4 Things About the Nahda

Tarek El-Ariss                                               DARTMOUTH NEWS

        The Nahda was (is) the renaissance in Arab intellectualism that began, roughly, in the late 19th Century. For historical purposes, it encompassed the early 20th Century, but artificially limiting either its inception or duration is an iffy proposition.
      So says Tarek El-Ariss, a Dartmouth professor who compiled The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda and in so doing, revamped academic and practical theory about what the Nahda is, its genesis and its place in its heyday and in the modern world.

1. The Nahda was a response to Ottoman monarchic and absolute rule in a large swathe of Europe, Asia and Africa. Ottoman rule provided governance, jobs, culture and societal structure in exchange for the freedom of its subjects. Sounds familiar.

2. We think Arab, we think Muslim. Arabs are primarily Muslims but are also Christians, Jews, other smaller sects, and secularists - secularism is perhaps a critical part of the Nahda.

3. Kahlil Gibran. yeah, that guy who is most familiar to  Westerners, is part of the Nahda.

4. A key feature of the Nahda is the reconceptualism of time: the idea that there is a past, present and future, which we affect by our present thoughts and actions.