Amman, May 5 — Iraqi thinker, academic and critic Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim delivered a lecture titled “Narrative and Cultural Identity” at the Abdul Hameed Shoman Cultural Forum, moderated by writer and critic Fakhri Saleh.
Ibrahim highlighted narrative as a key force in shaping collective awareness, memory, and identity. He argued that cultural identity, unlike religious or national identity, is created rather than inherited, and that societies actively construct their identities through narrative.
He pointed out that the Arab region has long been characterized by ethnic and religious diversity, explaining that cultural identity, while encompassing beliefs and ethnicities, goes beyond them to include the historical processes through which societies shape their identity through narrative.
He explained that narrative goes beyond literature, serving as a tool through which nations weave their historical experiences into a coherent identity. Identity, he said, is essentially a narrative formation shaped by memory, imagination, history, and lived experience.
Ibrahim emphasized that narrative is not confined to literature; extending its function beyond literature broadens its role to include ways of expressing individual and collective identity. He explained that narrative forges national identities by weaving together a nation’s historical experiences, achievements, and collective memory into a coherent whole that distinguishes it from others and that narrative conventions give rise to what he called “narrativity” — the methods through which societies carry, structure, and recount their experiences — and that all narratives necessarily carry cultural content. He defined identity as the set of traits, values, experiences, and imaginations through which a nation understands and represents itself at a given historical moment.
On modernity, Ibrahim argued that it is essentially the West’s narrative about itself and its modern experience, one that does not adequately accommodate non-Western societies. He noted that modernity framed differences between civilizations through binaries such as progress versus backwardness and civilization versus primitivism, with most of its gains remaining concentrated in Western centers.
He also distinguished between colonialism and coloniality, explaining that while colonialism as a historical condition has largely ended, coloniality persists as a global cultural, political, and economic condition that maintains dependency through systems of domination.
Ibrahim referred to ongoing identity conflicts in the Arab region and concluded by stating that in a world of diverse civilizations, beliefs, and ethnicities, culture is the unifying framework that can encompass all forms of difference. He called for starting with culture as a foundation, noting that it emerges from the interaction of knowledge, literature, arts, religions, traditions, histories, and shared heritage, all expressed through ideas, symbols, and social norms by which humans understand themselves and the world.
Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim is a leading specialist in narrative and cultural studies. Among his most prominent works is the nine-volume Encyclopedia of Arabic Narrative. He is a contributing researcher to The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, a fellow of the Sangalli Institute for Cultural Studies in Florence, and a member of several academic bodies and major literary prize committees. He has received numerous awards, including the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation Award (1997), the Sheikh Zayed Book Award (2013), the King Faisal International Prize for Arabic Language and Literature (2014), and the Sultan bin Ali Al Owais Cultural Award (2023).