Stephen Sheehi's pioneering book seeks a decolonial method and theory in exploring the epistemology of the Arab Renaissance (al-nahdah al-'arabiyah), a period that defines "Arab modernity." Using psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, Sheehi looks at texts by writers such as Butrus al-Bustani, Salim al-Bustani, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Farah Antun, Muhammad Abduh and others. His analysis deconstructs popular and academic perceptions--especially prevalent after 9/11--that Arabs have failed to internalize modernity. Sheehi's analysis seeks to find a common epistemology scaffolding of analytic categories such as "Christian secularists," "Islamic modernists" and "reformers," and "Arab nationalists." He does so by understanding the paradigms and syntagms that cut through a diverse body of Arabic writing (fiction and non-fiction), which produced a body of knowledge that constituted modernity in the Arab world well into the 21 century.