Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq:
An Arab Traveler in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Beyond
The best way to introduce al-Shidyāq is to first put his life and work in their proper context, that of the nineteenth-century Arab cultural renaissance (nahḍa) of which he was the most illustrious intellectual.
The nahḍa
The nahḍa 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 Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh. But it consisted also of imagining an Egyptian modern state in the work of Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī. The Lebanese nahḍa, an undertaking shouldered mainly by Christian intellectuals, did involve religious reform and did not shy away from social and political reforms, but was largely concerned with a secular literary and cultural revival.
The Lebanese contribution to the nahḍa 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 muqāṭaʿjī 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 nahḍa’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 unfolded in the city, where they became educators, translators, journalists, or simply writers earning a living from their writing. Their new patrons were British, American, and French missionaries, or local merchants who replaced the Emirs and Sheikhs.
Let us now have a look at the nahḍa’s principal actors and achievements: Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī (1800–1871) began his career as a private secretary to prince Ḥaydar al-Shihābī and Bashīr Shihāb II (ruling princes of Mount Lebanon, 1779–1840). He moved to Beirut around 1840 and worked as an Arabic tutor to Protestant missionaries until he became a teacher at the Syrian Protestant College (precursor of the American University of Beirut). Al-Yāzijī wrote on philosophy, grammar, style, rhetoric, and poetry. His chief contribution to the nahḍa was his call to emulate classical Arab writers as a means of reviving Arabic language and literature. His son Ibrāhīm (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 almanac and created a simplified Arabic font, which contributed to the development of Arabic printing. Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī died in exile in Egypt fleeing Ottoman repression.
Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–1883) was the nahḍa’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 ʿAyn 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 Salīm (1848–1884), the weekly al-Junayna, edited by his kinsman Sulaymān (1856–1925, who also translated Homer’s Illiad), and the monthly al-Jinān. His main contributions are the first modern Arabic dictionary Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ (1870) and a six-volume encyclopedia, Dāʾirat al-maʿārif (1870–1882). Another five volumes of the encyclopedia were added by Salīm and Sulaymān after the muʿallim’s death.
Yūsuf al-Asīr (1815–1889), born in Ṣaydā, was the prominent Muslim among the men of the nahḍa. A graduate of al-Azhar in Cairo, he was appointed judge in Tripoli, muftī in ʿAkkā (Acre, Palestine), and attorney general in Mount Lebanon under the mutaṣarrifiyya (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 letters from the straitjacket of rigid conventional style and its state of lethargy was a motivation animating all the pioneers of the nahḍa. They succeeded brilliantly with prose, less so with poetry. The translation of the Bible into Arabic was undoubtedly a landmark in that effort. Far beyond its impact with regards to the religious, the process of translation itself generated literary masterpieces, crowning the efforts of the nahḍa’s pioneers as well as reviving and renewing Arabic prose. Three translations were produced within a period of fifteen years, initiated by the Evangelists and soon followed by the Catholic missionaries. The translation by al-Shidyāq and the British orientalist Samuel Lee (1783–1852), who taught Arabic and Hebrew at Cambridge University, was funded by the British Foreign Office and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. It was published in 1857 and remains largely unknown. Assisted by Buṭrus al-Bustānī, the American Protestant missionary in Beirut Eli Smith (1801–1857) ventured on his own undertaking in 1847, and their translation was corrected by Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī. After Smith’s death, the task was taken over by another member of the Syrian Protestant mission, Cornelius Van Dyck (1818–1895), helped by the above-mentioned Yūsuf al-Asīr, with the final version coming out in 1865. In 1880, Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī produced a translation of the Bible for the Catholic Jesuit missionaries. Whatever the difference between the translated versions, they influenced generations of creative writers, not least prominent amongst them was Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān (1883–1931), author of The Prophet.
Renewal did not stop at language. New literary genres began to appear, directly inspired by Western literature. Mārūn al-Naqqāsh (1817–1855) is credited with having introduced the theatrical arts; in 1848, he staged the first modern play in Arabic, al-Bakhīl (The Miser), a loose translation of Molière’s L’Avare. Three years later, and with permission from the Ottoman Sultan, he set up the first modern theater in Syria next to his house in the Jummayza district of Beirut. Mīkhāʾīl Mishāqqa (1800–1888), born in Dayr al-Qamar to a family of mudabbirs (scribes and secretaries) converted to trade, pioneered the autobiography genre. Al-Jawāb ʿalā iqtirāḥ al-aḥbāb (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 muqāṭaʿjī order. The narrative emphasized the role of the individual in history and society. In his turn, Salīm al-Bustānī is credited with being a pioneer of the novel genre with his al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām (Love in Syrian Gardens, 1870) and Zanūbiyā (1871). Shortly thereafter, in 1891, Jirjī Zaydān (1861–1914) wrote the first of a series of historical novels, transcribing glorious and dramatic episodes of Arab-Muslim history. He also wrote a history of Arabic literature (Tārīkh ādāb al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya, 1911–1914) and a history of Muslim civilization (Tārīkh al-tamaddun al-islāmī, 1902–1906) which have become classics.
The men of the nahḍa 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 muqāṭaʿjī system and the Maronite Church. Furthermore, the impact of the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon on their lives and ideas was decisive. In his political bulletin Nafīr Sūriyya (The Clarion of Syria), Buṭrus al-Bustānī addressed weekly letters to “the sons of the nation” (“abnāʾ al-waṭan”) 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 “civilized West” and severe criticism of his compatriots, taxed as “tribes in discord,” the majority of whom were “not concerned with the common good nor harboring any feeling of belonging to the homeland.” Al-Bustānī 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.” Al-Bustānī founded his National School (al-Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya) in 1863 in order to contribute to the fight against the sequels of the war and propagate coexistence between the religious communities. This school was the first secular school in the Arab East and taught Arabic, Turkish, French, English, Greek, and Latin.
Many factors account for the conversion to Protestantism of the Maronites al-Bustānī and al-Shidyāq and the Greek Catholic Mishāqqa, and the close association of the Greek Catholic al-Yāzijīs with Protestant missionaries. Indeed, the men of the nahḍa 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 pretense to be the only authority on 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 bibilshiyyīn). The nahḍa 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 nahḍa were Ottoman reformers, Arab revivalists, and patriots. Ultimately, almost all took their distance from their Protestant associates. Buṭrus al-Bustānī publicly denounced the interference of foreign missionaries in Syrian internal affairs. Mishāqqa and al-Shidyāq went through a period of severe agnosticism. Al-Shidyāq attacked both Catholics and Protestants and converted to Islam. In that sense, the Christian pioneers of the Lebanese nahḍa 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, and the centrality of the individual in society and vis-à-vis the State were salient themes in their writings. Buṭrus al-Bustānī spent five months during the 1860 civil war translating Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whose central theme is about how society’s progress is predicated on the emergence of the individual. He speaks in the name of all the nahḍa men when he defines his political philosophy in the following comment from Letter 9 of his Nafīr Sūriyya (January 14, 1861): “The lack of good government and the scorn for laws are both among the greatest evils for a country whatever the stage of its civilization 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.”
It would also be a gross oversimplification to assume that the intellectuals of the nahḍa were simply Westernizers. To begin with, their prime goal was the revival of the Arabic language and culture of the ‘golden age’ of Arab-Islamic civilization. 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 nahḍa followed the tradition of its Egyptian counterpart in considering education as a principal mode of access to modernity and civilization. More importantly, the intellectuals of the Lebanese nahḍa were also feminist pioneers. Their founding text is Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s famous Khiṭāb fī taʿlīm al-nisāʾ (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. Al-Bustānī was himself married to an educated woman, Rahel ʿAtā, the first graduate of the American School for Girls in Beirut (presently the Lebanese American University).
Finally, the Lebanese nahḍa was a movement for the national, and not only cultural, awakening and revival of the Arabs. Its main actors viewed Arabism as belonging to a common language, culture, and history. In 1865, Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī began a poem he declaimed before the Syrian Scientific Society with his famous call: “Arabs, arise and awake!” (“Tanabbahū wa-stafīqū ayyuhā l-ʿArab”), which became the rallying call for the early generations of Arab nationalists. Buṭrus al-Bustānī, for his part, developed the notion of homeland (waṭan) in a vein similar to that of al-Ṭahṭāwī, and coined the motto “the love of the homeland is an act of [religious] faith” (“ḥubb al-waṭan min al-īmān”). Al-Bustānī’s ‘homeland’ was defined as natural ‘Syria’ (Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine). In line with the nahḍa’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
Fāris al-Shidyāq was born in ʿAshqūt (Kisrawān) in 1804 and lived in Ḥadath, 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” (“shuhadāʾ ḥurriyyat al-fikr wa-l-mayl”), to use the words of his pupil Mārūn ʿAbbūd. His father, who was opposed to the rule of Bashīr Shihāb II, the reigning prince of Mount Lebanon (1789–1840), participated in the commoners’ revolt against the ruler in 1820–1821. Upon the bloody defeat of the revolt, he went into exile in Damascus where he died in that same year. Following his father’s death, the adolescent Fāris had to quit his education at the Maronite convent in ʿAyn Waraqa and work as a copyist of manuscripts.
The other more dramatic event concerned Fāris’s older brother Asʿad, his tutor in Syriac and Arabic. Asʿad’s tragic death irreversibly changed the course of Fāris’s life. In the 1820s, in Mount Lebanon, the Maronite Church was inching under the control of Rome, engaged in a counteroffensive against the ideas of the French Revolution and Protestantism. The Maronite Patriarch Ḥubaysh published two edicts against the ‘Protestant heresy,’ forbidding his subjects commerce with them, under threat of ex-communion. Asʿad al-Shidyāq, summoned to teach Arabic grammar in the 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 Asʿad to repent. The latter chose to discuss in matters of faith. He was jailed in the dungeons of the patriarchal seat at Qannūbīn, in Northern Lebanon, where he died four years later.
After the arrest of his brother, Fāris 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 modernizing ruler Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha, Fāris 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, according to some, may have succeeded Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī as editor of the official al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya. Fāris lived in Cairo for nine years, during which he married a daughter of the Ṣawlīs, 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. Al-Shidyāq settled in Valetta, where 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, al-Shidyāq came into contact with Italian revolutionaries, partisans of Giuseppe Mazzini.
In 1846, al-Shidyāq 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 Samuel Lee, professor of Arabic at Cambridge. After commuting for two years between Malta and England, al-Shidyāq moved to London in 1848. 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, Fāris 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 Alphonse de 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 ʿAbd al-Qādir, who had just been released from French prisons.
In 1857, al-Shidyāq was invited by the reformist governor of Tunis, Aḥmad Bey, to provide Tunisia with a modern newspaper, al-Rāʾid al-Tūnisī (The Tunisian Pioneer). By the time the newspaper was launched in 1860, al-Shidyāq had converted to Islam and changed his name to Aḥmad Fāris 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 contributed to al-Shidyāq’s conversion. His revolt against official Christianity, in both its Catholic and Protestant versions, is undoubtedly one. Another would have been his deep identification with the Arab-Islamic heritage, which made him feel more at ease culturally as a Muslim than as 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, al-Shidyāq worked at the Imperial Press, translated the Journal of Ottoman Court Orders into Arabic (1868–1876) and, in 1861, founded the first modern Arabic-language newspaper, al-Jawāʾib, to which was attached a printing press and publishing house.
A New Literature
This towering figure of the nahḍa was a belles-lettrist, poet, grammarian, lexicologist, philologist, translator, travel-chronicler, educator, journalist, and publisher. Fāris authored two books relating his travels in Europe al-Wāsiṭa fī maʿrifat aḥwāl Māliṭa and Kashf al-mukhabbaʾ ʿan funūn Ūrubbā (both published in 1863). His writings on philology and grammar include a number of dictionaries from French and English into Arabic, while al-Jāsūs ʿalā al-qāmūs (The Spy on the Dictionary, 1881) is a monumental critique of al-Fīrūzābādī’s classic dictionary al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ. He is also the author of two books on grammar and rhetoric. In addition to his translation of the Bible, al-Shidyāq translated one of the first Arabic biographies of Martin Luther. In the field of Biblical criticism, his recently published manuscript, Mumāḥakāt al-taʾwīl fī munāqaḍāt al-injīl (Altercations of Interpretation: On the Contradictions of the Gospels, 1851), deals with the contradictions between the four Gospels. Many other of his writings are either still in manuscript form or were lost in a mysterious fire that broke out in his house in Istanbul. Today, al-Shidyāq is primarily known for his masterpiece al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq (Leg Over Leg, or: The Turtle in the Tree, Concerning The Fāriyāq, What Manner of Creature Might He Be—henceforth al-Sāq), a foundational text of Arabic linguistic and literary modernity, written and published in Arabic in Paris in 1855; it is now available to the English-speaking public thanks to the excellent bilingual edition prepared by Humphrey Davies who brilliantly managed to render the various facets of this extraordinary text.
Al-Sāq 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 the author’s life, as it also contains travel chronicles, lexicographical 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 al-Fāriyāq and al-Fāryiāqiyya. The work contains stories but is not a story, and it has no plot and no real ending. 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.”
In the construction of al-Sāq, al-Shidyāq 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 maqāma as a digressive storytelling form, but after purging it of its empty rhetoric and its sajʿ (rhymed prose). In contrast, he revives the creative prose of the great Abbassid Arab prose writer and satirist al-Jāḥiẓ, all the while visibly inspired by Laurence 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 in by the reader.
The works of al-Shidyāq 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 on sectarianism, his anti-clerical positions, and his conversion to Islam, not to speak of his profoundly subversive ideas, his biting satire and irony, and his erotic writings. The other reason is that many modernist Arab literary critics of the last half-century have attacked al-Shidyāq for not being within the modernist tradition of the novel, or for failing to write one!
Those two factors were conjugated to censor al-Sāq, even when it was translated into French and published in Paris in 1991 under the title La jambe sur la jambe. 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 Asʿad 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. Strangely enough, in 1855, Rāfāʾīl Kaḥlā, 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 al-Shidyāq. In 1991, René Khawam, the editor and translator of the French translation of the book, was not as liberal as the Syrian merchant-philanthropist. More surprisingly, the otherwise talented translator Khawam—a Syrian Christian too—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, into the acceptable Western novel genre and to be politically correct in religious affairs. If anything, al-Sāq is structured around an autobiography, as we shall see, without being confined strictly to it. The deleted chapter is but one among hundreds of passages that relay events from the life of the author. The book’s subtitle is further evidence: fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq (literally On Who Is al-Fāriyāq), and al-Fāriyāq is but a contraction of the name of al-Shidyāq himself, Fāri(s al-Shid)yāq.
Language, Lexicography, and the Press
Al-Shidyāq went farther than any of his contemporaries in the renewal of the 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. Al-Shidyāq’s translation had incurred him harsh criticism from Catholic clergymen, notably the Maronite archbishop Athanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī, as well as from his closest collaborators. His co-translator, Samuel Lee, considered al-Shidyāq’s rendering of the Holy Text too close to the language of the Qur’an. The fiercest polemic, however, raged between al-Shidyāq and young Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī. Al-Yāzijī defended the tradition set by his father of emulating classical Arabic style, that al-Shidyāq resented, deeming sajʿ (rhymed prose) and the maqāma as degenerate genres. Nevertheless, Yūsuf al-Asīr sided with al-Shidyāq, as did the learned Maronite archbishop Yūsuf al-Dibs, who described al-Shidyāq’s translation as “the most precise translation of the Holy Book.”
Al-Shidyāq’s contribution to reviving and modernizing Arabic did not stop at the high culture. We owe to him the initiation of the modern newspaper language developed in al-Jawāʾib, in which he initiated the art of article writing, the maqāla. This will lay the foundation for what could be called ‘middle’ or ‘standardized’ 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 al-Shidyāq’s excellence in Arabic than the testimony of Imam Muḥammad ʿAbduh who described al-Shidyāq as “an Imam in the Arabic language,” openly preferring al-Shidyāq’s style to his own?
As a lexicographer, al-Shidyāq will be remembered for his critique of al-Fīrūzābādī’s dictionary al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, in a voluminous book appropriately entitled al-Jāsūs ʿalā al-Qāmūs (The Spy on the Qāmūs [i.e., dictionary]). He is said to have memorized that whole dictionary by heart. As a tribute to his role as a lexicographer, the famous Būlāq printing press in Egypt chose al-Shidyāq to write the introduction to its reprint of Lisān al-ʿArab (The Arab’s Tongue), the celebrated thirteenth-century multivolume dictionary of Ibn Manẓūr.
As a publisher, al-Shidyāq devoted the best part of his active life in Istanbul to editing and publishing the classics of the Arab literary and cultural heritage, chosen among the most creative works, properly edited with comparisons between different manuscripts, and printed in clear type and on quality paper and binding.
From East to West and from West to East
Al-Shidyāq is a singular case in the way the intellectuals of the Arab nahḍa 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 Mārūn ʿAbbūd 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, al-Shidyāq’s books describe every conceivable aspect of the complexity of French and British societies. The author marveled 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, al-Shidyāq was also deeply aware of the rigidity of its social hierarchy, noting in al-Sāq 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.” He saw the stratification of British society articulated into five classes, as he mentioned in Kashf al-mukhabbaʾ: 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.
In fact, al-Shidyāq 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. Not content with providing a mere description, he sought to analyze the causes, concluding in al-Sāq that the misery of peasants in England lay in the system of landownership where a few thousand families held monopoly over the majority of cultivable land. 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. Al-Shidyāq 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,” al-Shidyāq came to realize 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 in al-Sāq, “How could it be that a thousand human beings, nay two thousands, should labor for the happiness of only one man?”
Al-Shidyāq 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.’ 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. This was clearly not an irrelevant question for somebody who landed in England in 1848 as revolutions were raging all over Europe. In Kashf al-mukhabbaʾ, 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. That passivity explained the low ratio of policemen to the overall population: 25,000 policemen for a population of 17 million.
It is relevant to compare al-Shidyāq in this respect with another traveler to Europe, Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873) who lived in Paris from 1826 to 1831, a quarter of a century before al-Shidyāq’s visit. The events witnessed by the two men were radically different. Al-Ṭahṭāwī was in Paris in his capacity as the imam of one of the first study missions in France, instigated by Egypt’s ruler Muḥammad ʿAlī 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 Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz (1834, recently translated into English under the title An Imam in Paris), in which al-Ṭahṭāwī did not hide his sympathy for the ‘Party of Freedom’ in the face of the ‘Monarchist Party.’
In contrast, al-Shidyāq arrived in 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. Al-Ṭahṭāwī’s outlook was that of an 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 nahḍa obsession par excellence. Al-Ṭahṭāwī 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, al-Ṭahṭāwī saw the negative consequences of capitalism as falling mainly on the capitalists themselves. He denounced the practice of interest, in conformity with the Qur’anic ban on usury, but readily accepted the profit motive.
In short, al-Ṭahṭāwī, the Azharite, was concerned with state-building. Al-Shidyāq, 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 to the riddle of the nahḍa.
A Libertarian Secularist
How should one explain the progress of the West and the regression of the East and the means to bridge the gap between the two? Such was the riddle that the nahḍa posed on itself and on Arab society. Al-Shidyāq accepted the challenge. At one point, he interrupts 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, al-Shidyāq’s answers articulated around four main axes: freedom, the work ethic, the value of time, and the emancipation of women.
In a chapter of al-Sāq, titled “An Incitement to Nudity” (“Fī l-ḥaḍḍ ʿalā l-taʿārrī”), al-Shidyāq relays the adventures of a Protestant missionary who suddenly decides to go naked. That title may equally serve as a metaphor for al-Shidyāq’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. Encapsulated in al-Shidyāq’s accusatory address to the church dignitaries held responsible for the death of his brother, expressed in another chapter in al-Sāq, are both his liberal and the secular notions. Questioning the arbitrary way in which the Maronite patriarch ordered the incarceration of Asʿad al-Shidyāq, he says:
You had no religious or civil authority over 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 behavior and commending charity, humility, peace, patience, and tolerance. In civilian terms, my brother did not commit any crime against his neighbor, 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 polemicized 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 realized 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.
As can be seen, al-Shidyāq 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.
Labor and Time
Al-Shidyāq deemed industrialization and the work ethic as the chief engines of progress. Modernity and renaissance could not be achieved unless the socioeconomic conditions that engendered them in the West were reproduced in the Arab world. That, anyway, was the gist of Muḥammad ʿAlī’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 civilization to life in urban centers and to speaking a foreign language.
Al-Shidyāq 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-Sāq is essentially the initiation voyage of an Arab man in the world of women, wherein al-Shidyāq’s curiosity and infatuation with women overcomes the temptations of sexism. In the introduction, he defines 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: ‘al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq’ (‘Leg over leg’) is as much a reference to the traditional seated posture of the storyteller (ḥakawātī) as the embrace during the sexual act. Even more, al-Shidyāq claims in the text itself that “while writing the book he had himself lived part of his life as a woman in order to learn feminine secrets; before God monstrously metamorphosed me into a man.”
To begin with, al-Sāq gave Arab women a voice, and created the first feminine character in modern Arabic literature: al-Fāriyāqiyya, feminine alter ego of al-Fāriyāq, 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 al-Fāriyāqa, the feminine of al-Fāriyāq, but al-Fāriyāqiyya, an attribute derived from al-Fāriyāq, has inspired literary critic Kamran Rastegar to claim that she is not a separate character but the feminine in al-Shidyāq himself.
Be that as it may, al-Fāriyāqiyya 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, al-Fāriyāq declared his preference for veiled women, as the veil allows freedom for the imagination, but he bitterly criticized the baṣīra, the Egyptian tradition of publicly deploying a handkerchief with the bride’s virgin blood on laylat al-dukhla, the wedding night.
Echoing The Decameron, or The Canterbury Tales, al-Sāq delights in stories about the debauchery of priests and rich people. It 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 a woman’s body, the various stages of ʿishq, the different positions of lovemaking, etc.
As early as 1855, al-Shidyāq 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-Ṭahṭāwī, al-Bustānī, or Qāsim Amīn) 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), al-Shidyāq 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 enjoy 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, al-Shidyāq’s most original contribution to women’s liberation is his defense of women’s equal right to sexual pleasure. In the long dialogues between al-Fāriyāq and al-Fāriyāqiyya, the most intimate questions concerning the emotional and sexual life of man and woman are discussed. 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 “extramarital love” (al-Shidyāq 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, al-Fāriyāqiyya insists upon the husband’s incapacity to satisfy his wife sexually.
Al-Shidyāq and Flaubert
In voicing his ideas in favor of the emancipation of Oriental women, al-Shidyāq 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 he 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.
In that sense, it would be interesting to compare al-Shidyāq’s views on European women with those of French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) on Arab women. Edward Said noted the identification Flaubert makes between the Orient and sex. In explaining this identification, the author of Orientalism (1978) maintains that the French novelist was searching in Egypt for what he and his contemporaries lacked in nineteenth-century Europe, where sex had become institutionalized and subjected to a whole network of legal, moral, and even political restraints. 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 al-Shidyāq 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, al-Shidyāq was in England. When Flaubert’s journal of his Egypt diaries, Voyage en Égypte, was published in Paris in 1853, al-Shidyāq 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 ʿālimas (Egyptian singers and entertainers) 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.”
In contrast, al-Shidyāq’s deep sense of observation and criticism 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. He 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, he 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 boasting 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. Al-Shidyāq managed to evade the constraints of his Protestant patrons by simply breaking away and leaving the grounds, yet he was nevertheless bound by more powerful patrons. The service of the Sultan had more imposing obligations and limits, especially for a British citizen—al-Shidyāq had acquired British citizenship before arriving to Istanbul—who, in addition, was a fervent admirer of the Khedives of Egypt and beneficiary of their financial support. It is to the credit of al-Shidyāq that he tried to resist and push those limits as best he could.
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 centralizing and modernizing reforms of 1839 and 1856, known as the tanẓīmāt. Al-Shidyāq 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 dhimmīs, 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 to moderating his radical ideas on democracy and socialism. Al-Shidyāq 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” (“ḥukūma qāhira”) capable of subduing its citizens. He also accused the Paris proletariat, which chose to revolt whilst the country was occupied by Prussian troops, of disregard for France’s national interests.
As a moderate reformer, al-Shidyāq then sought to strike a compromise between the Islamic shūrā 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 serialized articles on the Russian socialists published in al-Jawāʾib in 1878, in which he coined the term ishtirākiyya as a translation for ‘socialism.’ Though such positions were tolerated if not welcomed by the Ottoman authorities, the clash came when al-Shidyāq was increasingly unable to negotiate the conflicting Ottoman, Egyptian, and British interests and policies, especially with the ʿUrābī rebellion in 1882 and the subsequent British occupation of Egypt. Al-Jawāʾib 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 al-Shidyāq reacted with a compelling act of faith in the ethnic specificity of Arabs, as a community bound by a shared language and culture.
Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq 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 honors by the intellectual community and met the Khedive Ismāʿīl. 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 same year, al-Shidyāq’s corpse arrived in Beirut by sea from Istanbul. Fāris al-Khūrī, a young lawyer who would later serve 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 ʿUmarī Mosque in Beirut, and the body was laid to rest in accordance with the dead man’s testament in a small cemetery in Hazmiyeh, a neutral space between the Christian and Muslim districts, where the Christian Ottoman Pashas who governed Mount Lebanon under the mutaṣarrifiyya (1861–1915) are buried.
More than a century and a quarter after his death, the Lebanese government has yet to pay tribute to the country’s towering literary figure. A number of al-Shidyāq’s descendants, wanting to honor 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 honoring the memory of a man with a Muslim first name in a Maronite village in the Christian heartland of Kisrawān. 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 “Fāris al-Shidyāq, 1804–1887, known as Aḥmad Fāris,” but agreement has not been reached on it yet.