In the Garden

Numerous new periodicals joined Beirut’s lone newspaper Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār (The Garden of News) beginning in 1870. After a decade of increasing returns from silk, readers were invited to imagine Beirut and its new journals as so many gardens of culture, economics and useful news: the gardens of Al-Jinān, the Paradise-like Al-Jannah, or the smaller still garden of Al-Junaynah; the flower of Al-Zahrah; the bee of Al-Naḥlah; joined later in the decade by the choice clippings of Al-Muqtaṭaf, and the fruitful arts of Thamarāt al-Funūn. Reworking a far older adab and poetic tradition of figuring knowledge as the product of idyllic gardens, the Beirut press’s editors and authors cultivated a utopian fiction of the garden as site of what Zaydān would later call the Nahḍah. As in Eden, the garden is always threatened with a fall, and both Salīm al-Bustānī’s novel Al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām (Love in the Gardens of Damascus) and Yūsuf al-Shalfūn’s novel Al-Shābb al- maghrūr (The Conceited Youth; serialized simultaneously over the course of 1870 in Al-Jinān and Al-Zahrah, respectively), deliver that story.