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Let There Be Nahdah!

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2015

Tarek El-Ariss
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Abstract

This essay examines the movement of Arab national and cultural revival known as nahdah (meaning renaissance or awakening) as a speech act and a performance involving a nuhūd (rising) and an uncertain practice of civilization (tamaddun) that seek to bring about a culture of knowledge. Contesting its treatment as a homogeneous project of modernity that rose and fell and as a historical period with clear epistemic breaks, it argues that nahdah civilizational practices could not be reduced to notions of civilization associated with Orientalism as system of othering and cultural superiority. This approach frees up nahdah texts from the dominant narrative of rise and decline, and from their intertextual and ideological dependency on European modernity as a model to be borrowed or resisted.

Keywords

nahdahperformancetrialcivilizationrenaissance
Type
Forum on Literary World Systems
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , September 2015 , pp. 260 - 266
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Antonius, George, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (London: H. Hamilton, 1938)Google Scholar.

2 Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1798–1939) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

3 Sharabi, Hisham, Arab Intellectuals and the West: The Formative Years, 1875–1914 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

4 The examples are too many to list, but I mention here the works of Khaled Fahmy, Yoav Di-Capua, Marwa Elshakry, Samah Selim, Orit Bashkin, Lital Levy, Kamran Rastegar, Thomas Bauer, Muhsin al-Musawi, Omnia El Shakry, Marilyn Booth, Ziad Fahmy, Ussama Makdisi, Jacob Wilson, Shaden Tageldine, Michael Allen, Elizabeth Holt, Jeffrey Saks, Ghenwa Hayek, and others.

5 al-Musawi, Muhsin, “The Republic of Letters: Arab Modernity?” Part I, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1.1 (2014): 265–280 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 275.

6 El-Ariss, Tarek, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

7 al-Bustani, Butrus, “Lecture on the Culture of the Arabs (1858),” The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of Nahdah Literature and Culture (1707–1937), ed. Tarek El-Ariss, trans. Stephen Sheehi (New York: Modern Language Association Book Series, Texts and Translations, 2016)Google Scholar.

8 al-Bustani, Butrus, “Al-Jinan (1870),” The Arab Renaissance, ed. Tarek El-Ariss, trans. Elizabeth Holt (New York: Modern Language Association Book Series, Texts and Translations, 2016)Google Scholar.

9 Al-Bustani, “Lecture.”

10 See selections from Baydas, Khalil, “Stages of the Mind (1924),” The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of Nahda Literature and Culture (1707–1937), ed. Tarek El-Ariss, trans. Spencer Scoville and Farah Antun (New York: Modern Language Association Book Series, Texts and Translations, 2016)Google Scholar. “The New Jerusalem,” The Arab Renaissance, trans. Ghenwa Hayek.