INTELLECTUAL AND NATIONALIST
STIRRINGS
The dawn of the nineteenth century found Syria, like its
neighbours, deep in its dark ages. The black-out, though
interrupted by a decade of enlightened and tolerant Egyptian
occupation ending in 1841, was soon resumed. Egypt under
Muhammad Ali (1805-1848) was the first Arabic-speaking
land to establish vital cultural contact with western Europe.
Not only did the Ottoman Turks deliberately cut themselves
off from cultural intercourse with the West, but they denied
their subjects that opportunity at the crucial time when
Europe was passing through the eighteenth-century en-
lightenment and the industrial revolution. They neither
joined nor allowed others to join the caravan of progress
that Europe was heading. The only major technical element
permitted to pierce the Ottoman curtain was the military
one, which was of no avail to Syrians and other Arabs.
Down to the mid-nineteenth century Syria had, therefore, remained medieval in all the varied aspects of life. The family followed the old extended patriarchal type, dominated by the grandfather or the oldest male member, in contrast to the small biological type consisting of parents and un- married children. Learning, what there was of it, was almost the monopoly of theologians, mostly of the con- servative obscurantist variety. Industry operated on the low domestic level and was carried on with looms and simple hand tools. The economy was provincial and business partnership was largely confined to members of the same family. Science, in the modern sense, was non-existent. Quacks practised medicine, at best with the aid of yellow- leafed texts of Avicenna (ibn-Sina) and other Arab physicians
