ABSTRACT
Western models have played so prominent a part in almost every aspect of the Arab nahda that one needs to guard against the assumption that the relationship was merely one of tutelage. It is worth recalling that 'Westernization' was a direction taken by local elites even before they had to bend to lasting foreign rule; that the driving force behind it was never submission but the desire for emulation as the surest means of selfassertion; that 'the West', adopted as an example, viewed as monolithic and often idealized, was an abstraction tinged by Arab perceptions of their needs and aspirations; that the imitation was intended to be selective, even though accompanied by grave miscalculations about what was jeopardized by the choices; and that the progress achieved was seldom on an even front. This last point bears a little elaboration. The most immediately impressive feature of modem Western civilization is its technological attainments, and men of will and action - like Muhammad 'Ali - were quick to see the benefits they would reap from adopting and imitating them. Appreciation of the intellectual curiosity that infonns them came later, and acceptance of the philosophic and aesthetic values that are part of the same package, later still. At the same time, each act of accreditation of a foreign-inspired innovation facilitated the next, and by a process not of careful sifting but of validation by association, the civilization that had produced such clearly beneficial inventions as the steam engine and wireless telegraphy, came to be looked upon as holding the answers to virtually every problem of modem life (see Welch and Cachia 1979: 210-35).
