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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 September 2017
This article discusses Nahda intellectual Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s public and pedagogic writings. It focuses on the nationalist pamphlets, the Nafīr Sūrriya, written in the wake of the first sectarian–civil war, and his translation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, both published in Beirut in 1860. I analyze Bustānī’s politico-theological and economic thought by looking at the nexus of debt, guilt, love, and mercy that he draws out in the Nafīr. The article argues that Bustānī’s nation is inaugurated into a “guilt-history” and eternally faced with the task of confronting the mercy of debt and the un-requitable debt of mercy. Nationality in this specific sociohistorical context became a form of artifice that in a postlapsarian age requires religion, labor, and exchange to survive as a social contract. The “civil war” exemplified a return to a state of nature that could only be amended by a return to the laws of nature and the seeking of refuge under the name of one God and one religion, diyāna. The social contract, articulated in these terms, could only be sealed through the recognition of natural laws as the foundation provided by God himself, while politics remained concealed under the folds of political theology.
The analysis of debt is beholden to Mladen Dolar's essay on Shakespeare's Shylock from the Merchant of Venice: “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained,” Yearbook of Comparative Literature 60 (2014), 9–26.
1 Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–83) is a main figure in the Nahda or the modern intellectual movement that emerged at the intersection of capitalist modernization and colonialism in the nineteenth century. Born a Maronite, Bustānī converted to Protestantism and worked closely with the American missionaries in Beirut. He was involved in the King James Bible translation with the missionary Cornelius Van Dyck, and, in addition to compiling a modern Arabic encyclopedia and dictionary, Bustānī translated books like Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. He also wrote a significant number of essays, treatises, and speeches on social organization and society, Arab culture and literature, and modernization. Add to that a series of pedagogic lexicons in Arabic on calculus (for merchants) and grammar (for school students). Bustānī was a prominent figure in fin de siècle Beirut's rising urban middle class.
2 The transformation of relations of production in Mount Lebanon and Damascus had led to the gradual independence of the peasants from the iltizam land-tenure system and to the separation of labor skills from land property. In this context, and leading up to 1860, the Christian peasants of Kisirwan in Mount Lebanon revolted against the Christian Muqa'tiji and the moneylenders in 1858 following a year of bad crops and the repercussions of the global economic financial crisis of 1857–8. Led by a farrier, Tannius Shahine, the rebels stopped paying taxes, expelled the muqat'ici from their lands, and established a political structure with a representative body. The Europeans and Ottomans worked against the growing momentum of the peasant movement, which failed to garner alliances with the merchants and nobles, and it began to take on a sectarian character when Christian peasants rebelled against Druze feudal lords in search of the successes of the revolts in Kisirwan. Although the Druze lords won the battles by orchestrating unprecedented large-scale massacres, the result was that the land-tenure system that they had headed lost to the forces of capitalism in the Lebanese mountains: in the aftermath of these events the silk industry that was largely run by European capitalists emerged as the main form of production, wage labor replaced tax-farming to a large extent, and family and gender relations were significantly transformed. For relevant sources on the integration of the Ottoman Empire into the capitalist world economy refer to Dominique Chevallier, La société du Mont Liban a l'époque de la revolution industrielle en Europe (Paris, 1982); Pamuk, Sevket, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; Scholch, Alexander, Young, William C., and Gerrity, Michael C., Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development (Washington, DC, 1982)Google Scholar; Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley, 1995), Firro, A. Kais, “Silk and Agrarian Changes in Lebanon, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22/2 (1990), 151–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharara, Waddah, On the Origins of Sectarian Lebanon, Fi Usul Lubnan al-ta'ifiy: Khat al-yamin al-jamahiri (Beirut, 2011)Google Scholar; Hanssen, Jens, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Khater, Akram Fouad, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon 1870–1920 (Berkeley, 2001)Google Scholar. For discussions of the peasant revolts refer to Makidisi, Ussama, “Corrupting the Sublime Sultanate: The Revolt of Tanyus Shahin in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42/1 (2000), 180–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An earlier analysis of the Kisrawan revolt is Porath, Yehoshua’s “The Peasant Revolt of 1858–1861,” Asian and African Studies 2 (1966), 77–157Google Scholar; Freas, Erik Eliav, “Ottoman Reform, Islam, and Palestine's Peasantry,” Arab Studies Journal 18/1 (2010), 196–231Google Scholar.
3 The original manuscripts are at the American University of Beirut, Archives and Special Collections Department, and have been reprinted in the book volume Al-Mu'allim Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Nafir Surriya (Beirut, 1990).
4 Al-Bustānī, , al-Tuhfa al-Bustānīya fi- al- asfar al- kuruziya (al-Bustānī’s Masterpiece of Crusoe's Travels) (Beirut, 1860), American University of Beirut, Archives and Special CollectionsGoogle Scholar.
5 The “nation form,” as Étienne Balibar has defined it, emerges and persists as a global ideological form premised on the retroactive construction of national singularity. This nation form is tethered to the development of modern capitalism, within which it has diffused to almost all societies in the past centuries. The form determines a central process: the nationalization of society and the production of a people as a homo nationalis. Thus the tracing back of an origin for the nation form as an imaginary identification must take account not of its historical origin but of its formal structure and the symbolic forms that determine it. This means that the nation cannot be solely traced to Creole nationalism, as Benedict Anderson argued in his attempts to debunk the Eurocentric appropriation of the nation. Indeed, if the nation did indeed emerge from the sociohistorical context and debates of the French Revolution, it is not because of some natural French essence that it did so, but because of the central position of France as a world empire within the world system then. The resurfacing of nationalism in different historical moments after the French Revolution is a worldwide phenomenon that has been linked to the intervals of crises of state–capital formations. In moments of crisis, the nation emerges to fill the gaps of state–capital's organization of social life; however, the reaffirmation of the structural causality (of crisis and reorganization of society through nationalism) exposes the historicity of that equation. This structure of repetition is not evental but formal; as Kojin Karatani has argued, the nation emerges as a representative structure to establish some form of class equilibrium where there is none. Complementing the analysis of the nation at the formal level, an adequate understanding of nationalism as a modern social form requires that it “captures the dynamic interplay between sociohistorical processes and the embodied, constituting character of everyday practices and cultural categories of understanding,” for the nation lies at the conjunction of the socially generated divide between subjectivity and objectivity in capitalist modernity. Refer to Sewell, William, “The French Revolution and the Emergence of the Nation Form,” in Morrison, Michael A., ed., Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (Chicago, 2004), 91–125Google Scholar; Karatani, Kojin, The Structure of World History (Durham, NC, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goswami, Manu, “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44/4 (2002), 770–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Balibar, Étienne, “The Nation Form,” in Balibar, Étienne and Wallerstein, Immanuel, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London and New York, 1991), 86–106Google Scholar.
6 I borrow the term “psychotheology” from Santner, Eric, who employs it as an amendment to Sigmund Freud's “psychopathology of everyday life.” Santner, Eric, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rozenzweig (Chicago, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge, 1983). Makdisi, Ussama, “After 1860: Debating Religion, Reform, and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34/4 (2002), 601–17Google Scholar.
8 Makdisi, “Corrupting the Sublime Sultanate,” 194.
9 Ibid.
10 Makdisi, in his reading of sectarianism and of Bustānī’s discourse, rehearses the classical secularist false dilemma in which overcoming religion is perceived as essential for political emancipation. Marx's rebuttal of Bruno Bauer's radical secularism is instructive here. Marx argues that while religion indeed expresses a limit or a defect in human sociality, it is not the cause of that defect but indeed “the manifestation of secular narrowness” (Robert C. Tucker, The Marx/Engels Reader (New York, 1978), 26). Liberal secularists argue that individuals can be emancipated from religion but not from the state and not from their particularities (religion, private property, etc.), while for Marx emancipation can only be carried out by overcoming these secular restrictions and particularities themselves. The universalism of the political state and its internal contradictions is oxymoronic for Marx, for how can freedom and equality be embedded in the realm of rights, as ends, while the concrete means for achieving them are absent?
11 Makdisi, “After 1860,” 613.
12 Jeffrey Sacks, Iterations of Loss, Mutilation and Aesthetic Form: Al-Shidyaq to Darwish (New York, 2015), 88.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 90.
15 Al- Bustānī, Nafīr Sūrrīya (hereafter NS), Pamphlet 9, 14 Jan. 1861.
16 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 4.
17 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlets 1, 5, 7, 8.
18 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 8.
19 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlets, 1,5,9.
20 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 1.
21 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 5.
22 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 5, 1 Nov. 1860.
23 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 7, 19 Nov. 1860.
24 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3, 15 Oct. 1860.
25 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6, 8 Nov. 1860.
26 Ibid.
27 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 2, 8 Oct. 1860.
28 Nafīr Sūrrīya, al-muʿalim Buṭrus al-Bustānī, editor unknown (Beirut, 1990).
29 Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Refer to Honig, Bonnie’s “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review 85/1 (1991), 97–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Hamacher, Werner, “On the Right to Have Rights,” New Centennial Review 14/2 (2014), 169–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 2, 8 Oct. 1860.
33 Ibid.
34 Derrida, Jacques, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science 7/1 (1986), 7–15, at 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 4.
36 Al- Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 5.
37 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 1, 29 Sept., 1860.
38 Agamben argues that sovereign power is premised on the production and exclusion of bare human life for the purposes of justification of its legitimacy. Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, D. (Stanford, 1998)Google Scholar.
39 Santner, On the Pscyhotheology of Everyday Life, 101.
40 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 4.
41 Ibid.
42 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 7.
43 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6.
44 Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3.
48 Pamphlets 6 through 9 were dedicated to drawing out a ledger for calculating the losses and gains for the nation.
49 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 2.
50 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet, 7.
51 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3.
52 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 5.
53 Bustānī’s Speech on social organization, Khuṭba fi al-hayʾa al-ʾijtimāʿiyya (1869), carries the same task forward by providing an anthropological description beholden to American Puritanism. In it Bustānī draws out an understanding of society based on distinguishing social spheres from each other: the religious, the moral, the economic, and the political.
54 Meister, Robert, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York, 2011), 12Google Scholar, further argues in relation to this point, “To believe that we are living after evil and before justice is the essence of what it means to live in a secular age. Secularity is always a secondary concept, defined by whatever element of the sacred is absent from it, and by how that element of sacredness would be conceived.”
55 In fact, in al-Bustānī’s dictionary, Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ (Beirut, 1998), 301, diyāna and dayn are listed under one entry dānahu. He defines diyāna as “a word for all the ways in which God is worshiped, milla and madhab, plural form diyānāt.” And al-dayn: “infinitive noun, meaning a postponed loan,”
56 Ibid.
57 Hamacher, Werner, “Guilt History: Benjamin's Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion’,” diacritics 32/3–4 (2002), 81–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
58 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 7.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 9.
63 Refer to Santner's, Eric The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
64 Ibid.
65 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 4.
66 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 1.
67 Makdisi, “After 1860.”
68 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 1.
69 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 2.
70 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 7.
71 Ibid.
72 Refer to the discussion of the Robinson Crusoe translation in Ali, Nadia Bou, “Buṭrus al-Bustānī and the Shipwreck of the Nation,” Middle Eastern Literatures 16/3 (2013), 266–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
73 Al-Bustānī, , “Introduction,” in Al-Bustānī, , al-Tuḥfa al-Bustānīya fi al-asfār al-kurūziyya (al-Bustānī’s Masterpiece of Crusoe's Travels) (Beirut, 1860)Google Scholar.
74 Karl Marx, The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London, 1973), 86.
75 Al-Bustānī, “Introduction,” in al-Tuḥfa; al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 11.
76 Al-Bustānī, , “Ḥub al-waṭan min al-imān” (The Love of the Nation Is an Act of Faith), al-Jinan 1 (1871), 303–6, at 303Google Scholar.
77 The execution of the Khazen feudal family by the peasants was a pivotal moment during the violence as it provoked increased interference and interest from the Ottoman governors as well as local and foreign merchants. This family represented the tax-farming system: its execution at the hands of the peasants repositioned the Maronite Church and the Beiruti notables against the peasants.
78 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Marx, The Grundrisse, 83.
82 Al-Bustānī, Khuṭba fi al-hayʾa al-ʾijtimāʿiyya, 7.
83 Ibid.
84 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3.
85 Al-Bustāni, Al-tuḥfa al-bustānīyya fi al-asfār al-kurūziyya, 74.
86 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlets 1, 2, 4.
87 Meister, After Evil, analyzes the triad of perpetrator/beneficiary/victim in relation to national reconciliation projects post-1990. He also constructs parallels with postwar Lincolonian ideas on reconciliation in the late nineteenth century. The innocence of national subjects is made possible through projective identification with good victims that seek no retribution, as well as the repudiation of their status as beneficiaries through the avowal of collective guilt.
88 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3.
89 Karatani, Structure of World History, 213.
90 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 11, 22 April 1861.
91 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 1.
92 Hamacher, “Guilt History,” 85.
93 Al- Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 9.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 Hamacher, “Guilt History,” 93.
97 Ibid.
98 Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6.
99 Bustānī, NS, Pamphlets 6, 7, 8, 9.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 The unification of monetary values had already been under way since the mid- nineteenth century; refer to P. L. Cottrell, Monika Pohl Fraser, and Ian Fraser, eds., East Meets West: Banking, Commerce, and Investment in the Ottoman Empire (Aldershot, 2008); and Pamuk's, Sevket A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar. Also, 1860 was the first moment of humanitarian intervention in the Levant—an international tribunal was convened comprising Prussian, French, Ottoman, and British delegates. These proceedings were recently compiled and published in three volumes: Father Antoine Daw, ed., Ḥaw ādith 1860 fi lubnan wa dimashq, lajnat bayrūt al-dawliya, al-maḥādir al-kamila (The Events of 1860 in Lebanon and Damascus: The Beirut International Tribunal Complete Proceedings) (Beirut, 1996).
104 Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6.
105 This has a similar structure to the late nineteenth-century intellectual arguments in the Muslim world that Devji, Faisal describes in “Apologetic Modernity,” Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 61–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Devji analyzes the apologetic stance through which modernity was appropriated by Muslim intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, by which modernity was conceived in moral terms: “Modernity was being conceived in the classical terms of a beautiful life rather than in those of citizenship, even though this art of living had now come to constitute the morality of a new kind of national community, which did not participate in the life of a state. Ethics, in other words, was not a kind of citizenship, and Islam was not a kind of state, but both might well have served as ciphers for the citizenship and state that were denied to colonial subjects in general and minority populations in particular. The Muslim community for which the Aligarhists spoke was in fact a nation in suspense, one that struggled to position itself in a non-demographic space to avoid a politics determined by categories of majority and minority.” Devji argues that the response to modernity was cultural and moral, and posited counter to the legal and political categories of the state.
106 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6.
107 Ibid.
108 Al-Bustānī, “Ḥub al-waṭan min al-imān,” 303.
109 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6.
110 Ibid.
111 For discussion of the case of the French revolution refer to Sewell, “The French Revolution and the Emergence of Nation Form”; and for a discussion of history and repetition in relation to the nation form refer to Kojin Karatani's History and Repetition (New York, 2011)
112 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 7.
113 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3.
114 Ibid.
115 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 7.
116 Ibid.
117 It is important to note that in Bustānī’s Muḥīṭ dictionary, Nafīr Surrīya is added to the entry under al-nafar and following the subentry nafīr: “a trumpet or horn, Persian. The Nafīr Sūrrīya are hopes of ours that we had published during the events of 1860 AD in eleven pamphlets we called then the nationalist papers, waṭanīyaṭ.”
118 Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville, FL, 2004).
119 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London, 2005),7.
120 Robert Meister's discussion of religious anthropology is seminal here.
121 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 7.
122 Ibid., 1.
123 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 6.
124 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 5.
125 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 3.
126 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 1.
127 Al-Bustānī, NS, Pamphlet 4.
