This book intends to review the meaning of contemporary in Arab intellectual history. It presents a classification of four periods in modern Arab intellectual history; they are the following: 1) Nahda: the great Arab renaissance period, from 1850 to 1914. The Nahda sought through translation and vulgarization to assimilate the great achievements of modern European civilization; 2) the period between the two wars characterized by the the development of thoughts which played a leading role in social movements, especially in nationalist movements; 3) the period the Arab nationalist experiments on the unionist ideology; and 4) the period of moral and political crisis after the defeat in the 1967 War. The central thesis of this book is that the concept of history - a concept playing a capital role in modern thought - is in fact peripheral to all the ideologies that have dominated the Arab world till now.