The onrush of Western concepts of modernity in the Middle East, has brought a spiritual and intellectual dislocation in the area which has manifested itself in literature more than any other sphere of life. The conflict of indigenous traditions with foreign concepts of modernity has created a leadership crisis in the forms and genres of literature and the discourses governing them. It is from this disintegrated clay of the spirit that the new forms of culture and literature rise in their distorted figures, and present the society, and represent their own disfigurement. That is why Baraheni sees irregularity, asymmetry, and disharmony in place of regularity, symmetry and harmony. His main contention is that the literature of disintegration and fragmentation is more ontological than historical.
Disintegration becomes the theme of all major works of literature.
Even those adhering to organic concepts of form, find themselves in the ironic position of contradicting themselves when they produce better works of literature. The notice, rather than the historic, is the order of the day. Baraheni subvert Western concepts of universality and historicism to account for the universal disintegration which has taken hold of Africa, Asia and Latin America.