of comparison fixate the relationship between universal and the particular, Laroui points out that any comparative observation stages a historically situated account of the relationship between the particular and the universal. In this way, he reveals that the grounds of comparison are never as flat and homogeneous as centrist practices of comparison imply, and draws attention to the historical-epistemological and political conditions under which difference is relationally produced. Through studying Laroui's discussion of the logic of the concept of history and the concept of modernization in contemporary debates among Arab intellectuals, I analyze the conceptual form of Laroui's version of historicism (Arabic tārīkhāniyya, French historicisme) as a particular form of historicist Marxism. This historicist method challenges what I call centrist architectures of difference produced by centrist modes of representation. It leads Laroui to develop a critical method that I characterize as a situated universalism, steering between relativism and abstract universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from a June 4-6, 2015 conference on localizing social sciences in Berlin, Germany hosted by the Center for Area Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin university and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Topics of presentations delivered included African authors of the 1970s, the history of secular elements of Thailand, and the influence of American points of view on research on the 2011 Arab Spring.