Research Bio
Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed works on modern Arabic literature and thought, with particular interest in questions of time concepts and temporality, receptions of the ontological and ethical theories of Islamic philosophy and Sufism, and literary engagements with neoliberal economy and politics. He is interested in postcolonial thought, Classical Arabic literary theory, and North African literatures in Arabic and French.
His current book project explores the intersections of questions of temporality, orientalism, and cultural critique in postcolonial Arabic thought and literature. It addresses Arab modernist and postmodernist receptions of Islamic concepts of the moment (al-waqt), which include the theological notion of the renewed instant of being, and the Sufi moment of spiritual unveiling. These receptions vary between rationalist repudiations, aesthetic translations, and philosophical investments toward contemporary critiques of capitalist modernity. The book traces the transmission of the orientalist theory of discontinuous, momentary time in the Semitic imagination to twentieth century Arab readership. It surveys how this racial argument develops in Arab modernist debates on the timelessness of Islamic culture as well as how it has been contested. The monograph, then, intervenes in this debate by firstly demonstrating the multiplicity and inner translations of Islamic poetic, theological, and philosophical propositions on time. Secondly it argues that, among the diversity of concepts, the theological notion of the moment has in fact been productive of time-centered poetics and ethics which are attuned to the realities of flux and perpetual change. The monograph finally examines post-modernist Arabic reformulations of Sufi writing on the eventful moment within ethicist and poetic critiques of capitalist modernity and its theologies of progress.
Ben Hammed is a Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Culture in the Department of Comparative Literature. He obtained his B.A. in 2009 from the University of Tunis and his Master’s from the University of Notre Dame in 2016. In 2022, he completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
Selected Publications:
- “Between Aesthetic Revolution, Mysticism, and Mystification: Arab Marxist Critiques of Adonis’ Poetics and Cultural Studies.” Middle Eastern Literatures (forthcoming in Spring 2026).
- “The Poet who Never Repeats His Rhyme: Atomistic Cosmology in Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Account of Time and its Poetic Translations.” Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. (forthcoming, Fall 2026).
-“Abdelfattah Kilito: On the Merit of Bilingualism and the Persistence of Colonial Linguistic Paradigms,” Contemporary Moroccan Thought: 1956-2011, ed. Mohammed Hashas (Leiden: Brill, 2024)
-“The North African City: Literary Portraits of Colonial, Socialist, and Neoliberal Spaces,” Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, ed Lieven Ameel (New York: Routledge, 2022)
-“(Dis)Enchanting Modernity: Sufism and its Temporality in the Thought of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Taha Abdurrahman,” Journal of North African Studies 26, no. 3 (2021): 552-571.
-“Dispossession and Hybridity: The Moroccan Neoliberal City in Mohammed Achaari’s Literary Enterprise,” Arab Studies Journal 27, no. 2 (2019): 40-64.
-“Heterotopias of the Neoliberal Egyptian State in Sonallah Ibrahim’s Narratives,” Middle East Critique 28, no. 1 (2019): 1-14.