Butrus al-Bustani
Butrus al-Bustani | |
|---|---|
بطرس البستاني | |
Portrait of al-Bustani | |
| Born | January 1819 |
| Died | May 1, 1883 Beirut, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Lebanon) |
| Occupation(s) | 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.