For a few seconds, the man in the garb is suspended in the air. Will he land on the dry sand? Will he come short and splash into the river? His leap echoes the journey of decolonization in North Africa: full of pitfalls and the opportunity to reclaim one’s journey across history.

To avoid “salonning with idiots”, as Fatema Mernissi wrote in 1982, the Moroccan sociologist turned her living room into a remarkable assembly point in Rabat. Through memories and scattered traces, a different picture starts to emerge on intellectual communities and knowledge production in North Africa.

In Beirut in 1975, the Algerian journalist at the centre of the movie Nahla (1979) comes in contact with the other Arabs. What is the Maghreb, what is the Mashreq, and what is Arab identity according to Beloufa, Laroui, and Khatibi in the 1970s and 1980s?

Can there be a future while one’s past still belongs to others? That is the question that drove the young Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui. In his “History of the Maghreb” (1970), he drew up a guide to “decolonizate history”: combative, contentious, and maybe even revolutionary. From a historian’s pen.

The great Arab thinkers only grow bigger after their departure. Most often, their commemoration events lionize, glorify, and overlook their failures. Can we truly appreciate Abdelkebir Khatibi’s call for a plural Maghreb in 1982 without his failure to decolonize sociology in the 1960s?

The lecture hall was packed to see Abdallah Laroui, a reserved historian from another age, make his long awaited return. Younger readers were crucial in this movement by celebrating, discussing, and posting about him on social media since 2011. Some say the youth were only there to appear “smart” and “intellectual”.

Algiers in 1965 is bubbling with revolutionary ferment. Yet, the thinker Malek Bennabi returns from Cairo to publish memoirs of his childhood under French colonialism. Between the medersa and the “école française,” was a wink toward the country’s leaders: dream big, aim for an Algerian cultural renaissance.

It was billed as a battle of the giants: the Moroccan philosopher Muhammad Abed al-Jabri, speaking for the Maghrib, against Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, speaking for the Mashriq. Others added their voice, including George Tarabishi. The real question was: how did a thinker from the Moroccan “periphery” have such an impact on the Arab “centre” during the 1980s?

Paris was synonymous with Jean-Paul Sartre for the postcolonial North African intellectuals. In his publication, thirty intellectuals came together to adopt the Maghrib as their “horizon of thought”. Their goal was to overcome their dependency on external judgements and provide an antidote against toxic nationalism.

In Oxford’s Middle East Centre’s library, two books sit together in an isolated shelf, half-forgotten, ready to be rediscovered. Different authors, different titles and orientations, but published in the same year. They contain a similar movement toward history, modernity, and a revolution for North Africa… especially when read in the trail of the Arab Spring.