After two dense scholarly books—each nearly a decade in the making—I am now completing a crossover work that bridges academic rigor with a broader trade audience. The First Arabs: The Untold Story of the 1967 Generation (Princeton, 2027) revisits the dramatic story of the 1960s generation in the Arab world.
On a fall day in October 1970, five million people from across the Middle East rushed to Cairo to participate in a funeral. It was the funeral of Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser—and, in many ways, of the revolutionary movement that bore his name. Those who attended the mass service, along with the millions more who held vigils across the region, were the First Arabs: a generation of young men and women who embraced Nasser’s emancipatory politics of dignity as both a personal creed and an article of faith. The dream of a life worth living—and the struggles of the 1960s to make it a reality—has a long and dramatic history, beginning with a series of extraordinary victories and ending in the devastating defeat in the 1967 war.
The First Arabs offers a landmark narrative of this riveting generational history through the eyes of the poets, philosophers, literary critics, pedagogues, ideologues, filmmakers, singers, novelists and revolutionaries who partook in this struggle for dignity. Drawing on the rich intellectual record they left behind—much of it previously unstudied—The First Arabs explores their efforts to secure for themselves a respectable place in the world.
Yoav Di-Capua 