The city of Beirut , Lebanon, despite modern invocations of its antiquity and its spectacular urban growth after independence, is a product of a convergence of political, economic, and cultural forces of the nineteenth-century. "A beautiful ancient merchant city, it was one of the most important Syrian cities on the Roman coast. It rests on a nine-kilometre-long languet protruding into the Mediterranean Sea." This is how in 1875 Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819-83), a leading figure in the nineteenth century nahḍa , the Arab Awakening, located his hometown on