"De-colonizing the Study of the Early Nahda in Egypt" The term early Nahda arose as a way for Nahdawi scholars to explain the background of the long nineteenth century leading to the rise of the Egyptian novel, e.g., Zaynab among others. The term as a result is often associated with the 19th century translation movement yet somehow is never connected to the contemporaneous movement to revive the Arab-Islamic heritage by prominent figures such as Al-Zabidi, Al-`Attar among others. This one-dimensional approach to the cultural and historical dynamics of the early Nahda has however created more problems than it has solved, one such problem being that of how to reconcile the received Orientalist image of Egypt as a stagnant despotic society with the image of Egypt as a vibrant society capable of producing high culture including novels. In recent times, with the growth of knowledge about the revival of heritage, there continues to be no obvious solution. To make this point clear, the paper introduces a recent book on Ottoman Egyptian poetry and comments on some other work associating the Nahda with the 16th century. In such a situation, the paper argues there is an urgent need to reconsider the existing theories of the Early Nahda in a more reflexive way that could explain not only what has been dismissed but why it has been dismissed. In doing so, this paper interrogates the 19th century European colonial culture which gave rise to such theories concluding that what is called for at this point is a further de-centering and decolonizing of early Nahda literary and intellectual thought leaving open the possibility that the term “Early Nahda” might in fact be more applicable to some later and or earlier period and associated with some entirely different factors.