Alienation of the Arab writer

There is a new book by Halim Barakat titled "Alienation of the Arab Writer."  I was reading in it, and this is a theme that Halim was first to address back in the late 60s.  I was pleasantly surprised that he wrote about that dinner at his house some years ago when staunch Arab seculars (Hisham Sharabi and I, as I remember) went against Hasan Hanafi.   I remember that the discussion went on for hours and before I left, Halim told me that when he was going inside during the discussion, he was taking notes because he wanted to write about it later.  Sure enough, he did cover it in the book.