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'.

Examines the 'Nahda', a cultural renaissance in the Arab world, through the utopian visions of Arab intellectuals during the nineteenth century.

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'.

What is the relationship between thought and practice in the domains of language, literature and politics? Is thought the only standard by which to measure intellectual history? How did Arab intellectuals change and affect political, social, cultural and economic developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? This volume offers a fundamental overhaul and revival of modern Arab intellectual history. Using Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1962) as a starting point, it reassesses Arabic cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship and extends the analysis beyond Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the outbreak of World War II. The chapters offer a mixture of broad-stroke history on the construction of 'the Muslim world', and the emergence of the rule of law and constitutionalism in the Ottoman empire, as well as case studies on individual Arab intellectuals that illuminate the transformation of modern Arabic thought.

In this 2000 book, an international team of contributors offer a multidisciplinary approach to the evolution of nomadic society in the Middle East.

A.J. Racy, a scholar of ethnomusicology, provides an intimate portrayal of the Arab musical experience in this pioneering book. Racy focuses on tarab, a multifaceted concept that has no exact equivalent in English and refers to the indigenous music and the ecstasy associated with it. His book examines aspects of musical craft, including basic skills, musician's inspiration, love lyrics as tools of ecstasy, and the relationship between performers and listeners.

This book offers a new interpretation of the rich narratives of Arab secularism, contending that secularism as a set of ideas and a social movement is destined to loom large on the political and legal horizon of most Arab states. Youssef M. Choueiri provides a study of three moments in the development of secularism in the Arab World, the Machiavellian, the Alfierian and the Gramscian. It is within such a scope that secularism in its interaction with state-building projects, women’s emancipation and religion is treated as an intellectual current and a discursive entity embedded in the political process of its diverse societies. Through the chapters, Choueiri demonstrates how secularism occupies a pivotal presence in the religious and political life of the Arab world, exploring such interrelated configurations as indigenous contributions, diverse reforms and the impact of Western states. He concludes that secularism has become a moral prerequisite and a required vehicle in creating the necessary conditions for the success of democracy in the Middle East. Narratives of Arab Secularism tackles the complexity and contemporary ramifications of the subject in a way that no previous single study has been able to. It will be relevant to both students and academics dealing with topics related to the Middle East including religion, politics, anthropology and history. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.