Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–83) is synonymous with the nineteenth-century Beirut Nahḍa. He opened the first transconfessional school, established several periodicals, actively participated in learned societies, argued for a civil society based on a shared cultural heritage, authored a modern Arabic dictionary, and compiled the first Arabic encyclopaedia. For his contributions to education, journalism, language, and society, historians label him “A man ahead of his time” and “The spirit of the age”.Footnote 1 The man himself, however, elected Muʿallim (Teacher/Master) – an epithet that now appears inseparable from his name. This article examines how al-Bustānī created the Muʿallim brand by utilizing the Arabic oratorical tradition and the innovative medium of print.
The Nahḍa is “a loose construct with a range of meanings”, as Ayalon pithily stated.Footnote 2 There is no scholarly consensus on how to translate the term which broadly “implies an awareness of the dynamic process of social, cultural and political change that the Arab region underwent during the nineteenth century”.Footnote 3 “Awakening” is used to describe the upsurge in Arabic cultural production alongside the rise of Arab nationalist political activity.Footnote 4 “Renaissance” is also dispatched to stylize the literary efflorescence and secularizing reforms of the period.Footnote 5 “Modernity” has recently entered the nomenclatural mélange to explicate the practices, policies, and postures of the thinkers, merchants, scholars, and politicians of the period.Footnote 6 Accepting the limits (and the minefield) of translation, this article values the multivalent nature of the era and leaves the Arabic term Nahḍa untranslated.Footnote 7
Beirut was an epicentre of the Nahḍa and experienced profound social, economic, political, and cultural changes in the nineteenth century. Its population exploded from several thousand to over one hundred thousand,Footnote 8 and the coastal town expanded beyond its historic walls and grew into a modern cosmopolitan capital. Foreign consulates were headquartered in the city and cultural institutions, such as schools and presses, were established. Merchants conducted international business at the ports, while intellectuals discussed the past, present, and future at literary-scientific associations. In 1888 the Ottoman Sultan created the Province of Beirut, formalizing the newfound prominence of the city.Footnote 9 As the hub of transformations at all levels, Beirut epitomized the experimental and experiential aspects of the Nahḍa, which El-Ariss summarized as “the project of Arab cultural and political modernity”.Footnote 10
Buṭrus al-Bustānī was “the privileged product of [this] transitional age”.Footnote 11 Born to a Maronite family in Dibbiyeh (30 km south of Beirut) in 1819, the future Muʿallim studied at the reputable Maronite College of ʿAyn Waraqa. In 1840 he moved to Beirut where he commenced a lifelong association with the American Protestant missionaries. Al-Bustānī soon converted to Protestantism and acquired English. He capitalized on his American connections and bilingualism, securing employment as a missionary educator and translator and as a dragoman at the American Consulate. In the late 1850s he began to separate himself from the missionaries, although not from Protestantism, and to focus his energies exclusively on cultural projects. In 1859 he delivered Khuṭba fī Ādāb al-ʿArab (An Oration on the Culture of the Arabs), a critique of Arab society and civilization past and present. Regarded as a “foundational discourse” of the Nahḍa,Footnote 12 it was a major life event that enabled al-Bustānī to exhibit his intellectual and literary mettle and introduce Beirut to Muʿallim Buṭrus.
Etymologically, a muʿallim is someone who transmits ʿilm (knowledge). He is a teacher or master, a skilled practitioner of his craft. In the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition, the great teachers of society Aristotle (d. 322 bce) and al-Fārābī (d. 950) are known as the First Muʿallim and the Second Muʿallim, respectively.Footnote 13 Many Muslims correspondingly call Muhammad (d. 632) Muʿallim, in reverence for his spiritual and moral teachings.Footnote 14 Arabic speakers in the nineteenth century used the title in various official and ordinary contexts. The master craftsman who managed a workshop, trained apprentices, and employed journeymen was called a muʿallim.Footnote 15 There was also muʿallim al-dīwān (the master of the chancellery) at the court of governors and princes.Footnote 16 These master scribes were well-educated men who chronicled events and composed poetry, like Ibrāhīm al-ʿAwra (1796–1863) and Buṭrus Karāma (1774–1851).Footnote 17 Muʿallim remained a professional epithet for schoolteachers, such as Saʿīd al-Shartūnī (1849–1912) and Shākir Shuqayr (1850–96).Footnote 18 Al-Bustānī emerged from this cohort, first as a muʿallim (teacher) at his alma mater of ʿAyn Waraqa and then for the American missionaries in Beirut who celebrated the fact that he was “a good teacher of Arabic literature”.Footnote 19
As the socioeconomic landscape of Ottoman SyriaFootnote 20 shifted in the nineteenth century, so too did the usage of titles.Footnote 21 Foreigners and local Christians used khawājā, while sayyid, which had been reserved for descendants of the Prophet, acquired the pedestrian meaning of “mister”. Shaykh and ḥājj remained honorifics for elders and local nobility, and “a generation of self-consciously modern and middle-class-claiming men” became efendi.Footnote 22 Some individuals kept their existing titles,Footnote 23 while others wedded modern signifiers to traditional designations, like the Sunni poet, businessman, and civil servant “Sayyid Ḥusayn Efendi Bayhum (1833–81)”.Footnote 24 Professional sobriquets developed new connotations. The master craftsman muʿallim became a “merchant-entrepreneur” (muʿallim al-kār), as he picked up more administrative and commercial responsibilities.Footnote 25 Muʿallim Nicola Saig (1863–1942) transformed from a craftsman of iconography into a master artist of allegory which communicated national identity.Footnote 26 In parallel, al-Bustānī translated his professional rank of language master into that of public pedagogue.
The literary community in Beirut acknowledged “Muʿallim Buṭrus al-Bustānī” as such during his lifetime,Footnote 27 and in his obituary both Christian and Muslim newspapers prefixed the title to his proper name.Footnote 28 Arab chroniclers continued this practice in their early compendia of the Nahḍa.Footnote 29 The American missionary Henry Harris Jessup (1832–1910) likewise remembered him as “Muallim Butrus El Bistany [sic]”.Footnote 30 The epithet was used consistently in Arabic scholarship throughout the twentieth centuryFootnote 31 but has been underscored in English only recently.Footnote 32
This article contends that Buṭrus al-Bustānī instrumentalized old and new modalities of knowledge production to create the Muʿallim brand: an imprimatur that stood for literary innovations and cultural commodities. I first focus on oratory and analyse his 1859 Khuṭba fī Ādāb al-ʿArab (An Oration on the Culture of the Arabs; hereafter Khuṭba) to illustrate how he operationalized the Arabic rhetorical style to position himself as a public intellectual. His skilful appropriation of material from contemporaries is discussed next. Here I spotlight sariqāt (literary thefts/legitimate borrowings) in the oration to show how he introduced rhetorical flair to the words of his peers and participated in the collective practice of knowledge production. Lastly, I explore how he used the novel medium of print and developed advertising tactics to increase his visibility and establish himself in the burgeoning literary market of Beirut.
I argue that al-Bustānī created his status as the Muʿallim of the Beirut Nahḍa by coupling the enduring cultural power of the Arabic oratorical tradition with the modern “revolutionary” might of print.Footnote 33 The delivery and publication of the Khuṭba in 1859 came at a specific point in his career. In the late 1850s he was distancing himself from his longtime primary association with the American Protestant missionaries and working to establish himself as an independent intellectual entrepreneur.Footnote 34 Between 1855 and 1861 in particular, he was actively engaged in numerous literary projects. He reissued a book on mathematics and wrote a companion piece on bookkeeping; authored an account of the first Protestant convert and martyr; translated Robinson Crusoe; and penned Nafīr Sūriyya (The Clarion of Syria), a series of anonymous patriotic broadsides.Footnote 35 He also edited a three-volume history of Mt. Lebanon and began preparing the poetry of the great Arab panegyrist al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) for publication.Footnote 36 Al-Bustānī was buried deep in cultural projects and essentially flooding the blossoming print market with his work, most of which were printed at the American Mission Press (est. 1834), the publishing facility operated by the missionaries. His persistent efforts to publish and position himself as the Muʿallim, complemented by his working relationship with the American Protestants, helped preserve documents about him in the missionary archives and other Western collections, as well as to reinforce historically his seemingly ubiquitous presence in the Nahḍa sociocultural sphere. Through the modalities of sound and print, this article puts into relief how al-Bustānī transmitted his ideas, amplified his reputation, built his cultural empire, and became the master teacher of Beirut society.
I. The art of oration
Public speaking is a time-honoured tradition in the Arabic-speaking world. When orators spoke, they harnessed their linguistic knowledge and elocutionary talents to inform, persuade, and entertain a listening audience. Orations are an indispensable aspect of the political, religious, educational, and literary landscape of Arab-Islamic history.Footnote 37 In nineteenth-century Beirut the jamʿiyyāt (learned societies) were the cornerstone of social and intellectual life where audiences listened and learned about history, science, culture, literature, and human society from the speaker of the evening.Footnote 38 The extant archive preserves three of al-Bustānī's speeches before various iterations of these oratorical societies where he presented his views on the importance of female education (1849), the Arab cultural heritage (1859), and civil society (1869), in addition to giving minor talks on the city of Beirut and the maqāma-writer al-Ḥarīrī (d. 1122).Footnote 39 He also delivered public lectures, gave twice-weekly speeches at his Waṭaniyya (Patriotic) School, and preached, having had at one point seriously desired to enter full-time ministry.Footnote 40 A committed Protestant throughout his life, al-Bustānī evangelized outside in the countryside, led services at missionary stations on Mt. Lebanon, taught Sunday School regularly at the Beirut Evangelical Church, which he helped establish in 1848, and sermonized.Footnote 41 In 1882, the year before his death, he preached on “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord [Psalm 122:1]” and “Fear not, little flock [Luke 12:32]”.Footnote 42 In both spiritual and secular settings, al-Bustānī was a popular public speaker of the day.
Muʿallim Buṭrus, however, was not always a master linguist or orator. Applying a Fuṣḥā Arabic standard retrospectively to the nineteenth century, the historian Tibawi noted that many of al-Bustānī's early personal correspondences “are disfigured with grammatical mistakes and colloquialisms”.Footnote 43 Regarding his 1849 public lecture, Tibawi commented that “[t]he style of the lecture shows [al-]Bustānī struggling to achieve clarity and smoothness. In places, the Arabic is clumsy…”.Footnote 44 A decade later, however, al-Bustānī's rhetorical style was more eloquent when he delivered his Khuṭba on 15 February 1859 before a packed house of foreigners and Ottoman Syrians at ʿUmdat al-Khiṭābāt (the Oration Committee).Footnote 45 Many scholars have examined the intellectual substance of the Khuṭba.Footnote 46 Thus here I concentrate on his command of Arabic rhetoric to highlight how he operationalized orality to become an intellectual magnate.
My analysis of the Khuṭba commences with a caveat: we, in the twenty-first century, are not hearing what al-Bustānī said to his listeners in 1859. We are reading what he wrote for public consumption and published ten months later. In the published postscript, he informed his readers that “the gist of this Khuṭba was delivered extempore (irtijāl-an)”.Footnote 47 The marketing value of the adverb is noteworthy, as is the connection he made to the craft of speechmaking. In their discussions on oratory, the polymaths al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868) and Ibn Quṭayba (d. 889) applauded the ability of Arabs to speak extemporaneously with little to no preparation.Footnote 48 Al-Bustānī too understood “extempore” to compass oratory. He explained in his dictionary that the verb irtajala (to extemporize) “is often used to string poetry and create orations (inshāʾ al-khuṭab), as Arabs did in days of old”.Footnote 49 By boastfully printing “extempore” (irtijāl-an) in the postscript, he impressed upon his readers that he could engage his listeners directly by “controlling the directions of his words, which he based to a large extent on the reactions of his audience”, like orators did in the early Islamic period.Footnote 50 Whether he did or did not speak spontaneously, he delicately communicated to his reading audience that he was capable of such a task. The local newspaper underscored the aural dimensions of his oration and gave a more credible account of his delivery, reporting that he “composed it and delivered it aloud”.Footnote 51 Regarding the degree of control al-Bustānī had on the final published text, in all probability he exercised complete control on copyediting and proofing, because he self-financed its publication at the American Mission Press.Footnote 52
Al-Bustānī cued his speech as a language performance reminiscent of early Arabic orations, when people expected spontaneous eloquence from their leaders.Footnote 53 To assure his listeners of the cultural legitimacy of his speech and present himself as an heir to the Arabic oratorical tradition, he recounted how his predecessors “took pride in … composing orations (taʾlīf al-khuṭab)” and “could create extempore (irtijāl-an) what others could not”.Footnote 54 Al-Bustānī was aware that public speaking is a performance of the verbal arts where an orator assumes “responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence … [that] rests on the knowledge and ability to speak in socially appropriate ways”.Footnote 55 He thus feigned humility and offered a disclaimer at the outset, reminding listeners that it was they who had sought an exhibition of language from him: “Thus, by the petition and request of this [Oration] Committee, I stand before you gentlemen today, and say (aqūl)”.Footnote 56 His use of the first-person singular instead of the authoritative first-person plural “we say” (naqūl), which he used chiefly in the discourse, indicates insincere self-effacement on the part of the orator-teacher. Later in the Khuṭba, he used the first-person singular once more to express compliance with his audience's desires: “Had I been tasked (law kulliftu) to stand before you…”.Footnote 57 As the subject of a passive verb, he reminded his listeners that they had asked him to orate and thus, they carried the responsibility to evaluate his linguistic performance that evening.
Parallelism is a hallmark of Arabic oration and a ubiquitous feature of eloquent Arabic prose. In her groundbreaking study, Qutbuddin explicated how parallel constructions are boosted internally by sajʿ (rhymed prose), i.e. assonance (vocalic rhyme) and consonance (consonantal rhyme).Footnote 58 Although separated for analytical ease, these two types of rhymes regularly overlap. Speeches traditionally opened with stylistic embellishments, as a way to announce the oratorical capabilities of the speaker and to establish the performative nature of the event. Al-Bustānī adhered to this convention, starting his Khuṭba with the line: “The topic is the Culture of the Arabs (ādāb al-ʿarab), or if you would like, call [it] the sciences of the Arabs (ʿulūm al-ʿarab), the arts of the Arabs (funūn al-ʿarab), or the knowledge of the Arabs (maʿārif al-ʿarab)”.Footnote 59 While establishing comprehensive synonymity, he more crucially produced rhythm through parallel structures. The first word of each label has a long medial vowel: the first and fourth have /ā/; the second and third have /ū/. The word “Arabs” (al-ʿarab) anchors each synonym, acoustically creating punctuation. Al-Bustānī stretched the assonance into the next sentence: “However, before starting to speak about this topic, which will be delightful and beneficial (ladhīdh-an wa-mufīd-an) to everyone who desires to acquire (al-wuqūf) fully the truth of the matter (al-umūr), we must mention …”.Footnote 60 The adjectives and nouns are morphologically equivalent on the patterns faʿīl and fuʿūl, respectively. The acoustics of these introductory lines formed the introduction to al-Bustānī as a master orator.
A prominent feature of parallelism is the creation of synonymous pairs.Footnote 61 Regarding the Abbasid translation movement,Footnote 62 al-Bustānī related that the caliph al-Manṣūr (d. 775) “stirred people to read them [the translations] and urged them to teach them (ḥarraḍa l-nās ʿalā qirāʾat-hā wa-raghghaba-hum fī taʿlīm-hā)”.Footnote 63 The second phrase flawlessly mirrors the syntax of the first: verb + direct object + preposition + noun + indirect object pronoun. Furthermore, the verbs “stirred” (ḥarraḍa) and “urged” (raghghaba) are semantically and morphosyntactically identical, i.e. they convey the same meaning and are both on the pattern faʿʿala. Lastly, the prepositional phrases “to read them” (-hā) and “to teach them” (-hā) produce sentence-final assonance. In this example Muʿallim Buṭrus created a synonymous pair as per the rules of Arabic oration which, in conjunction with vocalic and consonantal rhyme, underscored his point and foregrounded him as a gifted rhetorician.
Al-Bustānī exploited the breadth of parallelism, which included the creation of antithetical pairs. Antithesis is when “adjacent phrases contained pairs of words with opposite meanings”.Footnote 64 On the removal of Arabic knowledge to medieval Europe, he remarked: “Its light began steadily decreasing in the East and increasing in the West (akhadha nūr-hā yatanāqaṣ fī l-sharq wa-yatazāyad fī l-gharb)”.Footnote 65 “And” (wa-) is the syntactic fulcrum, while “decreasing” (yatanāqaṣ) and “increasing” (yatazāyad) resonate in sound yet clash in meaning. The cardinal directions grounded the contrasting meanings. Antithetical pairs also reinforce semantics. Speaking on the status of Arabic in the nineteenth century, he noted: “It is truly poor, not rich (faqīra lā ghaniyya), and its people are poor, not rich (fuqarāʾ-u wa-lā aghniyāʾ-u)”.Footnote 66 Using antonyms to reiterate the deplorable current condition of Arabic and its users, al-Bustānī's point is confirmed acoustically with the second antithetical pair ending in -āʾ, which itself is bolstered by the printed ḍamma /u/ to mark the nominative case. Antithesis helped his audience better understand his message and enabled the Muʿallim to exhibit his aptitude in Arabic stylistics.
Al-Bustānī marshalled the full arsenal of rhetorical devices, including the theme of ubi sunt (Where are…[they]).Footnote 67 Displaying his mastery of Arabic rhythm and rhyme, he asked: “So where were the Arabs, and where are they now? …”
ayna l-shuʿarāʾ ayna l-aṭibbāʾ ayna l-khuṭabāʾ ayna l-madāris ayna l-makātib ayna l-falāsifa ayna l-muhandisūn ayna l-muʾarrikhūn ayna l-falakiyyūn ayna kutub hādhihi l-funūn ayna l-ʿulamāʾ al-muḥaqqiqūn ayna l-ʿudabāʾ al-mudaqqiqūn.
Where are the versifiers, doctors, and orators? Where are the schools, assemblies, and philosophers? Where are the geometricians, historians, and astronomers? Where are the books of these disciplines, and the demanding scientists and exacting humanists?Footnote 68
Acoustic harmony layers this rhetorical inquiry meant to cajole audience participation. The absence of punctuation, except for a final period, does not impede comprehension, for assonance and consonance internally structure the printed text. The sounds -āʾ, -ā-, and -ūn echo three times, each in succession, to form three distinct groupings. Next the -ūn in “the books of these disciplines” (l-funūn) echoes to link the writings to the individuals mentioned in the previous line. To complete the ubi sunt, al-Bustānī joined the nouns and adjectives to one another with near perfect alliteration and internal vocalic balance: u-a-āʾ for the nouns and u-a-i-ūn for the adjectives. His philological skill is unquestionable, as a single consonant differentiates the adjectives “demanding” (muḥaqqiqūn) and “exacting” (mudaqqiqūn). Regarding the word ayna (where), every lost item cited deserves its own interrogative. Stylistically, this refrain of relentless “wheres” rings throughout to enforce the loss and to enhance the aural experience for the audience. Knowing that in the Arab oratorical tradition rhetorical questions helped make “the oration a highly interactive speech performance”,Footnote 69 al-Bustānī deployed ubi sunt to create a euphonious moment in his Khuṭba so as to exhibit his proficiency at the art of oration.
Arabic oratory developed alongside Nahḍa discourses about reviving Arabic language, literature, and culture.Footnote 70 In the nineteenth century, Arab scholars and intellectuals debated how the Arabic literary language that they inherited could best serve new habits, worldviews, and socioeconomic changes in civil society. At oratorical societies and through the burgeoning press, they collectively redefined linguistic standards and contoured the language to suit their social and political wants and technological needs.Footnote 71 They did not, though, advance a singular vision, as documented in public polemics on the language.Footnote 72 Conservative reformers were concerned with proper usage and stressed the importance of language purity, while the liberal constituency argued that Arabic must be simplified in order to become a useful means of communication.Footnote 73 Buṭrus al-Bustānī approached Arabic grammar and style in a traditional manner, even though he exhibited innovative practices in lexicography and editing.Footnote 74 In this vein, the rhetorical features of his Khuṭba, such as sajʿ (rhymed prose) and synonymous pairs, can be seen as indicative of the genre of oratory, as well as his conservative adherence to elegant Arabic prose in general.
In 1859 al-Bustānī tapped into centuries of Arabic rhetorical style to begin stylizing himself as a public pedagogue. Akin to the Palestinian artist Muʿallim Nicola Saig, whose work “took place within well-established artistic, literary and intellectual practices of synthesizing elements of native modernity”,Footnote 75 al-Bustānī too utilized the devices of eloquent Arabic prose, such as synonymous and antithetical pairings, amplified by vocalic and consonantal rhyme, to contour his vision for the unfolding Nahḍa. As the heir to the Arabic oratorical tradition, he used the width, depth, and breadth of syntax and morphology to communicate his assessment of the condition of Arab society and culture. Following in the artistic footsteps of religious and political leaders from the past, as well as educators and scholars, Muʿallim Buṭrus deployed the art of Arabic oration to garner support and present himself as a public leader for Beirut.
II. Skilful sariqa
Al-Bustānī excelled at repackaging what his colleagues had already said. Zachs established that his 1859 Khuṭba “contained several clear echoes” of nationalist conceptualizations of Syria that were first championed by the missionary Eli Smith (1801–56) in an 1852 address before al-Jamʿiyya al-Sūriyya li-Ktisāb al-ʿUlūm wal-Funūn (the Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences, est. 1847; hereafter the Syrian Society).Footnote 76 In this section I concentrate on portions of al-Bustānī's oration that were verbatim to other Syrian Society speeches to explain how he practised the craft of sariqa to build his Muʿallim brand and engaged in the collective practices of Nahḍa writers to produce and proliferate knowledge.
Traditional Arabic literary theory interprets sariqa as “plagiarism” or “literary theft” and identifies three primary types: naskh (copy/paste), salkh (part copy/paste, part paraphrase), and maskh (paraphrase).Footnote 77 Al-Bustānī accepted this normative understanding, defining sariqa as “to take something secretly and craftily” (fī khafāʾ-in wa-ḥīlat-in), which occurred in the literary realm when “a poet takes a piece of poetry from others, claiming it as his own” (nāsib-an iyyāh ilā nafsih).Footnote 78 Critics of this formalistic rubric, however, describe sariqa as “legitimate borrowing” and argue that the sariqa practice cultivated more sophisticated imagery and generated “a rich intertextual space, both ancient and modern”.Footnote 79 Because the Muʿallim and his Beirut scholarly community were aware of sariqa,Footnote 80 the terms associated with it inform the following discussion on how he appropriated and stylistically enhanced existing material.
Before detecting instances of intertextuality in al-Bustānī's Khuṭba, it is useful to recognize that much of his literary output was based on emulating his predecessors and developing their writings, a standard practice in knowledge production in the Arabic-speaking world.Footnote 81 The works of Jirmānūs Farḥāt (1670–1732), the celebrated philologist and Maronite Archbishop of Aleppo, inspired several of his grammatical and lexicographical projects.Footnote 82 Al-Bustānī modelled his Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīt (Encompassing the All-Encompassing) and Miṣbāḥ al-Ṭālib fī Bathth al-Maṭālib (Lanterns Burning for Students Discerning) on Farḥāt's dictionary and grammar, respectively.Footnote 83 In his dictionary, al-Bustānī quoted extensively from al-Fīrūzābādī's (1329–1415) al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ (The All-Encompassing Dictionary),Footnote 84 and in naming his work Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīt (Encompassing the All-Encompassing [Dictionary]), he asserted that his lexicon – and by extension, he – was superior to its fourteenth-century forerunner. Muʿallim Buṭrus used materials and models from the past to become a prolific purveyor of Arab culture.
Al-Bustānī was part of a dynamic scholarly community in Beirut who read and listened to one another as they developed and debated ideas about Arab culture and society. Under the purview of the American Protestant missionaries, the Greek Catholic philologist Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī (1800–71) collaborated with al-Bustānī on many projects in the 1840s and 1850s. They worked as correctors, translators, and authors at the American Mission Press, produced a Protestant translation of the Bible, and engaged in lively discussions at Majmaʿ al-Tahdhīb (the Refinement Committee, est. 1846) and the Syrian Society.Footnote 85 About a decade before the Khuṭba, al-Yāzijī gave a speech titled Fī ʿUlūm al-ʿArab (On the Sciences of the Arabs) at the latter confraternity in which he surveyed the fields of Arab knowledge from the pre-Islamic era through the early centuries of Islam.Footnote 86 Al-Bustānī's reliance on this speech is evident in a subheading: “Part one: On the state of the sciences (ḥālat al-ʿulūm) among the Arabs before Islam”.Footnote 87 His attempt to conceal the source text by amending the title was futile. Al-Bustānī had established synonymity between ādāb (culture), ʿulūm (sciences), funūn (arts), and maʿārif (knowledge) in the first line of the Khuṭba and could have used any of these terms in the subheading.Footnote 88 By privileging the word ʿulūm, he unknowingly revealed al-Yāzijī to be his source and thereby enabled me to identify the initial author of the next paragraph:
Al-Yāzijī
lā yakhfā anna l-ʿarab kānū qawm-an ummiyīn lā yaʿrifūn al-qirāʾa wa-lā l-kitāba illā qalīl-un min-hum. wa-lam takun ʿind-hum illā qalīn-an fī l-nujūm wal-ṭibb ʿamal-an bil-istiqrāʾ-i wal-tajriba. gayra anna-hum kānū fī aʿlā ṭabaqat-in min nabāhat al-fikr wa-faṣāḥat al-lisān wa-surʿat al-khāṭir ḥattā kānū yunaẓẓimūn al-shiʿr irtijāl-an fa-yāʾtūn fī-hi bi-mā lā yuqaddar ʿalayhi ghayr-hum baʿd al-tarwiya wal-istiʿdād.
It is well known that the Arabs were an illiterate people who could neither read nor write, except for a few of them. They only had some [knowledge] of astronomy and medicine achieved through study and experience. Yet they were among the top tier in intelligence, eloquence, and intuition, such that they could string together poetry extempore, creating what others could not do even after thought and consideration.Footnote 89
Al-Bustānī
inna l-ʿarab qabl ẓuhūr al-islām ay fī ayyām al-jāhiliyya kānū qawm-an ummiyīn lā yaʿrifūn al-qirāʾa wa-lā l-kitāba illā l-qalīl min-hum. al-ʿulūm allātī kānū yatafākharūn bi-hā fa-hiya ʿilm lisān-him wa-aḥkām lughat-him wa-naẓam al-ashʿār wa-taʾlīf al-khuṭab. wa-kān la-hum maʿa hādhā maʿrifa bi-awqāt maṭāliʿ al-nujūm wa-maghārib-hā wa-ʿilm-un bi-anwāʾ-i l-kawākib wa-amṭār-hā ʿalā ḥasab mā adrakūh-u bi-farṭ al-ʿināya wa-ṭūl al-tajriba li-ḥtiyāj-him ilā maʿrifat dhālika fī asbāb al-maʿīsha lā ʿalā ṭarīq taʿallum al-ḥaqāʾiq. wa-maʿa anna llāh lam yamnaḥ-hum shayʾ-an min ʿilm al-falsafa wa-lā hayyaʾa ṭibāʾiʿ-hum lil-ʿināya bi-hi kānū fī aʿlā ṭabaqa min nabāhat al-fikr wa-faṣāḥat al-lisān wa-surʿat al-khāṭir ḥattā anna-hum kānū yāʾtūn irtijāl-an bi-mā lā yuqaddar ʿalayhi ghayr-hum baʿd al-tarwiya wal-istiʿdād.
Before the advent of Islam, i.e. in the Time of Ignorance, the Arabs were an illiterate people among whom only few could read and write. The fields in which they took pride were the lexicon and grammar of their language, versification, and composing orations. Along with this, they knew when the stars ascend and descend and discerned where the planets rise and set, which they came to know through extreme care and prolonged exposure, needing to know this in order to live – not to acquire facts. Although God granted them nothing from philosophy nor endowed them with a natural disposition for it, they were among the top tier in intelligence, eloquence, and intuition, such that they could create extempore what others could not do even after thought and consideration.Footnote 90
Al-Bustānī inserted al-Yāzijī's words straight into the Khuṭba, copying/pasting (naskh) the last sentence word-for-word. While he lightly altered the first sentence, the structure of the paragraph faithfully mirrors the opening lines of his contemporary. He stylistically modified al-Yāzijī's comment on “some [knowledge] of astronomy …”, writing: “they knew when the stars ascend and descend (maṭāliʿ al-nujūm wa-maghārib-hā) and discerned where the planets rise and set (anwāʾ-i l-kawākib wa-amṭār-hā)”. Here Muʿallim Buṭrus protracted the paraphrased sentence (maskh) through syntactic and semantic parallelism and auditory harmony, sequencing the patterns of mafāʿil and afʿāl, respectively.
Al-Bustānī also drew material from al-Yāzijī's conclusion, providing an example of salkh (part copy/paste, part paraphrase). The decline of state patronage for knowledge and intellectual inertness are the topic.
Al-Yāzijī
wa-mā zāla dhālika kadhālika ḥattā saqaṭat raghbat al-mulūk fī l-ʿilm fa-nqataʿat asbāb al-ṭalab wa-taʿaṭṭala l-saʿy fī taḥṣīl-hi wa-datharat muṣannafāt-hu wa-afnā l-dahr ahl-hu ḥattā fuqida kathīr-un min hādhihi l-ʿulūm fa-lam yuʿraf la-hā ʿayn-un wa-lā athar wa-jarrat baqiyat-hā ʿalā āthār-hi.
It remained like this until the appetite of kings for knowledge declined. As a result, [the means] to pursue knowledge became hopeless, efforts to learn became hindered, scholarly works fell into disuse, and time foiled the scholars until many of these sciences were lost. Absolutely no trace of the sciences was seen, and what remained of them ran on fumes.Footnote 91
Al-Bustānī
wa-mā zālat al-ʿarab kadhālika ḥattā saqaṭat raghbat al-mulūk wal-akābir fī l-ʿilm fa-nqataʿat asbāb al-ṭalab wa-taʿaṭṭala l-saʿy fī taḥṣīl-hi wa-darusat muṣannafāt-hu ḥattā fuqida kathīr min-hā fa-lam yabqa la-hā ʿayn-un wa-lā athar wa-kasudat biḍāʿat al-ʿilm wa-afnā l-dahr ahl-hu.
The Arabs remained like this until the appetite of kings and princes for knowledge declined. As a result, [the means] to pursue knowledge became hopeless, efforts to learn became hindered, and scholarly works were obliterated until many of them were lost. Absolutely no trace of the sciences was left. The value of knowledge stagnated, and time foiled the scholars.Footnote 92
Al-Yāzijī authored the bulk of this paragraph, which appears 25 pages into al-Bustānī's Khuṭba. The Muʿallim, though, exerted editing control and tweaked his predecessor's words and structure in order to magnify his own reputation as an Arabic master. By adding “and princes” to al-Yāzijī's “kings”, al-Bustānī created conceptual totality and syntactic parallelism. To flaunt his philological knowledge – a reputable pastime among Arabic aficionados – he also replaced the mundane verb “datharat” (fell into disuse) with the rare verb “darusat” (were obliterated). Furthermore, he deliberately let the reader think that he wrote these words. In the preceding paragraph, he quoted Avicenna (d. 1037), and, after a long first-person singular narration, al-Bustānī wrote: “… let's return to what we were just discussing on the history of the Culture of the Arabs; so, we say (naqūl)”.Footnote 93 By invoking the first-person plural, he spoke with an authoritative voice from the lectern and sought to claim al-Yāzijī's words as his own to conceal the fact that the Muʿallim stood on the shoulders of a living literary legend.
Al-Bustānī found inspiration also in the words of the missionary physician and dedicated educationalist Cornelius Van Dyck (1818–95), who was a fixture of the Beirut cultural landscape for over half a century. The two men roomed together in the early 1840sFootnote 94 and forged an enduring friendship as cultural collaborators and Protestant brothers in Christ. They co-operated on numerous enterprises such as the missionary school at ʿAbeih and as core members of three learned societies.Footnote 95 Al-Bustānī's literary reusages from Van Dyck's lecture at the Syrian Society titled Fī Ladhdhāt al-ʿIlm wa-Fawāʾidih (On the Pleasures and Benefits of Knowledge) were more subtle than his borrowings from al-Yāzijī's speech. Regarding the unjustified praise of people who possess a modicum of knowledge, Van Dyck wrote: “When someone learns to read and write, he thinks that he has concluded his education (qad khatama ʿilmah), …[and] has become the Philosopher of the Age (faylasūf al-zamān) and the Sage of All-Time”.Footnote 96 Al-Bustānī wrote in the Khuṭba: “It is said that whoever learns to read the Psalms and the Qurʾān has concluded his education (qad khatama ʿilmah), …and become the Great Scholar of his Age (ʿallāmat zamānih)”.Footnote 97 The phrasing and imagery are too similar to be coincidental, indicating that Van Dyck's speech served as a template. In a strict interpretation of sariqa, this literary theft is maskh: al-Bustānī paraphrased the sentence to deliberately hide his source text. In descriptive terms, however, he upgraded the borrowed sentence because he nuanced and decluttered it. Al-Bustānī's stereotypical learner is ecumenically relatable as a reader of both Christian and Muslim texts and, in a move uncharacteristic of the Muʿallim, he reduced Van Dyck's parallelism of “the Philosopher … and the Sage …” to simply “the Great Scholar …”. By developing this paraphrased sentence, al-Bustānī expanded the potential audience and the emotive force of the original, thereby subtly exhibiting his superior oratorical abilities.
Van Dyck and al-Bustānī both concluded their lectures with poetry, for in the Arabic tradition of oration citing verses “evoked strong associations, and thus encouraged an affirmative [audience] response”.Footnote 98 Van Dyck quoted the eminent orator and fourth political leader of Islam, Imām ʿAlī (d. 661), on the indispensability of scholars to humanity:
Curiously, al-Bustānī cited the same verses just before his rousing coda in 1859, although he omitted the middle line.Footnote 100 By extracting it, he concentrated solely on the positive value of knowledge for civil society and on the efforts of its tireless advocates, i.e. the Muʿallim and his counterparts. Both Van Dyck and al-Bustānī drew from the same literary repertoire to harness the authoritative connotations associated with ʿAlī's eloquence for themselves. However, al-Bustānī eclipsed both the missionary-educationalist and the orator-Imam by sharpening the verses and eliminating “the adversaries of scholars” from existence. Operationalizing the Arabic literary past and the words of longtime colleagues, the Muʿallim intertextually engaged with peer producers of knowledge and boosted what his brand name represented.
Since the three men were connected through the Protestant missionary effort and the Beirut cultural scene, it is probable that al-Yāzijī and Van Dyck read al-Bustānī's oration and noticed their words littered among his. It is highly plausibly that Van Dyck, a founder of the Oration Committee and member of its executive committee, actually heard al-Bustānī read his Khuṭba before the oratorical society.Footnote 101 Given the collaborative literary environment, al-Yāzijī and Van Dyck conceivably did not find his actions transgressive but instead deemed them to be permissible and helpful to advancing Arab culture and society. Their relationships with the Muʿallim did not deteriorate after 1859, as revealed by the poetic endorsements they wrote for his grammar in 1862.Footnote 102 Van Dyck remained close friends with al-Bustānī, even as the local intellectual detached himself from the missionary community to wholeheartedly pursue literary ventures. His eulogy of the Ottoman Syrian literary entrepreneur in 1883 speaks to their fraternal bond that lasted over 40 years:
I stand in your midst weeping and mourning my brother and love who was fiercely snatched away from us; nay, he was my muʿallim, my mentor (ustādhī), and my friend. How many evenings of studying, reading, writing, and pleasant companionship we enjoyed together … .Footnote 103
Similarly, al-Bustānī's relationship with al-Yāzijī did not cease after the Khuṭba. Sharing an unending love for the Arabic language, al-Yāzijī proofread drafts of the Muʿallim's dictionary Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīt (1867–70) and taught morphology, syntax, and rhetoric at his Waṭaniyya School (est. 1863).Footnote 104 Al-Yāzijī also composed the chronographic epitaph for al-Bustānī's daughter Sarah (d. 1866).Footnote 105 United by a passion for Arabic and the participatory nature of learning, these men remained connected with one another personally and professionally
Al-Bustānī stayed abreast of research produced by his peers and to establish himself as a wellspring of insight for society, he occasionally finessed their words and thoughts into more eloquent articulate forms. While many of his writings are original, a measurable amount was pilfered or expanded. Whether judged to be literary thefts or appreciated as legitimate borrowings, the Muʿallim stylistically developed the output of his peers to support his brand-building project and contribute to the collective project of advancing knowledge in Beirut.
III. A marketing genius
After delivering his assessment of Arab culture in February 1859, al-Bustānī published it with the sobriquet of Muʿallim emblazoned on the cover. Released in December 1859 his printed Khuṭba is the first standalone publication on a contemporary social issue written by a single Arab author during the Beirut Nahḍa.Footnote 106 Tracts issued by the American Mission Press, where he had been a translator and had his secular Khuṭba printed, are obvious forerunners, although these religious publications were often translated.Footnote 107 An original tract or two pedagogical treatises on childrearing issued by the same press might have inspired al-Bustānī to print his oration.Footnote 108 Previous publications by Ottoman Syrians in town often contained the views of many individuals, such as Aʿmāl al-Jamʿiyya al-Sūriyya (Transactions of the Syrian Society), or were poetry collections, lengthy travelogues, or textbooks.Footnote 109 Al-Bustānī's publication was distinct: it was a concise 40-page chapbook that contained his critique of past and present Arab scientific and humanist knowledge. A modern version of the handwritten scholarly risāla (treatise), his initiative to print his oration was unprecedented and created a model for others to follow.Footnote 110 For example, his Oration Committee colleague Khalīl al-Khūrī (1836–1907) published Kharābāt Sūriyya (Ruins of Syria) in March 1860, just months after al-Bustānī released his Khuṭba.Footnote 111 Muʿallim Buṭrus pre-empted his associate to foreground his name and ideas before the readership in town.
Al-Bustānī published his secular tract under the title: “A Khuṭba on the culture of the Arabs”. He strategically chose the word khuṭba in lieu of khiṭāb (address), explaining elsewhere that “from the pulpit” an individual “reads the khuṭba (sermon) to those in attendance, preaches theology for the sake of piety, and exhorts”, whereas a khiṭāb is “speech directed toward others so as to help them understand”.Footnote 112 By putting the word khuṭba on the cover, he exploited its religious and institutional connotations, even though within the discourse he referred to it as a khiṭāb.Footnote 113 The word khuṭba lent credibility to his oration and imbued him with a heightened sense of dignity and legitimacy. As noted above, al-Khūrī mimicked the Muʿallim's promotional strategy. In his newspaper he considered his address “Ruins of Syria” a khuṭba but called it a khiṭāb on the publication cover.Footnote 114 In the late 1850s both men were launching their public careers in the cultural arena, and a khuṭba was just the marketing device that al-Bustānī needed to distinguish himself.
In the Khuṭba al-Bustānī liberally printed the Arabic short vowels of ḍamma /u/, fatḥa /a/, and kasra /i/ to facilitate elocution and ensure that the customer-reader was able to render the text aloud properly. Typically, these auxiliary orthographic signs are transcribed to avert misunderstandings and resolve ambiguities. Yet in the Muʿallim's printed discourse, they served a pedagogical function. For example, the apocopated final letter of defective jussive verbs is printed: “Knowledge and culture no longer had marketability (lam yabqa lil-ʿulūm wal-ādāb sūq-un)”.Footnote 115 The final consonant-turned-short vowel for defective nouns also materialized: “… and not [a single] advocate (… wa-lā muḥāmin)”.Footnote 116 For formal grammatical features, such as feminine human plurals, he included the /a/, the shadda (geminating grapheme), and the sukūn (zero-vowel sign) to assist the reader: “… the nuns who, because of their order, were satisfied with what would benefit themselves (… al-rāhibāt allawātī min shaʾn ṭarīqat-hunna an yaqtaṣirna ʿalā mā bi-hi ifādat anfus-hunna)”.Footnote 117 Lastly, al-Bustānī systematically added /u/ and /i/ on “from him” (min-hu) and “in him” (fī-hi) to combat the phonetic transgressions “from he” (min-hī) and “in he” (fī-hū) on which he schooled his audience during the Khuṭba itself.Footnote 118 The constant appearance of the short vowels in the printed Khuṭba implies a didactic role for the printed text and graphemically affirmed the Muʿallim as an expert language teacher.
Al-Bustānī was already preoccupied with self-promotion years before delivering the Khuṭba. His Khiṭāb fī Taʿlīm al-Nisāʾ (An Address on Female Education) appeared in Transactions of the Syrian Society (1852), which he edited.Footnote 119 In a note separated from the main text by a decorative ligature, he informed readers that the address “was delivered at the request of the executive committee in Beirut at a public session on 14 December 1849 ad”.Footnote 120 In the entirety of the hundred-plus-page publication, his speech and the 1852 annual presidential address are the only dated entries. He also heightened his visibility to contemporaries and future generations by inundating nearly 25 per cent of Transactions of the Syrian Society with his speeches, personal notes, and editorial comments.Footnote 121 To ground himself in the historical archive of the Beirut Nahḍa, one shaped and curated by Ottoman Syrians, as well as the American missionaries, al-Bustānī in the early 1850s had the foresight to date his 1849 address and start publicizing his words as much as possible.
The ambitious intellectual steadily democratized the Muʿallim persona in print in order to attract a larger readership. Early in his public career textbook covers proclaimed authorship by “Muʿallim Buṭrus al-Bustānī, the Lebanese”.Footnote 122 As he took his career in a new literary direction in the second half of the 1850s, he dropped “the Lebanese”, i.e. from Mt. Lebanon, to broaden his image and underscore his far-reaching concern for residents of Beirut and its adjacencies.Footnote 123 A desire to seem less provincial and more worldly might also have driven him to jettison the endonym. In this respect, al-Bustānī stood apart from several of his counterparts who proudly advertised their geographic provenance throughout their lifetimes on publication covers, such as his colleague Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī “the Lebanese” and the poet Qāsim Abū l-Ḥasan al-Kastī (1830?–1909/10) “the Beiruti”.Footnote 124 Al-Bustānī dropped his provincial descriptor to appeal to the largest audience possible, while retaining his signature title of Muʿallim.
Printing commendations from colleagues helped increase al-Bustānī's visibility and legitimate the Muʿallim imprimatur. As was the scholarly practice of the day, al-Bustānī solicited taqārīẓ (endorsements) for his abridged grammar Miftāḥ al-Miṣbāḥ fī Uṣūl al-Ṣarf wal-Naḥw lil-Mubtadiʾīn (The Lantern's Key to Grammar and Morphology for Beginners) published in 1862.Footnote 125 The taqrīẓ (sing. of taqāriẓ) is “a comparatively brief statement of praise solicited for the promotion of a newly published work and, incidentally, its author”,Footnote 126 which enabled scholars to “create, consolidate, and document a [professional] network”.Footnote 127 Among al-Bustānī's seven taqrīẓ-writers were his friends and colleagues al-Khūrī, Van Dyck, and al-Yāzijī. His recommenders were building their own cultural careers in Beirut too, and al-Bustānī leveraged their literary and social standing to boost his own position in the local cultural community. In a move of professional collegiality, al-Khūrī reprinted all seven endorsements in his newspaper, advertising the recent publication of “the hardworking scholar, Muʿallim Buṭrus al-Bustānī … who continues to expend energy and work hard for Arabic knowledge and culture and for the good of his compatriots”.Footnote 128 To prove his continued relevance, al-Bustānī received two new endorsements for the 1867 updated edition of the grammar.Footnote 129 Using printed endorsements, he publicly affirmed the quality of Muʿallim-issued products.
The printing press prompted literary experimentation in Beirut in the second half of the nineteenth century,Footnote 130 and al-Bustānī was not the only person to utilize it to establish a new status and livelihood. In this technological climate of creativity, Khalīl al-Khūrī beat the Muʿallim to several innovations.Footnote 131 He founded the first periodical Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār (“News Garden”, 1858)Footnote 132 and authored the original novella Way, Idhan Lastu bi-Ifranjī (Alas, then I'm not a European, 1859–61).Footnote 133 He also set up his own press, al-Maṭbaʿa al-Sūriyya (the Syrian Press, 1857), nearly a decade before al-Bustānī established Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif (the Knowledge Press, 1868).Footnote 134 Ibrāhīm al-Najjār (1822–64), the chief physician of the Ottoman military hospital in Beirut, entered the publishing industry at roughly the same time as al-Khūrī.Footnote 135 A native of Mt. Lebanon, al-Najjār brought a letterpress back home from France in the early 1850s and commenced publishing. He instrumentalized his connections to the Ottoman administration to print official papers, municipal ordinances, and commercial regulations, as well as his own books.Footnote 136 Al-Bustānī and al-Khūrī recognized the impact that al-Najjār and his personal press made on the local publishing landscape.Footnote 137 From the multivocal early days of the Beirut print scene, the fact that al-Bustānī remains foregrounded in the historical records is due, in no small part, to his steady publishing efforts under the Muʿallim imprint, in addition to his presence in the records of the American Protestant missionaries and other Western archives.
The finale
By the end of the 1860s Buṭrus al-Bustānī had firmly established himself as the patriarch of the Beirut literary world. On 22 January 1868 the Beirut intelligentsia and political dignitaries attended the inaugural session of al-Jamʿiyya al-ʿIlmiyya al-Sūriyya (the Syrian Academy, est. 1868), an intellectual confraternity that brought together Christians and Muslims. Al-Bustānī was in attendance that evening, and, at the behest of the Syrian Academy President, he delivered “a very brief beneficial speech extempore (irtijāl-an)”, according to the local newspaper which al-Khūrī owned and edited.Footnote 138 As the Muʿallim of Beirut, his presence and words christened the event. On 11 May 1869 al-Bustānī spoke again before this oratorical society. What he said that night was secondary to how he said it. The Syrian Academy periodical recounted none of his thoughts or theories but instead underscored that he spoke “in the best form of eloquence and [rhetorical] elegance (al-faṣāḥa wal-balāgha)”.Footnote 139 Unlike a decade earlier when he published his oration after speaking at the Oration Committee, al-Bustānī arrived in 1869 with printed copies of his lecture on civil society in hand.Footnote 140 Understanding the enduring power of print over the evanescent nature of orality, he canvassed the grateful audience, gifting them a memento-cum-intellectual treatise of that night when Muʿallim Buṭrus was a guest speaker at the Syrian Academy in Beirut.Footnote 141 Through print he was able to ensure that his name and his ideas spread among contemporaries to firmly occupy a place within the annals of history.
Al-Bustānī lived to see the material payoff of his work and the strength of his eponymous brand. The Muʿallim came to represent new literary and educational commodities, as well as cultural and journalistic endeavours. In the years after the Khuṭba, he became the head of a family empire that promoted knowledge and education. With the support of family members, he opened the trans-confessional Waṭaniyya School (est. 1863), established Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif (1868), wrote a two-volume dictionary Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ (1867–70) and an abridgement Qaṭr al-Muḥīṭ (1869), launched the al-Jinān (“Gardens”) trio of periodicals (1870–71),Footnote 142 and started work on Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif (Encyclopédie arabe), the first volume of which appeared in 1876. The success of al-Bustānī's brand-promotion campaign was clear soon after his death. In 1885 al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-Sharqī (the Oriental Academy, est. 1882) in Beirut announced the Bustānī Award: a competition for the best “risāla” (treatise) on the prompt “Ways to Promote Knowledge in Syria”.Footnote 143 The notice intentionally placed “Muʿallim Buṭrus al-Bustānī” in scare quotes, recognizing the inseparability of the man from his signature title.Footnote 144
Buṭrus al-Bustānī appreciated tradition and innovation, finding professional use in both Arabic oratory and print. To become a public literary magnate, he needed recognition and popularity, which he astutely channelled from past and present forms of knowledge production. Living in a city that searched for instruction and inspiration on how to be in a modern world, he harmonized the proven methods for the transmission of knowledge with the germinating print revolution to his own advantage. Coupling recognized practices with novel strategies, he became the Muʿallim of the Beirut Nahḍa.
Open access
