Fact or Fiction ? In Search of the “ Learned Council ” of Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt

The “learned council” of Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt (1670-1732) often surfaces as illustrative of ecumenical humanism in the Levant in the century leading up to the Arab Nahḍa (Renaissance). Primary information about the group however is essentially nonexistent, prompting the regurgitation of facts culled from a discrete number of early 20 th -century researches on Farḥāt and his colleagues. This essay puts the historical existence of Farḥāt’s “learned council” on trial and argues that it never existed; nonetheless, its historiographical existence is undeniable. Based on a lexicographical study of the Arabic phrase “learned council (maǧmaʿ ʿilmī)” and a meticulous review of extant scholarship on the group, I claim that the 18-century group was conjured into existence in the 20 th century. I contend that Catholic Maronite scholars invented Farḥāt’s “learned council” in order to insert their confessional community into a crystalizing Protestantdriven narrative of the Nahḍa, which then Western historians reinterpreted as evidence of Arab Christian literary activity more broadly. This essay provides an example of dialectical historiography and calls for the careful reevaluation of some “facts” that have infiltrated Nahḍa Studies.


Introduction
Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt (1670-1732) embodies the humanist spirit of the Arab Nahḍa (Renaissance), a cultural phenomenon characterized by literary, social, and political transformations in the Arabic-speaking world in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries.Farḥāt was a man of God who served the Maronite Church as a priest, abbot, and superior general of monasteries before assuming the archbishopric of Aleppo in 1725.He was also a man of letters who composed homilies, authored grammars, compiled a lexicon, produced an oeuvre of poetry, and established the Maronite Library in Aleppo.1 One of his most laudable accomplishments is his "learned council (maǧmaʿ ʿilmī)" 2 where scholars, poets, and clergymen from various confessions assembled to translate devotionals, Arabize Maronite liturgy, and even establish an Arabic printing press. 3Fêted as the first of its kind in the modern Middle East, 4 his "learned council" exemplifies ecumenical humanism and the existence of literary activity in the Levant prior to the Nahḍa.Regrettably, his "learned council" has yet to be critically examined and in the absence of any comprehensive or systematic study, historians for over a century have had to rehearse unsubstantiated claims proffered by their predecessors about this 18 th -century confraternity.
This essay questions the historical existence of Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt's "learned council" and argues that it never existed.Nonetheless, its historiographical existence is irrefutable.In scholarship, it is akin to a synecdoche-a rallying point around which the pre-Nahḍa period can be positioned, enframed, and subsequently interpreted.Most importantly, as a named entity in history, it permits Farḥāt, his associates, and persons and events contemporaneous with it to be identified, documented, examined, and ultimately archived in the annals of history.I contend that, in the hands of scholars, clergymen, and literary enthusiasts, illusions of collective literary humanism in 18 th -century Aleppo were extracted from folios and rebounded, then categorized and encapsulated in nomenclature recognizable to modern scholars as Farḥāt's "learned council." The craft of writing history, i.e., the cultivation of a story, is at the core of this essay that in particular broaches the question: "Who started the Nahḍa?" Antonius in 1938 famously credited the American Protestant missionaries for initiating an Arab national "awakening." 5 Although Tibawi in 1971 sharply critiqued him for exaggerating their roles and marginalizing the contributions of local Arabs, 6 the missionaries continue to feature prominently, not as the progenitors of the Nahḍa but as protagonists whose involvement cannot be "undervalued." 7Countering this discourse that tracks teleologies sparked by foreign stimuli are studies in search of genealogies that explore ongoing cultural, literary, social, and intellectual practices. 8Scholars now are unshackling the colonialist matrices that circumscribed the field 9 by questioning the epistemological frameworks and ideological terminologies that generated the very notion of Arab Nahḍa. 10 In casting doubt on the historicity of Farḥāt's "learned council," this essay joins recent studies that interrogate the archival and historiographical record. 11No sources contemporaneous with either Farḥāt or members of the alleged group have surfaced to corroborate its existence.Moreover, the historiographical record on the group dates back to the early 20 th century and no further, compelling me to suspect that it was imaginatively constituted in order to advance scholarly agendas aimed at the historicization and nationalization 12 of 18 th -century Catholic Maronites in Aleppo.I suggest that scholars invented this "learned council," retrojected it into the historical record, and apotheosized its founder as a cultural icon. 13This study recounts how the 20 th century historicized 18 thcentury Aleppo in light of events that transpired in the Levant in the 19 th century.It provides an example of dialectical historiography in the modern Arab Middle East and pleads for the discriminate use of certain "facts" from and about the Nahḍa that have in actuality never been thoroughly investigated.
The story of writing Farḥāt's "learned council" into the historiography of the Arab Nahḍa unfolds in three parts.Part one is a lexicographical study of the Arabic phrase maǧmaʿ ʿilmī (learned council, i.e., "academy").I map out its semantic evolution in order to explicate the 20 th -century quality of the term and its continued popularity to describe the supposed 18 th -century coterie of lettered men.Next, I chronologically survey the historiography on Farḥāt's "learned council."In part two I look at the nationalization of local history and argue that Catholic Maronite scholars in the 20 th century initially constituted the council in order to inject their community into the emergent Protestant historiography on the Nahḍa.I explain in part three how predominantly Western scholars next rebranded the Catholic Maronite narrative as suggestive of a broader, Arab Christian cultural movement that occurred before the 19 th century.I conclude that historians retroactively established this confraternity under the superintendence of Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt to exhibit the active practice of literary humanism among learned Christian users of Arabic in the century prior to the Arab Nahḍa itself.

I. A lexicographical study of "Learned Council"
The assembly over which Farḥāt presided is customarily stylized as a "learned council."However, what does this term signify?Does the term accurately describe the literary-cumintellectual gatherings that ostensibly transpired around him?A lexicographical study of the phrase maǧmaʿ ʿilmī (literally, "place of learned gathering") is a worthwhile initial inquiry in search of the historical "learned council" in 18 th -century Aleppo.This part of the study details how an Arabic noun evolved from the meaning of "gathering" or "assembly" into an organized intellectual gathering analogous to the English term "academy."The semantic genealogy presented here is informative because scholars unremittingly refer to Farḥāt's "learned council;" yet, they have never explained why this particular nomenclature is significant.
To understand the phrase "learned council," we need to trace the semantic development of the collocation in Arabic.The noun maǧmaʿ derives from the tri-consonantal root (ǧ-m-ʿ) and carries the basic meaning of gathering and assembly.In terms of morphosyntax, it is a noun of place (nomen loci), i.e., the place of ǧ-m-ʿ (= gathering/assembly).The oldest Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-ʿAyn (The Book of [the Letter] ʿAyn), defines maǧmaʿ as "where people are assembled (yuǧmaʿ); it is also the noun for [a group of] people."14Classical Arabic lexicons, such as Lisān al-ʿArab (Tongue of the Arabs), al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ (The All-Encompassing Ocean), and Tāǧ al-ʿArūs (The Bride's Crown) reiterate a similar yet abridged definition: "the assembly place (mawḍiʿ al-ǧamʿ)." 15mong the Arab Christian population in the Levant, the word maǧmaʿ carries religious and institutional connotations, therein adding a layer of semantic complexity to the word.In the 18 th century, Farḥāt wrote Iḥkām Bāb al-Iʿrāb ʿan Luġat al-Aʿrāb (Perfecting the Semantic Field of Clear Expression in the Language of the Arabs)-a dictionary with which he inserted the voice of his confession into the Arabic lexicographical tradition.He replaced Islamic attestations with examples drawn from the Christian cultural landscape and also introduced some markedly Christian Arab definitions.For the lexeme maǧmaʿ, he reiterated the definitions provided by his predecessors and added: "the holy synods (al-maǧāmiʿ al-muqaddasa) are where Christian leaders, from among the bishops and scholars, gather to elucidate the true faith and to refute the heretics (al-mubtadiʿīn)." 16The noun maǧāmiʿ (synods) is the plural of maǧmaʿ and can also be rendered as "councils." The confessional resonance and religious authority infused in the word persisted into the 19 th century.For example, in 1846, a group in Beirut that fomented to train primarily Arab converts to Protestantism for itinerant preaching named itself a maǧmaʿ.17Christian organizations proselytizing in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time also capitalized on the word's religious implications.The Church Missionary Society (CMS, est.1799), an evangelical association affiliated with the Church of England, stylized itself as "the Maǧmaʿ of the English Church," and the Prayer Book and Homily Society (est.1812) in London likewise marketed itself in Arabic as a maǧmaʿ. 18The quintessentially Christian hue of the word persisted into the latter part of the century.In 1867, the literary master of the Nahḍa, Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819-1883), asserted in Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ (The All-Encompassing of the All-Encompassing) that a maǧmaʿ is "a group of religious leaders who assemble for the sake of examining religious issues, e.g., the Christian maǧāmiʿ (synods/councils) of provincial or ecumenical [types]." 19In sum, Arabic users in 19 thcentury Beirut and its environs understood a maǧmaʿ to be an organized assembly imbued with a type of institutional authority derived from religion.While the word suggested human assembly in the broadest of terms, it was closely associated with Christianity.The word was not yet coupled semantically to humanist and intellectual researches pursued in a collective manner at learned cultural societies or scholarly academies.
Near the end of the 19 th century, the semantic scope of the word expanded.The noun maǧmaʿ was collocated with the adjective ʿilmī (learned/scientific) to coin the phrase "learned society," or more appropriately "academy." 20The new coinage was possibly modeled on the phrase société savant (literally, "learned society"), which a fin-de-siècle French encyclopedia defined as "an organization of men of science and of letters, scholars and thinkers, who pool their efforts, knowledge, and resources to procure the advancement of their chosen branch of knowledge." 21It is possible that through this pairing, the noun's religiosity was neutralized and the institutional authority semantically circumscribing the word maǧmaʿ was redirected to serve humanist intellectualism.
An early example of this collocation in use to label an institutionalized organization of lettered social scientists is al-Maǧmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-Šarqī (the Oriental Learned Society, 1882-1885) in Beirut. 22Populated mostly by graduates of the Syrian Protestant College (est.1866; now the American University of Beirut, AUB), its membership included the historian Mīḫāʾīl Mišāqah (Michael Meshaka, 1800-1888) and the physician Yūḥannā Wurtabāt (John Wortabet, 1827-1908), in addition to the founders of the literary-scientific journal al-Muqtaṭaf ("Digest," est.1876): Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf (1852-1927), Fāris Nimr (1856-1951), and  Šāhīn Makāriyūs (1853-1910).At the inaugural meeting held on 8 March 1882, the collective prerogative of this group for scientific discourse is evident by the topics addressed: "Astronomy: Past and Present," "Chlorophyll in Living Beings," "Hailstorm," and "Analogy between the Movements of Plants and the Muscular Movements of Children, Called Chorea." 23The speakers' scientific credentials to discuss these topics are unquestionable.After every name, the letters "bāʾ.ʿayn.(= Bachelor of ʿIlm, i.e., Science)" appear24 to publically announce that these men completed their studies at the new institution of higher learning in the city.
The phrase maǧmaʿ ʿilmī developed further, semantically consolidating to become the Arabic equivalent for "academy," i.e., "a society or institution for the cultivation and promotion of literature, or arts and sciences, or of some particular art or science or branch of these."25In the early 20 th century, Arab savants, literary figures, and political and administrative bureaucrats residing in the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon harnessed the institutional authority of the noun maǧmaʿ and the intellectual liberality of the adjective ʿilmī, to establish academies by this name in their respective capitals, i.e., al-Maǧmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī bi-Dimašq (the Arab Academy of Damascus, 1919-present)26 and al-Maǧmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-Lubnānī (the Lebanese Academy, 1927-1930?) in Beirut. 27A faithful English translation of al-maǧmaʿ al-ʿilmī is indubitably "academy," given that the Damascus-based group stylized itself in French as the Académie arabe de Damas and considered itself a modern Arab incarnation of famed scholarly academies in world history. 28In the 21 st century, the noun maǧmaʿ stands independent to mean "academy" as evident by the present name of the Syrian institution: Maǧmaʿ al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya bi-Dimašq / Académie de la langue arabe de Damas (the Arabic Language Academy of Damascus).
In terms of mission and organizational structure, an academy and a learned society seem complementary with one another.Customarily, government sponsorship and public recognition endow the former with a degree of prestige, consecrating it as an institution, a valued and stable apparatus operative in civil society.As such, the academy is a public exhibition of collective, authoritative learning.It is a symbolic cornerstone of scholasticism and intellectualism, imaginatively siphoned from institutional predecessors such as The Academy of Plato (est.c. 387 BCE) in ancient Greece and the Académie française (est.1635) in Paris.Functionally, the institution of the academy is populated by a recognized "community of inquirers" formed through a three-part process in which participants i) organize themselves formally into an association; ii) distinguish themselves from peer associations and from civil society at large; and iii) enhance scholarly discourse among themselves, regulating their affairs internally and "heightening their credibility in the eyes of the public." 29n marrying the noun of a religious council/synod with the adjective of erudition, maǧmaʿ + ʿilmī, the humanist "academy" exists in Arabic as an institution dedicated to higher knowledge, one that typically considers its members to be specialists in art, science, and literature and that collectively promotes an opinion to be accepted as authoritative by the general public.It is this late 19 th -and early 20 th -century collocation that Arabic scholarship used in the 20 th century to locate, describe, and ultimately label the "learned council/academy" of Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt in the 18 th century.
In is conceivable that historiographers of the Nahḍa unreservedly adopt the term "learned council/academy" in order to circumscribe Farḥāt and his associates within the neoteric institution of the "academy."By conferring upon the 18 th -century coterie recognizable nomenclature, it becomes possible to insert it at the vanguard of a teleology of institutionalized intellectual and literary activity that, according to initial accounts, 30 the establishment of al-Ǧamʿiyya al-Sūriyya li-'ktisāb al-ʿUlūm wa'l-Funūn (the Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences, est.1847) in Beirut launched.An extreme fidelity to Arabic sources has perhaps blinded researchers to the semantic development of the original phrase maǧmaʿ ʿilmī.Furthermore, the fairly consistent usage of the collocation "learned council" by Western researchers divulges the Arabic origin of their sources and possibly their uncritical dependence on the analysis of previous scholars (discussed in Part Three).Because the veracity of the Farḥāt's "learned council" was never questioned, scholarship literally absorbed both its historical existence and the nomenclature used to define it.And thus, the anachronistic implications of the phrase maǧmaʿ ʿilmī to explain Farḥāt et

II. Inventing the "Learned Council"
A chronological review of the literature on Farhāt's "learned council" reveals that prior to the early 20 th century, it did not exist in the historical record.This startling reality prompts a meticulous examination of its historiography in order to discover how the group was birthed ex nihilo and why.I argue that its invention served to insert the pre-Nahḍa Catholic Maronite community into the Protestant-driven Nahḍa narrative that was crystalizing in the early part of the century. 32Fixated on Farḥāt, the groups' acclaimed leader, Catholic Maronite scholars retrieved this historical figure from their archives and re-presented him as a national icon for their confessional community which was searching for a place within a larger historical narrative.It seems that it was Ǧirǧis Manaš (Georges Manache, 1873-1931), 33 an Arab Jesuit scholar and literary historian, who conjured up Farḥāt's "learned council" into existence.Between 1902 and 1904, he published eight essays on literary and religious personalities who were active in 17 th -and 18 th -century Aleppo, 34 the latter four essays of which he dedicated specifically to Farḥāt's life and writings. 35Initially Manaš described Farḥāt as having "a learned assembly (maǧlis ʿilmī)" and wrote in 1904 that the meetings "happened very much like a learned circle (ašbaha šayʾ bi-dāʾira ʿilmiyya)." 36In 1934, the Maronite Church marked the bicentennial anniversary of Farḥāt's death by erecting a statue in front of St. Elijah Cathedral in Aleppo of the deceased archbishop-a statue that Manaš proposed but unfortunately never saw because he died before preparations were completed. 37In its commemorative publication of the events, the Maronite Church boldly formalized what up till then had been portrayed as an ad hoc confraternity.The text itself is circumspect, explaining that Farḥāt directed "a quasi-learned circle (šibh dāʾira ʿilmiyya);" the title of the section within the publication however is captioned "His Learned Council (maǧmaʿuh al-ʿilmī)." 38That same year, a certain Būlus Masʿad published a magisterial study of Farḥāt's life in which he described "a quasi-learned council (šibh maǧmaʿ ʿilmī) whose members eagerly applied themselves to composition and translation."39In 1952, the Lebanese historian Mārūn ʿAbbūd dropped the qualifier "quasi-(šibh)" and institutionalized the group, stating unequivocally that Farḥāt formed in Aleppo "a learned council (maǧmaʿ ʿilmī) whose members (aʿḍāʾuh) were concerned with translation." 40ithin approximately fifty years, the "like a learned circle" that Manaš summoned into being was transformed into a formal "learned council."This transformation is not simply a matter of nomenclature, i.e., dropping the qualifying words "like a (ašbaha šayʾ bi-)" and "quasi-(šibh)."As discussed previously (in Part One), a more accurate translation of the phrase maǧmaʿ ʿilmī at this temporal juncture is "academy," a term that invokes the existence of an institution-a formally constituted gathering of lettered humanists, social scientists, and intellectuals-in civil society.I surmise that Catholic Maronite scholars strategically used the collocation maǧmaʿ ʿilmī to instill the imagined 18 th -century coterie with the temporal and institutional validity of a 20 th -century academy.Through this contrivance, they could insert their indigenous voice into the Nahḍa narrative that Protestant-educated Arabs were popularizing in the early 20 th century.
In comparison to Protestantism, whose first missionaries did not reach the Eastern Mediterranean until 1819, the Roman Catholic Church had centuries-old linkages to the region through its association with the Maronite community. 41In the 12 th century, Maronites entered into communion with Rome, and in 1215 they were officially placed under the authority of the Holy See.Following the Fifth Lateran Council in 1515, Rome embarked on Latinizing the Eastern Churches in order to elucidate commonalities in practice and doctrine that united the Churches.In 1578, Jesuit missionaries arrived in the Levant to reform the rites and rituals of their Christian cousins.In 1584, Pope Gregory XIII established the Maronite College in Rome-a seminary intended to educate and train young Maronites for the priesthood. 42This college became a model for educational institutions founded in the Levant in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. 43Isṭifān al-Duwayhī (1630-1704), a graduate from the college in Rome, established the Maronite School in Aleppo in 1682, where Farḥāt and many literary figures of the period supposedly learned from another alum of the college, Buṭrus al-Tūlāwī (1655-1746). 44Nearly a century later, the distinguished graduate Yūsuf Isṭifān (1729-1793) established the famed Maronite College at ʿAyn Waraqa in 1789, 45 that counts among its alumni Nahḍa personalities such as Aḥmad Fāris al-Šidyāq (1805-1887) 46 and Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819-1883). 47n the 19 th century, claims to the Maronite legacy embodied in the historical person of Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt began to play out between printing presses in the Levant that were largely managed by Anglican, Protestant, and Catholic missionaries.The Church Missionary Society (CHS) published two of his writings at its Malta press (est.1825): a grammar edited by the Maronite-cum-Protestant (later turned-Muslim) Aḥmad Fāris al-Šidyāq 48 and a treatise on homiletics. 49The American Press in Beirut (est.1834), founded by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), produced a critical edition of Farḥāt's grammar in 1854, prepared by the Maronite-cum-Protestant Buṭrus al-Bustānī. 50At the hands of these two graduates from the Maronite College at ʿAyn Waraqa, the missionaries set out to integrate the Catholic Maronite Farḥāt into the fold of Protestantism.
In 1848, the Jesuit missionaries established their press in Beirut that avidly printed Farḥāt's writings throughout the second half of the century.This press issued an imprint of his grammar in 1865, his poetry in 1866, and then again his grammar in 1882, which Saʿīd al-Šartūnī (1849-1912) edited. 51Perhaps Farḥāt's greatest proponent on behalf of the Jesuits, al-Šartūnī also edited Farḥāt's Faṣl al-Ḫiṭāb fī 'l-Waʿẓ (The Last Word on Oration, 1896) and his poetry collection. 52While continuously printing Farḥāt's writings might bear witness to the reintegration of pre-modern (i.e., pre-Nahḍa) Christians into a broader "interreligious cultural space," 53 the relentless one-upmanship among presses-manifest in the four different editions of Farḥāt's grammar within a span of fifty years-hints at a competitive struggle over Farḥāt's textual remains and the confessional rights to his historical legacy.In the late 19 th century, the Nahḍa had not yet been explicitly codified as a seminal episode for Arab society.Nonetheless, Protestant and Catholic factions were already toiling through their presses to weave themselves into the Maronite past and to incorporate the local past into their own futures in the region.
Toward this end, Catholic and Protestant missionaries in Beirut also produced competing Arabic translations of the Bible 54 and established rival learned cultural societies, 55 educational institutions, 56 and periodicals.In 1870, the Catholics issued a weekly titled al-Bašīr ("The Herald") to which the Protestants responded with al-Našra al-Usbūʿiyya ("The Weekly Report") in the following year. 57In 1876, alumni from the Syrian Protestant College founded the literary-scientific journal al-Muqtaṭaf ("Digest").Twentytwo years later, the Catholics launched their own journal, al-Mašriq ("The Orient"). 58The resolve to outshine the Protestants is literally encapsulated in the journal name.The noun mašriq denotes the land of the rising sun and is also a historical geographical term encompassing modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine, i.e., "the Levant." Ǧirǧis Manaš, the Jesuit scholar who invoked Farḥāt's "learned council" into historical reality, might have been inspired to invent it and to promote its leader as a national icon for the Catholic Maronites by the editor-in-chief of al-Mašriq, the prominent Arab Jesuit historian of Arabic literature Luwīs Šayḫū (Louis Cheikho, 1857-1927).In 1899, Šayḫū awarded Aleppo prominence in the history of the Arab Renaissance by writing that Christians from various confessions in the city were "seized by national fervor (al-ḥamiyya al-waṭaniyya)" to study Arabic literary humanism after witnessing its utmost demise. 59Men such as Farḥāt, the poet Niqūlā al-Ṣāʾiġ (1692-1756), the printer ʿAbdallāh Zāḫir (1684-1748), and Armenian poet Mikirtīǧ al-Kasīḥ (1666-?) stand at the forefront of "this group/association (al-ǧamʿiyya)," as he called them.In the 20 th century, these men became distinguished representatives of the city's literary landscape during the pre-Nahḍa period. 60here is a historiographical dissonance between Manaš and Šayḫū.The latter associated the literary movement in Aleppo in the early 18 th century with the Roman Catholic Church.Šayḫū credited the Jesuits for "exciting their [i.e., Arab Christians] zeal, reconciling their hearts, and seeking to strike the fire of their ingenious capabilities;" he also praised the Jesuit missionary Pierre Fromage (1678-1740) for his efforts and work with the lettered 54 Rana ISSA, "The Missionary Bible (1860)" and "The Jesuit Bible ( 1877 59 Luwīs ŠAYḪŪ, "Šāʿir Ḥalabī Maǧhūl," al-Mašriq, 2.12 (15 May 1899), 442.
60 Ibid.men in the region. 61Curiously, Manaš excised Fromage from the "learned council" membership because, I suspect, the inclusion of a foreign missionary among the coterie that he was writing into the historical record would tarnish and dilute the indigenous composition of said group.The roster that Manaš provided for the group hints at his scholarly agenda: to underscore the local Maronite quality of the "learned council" and through induction, to highlight Catholic contributions to the Nahḍa.In it he prioritizes the ecclesiastical titles of members over their vocational talents: Priest (ḫūrī) Buṭrus al-Tūlāwī, the famed philosopher; presbyter (qiss) Yūsuf al-Bānī, the famed scholar; presbyter ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Lubyān, the famed liturgist; and presbyter ʿAṭṭallāh Zindah, the scribe and famous versifier. 62While Manaš mentions philosophy, scholasticism, and versification, these liberal arts are subordinate in importance to the clerical positions that these men held.He considered these figures to be clergymen first and foremost and thus presented their scholarly pursuits as derivative of their religious occupations.These men however were skilled practitioners of belles-lettres, many of whom received formalized training and were prolific producers of humanist literature.For example, Buṭrus al-Tūlāwī (1655-1746) studied in Rome, taught at the Maronite School in Aleppo, and translated several texts on philosophy and theology.Yūsuf al-Bānī (?-1725) 63 taught Syriac and Arabic in Rome 64 and translated into Arabic many devotionals and spiritual contemplations by Jesuit mystics, aesthetics, and exegetes from 16 th -and 17 th -century Europe. 65ʿAbd al-Masīḥ al-Lubyān (?-1742) learned philosophy, literary, and theoretical theology at the Maronite School in Aleppo and then enjoyed a career as a church treasurer, educator, translator, copyist, and liturgist. 66In foregrounding their rank within Church hierarchy, Manaš promoted their literary humanism as supportive at best.
Manaš also overlooked men who were not unquestionably Maronite, even though future scholars would consider them members of Farḥāt's "learned council."He did not count two Melkite poets, an Armenian poet, or the French Jesuit missionary (discussed in Part Three) because presumably their affiliation to other Eastern Churches or their foreignness would 61 Ibid.62 MANAŠ, "al-Mustaṭrafāt al-Mustaẓrafāt," 110.not corroborate the regional Arab story that he was trying to tell: local Maronites (read: Catholics) were central to the Nahḍa and pre-date the contribution of the American missionaries (read: Protestants).His Maronite-centric roster became the foundational membership list for Farḥāt's "learned council," as evidenced by the 1934 commemorative publication that duplicates it almost verbatim and keeps the order in which members are mentioned and their religious titles intact. 67Furthermore his 1904 essays on Farḥāt became the indispensable source on the 18 th -century figure. 68he invention of Farḥāt's "learned council" was the prerogative of one man, Ǧirǧis Manaš, who the Maronite Church in 1934 applauded as "the first to embark upon publicizing Farḥāt's accomplishments." 69As an origin for the Nahḍa crystalized mainly in the hands of Protestant-educated Arabs, the Catholic Maronite community perhaps resented their extraction and undervalued contribution to the socio-cultural phenomenon of the Arab Nahḍa that occurred in the previous century.They preceded the Protestants in time yet received minimal recognition for their efforts which dated back to the 16 th century.In designing an intellectual hub in Aleppo around a hometown boy, local Catholic Maronites spearheaded by Manaš were able to claim indigenous agency and ownership to the Nahḍa.In this way, the Catholic community could assert a role in cultivating the Arab literary and humanist movement, one that temporally preceded the comparably recent role of the Protestant missionaries.

III. Reinterpreting the "Learned Council"
In the second half of the 20 th century, Farḥāt and his "learned council" became a reference point, a contrivance to describe literary activities in the Levant prior to the 19 th -century Nahḍa.As his "learned council" proliferated in Western historiography on the Nahḍa and its membership expanded, I argue that his status as a national icon for the Catholic Maronite community was calculatingly rewritten to be a cultural icon for all Arab Christians.His "learned council" became indicative of a broader, Arab cultural phenomenon which was coded as illustrative of intra-confessional cooperation.
Initially, European scholarship was careful to avoid the phrase "learned council."In Encyclopaedia of Islam, First Edition (1913-1936) (hereafter, EI 1 ), Ignatius Kratschkowsky wrote that Farḥāt "was able to gather a circle of poets and scholars around him." 70 In the encyclopedia's second edition, A.G. Karam reworded Kratschkowsky and wrote that Farḥāt "gathered around him a circle of poets and scholars." 71The targeted removal of "was able to" recast the Maronite archbishop's action as intentional, and historiographically it indicates a preliminary step toward the group's formal institutionalization. Next the nomenclature of a "learned council" was adopted in translation from Arabic sources.In the 1950s and 1960s, it surfaces in French as "une sorte d'académie," 72 an exact gloss for Manaš's "like a learned circle."Lately the qualifiers "like" and "quasi-," which Arab scholars originally used to equivocate, vanished.In 1998, Nihād Razzūq baptized it "the first learned council (awwal maǧmaʿ ʿilmī) in the history of the East." 73In the 21 st century, this conclusion and nomenclature were unapologetically transferred into English.In the definitive biography on Farḥāt, Brustad stylized the group as Farḥāt's "learned council," 74 which Patel relabeled as a "learned society." 75o bolster claims that group participation reached beyond the Maronite Church and included non-clerical residents of Aleppo, Manaš's membership list was expanded.EI 1 inaugurated the process of transforming the confessional composition of the group into one filled with littérateurs: ... and he [i.e., Farḥāt] was able to gather a circle of poets and scholars around him.Of his friends mentioned in the Dīwān special reference may be made to Niqūlā al-Ṣāʾiġ …, of Greek descent, who shares with him the honour of being a very popular poet …, Mikirtīǧ al-Kasīḥ, an Armenian by birth …, the poet Niʿmatallāh al-Ḥalabī …, ʿAbdallāh Zāḫir who rendered great services to printing …, the theologian Ilyās b.Faḫr …, etc. 76 The men with whom Farḥāt exchanged poetry formed a metaphorical circle around him.Whether intentionally or carelessly ignoring the symbolic nature of this list, this coterie of five received automatic membership to the purported "learned council."And just like that, the Melkite poets Niqūlā b.Niʿma al-Ṣāʾiġ (1692-1756) and Niʿmatallāh b.Tūmā al-Ḥalabī (d.1767?) 77 became full-fledged members, along with the Armenian littérateur Mikirtīǧ al-Kasīḥ b. ʿAbdallāh al-Muḫallaʿ (1666-?), the printing pioneer ʿAbdallāh Zāḫir (1684-1748), and the British dragoman, Ilyās b.Faḫr (d.1757). 78he "learned council" roster currently in circulation is based on Manaš's 1904 list and "friends mentioned in the Dīwān," as presented in EI 1 .In terms of methodology, individuals have been admitted to the group throughout the past century without any explicitly stated criterion.The conditions for inclusion appear to be personal or professional engagements with either Farḥāt and/or his fellow colleagues.In other words, a discernable presence in his loosely-defined social network garners an individual admission to his fictitious assembly.The roster therefore is a cobbled list of translators, literary enthusiasts, and clergymen who lived in Aleppo at some time during Farḥāt's own lifetime.
The roster in circulation is permeable, accepting literate men and lettered notables whenever historians deem it appropriate. 79For example, Patel recently proposed the Patriarch of Antioch, Aṯanāsiyūs III Dabbās (1647-1724), as the eleventh member of the group, given his interest in printing and his association with ʿAbdallāh Zāḫir. 80Following these criteria-of-practice, I nominate the Jesuit priest Pierre Fromage (1678-1740) 81 for membership because of his active presence in the literary and religious milieu shaped by Farḥāt and his associates.Born on 12 May 1678 in Laon, France, Fromage served as a missionary in the Levant from 1710 until his death in 1740.He was a prolific literary figure, authoring and translating a total of thirty-three books. 82Zāḫir and his cousin, Niqūlā al-Ṣāʾiġ, corrected many devotional texts translated by the Jesuits.As a corrector, Zāḫir provided "the form" to translations to which Fromage had provided "the substance." 83Zāḫir printed many of these translations at the Arabic press founded at St. John the Baptist Monastery in Choueir in 1733.84Rome valued Fromage's close association with the Maronites in the Levant, inviting him to deliver the inaugural address at the Maronite Synod held at Our Lady of Louaize Monastery on 30 September 1736. 85If an identifiable network of literary producers did exist in the Levant in the early 18 th century, it is conceivable that Fromage was a dynamic contributor.Yet Fromage was a Frenchman and a Jesuit missionary.Because neither his country of origin nor career promote the narrative of a local, Arab-led literary and cultural movement, I suspect he has been denied membership in the made-up "learned council" until now.
Were he to be admitted, his presence would enrich the religious diversity and general character of the group.Of the twelve men generally considered members, nine came from 79 Consult Appendix A for the roster of purported members.The seemingly indiscriminate approach to populating the "learned council" has also made it difficult to identify a specific location for group operations.Aleppo is implicitly accepted to have been the location and ergo, a center of pre-Nahḍa literary humanism.The historiographical record however never pinpoints a place, nor does it reveal a specific moment of establishment, a duration for its operations, or a moment of closure.This timelessness and absence of locational specificity has permitted chronological contradictions to be overlooked or perhaps willfully ignored.If we take Farḥāt's archbishopric (1725-1732) as a possible timeframe for the group's existence, many core members did not overlap with him temporally in the city.Dabbās died in 1724, the year before Farḥāt returned to Aleppo.Al-Bānī died around 1725.Lastly, Zāḫir lived at St. John the Baptist Monastery at Choueir from 1722 until his death in 1748, except for brief periods at the monasteries of ʿAyn Ṭūrā and Zūq Mīḫāʾīl between 1722 and 1731. 88Aleppo could not have been the headquarters of the group in the years preceding Farḥāt's years as archbishop because he spent little time in the city of his birth after he joined the Lebanese Maronite Order, at the age of twenty-five.From 1695 until 1725, he resided primarily in the Qādīšā Valley in the north of modern-day Lebanon. 89For the first thirty years of his adult life, Farḥāt resided in locales other than his birthplace and is known to have return to his hometown just three times, in 1705, 1713, and 1720. 90If he did preside over a "learned council" of sorts before his tenure as archbishop, it was at best an itinerant confraternity without a defined city as a base.If he established it in Aleppo after 1725, then the haphazardly assembled membership list is rendered even more problematic.
This review of the historiography on Farḥāt's "learned council" exposes the imaginings of scholars on the existence of said council.Farḥāt's "like a learned circle" was recast as a "learned council" in its own right in order to pinpoint an episode of institutional humanism and intellectualism in evolutionary time, in a historical moment that was right before the literary and cultural renaissance known as the Arab Nahḍa.Through the process of making, naming, and reinterpreting the group in Aleppo as Farḥāt's "learned council," scholars could retroactively stumble upon the first learned society operative in the temporal zone just before the 19 th -century Arab Nahḍa.

Final Remarks
The historical existence of Farḥāt's "learned council" was on trial in this study.In reconstructing the literature on the group and the lexicographical history of the Arabic term "maǧmaʿ ʿilmī (learned council/academy)," I established that it is a fabrication of Nahḍa historiographers in the 20 th century.Catholic Maronite scholars invented it on behalf of their confession which then mostly Western scholars reinterpreted as descriptive of the Arab Christian socio-cultural landscape of 18 th -century Aleppo more broadly.The institutional character of a "learned council" titillated the imaginations of historians searching for an example of indigenous intellectual life in the century preceding the Arab Nahḍa.Reading the past against the matrix of a renaissance, the first generation of scholars used Farḥāt's group to insert themselves, local Arab Catholic Christians, into the revival narrative written chiefly by the local Protestant community.Future generations of scholars then disregarded the confessional motivations of their predecessors and reinterpreted the group as suggestive of ecumenical humanism in 18 th -century Aleppo.Within this crucible of indigenous forces and foreign influences, Farḥāt's "learned council" was conceived, cultivated, and ultimately christened as the first modern learned society in the Arab Middle East.
This study is an intervention in Nahḍa historiography.It asks that what seem to be established facts be revisited and that their historical validity be tested.Discovering Farḥāt's "learned council" to be a chimera reminds us that not all information ensconced in scholarship is necessarily historical truth.A critical eye must be turned to some 19 th -and early 20 th -century sources that scholars frequently consult when writing Nahḍa history because implicit in all writings is a prerogative.Scholars of the Nahḍa must become investigators of the Nahḍa.They must interrogate not only the figures who lived before and after the period in question but also the seemingly innocuous facts that their predecessors in the field left behind.Because Farḥāt's "learned council" is a product of historiographical fiction, its acceptability as a synecdoche for assembling the cultural and intellectual landscape of pre-Nahḍa Aleppo has been compromised.Ǧirmānūs Farḥāt however did exist.He is a historical fact.Farḥāt might have been a forerunner of the Arab Nahḍa but this epithet is the result of historiographic hindsight.To accurately position the Maronite ecclesiastic-cumphilologist within the Nahḍa narrative, a thorough examination of his catechisms, lexicon, grammars, and poetry would be instructive.And in order to mitigate the diffusion of "fake news" about him, his contemporaries, and 18 th -century Aleppo, what secondary sources relate should be corroborated by primary evidence, not a trail of citations to a single, relatively recent secondary source.We should read what he wrote and not what others )," in The Bible as Commodity: Modern Patterns of Arabic Language Standardization and Bible Commoditization in the Levant, PhD diss.(University of Oslo, 2014), 110-150.55 ANTONIUS, The Arab Awakening, 51-53.Information on the Jesuit al-Ǧamʿiyya al-Mašriqiyya (the Oriental Society, est.1850) comes from Yūsuf Ilyān SARKĪS, "al-Ǧamʿiyya al-Mašriqiyya fī Bayrūt," al-Mašriq, 12 (1909), 32-38.56 Samir KASSIR, "Between Boston and Rome," in Beirut, trans.M.B.DEBEVOISE (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 180-202.57 Robert Bell CAMPBELL, The Arabic Journal al-Mashriq: Its Beginnings and First Twenty-Five Years under the Editorship of Père Louis Cheikho, S.J., PhD diss.(The University of Michigan, 1972), 7. 58 Ibid., 8. See pages 5-11 on the founding of the journal.
87e Arab Nahḍah, 47 and 71n40.clergyandheld a range of offices from deacon up to archbishop and patriarch.86Avariety of Christian confessions were also represented.Farḥāt and al-Bānī were Maronite.The poets al-Ṣāʾiġ and al-Ḥalabī were Melkite Catholic, as was the Patriarch of Antioch, Dabbās.After the Melkite Church spilt into two factions in 1724, the controversialist Ilyās b.Faḫr aligned with the Greek Orthodox Church and wrote anti-Roman Catholic treatises.87Al-Kasīḥwas Armenian Orthodox.The membership of the Jesuit missionary Pierre Fromage further diversifies the composition of the group.