20 Facts About Francis Marrash

Francis bin Fathallah bin Nasrallah Marrash, known as Francis al-Marrash or Francis Marrash al-Halabi, was a Syrian scholar, publicist, writer and poet of the Nahda or the Arab Renaissance, and a physician.

Francis Marrash traveled throughout West Asia and France in his youth, and after some medical training and a year of practice in his native Aleppo, during which he wrote several works, he enrolled in a medical school in Paris; yet, declining health and growing blindness forced him to return to Aleppo, where he produced more literary works until his early death.

Historian Matti Moosa considered Marrash to be the first truly cosmopolitan Arab intellectual and writer of modern times.

Francis Marrash adhered to the principles of the French Revolution and defended them in his own works, implicitly criticizing Ottoman rule in West Asia and North Africa.

Francis Marrash was influential in introducing French romanticism in the Arab world, especially through his use of poetic prose and prose poetry, of which his writings were the first examples in modern Arabic literature, according to Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Shmuel Moreh.

Francis Marrash was born in Aleppo, a city of Ottoman Syria, to an old Melkite family of merchants known for their literary interests.

Francis Marrash had built up a large private library to give his three children Francis, Abdallah and Maryana a thorough education, particularly in the field of Arabic language and literature.

At the age of four years, Francis Marrash had contracted measles, and had ever since suffered from eye problems that had kept worsening over time.

In 1853, Francis Marrash accompanied his father , on a business trip of several months to Beirut, where there was a noticeable presence and cultural influence of Europeans.

Francis Marrash practiced medicine for about a year; however, deeming it safer for his trade to become a state-licensed physician, he went to Paris in 1866 so as to continue his medical education at a school.

Francis Marrash returned to Aleppo completely blind, but still managed to dictate his works.

Around 1865, Francis Marrash published Ghabat al-haqq, an allegory about the conditions required to establish and maintain civilization and freedom.

Since love, for Francis Marrash, was the general law, and freedom meant participation in that law, it followed that freedom would be inseparable from love and religion.

In 1867, Francis Marrash published Rihlat Baris, an account of his second journey to Paris.

Francis Marrash had then travelled through France, with a stopover in Lyon before ending up in Paris.

Francis Marrash was fascinated by France, and by Paris the most; everything he described in his account, from the Paris Exhibition of 1867 to gas lighting in the streets, served to praise the accomplishments of Western civilization.

Francis Marrash wrote many articles in the popular press; in those published in Butrus al-Bustani's journal Al-Jinan, he showed himself favourable to women's education, which he restricted however to reading, writing, and a little bit of arithmetic, geography and grammar.

Francis Marrash condemned Arab men's severe treatment of their wives and daughters.

Francis Marrash often included poems in his works, written in muwashshah and zajal forms according to the occasion.

Shmuel Moreh has stated that Francis Marrash tried to introduce "a revolution in diction, themes, metaphor and imagery in modern Arabic poetry", sometimes even mocking conventional poetic themes.