{"id":971,"date":"2013-02-19T17:08:09","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T17:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/?p=971"},"modified":"2013-02-20T04:45:24","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T04:45:24","slug":"beirut-the-port-that-became-an-educational-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/2013\/02\/19\/beirut-the-port-that-became-an-educational-capital\/","title":{"rendered":"LECTURE: Beirut – The Port That Became an Educational Capital"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Duncan Grimm ’15<\/p>\n

Thursday, February 14, at the Smith House, Trinity alumna Betty Anderson \u201987, Associate Professor of History at Boston University delivered a well-attended lecture on Beirut, Lebanon\u2019s capital city. Presented by the History Department, the International Studies Program, and the Co-Curricular Initiative on Cities, Anderson described how a minor city on the Mediterranean shore became a major trading hub and hotbed of learning throughout the latter half of the nineteenth, and majority of the twentieth centuries, reinvigorated recently in the decades following the Lebanese Civil War.<\/p>\n

Today, Beirut is Lebanon\u2019s largest port, responsible for much of the goods that pass in and out of the country.\u00a0 The role of education in this extraordinary urban growth is not lost on Professor Anderson, and is addressed in her 2011 book The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education<\/em>.\u00a0 Initially seeking to uncover how students of AUB became politicized, Anderson soon discovered that the story of the University lay in Protestant missionary tradition and international intrigue between European nations and the Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n


\nBeirut has been rebuilt significantly since the nearly sixteen-year Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) which left the downtown bleak and deserted.\u00a0 The rebuilding program has put Lebanon into enormous debt, but the city is no longer the ghost town it was in the years after the war, and has once again become a thriving port and educational powerhouse, just as it was at the turn of the century.\u00a0 Because of education, the city had a unique vibe separate from surrounding cities, and has since recovered this aspect of its character.<\/p>\n

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Facade of Beirut City Hall Today<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This vibe has its roots in the forming of both Beirut\u2019s educational and economic bases in the nineteenth century.\u00a0 To put the growth in perspective, in 1800 the city was home to 6,000 people, while in 1900 the population had reached 120,000.\u00a0 Beirut became part of the Ottoman desire to \u201cdefensively modernize,\u201d improving both military and educational institutions to European standards to stave off Europe itself.\u00a0 Part of this shift was economic, the Europeans wanted to be able to get the raw materials out of the Middle East, notably cotton and silk, a trade which the French involved themselves by infiltrating Mount Lebanon and started factories and invested in Mulberry trees between the 1820s and 1840s–the economy was French-dominated.<\/p>\n

By the 1850s however, native Lebanese began to involve themselves in this new economy, and the combined activity of the French and native Lebanese increased trade to such a degree that a better port was needed.\u00a0 The French endeavored to improve the port facilities over the second half of the 1800s, and it is here where education comes in, for it was in Beirut that missionaries started to collect.\u00a0 Driven by the papacy, French missionaries for centuries had a long standing presence in the region preaching Roman Catholicism, and increasingly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attempted to reform the Catholic Maronites.<\/p>\n

The fundamental shift however, began in 1820 with the arrival of American missionaries from the American Board in Boston.\u00a0 They knew nothing about the region except from their bible studies.\u00a0 Targeting \u201cnominal\u201d Christians, or those of non Protestant denominations, they hoped to peak Muslims\u2019 interests.\u00a0 Having no conception of local culture or even Arabic, the first missionaries discovered a completely foreign system, that within the Ottoman Empire one was legally defined by their religious sect (taxes, laws, etc.).\u00a0 There were no provisions for Protestants under Ottoman law. If one were to convert, they would be de jure a legal non-entity.<\/p>\n

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Saint George Maronite Cathedral and Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in Beirut<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Frustrated against the large Maronite presence and the Ottoman legal system, the found Muslim individuals were more interested in intellectual conversation and debate rather than conversion, and so the American Board missionaries invested in free missionary schools promoting higher education.\u00a0 They started by creating coeducational elementary schools and later high schools, shifting the balance of Lebanese society, most notably in the silk trade.\u00a0 The lower classes and poor, seeking to improve their lives and involve themselves in the lucrative economy (whereas the rich did not see this as necessary), could learn a foreign language such as English, German, or Italian, and acquire a job at a local consulate involved on many levels of relationships between foreign traders and local merchants.\u00a0 The poor classes now saw themselves empowered with a rising income to buy their way into the local silk industry, and this increased economic activity increased the capacity of the port, and in time saw goods like wheat from neighboring areas like Syria passing through Beirut as a regional hub.\u00a0 A growing prosperous economy encouraged investment in modern infrastructure such as railways and highways.<\/p>\n

This new interest in schools led to the 1866 founding of the Syrian Protestant College, renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920.\u00a0 According to Andersen, its founders including Daniel Bliss sought to establish a school with the traditional values of an American liberal arts education, bringing a \u201ctraditional\u201d European, westernized education to the Middle East.\u00a0 Essentially, Bliss and his colleagues were transplanting the college system from New England, bringing it in full force to Beirut.\u00a0 A strict adherence throughout the twentieth century to a western-style curriculum has precipitated student protests in favor of adapting the educational style to accommodate a greater consciousness respecting the city where the university is located.<\/p>\n

Conflict in Beirut began to rise between the empowered missionaries and other Christians existing outside of Ottoman law, sparking a violent confrontation in 1860 eventually put down by European powers.\u00a0 Mount Lebanon became its own special district due to the belief in primordial identities where administrative entities could come together; this perpetuated a system of legal sectarianism.\u00a0 This sectarianism reflected conflict over economic resources and political access, not primordial motivations but inequality between communities.<\/p>\n

These student protests during the 1960s dissipated with the Lebanese Civil War, but in 1998-99 during reconstruction, they provided the foundation for the reassessment of AUB\u2019s traditional values.\u00a0 Today, there is a healthy combination on the university campus between an American liberal arts education and a curriculum conscious of Middle Eastern proclivities. AUB remains a powerhouse and beacon of higher education in the Mediterranean world.<\/p>\n

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College Hall Today at AUB<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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By Duncan Grimm ’15 Thursday, February 14, at the Smith House, Trinity alumna Betty Anderson \u201987, Associate Professor of History at Boston University delivered a well-attended lecture on Beirut, Lebanon\u2019s capital city. Presented by the History Department, the International Studies Program, and the Co-Curricular Initiative on Cities, Anderson described how a minor city on the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":447,"featured_media":978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,17,8,7,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/447"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1001,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions\/1001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}