The Nahda ("awakening" or "renaissance") is the term Arabic literary historians use for the long, uneven, century-and-a-quarter renewal of Arabic letters that began with the impact of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt and Muhammad ‘Ali's subsequent modernisation, and ran through the introduction of the printing press in Arabic, the establishment of the first secular Arabic newspapers in Cairo and Beirut, the translation movement, the educational reforms in Cairo and Istanbul, and finally the emergence of the modern Arabic novel and short story before the First World War.
The major Nahda figures include the Lebanese language reformer Butrus al-Bustani; the journalist Jurji Zaydan, whose historical novels did for the Arab world what Walter Scott had done for Scotland; the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (the "Prince of Poets"); the Iraqi-born poet Ma'ruf al-Rusafi; the Mahjar circle around Khalil Gibran and Mikhail Naimy in New York; and the foundational Egyptian intellectuals Taha Hussein and Tawfiq al-Hakim.
The Nahda is best understood not as a single coherent movement but as a long set of interconnected reforms — linguistic, journalistic, novelistic, theological — that together delivered Arabic literature into the twentieth century with the institutional infrastructure (universities, journals, publishers, theatres) that the modern literary forms required.
