George Nicolas El-Hage Ph D

Sahifat "al-Risala" Al-Lubnaniya Al-Mahjariya George Nicolas El-Hage Ph D

This book tells the unknown story of one major Lebanese newspaper in North America called "al-Risala" which was owned and published by Murshid Jirjis Masoud, a Lebanese born in the town of Arsoun, Lebanon, on July 10, 1895. In 1910 he migrated to America and settled in Danbury, Connecticut, where he worked in a silk factory and lived in a house with four other Lebanese young men among them was Ralph Nader. Murshid then moved to Hornell, N. Y. and then to Syracuse, N. Y. where he first worked in a silk factory and then started his newspaper "al-Risala" which was published from the middle 1920s to the beginnings of the 1940s and was contemporary to many other major newspapers in North America like: al-Huda, al-Fonoon, al-Saih, al-Samir, Kawkab Amrica, Miraat al-Gharb, al-Muhajir, and other smaller newspapers. These publications played a major role in keeping the Lebanese and Arabs in diaspora connected with each other and with their motherland, particularly Lebanon. They also reflected the political and religious divisions and disagreements that the immigrants carried with them from their original country. These newspapers, all published in Arabic except one, exerted a tremendous influence in shaping the opinion of immigrants towards their communities and towards each other, their native land, and their adopted home as well as towards the great powers who were convening at the time to decide the fate of the whole world including that of the Middle East on the eve of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.