Najeeb Diab

Portrait of Najeeb Diab c. 1913

Najeeb Diab (Najeeb Moussa Diab) Arabic: نجيب موسى دياب (August 6, 1870 – July 11, 1936) was an early Arab nationalist, founding owner of major Arabic Newspaper, publisher of Kahlil Gibran and major force behind development of Arab-American Al Mahjar literary movement.

Najeeb Diab was born in the village of Roumieh, Mount Lebanon (now Lebanon), on 6 August 1870. Following his early education in Lebanon, he attended college in Assiut, Egypt. In 1891 he married Katherine Saba, and they immigrated to the United States from Alexandria, Egypt in 1893. While residing temporarily in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with his wife's brother's family, Diab wrote for Kawkab America, the United States' first Arabic language newspaper. The Diab family moved to New York City, the center of early Arab-American journalism, in 1894.

By 1898 Diab was Managing Editor of Kawkab America, and in 1899 he founded and became Managing Editor and Publisher of the newspaper Meraat ul Gharb (Mirror of the West), dedicating the paper "to speak for Arabism." The newspaper gained a wide national and international readership and by 1911 was considered "the best Arabic Newspaper" published in the United States. In 1902 the Ottoman Government issued a warrant for his arrest, confiscated his property in Lebanon and sentenced him to death in absentia citing his editorials as encouraging revolution in the Empire. In 1908 Meraat ul Gharb was reported as "one of the instruments which incited the Turkish military to its recent revolt" against the Sultan's Government.

Diab was an early activist for Arab independence, first supporting a confederation of Arab States within the Ottoman Empire, and, after World War I, secular republican Arab governments. In June 1913 he was a delegate from America's United Syrian Society, of which he was President and a founding member, to the Arab Congress of 1913, in Paris. In his speech to the Congress, "The Aspirations of the Syrian Emigrants," Diab called for semiautonomous status for Greater Syria within the Ottoman Empire, a strategy that has been called "using the Ottoman Empire as a shield from European ambitions" in the Arab region. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Diab, in 1919, opposed a French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, and was strongly against France's perceived role as speaking on behalf of the region at the post World War I Paris Peace Conference.

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