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Abstract This article attempts to understand Butrus al-Bustani's Nafir Suriyya as a foundational text in the creation of a new discourse of modern Arab subjectivity. More specifically, the study examines the epistemology that circumscribes al-Bustani's conception of the modern Syro-Lebanese Arab citizen. The article highlights the nomenclature fundamental to al-Bustani's formula for 'concord and unity' and 'love of the nation' in the wake of the inter-confessional violence, or civil war, of 1860 in Lebabnon and Damascus. In doing so, it reveals how conceptions of Arab self-hood are enframed by a binary of 'success' and 'failure'. While identifying native 'failure', al-Bustani displaces it into several different agents in his attempt to salvage his conception of an 'ideal' native subject. Inevitably, the author demonstrates, this ideal national subject that Nafir narrates is mired in an inescapable Hegelian, master‐slave, struggle with the West.
Stephen Sheehi (Mon,) studied this question.