Al-Nahda al-'Arabiyya: Forging a Modern Arab Identity in the Late Imperial Age
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David Lockwood | Liverpool Hope University
'The love of one's homeland is the true catalyst that drives a nation forward into civilization’.
-Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Egyptian intellectual and cornerstone of al-Nahda.
In his 1908 imperial screed Modern Egypt, British Consul-General Lord Evelyn Baring expressed his belief that the ‘primitive nature’ of the Arab people meant that the Egyptians would not learn self-governance for ‘several generations… or a thousand years’. This was a retrospective attempt to justify the British imperial move of stocking the Egyptian Cabinet with politicians servile to the Empire, in order for the British to rule covertly through the ‘veiled protectorate’.
Baring was, however, entirely oblivious to one significant detail of the contemporary Arab world: the political, cultural, and philosophical renaissance that had occurred throughout the nineteenth century: al-Nahda al-'Arabiyya (The Nahda). Translating to ‘renaissance’ or ‘awakening’, this was a period in which the Arab people had reached a collective awareness across seemingly disparate parts of differing empires, and realised that their cultural identity was not intrinsically tied to whom they were ruled by, but instead to the civic, cultural, and theological bedrock that comprised their thousand-year history.
Just over a century earlier, in preparation for his 1798 conquest of Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte read all that he believed necessary on the Arab world. He — like Baring and many before him — believed that the Arab identity could be encapsulated in the texts of merchants, military commanders, and imperialists that had been written over various stages of conquest. As Edward Said wrote in his seminal text Orientalism, Napoleon saw these written accounts as ‘unshakable abstract maxims about [Arab] “civilization”’, i.e., as truths.
Unsurprisingly, upon the French infantry’s arrival on the shores of Alexandria, they were met with a people whose reality did not reflect the mythos that surrounded them. As often happens when the sanctity of a culture is called into question, as it was with Napoleon’s heavy repression of those who resisted his invasion, the nature of what it meant to be Egyptian became a pertinent topic among dissidents.
The Nahda had begun. The movement, abstract as it was, repurposed the ‘enlightenment’ ideas of Napoleon's conquest towards Egyptian cultural self-determination. This accelerated under Mohamed Ali Pasha (d.1849), who rose to power as the Wāli (governor) of Egypt in the wake of the French withdrawal, prioritising national self-reliance over servility to the incumbent Ottoman Empire. Under his government’s modernist reforms, the Egyptian education system began to teach an array of technical subjects including engineering, medicine, and efficient agriculture. This opened Egypt to the prospect of a modern industrial economy, rather than reliance on subsidised farming. Egyptian intellectual and Islamic rationalist Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (d.1873) brought academic works from around the world to the libraries of Alexandria and Cairo, opening Arab culture to global culture at large. The Egyptian state began printing national newspapers, the first of which was Al-Waqa'i' al-Misriyya (Egyptian Affairs), first published in December 1828, and still in circulation to this day.
It is often mistaken that the great ‘liberal enlightenment’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was purely the product of an increasingly secularised, modernised Europe. From this myopic view, the existence of a theological culture is pitted as directly oppositional to progress and enlightenment, as though the two options available were to harmonise with modernity and reject tradition, or to react with an insular theocratic revival. Islamic modernist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d.1897) argued that the increasingly liberal renaissance of the Arab world must not see itself as separate from the ‘essentially religious’ element of society to combat imperialism; but that this religious element must be situated at the core of the post-imperial reform, rather than a capitulation to the increased secularisation of the West. This unique synthesis allowed for a cultural approach toward politics, religion, and jurisprudence that was unique to the Arab world, but whose progress was not purely a product of increased Western modernity.
The further misconception that the Arab world is exclusively the ‘Muslim World’ has meant that the region’s religious pluralism is often ignored in modern discourse, as though non-Muslim Arabs have dispersed across the globe and left no trace behind. The Arab world is, in fact, highly pluralist. The Levant, where a renaissance was occurring concurrent with that in Egypt, has been a religiously cosmopolitan region since the days of the Phoenicians, Canaanites, and Philistines, before the birth of Christ. In what is now the state of Lebanon, the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, an Ottoman millet (religious community) during the Nahda, was home to a Christian population making up roughly 80% of their total citizenry.
During the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the borderless nature of the Levant allowed for a greater confluence of individual, ‘national’ identities that led to the early formation of a pan-Arab ideal. The modern nation-states we know as Syria and Lebanon were, at this time, a hive for the cross-pollination of cultural norms, including the Melkites of Tyre, the Maronites of the Qadisha Valley, and the Alawites of Latakia, as people travelled between millets with relative ease, learning of the many shared aspects of their identities. With the introduction of Fusha (Modern Standard Arabic), the Levant became a hub of Arabic linguistic renaissance. Modernised translations of classical Arabic texts such as The Muqaddimah (‘Introduction’), a centuries-old product of Arab scientific advancement, as well as the Qur'an and the Bible, were republished to educate and enlighten the broadest possible audience across the Arab world.
In 1870, Lebanese Christian Butrus al-Bustani (d.1883) began printing al-Jinan (the Garden), a celebratory periodical of Arab political and literary advancements, taking a markedly pan-Arab enlightenment approach. Through its sixteen-year tenure in print, the magazine could be found in the homes of Arab citizens from Casablanca to Baghdad: in Beirut, Gaza, Cairo, and every city with a printing press. The publication and its readership did not shy away from religious belief, but proposed a modernised method of critically engaging with the concepts of faith and secularism. Al-Bustani’s maxim was ‘Let your religious beliefs and doctrines be between you and your Creator, and let love of the homeland unite you’. In the context of the Nahda, the ‘homeland’ of which he spoke was a conception of the pan-Arab ideal, rather than the modern notion of the nation-state. Although al-Bustani is often considered the first Syrian nationalist, his belief was that one must have love for one’s own region (known as Wataniyya), to further one’s love for the greater Arab homeland (Qawmiyya).
While there were differences in al-Bustani’s conception of Arabism from al-Afghani's more theologically based conception, this continued the theorisation of the Arab identity as situated at the unique junction of religion, culture, and language. The publication’s Pan-Arab political stance marked a shift in perception away from the Arab people being simply ‘Ottoman citizens’, thus allowing them to acknowledge themselves as a significant, independent nationhood with a shared lineage from the Moroccan shores of the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.
As a result, traditional Arabic concepts such as Neoplatonic ‘ruling-by-virtue' and the Ummah (global community) were revived in contemporary political discourse, cementing Arabism as a political movement beyond the confines of Ottomanism. What emerged from this, among citizens for whom a newfound political awakening was occurring, was that the collective that they found themselves a part of had the power of renaissance, far beyond the belief of the imperialists who saw the Arab people as a mismatched, unruly body in need of a blank slate of external governance for control.
In the mid-twentieth century, as Europe and its empires were recovering from the losses of the Second World War, the philosophies of linguistic and cultural unity that had been forged during the Nahda took centre stage in Arab politics. Post-imperial sovereignty was the driving force against what was perceived to be a lapse in self-reliance. King Farouk, the imperially-backed monarch of Egypt, was overthrown by Gamal Abdel Nasser (d.1970) in 1952, echoing the ambitions of Mohamed Ali Pasha a century and a half prior. Similar revolutions followed, such as in Libya, with the overthrow of their imperial monarchy in favour of their own brand of nascent Arab Socialism (Third Universal Theory), an ideology whose roots could be found in the pan-Arab, religious and political philosophies of al-Afghani and al-Bustani. The cultural and philosophical awareness birthed by the Nahda, along with the twentieth-century uprisings of post-imperial state-building across much of the Arab world, brought the religious integration of al-Afghani and the nationalism of al-Bustani to the fore. The Nahda and its continued post-imperial legacy refuted the colonialism of Napoleon and Baring, with its footprint still visible across the geopolitical decisions of the Arab world today, from movements against modern imperial hegemony to the continued celebration of the Arab identity.
Further reading:
George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1939).
Tarek El-Ariss, The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (The Modern Language Association of America, 2018).
Peter Hill, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Faber and Faber, 1991).
Elizabeth Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia University Press, 2010).
David Lockwood is currently completing an MA in Politics and International Relations at Liverpool Hope University. His interests broadly concern Arab Nationalist movements, the Arab world in international relations, political theology, critical and postcolonial theories, and Levantine politics.
