His main area of specialization was the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but he later placed a greater emphasis upon the Islamic world and its relationship to the West, evidenced by his contribution to the discourse of Orientalism.

Al-Azm was at the center of a political controversy in December 1969 when he was arrested in absentia with his publisher by the Lebanese government; he had fled to Syria only to later return to Beirut to turn himself in, where he was jailed in early January 1970.

He applied a Marxist-materialist critique to religion, not to discredit people's religious commitments, but to expose how "Arab regimes found in religion a crutch they could use to calm down the Arab public and cover-up for their incompetence and failure laid bare by the defeat, by adopting religious and spiritual explanations for the Israeli victory...."[8] Al-Azm was released from prison in mid-January 1970 after the "Court decided in consensus to drop the charges filed against the Defendant Sadiq Al-Azm and Bashir Al-Daouk due to the lack of criminal elements they were charged with.

"[8]: Appendix  Subsequent editions of Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini include the Documents from the Tribunal and continue to be published in Arabic to this day, though with restricted access in the Middle East.

In a 1981 essay, Al-Azm wrote of Said: "the stylist and polemicist in Edward Said very often runs away with the systematic thinker ... we find Said ... tracing the origins of Orientalism all the way back to Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Dante.

In other words, Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, as we thought earlier, but is the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent the realities of other cultures, peoples and their languages.

[citation needed] Al-Azm wrote numerous books and articles in Arabic, and some have been translated into European languages including Italian, German, Danish, French.