Butrus al-Bustani
Butrus al-Bustani | |
|---|---|
بطرس البستاني | |
Portrait of al-Bustani | |
| Born | January 1819 |
| Died | May 1, 1883 (aged 64) Beirut, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Lebanon) |
| Occupations | Writer, scholar, lexicographer, periodical editor, translator |
| Notable work | Muhit al-Muhit, Da'irat al-Ma'arif |
| Movement | Nahda |
| Spouse | Rahil Ata |
Butrus al-Bustani (Arabic: بُطرُس الْبُسْتَانِيّ, ALA-LC: Buṭrus al-Bustānī; 1819–1883) was a Lebanese writer and scholar. He was a major figure in the Nahda, the Arab renaissance which began in Ottoman Egypt and had spread to all Arab-populated regions of the Ottoman Empire by the end of the 19th century.
He is considered to have been the first Syrian nationalist, due to his publication of Nafir Suriyya which began following the 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war. He founded the secular Arabic-language al-madrasa al-wataniyya (the National School) in 1863 in Beirut. In 1870, he founded Al-Jinan, the first important example of the kind of literary and scientific periodicals which began to appear in the 1870s in Arabic alongside the independent political newspapers.