Maryana Marrash

Maryana bint Fathallah bin Nasrallah Marrash (1848–1919) was a Syrian writer and poet of the Nahda, the Arab Renaissance. She revived the tradition of literary salons in the Arab world, was the first Syrian woman to publish a collection of poetry, and may have been the first woman to write in the Arabic-language daily newspapers. ^{1 2}

She was born in Aleppo, in Ottoman Syria, to an old Melkite family of merchants known for their literary interests. The family had earned wealth and standing in the eighteenth century, although it had passed through troubles: a relative, Butrus Marrash, was killed by the wali's troops amid the Catholic–Orthodox clash of April 1818, and other Melkite Catholics, among them the priest Jibrail Marrash, were exiled from Aleppo. Her father Fathallah tried to defuse the sectarian conflict with a treatise written in 1849, and built up a large private library to educate his three children — Francis, Abdallah and Maryana — particularly in Arabic language and literature. ^{1 2}

Aleppo was then a major intellectual centre of the Ottoman Empire. The Marrash family learnt Arabic with French and other foreign languages in the French missionary schools. By educating their daughter at a time when Eastern Mediterranean women received no education, her parents challenged the widespread belief that a girl should not be educated. Fathallah placed his five-year-old daughter in a Maronite school; she was later taught by the nuns of St Joseph in Aleppo and finally attended an English school in Beirut, besides being tutored by her father and brothers. Early biographies say she excelled in French, Arabic and mathematics, played the qanun and sang beautifully. The Aleppine historian Muhammad Raghib al-Tabbakh wrote that she was unique in Aleppo, and that people looked at her with a different eye. ¹

Although she had many suitors, she initially wished to remain single; after her mother's death she was persuaded to marry, and chose Habib Ghadban, a scion of a local Christian family. They had one son and two daughters. ^{1 2}

From as early as 1870, Marrash contributed articles and poems to journals, especially al-Jinan and Lisan al-hal, both of Beirut. In her articles she criticised the condition of Arab women, urging them — regardless of their religious affiliations — to seek education and to express themselves on matters of concern to them. Her poetry collection Bint fikr (A Daughter of Thought) was published in Beirut in 1893, after she obtained Ottoman permission to print it by composing a poem exalting Sultan Abdul Hamid II; the collection also contains panegyrics to Ottoman governors of Aleppo. Her poetry was much more traditional in style than her brother Francis's, as her elegy for him shows, yet she was at home with the French Romantics, especially Lamartine and Alfred de Musset. Her non-fiction also includes Tarikh Suriya al-hadith, a history of late Ottoman Syria and the first book on the subject. ^{1 2}

Marrash was famous for the salon she held in the home she shared with her husband. She had travelled to Europe once and was impressed by what she saw; on her return to Aleppo she turned her house into a gathering place for celebrated writers who met regularly to discuss literature, music, and political and social issues. The salon's members included prominent Aleppine intellectuals of both sexes, among them Jibra'il Dallal, Kamil al-Ghazzi, Rizqallah Hassun, Qustaki al-Himsi and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, besides politicians and foreign diplomats. Marrash took full part in the discussions and entertained her guests by playing the qanun and singing. Joseph Zeidan notes that most participants had already been regular visitors to her family's home, and Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh has considered Antun Sha'arawi's vivid description of the evenings partly apocryphal. ¹

She died in Aleppo in 1919. ^{1 2}

The English article says she was born to an old Melkite family, and the Arabic article says her family followed the Melkite sect — in both, the words describe the family, not Maryana personally — while the Wikipedia articles file her under Melkite and Christian categories, and category filings are not attestations. No text names a church affiliation for her personally, so her faith is recorded as unknown in her data record, with this evidence preserved and the question flagged for a founder ruling. ^{1 2 3 4}