![]() ![]() ![]() The conflicts he faced were emblematic of an age of ideological and physical migration, when the competing claims of religion and freethinking, village and diaspora, had to be worked out by trail and error, as if for the first time. Yet Boutros was also very much a man of his era. His wife kept the school running for 11 difficult years before closing it down and moving to Beirut, where she devoted herself to supporting her children’s education. To Boutros’ disbelief, French governors of both the secular left and the clericist right preferred to finance his priestly rival the support he’d previously received from Protestants made them wary. And he eventually fled his wife and family, spending much of his time in Beirut, where he gave private lessons in a room he called “The Office of Knowledge and Work.” He also saw his dreams of political liberation betrayed-first, by the Young Turks, whose aspirations to make the Ottoman Empire a nonsectarian liberal state curdled into aggressive nationalism and then by the French, who took control of what is now Syria and Lebanon after World War I. Boutros feuded with his neighbors over land and loans. A “war of the schools” broke out-the local Greek Catholic priest plotted against Boutros, warning against his heterodoxies and sabotaging his hopes to create an academic empire. ![]()
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