This book is a story of a generation of Arab intellectuals in the late 20th century told through the biography of the famous Beiruti journal Mawāqif (1968–1994), which was founded and edited by the Syrian poet Adunis, and co-edited by a changing group of acclaimed Arab writers, thinkers and artists, including Khalida Said, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Elias Khoury, and Edward Said, to name but a few. At the heart of its narrative is the city of Beirut, a trans-Arab intelligentsia hotspot during the Long 1960s, then a war-torn capital in the late 1970s and 1980s, and ultimately a distant home imagined by the exiled Arab community in the early 1990s.

Mawāqif ’s biography mirrors that of a post-1967 Arab intellectual generation and its once-revolutionary project, and shows the deep interconnectedness of the modern intellectual (al-muthaqqaf) as social figure and of journal-making as this figure’s constitutive practice.

Yvonne Albers is a scholar of modern Arab intellectual and cultural history. She works as postdoctoral researcher and academic coordinator at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective at FU Berlin and is an affiliated fellow in the program Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME). Her current research focuses on time and temporality in/of the modern Arab periodical, and on global circulations of theory since the early 20^th century. Her recent book Beirut und die Zeitschrift Mawāqif has been published last year (Brill 2023). Together with Anne-Marie McManus and Barbara Winckler she is co-editing a volume on The Journal as Form: An Introduction to Arab Periodical Studies (De Gruyter 2025).