ABSTRACT
Conventionally, the nahd· a in Arabic literature is said to begin with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798. Although the French occupation lasted only three years,
in the eyes of many nahd· a intellectuals it marked the end of a prolonged period of Arab cultural ‘stagnation’ or ‘decline’ during the Ottoman Empire.5 Under the Ottoman ruler Muhammad Ali, the Egyptian elite began to study European languages and to translate European texts into Arabic, as part of the effort to ‘modernize’ Egyptian society. Egyptian writers imitated and appropriated Western literary forms, especially in prose. Simultaneously, however, intellectuals in Egypt and elsewhere sought to revive an indigenous Arab-Islamic cultural heritage (turāth), drawing on the classical pre-Islamic and medieval Qur’anic literary traditions. The relative importance of these developments is still debated. Recent scholarship has challenged the notion of a period of post-classical stagnation as well as Europe’s inuence in the nahd· a (Allen and Richards 2006; Rastegar 2007; El-Ariss 2013).
