Adab, the Nahḍah, and the Modern Sensibility

This chapter positions the period known as the Nahḍa , or the Arab renaissance, in the history of Arab modernism. It begins with Edwār al-Kharrāṭ’s 1999 study of Arab modernism, Aṣwāt al-ḥadātha . Focusing on the introduction to the book, the chapter assesses al-Kharrāṭ’s distinction between modernism ( ḥadātha ), which is always already deferred to the future and impossible, and “the modern sensibility, al-ḥasāsiyya al-jadīda ,” which is open to historicization, investigation, and periodization. Dallal’s chapter approaches the Nahḍa through al-Kharrāṭ’s lens and traces the modern sensibilities of adab in the nineteenth century and their intimate connection to a growing discourse of civilization ( tamaddun ). This discourse rooted adab in its expansive traditional meaning while also opening it up to the new genres of social existence and their institutions that were appearing in the nineteenth century. Using Muḥammad al-Muwaylīḥī as an example, Dallal studies two formal characteristics that define the modern sensibilities of nineteenth-century adab : temporality and the binary hierarchies of the manifest and the latent.