The nahdah (meaning renaissance or awakening) is a movement of Arab national and cultural revival from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century that is little known outside of intellectual circles even in the Arab world. Models of nationalism and secularism as well as Islamic revival are attributed to nahdah thought and institutions such as linguistic reform and the practice of translation; the emergence of new literary genres such as the novel; the periodical press, journalism, and a new publishing industry; professional associations and salons; and a new education system. Traditional scholarship has generally attributed the nahdah to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, which has been represented as the shock that awakened Arabs from their cultural and political slumber after four hundred years of Ottoman rule. Although George AntoniusFootnote ¹ coins the word awakening in 1938, defining the nahdah as a vigorous shedding of tradition and autocratic rule, Albert HouraniFootnote ² and Hisham SharabiFootnote ³ point out that the nahdah was in fact a reaction to a European political onslaught, which exposed the cultural and technological retardation of the Ottoman Empire. Perceived as an age of enlightenment meant to bring about progress and civilization resulting from the circulation of books and ideas, technological modernity, and accelerated exchange with or direct borrowing from Europe, the nahdah was compared to the European renaissance. Following the renaissance’s humanist legacy, the nahdah contributed to the forging of a modern subjectivity through debates about individual rights and freedom, aesthetics, political participation, and the nature of authority.

Nahdah debates and cultural production render some of today’s debates (Islam and democracy, tradition and modernity, the veil) déjà vu at best. Topics that are discussed in media and public contexts today have been engaged with thoroughly and more interestingly since more than a hundred years ago. Women’s veiling has been the subject of books and controversies from Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947) in Egypt to Nazira Zeineddine (1908–1976) in Lebanon, who engaged with philosophy, individual rights discourses, and Islamic jurisprudence, debating the views of such thinkers as Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Education policies and the relation to the humanities have been engaged with in institution building projects in 1920s Iraq. Thus, when examining the current landscape, contemporary nahdah scholars have a strong déjà vu feeling, wondering why are these debates unresolved, returning, and persisting despite their exhaustion during the nahdah.

Current nahdah debates and concerns assume that the nahdah never really took place, or, if it did, it didn’t really stick. Another interpretation is that the nahdah rose and fell. Along those lines, many scholars interpret the collapse of the nahdah with the Nakba of 1948, that is, with the permanent entrenchment of colonialism and imperialism in the Arab world despite nineteenth-century cultural revival, educational reform, and national consciousness. The nahdah thus follows in the footsteps of Arab cultural but also political achievements and demise. From this perspective, the nahdah is something to be revived or lamented as a “modern” golden age that held the promise of Arab universalism, democracy, human rights, and nation building. But is this model of the rise and fall and resurrection of the nahdah accurate? Is it the only way to rethink the nahdah?

In addition to the recurrence of nahdah debates, we are witnessing today multiple usages of the nahdah as a term. How many nahdah political parties (in Tunis, for example) do we have in the Arab and Islamic world today? Are we living in a second or third nahdah? Are the 1990s, with their inauguration of the satellite and digital age, the new nahdah foreground that should have been embodied in the so-called Arab Spring? The nahdah appears like a haunting or a boomerang that makes us question what it means for the nahdah to have taken place. The nahdah seems like the revenant in the Derridean sense, always coming back but never fully actualized. This state of the nahdah therefore requires a different set of interpretive tools and analytical trajectories that decolonize the nahdah and liberate it from the historical narrative of rise and decline.

Scholarly works on the nahdah have crossed many milestones in recent years.Footnote ⁴ Muhsin al-Musawi’s intervention in this issue has shown how the nahdah needs not be imagined as a break with the past, brilliantly introducing an Islamic republic of letters that transcends imagined epistemic ruptures and showing how lexical and literary traditions and conceptualizations of the nation portray a more dynamic understanding of what the nahdah is and how it was delineated. Even if we are “willing to conceive the consolidated and intense conversation at the turn of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century between religious thinkers, secularists like Faraḥ Anṭūn and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf, and journalists and writers as being a site of vigorous national awareness, we are bound to overlook not only the permeation of the culture of the middle period into the ‘modernity’ project, but also the relevance of the politics of the medieval Islamic republic of letters.”Footnote ⁵ al-Musawi elaborates on the work of scholars from historians to literary critics who are rethinking the limits and scopes of the nahdah. al-Musawi argues that there is no real break between Mamluk or premodern and modern, especially in the conceptualization of the nation, thereby reading this dynamic relation between the nahdah and what precedes it against Taha Hussein (1889–1973) and Salamah Musa’s (1887–1958) desire to disconnect, break, and overcome the past from the 1930s onward.

Though al-Musawi’s thesis makes perfect sense, one still finds, when reading nahdah texts, a “desire” for a break, an imagined break that becomes as important to the nahdah as the historical accuracy of the break conceived in Foucauldian terms. This leads us to rethink the break as performative and not historically accurate or epistemologically conclusive when considered, as al-Musawi does, from the perspective of the lexical and conceptual tradition that ties in Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and nahdah cultural production. Does the nahdah, therefore, consist of an attitude, a position, a posture that has more to do with the forging of the nahdah scholar and writer rather than a reflection of a clearly delimited time period?

The answer lies in al-Musawi’s formulation itself, his questioning of the nahdah as “modernity,” keeping modernity in quotation marks when referring to the Arab “‘modernity’ project.” I take this calling attention to “modernity” as a signal to rethink modernity as being, more or less, a homogeneous project that has risen and fallen and that could be revived (1990s, the present, etc.). To accept that there is such a unified project would be to accept the kind of break with the past that al-Musawi deconstructs in his contribution. The nahdah is porous, according to al-Musawi, both as a time period and as a set of beliefs, genres, and practices. This points us in the direction of the nahdah as a question, as a conceptual framework that needs to be reexamined beyond the limiting understanding of what the nahdah was and whether it happened at all, and if it did, what shape it took. To think the nahdah, therefore, is to question the question, and consider that the nahdah is a project that is never fully realized as a project. Rather, it consists of a series of projects and practices that intersect and clash. To say “project,” however, is to imagine it as lacking although it is not meant to be whole, one with itself, and actualized.

Decentering the nahdah as a unified and homogeneous project along those lines, I have argued elsewhere that we need to examine the nahdah as a series of trials and accidents (as a potentiality) that are associated with but could never be reduced to the Arab encounter with Europe from the nineteenth century onward.Footnote ⁶ Although these historical frameworks are important, they are not sufficient as we seek to understand the nahdah better, to recognize its fluctuations and contradictions and movement beyond these historical confines. Just as al-Musawi is using the republic of letters to cut through periodicity and epistemic closure, it is necessary to read nahdah writings and positions as nahdah-like, as processes involving literary and political performances that continue to unfold in the Arab world today. In this sense, the nahdah doesn’t only designate one specific cultural development or a fixed historical period that started in the nineteenth century and collapsed in 1948 with the loss of Palestine and the eventual rise of fundamentalism as some claim, but rather as a series of positions, styles, and poses that are not homogeneous or coherent.

Though there is a strong sense among many nahdah authors that they are living in a new age and undergoing revival, nahdah texts, ideas, and models that could be attributed to this new age vary greatly. Overall, the nahdah is associated with an enlightenment ideal of knowledge. The term nahdah is derived from the word nahaḍa, which means to rise or stand up vigorously. Starting in the 1850s, authors such as Butrus al-Bustani (1818–1893) suggested that the Arabs were slowly emerging from their decline (inḥiṭāṭ) and ushering in civilization (tamaddun).Footnote ⁷ In his journal, al-Jinan, al-Bustani states: “the Arab nation… is advancing to a fine stage in the stages of civilization and knowledge.”Footnote ⁸ In this sense, the nahdah refers to an age of renaissance in relation to that which preceded it, namely an age of torpor, sleep, or even death. This framework has contributed to the perception of the nahdah as that which put an end to a previous age characterized by political and cultural slumber under an Ottoman rule and dating back to the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

In his famous lecture on the state of Arabic culture in 1858, Butrus al-Bustani discusses schools, presses, and the general state of learning in the Levant and Egypt that are contributing to the spread of civilization. Identifying problems and emphasizing success stories, al-Bustani, the founder of al-Madrasa al-Wataniyya (National School) in Beirut, discusses the ways in which cultural acquisition and learning are the only means to overcome sectarianism and achieve unity and enlightenment. For al-Bustani, the nahdah as awakening or renaissance is a speech act, designating a mood and involving a performance, a nuhud (rising). Al-Bustani’s lecture captures the performativity of the nahdah as that which is meant to bring about enlightenment and achieve the public good. In his lecture, al-Bustani performs, points and gestures, encourages, invigorates, threatens, and warns. The lecture involves metaphors that embody movement (as in cultural progress) using such expressions as “we are able to raise our heads up high given our current accomplishments,” “If the bridle binding these publishing houses were released and their presses were to run with their full strength,” and “release of the mind’s reins and the will’s bridle.”Footnote ⁹ The image of horses running without inhibition is key in capturing the state (or desired state) of Arabic culture at the time. The printing presses running like horses bring together animal force and industrialization as necessary components of the nahdah in the speech. Comparing it to the engines of the printing presses, running like horses, al-Bustani’s image, which foregrounds futurist discourse on speed and culture in the age of mechanicity, is a call for riding, for embracing the power and the times. Let there be nahdah!

Many of al-Bustani’s contemporaries believed that a new age is now upon them. This translated into a personal and financial investment, an impetus to donate money among local communities to create schools, to conduct experiments, to write about microbes, and to engage in comparative reading of European art and pre-Islamic poetry. There is a series of acts, interventions, and performances arising from peer pressure as well that are trying to bring about the nahdah, make it happen. The nahdah is this potential, this vague thing that everyone is practicing without knowing what it looks like or whether it will be achieved or not or to what end. It is a question of faith, an engagement in the communal affairs that require time and effort that these nahdah thinkers and writers are practicing. With this in mind, we need to rethink the nahdah not so much as a historical period with clear or unclear epistemic breaks but rather as a process, a trial, as a condition of possibility and a state of mind that cuts through historical periods.

The nahdah for these thinkers and activists was tied to civilization, refinement, adab (culture, literature), and the achievement of civilization. “Civilization” (tamaddun), which has been a contentious issue that marked the European Orientalist discourse at the time, is key to understanding exactly what is meant by tamaddun for nahdah authors and thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century. Al-Bustani and his peers were practicing tamaddun, which was in the air, by writing, founding schools, and editing journals. These nahdah authors were practicing the nahdah as civilization, trying it on, writing in a new language in order to actualize it and bring about this culture of knowledge. This does not mean that they are mutamaddinin (civilized), endowed with the sense of certainty and superiority that postcolonial theory identified in their European counterparts as part of its critique of Orientalism. Engaging in this civilizing process does not amount to a civilizing mission, and not Orientalist or self-Orientalizing. In this sense, the notion of civilization is not absolute or equivalent to that of the West.

Understanding this non-equivalence, which is often missed by contemporary nahdah scholars, should inform our comparative practice and make us rethink the current and prevalent approach that tries to deconstruct notions of nahdah sexuality, literature, and education. A focus on the meaning of concepts in the Western context, as they have been studied, analyzed, and critiqued, will miss the usage and their practice in the Arabic one, preventing acts of recoding and translation, trial and error, and contradiction and inconsistency. The interpretation and the critique of the nahdah have to exist somewhere in between these two conceptual and linguistic registers, in between the performative and the conceptual.

Engaging the nahdah as trials and accidents, however, needs to be distinguished from Salamah Musa’s and Taha Hussein’s later definitions of the nahdah, which align more clearly with the internalized Orientalism that al-Musawi and other scholars discuss, wherein the nahdah is presented as a clear ideological project that they are confidently enacting as a sign of their modernity, superiority, that they now know with certainty, and in so doing limiting and interrupting the nahdah’s play. When approaching the nahdah with this clear view, when the nahdah is actualized and defined by Hussein, Musah, and contemporary nahdah scholars, then there is nothing to learn from the nahdah, which has now been foreclosed, defined, and fully formed. Insisting on the nahdah as this suspended space of trial and performance is essential to understanding it. Nahdah could be understood only through uncertainty. It is in the speech act, the bodily gestures, unstable genres, texts, and models that the nahdah needs to be engaged.

The importance of nahdah as trials and potentiality is necessary to free up the nahdah text from the nahdah as a “modernity” project through which that text becomes meaningful—and the only way that the text becomes meaningful. When we examine the function of literature during the nahdah, we find theories of the novel in Khalil Baydas (1875–1949) and Farah Antun (1874–1922) proclaiming that literature is meant to elevate and produce the moral subject, the subject of adab that is currently the topic of many scholarly works.Footnote ¹⁰ But if we read these texts closely, if we read deconstructively and comparatively, we realize that what is preached doesn’t correspond to what is produced, that there are radical discrepancies between intention and writing, between theory and practice.

It is at the intersection of public discourse on the nahdah and nahdah practices (writing, activism, editing) that the reading and nahdah research needs to take place. This opens up nahdah texts for reading and analysis, giving them their rightful place in Arabic literary studies. Thus far, these texts have been reduced to representation of discursive and political forces stripped of these kinds of particularities wherein dissonance, performance, and play occur. This requires that we read the texts and read them in all their differences and fluctuations, suspending the engagement with these works through the lens of nahdah rise or decline, Western influence or Arabic tradition, break or continuity. To decolonize the nahdah is to allow it to make its own meaning, however contradictory and inconsistent with historical narratives and ideologies of critique.