The four insightful engagements by Tarek El-Ariss, Francesca Orsini, Stefan Helgesson, and Debjani Ganguly convey the continued postcolonial effort to revisit early cosmopolitan literary constructions that connect in one way or another with “awakening” and “modernity” struggles. I plan to study this connection with some elaboration in a forthcoming monograph on Arab Modernists’ Struggle with the Past. The two pieces that appeared so far in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry try to set the taste for this monograph through an interrogation of some absolutes that some nahḍah prominent figures espoused in mimicry of the European Enlightenment discourse. After questioning the disparagement of the recent past and uncovering the complexity of the Arabic cultural production across Islamic lands and singling out its networks, makeup, and multiple venues and players, the six centuries of political upheaval and loss of a specific or unitary Islamic discourse pose a number of challenges to any positivist claims. Undaunted by this upheaval, cultural production and its multiplicity across large swathes and times require systematic reading to uncover significant epistemic shifts that should take us beyond a blanket disparagement of an age of decadence and stagnation. This is what The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) strives to explain.

I am glad the four respondents are in tune with respect to the need to explore other formations of world systems beyond the specific models that scholars of European literature have presented. Although these models were in the minds of many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics and scholars across Arab, South Asian, and African cultures, they are obviously so only because of some neglect of indigenous models that happened to have their own struggles and trials. The “Arabic knowledge construction” models that are collapsed under the trope of a republic of letters happen to enlist the participation of hundreds of scholars, critics, and craftsmen, from Isfahan, Samarqand, Khorasan, Jurjan, Marv, Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, Fez, and many other centers that suffered the ravages of war. Their migration among cities and places across six centuries give this construction a particularity, especially when studied in terms of epistemic shifts. The republic of letters is used throughout to signify networks, not only of scholars, but also of modes and venues that allow movement and exchange, and thence constellations of cultural capital that speak to each other across time and space, and give the impression of a lively period of exchange. Rather than one single model, we are addressing therefore an endless formation during such a long period and across these lands. Bibliophiles and scholars such as Yāqūt al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī reminisce about libraries like the ones in Marv before its destruction, libraries that he described as “pastures” that happened to provide source material for his famed dictionaries of nations and people. Although Arabic remained a language of conversation and discussion among writers and scholars, it was so only in the shadow of other empires and city-states; hence, it cannot be compared to Latin. Its relation to other competing and challenging vernaculars is a dialectical one, a record of give and take, but also as the most recognized by scholars from non-Arab regions. Baghdad Abbasid cosmopolitanism bestowed Arabic as the universal language associated with the spread of Islam and grew in post Abbasid times into the language of discussion among the rising elites and literate societies.

In relation to this daunting capital, Arab modernists show an enormous anxiety that is common in periods of transition, especially under the impact of British and French cultural achievement. The desire to be their Other, the European, and the need to retain native magnanimity drove them to the classical past of an Abbasid empire, a Golden Age, a lighthouse that justifies importation of a colonial culture in times of regression and decadence that the recent past signifies for them in terms similar to what the Middle Ages signify to the Enlightenment. This disparagement of a recent past remained problematic, especially given that the nahḍah scholars perceive their mission as not necessarily one of definitive success. When nahḍah intellectuals looked retrospectively back upon their achievements, they were not sanguine. Indeed Țāhā Ḥusayn, for one, bemoans the state of Egypt in the 1940s, for this was not what they “wasted their youth for,” a point that I elaborated on in The Postcolonial Arabic Novel (2003). The mournful tone is important for our discussion. Although there was uncertainty, struggle, anxiety, and unease, there was also a positivist view of progression and Enlightenment. In other words, there is this paradoxical intersection that leaves the nahḍah intellectual in a liminal space, a threshold, stranded and in perpetual trial even when voicing triumph and targeting others with sardonic sarcasm as Ḥusayn did in his seminal autobiography, The Days. Autobiography signals unease, not contentment. Otherwise, how can we understand the massive growth of autobiographical writing? On the other hand, this autobiographical stream speaks of an unverified belief in one’s role, a mastery of one’s fate, worth communicating and circulating widely to help justifying one’s role for posterity. What gives the movement its particularity and name are the sense of a mastery of time, a program for development and education, and a role to be played out by competing individuals whose literary and cultural battles signify diversity of positions and determination. Although it is true that each writer had a struggle of his or her own, these fall within a large struggle: Țāhā Ḥusayn’s struggle against his blindness and the limits it imposed on his life generated a search for a larger vision, more comprehensive and encompassing, to involve the liberation of a nation. The same applies to Mayy Ziyādah, Yaʿ‛qūb Ṣarrūf, Jurjī Zaydān, and Salāmah Mūsā, among others. Biographical, autobiographical, or narrative accounts signify a self-writ large to account for communal or national issues. As a significant threshold to nation, the act of narration provides us also with conditions of possibility and estrangement. The Days of Țāhā Ḥusayn, for example, could not become so seminal for subsequent writing without its power to incite, invite, and demarcate venues for self-dependency, sovereignty, and acclamation of Orientalists’ knowledge and methods in approaching and even reading Arabic literature.

Sensory experience does not fall outside this understanding, but becomes the core that he hears and comprehends with gusto against traditionalist ways of learning. Its battle against the specific figures, such as his primary school “master,” evolves into a large one of negation that overlooks a long chain of autobiographies, satires, travel accounts, compendiums, poetry, and deliberations on teaching and learning. More important is the neglect of medieval networks that cover large swathes of lands and regions and cut across significant modes of production. Although the personal was strong in these networks, it is hard to come across unsettling self-aggrandizements of the type that is distinguishable of the nahḍah. Indeed, the supplemental explanatory apparatus that often accompanies medieval and premodern travel accounts and autobiographies downplays subjectification while covertly substantiating the narrating subject’s knowledge. Such is ibn Maʿṣūm al-Madanī’s Salwat al-gharīb (1642‒1707), for example, a work where the autobiographical travel account makes less than one-third of its size. The same applies to Shakwa al-gharib (Complaint of a Stranger Exiled from Home) by ʿ‛Ayn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī (d. 1098).

The label attached to the movement, that is, nahḍah, could not be random because there were a number of economic, social, and political factors that made that particular period one of anxiety, restlessness, and romantic aspiration. The colonial encounter was present throughout these moments, including the most personal that speak of writers’ own biopolitics. As shown in a number of writings on Jurjī Zaydān, Yaʿ‛qūb Ṣarrūf, Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī, Ismāʿ‛īl Maẓhar, Mayy Ziyādah, Țāhā Ḥusayn, Muṣṭafā Ṣādiq al-Rāfiʿī, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, al-ʿAqqād, and al-Māzinī, the personal, the particular, and the national work together in creating a particularity within that grand aspiration for change. Although, as Tarek argues, there cannot be a project per se, there is the search for one, an aspiration to formulate a vision for the future. Indeed, the special issues of al-Hilal that were established by Jurjī Zaydān, address these projects, such as Arab or Islamic nationalism, the idea of homelands, and the conceptualization of literature in relation to the past. Sir Hamilton Gibb’s contributions to the journal were taken to be parameters for this conceptualization and its paradigmatic periodization.

At this intersection, the issue of language becomes paramount; not only because the colonial power is more keen to implement the vernacular and the colloquial, as more handy and also less comprehensive and serviceable to nationalist struggle against occupation, but also because prominent intellectuals, conservatives and liberals alike, thought of the classical as the right venue for cementing cultural solidarity and consolidating its symbolic capital. Ṣarrūf was no less attuned to this approach than Mayy Ziyādah, Țāhā Ḥusayn, al-ʿAqqad, and Muṣṭafā Ṣādiq al-Rāfiʿī. Their fight was also against their colleagues such as the formidable intellectual Salāma Mūsā.

As other colleagues have noticed, there were similar moments in the history of neighboring cultures, but Arabic, notwithstanding Ottoman encroachment, remained the language of intelligentsia across large swathes of Asia and Africa. This is why lexicons assume such significance throughout the medieval (i.e., premodern) period. While, as Francesca Orsini argues, Sanskrit flourished on the eve of colonialism, and continued to do so for some time, Arabic had struggled to sustain its circulation among rhetors, grammarians, poets, jurists, and philosophers. From the twelfth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, Arabic was the language of lettered societies. But what Sheldon Pollock argues can be applicable when we try to account for dissemination and limit. For a cultured society, Arabic was “cosmopolitan” and universal, even when rulers where not necessarily bound to this practice. Hence, Stefan Helgesson’s point is valid in trying to navigate between “extroversion and introversion” as a third space between one model and another. No culture can have its world systems or universal and cosmopolitan spread without this reach-out in regions other than its hinterland; the Arabic model with its Afro-Asian multiple centers had its knowledge construction and cultural capital beyond ethnicity and boundaries. Hence, it was wider than any of its components and more complex than regional or city-state formations. This sits well with Debjani Ganguly’s argument for polysystems. Along with the monographs and articles cited in Debjani Ganguly’s response, there is Hamid Dabashi’s book, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Indeed, my argument, as Ganguly notices, emerges as a “Counter-narrative to the history of European modernization and its impact on Arabic literary modernity.” But, the two-part article as one portion in a sequel to the Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction lays emphasis on the nahḍah only as an ambivalent moment whereby some prominent intellectuals thought of themselves as leaders of thought like the European Enlightenment figures, locating themselves in that European moment of a century earlier, cutting themselves doubly from their immediate history and the challenge to the age of reason brought about by the rising imperial culture of nineteenth-century Europe. Textualizing the moment and sanctifying it through association with Goethe and his comments on an age of transition, Țāhā Ḥusayn for one was more at home with texts and intellects than with the pressing and hard challenges of the turn of the century. Other intellectuals of less infatuation with Europe think of awakening in terms of incitement and national awareness. It is, as Tarek El-Ariss suggests, a moment of rupture and anxiety, and especially so when we see it stranded between derision of a recent past and espousal of both an Arab classical period, roughly eighth to eleventh centuries, and Europe’s cultural achievement. Unless we realize the loss involved in this way of thinking, its blackout of a recent past, we cannot see the gaps and holes that emerge as the breeding grounds and nests for violent onslaughts on the nation-states. If the Abbasid period offered a cosmopolitan culture that enlisted the participation of thousands of litterateurs and scientists, the middle period, twelfth to eighteenth centuries, offered as much, but not with Baghdad as epicenter or metropolis. Multiple cities and city-states appeared across West Asia and the Mediterranean, states that competed in radiance and richness only to be swept away by devastating wars, leaving scholars and poets bemoaning the loss. Only Cairo remained intact, and hence a unique epicenter that ensured accumulation of cultural capital, a reservoir and cauldron at the same time, a celebrated metropolis that was to ensure an imminent revival and dalliance in what we call nahḍah that nevertheless had to face other challenges and hence to have its own ruptures. The negotiated stance with respect to the recent past should not be perceived as rupture in the relationship with the Arab core culture, its regional centrality, but primarily with its West Asian dimension, the dimension that made Samarqand, Marv, Khorasan, Isfahan, and others conversant with Damascus, Cairo, Aleppo, and Fez. This nahḍah breakup has damaged future possibilities of growth and confined Arabs and Arab culture to regional boundaries. This is not an ordinary failure. Its other problematic also derives from the same estrangement. The recent past, the medieval six centuries or so, was not completely drowned in elitist enterprises and cultural constellations; there was a substantial body of knowledge, poetic modes, shadow plays, simplified compendiums and manuals, wide use of colloquialism, and other practices that address the common public. The appetite for reading among this public can be gauged through records of readings, copyists, and extant materials. This significant dimension in culture industry is referenced by nahḍah intellectuals, if ever, as failure and decadence rather than as part of a comprehensive republic of letters with such a massive reach-out. This dialogic space could have been retrieved by modernists to ensure a much needed connect with the masses. What applies to Arab nahḍah may also apply to other models and systems. Needless to say, it is writers like us who perceive a system in a seemingly random enterprise, a system with a number of modes, constructs, cultural products, and activity.