While it was the Christian clerics of the Syrian monasteries who prepared the ground for the nahḍah in Lebanon, it was the Muslim shaykhs of perhaps the greatest institution of Muslim learning, the al-Azhar in Cairo, who led the way in Egypt. An inevitable consequence of the paradigm of decline for the study of Arabic thought and culture in the centuries preceding 1798, however, has been the almost total neglect in modern scholarship of this important institution, its scholars, their vast output and activities. This chapter begins by considering the role of al-Azhar and reveals a picture of an intellectual community that was far from being in the moribund state suggested by proponents of the decline thesis. Al-Azhar not only continued to function as a beacon of Islamic learning during a period widely regarded as one of decline, but also produced a number of outstanding authors who flourished in the fields of philology, poetry and historiography, and had a far-reaching influence on the nahḍah. This chapter then focuses on the humanistic activities of some leading Azharī figures in the eighteenth century such as al-Ṣabbān, al-Zabīdī, al-Jabartī and al-‘Aṭṭār. It is argued that these scholars along with others had laid the cultural foundations for the nahḍah in the nineteenth century, and despite the originally religious orientation of their work and activities they made significant contributions to the nahḍah.