Maryana bint Fathallah bin Nasrallah Marrash (Arabic: مريانا بنت فتح الله بن نصر الله مرّاش, ALA-LC: Maryānā bint Fatḥ Allāh bin Naṣr Allāh Marrāsh; 1848–1919), also known as Maryana al-Marrash or Maryana Marrash al-Halabiyah, was a Syrian writer and poet of the Nahda or the Arab Renaissance. She revived the tradition of literary salons in the Arab world and was the first Syrian woman to publish a collection of poetry. She may have been the first woman to write in the Arabic-language daily newspapers.
Maryana Marrash was born in Aleppo, a city of Ottoman Syria (present-day Syria), to an old Melkite family of merchants known for their literary interests.[1] Having earned wealth and standing in the 18th century, the family was well established in Aleppo,[2] although they had gone through troubles: a relative of Maryana, Butrus Marrash, was killed by the wali's troops in the midst of a Catholic–Orthodox clash in April 1818.[3] Other Melkite Catholics were exiled from Aleppo during the persecutions, among them the priest Jibrail Marrash.[4][a] Maryana's father, Fathallah, tried to defuse the sectarian conflict by writing a treatise in 1849, in which he rejected the Filioque.[6] He had built up a large private library[7] to give his three children Francis, Abdallah and Maryana a thorough education, particularly in the field of Arabic language and literature.[8] As worded by Marilyn Booth, Maryana's mother was from "the famous al-Antaki family", related to Archbishop Demetrius Antachi.[9]
Aleppo was then a major intellectual center of the Ottoman Empire, featuring many thinkers and writers concerned with the future of the Arabs.[10] It was in the French missionary schools that the Marrash family learnt Arabic with French, and other foreign languages (Italian and English).[10] By providing their daughter with an education, at a time when Eastern Mediterranean women received none, Maryana's parents challenged the then widespread belief that a girl should not be educated "so she would not sit in the men's reception room", as quoted by Marilyn Booth.[11] Thus, Fathallah put his five-year-old daughter in a Maronite school.[12] Later on, Maryana was educated by the nuns of St. Joseph in Aleppo.[13] She finally went to an English school in Beirut.[14] In addition to her formal education in these schools, where she was exposed to French and Anglo-Saxon cultures, she was tutored by her father and brothers, especially on the subject of Arabic literature.[7] The first biographies of Maryana mention that she excelled in French, Arabic and mathematics, and that she played the qanun and sang beautifully.[15]
Aleppine historian Muhammad Raghib al-Tabbakh wrote that she was unique in Aleppo, and that "people looked at her with a different eye".[16] Although she had many suitors, she initially wished to remain single.[17] However, she was persuaded to marry after her mother's death, and chose for husband Habib Ghadban, a scion of a local Christian family.[18] They had one son and two daughters.[19]