The “Global Nahda / Global Weimar” symposium marked the beginning of OIB's 2024 activities and initiated the institute’s collaboration with the Arab cultural center, Der Divan, in Berlin Zehlendorf. The Nahda and the Weimar Republic may be separated both in terms of time and space, but as metaphors and projects both continue to inform the present. The initiators of this comparison of the history of ideas, Simon Conrad and Peter Makhlouf from the Princeton University, identified numerous parallels, which were reflected upon and further developed at this thought-provoking and well-attended symposium.
 

We document the thematic introduction by OIB’s director Jens Hanssen.
 

"What is the Nahda?"
 

I have chosen this general question so that we can create a common basis for our experimental Weimar-Nahda comparison. Nahda is still omnipresent in public discourse in the Arab world. For a Berlin audience, however, "Weimar" is likely to evoke more diverse and intense associations. 
For the time being, we can define the Nahda as an emancipation project of Arab intellectuals in the long 19th century that lasted until the 1940s.
In the year of Kant, I naturally also ask the question "What is the Nahda?" in allusion to Kant's epochal question "What is Enlightenment?" from 1783, where Kant famously demanded that people should have the courage to "make public use of their reason in all matters". Only in this way could we humans emerge from self-inflicted immaturity into a state of freedom. However, Kant immediately restricted this freedom for citizens in office and religious authority. In Kant's normative presentation, Enlightenment is a project for responsible citizens aimed at the "dankbare Welt und Nachwelt". The community of scholars should help society to leave the past behind and create a better future. 
Literally translated, al-nahda does not mean enlightenment - that would be al-tanwir, a term that only became programmatic in the late 1980s – but rather: " rising up," "uprising," and "revival." 
On the one hand, the Arab Nahda, like the European Enlightenment, is a historical epoch with a beginning and an end (which, of course, is a matter of dispute). On the other hand, it is an ongoing, normative project for the future, based on the declared emergence from an alleged indolence or backwardness (this is also the subject of heated debate). 
The Nahda dedicated itself to reviving the Islamic-Arabic cultural heritage, especially the Golden Ages of the Abbasid Empire (until the Mongol invasion in 1258) and the Islamic-Jewish high culture on the Iberian Peninsula - "al-Andalus" (which was destroyed by the Catholic-Castilian genocide in 1492). But the Muslim, Christian and Jewish Nahdawis of the 19th century did not just see themselves as heirs to these times. They also had a great urge for innovation and reform in their social, religious, cultural and individual lives, without, however, daring to make a radical break with the status quo. This "revival-and-reform" movement was primarily driven by the rapid spread of Arabic newspapers and magazines, especially in Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria from the 1860s onwards. 
The beginning of this project has been disputed ever since Jurji Zaidan proclaimed the "new Nahda" in 1892. However, the Nahda phenomenon existed before there was even a term for it. In their hindsight, the Nahdawis themselves regarded Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798 as the trigger for the coming of 'their time'. Arab nationalists and post-colonial scholars were suspicious of this external, European, colonial reference. Some of them insisted on autochthonous factors for the Nahda. They researched the 18th century in search of evidence of an Islamic enlightenment (R. Schulze), or to acknowledge the intellectual spadework of Arab-Christian scholars before 1798 (B. Heyberger, F. Kremsti). 
Nahda-critical researchers (Jabiri, Massad, Dalal), on the other hand, warn that any epistemological reference to Europe makes the history of Arab ideas appear derivative or belated. Moreover, the attempt to find Nahda precursors in the 18th century conceals those intellectual traditions that did not culminate in the Nahda and which the Nahda project arrogantly declared obsolete. 
I am not concerned here with right or wrong interpretations. According to Nietzsche, interpretation always includes claims to power. Rather, this sketch is intended to show that the Nahda represents a kind of Archimedean point for Arab modernity, on which truth claims about the Arab past and future have been balanced since the late 19th century. 
Nahda's legacy is in some ways similar to that of the two broad interpretive axes of the European Enlightenment. One axis leads from Voltaire via John Stuart Mill, and the optimistic Marx, to Habermas; and the other axis along Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Michel Foucault. For Voltaire, the Enlightenment was characterized by the power of critics to negotiate greater freedoms with the authorities. Habermas would later celebrate this as the structural transformation of the public sphere in the 18th century. In this axis, progress has a positive connotation, and modernity is a project that is constantly being perfected. Rousseau also recognized that freedom was spoken of everywhere in his time, but he saw the developments in the 18th century as a worsening, a general alienation of man. After the Second World War, Horckheimer and Adorno spoke of an instrumentalist dialectic of enlightenment, in which "enlightenment relates to things like the dictator relates to people (whom he can) manipulate." Foucault then sees the whole of modernity as a discursive corset - Rousseau's "chains" - which the European Enlightenment has placed over all of humanity. 
The verdict on Nahda in the Arab world is roughly analogous. Some speak of an initial cultural spark for a still imperfect Arab modernity; others speak of the beginning of Arab self-alienation. There were also voices within the Nahda that were critical of certain innovations; and these did not only come from religious dignitaries and patriarchs, for whom everything was moving too fast and whose social power and authority of interpretation was felt to be eroding. 
A veritable culture war broke out between Nahdawis, for example, over the new Arabic language - which Ibrahim al-Yaziji dismissed around 1900 as a mere “newspaper language” - or what Brecht's later radio criticism called the manipulative "communication apparatus". Poets and philologists among the Nahdawis were suspicious of those journalists who allowed the magic of the Arabic language to be flattened by the printed word, and by print capitalism in general, precisely through its dissemination. In contrast, Jurji Zaydan, the newspaper entrepreneur and author of dozens of historical novels that are still widely read today, saw his language-renewal project as a bulwark against British and French cultural imperialism, which was striving to upgrade regional Arabic dialects to national languages. 
Before we think any further, we should disentangle the collective noun "Nahda" spatially and temporally. For intellectuals and scholars respond in their writings not only to other writings or world events in general, but also to events in their homeland or in the cities where they lived in exile. The first Nahda centers were Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria. Then came the Nahda exile bases: Istanbul, Paris, London, New York and – much later – Weimar Berlin. At the end of the nineteenth century, when private printing houses were founded in Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Mosul, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tanta and elsewhere, and journals appeared everywhere, the network of Nahdawis expanded deep into the provinces.
As historians, we must also divide the Nahda into different phases. Roughly speaking, until 1860, the revival of the historical and literary heritage was the driving force behind a Nahda that was mainly characterized by Christians. In that year, the civil war in the Mount Lebanon and the massacre of Christians in Damascus shocked Syrian-Lebanese scholars. Led by the polymath Butrus al-Bustani (one of Susannah Heschel's and my favorite Nahdawis), they started to devote themselves to urgent questions of reform, such as: What social order prevents "atavisms" like the violence of 1860? What is the role of the state, the Western imperialists, the educated Arab men and women, and the new economic elites? 
The third Nahdawi phase was heralded by the First World War. This was a war in which one sixth of the population in the Levant died, and after which Great Britain and France - legitimized by the League of Nations in Geneva - colonized the Arab provinces of the dismantled Ottoman Empire. In the 1920s, a new generation of Nahdawis added the struggle for independence to their repertoire, alongside their enthusiasm for cultural and social reform. Anti-colonial uprisings in Egypt in 1919, in Iraq in 1920, in Syria in 1925-27, and in Palestine in 1929 and from 1936 to 1939 challenged the old generation of Nahdawis. They had only wanted to negotiate their freedoms and state independence with the colonial powers at the green table. 
In the interwar period, the Nahdawis found it difficult to reconcile their appreciation of Western culture and democratic values with the real-life brutality of the mandate and protectorate administrations. Remarkably, this did not prevent the Nahdawis from siding with the Allies during the Second World War. In their newspapers, they condemned National Socialism as an even greater threat to Arab democratic aspirations than the British and French.
The Moroccan philosopher of history Abdallah Laroui once said that the anti-colonial liberalism of the first Nahda had the chronological misfortune of asserting itself precisely at the historical juncture when Europe was becoming illiberal and antidemocratic. 
The Republic of Weimar and the Weimar Project fell in 1933; the Nahda only fell with the Nakba in 1948. In the post-war period, German and Arab democracy projects had a difficult time to reassert themselves. But Weimar and the Nahda continue to inspire Eldorado anxieties and prospects. 
For all their difference, what do we gain by studying Weimar through a Nahda lens and the Nahda through a Weimar lens? What are the similarities and differences of the two hopeful but flawed periods and projects? Their legacies acquire a creeping sense of urgency, in the context of rightwing extremists winning elections in Germany, France, across Europe and in the United States, and in the context of war, destruction, famine and disease in the Middle East. Will we look back to the year 2024, the Kant year no less, as we now do at 1933 and 1948?