The Nahda paradigm, a 'Zeitgeist' for Opposite forces in Egypt
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Catherine Cornet, Phd Candidate, Rome University Ii- Ecoles Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales, Paris The Arab Renaissance , a traveling Zeitgeist through the Century A common ground for opposite forces in the Middle East
Transcript of The Nahda paradigm, a 'Zeitgeist' for Opposite forces in Egypt
Catherine Cornet, Phd Candidate, Rome University Ii- Ecoles Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales, Paris
The Arab Renaissance, a traveling Zeitgeist through the CenturyA common ground for opposite forces in the Middle East
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✤ How did the malaise/Renaissance Zeitgeist travel between these different sectors of society and across the Arab world in general?!
✤ How can we theorize the wide use that Arab thinkers, politicians and artists have made of the Renaissance paradigm? !
✤ How the Zeitgeist category can help analyze the phenomenon?!
✤ Can the Renaissance/malaise, studied as a Zeitgeist contribute in partly explaining the Arab revolutions that followed? !
The Nahda
✤ The Rinascimento contextualised by the central work of Mez ‘Die Renaissance des Islams’, was translated into Arabic by Abu Rida as ‘Nahda’ (less often Ihya’). !
✤ The word was later applied to the cultural flowering of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in the Arab world (Hourani 1982).
The 4 phases of the Nahda
✤ 1st. 1830 to 1870: 'is that in which a small group of officials and writers became aware of the new Europe industry, swift communications, and political institutions, not as a menace so much as offering a path to be followed' (Hourani 1962). !
✤ 2nd. 1870 to 1900: complete changed situation since Europe 'has become the adversary as well as the model'(Mohamed Abduh and the periodical Al Manar)!
✤ 3rd. 1900-1939: separation between the two thought that Abduh and others were trying to keep together: Muslim fundamentalism and secularism that becomes the principle of nationalism, with the typical figure of the time, Taha Hussein.!
✤ 4th. Second World War, end of European ascendancy and the predominance of the United States and Russia as new influencing powers.
A Zeitgeist deeply rooted in the relation with the ‘other’
✤ L’expédition d’Egypte!
✤ From Cairo to Beirut and Damascus!
✤ Marxist reading : ‘first anti -imperialism’
Anti-imperialist dimension
✤ 'From the middle of the 19th century the process of integration of the Arab and Ottoman world in the world capitalist economy was such that the scope for autonomy enjoyed by Mohamed Ali's Egypt shrank to the point of virtually vanishing. The movement of reaction to this colonization was principally determined by rejection of colonization and thus acquisition of a prevailing anti-imperialist dimension. This was the case of the Nahda' (Amin, 1986)
Why are we weak?
✤ 'Comment se fait-il que le monde soit devenu l'enfer des croyants et le paradis des incroyants ? Telle est la question qui a hanté le XIXe siècle après que le règne de Muhammad 'Ali eut succombé aux déprédations commises par les armées, les flottes et les commerçants de l'Occident. Posée en ces termes, dans l'esprit religieux de l'époque, elle peut paraître naïve. Elle a pourtant sous-tendu toute la pensée des artisans de la Nahda (« renaissance »), de Tahtâwi à Jamâl al-Dîn al-Afghâni et Muhammad 'Abduh, en passant par 'Abd Allah al-Nadîm. En effet, il s'agissait pour eux de déterminer les voies qui mèneraient à la Nahda en s'interrogeant, d'une part, sur les causes du retard de l'Orient musulman en général et de l'Égypte en particulier et,d'autre part, sur les raisons de l'avancée de l'Occident et les moyens de le rattraper.' (‘Issa 1996)
3 components of the Nahda
✤ Religious Nahda!
✤ Political Nahda!
✤ Cultural Nahda
Religious Nahda
✤ Jamal a-Din al- Afghani (1838-1897) !
✤ Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905)
Political Nahda
✤ Rifa'a Rafi al-Tahtawi (1801-1873) 'Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Takhlis Bariz' -the Extraction of Pure Gold in the Abridgement of Paris- Paris diary published in Cairo (1834)
Cultural Nahda
✤ In 1914, Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888–1956) publishes ‘Zaynab’, the first Egyptian novel written in Egyptian Arabic!
✤ Khalil Khalil Gibran !
✤ Taha Hussayn (1889-1973) His book 'Mustaqbal al Thaqafy fi Masr' (The Future of Culture in Egypt) (Hussein, 1954) published in 1938
The factors that led to the Nahda
✤ Grasp the secret of progress (Hourani)!
✤ Criticism of despotism (Hourani)!
✤ Science (Hourani)!
✤ 'Intensification of cultural and intellectual activities in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century'. (Kassab)!
✤ Malaise
The Nahda Zeitgeist in the ME after 2001
Malaise / Clash of Civilisations
✤ ‘World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. (…) From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future. In this emerging era of cultural conflict the United States must forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values wherever possible. With alien civilizations the West must be accommodating if possible, but confrontational if necessary. In the final analysis, however, all civilizations will have to learn to tolerate each other’ (S. Huntington, 1993)"
✤ ‘It’s not pleasant being Arab these days. Feelings of persecution for some, self-hatred for others; a deep disquiet pervades the Arab world (..)'Arab' itself is so impoverished a word that it's reduced in places to a mere ethnic label with overtone of censure, or at best, a culture that denies everything modernity stands for’ (S. Kassir,2006)
2.O Generations call for Nahda
✤ New Artistic Renaissance !
✤ Islamic movements (Nahda parties, Wasattyia movement)
Artistic Renaissance
✤ Private Foundations funding!
✤ 2.0 revolution!
✤ Arab is the ‘new cool’
Islamic Nahda
✤ ‘Harakat an-Nahda’ TUNISIA;!
✤ ‘Haraka an-Nahda Islamyyia’ ALGERIA; !
✤ ‘Nahda party’ /Egyptian Renaissance Party EGYPT !
✤ Who is the artist? He is a person to whom God has granted a special gift, capability, and talent that allow him to receive things with an extraordinary sensitivity. He expresses himself with an accuracy and richness not granted to others. Whether a poet, writer, or painter, the artist sees in the rhythm of things louder voices and clearer expressions that he is able to capture in a special, unique way.... It is unimaginable that Islam would be against this’ (Abul Magd in Baker 2003, Chapter 1. Section 2 'Embracing the Arts')
Conclusion
✤ using the specific Zeitgeist category allows to understand the need of an Arab Renaissance to enter modernity and transcend the Arab malaise, backwardness and despair!
✤ during the last decade, the Zeitgeist has shaped intellectual life, its cultural actors and direct patrons in the Arab world as no other ideology has ever done.!
✤ The Zeitgeist has shaped cultural expressions, their patrons’ actions and beyond them, the social fabric through the cultural democratization of new technologies. !
✤ It tentatively explains how the concept of Zeitgeist has led to the creation of a pre-revolutionary under-layer !
✤ Allows to question the instrumental aspect of this zeitgeist, and the use of culture by secular actors (understood as 'naturally' secular, 'modern', open and global) with their main interlocutors in the field of ideas, the tenants of political Islam.
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'When the men of the Renaissance glorified themselves for the renewal or the renaissance in the art and culture, did they conceive this renaissance as a spontaneous resurgence as such (comparable to nature’s awakening of the spring) or as the fact to have deliberately revived the classical culture?' !
✤ Erwin Panosfky, La Renaissance et ses avant-courriers dans l'Art d'Occident (1960)
