Mokarzel claimed that his publication was secular but his writings often showed religious bias; he used his publishing house to print and circulate Maronite politics and Lebanese nationalism.

[1] Mokarzel was born into a Maronite Catholic family from the town of Freike in Mount Lebanon, then a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire.

His father Antoun, a Maronite priest, and his mother Barbara Mokarzel née Akl were influential figures in local civic and political affairs.

After graduation, Mokarzel moved to Cairo, Egypt where he landed a job teaching literature at the Jesuit college; he became ill with fever after a year there and returned to his hometown in 1886 where he founded a boarding school.

[4][5][6][7] On August 4, 1888, Mokarzel and the Rihanis landed in New York; they lived in the basement of 59 Washington Street in Manhattan, a part of the city that was known as Little Syria due to the settlement of a growing Arab Christian immigrant population.

[9] The Jesuit-educated Mokarzel, who was fluent in French, was quickly hired to teach the language at the Saint Francis Xavier's College in Manhattan, a Jesuit institution at the time.

Mokarzel and Nageeb Arbeely engaged in a journalistic feud, personally attacking each other resulting in series of lawsuits and counter-suits between the two newspapers.

[14][11] Meanwhile, Mokarzel was gaining notoriety for his controversial demeanor;[5] he engaged in brawls and verbal disputes with other Arabic-speaking immigrants and was arrested on several occasions for libel and physical assault against members of the community affiliated with the Arbeely family.

The brawls that started as a result of professional competition and personal antipathy evolved into sectarian battles between Mokarzel's Maronite entourage and the Orthodox families of the community.

In 1895, Tannous Shishim, a Lebanese immigrant, petitioned for divorce from his wife Sophie on the ground of adultery and Mokarzel was named co-respondent in the court proceedings.

[5][18][6] The format of the publication changed after Salloum's arrival; Al-Hoda began appearing twice weekly and was reduced to eight pages with more space reserved for paid advertisements.

Feeling threatened by the looming publication, Mokarzel contravened his previous positions and declared that Al-Hoda had always served the Maronite sect and nation and accused the clergymen of seeking "personal and dishonorable purposes".

[23] The sectarian tension in Little Syria reached its zenith in 1906 when John Stefan, brother of the priest Khairallah Stephan, was killed in a restaurant brawl on Washington Street.

[5][24] During Zreik's trial, the prosecution held that Elias and his brother George were sent to kill Mokarzel; when they did not find him in his office they set out to the restaurant where his Maronite sympathizers often met.

[23] In 1910, the Mokarzel brothers decided to adapt the linotype machine to Arabic script to mitigate the expensive cost and tedious task of manual typesetting.

[11][14] While the linotype machine made printing cheaper, there was significant competition for readership since New York's Arabic-speaking community did not exceed 10,000 before World War II.

[31][32] In 1917, Mokarzel sought and collected through Al-Hoda more than $30,000 US in donations to relieve his compatriots in Mount Lebanon who were experiencing a great famine due to Entente and Ottoman blockades.

The collected donations were to be personally dispensed by Mokarzel, but half of the money was directed to fund a volunteer armed force that was gathering to enter Lebanon instead of toward relief aid.

[5][33] In 1923, on the occasion of Al-Hoda's Silver Anniversary, Mokarzel was celebrated as a leading figure by the Maronite and the non-Maronite literary community of America, as well as by a number of American friends.

[13] Mokarzel held an esteemed position in New York's Arabic-speaking community at a young age; his political and social views were expressed in Al-Hoda as well as other non-Arabic American newspapers.

[36] In 1898, the Ford Committee lobbied for more stringent immigrant admission criteria to the United States and proposed to the US Congress that the undesirable be turned back.

[5] In 1899, Mokarzel criticized the newly established Young Syria Party that aimed to overthrow the Ottoman government and sought to recruit a militia for that purpose.

[27][41] The mistreatment of the Lebanese during World War I and the ensuing famine were turning points for Mokarzel, who afterward openly called for Lebanon's independence from the Ottomans.

[5][18] His call for action was met with distrust and was not successful as there was a growing concern that the recruits would be exploited in occupying Mount Lebanon on behalf of the French, not liberate it from the Turks.

[18] Mokarzel participated in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and advocated a French Mandate over Mount Lebanon to train the locals in good governance in preparation for independence.

[45][48][49] Mokarzel also criticized the clergy for imposing social and religious barriers on Syrian women which prevented them from receiving a formal education.

[50] Mokarzel attacked what he called "false modesty" and how the men of the community allowed their women to peddle freely and stay out of town overnight while labeling them as immodest if they became writers or gave public lectures.

Mokarzel further encouraged female education by offering a free Al-Hoda subscription to any literate woman from the Arabic-speaking community of the United States.

He managed to collect more than half a million dollars that were transferred to a committee in Lebanon headed by Moussa Nammour, a member of the Lebanese parliament.

[60][58] Mokarzel argued that Syrians are of Arab origins, "the purest type of the Semitic race" and that therefore are "free white persons" falling within the meaning of the naturalization statute.