Jurji Zaydan was born on December 14, 1861, in Beirut to an
Eastern Orthodox Christian family of limited means that had probably originated in the
Hauran region. His father owned a restaurant and, being illiterate and uneducated himself, placed little importance on education. Zaydan dropped out of school after he completed an elementary education to help his father run the business. However, he maintained a desire to educate himself by attending night classes in English until, in 1881, at the age of 20, he was admitted to the
Syrian Protestant College as a medical student. He developed an interest in concepts of
individualism such as
laissez-faire economics, the
Freemason belief in a universal enlightenment, and
social Darwinism. Furthermore, the book's focus on individualism and the self, a relatively new theme in Arab intellectual thought, would be a common theme in Zaydan's later historical novels. He attended the university around the same time as
Yaqub Sarruf (1852–1927), who first translated
Self-Help into Arabic and would later found the magazine
Al-Muqtataf (The Elite, 1876) with whom he shared ideals of modernizing the
Arab world and emphasis on individual success through hard work.
Cornelius Van Dyck, an American professor of pathology at the Syrian Protestant College known for his translation of the Bible into Arabic in 1847, first encouraged Sarruf to translate
Self-Help. He also influenced Zaydan's worldview, leading him to adopt the idea that education was the most important factor for the progress and development of a people. Such widespread education could be reached only by widespread internal reform and modernization of all aspects of Arab government and daily life. Zaydan thus became critical of contemporaries such as Egyptian
Mustafa Kamil Pasha and
Ahmed Orabi, who were concerned solely with gaining independence from Western influence. Zaydan argued that reform must precede independence to ensure its success. In 1882, Professor E. Lewis was fired from the Syrian Protestant College for lightly praising
Charles Darwin in a speech that he made to students of the college. Because the concept of
Darwinism was highly controversial in
Protestantism, the school had forbidden its inclusion in any curriculum. The firing led to mass protests amongst the students, many of whom left or were expelled for rebelling. Additionally, many of the European pastors running the college were beginning to favour English over Arabic as the language of education. Zaydan was among those who left Syria for Cairo, where many Lebanese intellectuals and members of the
Nahda had already relocated as a reaction to increased
Ottoman suppression. After a short stint in the Medical School of 'Ain Shams' and a military expedition with the British army to the Sudan, he turned his focus to developing his writing career. Yaqub Sarruf began publishing
al-Muqtataf in 1876 with help from
Cornelius Van Dyck and his Syrian Protestant College classmates
Faris Namir and
Shahin Makarius. The magazine was concerned primarily covering modern scientific advancements, the first to do so in the Arab world, and it was known particularly known for its controversial coverage of the theory of evolution and Darwinism in the early 1880s. ==Career==