| المستخلص: |
The cultural history of both the Arab world and the South of the United States from the 1920s till the late 1940s was a history of monumental changes. Some of these changes were traumatic and painful as they led both regions to perceive the disharmony that existed between their idealized states and their realized ones. At the heart of these changes was the issue of modernity- “Hadatha" in Arabic. The official end of the caliphate in the Arab world around 1924, the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, the rise of independence movements coupled with the advent of Arab nationalism in the late 1940s, revived the cultural divide which existed between those who espoused modernity as a panacea for the region’s lack of progress and those who claimed that the region’s problems were basically caused by modernity itself. Almost one year after the end of the Caliphate in the Arab World, the South of the United States witnessed in 1925 the Scopes or Monkey Trial. The events surrounding the Scopes trial revealed the South’s problematic relations with modernity as well. The Crash of 1929 and its concomitant 1930s depression, the New Deal policies, the end of World War II, and the onset of the desegregation campaigns further exposed the South of the United States as America’s last citadel against modernity. This paper seeks to examine the problematics of modernity in the Arab World and in the South of the United States during specificperiods of histoiy characterized by monumental changes and transformations. In so doing, this paper seeks to establishpossible common cultural and historical connections between the two regions without overlooking their various differences .This paper argues that theproblematics of modernity in the Arab world and in the South of the United Stateswere indicative of cultural and identity crises. Compared to the South of the United States which overcame its cultural and identity crises as it gradually integrated the rest of the American nation by the end of the World War II, the Arab world continued- and would continue- to have problematic relationships with modernity due to its on-going exposure to change and transformation.
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