personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

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 midcentury,
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
88
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 “Reenforcing
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-
Vol. 5, Fall 2005, © 2005 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies