Nadia Oweidat

As a historian of ideas, Dr. Oweidat is interested in how ideas impact communities. In particular, her research focuses on reformers who articulate their people’s natural aspirations to be free of oppression and violence. Her first book, Reform and Its Perils in Contemporary Islam: The Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (Oxford University Press, 2024) took as its case study one of the foremost representatives of liberal Islamic thought: Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. For Abu Zayd, an accurate interpretation of Islamic texts is one that aligns with universal human rights. Abu Zayd was also an outspoken champion of the rights of women and minority groups in Muslim-majority societies.

Her second book examines the impact of ideas on the region over the past century, from the nineteenth-century renaissance to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military state in Egypt, to Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, to the Arab Spring that swept across the region. In each of these periods, deliberate focus on disseminating and supporting certain ideas and ideals transformed societies in previously unimaginable ways. The book is a historical account of the transformative impact of soft power.

After completing this book, Dr. Oweidat plans to write a book that showcases creative dissent in the Arabic-speaking world. The book will highlight the George Orwells and the Vaclav Havels of the Middle East and North Africa. While these works are popular in the Arab world, they remain largely unknown to Western audiences because few have been translated from Arabic into English. The continued circulation and reissue of these works demonstrate their relevance decades after they were written. Excerpts from poems and plays written in the fifties and sixties, which became popular on television sets in the 1980s and 1990s, went viral again during the Arab Spring. A new generation seeking freedom from political oppression rediscovered these works and found they still spoke to the challenges of their times.