Francis Marrash

Francis bin Fathallah bin Nasrallah Marrash (1836–1874) was a Syrian scholar, publicist, writer and poet of the Nahda, and a physician. Most of his works revolve around science, history and religion analysed under an epistemological light. The historian Matti Moosa considered him the first truly cosmopolitan Arab intellectual and writer of modern times; his use of poetic prose and prose poetry was the first of its kind in modern Arabic literature, and his ways of thinking had a lasting influence on contemporary Arab thought and on the Mahjari poets. ^{1 2}

He was born in Aleppo, in Ottoman Syria, to an old Melkite family of merchants known for their literary interests. His father Fathallah tried to defuse the city's sectarian conflict with a treatise of 1849 rejecting the Filioque, and built a large private library to educate his three children — Francis, Abdallah and Maryana — in Arabic language and literature. Francis first studied Arabic privately. Measles at the age of four left him with eye problems that kept worsening; hoping for a treatment, his father took him to Paris in 1850, where he stayed about a year, and in 1853 he accompanied his father on a business trip to Beirut. He then received four years of private tutoring in medicine under a British physician in Aleppo and practised medicine for about a year. Wanting a state licence, he went to Paris in 1866 to enrol in a medical school, but his fragile health and growing blindness forced him to interrupt his studies within a year; he returned to Aleppo completely blind, yet still managed to dictate his works until his early death. ^{1 2}

The sources disagree on his dates. The obituary published in al-Hilal in 1897 gives his birth as 29 June 1836 — the date Jurji Zaydan quoted from it — while Qustaki al-Himsi gives 1835. The obituary places his death around 1873, but the elegy his sister Maryana published in Bint fikr, al-Himsi and later scholarship support 1874, and his writings were still appearing in al-Jinan in 1874. ^{1 3}

Around 1865 Marrash published Ghabat al-haqq (The Forest of Truth), an allegory about the conditions needed to establish and maintain civilisation and freedom, in which a war between a Kingdom of Liberty and a Kingdom of Slavery is resolved by a trial before the King of Liberty and the Queen of Wisdom. He expressed ideas of political and social reform — among them representative democracy, equality before the law and support for trade and inventors — and stressed that the Arabs needed above all modern schools and a patriotism free from religious considerations; in the work he also supported the abolition of slavery. Shmuel Moreh stated that with this book Marrash became the first Arab writer to reflect the optimism and humanistic view of eighteenth-century Europe. At the same time, Marrash tried to blend European thought with his own reading of the Christian belief in universal love, and to reconcile his philosophical understanding of liberty with his belief in the benevolence of the Catholic Church's authority: love, a pillar of Christianity, was for him the general law of the universe, and freedom meant participation in that law. ¹

In 1867 he published Rihlat Baris, an admiring account of his second journey to Paris; in Mashhad al-ahwal (1870) his earlier optimism about Ottoman reform gave way to pessimism, and in Durr al-sadaf (1872) he criticised the blind imitation of Western customs. He wrote many essays on science and education — without the education of the mind, he wrote, man is a mindless beast — and in al-Jinan he favoured women's education, though restricted to reading, writing and a little arithmetic, geography and grammar, while also condemning Arab men's severe treatment of their wives and daughters and closely following his sister's studies. In his later works he tried to demonstrate the existence of God and of the divine law. Shmuel Moreh credited him with a revolution in the diction, themes and imagery of modern Arabic poetry; Salma Khadra Jayyusi described his prose as the first example of poetic prose in modern Arabic literature. Kahlil Gibran, who had read him at al-Hikma School in Beirut, was a great admirer, and Marrash's ideas on enslavement, education, women's liberation and the natural goodness of man echo through Gibran's own works. ¹

The English article says he was born to an old Melkite family, and the Arabic article says the same of the family — family background, not a statement about Francis personally — while the articles file him under Melkite and Christian categories, which are filings, not attestations. Beyond that, the scholarship the English article cites describes his own thought in Christian terms: Hawi says he tried to reconcile his understanding of liberty with his belief in the benevolence of the Catholic Church's authority, and Jayyusi describes his blending of European thought with his own reading of the Christian belief in universal love. Those passages describe a personal belief but name no affiliation, so his faith is recorded as unknown in his data record, with both readings preserved and the question flagged for a founder ruling. ^{1 2 4 3}