The Arabic noun Nahda (نهضة), typically glossed as “rebirth”, “revival”, or “awakening”, became an organizing principle for social consciousness and uprisings in the Arab World during a century of intellectual, cultural, and material reform. The Nahda is generally divided into two main phases. The first began in the 1860s and lasted through the 1910s. This Nahda marks the peak of regional reforms in the Arab World, which began as early as Napoleon’s political and military campaign in Egypt. The second Nahda took place between the 1920s and 1940s and was widely marked by the emergence of modern Arab literature and wide-scale publications.¹ The overarching question of Arabs’ positionality in the world underpinned these waves of change, and Arab intellectuals, or Nahdawis, were situated squarely within this paradigmatic transition. The vocation of defining the parameters of the Arab identity occupied itself with ideas of collective consciousness and identity, which drove many Nahdawis “to contend with discourses of ancient authenticity” and what it means to be Arab.²

The issue of authenticity is arguably energized by the cross-cultural interactions between Europe and the Arab World, dating as far back as Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt in 1798. These cross-cultural encounters remain the premise for key issues in the Arab World, including debates on ‘modern’ versus ‘westernized’ society, the role of religion in politics and law, regional alliances, land claims, citizenship, and perceptions of shared heritage (the Gulf, North Africa, the Levante). In this essay, I argue that the genesis of contemporary issues and intricacies in Arab identity is located within the early years of the first Nahda. This is evident by examining the socio-political context of this time period in which the quest for Arab self-conceptualization emerged. Namely, the context of cross-cultural encounters with Europe that inspired the interest in borrowing from European liberal thought to remedy issues in the Arab World–contentious identity and failing political systems alike.

Napoleon in Egypt: Cross-Cultural Encounters

Early figures of the first Nahda, such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Butrus al-Bustani, and Khayir Al-Din, were interested in conceptualizing the Arab identity within their broader ambitions to reform the Arab World. In the 1990s, postcolonial scholar Edward Said drew a link between the inception and purpose of these reforms and Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, which “spurred the thinking” of Egyptian and Arab intellectuals in the face of shocking military defeat, extensive exposure to European culture, and rising concern for the sustainability of Ottoman rule.³ During this cross-cultural encounter, discourse was predicated upon comparing one people with another, as reflected in Napoleon’s public address in Egypt, and Al-Jabarti’s response to it, in June of 1798.⁴ Contrasting Arab and Western societies transcended its initial temporal context to become the core intellectual paradigm of Nahdawi writing and thought on Arab identity in the following years, irrespective of their varying ideological, sectarian, political, or national stances.⁵ Indeed, early Nahda figures expressed interest in European conviction for modernity, often portraying European thought as recourse for challenges in the Arab World at the time.

In Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Albert Hourani attests to these parallelisms between early Nahdawi thinkers. He references Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, who depicts Europe as “the norm of civilization… [Muslims] can enter the mainstream of modern civilization, by adopting European sciences and their fruits”, as well as Khayir Al-Din, who was an advocate of learning from the advanced military of Europe, to restore and sustain the Umma through the Liberal Age.⁶ Albeit expressing some reservations to the European way of life, for instance, the “moral danger” that it poses, Nahwadi campaigns were ultimately concerned with exposing the ways in which the Arab World was lacking relative to Europe.⁷ These campaigns endeavoured to strike a balance between allowing indigenous elements of Arab intellectual thought to guide the discourse on modernity and drawing inspiration from the European experience of modernity. This effort  produced a hybrid model that combined liberalist modernity and Arab intellectual thought to form Arab modernism. 

Despite attempting to hybridize Arab modernity,, its epistemological basis  remains grounded in European Liberal Age priorities exemplified in Napoleon’s expedition. These included imperial missions, capitalist development, Western hegemony, and Europe’s cultural, material, and political superiority. Edward Said reiterates that Europe sought “to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial occupation with the title ‘contribution to modern learning’ … for a text whose usefulness was not to the native.”⁸ Arab intellectuals arguably accepted the premise of liberal values, despite the fact that modernity is a concept fundamentally created, defined, and re-defined by and for European interests. Pan-African intellectual Amilcar Cabral describes the greatest weakness of struggles against Western dominance as an “ideological deficiency […] explained by ignorance of the historical reality which these movements aspire to transform.”⁹ Expositions by early Nahdawis reflect a belief that Arab societies, which formerly developed under the tenants of Islam, were inferior to European societies since they found their socieites to belacking in areas where European societies exceled. The complicated nature of the Arab identity today finds much of its roots here: the confrontation with Europeans transposed the ways the Arabs saw their position in the world, and in effect Nahdawis were unified by their belief of Arab inferiority compared to the West and thought that importing certain European values would remedy this problem. In this sense, Arab subjective identity transpired internally within the Arab World by taking for granted the politics underpinning modernism and the historical ventures that drove to be concerned with it.

A Different Nahda

This understanding of the genesis of the modern Arab identity thus prompts a revision of the ways the first Nahda has been interpreted by intellectual currents of the mid-twentieth century. As argued by Stephen Sheehi, “Arab identity was constructed through experimentations in language, rhetoric, and of course, literature… in the era of capitalist and imperialist expansion,” which suggests that “the inherent failure” of Arabs is not proof of their inability to enter into modernity but a fact of modernity.¹⁰ Despite these achievements, mid-twentieth century intellectual currents in the Arab world view the intellectuals of first Nahda as failing to actualize a potential “point of departure condition that would found the new or the different,” missing the opportunity to harness such novelty for the purpose of nation-making, and thereby tilting the identity-building purpose  of the Nahda away from its objective.¹¹ This narrative manifested in the following years primarily by shaping the meaning and purpose of social movements and political groups. Egypt’s mid-twentieth century Free Officers and Ikhwan movements have, for instance, “framed their rivalry as an extension of … struggle against external and imperial domination” and in effect aimed to “rediscover [the]‘true’ Arab-Muslim identity” in their view.¹²

Conversely, other mid-twentieth century intellectual movements sought to revisit the Nahda and position it as an integral pillar to the modern Arab identity. For instance, Elias Khoury offers an alternative premise and praxis for ‘rediscovering’ the Arab identity in a way that is discursively and epistemologically unique to the region and its people. Khoury argues for a third Arab Nahda, in which “[d]emocracy is the precondition of Arab thought” and the unification of Arabs as a people is rooted in the lingua franca, the Arabic language. He emphasizes that ‘Arabism’ is different from Europe’s nationalist movements as it “does not pertain to the nation-state[,] … [it] is not made out of ethnicity” and, in effect, inherently abandons the ‘borrowing’ of European thinking of identity. Arabism, to Khoury, lives as “a plural horizon” concerned with the interests of the Arab world, “in continuity and integration.”¹³ As such, Khoury’s account cleverly draws on the work of early Nahdawis to offer a critical lens on the strategies and thought processes involved in the creation of an Arab identity. Therefore, past generations can offer valuable insight for imagining a new awakening today through their experiences and conflagration of different intellectual currents. Re-evaluating Arab modernity should thus be undertaken not against the backdrop of a new form of loss, but rather as the power to narrate, define, and validate Arab history on its own terms.∇

Lina Lashin is a graduating student at Trudeau’s Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies housed at the Munk School. She holds regional minors in African Studies and Near Middle Eastern Studies. Her academic interests include the study of institutions and governance, Arab intellectual history, migration, and the relationship between Law and society.

1. Elias Khoury, “For a Third Nahda,” in Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age, eds. Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen, tr. Hanssen and Weiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 358-360.
2. Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen, “Introduction,” in Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age, eds. Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3.
3. Robert L. Tignor and Shmuel Moreh, Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabartî's Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798 (New York : Markus Wiener Publications, 2004), 15.
4. Tignor and Moreh, Al-Jabartî's Chronicle, 24-33.
5. Khalid Furani. “ Foundations of Modern Arab Identity” Journal of Arabic Literature 36, No. 2 (2005), 224–227.
6. Albert Hourani , Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1962] 1983), 82; 90.
7. Hourani, Arabic Thought, 90.
8. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 176.
9. Amilcar Cabral, “Weapon of Theory: Address Delivered to the First Tricontinental Conference,” Marxist.org, Last accessed on January 25, 2022, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm.
10. Lucia Volk, review of “Foundations of the Arab Identity” 132-133.
11. Khoury, “For a Third Nahda,” 359-360.
12. Khoury, “For a Third Nahda,” 361-362.
13. Khoury, “For a Third Nahda.” 361-362.