The Nahda giant Butrus al-Bustani (d. 1883) left us an anonymous testimony of his account of the civil war of 1860, its possible causes and potential effects. In Nafir Suriyya, a series of eleven broadsheets distributed in Beirut in the immediate wake of the carnage in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, the horrified author grapples with the event he witnessed, and he is failing to find adequate words, concepts and meanings for it. Al-Bustani was palpably dwarfed by the magnitude of the event and the fear that it might become structure. My paper, too, grapples. It grapples with the connections al-Bustani made in Nafir Suriyya between, the contingent materiality of civil war – the most uncivil of human experiences and menacing spectre of collapse hovering over society – and the Nahda realm of thought, language and learning that so promised progress and peace. I interrogate Bustani’s frantic yet hesitant attempts at conceptualizing – in good-faith – what had just happened in the summer of 1860: Were his the first steps to overcome the conflict’s sectarian causes and avoid them in the future? Or has al-Bustani’s text, rather, ended up solidifying, malgré lui-même, this violent event into the structure of sectarianism that we think we know today? Perhaps his faith in the emancipatory powers of words, concepts and abstraction exposes the limits of language inherent in all our critical intellectual work.