The archives of the Nahdah have been vigorously revisited in the past decade in order to excavate either lineages of intellectual history, or to investigate our understanding of Arab literary history. Exemplifying the former are intellectual histories that reveal genealogies of concepts or modes of thought, as is the case with psychoanalysis, Darwinism, and Marxism; exemplifying the latter are literary histories that read the creation of new literary forms alongside not only the formation of the nation and nationalist thought, but to the blossoming of a capitalist world system. In this presentation, I will focus on the work of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq to provide a bridge between the two disciplines of intellectual history and literary history. Approaching the work of al-Shidyaq, including his four volume, Leg Over Leg, as well as his journalistic work, I show how his intellectual project can give us lessons in literary criticism as well as historiography, and in doing so, approaches what Edward Said called “secular criticism.” I read al-Shidyaq’s negotiation of the concept of civilization alongside his attempts at writing a unique book like Leg Over Leg. In this way, we can simultaneously trace his participation in the intellectual field of the Nahdah, while also saving the text from the redundancies and reductions of a historiography premised on the paradigm of dependence and resistance. Finally, the paper ponders how this approximation of literary history and intellectual history invites us to see Arabic literature as part of the literary world, and modern Arab thought as part of World History.