AN OTTOMAN ARAB MAN OF LETTERS AND
THE MEANINGS OF EMPIRE, c. 
By Andrew Arsan
   *
ABSTRACT. This paper returns to one of the germinal texts of nineteenth-century
Arab political thought, Butrus al-Bustani’s Nafir Suriyya (‘The Clarion of Syria’). A
series of broadsides published between September  and April , these
reflected on the confessional violence that had rent apart Mount Lebanon and
Damascus in mid-. As scholars have suggested, Bustani – now regarded as one
of the pre-eminent thinkers of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda, or ‘awakening’ –
here offered a new vision of Syrian patriotism, which formed part of a longer
reflection on political subjectivity, faith, and civilisation. But, this paper argues,
these texts can also be read as reflections on the changing workings of empire: on
the imperial ruler’s duties and attributes and his subjects’ obligations and rights;
on the relationship between state and population and capital and province; on
imperial administrative reform; and on the dangers foreign intervention posed to
Ottoman sovereignty. Drawing on the languages of Ottoman reform and ethical
statecraft, as well as on imperial comparisons, Bustani argued against the autonomy
some counselled for Mount Lebanon and for wholesale integration with the
Ottoman state. These texts offer grounds for methodological reflection and for
writing Ottoman Arab thought into broader histories of imperial political thought.
I Introduction
In late September , the Ottoman port of Beirut was still a city reeling
from war. In the last days of May, brutal fighting had broken out
between the Christian and Druze inhabitants of Mount Lebanon,
whose ranges overhung the Mediterranean littoral. The conflict lasted
barely a month. By the end of June, Druze fighters had prevailed over
their opponents, leaving Christian localities like Zahleh and Dayr
*I am grateful to Margot Finn and the RHS Councillors for their invitation to give this
lecture, to Sue Carr, Katherine Foxhall and Frances Andrews for their kind assistance, and
to Andrew Spicer for his patience and kindness. I would also like to thank the participants in
the Cambridge Middle East reading group for their comments and suggestions. I am espe-
cially grateful to Paul Anderson for organising this event, to Camille Cole and Hannah
El-Sisi for their close, thoughtful engagement, and to Camille, Hannah and Will Ryle-
Hodges for reading suggestions.
Transactions of the RHS  (), pp. –© The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge
University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society. This is an Open Access article,
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creative-
commons.org/licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
doi:./S

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al-Qamar in ruins. The fighting in Mount Lebanon was soon followed by
violence in Damascus, where crowds attacked the city’s Christian quarters
for two weeks in July, provoking panic on the coast. Now, as summer
drew to an end, the traces of war were still everywhere about Beirut.
Thousands of refugees remained in makeshift settlements on its outskirts.
In the pine forest to the south of the city lay the headquarters of the French
expeditionary force that had landed in August, charged with restoring
order after the ‘crime[s] against civilisation’ of the summer. In Beirut
itself, the Ottoman state’s special envoy to its Syrian provinces, Fuad
Paşa, established an extraordinary court to try Druze accused of having
orchestrated the violence against Christians. On  September, several
leading Druze notables gave themselves up for trial after three months
at large. Four days later, the members of the international commission
tasked with restoring peace to Syria met for the first time.
It was amidst this tumult that a broadside appeared in Beirut on 
September, just three days later. Under the title Nafir Suriyya, or ‘The
Clarion of Syria’, its author urged his fellow Syrians to remember that
‘you drink the same water and smell the same breeze, and the language
that you speak and the earth on which you dwell and your interests and
habits are but the same’. If ‘you are now still drunk with drinking the
blood of your brothers in the homeland and heedless of the enormity
of the disasters that have befallen you, there is no doubt you will soon
awaken from this foolishness and take stock of the meaning of … the
general interest’. Its author’s intent, then, was ‘to guide you to knowledge
of your interest and the welfare of your country and to move your hearts
to express the principles of true faith (diyana) in which you are believers’.
More broadsides were to follow in a similar exhortatory, predicatory
style over the coming months. In all, eleven appeared between
September  and April . These ranged in content from attempts
to consider the war’s causes and to tally up the material and moral
losses – and gains – it had occasioned, to appeals to provide urgent
relief to those who still remained homeless as autumn turned to winter,
disquisitions on the meaning of war, civil war and civilisation, and
programmatic statements on the future government of Mount
 Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in
 (Berkeley, ), . This remains the best account of the war of , alongside
Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-
Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, ).
 Anon., La Question d’Orient. Un Homme et une solution (Paris, ), . On this intervention,
see Fawaz, Occasion for War, –; Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian
Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, – (Princeton, ), –.
 Fawaz, Occasion for War, ff., .
 Al-Mu‘allim Butrus al-Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, ed. Yusif Quzma al-Khuri (Beirut, ),
–.
      
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Lebanon. But they returned insistently to their central themes, harping on
the need to reform Syria’s society and administration and to expunge
prejudice from its inhabitants’ spirits, replacing it with the genuine faith
from which patriotism and concord could spring. All bearing the pseudo-
nym muhibb li-l-watan – the ‘lover of the homeland’ – these were the work of
the man of letters Butrus al-Bustani (c. –).
It is no exaggeration to say that Bustani occupies a pre-eminent – not
to say canonical – position in the overlapping fields of Arab intellectual
and literary history and the history of Arab political thought. Born into
a Maronite Christian family in the southern reaches of Mount Lebanon,
he was educated at the Maronite seminary of ‘Ayn Waraqa. In the s
he fell in with the American missionaries who had recently established a
station in Syria and converted to Protestantism, his break with the
Maronite Church consecrated by the martyrdom of his fellow convert
As‘ad Shidyaq. As Ussama Makdisi has shown, however, this traumatic
event only reinforced Bustani’s belief in freedom of conscience and his
‘ecumenical’ sense that a diverse range of religions were all ‘equidistant
 For an English translation, see the excellent Butrus al-Bustani, The Clarion of Syria: A
Patriot’s Call against the Civil War of , transl. Jens Hanssen and Hicham Safieddine
(Berkeley, ). I rely here on Yusif Quzma al-Khuri’s  Arabic edition, Bustani,
Nafir Suriyya. On the importance of treating these texts as broadsides, see Hala Auji, ‘The
Implications of Media: A Material Reading of Nineteenth-Century Arabic Broadsides’,
Visible Language,  (), –.
 The literature is vast, but see in particular George Antonius, The Arabic Awakening: The
Story of the Arab National Movement (), –; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age
(Cambridge, ); Abdul-Latif Tibawi, ‘The American Missionaries in Beirut and Butrus
al-Bustani’, St Antony’s Papers,  (), –; Leon Zolondek, ‘Socio-political views of
Salim al-Bustani (–)’, Middle Eastern Studies,  (), –; Butrus Abu
Manneh, ‘The Christians between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism: The Ideas of
Butrus al-Bustani’, International Journal of Middle East Studies,  (), –; Jan [Jean]
Dayah, Al-Mu‘allim Butrus al-Bustani: Dirasa wa Watha’iq (Beirut, ); Stephen Sheehi,
‘Unpacking Modern Arab Subjectivity: Reading al-Mu’allim Butrus al-Bustani’s Nafir
Suriya’, Arab Studies Journal,  (), –; Sheehi, ‘Inscribing the Arab Self: Butrus al-
Bustani and Paradigms of Subjective Reform’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies,
 (), –; Rana Issa, ‘Biblical Reflections in the Arabic Lexicon: A Very Modern
Translation Phenomenon’, Babylon Nordisk Tidsskrift for Midtøstenstudier (), –;
Nadia Bou Ali, ‘Butrus al-Bustani and the Shipwreck of the Nation’, Middle Eastern
Literatures,  (), –; Maya Issam Kesrouany, ‘Stranded in Arabic: Robinson
Crusoe in Beirut’, Comparative Literature Studies,  (), –; Jeffrey Sacks, Iterations of
Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish (New York, ), –; Rana
Issa, ‘The Arabic Language and Syro-Lebanese National Identity: Searching in Butrus
al-Bustani’s Muhit al-Muhit’, Journal of Semitic Studies,  (), –; Nadia Bou Ali,
‘Blesseth Him That Gives and Not Him That Takes: Butrus al-Bustani and the Mercy of
Debt’, Modern Intellectual History,  (), –; the critical essays by Jens Hanssen and
Hicham Safieddine in Bustani, The Clarion of Syria, trans. Hanssen and Safieddine; Peter
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda (Cambridge, ); and Ussama Makdisi, Age
of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland, ),
–.
   , c. 
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from a universal god’, and he eventually broke with the ‘Bible-men’, as
the missionaries were known locally. Over the course of a long and busy
life, Bustani was variously a translator, lexicographer, encyclopedist,
orator, publisher and educator. He founded and ran learned societies,
schools, printing presses and newspapers, and among his many published
works were a new translation of the Bible, prepared with the American
missionary Cornelius Van Dyck, primers in Arabic grammar and
arithmetic, an edition of the Abbasid poet al-Mutannabi, a dictionary,
a vast, multi-volume encyclopedia, and Arabic renditions of Robinson
Crusoe and Pilgrim’s Progress.
In light of such commitments, scholars have tended to treat Bustani as
the archetypal Arab reformer, whose work strove to explore the central
questions of the nahda, or cultural ‘awakening’ of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries: how to refurbish the Arabic language to make
full use of its vast lexical possibilities? How to renovate Arab culture
under the emergent conditions of capitalist modernity and craft a new
Arab subject capable of progress and civilisation? How to engage with
the West without losing oneself? And how to give coherent shape to an
Arab or Syrian nation? Indeed, Bustani has often been regarded as a
proto-nationalist, whose writings laid the foundations on which later,
fuller constructions of Syrian and Arab identity were built.
 Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, . See Tibawi, ‘The American Missionaries in Beirut’;
Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the
Middle East (Ithaca, ); Christine B. Lindner, ‘Negotiating the Field: American
Protestant Missionaries in Ottoman Syria,  to ’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of
Edinburgh, ).
 On Bustani’s associational life, see Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, –, –; Butrus al-
Bustani, Al-Jam‘iyya al-Suriyya li-l-‘Ulum wa al-Funun (Beirut, ); and Yusif Quzma Khuri
(ed.), A‘mal al-Jam‘iyya al-Suriyya – (Beirut, ). I am grateful to Peter Hill for pro-
viding me with a copy of the latter. On his educational work, see Jens Hanssen, ‘The Birth
of an Education Quarter: Zokak El-Blat as a Cradle of Cultural Revival in the Arabic
World’, in History, Space and Social Conflict in Beirut: The Quarter of Zokak El-Blat,
ed. H. Gebhardt (Beirut, ), –; and Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an
Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford, ), –. On his publishing and journalism, see
Ami Ayalon, The Arabic Print Revolution: Cultural Production and Mass Readership (Cambridge,
), –; and Elizabeth Holt, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel
(New York, ), –.
 For critical reflections on this scholarship, see Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss,
‘Introduction. Language, Mind, Freedom, and Time: The Modern Arab Intellectual
Tradition in Four Words’, in Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual
History of the Nahda, ed. Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (Cambridge, ), –; Hill,
Utopia and Civilisation, –; Stephen Sheehi, ‘Towards a Critical Theory of al-Nahdah:
Epistemology, Ideology and Capital’, Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), –; Shaden
Tageldin, ‘Proxidistant Reading: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the Nahḍah in US
Comparative Literary Studies’, Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), –.
For treatments of Bustani that frame his work in such terms, see Hourani, Arabic
Thought, –; Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville, ),
      
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This view is, to a significant extent, founded on readings of Nafir Suriyya.
These broadsides bore the deep imprint of the violence and dislocation
Bustani had lived through. But they also form part of a longer reflection
on citizenship, faith and community, on sin, duty and judgement, and
on language, culture, civilisation and ethics, which left its inflection on
earlier writings such as his translations of Pilgrim’s Progress and the Bible,
or his ‘lecture on the morals and mores of the Arabs’. It is perhaps unsur-
prising, therefore, that they have lent themselves to the view that they
were, at heart, meditations on the meaning of patria – and, in particular,
articulations of a Syrian patriotism which Bustani hoped could supplant
the fanaticism that had rent asunder local society. In part for this
reason, they have acquired canonical status in Arabic political thought.
Generations of readers have come back to them, seeking in their words
the means to build a future after war and to construct a secular politics
founded on fraternity among fellow citizens.
I want to return here to the Nafir to complicate these readings. As
much as evidence of Syrian patriotism, I contend, these texts show
Bustani as an imperial political thinker. By this, I mean not just that,
as scholars have long since shown, his primary loyalty lay to the end
with the Ottoman Empire, nor that his sense of Syrianness did not
conflict with this broader commitment but was fortified by it. After
–; Nadia Bou Ali, ‘Corrupting Politics’, in Islam after Liberalism, ed. Faisal Devji and
Zaheer Kazmi (), –.
For an English translation, see Stephen Sheehi, ‘The Culture of the Arabs Today’, in
The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda, ed. Tarek el-Ariss (New York, ),
–.
Abu-Manneh, ‘The Christians’, . On the couplet of watan and gharad, see Jens
Hanssen, ‘Wataniyya as an Antidote to Sectarianism’, in Bustani, The Clarion of Syria,
–, esp. .
See for instance Yusif Quzma al-Khuri, ‘Kalimat ila al-Qari’, in Bustani, Nafir Suriyya,
–. For more on this, see Jens Hanssen, ‘Nafir Suriyya in Arabic Historiography’, in Bustani,
Clarion of Syria, –.
On imperial political thought, see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International
Thought (Cambridge, ); Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of
World Order, – (Princeton, ); Duncan Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global
Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge,
); Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton,
); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago, ); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, );
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France
(Princeton, ); Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge, MA,
); Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Oakland, ). For an
effort in this direction by a historian of the Middle East, see Thomas Philipp, ‘From
Rule of Law to Constitutionalism: The Ottoman Context of Arab Political Thought’,
in Arabic Thought, ed. Hanssen and Weiss, –.
Hourani, Arabic Thought, ; Abu-Manneh, ‘The Christians’, –; Jens Hanssen and
Hicham Safieddine, ‘Butrus al-Bustani: From Protestant Convert to Ottoman Patriot and
Arab Reformer’, in Bustani, The Clarion of Syria, –; Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, .
   , c. 
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all, as Ussama Makdisi has reminded us, the only surviving portrait of
Bustani, painted a week before his death, shows him wearing the fez of
the Ottoman reformer, a majidiyya imperial medal proudly pinned to
his chest. More than this, I argue that the Nafir evinced a deep
concern with the central questions of imperial governance: what
should be the relationship between the imperial capital and the provinces
in a polity characterised by its territorial extent and demographic
variety? On what basis could the imperial state build an effective and
cohesive system of government? What path, in other words, should
administrative reform follow? What rights should imperial subjects
possess, and what were the duties incumbent upon them? And how
could the Ottoman state thrive in a world of empires, at a time when
other polities were increasingly encroaching upon its sovereignty? To
answer these questions, Bustani resorted not just to the language of the
Tanzimat itself, which he wove into his own political vision, but also,
it would seem, to older conceptions of ethical governance which still
inflected Ottoman languages of state into the nineteenth century.
Furthermore, I argue that Bustani’s broadsides were also an attempt
to puzzle through a more immediate, practical and local question:
what future should the government of Mount Lebanon pursue after
the disaster of ? Here too Bustani fell back upon empire, rejecting
the autonomist visions of Maronite clergymen and French diplomats
and military officers in favour of wholesale integration into a reformed
Ottoman state. In short, Bustani was not simply concerned here with
limning a new vision for the ‘integration of Syrian society’ within the
‘framework’ of Ottomanism, but also with establishing a new relation-
ship between local society and imperial state.
II Bustani as a thinker of empire
Reading Bustani as a thinker concerned with the changing workings of
empire allows us to see him as a figure who lived in his own times –
times that were, as the phrase has it, deeply out of joint – rather than
as a pioneer whose writings foreshadowed later ideas of the nation.
To make sense of Bustani’s writings, in other words, we must read
them synchronically, and not teleologically as links in a chain of concep-
tual transmission broken by the tragedies of the Arab twentieth century
or proleptically as ‘earlier “anticipations” of later’ ideologies and
Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, .
Marinos Sariyannis, A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century
(Leiden, ); Linda Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The
Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (Abingdon, ).
Abu-Manneh, ‘The Christians’, .
      
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imaginings of the Arab nation. The ‘problem-space’ in which these
texts took form was one that was shaped by the existence of empire.
It is not just that, as Ussama Makdisi has suggested, Bustani was in
many ways the ‘embodiment of the Tanzimat’, a figure whose works
echoed the ‘civilising’ impulse of Ottoman reform even as they offered
a less hierarchical and more ‘secular [and] liberal’ vision of ‘coexistence’
than that which imperial reformers were willing to countenance,
reversing the Tanzimat’s ‘negative imperative … to not discriminate into
a positive injunction to respect diversity’ as the foundation of active ‘citi-
zenship’. More than this, his thought during these fraught months
was concerned as much with the state as with society, giving rise to a
series of urgent reflections on the workings of government, the shortcom-
ings and potentiality of imperial reform, and the respective duties
and expectations of imperial state and subject. His writings took as
their own, to a degree hitherto unappreciated by scholars, both the
dirigiste, rationalising ethos of the Tanzimat – the ‘reorganisation’ of
the state, as the Ottoman military and administrative reforms of the
mid-nineteenth century are known – and the older languages of virtuous
governance on which it drew. As Hala Auji has recently suggested, this
was reflected even in his broadsides’ visual grammar, which shared
‘numerous … similarities’ with the Arabic translation of the 
decree Bustani prepared at the American Missionary Press in Beirut.
For Auji, it is no coincidence that Bustani referred to his text as a
layyiha or ‘bill’, the same term that contemporaries used for the
Ottoman decrees posted in public squares, for the original copies of
the Nafir ‘resemble’ his setting of the  edict ‘more than they do
any other extant print medium from this period’.
At the same time, Bustani’s answers to the fundamental questions
thrown up by imperial governance were shaped by the intensely eventful
and traumatic political and social context in which he wrote. This, too,
posed urgent questions. Scholars have largely focused on the broader
Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and
Theory,  (), –, at .
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC,
), .
Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, ; Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, .
For a recent synthetic account of this period, see Douglas A. Howard, A History of the
Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, ), –. For a restatement of an older view, see Carter
V. Findley, ‘The Tanzimat’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. IV, Turkey in the Modern
World, ed. Reşat Kasaba (Cambridge, ), –.
Auji, ‘Implications of Media’, , –.
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford,  []), –. Quentin Skinner, ‘A
Reply to My Critics’, in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully
(Cambridge, ), . On Bustani’s participation in relief efforts in , see Hanssen,
Fin de Siècle Beirut, .
   , c. 
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consideration to which Bustani returned repeatedly: how to salve the
wounds of civil war and construct a new compact for a Syrian society
rent apart by fanaticism? But it is clear that Bustani was also concerned
with the question of Lebanon’s future government, and of how best to
overcome the ruinous legacies of a system that had given rise to the
bloodletting of .
Until the s, Bustani’s home region had been subject to a complex
system of layered governance, in which local-born potentates enjoyed
considerable fiscal and military powers. In the early nineteenth
century, this system was dominated by one man, Bashir al-Shihab,
who had concentrated political and economic power in his own hands,
curbing the authority of Druze dynasties like the Junblat, while bolstering
that of Christian families like the Khazin and encouraging the activities
of Christian merchants in market towns like Dayr al-Qamar and
Zahleh. This was an order founded on the dominance of an elite struc-
tured around complex gradations of rank, status and faction – and not
around religious difference.
The Egyptian occupation of Syria from  to , and the estab-
lishment of direct Ottoman rule in , precipitated the collapse of
this ‘old regime’. From the s onwards Ottoman officials and
European diplomats created a new political system for the mountain,
founded on the assumption that religion was fundamental to its inhab-
itants’ sense of self and that the confessional community should therefore
serve as the basic building block of public life. Far from reflecting ancient
distinctions, this gave rise to a distinctly novel ‘culture of sectarianism’. As
newfangled ideas of popular sovereignty and religious difference bled
into each other, the mountain’s Christians increasingly came to think
of political representation and rights in the terms of popular sovereignty.
On early modern governance, see among others Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn, Provincial
Leaderships in Syria, – (Beirut, ); Abu-Husayn, The View from Istanbul: Lebanon and
the Druze Emirate in the Ottoman Chancery Documents, –; Stefan Winter, The Shiites of
Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, – (Cambridge, ); Heather Ferguson, The Proper
Order of Things: Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses (Stanford, ),
–.
See William Polk, The Opening of South Lebanon, –: A Study of the Impact of the West
on the Middle East (Cambridge, MA, ); Iliya Harik, Politics and Change in a Traditional
Society: Lebanon, – (Princeton, ); Richard van Leeuwen, Notables and Clergy in
Mount Lebanon: The Khazin Sheikhs and the Maronite Church, – (Leiden, ); Fruma
Zachs, The Making of Syrian Identity: Intellectuals and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut
(Leiden, ), –.
Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism, –.
The phrase is Ussama Makdisi’s: Makdisi, ibid., . On the Egyptian occupation of
Syria, see Polk, The Opening of South Lebanon, –; Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men:
Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, ), –; Caesar
Farah, The Politics of Intervention in Ottoman Lebanon, – ().
      
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By the late s, Maronite clerics and laymen argued that Christians’
demographic dominance, as well as the Shihabs’ supposed conversion
to Christianity, gave them the right to govern. Christian commoners
like the muleteer Tanyus Shahin, who in  led the people of
Kisrwan in revolt against their Khazin landlords, combined this commu-
nitarianism with a growing sense that elite families, whether Christian or
Druze, had usurped the people’s right to govern themselves. Shahin thus
demanded not just ‘full equality and complete freedom’ from the land-
lords’ exactions, but also the ‘liberation of Christians from their servi-
tude’. Such language only exacerbated existing tensions over land
and labour in mixed regions like the Matn and the Shuf, feeding a
cycle of mutual recrimination that culminated in the conflict of .
Bustani’s texts were a reflection on this tortuous history and an
attempt to envision another future. As such, they sought to provide an
alternative not just to local visions of reform and restoration, but also
to the recommendations of the international commission constituted to
‘seek the origin and cause of these events … [and] suggest modifications
to the current order of things … in the government of the Mountain’.
Here, I argue, empire provided the answer as much as the question. For
Bustani’s later broadsides can be read as a rebuke to those who proposed
cleaving off the mountain from Ottoman sovereignty and keeping its
government on a confessional basis. Where Maronite clergymen and
European diplomats and military officers called for the creation of an
autonomous, if not independent, political unit, governed on a religious
basis, Bustani counselled the mountain’s subjection to the writ of a
reformed and reforming Ottoman state.
At the same time, we should be wary of too reductive and temporally
narrow an understanding of context, which regards reflective writings
entirely as epiphenomenal products of their political and economic
circumstances. For the Nafir can also be read, not just as reflections
Carol Hakim, The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea – (Berkeley, ), –.
Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon ( []), .
Marwan Buheiry, ‘The Peasant Revolt of  in Mount Lebanon: Rising
Expectations, Economic Malaise and the Incentive to Arm’, in Land
Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East, ed. Tarif Khalidi (Beirut, ), –;
Caesar Farah, The Road to Intervention: Fiscal Politics in Ottoman Lebanon (Oxford, );
Ussama Makdisi, ‘Corrupting the Sublime Sultanate: The Revolt of Tanyus Shahin in
Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 
(), –.
 ‘Protocole de la première séance de la commission de Syrie, tenue à Beïrout, le 
octobre  ( rébiul-ewel )’, in I. de Testa, Recueil des Traités de la Porte ottomane avec
les puissances étrangères depuis le premier traité conclu en , entre Suléyman I et François I, jusqu’à
nos jours ( vols., Paris, –), VI, .
Omnia El Shakry, ‘Rethinking Arab Intellectual History: Epistemology, Historicism,
Secularism’, Modern Intellectual History,  (), –. See also Peter E. Gordon,
   , c. 
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on and of the moment, but as interventions in a ‘historically extended…
argument’, a discursive tradition full of ‘alteration’ and disagreement.
As I will argue, there are tantalising signs that Bustani drew upon older
ideas of ethical and wise government, refurbishing them to make them fit
for his own times. It is clear, then, that categorical distinctions between
intellectual reflection and political engagement, which treat one or
another of these as determinant, are of little help here. For Bustani’s
writings of  were at once commentaries on the pressing concerns
of the present and attempts to construct a normative basis for political
and ethical conduct. As such, they present an opportunity to rethink
the workings of context and the relationship between praxis and norm-
making, while integrating Ottoman Arab thought into broader histories
of imperial political thought.
III Writing the Tanzimat: imperial patriotism and civic
responsibility
Much of the case for Bustani as a Syrian patriot rests on the Nafir Suriyya,
which recent scholarship continues to treat as an attempt to imagine an
‘Arab national subject’ and a new ‘positive definition of the nation’ for
‘Levantine society’. Indeed, even those who acknowledge the imperial
dimension continue to treat him as, ultimately, ‘the first Syrian nation-
alist’. There is no disputing that these eleven broadsides were, at a
fundamental level, concerned with elaborating a new kind of local com-
munity of feeling. After all, as their title suggests, it was for Syria that they
sounded the alarm. Equally suggestive is the epithet Bustani gave his
pieces: wataniyyat, or patriotic letters. Each opened in the same way,
‘Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas’, in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual
History, ed. Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford, ), –.
David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, ), .
Andrew Arsan, ‘Under the Influence? Translations and Transgressions in Late
Ottoman Imperial Thought’, Modern Intellectual History,  (), –, at –. See
also Hussein Omar, ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Cage’, in Islam after Liberalism, ed.
Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi (), –.
For efforts in a similar direction by historians of international law, see Lâle Can and
Michael Christopher Low, ‘The “Subjects” of Ottoman International Law’, Journal of the
Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association,  (), –; Aimee M. Genell, ‘The Well-
Defended Domains: Eurocentric International Law and the Making of the Ottoman
Office of Legal Counsel’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association  (), –
; Umut Özsu, ‘Ottoman International Law?’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Association,  (), –.
 I borrow here from Milen Petrov’s notion of ‘speaking Tanzimat’. Milen Petrov,
‘Everyday Forms of Compliance: Subaltern Commentaries on Ottoman Reform, –
’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,  (), –.
Sheehi, ‘Unpacking Modern Arab Subjectivity’, ; Bou Ali, ‘Butrus al-Bustani’, .
Abu-Manneh, ‘The Christians’, .
      
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with a call to Bustani’s ‘fellow countrymen’ – abna’ al-watan, ‘the sons of
the homeland’ – a form of address that he used repeatedly to punctuate
each new section. And each had the same signature, muhibb li-l-watan,
‘lover of the homeland’, anonymity here a function of Bustani’s desire
to stress patriotism as an article of faith. What’s more, Bustani made
explicit the scope of this ‘homeland’. In September , he declared
that ‘Syria … with all its plains and desolate places, its coastlines and
mountains, is our homeland. And the inhabitants of Syria, of various
religious persuasions and origins and groupings are the sons of our
homeland.’ By his last broadside, Bustani had distilled this still-
complex vision of patriotic belonging into a purer formula, writing
simply of ‘the people of Syria, our countrymen’.
The evidence that these texts were, first and foremost, expressions of a
new understanding of Syrian patriotism appears overwhelming. I do not
want to suggest, therefore, that such readings are somehow wrong-
headed; on the contrary, they are entirely legitimate. But I do want to
add another layer of interpretation here, by arguing that, nested
within these dense, allusive, sometimes repetitive texts, there was also
another vision of belonging to the Ottoman Empire, or mamlaka. This
worked its way into Bustani’s language and shaped his sense of the rela-
tionship between society, homeland and state as one that was fundamen-
tally hierarchical and founded as much on duties as on rights.
Thus, Bustani redeployed the political language of Ottoman reform,
with its conception of the state as a benevolent protector, even when
he was considering the ties binding the territorial patria to its inhabitants.
In his fourth broadside, Bustani wrote that first among the ‘obligations
the homeland owes its people’ was ‘security for their most important
rights, their [life and] blood, honour, and wealth (damihim wa ‘irdihim
wa malihim)’. As Peter Hill has pointed out, these were the self-same
rights enshrined in the  Gülhane edict, with its call for ‘new laws’
that would ensure the ‘security of life and soul and the preservation of
honour, conscience, and wealth’ – emniyet-i can ve mahfuziyyet-i ırz u
nâmûs u mal. The  reform edict that so impressed Bustani
reaffirmed the imperial state’s commitment to protect the ‘life, wealth
… and honour’ of ‘all the subjects of our realm without exception’.
Bustani’s order of priorities here, then, is precisely that of imperial
See for instance Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, –.
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, . www.muharrembalci.com/hukukdunyasi/belgeler/
.pdf (last accessed  April ).
www.muharrembalci.com/hukukdunyasi/belgeler/.pdf (last accessed  April
).
   , c. 
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reform. Even when seemingly absent from Bustani’s vision, the state
remained a presence, haunting his prose and shaping his conception of
what the people were owed.
What has not hitherto been appreciated, however, is that Bustani’s
subsequent invocation of ‘civil, moral, and religious rights, not least
the right to freedom of conscience in the matter of religious persuasion
(hurriyyat al-damir fi amr al-madhhab)’, was also an invocation of the 
decree, with its commitment to guaranteeing ‘every denomination
(mezhab)’ ‘perfect freedom’ of belief. This is not to claim that
Bustani’s stress on freedom of religion was not born of his own experi-
ence as a Protestant and his grief at the martyrdom of his fellow
convert, As‘ad Shidyaq. Rather, it is simply to suggest that Bustani
voiced this commitment in the language of imperial reform. Neither of
these two contexts – the eventful, lived, intensely affective context of per-
sonal and local experience, and the linguistic, normative context of
imperial decrees and administration – took precedence over the other
in Bustani’s writings. On the contrary, they were interwoven to create
a powerful vision of the rights and duties of the individual subject.
Here, Bustani was not pushing the state to go further than it was pre-
pared to go or sketching out a new horizontal conception of Syrian citi-
zenship. Rather, he was urging his fellow Syrians to regard the rights
enshrined in the decrees of  and, especially,  as their own – to
enjoy freedom of religion, but also to remember that these rights
should not be abused or misconstrued, and that they entailed duties
and constraints on individual subjects’ comportment. Jens Hanssen is
thus certainly correct to argue that Bustani was promoting here ‘a con-
tract of rights and duties between the inhabitants and their homeland’.
This is plainly apparent from Bustani’s insistence that ‘the people have
binding rights and claims (huquq) on their patria, just as the patria
[imposes] obligations on its people’. But if the people were to be given
‘a hand in the affairs’ of their country, it was precisely because this
‘responsibility’ would increase their ‘concern for its progress’. This,
then, was a vision of ‘active citizenry’ that placed a great deal of
weight on commitment to the commonweal. ‘Love of the homeland’
should take precedence over ‘religious fanaticism’, and Syria’s ‘welfare’
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, ; www.muharrembalci.com/hukukdunyasi/belgeler/.pdf
(last accessed  April ).
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, ; Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, –.
Ussama Makdisi, ‘After : Debating Religion, Reform and Nationalism in the
Ottoman Empire’, International Journal of Middle East Studies,  (), –, at –;
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, .
Hanssen, ‘Wataniyya as Antidote to Sectarianism’, .
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, .
      
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over ‘personal inclinations’ – ghayyat shakhsiyya, Bustani using here, in his
punning, allusive way, a term also connoting error and sin. Bustani
clearly did conceive of his Syrian compatriots as rights-bearing subjects.
His understanding of these rights, however, was closely modelled on that
of the reforming Ottoman state. What’s more, he saw these rights as
always entailing concomitant duties – to one’s fellow countrymen, to
the homeland and, as I will argue below, to the imperial state.
For while Bustani’s fourth broadside focused on the relationship
between the Syrian land and its people, at other moments he strove to
consider their place within the overarching structures of imperial rule.
This is true not just of rote invocations of imperial munificence like
that which opened his second broadside in September , with its
praise for Sultan Abdülmecid’s ‘beneficent intentions’ to ensure
‘comfort, security, and justice’ for all members of his ‘flock’ ‘without
exception’. At a more fundamental level, Bustani’s stress on the rela-
tionship between the territorial homeland and the imperial state
shaped both his aetiological analysis of Syria’s maladies and his prescrip-
tions for a ravaged society. This is apparent from his fifth broadside, in
which he considered at length the causes of the events of . It was not
just that Syria’s inhabitants were ‘a cluster of tribes of varying places,
temperaments, prejudices, and interests, the majority of whom care
not for the general interest’. To compound matters, the ‘peripheries of
the land were far from the centre of government, that is to say the
capital of the empire (mamlaka)’ and their ‘governance was left to group-
ings (aqwam), many of whom, as history informs us … did a great deal of
harm to the lands under their rule, perpetrating acts of corruption and
destruction’.
The effects of this were plain to see ‘when we open … a book giving
news of this land’ – perhaps, as Peter Hill suggests, Tannus Shidyaq’s
chronicle Akhbar al-A‘yan fi Jabal Lubnan, which Bustani had recently
edited. For Syria’s history was ‘full of wars and disasters’, and ‘blind’
‘prejudice’ stains every page ‘like a black ugly spot’. ‘This malicious prin-
ciple’, Bustani went on, ‘takes on a different colour in each age.’ In
earlier times, it had attached itself to ‘names like Qaysi and Yamani
and then Junblati and Yazbaki’ – for Shidyaq the main factions of
elite politics in early modern Mount Lebanon. ‘More horrid’ still was
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, . Tannus Shidyaq, Kitab Akhbar al-A‘yan fi Jabal Lubnan, ed.
Butrus al-Bustani (Beirut, ).
Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (), –.
Axel Havemann, Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung im Libanon des . und . Jahrhunderts: Formen
und Funktionen des historischen Selbstverständnisses (Beirut, ).
   , c. 
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‘the form’ that prejudice had taken ‘these past few years, when it had
consumed once-sacred epithets like Nazarene [Christian] and Druze,
and then Muslim and Christian’. For Bustani, local prejudices –
whether of faction and family or religion – had for too long been the
motive force of Syrian history. For all that there were many people of
‘morals and quality’ among its inhabitants, left to its own devices
Syria could not but succumb to this ‘evil’. Only one path could
provide real ‘hope of progress and civilisation’ and allow the inherent
‘qualities’ of the majority to prosper: ‘plac[ing]’ the country under
special measures, by imposing ‘reforms (tanzimat) befitting the time and
circumstances, and whose aim is the welfare of the land and the
comfort of the subjects’.
On the one hand, it is clear that the Nafir was an ‘antisectarian’ appeal
to ‘build a cohesive and “civilised” Syrian society’. In such passages,
Bustani developed a searing historical critique, both of the ‘old order’
that had prevailed until the early nineteenth century and the new
‘culture of sectarianism’ that emerged from the s on. As dangerous
as a system of government founded on inherited status and rank was one
built on the confessionalisation of social life, the reduction of religious
belief to sectarian prejudice, and the elevation of prelates to the position
of temporal rulers. Both were equally ruinous, stymieing Syria’s potential
for civilisation. On the other hand, it is rather less certain that what
he aimed for was a new ‘social contract’ in which Ottoman ‘absolutist
monarchy’ would give way to the ‘logic of the modern nation-state’.
For it is striking that Bustani did not see the imposition of direct
Ottoman rule as in any way responsible for the events of . On the
contrary, he regarded this violence as, at least in part, born of Syria’s pol-
itical autonomy and remoteness from the centres of imperial sovereignty.
Nothing could be done to overturn the tyranny of distance. But it could
still be hoped that the watan – the homeland – could be integrated more
fully within the mamlaka – the imperial realm – through a programme of
thoroughgoing and just reform, which would expunge for once and for
all the forces of prejudice from Syria.
IV Against autonomy: Mount Lebanon in the Nafir
Indeed, this was not the only instance in which Bustani’s language pro-
vides evidence of his endorsement of effective imperial reform as the only
means of salving Syria’s wounds and restoring order to Mount Lebanon.
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, –.
 Jens Hanssen and Hicham Safieddine, ‘Introduction: Translating Civil War’, in
Bustani, Clarion of Syria, .
Bou Ali, ‘Blesseth Him That Gives’, , .
      
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In November , he reiterated his call for ‘appropriate laws and just
reforms, which suit the circumstances, the place and the time’.
At one level, this appears a straightforward use of the stock phrases of
administrative parlance, with their rote invocation of the need to
devise ordinances befitting the time and place. At the same time,
however, this can be read as a call to place Mount Lebanon in the
grip of a strong, reforming central state. It is in this light that we can
read Bustani’s calls for ‘appropriate laws (shara‘i mutfiqa) and just
reforms (tanzimat ‘adila)’. The measures needed to address Mount
Lebanon’s predicament were not, for Bustani, the bespoke protocols
devised by partisans of Mount Lebanon’s administrative autonomy.
Quite the opposite: the moment demanded that the state fulfil the
commitments spelled out in grand edicts like those of  and 
and continue with the thoroughgoing reorganisation, rationalisation
and homogenisation of government. In other words, the reformed
administration of Mount Lebanon and Syria should follow the imperial
norm, rather than the devolved exception.
This is apparent from Bustani’s insistence that the empire’s laws and
regulations should not be ‘admixed with confessional laws’ and that
‘judgments [should] consider the particulars of the case and not the
person’. Legislation should be ‘rigorous, vigilant, and capable of
keeping each [subject] within his limits’. But it should also ‘look
equally on every class of subject, granting no recognition to religious
sects other than that accorded to their members’ religious, moral, and
civic rights, and the defence of these rights as such, and not by virtue
of their connection to any person or group’. Here, Bustani can again
be seen restating the programme of the  reform edict, with its com-
mitment to erasing ‘every distinction or designation tending to make any
class whatever of the subjects of my Empire inferior to another class, on
account of their religion’, to ensuring freedom of religion, and to creating
mixed courts for the judgement of ‘all commercial, correctional, and
criminal suits’ involving members of different religious communities.
This too can be read as an intervention in debates on the future status
of Mount Lebanon. Against those who insisted that the region should
retain its own administration founded on the principle of confessional
distinction, Bustani argued that it should be folded fully into an
empire-wide system of universal and impersonal procedural norms
that would ensure equal judicial treatment for all. Religious difference
should be respected as sacrosanct, but no single confessional group
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
 I am grateful to Camille Cole for pointing this out.
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
www.anayasa.gen.tr/reform.htm (last accessed  April ).
   , c. 
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should be accorded special status. To overcome the strife that had torn
local society limb from limb and allow the wounds of sectarian hatred to
close over, it was necessary to pursue the path of imperial reform to its
fullest expression, rather than retreating into self-government founded
on the weighted representation of different communities.
We do not need to look far for evidence that Bustani took seriously the
potential of Ottoman bureaucracy. For his penultimate broadside
treated the state as one of the primary agents of social transformation,
setting out an expansive programme for a new regime of imperial sover-
eignty. He thus insisted on the ‘need for governors to show circumspec-
tion and vigilance in the exercise of their mission, and to take steps to
prevent events before they occur’. In an implicit criticism of the
actions of Fuad Paşa, who had sentenced Druze notables to death on
the basis of lists drawn up by Christian villagers, Bustani insisted it was
not enough ‘to execute the first killer … or to pin the responsibility on
the administrator of the province or district where the violence
occurred’. Far more effective than this organised score-settling was a
system of government that might prevent such ‘strife’ from occurring
in the first place. For ‘the country’ could find ‘repose and success’ only
in ‘secure and favourable circumstances’. This was, once again, a delib-
erate echo of mid-nineteenth-century imperial decrees that harped on
the need for ‘security’. But it was also, in a way, a rebuke of the approach
Ottoman administrators had taken in . What was needed was the
ideal vision of reformed government presented in official pronounce-
ments, of ‘governors who believe in the right of the state and the law
of the country and the people, and who possess the ability, the will,
and the means, both personal and military, to implement the laws and
to punish offenders’, rather than the ‘reliance’ shown on ‘principles of
division’ drawn from the ‘dark ages of despotism’. To pit Christian
against Druze by giving in to demands for ‘retribution’, let alone to
make confessionalism the keystone of Mount Lebanon’s government,
would be a mistake.
It followed from this that ‘a barrier’ should be erected separating ‘spir-
itual power from statecraft or civil power’. Whereas spiritual ‘leadership’
(al-ri’asa) was ‘by nature … invariable’, ‘governance [was] related to
external and changing matters’. As only the latter was ‘susceptible to
alteration and reform’, it alone was capable of bringing ‘process and civ-
ilisation’. Inflexible and unresponsive to ‘circumstances’, religious leader-
ship could lead only to stagnation. It was not that there was no place for
religion in social life – quite the contrary. But combining spiritual and
On Fuad Paşa’s actions, see Fawaz, Occasion for War, ff.
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, –.
 Ibid., .
      
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religious authority would only attract unsuitable candidates, thus cor-
rupting both true religion and statecraft, undermining faith in these
‘most important and noble’ of tasks and sowing ‘discord’. Under ‘spirit-
ual leaders who could agree only to disagree’, ‘the people’ were ‘like a
flock without a shepherd’, stripped all at once of legitimate government
and spiritual guidance.
Bustani protested – too eagerly, perhaps – that he had no particular
community in mind, but spoke ‘of all the many spiritual leaders of our
country, Muslim and Christian, Druze, Nusayri, Isma‘ili, Yazidi,
Jewish, or Samaritan’. It is hard, however, not to see this as an
attack on the Maronite Church’s growing pretensions to political author-
ity. Since the s, churchmen had increasingly argued that Mount
Lebanon was, in history and population, a Christian land. It followed
from this, both that the Maronite Church was the natural representative
of the people and that the country should be governed by a Christian
ruler reflecting its culture and demographic make-up. To the dismay
of men such as Tubiya ‘Awn, the Maronite archbishop of Beirut, this
vision of Mount Lebanon as a Christian land had slipped out of their
grasp in  when it was taken up by subaltern agents like the muleteer
Tanyus Shahin. Now, amidst the ruins, figures like the Maronite patri-
arch, Bulus Mas‘ad, and the archbishop of Saida, ‘Abdallah al-Bustani,
attempted to reassert their control over their community, portraying
themselves to Ottoman authorities and French diplomats as the
Maronites’ legitimate representatives. In the Nafir, Bustani urged his
countrymen to renege on this vision and to follow the precedent of the
‘civilised countries that have taken stock of the dangers of this admixture,
and who have created a separation between these two powers so that
neither counteracts the other’s public benefits’.
For Syria and Mount Lebanon to be governed effectively, sovereignty
over the people should not be divided among the religious leaders of each
community but concentrated in the hands of the imperial state. Indeed,
Bustani insisted that the sultan’s ‘righteous power’ should reign supreme,
for neither ‘true religion nor statecraft (siyasa) provided any grounds for
his subjects, whatever their background, to fail to give it due respect and
consideration’. There was no room in Bustani’s vision for consultation or
representation. For as he explained, should imperial decrees ‘be subject
to the will of the people and their diverse desires and varying prejudices’
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
Hakim, Origins, –.
Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism, –.
Hakim, Origins, –.
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
   , c. 
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they would quickly lose all persuasive force, holding ‘great meaning’ for
some and none at all for others. Bustani’s vision of the new relationship
between the locality and the imperial centre, then, was deeply hierarch-
ical. Against the autonomy that some were advocating for Mount
Lebanon and Syria, he insisted on subjection to the singular will of the
sultan, the better to break the clergy’s overweening influence over
their flock. Far from the liberal, egalitarian dispensation that some
have discerned in Bustani’s writings, this was a frank endorsement of
the munificent authority of an autocratic state.
If this separation between local clerical authority and imperial sover-
eignty was one element of Bustani’s vision, another was his opposition to
inherited status. He thus called for ‘the granting of administrative pos-
itions on the basis of merit and aptitude, rather than nationality,
descent, wealth or status’. To entrust administrative office to figures of
‘lofty rank’ on the basis of the ‘majesty of the founder’ of their ‘tribe
or dynasty’ was a mistake, for these figures’ belief that ‘precedence’
was theirs by right of birth and contempt for their perceived inferiors
rendered them ‘unsuitable’ for office. As careful observation of the ‘con-
ditions of states’ showed, government founded on inherited status led
inexorably towards ‘decline’, while a system that accorded positions to
‘those who deserve them, and not on the basis of inheritance’ was
assured of steady progress.
It is again important to situate these arguments within a local context.
Bustani was writing in February , at a time when various schemes for
the future of Mount Lebanon were being floated. One was that of the
commander of the French expeditionary force to Syria, General
Beaufort d’Hautpoul, who advocated the creation of a quasi-independ-
ent Lebanon under the aegis of Amir Majid Shihab, a scion of the family
that had dominated the administration of Mount Lebanon until the
s. To demonstrate the purported legitimacy of his plan, Beaufort
circulated a petition through the mountain calling for the right of the
Lebanese to be governed by a Christian prince and the restoration of
the Shihabi dynasty. Another was that of Patriarch Mas‘ad, who
shared Beaufort’s vision of an autonomous Lebanon under a Christian
governor, but favoured his own candidate, Yusuf Karam, himself the
son of a family of standing from the mountain’s northern reaches.
 Ibid., .
Hakim, Origins, –.
For an account that stresses liberalism in all its contradictions, see Bou Ali, ‘Blesseth
Him That Gives’.
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
Hakim, Origins, –.
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., –.
      
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Here, Bustani marked his opposition to these schemes of princely govern-
ment. And he did so by resorting again to the language of the 
imperial rescript, with its declaration that ‘all the subjects of my
Empire, without distinction of nationality, shall be admissible to public
employments, and qualified to fill them according to their capacity
and merit’. In weaving the rhetoric of imperial reform into his own
prose, Bustani sought to ensure the creation of a new social order in
Mount Lebanon and Syria by their wholesale integration into a reformed
imperial polity.
V Looking backwards: imperial ethics and just
administration
In articulating this vision of the relations between centre and province
and state and people, however, Bustani did not simply redeploy the lan-
guage of the Tanzimat, but also an older way of thinking about govern-
ance. This is apparent from his eighth broadside. In this text, which
appeared in November , he wrote that among the many baleful con-
sequences of the late ‘civil war’ was
the loss of the mutual support (arkan) between ruler and ruled, and between subjects
(ri‘aya) and their government. For it is well known that the trust of those who govern
the matters [of state] in the people depends in great part on the trust (irkan) of the
people in them, and vice versa.
‘Hope’ for progress, then, resided ‘on the one hand … in the wisdom of
rulers, the excellence of their administration (husn idaratihim), [and] the
reform of their conduct towards their subjects’. But while progress was
contingent on rulers’ capacity to ‘show consideration’ towards those
they ruled, it also depended on ‘the people’s knowledge of their own
welfare, [and] avoidance of … excess in asking for what is forbidden
by ethical government, true religion, and morals (siyasa wa diyana wa
adaban)’.
At one level, this vision of restraint and mutual trust did track the
reforming Ottoman state’s own perception of itself. Thus, Bustani’s lan-
guage here followed that of the  Gülhane edict, with its declaration
that only ‘new laws’ would ensure ‘excellence of administration (hüsn-i
idaresi)’, enabling the well-protected domains to regain their ‘prosperity
and strength’. However, it is telling that this expression, which did
not recur in the  reform edict, was drawn from an older lexicon of
www.anayasa.gen.tr/reform.htm (last accessed  April ).
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
 I use here Halil İnalcık’s translation in Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East, ed.
Akram Khater (Belmont, ), ; and the Ottoman text in Latin characters available at
www.muharrembalci.com/hukukdunyasi/belgeler/.pdf (last accessed  April ).
   , c. 
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Islamic statecraft. For there are tantalising hints that Bustani’s own
understanding of the political was shaped by his engagement with this
tradition. It is striking, for instance, that he expected ordinary subjects
to obey not just the universal norms of religion and morals, but also
the specific injunctions of siyasa. Now commonly translated as ‘politics’,
this was still in the mid-nineteenth century a polysemic and fluid term,
which denoted both statecraft and the administration of justice. It was
in this latter sense that it was used in Khedivial Egypt, where majalis
siyasiyya were established alongside the shari‘a courts and granted
‘discretionary powers’ to adjudicate criminal cases using new
bureaucratic procedure.
At another level, however, the term evoked a tradition of reflection on
statecraft that included both works of counsel for rulers such as the Qabus-
nama and Nizam al-Mulk’s Siyasat-nama, both written for eleventh-
century Seljuk rulers, and philosophical treatises such as al-Farabi’s
tenth-century al-Madina al-Fadila, the ‘ideal city’ or polis, and Nasir al-
Din al-Tusi’s thirteenth-century Akhlaq-i Nasiri. For al-Farabi, the ultim-
ate end of the ‘royal, political art’ of siyasa was to lead man ‘to happiness
by having a philosopher-king as ruler’. In Edwin Rosenthal’s gloss, the
sovereign should ‘rule with practical wisdom and experience … so that
political … acts encourage virtue and good behaviour’ in his subjects.
In similar fashion, al-Tusi saw the duty of the ‘ideal ruler’ as being to
‘help his subjects’ to ‘reach potential wisdom’. Under his ‘care and pro-
tection each member of society, secure in the best place suited for him,
was to … struggle to achieve perfection’. For him, siyasat-i mudun – the
management of the affairs of the polis, or statecraft – was one of the
two central expressions of ‘practical wisdom’ – hikmat-i ‘amali.
We cannot know for certain whether Bustani had in mind the writings
of Farabi and Tusi. As Peter Hill has noted, ‘we should not assume that…
particular passages’ drawn from the classical canon ‘were known to’
nineteenth-century ‘Arab literati’. More work still needs to be done
on nahda thinkers’ reception of falsafa, the tradition born of Islamic
engagement with Plato and Aristotle, and the ways this shaped their
ideas of ethics, virtue and the state. At the same time, we do know
that the sixteenth-century Ottoman writers Kınalızade Ali Çelebi and
Hasan Kafi, who drew from Tusi and other medieval Persian writers
of ethics their sense of the relationship between wise government and
Khaled Fahmy, In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt
(Oakland, ),  and – passim.
Edwin Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline (Cambridge
), –.
Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India, c.– (Ranikhet, ), –.
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, .
      
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social order, were known to Bustani’s contemporaries. Kınalızade’s
Ahlak-i Ala’i was first printed at the Bulaq press in Cairo in  and
went through a number of editions over the course of the nineteenth
century. Hasan Kafi’s work was likewise reprinted three times before
. Bustani’s near-contemporary the Young Ottoman Namık
Kemal cited both Kınalızade and Tusi, among others. Another con-
temporary, the Tunisian reformer Khayr al-Din al-Tunsi, argued in a
passage in which he cited the ‘wisdom of Aristotle’ that ‘the rightful
path is ‘the statecraft practised by the ruler (siyasa yasusiha al-malik)’.
Alongside this we must place the evidence from Bustani’s own dictionary,
Muhit al-Muhit, published seven years after the Nafir. There, he gave the
meaning of hukuma – nowadays glossed as ‘government’ – as arbab al-siyasa,
or the masters of statecraft. More telling still, among the definitions of
hikma or wisdom that he listed were the following: ‘justice and learning and
understanding and reason (hilm) and prophecy and the Qur’an and the
Gospels’; and ‘the science of the truth of things as they are’. The ‘people
of wisdom’, he went on, ‘are the philosophers (al-falasifa)’, or those who prac-
tise falsafa, a term often used for thinkers such as al-Farabi and al-Ghazali.
Wemust at least allow for the possibility that when Bustani wrote in the Nafir
of the ‘wisdom of rulers (hikmat al-amirin)’ and the need to rebuild the trust of
‘subjects … in their government (hukumatihim)’, he had these meanings and
the tradition from which they sprung in mind. More than a thinker
gazing forward proleptically into the national future, Bustani appears at
such moments to be grappling with this long, rich tradition of reflection on
the relationship between reason, ethics and government. If the Tanzimat
decrees themselves redeployed this language, as some have argued, we
must be open to the possibility that so too did the Nafir.
See Sariyannis, Ottoman Political Thought, , –; and Asli Niyazioğlu, ‘Kınalızade Ali
Efendi’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam III, https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopae-
dia-of-islam-/knalzade-ali-efendi-COM_?s.num=&s.f.s_parent=s.f.book.encyclopae-
dia-of-islam-&s.q=Kinalizade (last accessed  April ).
Darling, History of Social Justice, ; Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A
Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, ), . See also H. Z. Ülkan,
‘Tanzimattan sonra Fikir Hariketleri’, in Tanzimat I: Yüzüncü Yıldönümü Münasebitile, ed. H.-A.
Yücel (Istanbul, ), ; and M. A. Mehmet, ‘La Crise ottomane dans la vision de Hasan
Kafi Akhisri (–)’, Revue des Etudes Sud-Est Européennes,  (),  n. .
Mardin, Genesis, , .
Khayr al-Din al-Tunsi, Aqwam al-Masalik fi Ma‘rafat Ahwal al-Mamalik, ed. Munsif al-
Shanufi (Tunis, ), .
Butrus al-Bustani, Kitab Muhit al-Muhit ta’lif al-Mu‘allim Butrus al-Bustani ufiya ‘anhu ayya
Qamus Mutawwal al-Lugha al-‘Arabiyya ( vols., Beirut, ), I, –.
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
Darling, History of Social Justice, . See also Butrus Abu-Manneh, ‘The Islamic Roots
of the Gülhane Rescript’, Die Welt des Islams,  (), –; Frederick Anscombe, ‘Islam
and the Age of Ottoman Reform’, Past & Present,  (), –.
   , c. 
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VI Looking outwards: global comparison and imperial
sovereignty
At other moments, Bustani looked not backwards into tradition, but
outwards across the world to find evidence in support of his argument.
This is apparent from a passage in November  in which he strove
to distinguish between religion, understood as an intrinsically hier-
archical relationship between ‘a servant and his maker’, and civil
matters – al-madaniyyat – understood as a dual contract, which entailed
at once a horizontal relationship between ‘man and his compatriot’
and a vertical engagement between the individual subject and ‘his gov-
ernment’. The relationship of one compatriot to another, and between
subject and government, were not independent of one another. As
Bustani wrote:
So long as the sons of the country do not open the doors to knowledge and industry …
they cannot wait for order along the lines of civilised countries or respect and consider-
ation in the eyes of others, nor even in their own eyes, or expect to have the doors opened
to them to lofty positions in government. For though the Arabs were, in times of old,
sovereign and possessed the most well-considered positions, it cannot be hoped that
they will progress higher than the rank of a scribe or translator or council member
should they remain in their current position.
In short, ‘the Arabs’ owed it to each other to embark on the educational
reforms Bustani had long espoused. But if this was in part because it
would bring ‘order’ and civilisation to their own lands, it was also
because it would allow them to earn the respect of others and integrate
fully the institutions of state. Awakening their latent potentialities, then,
meant nothing if it did not strengthen their ties to the imperial polity. At
the same time, the Ottoman state itself needed to do more to ‘open the
doors’ of government to all. For ‘God only knows how many of the
current government employees’ would remain, should
the government create an order like that in the Chinese empire, for example, which does
not accept anyone into government functions who is not competent, who does not
possess perfect knowledge of the language of his land, and who is not expert in the
laws and regulations of the empire.
What are we to make of this comparison, made at a time when, some
have argued, Bustani anxiously regarded Western civilisation as the uni-
versal benchmark by which all other societies should be judged? To be
clear, this was no empirical comparison. As Bustani was writing, much of
China had been consumed for a decade by what was, by some reckon-
ings, the bloodiest civil war in history. For four years, the Qing state
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
Sheehi, Foundations, , ; Makdisi, ‘After ’, . For an insightful discussion of
this, see Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, ch. .
      
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had been confronting British and French military incursions. Its coastline
was moth-eaten by the extraterritorial enclaves of the treaty ports. But
all this was beside the point, for it is clear that Bustani was writing here in
the abstract. This passage, then, was fundamentally different from the
comparative empirical accounts of Khayr al-Din al-Tunsi or the
Egyptian Rif‘at Rifa‘ al-Tahtawi, or even from later Ottoman writings
on Meiji Japan. Rather, Bustani saw in a stylised China the ideal
type of the bureaucratic empire he longed for. This underscores the con-
tinuing openness and worldliness of mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman
Arab political thought. Casting about for a normative basis for effective
imperial governance, Bustani felt no need to look exclusively to the pre-
cedents offered by the ‘civilised countries’ of Europe and North America.
On the contrary, he set his gaze eastwards across the globe.
This effort at global comparison was the product, to be sure, of
what Peter Hill has described as Bustani’s profound wariness of
‘uncritical acceptance’ of Europe as the ‘universal standard of civilisa-
tion’ and his fear that his compatriots would lose themselves in ‘blind
imitation’ of ‘all things’Western. But if cultural considerations were
at play, so too were political ones. As Bustani stressed in February
, European powers’ growing encroachments on Ottoman sover-
eignty rendered the task of reforming the state and rebuilding the
trust between ruler and ruled all the more urgent. For only through
fulfilling the Tanzimat’s commitment to ‘preserve the peace and
comfort and prosperity’ of its subjects could the Ottoman state ‘con-
vince them there is no need … to have recourse to foreigners and to
place their livelihoods and interests under their protection and super-
vision’. Here, too, we can feel Bustani’s immediate lived context
pressing into the text. He wrote, after all, in a city in which those dis-
placed by violence remained reliant on European relief efforts, and in
which many profited from the silk trade with France or found
Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century
China (Stanford, ); James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in
Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC, ). See also Ussama Makdisi, ‘Diminished
Responsibility and the Impossibility of “Civil War” in the Middle East’, American
Historical Review,  (), –.
Rifa‘ah Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric
(–), trans. Daniel L. Newman (); Khayr al-Din al-Tunsi, The Surest Path: The
Political Treatise of a Nineteenth-Century Muslim Statesman, trans. Leon Carl Brown
(Cambridge, MA, ). On Ottoman views of Japan, see Cemil Aydin, The Politics of
Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought
(New York, ); and Renee Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan: East, Middle East, and
Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, ).
Hill, Utopia and Civilisation, , , .
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
   , c. 
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employment as dragomans or guards in European employ, as Bustani
had done in the s.
It is clear that despite – or perhaps because of – his earlier entangle-
ments, Bustani retained a deep ambivalence about the role of foreign
powers in Syria. On the one hand, he wrote in January ,
European ‘intervention’ had been ‘necessary to stop the spread of
turmoil and destruction that were spreading from place to place …
like infectious disease’. There was no denying that ‘misrule and disdain
for the laws are among the greatest of harms to a country, no matter
what its degree of civilisation and success, as wise government and virtu-
ous laws are like health, one only knows their value when they are lost’, so
that ‘those who transgress the bounds of humanity and moderation find
themselves facing the opprobrium of the entire world, and it is necessary
for a foreign hand to intervene in the affairs of their country’. On the
other hand,
interference by foreign hands in the political affairs (siyasa) of any country, and especially
this country, where it strengthened the various conflicting parties … and where the
causes of disagreement on the causes of intervention varied in accordance with the reli-
gious and civil interests of the intervening parties, will be harmful to the country, even if
it brings temporary benefits to some individuals.
In this passage, Bustani again brought together the normative and
the descriptive, the eventful and the speculative. Intervention in the sov-
ereign matters of any given state, he contended, was always detrimental.
But events had shown that it was especially so in Mount Lebanon
and Syria, where Britain and France had shown contrasting attitudes
towards Druze and Maronite, and where French endorsement of
Maronite claims, in particular, had strengthened the latter’s hand.
Gone here is the sense of hopeful gratitude that marked Bustani’s first
wataniyya, in which he counselled his readers to ‘look with trust’ on the
‘allied states coming to provide them with comfort and to make them
secure in their dwelling places’ and ‘wait patiently for the good deeds
that the great of the world had set in motion’. By early , this opti-
mism had been replaced by a growing sense of the dangers of foreign
encroachment. If the Ottoman state appeared to him the guarantor of
the welfare of Syria, then the European states that had assembled in
Beirut to decide on the fate of Syria increasingly seemed not saviours
and protectors, but threats to its well-being.
See Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Cambridge,
MA, ); Boutros Labaki, Introduction à l’Histoire économique du Liban: soie et commerce extérieur en
fin de période ottomane (–) (Beirut, ); Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut.
Bustani, Nafir Suriyya, .
 Ibid., .
      
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VII Conclusion
Butrus al-Bustani’s Nafir Suriyya, I have argued, can be read not just as a
call for a new Syrian patriotism, but as a contemplation on the workings
of empire. Bustani reflected at various moments on the imperial ruler’s
duties and attributes and his subjects’ obligations and rights, on the
relationship between state and population and capital and province,
on the reform of imperial administration, and on the dangers foreign
intervention and encroachment posed to Ottoman sovereignty. To do
so, he drew not just on the language of the Tanzimat, but also on an
older language of ethical statecraft, as well as on comparison with
other imperial polities such as China, whose civil administration open
to all the talents he saw as a model for bureaucratic governance. At
the same time, Bustani offered a commentary on the future of Mount
Lebanon. Here too, he stressed the importance of empire. For he coun-
selled not just against a return to the dominance of local elites or an
increased role for religious dignitaries in government, but also against
the various schemes for autonomous administration floated for the
region as he wrote. The only means to overcome the violence of 
was, he argued, wholesale integration into the reformed structures of
the Tanzimat state, embracing the norms of Ottoman imperial govern-
ance rather than carving out an exception under the protection of other,
European, empires.
In the end, Bustani’s vision did not come to pass. By June , the
international commission sitting in Beirut had drawn up the basic law
that would regulate Mount Lebanon’s government until the First
World War. Far from doing away with confessionalism, this document
enshrined it as the basis of administrative order: henceforth, the
region’s governor would be a Christian, assisted by an administrative
council made up of representatives of the mountain’s religious commu-
nities. At the same time, Mount Lebanon would enjoy a significant
measure of autonomy, with its own gendarmerie and fiscal system.
This autonomy would be ‘guaranteed’ by the concert of powers, which
thus gained a significant measure of oversight over its internal
affairs. Though this arrangement ensured a ‘long peace’ for
Ottoman Mount Lebanon, it also allowed for continuing French and
British intervention in its political life and the entrenchment of the
logic of confessional government. Bustani’s writings, then, offer an
alternative future – one that provides grounds for further reflection on
Adel Ismail, Documents Diplomatiques et consulaires relatifs à l’histoire du Liban et des pays du
proche-orient, du XVIIe siècle à nos jours ( vols., Beirut, –), XI, –.
Engin Akarlı, The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, – (). See also John
Spagnolo, France and Ottoman Lebanon, – ().
   , c. 
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the ways late-Ottoman Arab literati reckoned with the existence of
empire and on the relationship between lived and textual contexts and
the relationship between political engagement and normative prescrip-
tion. These are the grounds that I have tried to open up here.
Recent years have seen a revival of interest in Bustani. The last decade
alone has witnessed important work by the likes of Rana Issa, Nadia
Bou Ali, Peter Hill, Ussama Makdisi, and Jens Hanssen and Hicham
Safieddine, whose critical edition provides English-language readers
with access to the Nafir. This interest is in part the product of an enduring
fascination with the complexities and paradoxes of Bustani’s thought –
and of the nahda more broadly – and of its complicated influence on
subsequent generations of Arab thinkers. But it is also an attempt to
push back against enduring Western narratives of the Middle East as a
place of disorder and fanaticism, to demonstrate, once and for all, that
it was not always thus, that confessionalism and sectarianism are histor-
ical constructs, mutable, motile practices amenable to context and not
the fixed fittings of Arab society, and that there exists a rich tradition
of what Ussama Makdisi has recently called ‘ecumenical’ or ‘antisectar-
ian’ thought in the region. Understandably, then, many of these
writings – even when critical of the contradictions in his thinking –
have taken Bustani’s chief concern to be the patria and the horizontal
ties of concord and understanding binding the inhabitants of a shared
homeland together. They are not wrong. Patriotism was integral to his
political thought. But it is perhaps time that we also read Bustani as a
thinker of empire, one who was also concerned with the vertical ties
between imperial state and subject, with the ethical and practical under-
pinnings of imperial governance, and with the conditions of imperial
sovereignty and the increasingly stark power asymmetries between
imperial polities. In doing so, we may be true both to the context in
which these haunting, allusive texts took shape and to our own tragic
times of intervention and unequal sovereignty.
Makdisi, Age of Coexistence. See also Hanssen and Safieddine, ‘Translating Civil War’,
–.
      
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