Marshal Hodgson

p.272- 273
EGYPT AND EAST ARAB LANDS 272

Despite this, the leading eastern Arab centres (but not most of either
Arabia or the Maghrib) had been assimilated more than most other Muslim

EGYPT AND EAST ARAB LANDS 273

centres into the international European system. Under Ismail, Cairo had
taken on the outward appearance of a European city and the revolt of
IUrabi had already been infused with Western idealism. The Egypt of Cromer
was in fact far advanced not only as a colonial economy but, with Syria, as a
focus of attempted Modernization in manner and in spirit. In contrast to its
past, and without much positive support from it, Egypt was to move toward
becoming a major leader among Modern Muslim peoples. Nowhere else was the
need for finding a base in the older heritage for a Modern sense of nationality
at once so problematic, so urgently pressing, and so passionately and fatefully
dealt with as in Egypt and Syria.

Reviving the Muslint-Arab heritage: MulJammad IAbduh

The Egyptian Arabs were turned more painfully against Occidental political
power than were the Turks: they were under direct occupation by an Occidental
power; smarting from the British sense of superiority, not always so
subtly or so gently expressed as by Lord Cromer, and in any case daily
present at least among the educated classes; and already feeling threatened
by a relatively subordinate historical position even among Islalnicate
peoples. At the same time, alert Egyptians were as aware as were any Turks
of the necessity of coming to terms with Western culture. One of the fruits of
British concern for the personal immunities \vas that Arabs in Egypt were
relatively free to work through their dilemma in print unlike either Arabs or
Turks under Abdul Hamid. The journalistic press multiplied in the later
nineteenth century in Egypt, as in Turkey, but it expressed more freely and
at large the problems facing Muslims in Modernization.
In these circumstances, a wide variety of possibilities were suggested; but
the most popular involved one or another sort of stress on the specifically
Arab heritage. Especially in Syria, more particularly in Mount Lebanon
where, in conjunction with the thriving port of Beirut, there was a large
Christian peasant population, many Christian Arabs had been educated at
mission schools. There they had become interested in the wealth of their
Arabic language and the historic splendour of the Arab past.
Despite the association of that heritage with Islam, in its language and in
its remoteness, both, it was at least diss6ciated from the then ruling Turkish
exponents of Islam. The language was revered in all Muslim lands and
respected by Western scholars; the Christians, taking an economic lead
among the Arabs, were glad to appropriate the rest of the Arab heritage at the
same time. In the latter part of the century, a few of them had attempted,
without perfect success, to reproduce, in Arabic, works of a strictly Western
style. But others were taking more successfully to a conscious revival of the
style of the classical Abbasi period; for instance, Nasif al-Yaziji, who wrote
Maqamat in the purest manner, directly following Hariri. He became a
master of most later writers, as to sheer style. In this way, the small Syrian
district of Lebanon turned out to be a focus of Arab cultural revival.

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Marshal Hodgson
p. 276

Egyptian nationalism and Arab nationalism

Muhammad 'Abduh felt (as had earlier Egyptian reformers before him) a
warm attachment to Egypt as such. His attachment to the classical Arab
heritage was largely an expression of this attachment to Arab Egypt, as
was perhaps in part even his continuing interest in the Dar aI-Islam at
large, which he retained from the days of Afghani's inspiration. But in
terms of practical nation-building, these several loyalties need not be automatically
in harmony. The dilemmas implicit in loyalty at once to Egypt,
to Arabism, and to Islam were eventually forced into the open. Some of
them came out already in the first two decades of the twentieth century,
as the complacent world hegemony of Europe, expressed in the outlook of
Cromer, was abruptly cast in doubt.

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Remember, three phenomena associated with Nahda/Renaissance in the 19th
century:
Nahda: literary revival/modernization (for Christian Arabs)
Nahda: ethical purification/modernization of Islam (for Muslim Arabs)
Nahda put in question traditional community life in village