The Arab Renaissance: The Nahda
Al-Nahda al-’Arabiyaa, or The Arab Renaissance, was a period of literary, linguistic, political, and cultural change that occurred most concentratedly within Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. The beginning of the Nahda is typically attributed to the early 19th century, after the invasion of Napoleon and his troops in 1798, and lasted until the early 20th century, bringing about the foundations of Orientalism. The invasion ushered in an influx of Western literature, philosophies, and general influence. The westernizing effects of colonization, which were marred with violence, distorted scholarship for many years after this initial encounter, even after the French were expelled in 1801 and during the subsequent rise of Mohamad Ali Pasha. During this period, intellectuals flocked to the cosmopolitan hub of Cairo, where printing houses were set up, newspapers were emerging, new translations of Western works (including works by European Orientalists) were being made, all against the backdrop of rising nationalist sentiments.
The flourishing of this cultural phenomenon or awakening was first dubbed “nahda” by the journalist Jurjī Zaydān in his popular journal al-Hilal, in an 1892 article referring to the “Egyptian Nahda”. Tracing the philological history of the movement is vital to analyzing the Nahda, especially as the movement itself was so intertwined with the evolution and use of the Arabic language for literary translations, political, or cultural ends. Therefore, the Nahda accelerated when it was acknowledged and given a name, with the intellectuals conscious of the environment they were both immersed in and contributing to. Language was becoming highly controversial during this period. Therefore, the choice of a term carries even more significance. Particularly for lexicon transformation in Arabic and the burgeoning industry of Arabic print media, the contention arose with making the language of the Quran malleable enough to fit the demands of modernity, to make it suitable for “producing translations of foreign texts, serializing original literature, and reporting local and international news, including scientific and technological advances” (Deuchar 2017).
The term of the Nahda itself was not created during the Arab renaissance but rather evolved along with it. The flexibility of the term has been identified in the 1870 dictionary Muhīt al-Muhīt “ as a synonym for the related noun inithād, meaning “rising” or “getting up” (al-Zabīdī 99). The verb has extra, specific functions: “na-ha-da,” used of a plant, is “to mature” or “to ripen” (istawā); of a bird, “to extend its wings to fly [basata janahayhi li-yatīr]” (Deuchar 2017). With movement inherent to the conception of the word as a verb, the main emphasis shifted primarily upon the energy necessary for some development to occur.
Within Zaydān’s article from 1892 that identified the Nahda in a renaissance sense, he acknowledged it as an event following a series of ebbing and flowing of access to knowledge across Egyptian history. Therefore, from the Abbasid “golden age” with the boom and bust of periods of prosperity, “nahda” was the term used by Zaydān to be given to this form of recurring historical event.
European influence, like that of Napoleon, need not be attributed as the only catalyst of the nahda according to Zaydān. He viewed the environment formed by Mohamad Ali Pasha’s expulsion of the French as the precipice, since it turned Egypt towards a national cause, with a call to activity and an emergence of nationalism, which was the foundation of much of the literary and political activity of the era. The metaphorical definition of nahda is interpreted literally as throwing off an oppressive foreign force.
Many voices of leading intellectuals/bourgeoisie, both men and women, used the resources available to them, most often in the form of articles and letters, to effectuate dialogue regarding a wide variety of subjects. The Beirut newspaper Lisan al-Hal was one such platform of the time, with a majority of Christian Arabs working for similar newspapers, in both Beirut and Cairo. The discourse of the late 19th century also included seemingly mundane subjects relating to private life, which still felt the effects of the age of awakening.
The terminologies of public or private spheres are plastic, especially when subjected to varying cultural frameworks. Therefore, emerging from an era where some gender expectations within the Middle East were different than much of the West, going into an epoch of increasing universalism in terms of standard scientific and historical knowledge, each case must be analyzed subjectively in terms of its relative modernization. Hisham Sharabi describes in Neopatriarchy:
that during the nahda the patriarchal structures within Arab society were far from being displaced or truly modernized; rather they were strengthened and/or maintained in deformed, “modernized” forms. This “neopatriarchy,” as Sharabi terms it, which was neither modern nor traditional, created a foundation in which women and men could re-debate their relationships in the family. (Zachs 2012)
Within the jostled foundations of societal roles, the disruption allowed women to renegotiate some of their positions within their society professionally and otherwise.
The translators became co-authors within the text as in the case of Al-Manfaluti’s remembrance of Andalusia in “al-Dhikra” in 1915. The original by Chateaubriand, published in 1826, depicts the experience of a young Arab who was the last member of the royal line who used to rule Andalusia. While filled with sadness for the ignorance he has over the territory his family used to rule, he falls for a Spanish Christian noblewoman and returns to Tunis, where he soon dies. Al-Manfaluti’s interpretation gives more autonomy to the central character while maintaining the general structure of the initial plot. He renames the central figure Sa’id ibn Yusuf ibn Abi ‘Abdallah, and instead of being ignorant of his family's history in Granada, he laments the loss of his ancestors as he traces their history through each room of the Alhambra palace. He also altered part of the ending, where instead of returning to Africa out of his own will, downcast and heartbroken, al-Manfaluti’s protagonist is martyred by the Spanish Inquisition for seducing a Christian woman and is sentenced to death in Spain. The story’s framework is unchanged, but the dialogue al-Manfaluti has with the text imparts a message that was not present in its original version. Both original composition and translation, he transformed Orientalist images into a cultural and political message for Arabic reading audiences.
In addition to translating relatively modern works, there was a movement of classical revival as well, citing the Arab heritage of the legacy of the Greeks. While previously Classical traditions have been majority-wise Eurocentric, during the nahda there was a resurgence of translating Greek epics and poems that had not already been translated during the eighth and tenth centuries. The interconnectedness between Ancient Greece and Arab thought is underscored by how Greek thought contributed to Arab-Islamic philosophy, where a majority of :
all scientific, medical and philosophical works available in late antique Alexandria were translated into Arabic in the ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad. The Greek texts which became available in Arabic through the efforts of translators provided the foundations not only for Arabic medicine, philosophy, mathematics and other sciences, but also had an impact on Arabic philology and poetry as well as on Islamic theology (kalām) and jurisprudence (fiqh) (Pormann 2006)
With Greek influence already present throughout Arab society, what was not already present in terms of untranslated poetry was seen as necessary to be reintroduced in Arabic by translators (especially in Egypt) to contribute to the cultural resurrection.
Sulaimān al-Bustānī, who was both a writer and a politician, translated the Iliad into Arabic. The semantic challenges posed were similar to the issues present with translating other foreign languages with unique rhyme schemes and idioms; however, in the case of the Iliad, it contained further complexity. Greek and Arabic meter is different, and the balance of each line was necessary to emulate the Greek original hemistiches of rhyme and metrical constraint. Al-Bustānī Arabized many of the names for his audience as well as making some alterations to fit into Arabic conventions of poetic codes.
Along with Bustānī, Tāhā Husain was a prolific and highly recognized intellectual of the nahda, and served as the Minister of Education from 1950-1952. Believing in the vital importance of a cultural reform adapting aspects of a Western framework to modernize, he also translated many Greek works. Placing Egypt within a Mediterranean context and not merely the oriental concept of the “East”, Husain claimed the cultural inheritance of the Greeks as being closely connected to Egyptian heritage. Studying in Cairo and Paris, he studied Greek and Latin and, as a result, translated a large body of work, including French plays dealing with mythological subjects, as well as most of Sophocles’ plays including Electra, Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Philoctetes.
While conveying the meaning through prose, he left the translation straightforward enough that it would be accessible to the average Arabic reader. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, following contact with the Europeans during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798-1801), Arabic drama evolved in part out of that cultural exchange. However, Arabic theater would proliferate mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century based upon Classical works.
Other translated works would contain the influence of nationalism like Ahmad Šauqī’s The Downfall of Cleopatra, which characterized her “Unlike Plutarch and Shakespeare…[since] he does not depict Cleopatra as a man-eating, attention-seeking, dangerous woman, but rather as a heroine who has the interest of her country, Egypt, at heart. Even her suicide appears in this light: it is her ultimate sacrifice for her homeland, whose freedom she is not willing to sacrifice” (Pormann 2006).
Translation was meant to be the precursor or nourishment of a subsequent literary movement aiming at expanding the adaptability of modern Arab literature. For al-Hakīm, another prolific writer, returning to Greek sources is the necessary action to begin the chain of events leading to an eventual equal literary/cultural footing with the West, along with the backdrop of political struggles for independence, which marred this intellectual revival with political undertones. Tāhā Husain “was convinced that Arabic cultural liberation and emancipation had to emerge via the active mastery of the classical languages. For as he argues, only when Egyptians themselves have access to the Greek and Latin sources, will they be able to write their own history, thereby throwing off the yoke of colonization” (Pormann 2006). At the same time, translators like al-Manfaluti and al-Hakīm transformed aspects of Greek myth into a version that would mesh with Arab, and mostly Islamic consciousness.
The influence of nationalist sentiment imposing itself into translated works from Greek Antiquity in forming identity, whether cultural, religious, was pervasive into all aspects of life during the nahda, and moral authority from the community played a key role during the cultural awakening Some forms of nationalism that were prevalent were Arab, Egyptian, Turkish, Persian, Jewish (Zionist), Armenian, etc.. According to Albert Hourani, “it is asserted that there existed between members of a certain group a link so strong and important that they should form a political community, and that a government possessed moral authority only if it expressed the will of that community and served its interests” (Hourani, 1983). Linguistic, religious, and ethnic questions of identification and unification emerged in the discourse of nationalism during the liberal age of Arabic thought. These connections would unite people into supranational units, uniting people based upon a chosen identity of a shared past rather than the political environment of their present.
The modernization through a national context saw the adaptation of Islamic concepts into a European equivalent philosophical framework. For example, “Ibn Khaldun’s ‘umran gradually turned into Guizot’s ‘civilization’, the maslaha of the Maliki jurists and Ibn Taymiyya into the ‘utility’ of John Stuart Mill, the ijma’ of Islamic jurisprudence into the ‘public opinion’ of democratic theory, and ‘those who bind and loose’ into members of parliament” (Hourani, 1983). The period of Islamic and Arab modernization valued national independence over liberating the individual. This may have resulted from prioritizing throwing off the influence of the West before addressing internal issues, a relative indifference to issues of social justice, or due to the fact that the proponent figures of nationalist movements either came from wealthy backgrounds or had become wealthy by their own merits. It was generally presumed that after issues of national independence that economic and social issues would have the ability to be resolved, therefore deprioritizing political efforts without a strong nationalist sentiment.
Even once freed, the states of the Middle East would not be able to free themselves from international subordination, even with degrees of independence from the countries of England and France. Although, with the outbreak of World War Two, the European states would lose their presumed moral upper hand. The early twentieth century was still the age of Europe, which would force the newly independent Arab nations to contend with economic and cultural intervention even after the end of colonial rule. However, with the eventual course of established independent Middle Eastern states becoming the default and not the exception, growing self-sufficiency within the region allowed many Eastern states, for the first time in their history, to fully break off connections with the West, which had dominated national memory over a century.
With growing movements of secular unity, the religious cornerstones of government became sidelined to only a cultural unification of a people. Stamps no longer contained images of mosques or kings, but instead showed workers or peasants heroically depicted. There was the inevitable shift to European codes and abandonment of sharia since “they no longer believed, for the most part, that they had received from the past an unchanging norm of wisdom, a system of principles which had regulated and should always regulate the organization of society and the activities of the State whether that norm were derived from the customs of the ancestors or the Sacred Law'' (Hourani, 1983). Within an environment of rapid change in terms of technology and regime evolution, the distance made with the past could no longer adequately prepare or inform action in the present.
While religion served as cultural unity in the face of national independence, it was sidelined by some politicians in the same manner that social justice was deprioritized by nationalists. Habib Bourguiba “in his criticism of the fast of Ramadan, he maintained that the principles of Islam should be interpreted flexibly, and that, just as in the past the hardships of travel had dispensed Muslims from the obligation of fasting, so too should the hard work of economic development in a backward country like Tunisia” (Hourani, 1983). Along with the secular responses to modernization and nationalism, such as the case with Bourguiba, there were also more religious responses. One such response is that of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun) founded by Hasan al-Banna’ in 1928 in Egypt. They looked to a larger Islamic community, condemning innovations in doctrine or practice, and instead looked only to sharia for reforms that would expel Western moral influence and return to having religious control over education, as well as the government. The Brothers, as a political movement, were more nationalist than Wahhabis or other religious reformist movements, since their goal was to generate popular support to seize power rather than simply aiming to restore Islamic virtue.
With private and public life feeding into one another, the private sphere within the Nahda carried with it a public face with political momentum. The traditional structure of the nuclear family was addressed as either the cornerstone of Arab-Islamic society or as something to be reinterpreted in the modern age as women became active within the discourse for the first time. The evolution of the Arabic language also posed serious complications due to the proposed alterations to the holy language of Islam, which was necessary to translate Western works. With the booming popularity of newspapers, journals, fiction, non-fiction, and translations of modern and Greek Classical poetry, multicultural and Arabic dialogue continued. This exchange of cultural heritage that the Arabs could claim from the Greeks, as well as Orientalist view of their culture imposed upon them, allowed for the intellectual challenge of engaging with one’s culture through the evolution of the language itself and creativity of translation within each text.
Religious cultural unity was interpreted in secular nationalist, or fundamentalist nationalist frameworks, all aiming at the modernization process necessary to pull Arab countries into a modern age to better compete with their former colonizers on an equal footing on the stage of international relations. Religion for national unity played a role since the beginning of the cultural awakening, but along with the phenomenon of literary and cultural development was the move for pragmatic secularization by many nationalists. Ultimately, while overseen by colonial tensions, the phenomenon of the Nahda awakened a curiosity in the private and public spheres of life and contributed to questions of identity and the malleability of nationality, linguistics, and culture.
Works Cited
Deuchar, Hannah Scott, and دﯾﻮﻛﺎر ﺳﻜﻮت ھﻨﺎ. “‘Nahḍa’: Mapping a Keyword in Cultural Discourse
/ اﻟﺜﻘﺎﻓﻲ اﻟﺨﻄﺎب ﻓﻲ رﺋﯿﺴﻲ ﻤﺼﻄﻠﺢ : (( اﻟﻧﮭﻀﺔ.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 37, 2017, pp. 50–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26191814. Accessed 14 May 2024.
Zachs, Fruma. “Debates on Re-Forming the Family: A „Private" History of the Nahda?” Wiener Zeitschrift Für Die Kunde Des Morgenlandes, vol. 102, 2012, pp. 285–301. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23862112. Accessed 14 May 2024.
Pormann, Peter E. “The Arab ‘Cultural Awakening (Nahḍa)’, 1870-1950, and the Classical Tradition.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 13, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30222102. Accessed 14 May 2024.
Scoville, Spencer, and ﺳﻜﻮﭬﯿﻞ ﺳﭙﻨﺴﺮ. “Translating Orientalism into the Arabic ‘Nahda’ / اﻟﺘﺮﺟﻤﺔ اﻟﻨﮭﻀﺔ ﻓﺘﺮة ﻓﻲ ﺑﺎﻻﺳﺸﺮاق وﻋﻼﻗﺘﮭﺎ.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 38, 2018, pp. 11–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26496368. Accessed 14 May 2024.
Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. Cambridge University Press, 2012.