He is considered to be the first Syrian nationalist,[1] due to his publication of Nafir Suriyya which began following the 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war.

In 1870, he founded Al-Jinan, the first important example of the kind of literary and scientific periodicals which began to appear in the 1870s in Arabic alongside the independent political newspapers.

He received primary education in the village school, where he attracted the attention of his teacher, Father Mikhail al-Bustani, because of his keen intelligence that he showed brilliantly.

In 1840, after completing his studies at ‘Ayn Warqa’, Al-Bustani moved to Beirut and obtained his first employment outside of academia as a dragoman for the British Armed Forces assisting them in their efforts to evict Ibrahim Pasha from Syria in the interest of preserving the Ottoman Empire.

Both al-Bustani and Nasif Al-Yaziji worked on Van Dyck's version under the supervision of Eli Smith who was an American Protestant Missionary, scholar and Yale graduate.

While working to translate the Bible, Al-Bustani learned Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and perfected Syriac and Latin thus bringing the number of languages he mastered to nine.

[7] In the late 1840s, al-Bustani obtained the position of the official dragoman for the American Consulate in Beirut which he held until he passed it on to his son Salim in 1862.

Following the Maronite/Druze civil war of Mount Lebanon in 1860, al-Bustani, having witnessed these political/religious tensions, published an irregular newspaper which he called Nafir Suriyya (a Clarion of Syria), wherein he voiced his ideal of a Syrian fatherland.

The National School educated its students in Arabic, French, English, Turkish, Latin and Greek and modern sciences without the pretense of religion but with an obvious nationalistic aim.

Al-Bustani welcomed students from all religions and races and qualified staff not based on their religious standing but on their competence and professional qualities.

In 1868, al-Bustani helped found the Syrian Scientific Society al-Ja’miyya al-Ilmiyya al-Suriyya, a group of intellectuals who would be a part of promoting the study of science in educational institutions in Syria.

For he took a non-sectarian approach and worked to bring together both Christians and Muslims into the greater agenda of the revolution of Arab identity and culture.

He wished to spread awareness and appreciation for the Arabic language, hoping to promote the cultural significance of the Middle East in the modern world.

Nor is his advocacy of discriminately adopting Western knowledge and technology to 'awaken' the Arabs’ inherent ability for cultural success (najah) unique among his generation.

That is, his writing articulates a specific formula for native progress that expresses a synthetic vision of the matrix of modernity within Ottoman Syria.