Nahda

The Nahda, Arabic for the Awakening or Renaissance, was a broad Arab cultural, literary and intellectual revival that flourished from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century across the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, especially Egypt and the Levant, reviving classical Arabic literary forms while absorbing modern European literary genres, ideas and print culture. Its leading figures spanned reformist scholars and writers such as Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, who championed learning from Western science while working within Islamic tradition, Butrus al-Bustani, a founder of secular Arabic education and an important lexicographer and encyclopedist, and the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh, alongside a new generation of Arabic novelists, journalists and poets who established the modern Arabic press and the Arabic novel as literary forms. The Nahda brought together both Muslim and Christian Arab intellectuals in a shared project of literary and educational modernization, and it is generally regarded as the founding movement of modern Arabic literature, laying the intellectual and literary groundwork for the Arab nationalist movements of the twentieth century.