An influential follower of al-Bustani was the Belgian Jesuit historian, Henri Lammens, ordained as a priest in Beirut in 1893, who claimed that Greater Syria had since ancient times encompassed all the land between the Arab peninsula, Egypt, the Levantine corridor and the Taurus Mountains, including all the peoples within the Fertile Crescent. This was also accompanied with the rise of a profoundly idealistic patriotism, largely resembling European romantic nationalism, idealizing the coming of a National Revival to the Levant, that would shake off the Ottoman past and propel back what many started to see again as the cradle of civilization into the modern world's front stage. In that aspect, the works of Kahlil Gibran (the English name of Jubran Khalil Jubran) who began expressing his belief in Syrian nationalism and patriotism are central. As Gibran said, "I believe in you, and I believe in your destiny. I believe that you are contributors to this new civilization.... I believe that it is in you to be good citizens. And what is it to be a good citizen?... It is to stand before the towers of New York and Washington, Chicago and San Francisco saying in your hearts, "I am the descendent of a people the built Damascus and Byblos, and Tyre and Sidon and Antioch, and I am here to build with you, and with a will." Colonialism, Zionism, and sectarianism The late 1920s and the early 1930s were also a period of cultural and political effervescence that greatly contributed to the emergence of Syrian nationalism as a distinct ideology. In 1920, the French army toppled the first Arab Kingdom of Syria and the Hashemite King Faisal, who had been proclaimed "King of all-Syria" by the Syrian National Congress at the Battle of Maysalun. The British and the French dissected the region into spheres of influence in what later became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, setting up colonial administrations throughout the Levant. The Great Syrian Revolt was brutally repressed in 1925 while a small clique of traditional landowners and notables coalesced around the newly founded administration of the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. Greater Lebanon was established on the ruins of the Mutasarrifiyya of Mount Lebanon with arbitrarily drawn borders and with a state structure largely dominated by the Christian Maronites, a community whose elite were historically well-disposed to the French, and who would ensure the French colonial