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Lebanon pisses me off.
That’s not the beauty of this place. For the classic tourist, Beirut is a city with not much to explore. one can walk along The Esplanade – The boulevards along the Mediterranean. One can get lost in the shopping streets of Muslim west Beirut. You can eat at nice French restaurants in the Christian quarter. On Saturday nights, all the outdoor tables of many restaurants in the rebuilt city center are packed with people, many of whom smoke shisha. All this is good, the weather is nice in October, but the sights can hardly be compared with Istanbul or Thessaloniki: not a walk along the water, not shops, not even restaurants and cafes.
What makes this city so extraordinary is not what one can see, but the story behind each building: learn about the city center’s pre-war history, its wartime fortunes and the remarkable story of its post-1990 reconstruction ( Still a work in progress), making sitting here an exercise in rubbing Aladdin’s lamp. Ghosts will soon appear and take you to the past and future.
First, you find yourself in a pleasant but “bland urban ideal, with cobbled streets and teeming with art galleries and boutiques” (Nicholas Blanford): this is now. Then you see yourself sitting on an archaeological gold mine, Roman roads, Greek mosaics, Phoenician tombs: this is the distant past. The next image is of a place that looks like “a collection of ruins and overgrown streets, inhabited by impoverished squatter families and packs of wild dogs”: this is the city center of twenty years ago. Then “countless bullet holes pricked the sandstone facades of Ottoman-era houses named after World War I generals Foch, Weygand and Allenby” (Nicholas Blanford in his gripping ‘Killing Mr Lebanon’. I looked up and saw that the elegant shopping street I was on was still named after Allenby.
On Saturday I drove to Byblos. This is one of the oldest towns in the world, located on the coast north of Beirut. When two days in Lebanon were still part of most Middle Eastern tour packages, this was one of the obvious tourist attractions. Visitors will see the remains of a Crusader castle and a 12th century church, some Ottoman buildings, and a small port dating back to Phoenician times. It is a picturesque and interesting place, definitely worth a visit, but not worth a dedicated trip. Today, however, there were very few tourists. I learned in Byblos that most EU embassies have issued travel warnings for Lebanon, so tour operators coming to Syria are afraid to come here at the moment.
Even more fascinating than the monuments was the drive from Beirut to Byblos (Jbeil in Arabic): a chaotic, dense mix of buildings along the coast, a marked lack of urban planning, and the construction of shopping malls, casinos, and nightclubs: what one author unkindly calls “a flashy, superficial Western facade for wealthy Arab tourists.” The Beirut metropolitan area is not limited to the north or south of the city itself. Kosovo is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, with about 2 million people living in 10,000 square kilometers. In Lebanon, however, 4 million people live in an area the same size as Kosovo. It is a very crowded place indeed.
The northern area of Beirut is mainly populated by Christians. The current president of Lebanon, who has always been a Maronite Christian, is from here (the Maronites are the largest Christian group). Here, as in east Beirut, evidence of Christian life is everywhere: statues of the Virgin, statues of saints, signs of educational institutions run by religious orders.
Lebanon is not only densely populated but also extremely diverse. It was precisely because of the strong influence of the Maronites in the Mount Lebanon region that France separated Lebanon from Syria, both of which were French protectorates at the time. This also explains one reason for the recent unrest in Lebanon: Syria’s unwillingness to accept Lebanon as a fully sovereign neighbor. Damascus is only about 30 kilometers away from the Lebanese border. My friend told me that it only takes less than 2 hours to drive from Beirut to Damascus.
Lebanon’s diversity has been a source of tension throughout its modern history. Who should be responsible? How is power distributed among different sects, Christians and Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites, Druze, Armenians, smaller Arab Christian groups and the large numbers of Palestinian refugees? The formula for sharing power is “confessionalism,” based on a very rough idea of how many people of different faiths there are in the country. As the population balance changed over time, people decided early on to stop calculating racial composition: ignorance was the solution, because too much knowledge is dangerous.
in her book Tear down the walls Carole H. Dagher describes the evolution of the population. The last official census was taken in 1932: 32.4% Christian Maronites, 9.8% Greek Orthodox, 5.9% Greek Catholics, 22.4% Sunnis, 19.6% Shias, and 6.5% Druze (among other smaller groups).
By 1990, the total Christian population had fallen to 43%, with an additional 29% Shia, 24% Sunni, and 4% Druze. These figures do not include the estimated three or four hundred thousand (mostly Muslim) Palestinian refugees, nor the large number of foreign workers from Syria. It is because of this “fragile balance” that even the descendants of the Palestinian refugees who arrived in Lebanon in 1948 have not been granted Lebanese citizenship or other basic rights (such as owning property). This is obviously the second major cause of instability in recent decades: the uncertain relationship between Lebanese society and these refugees, and the direct connection between Lebanese politics and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict (which has triggered multiple Israeli interventions).
However, comparing population data from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 20th century reveals a striking fact: the change was very small.
By the standards of the early 20th century, Beirut was an ordinary Ottoman town: a city of ethnic diversity similar to Istanbul, Izmir, Jerusalem or Thessaloniki. By today’s standards, Beirut has an almost unique mix of Christian and Muslim populations. In most other places, including Mediterranean Europe, this diversity was destroyed in the 20th century. In Beirut, it survived.
To visit the city today, therefore, is to return to the communal organization of the Ottoman era. As Charles Winslow writes, “The peoples of the Middle East must not only learn to live with difference but also institutionalize the means of doing so…Individuals need a communal dimension of security similar to that which the old Ottoman millet system used to provide.” Although the 1990 Taif Agreement that ended the war called for “the phased abolition of political sectarianism,” sectarianism remains very much alive today.
As I walked through Beirut, I began to wonder: Did Istanbul feel the same way a century ago when it was a city with a large Christian population? At that time, the villages along the Bosporus were inhabited by Greeks and Armenians, and the Bosphorus University today is run by American Protestants? At a time when the legacy of the Millet system was still clearly visible?
It’s hard not to feel romantic about Beirut’s diversity, even if it’s impossible not to be fascinated by it. Everywhere there are remnants of interreligious conflict and thousands of years of coexistence. Open a daily newspaper in English or French and you’ll see ongoing tensions that defy easy categorization: There’s a history of fighting between Muslims, there’s a history of fighting between Christian militias. The crisis at the moment is between Salafi Sunnis near the northern city of Tripoli and other, more moderate Sunnis and the government (as a recent Carnegie paper put it) “Lebanese Sunni Islamists” Well described). Meanwhile, in the latest conflict, East Beirut’s large Armenian community has also managed to remain neutral in recent decades of religious fighting.
[As elsewhere, I wonder if Samuel Huntington has ever actually set foot in Lebanon: he could not have possibly have come up with his theory of the clash of civilisations in light of this particular complex story]
In fact, visiting Lebanon today is a bit like visiting modern-day Al-Andalus… just without the romance that comes with the distance of time. Here one can observe the intersection and fusion of cultures and religions, but without any certainty about the next chapter of an open-ended story of coping with diversity. Like medieval Spain, the fate of multi-religious Lebanon is seen as crucial in a broader sense, as is multi-religious Bosnia.
Carole Dagher concludes her book Tear down the walls Referring to the Lebanese “mission”:
“Lebanon’s challenges mirror, in part, those facing the entire region. Lebanon’s failure represents a meaningful step forward in the Arab world’s efforts to manage religious pluralism and cultural diversity and institutionalize freedom, equality, respect and participation. The experiment failed. This would leave the Arab world without a model to draw from, reminiscent of the lost Al-Andalus.”
The history of medieval Spain is as much a history of interaction as it is a history of conflict. There were local struggles that were manipulated and even instigated by outsiders; Crusader Christians in the north and fanatical North African rulers in the south ultimately destroyed a unique culture. But today, Andalusia is a myth, as is its hero, the mercenary El Cid.
Multiethnic Beirut is already a reality; the fate and future of this modern millet system is a matter of war and peace. Beirut is Mark Mazower’s Thessaloniki, but not a ghost town: a place where different faiths continue to live together as they did a century ago. It is a mirror of universal promises that, after looking into it, it is difficult to tear yourself away.
On the way to the airport, I finished reading another short book recommended by a friend: Mai Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut. If there is one book I’ve read about Lebanon these days that I would recommend you read, it’s this one: a Lebanese writer, artist, and activist’s masterfully personal reflections on the impulse for revenge after a terrible crime, and on slippery notions like honor and treason in times of conflict. It’s a very rich book, and I’ll come back to it later, but let me wrap up my account of what I saw in the Beirut mirror with Ghassoub’s case study of reconciliation in Lebanon:
“In 1994, the victims of the massacre in the Chof area of Lebanon were invited to a three-day conference to discuss Acknowledgement, forgiveness and reconciliation – alternative approaches to conflict resolution in Lebanon. The village in question, Maasir al-Chouf, is a predominantly Christian enclave of Druze people that has lived in peace for much of the civil war. So much so that a few days before the massacre, some French journalists invited to visit this haven of civilized coexistence between two hostile communities rushed home to write an article titled “Peace is still possible in Lebanon”, as shown here It had a large photo of a local priest and a Druze chief shaking hands and smiling. “
The journalists wrote their articles on March 7, 1977. On March 16, after the death of Kemal Jumblatt, Druze militants opened fire on Christian houses in Maasir al Chouf. …
At this reconciliation meeting, aimed at encouraging resettlement of Christian refugees from the village of Maciel, the victims of violence issued a statement: “We bury our dead with dignity, we transcend our wounds, we forgive… The state needs time to work towards a solution: time weakens resentment, and the effect of forgetting is that demands for justice weaken. We, the victims, are not asking for the impossible. But we refuse to be ignored, neglected and subjected to a fait accompli. We insist on the right to return to our villages and our lands. … At the same time, we believe in the logic of coexistence.”
Here it is: the echoes of Bosnian displaced persons from a decade ago, who demanded to return to their homes in central Bosnia, Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. The universal dilemma of post-conflict forgiveness and the struggle for justice, while trying to build a viable future.
Leaving Beirut this Sunday morning, I have a feeling I’ll be back soon.
The truth is, we’ve all been here before.
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