Nahda

thumb|Renaissance by Moustafa Farroukh (1945), a painting symbolizing the Nahda The Nahda (, meaning 'the Awakening'), also referred to as the Arab Awakening, Arab Enlightenment or Arab Renaissance, was a cultural movement that flourished in Arab-populated regions of the Ottoman Empire, notably in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Tunisia, during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

In traditional scholarship, the Nahda is seen as connected to the cultural shock brought on by Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the reformist drive of subsequent rulers such as Muhammad Ali of Egypt. However, more recent scholarship has shown the Nahda's cultural reform program to have been as "autogenetic" as it was Western-inspired, having been linked to the Tanzimat—the period of political reform within the Ottoman Empire which brought a constitutional order to Ottoman politics and engendered a new political class—as well as the later Young Turk Revolution, allowing proliferation of the press and other publications and internal changes in political economy and communal reformations in Egypt and Syria and Lebanon.