As a child he experienced the famine in Mount Lebanon at the end of World War I. He was educated in Bikfayya before attending the Jesuit College of St Joseph in Beirut from 1923 to 1927. He became a journalist, becoming editorial secretary of the nationalist Damascus-based newspaper al-Qabas in 1931. He married the daughter of a Lebanese merchant and qualified as a lawyer before returning to Beirut in 1933.