Ahmad Faris Shidyaq: An Arab Traveller in 19th Century Europe
Anyone who knows enough of the Arabic language would immediately realise that the man’s name sounds funny. Ahmad Shidyaq? Ahmad is one of the names of the Prophet Muhammad. But Shidyaq? What does Shidyaq mean? In Lebanon, it is the name given to a deacon who serves in the Maronite church. A contradiction in terms!
No wonder, Shidyaq himself does not fit the conventional categories of identity attribution. Born into the Maronite Christian sect, he flirted with the Protestants for a few years, then fiercely denounced both the Catholic and Protestant Churches, and became a free-thinker. His sudden conversion to Islam in 1857 shocked many of his co-religionists and branded him with a virtual ex-communion by the Maronite church in Lebanon. But that was not all concerning his multiple ambiguities and paradoxes. He was naturalised a British citizen and married an English woman after the death of his first wife. Politically, after having been the first Arab to profess socialism, he turned into an Ottoman reformer, but ended his life as an Arab cultural nationalist.
The best way to introduce Shidyaq is to first put his life and work in their proper context, that of the 19th century Arab cultural renaissance ( Nahdah) of which he was the most illustrious intellectual.
The Nahdah
Al-Nahdah emerged in two principal locales, Egypt and Lebanon (with an extension in Tunisia). In Egypt, the cultural revival movement consisted mainly of a return to the sources of ‘pure’ Islam, and an attempted reconciliation between Faith and Science, at the hands of reformers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abdu. But it consisted also of imagining a Egyptian modern state in the work of Rifa`ah Rif`at al-Tahatawi. The Lebanese Nahdah, an undertaking shouldered mainly by Christian intellectuals, did involve religious reform and did not shun from social and political reforms, but was largely concerned with a secular literary and cultural revival.
The Lebanese contribution to the Nahdah was the product of a singular symbiosis between Beirut and Mount Lebanon set against the context of an opening to Europe and the Syrian hinterland. Beirut provided the commercial, educational and cultural infrastructure and urban setting. Mount Lebanon was the scene of a dramatic transition after the collapse of the old Ottoman muqâta‘ji system of tax-farming and land control under the combined effects of the penetration of colonial capitalism and a series of commoners’ revolts that culminated in a bloody civil war. The Nahdah’s principal actors were recent migrants from Mount Lebanon to Beirut. They had been schooled in the Mountain but refined their scholarship in the city. Almost all had served as secretaries and copyists for Mount Lebanon’s sheikhs (honorific title for nobility) and emirs (Arabic for princes). The transition from traditional to modern intellectuals unravelled in the city, where they became educators, translators, journalists or simply writers earning a living from their writing. Their new patrons were British, Americans and French missionaries or local merchants who replaced the emirs and sheikhs.
Let us now have a look at the Nahdah’s principal actors and achievements:
Nâsîf al-Yâzîji (1800-1871) began his career as a private secretary to prince Haydar al-Shihâbi and Bashir Shihâb II (ruling princes of Mount Lebanon, 17791840). He moved to Beirut around 1840 and worked as an Arabic tutor to Protestant missionaries until he taught at the Syrian Protestant College (precursor of the American University of Beirut). Al-Yâzîji wrote on philosophy, grammar, style, rhetoric and poetry. His chief contribution to the Nahdah was his call to emulate classical Arab writers as a means of reviving Arabic language and literature. His son, Ibrâhîm (1847-1906) is known for his valuable contribution to the modern study of
Arabic poetics. His wider scope of interests included music, painting and astronomy. He also designed the first Arabic almanach and created a simplified Arabic font, which contributed to the development of Arabic printing. Ibrahim Yaziji died in exile in Egypt fleeing Ottoman repression.
Butrus Bustâni (1819-1883) was the Nahdah’s encyclopedist but also a grammarian, educator, journalist, critic and a pioneer in liberal, nationalist and secular thought. He studied in the Maronite college of ‘Ayn Waraqa and taught at the Protestant seminary in Beirut then at the Syrian Protestant College. In 1870, he published the daily Al-Janna edited by his son Salîm, the weekly, Al-Junayna, edited by his kinsman Sulaymân (1856-1925) who translated also Homer’s Illiad, and the monthly al-Jinân. His main contributions are the first modern Arabic dictionary Muhît al-Muhît (1870) and a six-volume encyclopedia, Dâ’irat al-Ma`ârif (1870-82). Later, five volumes of the encyclopedia were added by Salîm and Sulaymân after the mu’allim’s death.
Yûsuf al-Asîr (1815-1889) born in Saïda was the prominent Muslim among the men of the Nahdah. A graduate of al-Azhar in Cairo, he was appointed judge in Tripoli, mufti in ‘Akka (Acre, Palestine) and attorney general in Mount Lebanon under the mutasarrifiyah (the autonomous status granted to Mount Lebanon within the Ottoman empire, 1861-1915). In addition to a collection of poetry, his writings include a commentary on the Ottoman Civil Code. He was also the founder, in 1875, of the first newspaper in Lebanon to be published by a Muslim.
Unshackling Arabic lettres from its corsetting in rigid conventional style and its state of lethargy was a motivation animating all the pioneers of the Nahdah. They succeeded brilliantly with prose, less so with poetry. The translation of the Bible to Arabic was undoubtedly a landmark in that effort. Far beyond its impact with regards the religious, the process of translation itself generated literary masterpieces crowning the efforts of the Nahdah’s pioneers, reviving and renewing Arabic prose. Three translations were produced within a period of fifteen years. The Shidyaq-Lee translation published in 1857 remains largely unknown. Eli Smith (1801-1852) ventured on his own undertaking in 1847, assisted by Butrus al-Bustâni, their translation was corrected by Nâsîf al-Yâzîji. After Smith’s death, the task was taken over by Cornelius Van Dyck (1818-1895) helped by Yûsuf al-Asîr and the final version came out in 1865. In 1880, Ibrahim Yâziji produced a translation of the Bible for the Catholic Jesuits missionaries.
Whatever the difference between the translated versions, they influenced generations of creative writers, not least prominent amongst them was Jibrân Khalîl Jibrân, author of The Prophet.
Renewal did not stop at language. New literary genres began to appear, directly inspired by western literature. Mârûn Naqqâsh (1817-1855) is credited to have introduced the theatrical arts, in 1848, he staged the first modern play in Arabic, Al-Bakhîl, a loose translation of Molière’s L’Avare. Three years later, he set up the first modern theatre in Syria, with permission from the Ottoman Sultan, next to his house in the Jummayzah district of Beirut. Mikha’îl Mashaqa, born in Dayr al-Qamar to a family of mudabbirs (scribes and secretaries) converted to trade, pioneered the autobiography genre. Al-Jawâb ‘ala Iqtirâh al-Ahbâb [A Response to the Suggestion of the Beloved Ones], written in 1873, tells the story of his family, set against the backdrop of the bloody events of 1860 and the breakdown of the muqâta‘ji order. The narrative emphasized the role of the individual in history and society. In his turn, Salîm al-Bustâni is credited for being a pioneer of the novel genre with his Al-Huyâm fi Jinân al-Shâm [Love in Syrian Gardens] and Zannûbiya. Shortly thereafter, Jirji Zaydân wrote the first historical novel, transcribing glorious and dramatic episodes of
Arab-Muslim history. He also wrote histories of Arabic literature (Târîkh al-Âdâb al‘Arabiya) and of Muslim civilisation (Târîkh al-Tamaddun al-Islâmi) which have become classics.
The men of the Nahdah witnessed a dramatic transitional historical bracket during which the older order was disintegrating, and they chose not to remain passive witnesses of their times. They were actively engaged in the struggle against the two pillars of the old order: the muqâta‘ji system and the Maronite Church. Furthermore, the impact of the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon was decisive on their lives and ideas. In his political bulletin Nafîr Sûriya, (The Clarion of Syria) Butrus al-Bustâni addressed weekly letters to “the sons of the nation” in which he qualified civil wars as “the most pernicious and most odious of wars”. Those letters were tinged with a feeling of shame vis-à-vis the “civilised West” and severe criticism of his compatriots taxed as “tribes in discord”, the majority of whom were “not concerned with the common good nor harbouring any feeling of belonging to the homeland”. Bustâni imputes the responsibility of the civil violence to a “bestial principle” ––the “politicization of religion”. He exhorts his compatriots to reconcile, granting primacy to public interests over private interests, love for the homeland over sectarian bigotry. Finally, he proposed a secular solution to sectarian strife based on the separation between “leadership, or spiritual power, and politics, or civil power” (Nassar, 1970: 29). Bustâni founded his National School [al-Madrasa al-Wataniya] in 1863 in order to contribute to the fight against the sequels of the war and propagate coexistence between the religious communities. This first secular school in the Arab East taught Arabic, Turkish, French, English, Greek and Latin.
Many factors account for the conversion of the Maronites Bustâni and Shidyaq and the Greek Catholic Mashâqqa to Protestantism, and the close association of the Greek Catholic Yâzijis with Protestant missionaries. Indeed, the men of the Nahdah learned much from their Protestant patrons, associates, and mentors in terms of languages, works in science and methodology in scholarly research. They also shared with them the rejection of the Catholic Church’s rigid hierarchy and its pretence to be the only authority for the interpretation of the Holy texts. The Protestant interpretation appealed to them as more liberal and subjective. In addition, in their conduct as philanthropists and employers, Protestant missionaries were less demanding and certainly less humiliating than the emirs, sheikhs and rulers under whom most had worked. But the Protestant missionaries were chiefly concerned with the propagation of the “word of God” and their own brand of Christianity through education and the publication and distribution of the Arabic Bible (which earned them the pejorative popular nickname of “Bibilshiyyin”). The Nahdah intellectuals, in contrast, were mostly secular with predominantly worldly interests.
The missionaries represented the interests of their respective states, with overtones of colonial designs, whereas the men of the Nahdah were Ottoman reformers, Arab revivalists and patriots. Ultimately, almost all took their distance from their Protestant associates. Bustâni publicly denounced the interference of foreign missionaries in Syrian internal affairs. Mashâqqa and Shidyaq went through a period of severe agnosticism. Shidyaq as we have seen attacked both Catholics and Protestants and converted to Islam. In that sense, the Christian pioneers of the Lebanese Nahdah could hardly be called ‘organic’ intellectuals representing their religious communities. They were rather marginal dissidents, even outcasts. For much of their inspiration they did not turn to Christian Europe but to the secular Europe of the Enlightenment, English liberalism, and the ideals of the French Revolution.
Freedom of expression, the rule of law, the centrality of the individual in society and vis-à-vis the State were salient themes in their writings. Bustâni spent five months during the 1860 civil war translating Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as the novel’s central theme is that society’s progress is predicated on the emergence of the individual. He speaks in the name of all the Nahdah men when he defines his political philosophy in the following comment: “The lack of good government and the scorn for laws are both among the greatest evils for a country whatever the stage of its civilisation and the degree of success it has achieved. Government and laws resemble good health. In other words: you do not know their worth except in their absence” (Bustani, 1860: 52).
It would also be a gross oversimplification to assume that the intellectuals of the Nahdah were simply westernisers. To begin with, their prime goal was the revival of Arabic language and culture of the ‘golden age’ of Arab-Islamic civilisation. Faced with mounting pressure from colonial Europe to weaken and partition the Ottoman Empire, that revival was perceived as the most efficient way to face up to the colonial challenge.
The Lebanese Nahdah followed the tradition of its Egyptian counterpart in considering education as a principal mode of access to modernity and civilisation. More importantly, the intellectuals of the Lebanese Nahdah were also feminist pioneers. Their founding text is Bustani’s famous Allocution On the Education of Women, read before the Syrian Society for Sciences and Arts in 1849, arguing perhaps for the first time in the Arab world the case for the education of women. Bustani was himself married to an educated woman, Rahel ‘Atâ, the first graduate of the American School for Girls in Beirut (presently the Lebanese Americans University).
Finally, the Lebanese Nahdah was a movement for the national, and not only cultural, awakening and revival of the Arabs. Its main actors viewed Arabity as belonging to a common language, culture and history. In 1865, Ibrâhîm al-Yâziji opened a poem he declaimed before the Syrian Scientific Society with his famous call
“Arabs, arise and awake!” which became the rallying call for the early generations of
Arab nationalists. Butrus Bustâni on his part developed the notion of homeland (watan) in a vein similar to that of Tahtâwi, and coined the motto “the love of the homeland is an act of [religious] faith”. Bustâni’s homeland was defined as natural ‘Syria’ (Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine). In line with the Nahdah’s passion for science, he used the metaphor of the magnet to describe the power of attraction that the homeland exercises on its inhabitants.
A Life in Exile
Faris Shidyaq, was born in `Achqût (Kisrawân) in 1804, lived in Hadath, near
Beirut, in a family whose members suffered from political divisions, the oppression
of the Church and the local feudalities. In fact, his life will be deeply determined by two major events related to those two institutions.
His grandfather, father and brother died as “martyrs of freedom of thought and inclination”, to use his own words. His father who was opposed to the rule of Bashir Shihab II, reigning prince of Mount Lebanon (1789-1840), participated in the commoners revolt against the ruler in 1820-21. Upon the bloody defeat of the revolt, he went into exile to Damascus where he died in that same year. Upon his father’s death, the adolescent Faris had to quit his education at the Maronite convent in ‘Ayn Waraqah and work as a copyist of manuscripts.
The other more dramatic event concerned Faris’ older brother As’ad, his tutor in Syriac and Arabic. As`ad’s tragic death irreversibly changed the course of Faris’s life. In the 1820s in Mount-Lebanon, the Maronite church was inching under the control of Rome, engaged in a counter-offensive against the ideas of the French Revolution and Protestantism. The Maronite Patriarch Hubaysh published two edicts against the ‘Protestant heresy’, forbidding his subjects commerce with them, under threat of ex-communion. As‘ad Shidyaq, summoned to teach Arabic grammar in Fisk’s school of British Protestant missionaries in Beirut, was won over to Reformist ideas. He criticized the adoration of icons and considered the Bible, and not the Church, as the supreme authority in matters of Faith. In 1826, the Patriarch summoned As`ad to repent. The latter chose to discuss. He was jailed in the dungeons of the patriarchal seat at Qannûbîn, in Northern Lebanon, where he died four years later.
After the arrest of his brother, Faris left the country for an exile from which he was never to return, except for a brief visit in which he acted as guide for a German Protestant missionary on a tour in Syria and Palestine.
In Cairo, under Egypt’s modernising ruler Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, Faris taught Arabic to American Protestant missionaries and perfected his command of Arabic and the classics under the sheikhs of al-Azhar. He later became an employee of the state press and succeeded Rifâ`a Rif`at al-Tahtâwi as editor of the official al- Waqa’i` al-Masrîya.
Faris lived in Cairo for nine years, during which he married the daughter of the Sawlis, a family of rich Christian notables of Syrian origin. He commuted frequently to Malta where he was commissioned by the Evangelists to direct their Arabic press, and ultimately moved to Malta, where he spent 14 years, between 1834 and 1848. Shidyaq settled in Valetta, he taught at the American missionary school and edited the publications of the American Press. He also held a teaching job in Arabic at Valetta University. During his Malta residence, Shidyaq came into contact with Italian revolutionaries, partisans of Mazzini.
In 1846, Shidyaq was invited by the British Foreign Office and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to translate the Book of Prayers and the Bible into Arabic in collaboration with Dr. Lee, professor of Arabic at Cambridge University.
After commuting for two years between Malta and England, Shidyaq move to London in 1848. During his residence in England the family was afflicted with the loss of a child in the village of Barley near Cambridge. The translation, which was made using the King James’ version, compared with the Hebrew and Greek texts, was finished in record time. After failing to get a teaching post in Arabic at Cambridge University, Faris broke with his Protestant patrons and left for Paris where he lived for some thirty months a libertine life and experienced an intense surge in literary creativity. In Paris he met Lamartine, the French poet who had made his famous journey to Lebanon and championed the cause of Mount Lebanon’s Christians, wrote a poem in praise of Louis Bonaparte, soon to become Napoleon III, and befriended the defeated Algerian rebel against French occupation Emir ‘Abd al-Qâdir, just released from French prisons.
In 1857 Shidyaq was invited by the reformist governor of Tunis, Ahmad Bey to provide Tunisia with a modern newspaper, al-Râ’id al-Tûnisi (The Tunisian Pioneer). By the time the newspaper was launched in 1860, Shidyaq had converted to
Islam and already left for Istanbul, invited by the Sublime Porte to work in the Ottoman capital where he spent the remainder of his days. A combination of factors have contributed to Shidyaq’s conversion. His revolt against official Christianity, in both its Catholic and Protestant versions, is undoubtedly one. Another would be his deep identification with Arab-Islamic heritage, which made him feel more at ease culturally as a Muslim more than a Christian. But there is a more pragmatic, if not opportunistic factor, which had to do with his aspiration to an official position in the Ottoman Empire. A more concrete and more laudable literary motive has to do with his research into the Arab-Islamic heritage. Many of the Arabic manuscripts he was investigating were to be found in mosques or Islamic religious institutions all over the Ottoman Empire, and entry to those was still barred to non-Muslims.
In the Ottoman capital, Shidyaq worked at the Imperial Press, translated the Journal of Ottoman Court Orders into Arabic (1868-1876) and founded the first modern Arabic-language newspaper al-Jawâ’ib in 1861 to which was attached a printing press and publishing house.
This towering figure of the Nahdah was a belles-lettrist, poet, grammarian, lexicologist, philologist, translator, travel-chronicler, educator, journalist and publisher. Faris authored two books relating his travels in Europe Al-Wâsita fi Ma‘rifat Ahwâl Mâlta and Kashf al-Mukhabbâ ‘Ann Funûn Urubbâ (both published in 1863). His writings on philology and grammar include a number of dictionaries from French and English into Arabic, Al-Jâsûs ‘ala-l-Qâmûs [The Spy on the Dictionary], is a monumental critique of Fayrûzabâdi’s classic dictionary Al-Qâmûs al-Muhît. He is also the author of two books on grammar and rhetoric. In addition to his translation of the Bible, Shidyaq translated the first Arabic biography of Martin Luther. In the field of Bible criticism, his recently published manuscript deals with the contradictions between the four Gospels. It has for title Mumahakat al-Ta’wil fi Munaqadat al-Ingil (Altercations of Interpretation. On the Contradictions of the Gospels, 1851) Many other of his writings are either still in manuscript form, or have been lost in a mysterious fire that broke in his house in Istanbul. Shidyaq is primarily known for his masterpiece, al-Sâq `alâ-l-Sâq Fi Ma Huwa al-Fariaq (The Thigh Over the Thigh; On Who is Fariyaq– henceforth, al-Saq) a foundational text of Arabic linguistic and literary modernity, written and published in Arabic in Paris in 1855
The works of Shidyaq have been sentenced to censorship, silence or oblivion in contrast to his otherwise literary fame. Two main reasons account for this. In Lebanon, many have not forgiven him his attack of sectarianism, his anti-clerical positions and his conversion to Islam, not to speak of his profoundly subversive ideas it defends, biting satire and irony and erotic writings. The other reason is that many modernist Arab literary critics of the last half-century, have attacked Shidyaq for not being within the modernist tradition of the novel, or for failing to write one!
Those two factors were conjugated to censor Al-Sâq, even when it was translated and published in Paris in 1991. The French edition was amputated of a small chapter in which the author denounced the Maronite patriarch whom he held accountable for the death of his brother As`ad and enumerated what he called the “thousand outrages against religion committed by the same people who pretend to serve it”, the popes and high dignitaries of the Catholic church. (Cf. Faris Chidyaq:
La jambe sur la jambe, roman, traduit de l’arabe par René R. Khawam, Paris, Phébus, 1991). Strangely enough, in 1855, Rafful Kahla, the Christian Damascene merchant who financed the publication of the book in Paris, had requested the deletion of that same chapter, but withdrew his request upon the insistent refusal of Shidyâq. In 1991, the Parisian French editor of the translation of the book was not as liberal as the Syrian merchant-philanthropist. More surprisingly, the otherwise talented translator René Khawam, a Syrian Christian too by the way, has no explanation for the suppression of the chapter in question other than claiming that it was autobiographical whilst the book was a “novel”. Thus for the book to acquire the right to be translated and published in French, a heavy price had to be paid: it had to fit, willy nilly, in the acceptable western novel genre and to be politically correct in affairs religious. If anything, Al-Saq is structured around an autobiography, as we shall see, without being confined strictly to it. The deleted chapter is but one among hundred of passages that relay events in the life of the author. The books’s subtitle is further evidence: Fî mâ Huwa-l-Fâriyâq (On Who is Al-Fariyaq), and Al-Fariyâq is but a contraction of the name of Shidyâq himself; Far(is Shid)yâq.
Work Language, journalism, lexocigraphy
Shidyaq went farther than any of his contemporaries in the renewal of Arabic language. The translation of the Bible was the occasion for a long-lasting controversy that flared among the translators on questions of technique, the means of reviving Arabic, the language’s origins and the relationship of Arabic to Hebrew, Syriac and
Greek, the use of the colloquial and the accessibility of the texts to the wider public. Shidyaq’s translation had incurred him harsh criticism from Catholic clergymen, notably the Maronite archbishop Tutunji, as well as from his closest collaborators. His co-translator Dr. Lee considered Shidyaq’s rendering of the Holy Text too close to the language of the Qur’an. However, the fiercest polemic however raged between young Ibrâhîm al-Yâziji and Shidyaq. Yâziji defended the tradition set by his father of emulating classical Arabic style, that Shidyaq resented, deeming saj‘ (rhymed prose) and maqâmât as degenerate genres. Nevertheless, Yûsuf al-Asîr sided with Shidyaq, as did the learned Maronite archbishop Yûsuf al-Dibs, who described Shidyaq’s translation as “the most precise translation of the Holy Book”.
Shidyaq’s contribution to reviving and modernising Arabic did not stop at the high culture. We owe to Shidyaq the initiation of the modern newspaper language developed in al-Jawa’ib in which he initiated the art of article-writing, the maqalah.
This will lay the foundation for what could be called ‘middle’ or ‘standardised’ Arabic, a form of the classical language that Arab media will later propagate, enriched and modified by the spoken language.
In the final analysis, what better tribute to Shidyaq’s excellence in Arabic, than the testimony of Imam Muhammad `Abdu who described Shidyaq ‘an Imam in the Arabic language’, openly preferring Shidyaq’s style to his own?
As a lexicographer, Shidyaq will be remembered for his critique of alFayrouzabadi’s dictionary al-Qamous, in a voluminous book appropriately entitled al-Jasous `ala-l-Qamous, the Spy on the Qamous (=dictionary). He is said to have memorised that whole dictionary by heart. As a tribute for his role as a lexicographer, the famous Bulaq printing Press in Egypt chose Shidyaq to write the introduction to its to reprint of Lissan al-`Arab (The Arabic Tongue), the celebrated many-volumed dictionary of Ibn Manzour.
As a publisher, Shidyaq devoted the best part of his active life in Istanbul to editing and publishing the classics of the Arab literary and cultural heritage. Thanks to the work of Geoffrey Roper, ex-librarian at Cambridge university, we know have the list of 75 of such manuscripts, chosen among the most creative, and properly edited with comparisons between different manuscripts, and printed in clear type and on quality paper and binding.
A New Literature
Al-Saq occupies a unique position in Arabic literature inasmuch as it forms a genre of its own. It is autobiographical without being reduced to simply recording one’s life, as it also contains travel chronicles, lexicography lists and all the imaginable digressions including irony, satire, relations of dreams, anecdotes, storytelling, and philosophic meditations. It is a novel form in Arabic literature, without necessarily being fixed in the novel genre despite its individual subjective tone and its two principal characters, the couple Fariyaq and Fariyaqiyah. The work contains stories but is not a story, and it has no plot and no real ending. For it concludes with a surprising page written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic that deals additional blows to the clerics and the rich, before announcing a forthcoming second volume of the book to be delivered “after the author has been stoned or crucified by God’s charity and generosity, Amen” according to the words of Shidyaq himself (Al-Saq, 710)
In the construction of al-Saq, Shidyaq has accomplished a formidable linguistic and literary tour de force. Deeply rooted in the Arab heritage, endowed with an exceptional mastery of the language, the author makes use of the traditional maqama as a digressive story telling form, but after purging it of its empty rhetoric and its saj` (rhymed prose). In contrast, he revives the creative prose of the great Abbassid Arab prosateur and satirist Al-Jahiz, all the while visibly inspired by Lurence Sterne’s equally unclassifiable work Tristram Shandy from which he borrows structural elements and such tricks as the empty chapter and the blank spaces to be filled by the reader.
From East to West and from West to East
Shidyaq is a singular case in the way the intellectuals of the Arab Nahdah viewed the West. The product of an East he conceived as plural and conflictual, he saw the West in a similar vein. The Lebanese literary critic Mârûn ‘Abbûd, described him as a westernized intellectual who revealed the negative as well as the positive aspects of the West. The attraction of civilization, progress, democracy and freedom did not mask the reality of the misery of the majority of the working population in the Europe of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Informed by keen observation and a high sensibility to the paradoxical and the equivocal, the books describe every conceivable aspect of the complexity of French and British societies. The author marvelled at the contrast between the sense of security the English enjoyed and the shockingly abominable serial crimes committed in London and its countryside. He appreciated the fact that Europeans cared little for the individuals’ origin or religion, contrary to what prevailed in the East, but still preferred the generosity, solidarity and intimacy of life in the East to the individualism and selfishness of life in European societies. Though he wrote admiringly of the most recent scientific discoveries (such as the telegraph and the gas-lit streets) he did not fail to mention the widespread superstitions and practice of black magic in England.
In as much as he was enthusiastic about equality among citizens in England, Shidyaq was also deeply aware of the rigidity of its social hierarchy, noting that “stratification between the different classes of the people is very much like the stratification of the organs of the human body, each having its own specific function which it does not transgress” (Shidyaq, 1855: 191). He saw the stratification of British society articulated into five classes. First in rank were the princes, ministers, noblemen and officials of the state. Second in rank were the elite and the notables (the landed gentry). Third, were scientists, judges and import-export merchants. Fourth were small and middle merchants and scribes, and fifth were craftsmen, workers and peasants (Shidyaq, 1863: 121).
In fact, Shidyaq was shocked to find that the living conditions of the French and English workers and peasants were no better than those of their counterparts in his own country (al-Saq, 1855, 76). Not content with providing a mere description, he sought to analyze the causes, concluding that the misery of peasants in England lay in the system of land-ownership where a few thousands families held monopoly over the majority of cultivable land (Shidyaq, 1855: 591).
He refuted the legitimacy of inherited wealth, and the logic used by the rich to keep the poor in a state of deprivation, on the grounds that giving the poor their due would wet their avidity. Shidyaq vetted his anger against the religious discourses idealizing poverty. He also meditated in long passages on the manner in which money corrupts human relations and feelings. In Victorian London, where rich and poor quarters coexisted side by side, “as Heaven and Hell would coexist”, Shidyaq came to realise that poverty was the basis of all social ills: crime, suicide, prostitution of adolescents, abortion, etc. He poignantly understood that the misery of the many made the happiness of the few: “How could it be that this world is built upon so much corruption/luxury?” he asked, “How could it be that a thousand human beings, nay two thousands, should labour for the happiness of only one man?” (Shidyaq, 1855:
595). On one of his promenades in London he writes:
“its workers are the creators of the whole world and yet are deprived of it and the fate of the worker is like that of the peasant in the sense that he toils and suffers all day and has no chance at might but to just close his eyes and go to sleep. Strange how these people embellish life and make it more joyful and civilized and are excluded from it and deprived of it…” (al-saq, 592)
Shidyaq was thus seduced by socialism. He found out that a society of peasants and workers is more reasonable than a society exclusively and entirely composed of the rich, and added that a ‘State of the Poor’ would be closer to reality and to justice than the ‘State of the Rich’ (Al-Sulh, 1980: 209). But he remained perplexed as to why, despite all ills and the flagrant class differences, the English do not rebel as the French frequently do? Not an irrelevant question for somebody who landed in England in 1848 as revolutions were raging all over Europe. He ventured two main explanations: one was the individualism of the English (each minding his/her own business, in the literal sense of the term); the other was the state of extreme poverty that prevented them from being preoccupied with anything else but earning their daily bread (Shidyaq, 1863: 121-22). That passivity explained the low percentage of policemen to the overall population: 25.000 policemen for a population of 17 million.
It is relevant to compare Shidyaq in this respect with another traveller to Europe, Rifa`a Rif`at al-Tahtawi who lived in Paris during from 1826 to 1831, a quarter of a century before Shidyaq’s visit. The events witnessed by the two men were radically different. Tahtawi was in Paris in his capacity as the imam of one of the first student study missions in France, instigated by Egypt’s ruler Mohammad ‘Ali Pasha. He left the French capital after the outbreak of the republican revolution of 1831, which he described in detail and with much admiration in his Takhlees alIbreez fi Talkheess Bareez (1834, recently translated into English) in which Tahtawi did not hide his sympathy for the ‘Party of Freedom’ in the face of the ‘Monarchist Party’.
In contrast, Shidyaq arrived to Paris in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, which had a powerful working class component. Though defeated, the ideas of socialism and feminism were still very much alive under the Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The position held by each of the two men in his own country and their different experiences in Europe influenced their respective outlooks to a great extent. Tahtawi’s outlook was that of an al-Azhar scholar enthralled by the project of building a modern state in Egypt. What caught his attention most in France were elements that pertained directly to political power and state building: the republican constitution, the political and judicial equality between citizens, the rule of law, the separation of powers, etc. Moreover, he was convinced of the importance of education in modernizing society, an Arab Nahdah obsession, par excellence. Tahtawi was a liberal in economics and a liberal republican in politics. He admired industrialization without overseeing the negative consequences of capitalism, which he conceived as economic rather than social: competition under capitalism invariably leading to bankruptcy. In other words, Tahtawi saw the negative consequences of capitalism as falling mainly on the capitalists themselves. He denounced the practice of interest, in conformity with the Quranic ban on usury, but had no readily accepted the profit motive.
In short, Tahtawi, the Azharite, was concerned with State building. Shidyaq, the exiled rebel and outspoken enemy of tradition and inequality, was more focused on social change. It is through social change that he conceived modernity and the solution of the riddle of the Nahdah.
Social Change as Modernity
How to explain the progress of the West and the regression of the East and how to bridge the gap between the two. Such was the riddle that the Nahdah posed on itself and on Arab society. Shidyaq accepted the challenge. At one point, he interrupted his description of life in England and exclaims: “When will we, sons and daughters of Adam, become human being as they are? When will we finally become aware of our rights and our duties?” Yet his answers to the riddle differed radically from those of his contemporaries, while these focused on education and science, Shidyaq’s answers articulated around four main axes: freedom, the work ethic, the value of time, and the emancipation of women.
A Libertarian Secularist
In a chapter of Al-Saq, titled An Incitement to Nudity, Shidyaq relays the adventures of a Protestant missionary who suddenly decides to go naked. That title may equally serve as a metaphor for Shidyaq’s position on the question of liberty and secularism. All his intellectual and practical adventures were a long quest for freedom. Beyond the struggle for his own personal freedom, he demanded a liberty predicated on equality of rights between human beings in opposition to all kinds of privileges. At the heart of this conception lies the firm belief in freedom of opinion. In Shidyaq’s accusatory address to the church dignitaries held responsible for the death of his brother, are encapsulated both his liberal and the secular notions. Questioning the arbitrary way in which the Maronite patriarch ordered the incarceration of As‘ad Shidyaq, he says:
“You had no religious or civil authority on him … According to religious canon, Christ and his disciples did not command jail for those who opposed their ideas, they only ostracized them … In addition, Christ and his disciples had no interest except in encouraging good behaviour, and commending charity, humility, peace, patience and tolerance. In civilian terms, my brother did not commit any crime against his neighbour, his prince or against the State for that matter. And even if he had, he should have been tried before a judge in court… Granted that my brother had debated and polemized in matters religious and maintained that you were in the wrong, you had no right to kill him for that. You should have rather refuted his proofs and his arguments by word or text, if you considered him a scholar whose ideas you dread … Had you any foresight, you would have realised that oppressing someone and compelling him to renounce his beliefs, will only increase the attachment of the oppressed and his party to those beliefs for which he had been oppressed.” (Shidyaq, 1855: 188).
As can be seen, Shidyaq preached religious tolerance all the while insisting that religion was a private matter that cannot be a viable foundation for the state, he advocated the separation of religion and state, endorsing unwaveringly the sovereignty of the state over religious institutions. On the other hand, he maintained that the ideals of justice and equity in religions would and should always inspire the constitutions and legislations of states.
Labour and Time
Shidyaq deemed industrialization and the work ethic as the chief engines, modernity and renaissance could not be achieved unless the socio-economic conditions that engendered them in the West were reproduced in the Arab world. That, any way was the gist of Muhammad `Ali’s project in Egypt. “Education without work”, he said, “is like a tree without fruits or a river without water”. In addition, work was the means by which the future is secured. He also warned against reducing modernity and civilisation to life in urban centres and to speaking a foreign language. Shidyaq granted equal importance to the notion of time. During his stay in Istanbul, he frequently criticized the sheer waste of time in the conduct of everyday life.
Women, their love and emancipation
Al-Sâq ‘ala-l-Sâq is essentially the initiation voyage of an Arab man in the world of women, wherein Shidyaq’s curiosity and infatuation with women overcomes the temptations of machism. He defined the purpose of the book initially as that of “uncovering the marvels of Arabic and singing the praise of women”. The title says it all, linking language to gender: The Thigh Over the Thigh is as much a reference to the Oriental storyteller’s (hakawâti) seated posture as much as to the embrace during the sexual act. More, Shidyaq claimed that “while writing the book he had himself lived part of his life as a woman in order to learn feminine secrets; before God monstruously metamorphosed me into a man” (al-Saq, 128).
To begin with, al-Saq gave Arab women a voice, and created the first feminine character in modern Arabic literature: Al-Fariyaqiyah, feminine alter ego of Fariyaq, wife, lover, interlocutor and above all equal partner in the birth of a couple in the romantic sense of the term. The fact that she is not called the Fariyaqa, the feminine of Fariyaq, but Fariyaqiyah, an attribute derived from Faryaq, has inspired some literary critics to claim that she is not a separate character but the feminine in Shidyaq himself.
Be that as it may, Fariyaqiyah not only imposes herself in the life of the couple but in language itself. Complaining that Arabic is a masculinized language, she demands, in very post-modern terms, that language be feminized. And feminized it is under the magical pen of the author, flowing like an unending delirium when it comes to women and love. Egyptian women are depicted as so elegant and ethereal in their posture they could be seen walking on walls and ceilings. Strangely enough, Fariyaq declared his preference for veiled women, as the veil allows freedom for the imagination, but he bitterly criticized the Basira, the Egyptian tradition of publicly deploying a handkerchief with the bride’s virgin blood on Laylat al-Dukhlah, the wedding night.
Echoing the de Cameron nights, or the Canterbury tales, Fariyaq delights in stories about the debauchery of priests and rich people. He also details the sexual services offered by Parisian prostitutes as much as he marvels at the strange habit of the fervently religious prostitutes of Valetta, who, upon receiving a client, turn the icons and statues of the Virgin Mary and the saints to face the wall. In addition to all this and others, you will find tens of pages of lexical listings of the parts of woman’s body, the various stages of `ishq, and the different positions of love-making, etc. As early as 1855, Shidyaq had postulated that “there will be no liberation nor renaissance of the East without the liberation and renaissance of the Oriental woman”. In contrast to other pioneers of feminism (al-Tahtâwi, Bustâni or Qasim Amin) who dreamt of an ideal Oriental woman educated yet bound to her household, playing her role as educator to the new generation (of male children) Shidyaq was a partisan of the complete equality between women and men. He strongly opposed sexual segregation –arguing that segregation reduces woman to a sexual object. He defended women’s right to work, choose their husbands and their equal rights in divorce. On the other hand, he maintained that the right of women to education and work would remain unfulfilled as long as man does not share all that interests him with his wife and contribute to the development of her own personality.
However, Shidyaq’s most original contribution to women’s liberation is his defense of women’s equal right to sexual pleasure. In the long dialogues between Fariyaq and Fariyaquiyah are discussed the most intimate questions concerning the emotional and sexual life of man and woman. There emerges a new approach that goes to the heart of the matter of gender relations: the question of instinct between freedom and repression. For example, when the wife evokes “extra-marital love” (Shidyaq refrains from using ‘infidelity’) the husband attacks prevailing hypocrisy and double standards, noting furthermore that women have more reasons to be “unfaithful” than men. Among the reasons listed, Fariyaqiyah insists upon the husband’s incapacity to satisfy his wife sexually.
Shidyaq and Flaubert
In voicing his ideas in favour of the emancipation of Oriental women, Shidyaq did not transform European women into a referent or model. He described European women in the finest details: looks, personality, clothing, relationship with men, and engaged in a relentless comparison between French and British women. He further noted that Parisian women exerted strong control over their men, and he did not play down his preference for British women. Yet, he was invariably careful not to generalize, or essentialize or stereotype a ‘European’ or ‘Western’ woman.
It that sense, it would be interesting to compare Shidyaq’s views on European women with those of French novelist Gustave Flaubert on Arab women. Edward Said noted the identification Flaubert makes between the Orient and sex. In explaining this identification, the author of Orientalism maintains that the French novelist was searching in Egypt for what he and his contemporaries lacked in 19th century Europe, where sex had become institutionalized and subjected to a whole network of legal, moral and even political restraints (Said, 1978: 188). It could easily be added that the dialectic of the East-West relationship operates in such a manner that each of these two writers was searching in the country of the other, for what he lacked in his own country. Both Flaubert and Shidyaq searched for prostitutes in Cairo and Paris, and both found them. Yet the way each regarded his own ‘discovery’ is radically different from the other.
Significantly, when Flaubert spent eight months in Egypt in 1848-49, Shidyaq was in England. When Flaubert’s journal of his Egypt diaries was published in Paris, in 1853, Shidyaq was living in Paris. As we have seen, his description of the versatility of French prostitutes in the arts of love was but a sequel in a long journey in the world of women. Flaubert’s feminine encounters in Egypt can be reduced to the dancers and prostitutes he frequented. Worse than that, the great French novelist considered his sexual encounters with a dozen âlimas and prostitutes sufficient data from which to establish a stereotype: the Egyptian prostitute became the coined representation of the ‘Arab woman’, in general, and is presented “as a mere sexual tool… incapable of distinguishing one man from another, inasmuch as she is incapable of obtaining pleasure or reaching orgasm due the fact that she has undergone clitoridectomy.” (Flaubert, 1853).
In contrast, Shidyaq’s deep sense of observation and criticiam drives him to approach prostitution as a social and human problem. He produces statistics concerning the respective number of prostitutes in London and Paris and investigates their legal and health status. Then goes on to look into the causes that lead women, especially teenagers and minors, to prostitution and concludes that poverty is the major cause. And finally vents his revulsion and anger at the prostitution of minors describing poignantly their medical afflictions, notably venereal diseases and abortions. In contrast, all that Flaubert has to say in this respect is boast that he had sex with a fourteen-year old Egyptian prostitute…
Late Style: Ottoman Days
An intellectual who has made the transition from that of copyist and secretary in the service of the Emirs and Sheikhs of Mount Lebanon to more modern and powerful patrons does not necessarily become more independent or free in his ideas, positions and actions. Shidyaq managed to evade the constraints of his Protestant patrons, by simply breaking away and leaving the grounds, he was nevertheless bound by more powerful patrons. The service of the Sultan had more imposing obligations and limits. Especially for a British citizen, who, in addition, was a fervent admirer of the Khedives of Egypt and beneficiary of their financial support. It is to the credit of Shidyaq that he tried to resist and push those limits as best he can.
Be that as it may, our author’s social and political positions were extremely moderated during the quarter of a century of his life in Istanbul, where he figures mainly as an active supporter of the Ottoman centralising and modernising reforms of 1839 and 1856, known as the Tanzimat. Shidyaq welcomed and heartily defended the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 which abolished the millet system that divided the Ottoman subjects between Muslims and ‘protected’ Christian and Jewish Dhimmis, declared the equality between all the subjects of the Empire and vowed to provide freedom and security for all.
Paradoxically for that self-professed socialist, it was a workers’ revolt that contributed in moderating his radical ideas on democracy and socialism. Shidyaq was shocked by the unbridled violence of the masses during the Paris Commune of 1871. As a journalist, he scrutinized news, cross checked and double checked as much as he could the dispatches diffused by the news agencies of the time, refusing to take for granted all that was produced by the right-wing campaign against the rebels. Nevertheless, the excesses of the communards pushed him to become a partisan of what he called “an overriding government (Hukûmah Qâhirah)” capable of subduing its citizens. He also accused the Paris proletariat that chose to revolt whilst the country was occupied by Prussian troops, of disregard for France’s national interests.
As a moderate reformer, Shidyaq then sought to strike a compromise between the Islamic shûra and the european republican principle of popular sovereignty without abandoning the quest for reconciling freedom and equality. He maintained his interest in the socialist movements and wrote long serialised articles on the Russian socialists published in al-Jawa’ib in 1878 in which he coined the term Ishtirâkiyyah as a translation for ‘socialism’.
Though such positions were tolerated if not welcome by the Ottoman authorities, the clash came when Shidyaq was increasingly unable to negotiate the conflicting Ottoman, Egyptian and British interests and policies especially with the `Urabi rebellion, in 1882, and the subsequent British occupation of Egypt. al-Jawa’ib was nevertheless banned a number of times before finally stopping publication in Istanbul and moving to Tunis and then to Cairo.
Another issue of discord with the Ottoman authorities concerned the Sublime Porte’s campaign of Turkification to which Shidyaq reacted with a compelling act of faith in the ethnic specificity of Arabs, as a community bound by a shared language and culture.
Ahmad Faris Shidyaq died in Istanbul on 20 September 1887. As if to confirm his permanent fidelity to the first country of his exile, he went on a last visit to Cairo in 1886 where he was received with honours by the intellectual community and met the Khedive Isma`il. Strangely enough, the British consul in Istanbul was not present at the funeral of the British citizen, though less related consuls of foreign powers had attended. Maybe an additional proof that our author did not succeed in pleasing any major power at the end of his life.
On 5 October of that year, Shidyaq’s corpse arrived to Beirut by sea from Istanbul. Faris al-Khûri, a young lawyer who would later served as Syria’s Prime Minister, described the tension reigning over the city as Christian and Muslim clerics disputed the property of the corpse. A compromise was reached and both parties participated in the funeral rites at the Grand `Umari mosque in Beirut and the body was laid to rest in accordance with the dead man’s testament in a small cemetery in Shidyaq WIKO 15
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Hazmiyeh, a neutral space between the Christian and Muslim districts, where are buried the Christian Ottoman pashas who governed Mount-Lebanon under the Mutassarrifiyah (1861-1915).
One hundred and twenty one years after his death, the Lebanese government has yet to pay tribute to the country’s towering literary figure. A number of Shidyaq’s descendents, wanting to honour their relative by erecting a bust statue of him in his native village, soon found the family council divided, as a faction could not resign itself to honouring the memory of a man with a Muslim first name in a Maronite village in the Christian heartland of Kisrawan. Pressure was exerted on the municipality and the Ministry of Interior to prevent the ceding of a small plot of land not exceeding one square meter upon which to build the statue’s base. The opposition faction succeeded in blocking the municipal decision. A compromise settlement was suggested to inscribe the name on the statue’s base as “Faris Shidyaq, 1804-1887, known as Ahmad Faris” but agreement has not been reached on it yet.