Tayyeb Tizini

Tayyeb Tizini was a Syrian philosopher, researcher and academic who was born in the city of Homs in 1934. He was a supporter of Marxist nationalist thought and relied on the historical dialectic in his philosophical project to re-read Arab thought since before Islam until now. He wrote several books and articles on topics such as tradition, revolution, enlightenment, renaissance, civil society, and corruption in the Arab world. He was also an outspoken critic of tyranny and oppression and participated in the Syrian uprising in 2011. He was beaten and briefly detained by the security forces for demanding the release of political prisoners. He later joined the national conference convened by the regime in Damascus and called for a dialogue based on five demands: no firing at fellow Syrians, release of political prisoners, applying the rule of law, abandoning the security state, and reconstructing the media for a real national debate. He died in Homs at the age of 85 after a struggle with disease in 2019. He was widely regarded as one of the greatest Arab philosophers of the modern era.