Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisian Arabic: عبد الوهاب المدب; 17 January 1946 – 5 November 2014) was a French-language writer and cultural critic, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.

His vigilant point of view derived from what he called the "in-between" space ("l’entre deux") that he occupied as a North African writer based in France, and from the responsibility of being a public intellectual.

His work juxtaposes writers and scholars from East and West, engaging subjects that are historical, cultural, religious, political, and thereby challenging the stereotypes that Muslims and Europeans hold about each other.

A voice of tolerant Islam, Meddeb is no stranger to controversy from militant Muslim quarters and some left-wing journalists, who accuse him of complacency towards the Ben Ali regime.

[7] From his earliest essays, novels, poems and editorial work in the mid-1970s onward, Meddeb's writing has always been multiple and diverse, forming an ongoing literary project that mixes and transcends genres.

Formally, Meddeb practices what he calls an "esthetics of the heterogeneous,” playing with different literary forms from many traditions, including the European modernist novel, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, the medieval mystical poets of Islam, Japanese Haiku, and so on.

His privileging of these Arabic and Persian literary precursors explores archaic cultural resources in postmodern forms, emphasizing the esthetic, spiritual and ethical aspects of Islam.