Description
Book SynopsisExploring the ''Nahda'', a cultural renaissance in the Arab world responding to massive social change, this study presents a crucial and often overlooked part of the Arab world''s encounter with global capitalist modernity, an interaction which reshaped the Middle East over the course of the long nineteenth century. Seeing themselves as part of an expanding capitalist civilization, Arab intellectuals approached the changing world of the mid-nineteenth century with confidence and optimism, imagining utopian futures for their own civilizing projects. By analyzing the works of crucial writers of the period, including Butrus al-Bustani and Rifa''a al-Tahtawi, alongside lesser-known figures such as the prolific journalist Khalil al-Khuri and the utopian visionary Fransis Marrash of Aleppo, Peter Hill places these visions within the context of their local class- and state-building projects in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, which themselves formed part of a global age of capital. By illuminating th
Trade Review'an important contribution to studies of the cultural and intellectual revival of the nahda … which the Arab world witnessed in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries … opens new perspectives for understanding the nahda.' Hilary Kilpatrick, Journal of Islamic Studies
'erudite and thought-provoking … a welcome contribution to post-national and materialist accounts of modernity in the Arab world.' Samah Selim, Global Intellectual History
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Who made the Nahda?; 2. The discourse of civilization; 3. A place in the world; 4. An Arab utopian; Conclusions.
