Ahmad Rida
Sheikh Ahmad Rida (also transliterated as Ahmad Reda) (1872–1953) (Arabic: الشيخ أحمد رضا) was a Lebanese linguist, writer and politician. A key figure of the Arab Renaissance (known as al-Nahda), he compiled the modern monolingual Arabic dictionary, Matn al-Lugha, commissioned by the Arab Academy of Damascus in 1930, and is widely considered to be among the foremost scholars of Arab literature and linguistics.
Ahmad Rida | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1872 Nabatiye, Ottoman Syria |
| Died | 1953 Nabatiye, Lebanon |
| Occupation | Linguist, writer, politician, poet |
| Genre | Linguistics, poetry, political theory |
| Literary movement | Nahda |
| Notable works | Matn al-Lugha ("Lexicon of the Arabic Language") Radd al-ʻammiyya ila al-fusḥa ("Tracing the Colloquial to the Classical") A series of other published works, as well as major essays and articles published in Al-Irfan, including "What is a Nation?" (1910) and "Mitwalis and Shi'is in Jabal `Amil" (1911) |
Rida was also heavily involved in Arab nationalist politics and has been variously described as "one of the leading reformers in Syria" and among the "key players in the turn-of-the-century stirrings of Arabism, local patriotism, and even defenses of Shi'i particularism".
He argued for pan-Arab unity, and was among the first scholars in Jabal Amel to seek to integrate his Shi'ite co-religionists into the greater Arab and Muslim nations while retaining their identity as a religious community.