Buṭrus al-Bustānī and the Shipwreck of the Nation

Abstract

During the outbreak of violence and civil war in 1860 Mount Lebanon, Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–1883) in a series of political pamphlets entitled Nafīr Sūriyya painted an image of an imaginary nation that was meant to be the cure for this social crisis. He also translated the story of Robinson Crusoe during these times and proposed it as an allegory for the instruction of society. This article analyzes Bustānī's allegorical use of Robinson Crusoe for a war-torn society. It explores the implications of translation as an epistemological stance in the time of modernity. By Iooking at the two sources, Nafīr and Crusoe, we come to understand how the logic of 19th-century liberal political economy works to naturalize sectarianism and depoliticize it through the discourses of pluralism and co-existence that are articulated in Bustānī's formulation of ‘love’ as a binding force for the nation. The article explores the formation of a ‘national fantasy’ as a response to crisis in affectual terms. Moreover, it shows how Bustānī's invocation of the trope of human rights, ḥuqūq al-insāniyya, overlaps with a utopian view of justice that is knowingly anachronistic.

Notes

1 Bustānī's definition of nafīr in his Muḥīṭ dictionary is as follows: ‘a noun, when the public arises to fight the enemy … a clarion, and Nafīr Sūriyya is a series of eleven pamphlets in which we had written our hopes and aspirations during the event of 1860.’ Bustānī, Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ 908.

2 al-Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya.

3 I refer here to Usama Makdisi's analysis as well as Ghasan Hage's unpublished dissertation. Makdisi, Cultures of Sectarianism; Hage,‘The Fetishism of Identity.’

4 Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 5–21.

5 Although I use the word nation throughout to translate the 10th-century term waṭan, it is important to keep in mind that, like every translation, this one betrays the meaning of the original. The term waṭan is invoked by 19th-century intellectuals as a site of contestation: their use of the word in various contexts to denote a multiplicity of meanings such as homeland; paradise or utopia; a territorial as well as non-territorial space if anything points to the fluidity and transformability of the nation. The politics of translation are explicit in my analysis of Bustānī's text throughout: in both my choice of words and his. Rather than paying tribute to the original as a dutiful translator would, I learn from Bustānī ’s own performative gestures to forefront the ambiguities and disarticulations of the original concept itself.

6 Marx, Grundrisse, 83.

7 Ibid.

8 Bustānī, Khuṭba fī l-hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya, 7.

9 Marx, Grundrisse, 84.

10 al Bustānī, al-Tuḥfa, Introduction.

11 Ibid., 1.

12 Marx, Grundrisse, 83.

13 Bustānī, al-Tuḥfah, 74.

14 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlets 1, 5 and 7.

15 Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 57.

16 Ibid.

17 Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy, 21.

18 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 4.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy, 4.

23 It is important to note that Daniel Defoe was a student of Hobbes' works and it is evident that Buṭrus al-Bustānī was also fascinated by the same ideological positioning.

24 Bustānī, ‘Ḥubb al-waṭan min al-imān,’ 302. This article is added to the original 11 Nafīr pamphlets that were re-published in 1990 post the Lebanese civil war and edited by yet another ‘anonymous lover of the nation.’ See Bustānī, Nafīr Sūrriya, by al-Muʿallim Buṭrus al-Bustānī.

25 Bustānī, ‘Ḥubb al-waṭan min al-imān,’ 303.

26 Bustānī, al-Tuḥfa, 68.

27 Ibid., 118.

28 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, 10.

29 Ibid., 17.

30 Ibid.

31 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 1.

32 Meister, After Evil, 36.

33 I borrow this term from Lauren Berlant's analysis of Nathanial Hawthorne and the formation of American nationalism in the late 19th century. Berlant points to the importance of analyzing national spaces through the category of affect in which structures of personal/collective experience are produced as vital nodes for the formation of the political legitimacy of the nation form. She thus shifts focus from the realm of the law and duties to the realm of the citizen's private and even unconscious existence.

34 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 9.

35 Ibid., Pamphlet 7.

36 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, 109.

37 Ibid.

38 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 4.

39 Ibid., Pamphlet 3.

40 Ibid.

41 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 4.

42 Ibid., Pamphlet 1.

43 Ibid., Pamphlet 6.

44 Ibid., Pamphlet 3.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., Pamphlet 4.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 4.

51 Bustānī, ‘Ḥubb al-waṭan min al-imān,’ 303.

52 Ibid.

53 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 2.

54 Ibid.

55 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 4.

56 Ibid.

57 Bustānī, Nafir Sūriyya, Pamphlet 2.

58 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 4.

59 Bustānī, Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ, 985

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 1.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 4.

69 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, 78.

70 Ibid.

71 Georg W. F. Hegel, quoted in Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, 54.

72 Ibid.

73 I use here Hans Blumenberg's reading in Shipwreck with Spectator, where he traces the metaphor of shipwreck in the works of philosophers and thinkers who belong to the early modern and modern age. Beginning with ancient Greek thinkers who were reread during the Enlightenment, Blumenberg discusses the shifting perspective from Lucretius to Goethe to Hegel. Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator.

74 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlets 1, 4, 6 and 8; and Bustānī, ‘Ḥubb al-waṭan min al-imān.’

75 Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 10.