The Nahda (Arab Awakening or Renaissance) as it is commonly referred was a period during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a burgeoning intellectual scene in the broader Islamic world. Intellectuals and Nahdawis (the Nahda men but there were also women often left out of the historiography) debated ideas about nationalism, Islam, the role of religion in the state, the relationship with Europe, and several topics dujour. The historiography of the Nahda, while substantial, has largely been dominated by Arab Sunni and Christian men. While the chameleon Persianate intellectual Jamal al-Din al-Afghani is often included as a “Nahdawi” who was perhaps Shi’i, his identity was notoriously fluid. The parameters of the modern historiography on contemporary Shi’ism (with few exceptions) often assumes that Shi’i political consciousness emerged in the wider Islamic world with the Islamic revolution in Iran, waking up dispossessed Shi’i masses from a stupor. As more recent scholarship on Shi’ism shows, this was hardly the case. This paper contributes to a growing scholarship which challenges assumptions around Shi’i intellectual and political participation in global intellectual exchanges and movements, the Nahda or otherwise. In Jabal ‘Amil, (South Lebanon) in the early twentieth century a little known Shi’i Nahdawi, Ahmad Aref al-Zayn (1884-1960) founded a Shi’i periodical Al-‘Irfan in 1910 which published on a vast range of global and intellectual topics of the day from nationalism to Islam to the Lebanese Syrian Shi’i community in Africa. Al-Zayn debated renowned Lebanese Nahdawi Rashid Rida living in Egypt, in his widely sourced periodical Al-Manar. Al-Zayn was only one of many of these Shi’i Nahdawis which also included Rashid Baydoun, Ahmad Rida, Sulayman Zahir and many others. While other historians have covered some of these men in their works, I have yet to come across a study that systematically treats Shi’is as part and parcel to the Nahda. This paper uses Al-‘Irfan and other popular Nahda periodicals of the era to write Shi’i Nahdawis into the history of the Nahda changing the narrative around Shi’i political and intellectual involvement in the early twentieth century.