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Modern Arabic literature is often considered to have begun with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, while the 19th century is recognized in sources as the Nahda (renaissance) century. During the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha in Egypt, who assumed power in 1805 after Napoleon, significant steps toward modernization were taken. Key developments included the establishment of the Bulaq Press, the sending of students to Europe for education, translation activities, and the founding of the School of Languages. While literary products began to emerge after the 1850s, the appearance of the first modern literary works extended into the early 20th century. Today, Paul Starkey is one of the most prominent scholars of modern Arabic literature in the West. Paul Starkey, a British Orientalist and scholar known for his work on modern Arabic literature and Arabic-English translation, who studied at Oxford University and until his retirement was Professor of Arabic at Durham University, has published numerous scholarly articles on various aspects of the Arabic novel, especially on Arab writers such as Edwar al-Kharrat and Sonallāh Ibrahim. He has won many awards in the international arena. In his work Modern Arabic Literature, English Orientalist and academic Paul Starkey argues that modern Arabic literature did not begin with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Starkey suggests that the use of the term modern in this context reflects the influence of the rise of the novel in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and its peak in the 19th century, which marked the West’s modernity being mirrored in the East. He also emphasizes that the term Arabic in Arabic literature is not limited to works written in the Arabic language but includes works by Arabs or authors of Arab origin, especially in Western languages such as English, French and Spanish can also be considered as Arabic literature. Moreover, the evaluation of this literature, which brings Mahjar literature to mind, brings with it a new perspective that considers the publications written in Spanish by Arabs in South America as a continuation of Mahjar, contrary to the ideas that Mahjar literature ended in the 1960s but continued its influence. Finally, Starkey points out that the word “Adab” has a much wider layer of meaning than the meaning of literature. In the related article, descriptive method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used throughout the research and the data obtained were evaluated by analysis method. In this context, in the light of the aforementioned information, this article aims to explore the concept of Modern Arabic Literature through Paul Starkey’s perspective and to provide a broader interpretation of this concept. It also examines the Nahda movement and the emergence of the novel as a genre resulting from modernization efforts.

Tunisia&s transition away from authoritarianism has been shaped by a politics of consensus, which has brought together representatives of the former regime with their historic adversary, the Islamist movement al-Nahda. This article argues that consensus politics was a legacy of the authoritarian regime that was re-produced during a democratizing transition. The politics of consensus was encouraged and enabled by al-Nahda, which prioritized its inclusion within this elite settlement to provide political security for itself and the broader transition. However, this came at a cost, engineering a conservative transition, which did not pursue significant social or economic reform. The Tunisian case shows that historical legacies, such as consensus politics, can shape a transition as much as contingent, pragmatic decisions by political leaders.

In Egyptian popular history and culture, Qasim Amin is often referred to the “father of feminism” or the “liberator of women.” However, this was not always the case. Upon his death in 1908, a different legacy emerged in many early eulogies, speeches, biographical sketches, and commemorations of Amin's life. In this early framing of Amin's legacy, his two most famous books were celebrated in ways that minimized the “woman question” while highlighting other aspects of his reforms and work. This allowed Amin's 1908 contemporaries to overlook the divisiveness of his earlier positions in favor of a new sort of fraternal solidarity—one that served the interests of certain political and intellectual male elites. For many of these writers—with a few notable exceptions—Amin was a quintessential reformer and thinker whose interest in the status of women was important insofar as it spoke to the ethos of his intellectual and political projects, not what it could do for women.

In this book Zeina G. Halabi examines the figure of the intellectual as prophet, national icon, and exile in contemporary Arabic literature and film. Staging a comparative dialogue with writers and critics such as Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan, and Mahmoud Darwish, Halabi focuses on new articulations of loss, displacement, and memory in works by Rabee Jaber, Elia Suleiman, Rawi Hage, Rashid al-Daif, and Seba al-Herz. She argues that the ambivalence and disillusionment with the role of the intellectual in contemporary representations operate as a productive reclaiming of the ‘political’ in an allegedly apolitical context. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual offers the critical tools to understand the evolving relations between the intellectual and power, and the author and the text in the hitherto uncharted contemporary era.

Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the pioneering postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Bringing three competing accounts of the machine's invention together, I find that in each the Arabic typewriter was turned to very different purposes. Consistently, however, it was co-opted into intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeded its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it was written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. And across the accounts, diverse names and places reappear: New York, Palestine, Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter's origin-stories, I ask finally whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history—one that is itself uncanny and estranged.

This article explores the pre–World War I writings of the Najafi cleric Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani (1884–1967), situating them within the broader Islamic revival movement, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the Arabic Nahda, and the Ottoman Shiʿi shrine cities in the years preceding the British invasion of Basra in 1914. It makes four arguments. First, al-Shahrastani's calls for constitutionalism, Islamic unity, revival, and the cultivation of the self were all attempts to respond to what he saw as the immediate and existential threat to his world posed by European imperial expansion. Second, he attempted in a variety of ways to mobilize what he called the Islamic social practices against this threat. Borrowing from his own theorization of these practices, I employ the concept of political sociality to gather his attempts to foster various social assemblages—of both newer and older provenance—that would cultivate Muslim subjects with the capacity to resist European aggression. Third, his conceptions of sociality and of political temporality, although often resonant with those of the more widely studied Sunni and Christian reformers of the Nahda, had specificities that I relate to his understandings of subject formation, the sense of impending calamity in his writings, and the borderlands context of the shrine cities. These conceptions were not necessarily affiliated with the nationalist and disciplinary project of the modern territorial state and were animated by a temporality of urgency rather than deferral. Finally, I consider how al-Shahrastani's theorizations of sociality and ultimately of revolution (al-thawra) reveal moments in the historical constitution of a reformist and soon-to-be insurgent Shiʿi public in these cities.

This article explores early attempts to romanize the Arabic language in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt and situates them within a global history of script reforms in the modern period. I focus on the models to write Arabic in the Latin script developed by the Cairo-based magazine al-Muqtataf between 1889 and 1897 (which, to the extent of my knowledge, have never been examined before), relating them to the responses they elicited from the magazine's readers and some of the romanization practices found in advertising, commercial displays in the streets, and governance at the time. I demonstrate that, in this period, romanized Arabic was envisioned as an original way to pursue financial profit and technological efficiency, confront European knowledge production, and redefine the standing of Arabic within transregional publishing networks that encompassed different languages and alphabets. This analysis thus offers an alternative geography of script reform that supersedes the national framework.

By analyzing temporal language, this study investigates the intellectual origins and the conceptual history of three concepts of tolerance that emerged in the Arabic context towards the end of the 19th century. The first is a philosophical concept that has evolved within the philosophical-rational tradition and has connections to the Enlightenment and liberalism. The second is a theological concept that advocates for a harmonious interpretation of all monotheistic religions based on the assumption that all monotheistic scriptures are true. The third is a legal Islamic concept that aims to preserve the traditional imperial and hierarchical Islamic system while addressing contemporary concerns related to citizenship and political affiliation. Tolerance is frequently examined within the research framework on secularity and secularism. Before secularism emerged as a holistic doctrine in Arabic (ʿalmāniyya), discussions surrounding tolerance were closely linked to societal and political principles, including civil equality, freedom of conscience, and the neutrality of religion in the public domain.

This article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.

This article aims at exploring the simultaneous state-building and nationbuilding process in the Arab Mashrek region after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Historical narratives profoundly changed at the time of the emergence of the modern nation-state system, which was alien in a region where the premier element of ideology was religion. The nineteenth-century Nahda introduced a vibrant intellectual life to the region and marked the beginning of the so -called liberal era. Whereas in the first half of the twentieth century the region witnessed the birth of modern professional historiography, which (particularly in the case of Egypt) led to scientific enquiry based on national archives, the second half would see the radical phase of Arab nationalism produce a rather different historical narrative along socialist lines. However, the War of 1967, known also as the Setback (an-Naksah), challenged pan-Arabism, and regimes discouraged professional history writing about the conflict.