Nahda

The Nahda, Arabic for "awakening" and often called the Arab Renaissance, was a cultural revival that flourished in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Centred on Egypt and the Levant, with Tunisia also important, it renewed Arabic language and literature, built a modern press and schools, and nurtured new ideas about reform, religion and national identity.

Older accounts trace the movement to the shock of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt and of the modernising rule of Muhammad Ali that followed. More recent historians stress that it grew as much from within as from European example, linking it to the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of 1839 to 1876 and later to the Young Turk Revolution, which loosened controls on publishing. The revival began in Egypt and the Levant at roughly the same time; Egyptian writers tended to focus on politics, while those in Syria and Lebanon leaned towards culture, though the two strands soon merged.

The first major figure is usually taken to be Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), an Egyptian scholar. Sent to Paris by Muhammad Ali in 1826, he spent five years there, translated scientific works into Arabic and, in a book published in 1834, described French society for Egyptian readers, arguing that the Muslim world could learn from Europe while keeping its own values. Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, born into a Maronite family in what is now Lebanon, lived in Cairo, Malta, Britain, Paris, Tunisia and finally Istanbul, where he started an Arabic newspaper; he is seen as one of the founders of modern Arabic literature. In Beirut, Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1893) helped translate the Bible, opened a non-sectarian National School in 1863 after the communal fighting of 1860, and compiled dictionaries and the first modern Arabic encyclopedia. In Tunisia, the statesman Hayreddin Pasha wrote on combining Islamic tradition with Western-style government, and the Syrian writer Francis Marrash called for modern schools and a patriotism not based on religion.

Printing was the movement's engine. Muhammad Ali brought a press to Egypt in 1821, the first all-Arabic newspaper appeared in 1855, and Al-Ahram was founded in 1875. Between 1870 and 1900 Beirut alone saw some 40 periodicals and 15 newspapers launched. Translation of European works forced the coining of new words from Arabic roots, and the growing press helped turn Classical Arabic into the Modern Standard Arabic now used across the Arab world. Mission and church colleges, including the Syrian Protestant College that became the American University of Beirut, educated new generations, and Arab Christians played a large part in this cultural life.

In religion, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897) and his student Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) argued for a reformed, rational Islam and for solidarity against European colonialism; their journal of 1884 lasted only months but circulated from Morocco to India. Abduh's student Rashid Rida carried these ideas into the twentieth century. Politically, the Ottoman constitution of 1876 created a new class of local politicians, from whom Egyptian, Syrian and Arab nationalist movements later emerged, along with secret societies such as al-Fatat before the First World War.

New writing gradually broke from classical forms. In Egypt, Ahmad Shawqi reworked the classical ode, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal's Zaynab of 1914 is often called the first modern Egyptian novel. Jurji Zaydan developed the Arabic historical novel. Emigrant writers from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine carried it to the Americas, where Kahlil Gibran and others were active in the Pen League, an Arabic literary society in New York, from 1920.

Our 1880 and 1900 maps show the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in the Nahda's heyday, and the 1920 map shows the region divided after Ottoman rule ended.