From our present vantage point—with Iraq in the midst of another vicious round of sectarian violence, with Syria in the midst of a debilitating civil war, and with Lebanon perpetually on the verge of sectarian implosion, to recall a vibrant history of coexistence in the modern Middle East might appear, at first, to be an exercise in futility. There is pervasive belief in both the West and, unfortunately, increasingly in the Arab world itself, that sectarianism is, and has always been, an obvious and self-evident feature of the Arab world.
The history of the Levant is, in fact, quite different. The nahda, Arabic for renaissance or awakening, refers to a well-documented nineteenth-century efflorescence of Arab printing, journalism, and education that began in the late Ottoman empire—similar to how many societies around the world engaged with technological innovation and the increasing hegemony of modern science. The term nahda was coined by the Syrian writer and publisher Jurji Zaydan, who migrated in the 1880s from one major center of Arabic printing, Beirut, to another in Cairo where he established a famous journal Al-Hilal and the publishing house Dar al-Hilal. A central feature of the nahda was its ecumenical character and the fact that Muslims, Christians and Jews worked together to produce a modern Arab consciousness to cohere a secular public sphere.
The nahda has often been more mythologized than historicized. The nahda project proposed here has no desire at all to add to this romanticism. The nahda, in fact, evoked several major tensions that continue to haunt the modern Arab world and that inform, in turn, the nahda project itself: these included (1) the place of so-called proper religion in the modern, “civilized” state, (2) the nature of modern politics and whether it is democratic or not, (3) the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, and perhaps most important, (4) the crucial question of sovereignty. If anything, scholars and journalists who have taken up the nahda have not emphasized deeply enough how a modern idea of coexistence elaborated by Christian and Muslim and Jewish Arabic writers broke fundamentally with a traditional Islamic imperial order that enshrined political and legal discrimination. Nor have they been aware at all of how this same conviction in coexistence diverged radically from the exclusionary nationalist trajectory embodied by Balkan and Ottoman Turkish nationalisms, all of which invariably made religious affiliation a crucial marker of modern belonging and citizenship. Finally, they have not emphasized the degree to which this Arabic coexistence was antithetical to a colonial model of pluralism in which Western colonial powers made themselves indispensible arbiters over allegedly hostile “native” tribes, communities and religions.
The premise of the nahda project is (1) to underscore at a time of extreme sectarian pressures on and in the Middle East the extraordinary history of coexistence in the Levant that involved different Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities and individuals (2) to recover, reconstruct and document the lived experiences, trajectories and works of these individuals (3) to push back against orientalist, Islamist and minoritarian narratives that obscure the degree to which modern coexistence was both a lived experience and a modern cultural norm in the region (4) and finally to emphasize the degree to which this coexistence was a choice and an expression of will and an act of interpretation of an undeniable historic social reality of religious and ethnic diversity that has long defined the Middle East.
The nahda project, in short, seeks to narrate and map the richness and complexity of ecumenical thought and to chart what had been until the middle of the nineteenth century unimaginable discourses of compatriotship, religious pluralism, and equality in what were, after all, profoundly multi-religious societies. In this sense, the nahda project does not accept any easy distinction between a secular West and a religious Middle East. We have lost sight, in short, of the significance of the Arabic workings out of ecumenical thought, or rather, we have ignored their implications because the situation of the post-colonial Arab world today appears to be so sectarian, and so illiberal.