Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda

by Peter Hill

Exploring 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 this little-studied early period of the Arab Nahda movement, Hill places the transformation of the Arab region within the context of world history, inviting us to look beyond the well-worn categories of 'traditional' versus 'modern'.

Genres: History

304 pages, Hardcover

Published February 29, 2020

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arguing against prior conceptions of the Arab Nahda as either a heroic, nationalist expression of Arab consciousness in the early imperial period (represented by authors like Albert Hourani and Arab Thought in the Liberal Age) or a tragic, comprador-led acceptance of imperialist modes of thought and expression (represented by authors like Timothy Mitchell and Colonizing Egypt), Peter Hills in Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda for new paradigm, one in which the ascendant middle-class and rising Arab bourgeoisie is situated in a global context in which they accepted and propagated the imperial ideas of Europe (particularly Anglophilic ones, favoring free trade and forced "opening" of "semi-civilized" peoples) without sacrificing Arab autonomy or self-governance. Hill uses the example of the Beiruti newspaperman Khalil al-Khudri and his Hadiqat al-Akhbar, utilizing Western-influenced "civilizational rhetoric," the translations of European geographical texts by the Egyptian Rifa'a al-Tahtawi and his editorial choices to present views more friendly to Islam and justify the imperial-expansionist policies of Mehmed Ali's Egyptian state, and Aleppo-based Arab utopian fiction author Fransis Marrash as examples of this harnessing of European-influenced rhetoric and discourse to the needs of the expanding capitalist relations in the Arab world before the dawn of European colonial control.

[Jonathan Jonsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Hill masterfully constructs a new way of understanding the Arabic Nahda, in contrast to two traditional meta-narratives: one heroic, glorifying the Nahda thinkers as visionaries, and one defeatist, characterising the Nahda as a period of capitulation to imperialism. Based on immense archival research, Hill places the Nahda into a context of worldwide capitalist expansion, presenting its thinkers as a small urban bourgeoisie with utopian ideals. Instead of the traditional separation between Eastern and Western ideas, Hill shows how they are intertwined and syncretic. Rather than a relationship of colonising empires and native assistance or refusal, Hill presents individuals negotiating agency without regard to this sharp division. It is refreshing, well researched and very well written.