The Lewis affair and the fortunes of al‐Muqtataf

Abstract

It has often been supposed that the Syrian journalists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who went down to Egypt did so driven by Ottoman oppression. Among those allegedly so driven were Ya'qub Sarruf, Faris Nimr and Shahin Makarius, joint editors of al-Muqtataf, the scientific review which they published in Beirut in 1876 and later moved to Egypt in 1884. In Egypt they published, besides al-Muqtataf, the daily al-Muqattam, the monthly al-Lataif, and finally the Sudan Times. They were, therefore, a group of active journalists, and the reason for their migration from Syria into Egypt is worthy of investigation. As far as these three were concerned, Ottoman oppression was not the cause. As soon as al-Muqtataf arrived in Egypt, permission was secured from the Porte for its re-entry into Syria. As will be shown, the immediate reason for their departure was the Lewis affair-a flagrant case of infringement of academic freedom which shook the foundation of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut in 1882, the institution where Sarruf and Nimr were employed as teachers. The story briefly is this. At the Commencement exercise of 1882, one of the young American instructors, Edwin Lewis, read out a speech which 'smacked of Darwinism'. The outcome of this apparently harmless exercise, as will be seen in the following pages, was disastrous. Lewis was forced to resign; some of his more liberal colleagues resigned as a gesture of protest against the injustice that was being done; students signed petitions and were suspended; and on one occasion indignation and anger expressed themselves in such violence on campus that the police had to intervene. Of late years, fresh material has appeared dealing with the Lewis affair, and throwing light on the events of the year 1882.1 This article makes use of unpublished material in the archives of the American University of Beirut Library. It proposes to illuminate the Lewis affair not so much by dwelling on the events which took place, and which are known, but by first recreating the atmosphere of the College with the politics of the faculty and the mission, second by bringing into focus the whole question of the theory of evolution which was then being debated, and third by looking at the crisis in its relation to Sarruf and Nimr in their dual capacity as editors of a journal which took part in the debate and as teachers whose future was at stake.