Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, By Peter Hill

Abstract

This book is an important contribution to studies of the cultural and intellectual revival, the nahḍa (Renaissance or, more accurately, Risorgimento), which the Arab world witnessed in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. It takes issue with two well-established narratives of this movement, one seeing it as a founding moment of Arab modernity, and the other as the period where indigenous Arab and Islamic traditions yielded to the Western project of colonization. It also rejects the teleological approach which considers the period it examines, 1830–70, simply as a prelude to the more substantial events starting in the mid-1870s; instead, it studies this period in its own right. And it places the contemporary projects of class- and state-building in a global perspective. The opening chapter sets the scene. It first presents the intensification and expansion of capitalism in the early nineteenth century as a complex phenomenon in which global and local economic realities interacted and sub-systems emerged round capitalist nodes. One of these nodes was Beirut with its new bourgeoisie, many of whom were bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals. Some of them gave the impulse for the formation of cultural and scientific associations, the best known of which was the Syrian Scientific Society, inspired in its organization by American Protestant models. Hill outlines its membership and debates. In Egypt, by contrast, the main centre of nahḍa activity was the Languages School, set up by Muḥammad ʿAlī as part of his state-building project and headed by Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī. The functioning of the School, the translators who worked in it and the circulation of the books printed are sketched. Another centre of the early nahḍa, less well-known than Beirut and Cairo, was Aleppo. There informal circles of discussion round the Greek Catholic Dallāl and Marrāsh notable families continued a tradition of Christian cultural activity which had started some two centuries earlier and which had ties to Muslim cultured circles. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a still wider perspective of the nahḍa might be envisaged, geographically, socially and linguistically.