Sati' al-Husri

Sāṭi` al-Ḥuṣrī (in Arabic: ساطع الحصري, in Turkish: Mustafa Satı Bey, August 1880 – 1968) was an Ottoman and Syrian writer, educationalist and an influential Arab nationalist thinker in the 20th century.

Al-Husri was born in Sana'a, Yemen, to a government official from a wealthy Aleppo family. Frequent moving meant that he never received a formal education from a madrasah but instead spent his formative years in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

Before studying the Arabic language, he learned Turkish and French. When he spoke, he reportedly had a slight Turkish accent.

In 1900, he graduated from the Royal Academy, and worked as a schoolteacher in Ioannina in Epirus, then part of the European territories of the Ottoman Empire. During this period, he began to show an interest in questions of nationality and was exposed to the competing strands of European nationalism. After five years in Yanina, he took up a high-ranking administrative position in Macedonia, where the officers who would later form the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) had a strong presence. After the Young Turk revolution of 1908, he was appointed in May 1909 director of the Teachers' Institute, Darülmuallimin in Istanbul, where he initiated major reforms in pedagogy and the public education system. In this period he became editor of two important educational reviews ("Tedrisat-ı İbtidaiye Mecmuası", "Muallim"). From 1910 to 1912, he visited European countries to examine modern educational methods. Initially a supporter of Ottomanism and the Young Turks, from 1916 on he moved towards Arabism.

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