Al-Nahda

For the modern political parties see Nahda movement (Tunisia ) and Nahda Movement (Algeria)!

As Nahda (Arabic نهضة, DMG Nahda ) is a movement called that tried to link the basic values ​​of Islam with modernity.

Literally translated, the word " Nahda " a movement from a lower to an upper body posture (such as when standing up). It is an Arab renaissance. Use is the word to describe the flowering of Arabic language and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Nahda movement represents a return to the era of the great hopes. The main policy Nahda - product of the movement was the nationalist idea, especially pan-Arabism, but also the Syrian nationalism that led to the creation of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which advocated the creation of a Greater Syria. The Nahda was influenced by Dawn of Modernism as from romantic transfiguration of history.

Protagonists of the Nahda called Nahdisten. The first Nahdisten were Egyptian Muslims. They shared the conviction that Islamic religious and scientific progress are compatible. Islam they considered as a viable basis for a modern Arab society, but at the same time called for a renewal of Islam in the sense of the Zeitgeist on. The reformers of the Nahda fought simultaneously against the secularism of modernity, however, were one for the ability to build a democratic state based on an evolved Islam.

The Nahdisten made ​​the cultural impetus that triggered the Western missionaries, fruitful for themselves. They made historical- sociological considerations at a local determination of their society and to clarify the question of why the Islamic world has taken a different development than the Western.

The reformer of Islam Nahda to Jamal al-Din al - Afghani (1838-1897) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) fought against modern secularism of the nationalists, but also against the binding to the culture area of ​​the Ottoman tradition, which in the course of centuries religion has corrupted. They wanted to return to a true Islam and to the sources. They stood for a new, rational interpretation of the Koran.

Later, another Nahda model began to emerge, which tended religion in favor of secular orientation, ie to minimize a separation of state and religion to exclude, ( as Farah Antun ) or its binding force ( so Dschurdschi Zaidan ). Advocates of this second Nahda model were mainly Christians. A "patron " of the Christian representatives of the Nahda movement was, for example, the missionary Cornelius Van Dyck. Antun Sa'ada and Michel Aflaq resulted in a conversion of this model into a political nationalist program. This second Nahda model prevailed insofar as the accrued after the first World War, Arab countries decided all their citizens for a task of the dhimma and Millet system in favor of civil equality.

The Nahda split into a secular and Salafist flow. Leader of the secular was the Egyptian Sheikh Ali Abdel- Razeq ( 1888-1966 ). He tried in his 1925 book " Islam and the foundations of the rule " to establish the Islamic secularism. Leader of the Salafist Sheikh Rashid Rida was the. They represented a Hanbali fundamentalism and called for the restoration of the Caliphate State. They stood near the Wahhabism.