Fruma Zachs

The Making of a Syrian Identity: Intellectuals and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut

Leiden: Brill, 2005

Reviewed by Leila Hudson*

Fruma Zachs’s The Making of a Syrian Identity: is a valuable and solidly researched contribution to the cultural history of Bilad al-Sham. Zachs’s attempt to locate indigenous roots of the twentieth century culture of nationalism in the milieu of the “middle stratum” Christians of Mount Lebanon and Beirut fleshes out the long accepted notion that these bourgeois intellectuals formed the vanguard of proto-national Syrian identity. To her credit, she acknowledges that this is one Syrian identity in a complex social, historical, regional cauldron with the inclusion of the particle “a” in the title.  Noting that Lebanese Catholics and Muslims also had parallel processes of identity development, she convincingly posits the development of a Syrian, as opposed to a Shami or Phoenicianist, identity as the oldest and most influential and arguably the most complex. The Lebanese Christians of the middle stratum perched at the key nodes of a changing economy as well as imperial and local balances of power were more immediately and powerfully affected by external forces of change. Constituting an “other” both to Europeans and Muslims, but also mediating and forming alliances with each made the Syrian identity the most broadly inclusive and fraught with potential faultlines. Zachs’s analysis skillfully teases out the traces of this composite proto-national identity in the textual analyses which are the most interesting sections of the book.

Zachs begins with the economic and political transformation of Mount Lebanon under the in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Amir Bashir II and the rising merchant class of Zahleh and Dayr al-Qamar which thrived on silk and laissez faire policies constrained the traditional “feudal” landowners. The amirs and the emerging bourgeoisie also began an intellectual tradition of salons and literary patronage which would devolve to Beirut with the decline of the region. Zachs weaves together the economic factors in the rise of Zahleh and Dayr al-Qamar quite effectively with her readings of the court historians whose works are the best supporting evidence of the trend she describes. In addition to the well-worn ground of the literary nahda, Zachs finds evidence of the earliest Syrian identity in the historian’s praise for the virtues of the Shihabi emirate – not the traditional Shami administrative centers of Damascus and Sidon.

With Ibrahim Pasha’s incursion into Syria at the approach of mid-century, what Zachs sees as the first phase of Syrian identity formation comes to an end; and the second, or Beiruti, phase begins. The middle stratum, mercantile class and their nascent notion of a non-Shami, non-Islamic Syrian identity move to the port city of Beirut, itself a rising star in the new Mediterranean trade system. Attracted by the trade opportunities, security and cosmopolitanism of the new port-city, immigrants to Beirut made and Beirutis made the Syrian identity even more of a repository for literary, western, secular, and hybrid influences animating the city. Rather than following up on the most interesting thesis of links and continuities between the Mountain identity and the Beiruti identity (Zachs disappointingly makes this connection only in a footnotes) she goes on to survey the more familiar territory of the merchant families and intelligentsia of Beirut and their public institutions. Her inevitable discussion of Butrus Bustani focuses on his use of the concept of tamaddun and that of his son Salim Bustani in his less known historical novels. I wonder if Zachs’ insistent reading of mutamaddinun as civilized (as opposed to savage) rather than the more subtle cosmopolitan (as opposed to insular or traditional) doesn’t degrade somewhat the subtlety of this important component of the proto-national secular Syrian identity.  While her discussion of the concept over two generations of Bustanis is an original and helpful approach, Zachs fails to show how their concept of grounded cosmopolitanism reverberated in middle stratum Beiruti society except as a critique.

The reader may at first be surprised that The Making of a Syrian Identity devotes its core chapters to addressing the external pressures which shaped Syrian identity. But therein lies the source of the dynamic complexity of the Syrian proto-national identity; it could not be understood without the political, economic and cultural pressures which forged it. In the first of these two central chapters “Re-enforcing an Identity: The Tanzimat Reforms” it is somewhat surprising that Zachs chooses not to engage directly with the work of Engin Akarli and particularly Ussama Makdisi who have made the topic of Ottoman “proto-Lebanon” a theoretically interesting one. Akarli did this by emphasizing the stability and hybridity of the Ottoman /coastal provincial elite culture, and Makdisi did it by emphasizing the Ottoman contribution to the production of Lebanese sectarianism. Zachs’s contribution completes the triptych of Ottoman/Lebanese identity dynamics by illustrating how Tanzimat reformers – the little known governor Rashid Pasha and the well known Midhat Pasha in particular – turned the vague notion of a cosmopolitan, coastal, trade oriented, bourgeois, secular, non-Shami Suriyya into an actual administrative and functional unit by simultaneously enforcing reformist principles in their provincial regimes and reinforcing local resistance to homogenous, non-particular Ottomanism. On the other hand, following the lead of her mentor Butros Abu Manneh whose subtle analyses of the local effects of elite Ottoman reformist and court politics are sometimes neglected in the study of Arab nationalism, is to be commended.

More theoretically engaged in the literature of cultural interaction and cognizant of the argumentative poles defining her field than the previous chapter, Zachs’s revisiting of the American missionary literature intensifies the focus on “outsiders’” contribution to shaping of the complex Syrian identity. (Again, Zachs inexplicably neglects to engage with the scholarly work of Ussama Makdisi on the topic except in an aside, while finding occasion to cite Daniel Pipes’ ideologically motivated Greater Syria.) This chapter, more than the Tanzimat chapter, strays into the distant origins of the admittedly interesting Protestant imported imaginings of Syria which brought with them a new-worldly air of bold beginnings, geographical determinism and prosletyzing territoriality for the Beirut intelligentsia to strengthen their indigenous sense of Syrian identity. The argument is a convincing fleshing out of familiar territory, and Zachs – based on her Shihabi court historians material sides with nationalist historian Abd al-Latif al-Tibawi that the missionaries and their educational systems did not ignite, but rather encouraged, the nahda. Yet another analysis of the ubiquitous Bustani, this time in parallel with his missionary mentor Eli Smith, reveals the contours of an evolving proto-national territorial referent from balad to watan. But as with the last chapter, this one fails to make the leap from the “outsiders’” utilitarian concepts of Syria all the way to the Beiruti middle stratum intelligentsia’s (other than Butrus Bustani’s) sense of self-identity.

The final chapter on genres and narratives returns from imported (cartographic and territorial) concepts adapted into Syrian identity to the local elaboration of that identity in literature. It is a strong ending to a solid book in which the concept of a territorial watan descended from the hybridization of Islamic umma, minority milla, Shihabi imara, Beiruti tamaddun, Presbyterian balad, and Ottoman vilayet comes to emotional life in three new literary forms – newspapers, “new historiography” and historical novels. Zachs misses an opportunity to reach a broader audience by failing to bring her analysis directly to bear on Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities.” She limits her comments on Anderson to observing that newspapers were a tool for spreading the concept of Syria and fails to emphasize sufficiently the extent to which the very acts of producing and reading newspapers were a crucial embodiment of the complex new community identity. Attention to local historians’ works shows the watan rather than the city becoming the new unit of historiographical analysis and of intellectual abstraction as wataniyya. The highlight of the chapter is the mini-essay on the emergence of the historical novels and patriotic heroines of (yet again!) Salim al-Bustani, Butrus’ son. This topic cries out for more investigation in a stand-alone format or in extended comparison with Egypt and Istanbul because it deals with the representation of women at the nexus of watan and print capitalism and even presents tantalizing original illustrations of Bustani’s patriotic heroines.

Coming at the tail end of this rich book, however, this fascinating section on literature, representation of women and nation seems tacked on rather than featured.  One is left wondering if the exploration other gendering practices – family, fashion, childrearing, schooling might have shown us Syrian identity emerging in middle stratum practice, rather than just in Butrus and Salim Bustani’s works and heads. The feeling of anti-climax is heightened by the author’s choice to end with an epilogue rather than a conclusion.  Drawing together all the genealogies of the rich and complex Syrian identity would have been more helpful for the reader and an opportunity for greater theoretical insight for the author than the perfunctory assessment of Syrian identity’s fate in the Hamidian, Young Turk and war periods.  This topic of course deserves its own monograph.

The book includes a helpful prosopography of middle stratum Beiruti, coastal and mountain families. Its catalogue of the uses of the name Syria would have been better incorporated into the book’s introduction rather than tacked on as Appendix 2. In short, Zachs has produced a rich, well researched, nuanced yet readable account of the emergence of one complex part of Syrian identity through the translation of political, economic and cultural pressures into (elite) local literature. There is more to be done.