thought that contributed the new concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity.
These and cognate ideas found their earliest expression — as was to be expected — in the writings of Syrian and Lebanese residents of Egypt, several of whom were con- demned in absentia to death by the oppressive regime of Abd-al-Hamid (i 876-1 909). One of the first Arabic writers to address himself to the subject of liberty and equality, defining and characterizing them, was a Christian Aleppine, Faransis al-Marrash (1 836-1 873). Another Aleppine, a turbaned Moslem, Abd-al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1846- 1906), authored a most devastating treatise on the 'char- acteristics of dictatorship and the evils of oppression'. In 1870 a Christian Beiruti, Butrus al-Bustani, issued a literary magazine carrying for its motto: 'Love of country an article of faith' — a novel concept in a brand-new expression. Orthodox Islam considered the country of the believer not that delimited by geographical or political lines, but the entire area where Moslems lived. The Moslem's was a religious, not a territorial, homeland. Another writer, Adib Ishaq, a Damascene living in Egypt, was one of the first to use and give currency to a new term watan in the sense of fatherland. The term for nationalism (qawmiyah) did not acquire vogue until the second and third decades of the twentieth century.
Though basically the modern concept of nationalism, in the sense of loyalty to a political unit that transcends all other loyalties including the religious, is in conflict with the theory of Islam as a religious fraternity, the idea developed from faint beginnings to become an all-penetrating element in the life of Moslems from Morocco to Iraq. Its earliest expression took the form of an all - embracing Arab nationalism based on language and culture rather than on religion. Its earliest voice was that of a Christian Lebanese, Ibrahim al-Yaziji who, in a secret session of a Syrian learned society held in Beirut in 1868, recited a fiery original poem
