Ahmad Rida

Ahmad Rida
Born	1872 Nabatiye, Ottoman Syria
Died	1953 Nabatiye, Lebanon
Occupation	Linguist, writer, politician, poet
Ethnicity	Arab
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)

Sheikh Ahmad Rida (also transliterated as Ahmad Reda) (1872–1953) (Arabic: الشيخ أحمد رضا‎‎) was an Levantine Arab linguist, writer and politician. A key figure of the Arab Renaissance (known as al-Nahda), he created the first modern dictionary of the Arabic language, 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.

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.

Born in Nabatiyeh, he was a main supporter of King Faisal's Greater Syrian rule, following the Arab Revolt in the First World War. With Ahmad Aref al-Zain, he represented Jabal Amel and Lebanon's Shi'ites in most of the conferences which, at first, led to the creation of the short-lived Syrian Arab Kingdom ruled by Faisal and later, in 1936, were held to underscore Syrian unity.

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