The paper traces on the development of Arab Studies as the central axis for inter-disciplinary knowledge production about the Arab past, drawing on the intellectual lineage of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda (awakening) while being enabled by Cold War funding for area studies. Whereas the story of Area Studies and Middle Eastern Studies in the United States—and in Britain to a certain extent—has been told, the history of Middle East Studies in the Middle East is yet to be unpacked. The paper traces the developed of the Arab Studies Program (ASP) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) starting in1936 and up until 1956. In 1936, Constantine Zurayq took part in a delegation to Egypt that sought Taha Hussein’s council for establishing a scholarly program dedicated to the study of the Arab world. However, the Program only came to fruition in 1948, led by Zurayq and Nabih Amin Faris, enabled by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1956, Faris, as ASP director, submitted a proposal for the reformation of Program to Zurayq, then Acting President of AUB. Faris’s 1956 proposal contained a section on ‘Related Activities’, which included: a Summa Arabica, a Translation Bureau, a university journal (though reviving al-Muqtataf) and a University Press (through reviving the American Press). This proposal bears the distinct marks of a Nahdawi project, namely a community of scholars who are engaged in teaching, pedagogical reform and translation, and who disseminate their knowledge through the periodical press, all sustained through a political economy of print. This raises the question: is the program a product of the Cold-War politics of knowledge production and the growth of Area Studies programs, or is it enmeshed in the historiography of the nahda? Such a question collapses the historiographic distinction between late Nahda and the early years of the Cold War while complicating the notion that the Nahda ended at a particular historiographic juncture across various intellectual spaces. It indicates that the Nahdawi imagery lived on in the practice of certain institutional settings and liberal intellectual milieus. It also points to the conclusion that Area Studies took on different forms in varying contexts, and that the American model for Middle Eastern Studies in the Middle East did not go unchallenged.