It is undeniable that colonialism and post-colonial nationalism have wreaked havoc on many forms of life. I am acutely aware of this writing from India, where I am currently doing fieldwork, and where the colonial historical project of vilifying Muslim rule in India has now become the dominant political discourse, with terrifying consequences. (And the Hindutva project, like many post-colonial projects, shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered.) But as Bardawil’s reading of The Arabic Freud allows us to see, this sense of rupture and alienation was not the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer. There were also—perhaps minor, as Bardawil indicates—traditions in which people like Yusuf Murad could be hospitable to the intellectual excitement of Freud and bring it together with the insights of classical Islamic writers, like Ibn ‘Arabi, to create new forms of knowledge, “neither of the East nor of the West.” El Shakry points us to a new direction of research: to think about the plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions—and hence the possibilities of productive conceptual dialogue—despite the brute facts of colonialism and its ruptures.