By Pierre A. Maroun

When I was a graduate student in history at Youngstown State University, I wrote an essay on the Enlightenment. After reading it, my advisor remarked, “This is one of the worst things I have read on the Enlightenment.” At the time, I misunderstood the critique. I thought enthusiasm could compensate for weakness of argument. I believed that defending an idea meant I already possessed it. Patriotic enthusiasm for the American Revolution had gotten the better of me. Years later, I understood what I had missed: the difference between inhabiting an idea and examining it. That shift — from enthusiast to inquirer — is itself an Enlightenment move. It is where this essay begins.

The prompt for returning to the subject was an essay by Ali Badawi. But the real question that drew me back was philosophical, not historical: when does heritage cease to be a source of pride and become an object of examination? When does reason cease to be a slogan and become a discipline? When does knowledge shift from accumulation to awareness?

The Enlightenment, in this sense, is not simply a period. It is a posture. It begins when inherited authority is no longer accepted merely because it is inherited. It begins when the human being refuses to live only inside received answers and instead confronts the conditions under which truth, law, and power become legitimate. It begins when obedience is no longer the highest form of order, and when the citizen, the believer, the student, and the thinker all acquire the right to ask: by what authority? This posture was not born in one place. No civilization owns it. No civilization is immune from losing it.

The familiar European story of the Enlightenment is not false, but it is incomplete. Europe did not invent reason from nothing. It inherited, translated, contested, and politicized older traditions of inquiry. Its achievement was not the discovery of reason itself, but the transformation of reason into a public force: a challenge to kings, churches, inherited privilege, and arbitrary power. The roots of that transformation reach far beyond Europe.

In Mesopotamia, law was written. Once authority becomes a text, it can be copied, compared, interpreted, and eventually challenged. The Code of Hammurabi did not create constitutionalism, but it made power thinkable rather than fated. Whatever has form can be judged. The Phoenician alphabet widened this possibility: knowledge could travel beyond palace or temple, detached from immediate presence, surviving its originators. The Greeks made the question itself sovereign. Socrates turned ignorance into a method. Plato and Aristotle built reason into systematic structures of inquiry — evidence, logic, the willingness to be wrong. Christianity added radical interiority: the conscience as a site of truth no institution could fully monopolize. Once truth has an interior witness, the institution can never entirely own the soul.

The Islamic world carried the thread in another decisive way. In the Islamic East and al-Andalus, Greek thought did not survive merely as memory. It became horizon. Al-Farabi asked how philosophy, religion, and political order might relate to one another — a new problem, not an inherited one. Avicenna pressed reason into vast metaphysical territory. Averroes defended the philosophical life and argued for the compatibility of inquiry with revelation properly understood. Ibn al-Haytham transformed optics by insisting on observation and the disciplined testing of appearances — correcting Greek assumptions through experiment, not deference. Al-Biruni compared cultures, calendars, and sciences with a seriousness that treated knowledge as something enlarged through encounter. These were not acts of preservation. They were acts of inquiry.

Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan makes the philosophical argument explicit: a mind left alone with nature, sense experience, and reflection ascends from perception to abstraction to metaphysical insight — without instruction, without inheritance. The drama of the autonomous intellect was never Europe’s monopoly.

These figures matter not because they allow modern Arabs or Muslims to claim ownership over the Enlightenment — that would merely replace one civilizational vanity with another. They matter because they show that reason is a human possibility, not a European property. And they carry a warning: conditions are not the same as transformation. Civilizations can accumulate libraries and honor philosophers while fearing philosophy in practice.

The signs of rupture appeared early. The defeat of the Muʿtazilite rationalists, the narrowing of independent legal reasoning, and the fate of Averroes — read with greater consequence in Latin Europe than in much of his own world — all suggest that the thread had begun to fray long before colonialism arrived. The open question was increasingly seen as threat.

Europe’s breakthrough was different in kind. Through centuries of conflict — Magna Carta’s challenge to royal immunity, the Renaissance’s return to the human as observer and maker, Galileo’s relocation of truth from institution to observation, the Reformation’s shattering of interpretive monopoly — reason became political. Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Kant converted critique into legitimacy: government by consent, separation of powers, the courage to use one’s own understanding. The subject of knowledge became the subject of rights.

The American and French Revolutions attempted to institutionalize this, even as they exposed its contradictions: liberty proclaimed alongside slavery, equality invoked while entire populations were excluded, freedom that could harden into new coercion. The Enlightenment’s universalism was morally indispensable but historically incomplete. Its critics are right about these failures. But critiquing Enlightenment with Enlightenment tools — reason exposing reason’s betrayals — is the tradition working as intended. The task is not to abandon it but to complete it.

This brings us to the Arab world.

The region stretching from Mesopotamia to the Nile, from Phoenicia to al-Andalus, was never a margin of history. Here law was written, the alphabet traveled, reason and revelation encountered one another, methods of science matured, and scholars, jurists, physicians, and mathematicians helped shape the conditions of world civilization. Yet the painful fact remains: in much of the contemporary Arab world, reason is too often treated as suspicion, freedom as danger, criticism as betrayal, and knowledge as a luxury. The language of heritage grows louder even as the living habits that once made heritage creative grow weaker.

Why was the thread cut?

Colonialism wounded the region deeply — disrupting institutions, distorting economies, breeding defensive politics of identity. But colonialism alone does not explain the rupture. If it did, independence would have restored the conditions of renewal. It did not. Postcolonial regimes often inherited the language of liberation while reproducing structures of submission: building schools that rewarded obedience over judgment, praising heritage while treating free inquiry as instability, invoking unity while silencing plurality. Law served power. Religious language closed inquiry rather than deepening it. The state feared the thinking citizen.

The deeper rupture was internal: reason was converted from a living method into a monument of heritage. A civilization may honor its philosophers while fearing philosophy. It may praise its scientists while neglecting science. It may invoke its golden age while refusing the freedom that made such an age possible. Heritage becomes sterile when it is used as compensation for present weakness. The true honor owed to a great tradition is not praise but continuation.

Continuation means restoring the conditions that made the tradition creative: free reason, serious education, just law, intellectual humility, and political systems unafraid of criticism. It means building institutions where power can be challenged without treason, where religion can inspire without suffocating inquiry, where citizenship means participation rather than obedience, and where knowledge is treated not as luxury but as civilizational necessity.

Enlightenment is not a memory. It is a posture. It is the courage to confront the grounds of authority, the humility to revise inherited certainties, and the discipline to submit all power — including the power of reason itself — to examination. No civilization owns truth. All are capable of decline when they confuse past greatness with present vitality.

The thread of Enlightenment is not a possession to be claimed. It is a fragile achievement to be renewed. If this region once illuminated the world, it will not do so again by recalling its past light. It will do so only by reigniting the conditions that make light possible: free reason, just law, critical education, and a state unafraid of the citizen.

* Researcher and Strategic Analyst

President, Shields of United Lebanon — SOUL

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