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The Woman Who Never Stopped Talking
The secret of Madame de Stael's success.
Stacy Schiff
posted Oct. 6, 2008
Cheney's Handiwork
Unveiling his methods, and some of his motives.
David Greenberg
posted Oct. 3, 2008
Is Humanitarian Intervention Dead?
History offers some sobering lessons.
Samantha Power
posted Sept. 29, 2008
Jefferson's Other Family
His concubine was also his wife's half-sister.
François Furstenberg
posted Sept. 23, 2008
Country for Old Men
David Lodge's touch wavers when the topic is aging.
Peter D. Kramer
posted Sept. 17, 2008
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books: Reading between the lines.

Liberalism in the Levant?One man's dreams suggest some lessons.

By Alexander Star
Posted Monday, June 16, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET

These are dispiriting times for Arab liberals. The governments of Egypt and Syria have been rounding up their dissidents once again. Lebanon has barely recovered from mortar fire in the streets. In the Gulf, many Kuwaitis wonder whether they've fallen behind their neighbors due to their peculiar penchant for holding elections. And even as modernizing princes in the Emirates extend a welcome to cutting-edge Western academics and curators, they continue to squelch local dissent. If supporters and opponents of the war in Iraq agree on anything, it's that the phrases "Jeffersonian democracy" and "banks of the Euphrates" are antonyms.

Could it have been otherwise? In his family memoir, Origins, Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese novelist who has lived in Paris since 1975, recalls a different time, a hundred years ago, when Arab liberalism was briefly at its zenith. Enlightenment ideals of rationality, liberty, and progress were zealously championed by schoolteachers and scientists, freemasons and poets, across the planet—and not least in the Arab world, where many of the leading reformers were, like Maalouf and his ancestors, Lebanese Christians. Writing as a detective-historian, Maalouf has ransacked old chests and the fading memories of relatives to tell the story of a forgotten man of the Enlightenment—his grandfather Boutros. Born in the late 1880s, Boutros was a libertine, a man of letters and a small-town philosophe, whose story Maalouf subtly shows to be all too timely. His efforts to improve his homeland illustrate the messianic hopes and bitter disappointments of a Levantine liberalism that is still half-born.

During the 19^th century, the Maronite Catholics, Greek Catholics, and Greek Orthodox of Mount Lebanon emerged from their cloistered religious communities and began migrating to coastal cities or much farther away. They had come to see the walls of the village church as a barrier rather than a protection, as the historian Albert Hourani has observed. Often they studied with Protestant missionaries, but what they typically learned had more to do with liberalism than with Luther. They edited the leading newspapers in Cairo and presided over the reinvention of Arabic prose, imagined the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a nonreligious state and struggled for permission to teach Darwinism at the Protestant College in Beirut. Most of all, they dreamed of fusing the wisdom of the East and the accomplishments of the West into a higher synthesis: The West grew out of the East, they believed, and must return to it.

A man of his times, Maalouf's grandfather spoke from modest balconies in soaring tones about the future of mankind and waged ideological war with the village priest. Defying his father, Boutros left home in the late 1880s to attend a Protestant mission school, where he eagerly embraced a Western-style education. He taught mathematics and Arabic for a few years, and then traveled to Cuba, where he worked briefly for a brother who had become a successful merchant. In 1904 he also visited New York, where he met with émigré shop owners and printers and composed advertising copy for a cigarette company. Back in Lebanon, he returned to his home village, where he opened an innovative academy in 1913. The Universal School accepted students from all creeds; boys and girls learned together; and the best students were instructed to take responsibility for teaching their peers. The school flourished, attracting students and the support of Protestant missions.

But its success soon spelled trouble. A "war of the schools" broke out—the local Greek Catholic priest plotted against Boutros, warning against his heterodoxies and sabotaging his hopes to create an academic empire. Boutros feuded with his neighbors over land and loans. And he eventually fled his wife and family, spending much of his time in Beirut, where he gave private lessons in a room he called "The Office of Knowledge and Work." He also saw his dreams of political liberation betrayed—first, by the Young Turks, whose aspirations to make the Ottoman Empire a nonsectarian liberal state curdled into aggressive nationalism; and then by the French, who took control of what is now Syria and Lebanon after World War I. To Boutros' disbelief, French governors of both the secular left and the clericist right preferred to finance his priestly rival; the support he'd previously received from Protestants made them wary. In 1924, he died of a heart attack. His wife kept the school running for 11 difficult years before closing it down and moving to Beirut, where she devoted herself to supporting her children's education.