A Moroccan intellectual born in 1935, Abdullah Laroui taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat and was one of a distinguished group of Moroccan thinkers such as M. A. Lahbabi and M. A. al-Jabri. His work involves a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including history (his main professional discipline), sociology, philosophy, and literature. He has produced histories of the Maghreb (North Africa) and of the Arab world in general, and his writings on modernity and strike at the heart of many key issues that are important for Arab culture in the postcolonial world. He raised in particular the questions how history should be written and how to understand the cultural life of a group of people through understanding their histroy. This comes out as a much more complicated issue than might initially appear to be the case, and Laroui uses the conceptual machinery of...