Modernization and the Growth of Nationalism 103

withstanding the drain of war and conscription. Mohammed All
moreover introduced to some thousands of young Egyptians the
elements of Western education and culture.1 And, not least, he
left his country free from debt.

During his nine years government of Syria and Lebanon (1831-
40), Ibrahim Pasha followed his father's example in encouraging
education with a military and technical intention. While govern-
ment elementary and secondary schools were opened for Muslims
in the principal towns, he provided for the Christian majority in
the Lebanon, a community outstanding in the Middle East for its
combination of intelligence with application and adaptability, by
encouraging the establishment of foreign missions. The French
Jesuits were allowed to return in 1831 and rapidly opened schools,
finally founding their Universite de St. Joseph at Beirut in 1875.
The American Presbyterian Mission which had first arrived at
Beirut in 1820 established a printing-press in that town in 1834.2
By 1860 they had thirty-three schools with a thousand children,
and in 1866 they founded the Syrian Protestant College, subse-
quently renamed the American University of Beirut. While the
Jesuits' printing-press produced from 1853 onwards a series of
scholarly works in French or Latin, the Americans devoted them-
selves to the production of school-texts in Arabic. Thus, while the
French Catholics made a valuable contribution to the progress of
Syrian education in general, the Americans played the greater part
• in the revival of Arabic as a literary language, after three centuries
\ of neglect in favour of the official Turkish, and so unconsciously
inspired the first Arab nationalist aspirations, in the propagation of
which some of their students and locally-recruited teachers played
a leading part. What began as cultural societies came to assume an
.air of political conspiracy in the sacred name of liberty from Otto-
man oppression. About 1880 a secret society of twenty-two
members, including Muslims and Druze but founded by young
Christians educated at the Syrian Protestant College, displayed a
1 The number of students who passed through the government schools has
been estimated at 10-12,000 (J. Lugol, Le Panarabisme (Cairo, 1946), 166 f.,
quoting A. Sammarco).
2 While the first printing-press at Istanbul was set up in 1727, it was not
until the arrival of Napoleon in Cairo that this instrument of intellectual
awakening reached any of the cities of the Arabic-speaking East.
H