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Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature

The Arab NahdahThe Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement

By Abdulrazzak Patel

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£100.00

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About this book

Explores the influences that triggered the Arabic awakening, the 'nahdah', from the 1700s onwards

  • Highlights the complexity of the movement and offers a more pluralist history of the period
  • The first English-language study to focus on little-studied intellectual figures and currents of the early nahdah
  • Deals with important themes such as modern Arab intellectual history, literature and culture, and with issues of modernity, language and identity – allowing for significant engagement with the study of the intellectual life and discourse of the nahdah as a whole

To understand today's Arab thinking, you need to go back to the beginnings of modernity: the nahdah or Arab renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Abdulrazzak Patel enhances our understanding of the nahdah and its intellectuals, taking into account important internal factors alongside external forces.

Patel explores the key factors that contributed to the rise and development of the nahdah. He introduces the humanist movement of the period that was the driving force behind much of the linguistic, literary and educational activity. Drawing on intellectual history, literary history and postcolonial studies, he argues that the nahdah was the product of native development and foreign assistance and that nahdah reformist thought was hybrid in nature.

Table of contents

Preface
Introduction: Perspectives, Paradigms and Parameters

  1. Contemporary Interpretations of the nahḍah: Tradition, Modernity and the Arab Intellectual
  2. The Reintegration of Pre-modern Christians into the Mainstream of Arabic Literature and the Creation of an Inter-religious Cultural Space
  3. Guardians of the Pre-modern Arab-Islamic Humanist Tradition: Legends without a Legacy, a tradition without heirs
  4. Language Reform and Controversy: the al-Shartūnīs Respond in Defence of the Pre-modern Humanist Tradition
  5. Arabism, Patriotism and Ottomanism as means to Reform
  6. Arab intellectuals and the West: Borrowing for the Sake of Progress
  7. Education, Reform and Enlightened Azharīs
  8. Enacting reform: Local Agents, Statesmen, Missionaries and the Evolution of a Cultural Infrastructure

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Abdulrazzak Patel

Dr Patel graduated from the University of Exeter with a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies in 2007. He then worked as a Teaching Fellow at Exeter before moving to the University of Oxford in 2008 where he has been pursuing a program of research from his doctoral work and been working on a major new project on the rise and development of the Arab nahḍah. He has already published several articles on the subject in the top journals of his field.

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