Nasif al-Yaziji

Nasif al-Yaziji was born in Kf嶋rshima in Mount Lebanon into a Greek Catholic family. Serving as court secretary to Emir Bashir Shihab II for over a decade, he relocated to Beirut in 1840, where he became the primary linguistic authority for the early Nahda, teaching Arabic at the Syrian Protestant College (American University of Beirut).

Yaziji dedicated his career to purifying and modernizing Arabic prose and poetry, proving that the classical language possessed unmatched richness and flexibility for the modern era. His famous imitation of Al-Hariri's picaresque tales, Majma' al-Bahrayn (The Confluence of the Two Seas), and his textbooks on grammar and prosody trained the pioneers of modern Arabic literature.