Beginnings

The Islamic Nahḍah (rebirth, renaissance) started in Syria and achieved its real momentum in Egypt in the nineteenth century, then as subsequently the intellectual engine room of Islamic intellectual life. The Nahḍah movement represented an attempt to do two things. One was to introduce some of the main achievements of European culture into the Islamic world. The other was to defend and protect the major positive features of Arab and Islamic culture and revive them despite the assaults of European imperialism. The important features of the movement were the attempt to combine these policies and the reaction to the apparent decadence of the Arab world not by rejecting Arab culture but by purifying it and introducing it to aspects of modernity from without that were seen as acceptable from an Islamic point of view.

Development

The main Nahḍah thinkers were Sayyid Jam...