Morpho-Semantic Evidence of Emerging Subjectivity in the Language of the Nahḍah — A Proposal

This article reviews some key concepts of the Arab(ic) Nahḍah with the aim of highlighting the usefulness of a more genuinely linguistic, i.e., grammar- and etymology-oriented approach for a deeper understanding of some basic features of the foundational period of Arab modernity. My contention and starting-point is that the Nahḍah was, among other things, an era in which the Arab subject came to sense its own agency. This is reflected not only in the many phenomena we are used to associate with the Nahḍah — the emergence of the intellectual, of critical journalism, of historicism, sentimentalism, new literary genres, etc. — but also in the morpho-semantics of key Nahḍah terminology. I argue (a) that the self-referential t-morpheme that features in many words signifying important Nahḍah concepts, such as taraqqī, taqaddum, or tamaddun, can and should be seen in the same light, i.e., as an indicator of a new emphasis on the self. Moreover, I argue that both the grammatical form of the new vocabulary (e.g., the -iyyah suffix for abstracts, verbal nouns, the causative patterns of form II and IV) and its “original”, “basic” (root) meanings underline (b) secularisation and the concomitant centrality of the human being, as well as (c) proactivity, energetic verve, and creativity, i.e., the subject’s being a cause of change in time (hence history). Thus, each new conceptual term is a little ‘Nahḍah in a nutshell,’ containing the very essence of Nahḍawi thought and the actual experience of feeling “modern”.