This chapter challenges some of the standard paradigms on the origins and development of the nahḍah with particular reference to the position of Arab Christian intellectuals, who have traditionally been regarded as its pioneers and as constituting a transposable unified community different and alienated from their Muslim counterparts, but inherently attracted to the West. The chapter also examines contemporary interpretations of the nahḍah in the light of the ongoing debate on tradition and modernity in Arab intellectual and literary circles. It critiques the views of a number of leading Arab intellectuals who, in viewing modernity as a magnificent homogeneous phenomenon that guarantees progress and success, and tradition as its opposite, attribute Arab ‘backwardness’ to the failure of nahḍah intellectuals to make an episte-mological break with tradition and internalise modernity. In so doing, this chapter prepares the ground for some of the main arguments developed in the book.

Nahḍah

The Arab world's encounter with modern Europe in the nineteenth century would be the first of a long series of uneasy relationships with the West. It created a painful realisation among Arab intellectuals of the ‘decline’ (inḥiṭāt) of their own societies as traditional ideas and ways of life were challenged in the name of modernity. Since then Arab thinkers have compared the decline of their societies with the accomplishments of Western civilisation, an agonising distinction when one considers that the Arab world was at the height of its cultural and political glory, and at the vanguard of science and philosophy, when Europe was steeped in medieval ignorance; not to mention the success of European nations in colonising the Arab world.