This book, which is the first volume in a series, is entirely devoted to the valorization of the ethical-philosophical and theoretical-political heritage developed, since the second half of the 19th century, within the framework of the resistance of Arab-Muslim societies, from the Maghreb to the Machreq – from the Gulf to the Ocean, to use a phrase that has become traditional – to Western colonialist penetration, and its neocolonial extension. This resistance was expressed in particular, intellectually, politically and culturally, through the Nahda movement, led by a fraction of the Arab elites. Nahda, in other words the process of resuscitation of the Arab-Muslim nation, was envisaged as a civilizational recovery. This is also the meaning of the Arabic root NHD, from which the term comes, and which means “to rise”, “to stand up”, “to be ready”. We clearly understand the dynamic scope of this movement. Multifaceted, Nahda has manifested itself in the fields of religion/spirituality (dogmatic theology, exegesis of the Koran, legal sciences, Sufism), fine arts and literature (Arabic language, poetry, novel, music, etc. .), social life (press and journalism, education, science, etc.), without forgetting an essential area, that of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle. The intellectual and cultural work of the Nahda cannot be separated, of course, from the social movements, the political struggles, the armed clashes against colonialism which mobilized Arab societies.

The Nahda will irrigate the entire 20th century, asking a double question: how to put an end to dependence (on the Western North and its colonialist and capitalist civilization)? How to overcome internal decadence, “colonizability”, to use the expression of the Algerian intellectual Malek Bennabi, decadence which weakens the social fabrics and mental structures of the societies of the Maghreb and Mashreq, thus allowing the West to dominate them ? Civilizational recovery is therefore twofold, both anti-imperialist (liberation) and reformist (in the sense of disalienation, internal reform (islah), reform of a psychic, social, cultural and religious nature).

Certainly, all the social forces and all the currents of thought which will shape, in the Arab nation, the ideological and political space of the 20th century (until the present day) have not been explicitly linked to the Nahda. But, as soon as these forces and currents pose themselves as levers of social mobilization against the Empire, they are, in fact, in the same family of spirit as the heralds of the Nahda of the previous century, the spokespersons of the Arab civilizational national soul.