This essay examines the movement of Arab national and cultural revival known as nahdah (meaning renaissance or awakening) as a speech act and a performance involving a nuhūd (rising) and an uncertain practice of civilization (tamaddun) that seek to bring about a culture of knowledge. Contesting its treatment as a homogeneous project of modernity that rose and fell and as a historical period with clear epistemic breaks, it argues that nahdah civilizational practices could not be reduced to notions of civilization associated with Orientalism as system of othering and cultural superiority. This approach frees up nahdah texts from the dominant narrative of rise and decline, and from their intertextual and ideological dependency on European modernity as a model to be borrowed or resisted.
