LITERATURE AND CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT IN BEYRUT IN THE 19TH CENTURY

Throughout history, Beirut has been the habitat of different religions and nations. The people of various nations are made up of Christians and Muslims. Today, it is seen that languages such as Arabic, French and English are among the most spoken languages in Lebanon, where Beirut is located. Looking at Beirut in the 19th century, it was seen that colonial powers such as Britain and France were a conflict area, and at the same time it was one of the centers of Arab nationalism thought against the Ottoman Empire. During the occupation of Mehmet Ali Pasha, missionary schools were allowed to open, as well as cities such as Zahle, Damascus and Aleppo, Jesuit schools were opened in Beirut. With the opening of American Protestant schools, the influence of the relevant schools in the emergence and development of the idea of Arab nationalism is inevitable. Especially in Beirut, it would be appropriate to state that the aim of using languages such as French and English instead of Arabic education in missionary schools is to instill Western culture and to attract students to Christianity. The students of the Syrian Protestant College, who constituted the original of the American University of Beirut, worked against the Ottoman Empire within the society they established and aimed to establish an independent secular Arab state. Beirut comes to the fore especially in areas such as poetry and theater before the “Nahda” movement that started in Egypt during the reign of Kavalalı Mehmet Ali Pasha with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. The advances that paved the way for the development of modern literature in Beirut before Egypt will find a place in the field of literature later. In this study, it is aimed to present information on literary and cultural activities that took place in Beirut and emphasize the importance of Beirut in modern Arabic literature in the 19th century.

“To Promote the Cause of Christ's Kingdom”: International Student Associations and the “Revival” of Middle Eastern Christianity

This article traces the presence in the Arab world of international Christian student organizations like the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and its intercollegiate branches of the YMCA and YWCA associated with the Protestant missionary movement in nineteenth-century Beirut. There, an American-affiliated branch of the YMCA emerged at Syrian Protestant College in the 1890s, and the Christian women's student movement formed in the early twentieth century after a visit from WSCF secretaries John Mott and Ruth Rouse. As such, student movements took on lives of their own, and they developed in directions that Western missionary leaders never anticipated. By attending to the ways in which the WSCF and YMCA/YWCA drew Arabs into the global ecumenical movement, this study examines the shifting aims of Christian student associations in twentieth-century Syria and Lebanon, from missionary-supported notions of evangelical revival to ecumenical renewal and interreligious movements for national reform.

Mourning the Nahḍah

The 1880s, witnessing disappointing returns on silk in Syria, Salīm al-Bustānī’s far too early death in 1884, the increasing censure of the Sublime Porte, and the emigration to Cairo of Jurjī Zaydān, Fāris Nimr and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf -- fleeing the collapse of the Syrian Protestant College intellectual community --, disillusioned the dreams of material and intellectual progress that fueled the rise of the private Arabic press and the serialized Arabic novel in 1860s and 1870s Beirut. It is a macabre, melancholic turn for the Arabic novel, haunted by Salīm al-Bustānī, whose novels lie buried, Zaydān tells us, “in the pages of Al-Jinān.” Zaydān’s early 1892 novel Asīr al-Mutamahdī (Captive of the Self-Made or Would-Be Mahdi) emblematically pivots around a bloody lock of hair locked in a box in Cairo since the novel’s protagonist fled 1860 Mt. Lebanon. In Egypt, debts to British and French banks simultaneously funded the speculative irrigation of cotton land as well as the transformation of Cairo’s city center, sedimented in the public garden of Ezbekiyya. The addictive, illicit, nocturnal pleasures of Ezbekiyya would cast an anxious pall over its Edenic grounding of Egypt’s own Nahḍah, if only readers would decode its specious, speculative foundations.

Critique

This chapter explores competing notions of critique as brought to light by discussions of Charles Darwin, focusing on a section of Naguib Mahfouz's novel, Qasr al-shawq (Palace of Desire), in which the youngest son, Kamal, publishes an article on Darwin in an Arabic-language journal. The chapter casts this fictionalized incident alongside the Lewis Affair, in which a professor at the Syrian Protestant College, Edwin Lewis, resigned over a scandal involving his evocation of Darwin during a commencement address. Where Edwin Lewis emerges as a martyr for academic freedom in the Arab world, Kamal negotiates his relationship to his family's response to his work differently. The chapter considers the presumptions at play in critical response and its connection to modern education.

PHILIP HITTI, BRAZIL, AND THE DIASPORIC HISTORIES OF AREA STUDIES

This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrowing a template for studying the Middle East, Hitti and colleagues imbued it with a widespread sentiment that Arab and Muslim legacies of the Iberian peninsula had shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. They relocated a model of area studies but refitted its content. In revealing how the institution of area studies moved across and merged with varied sociocultural settings, these diasporic histories provincialize the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.