Physicists Probe Antimatter For Clues To How It All Began : The Two-Way : NPRHow it all began - A concise history of Lebanon
From "A House of Many Mansions - The History of Lebanon Reconsidered" (chapter 1, pages. 19-37)Published by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1993, ISBN 1-
Reproduced by kind
of the author.
How it all began - A concise history of Lebanon
To create a
to create a nationality is
another. In the wake of the first world war, which ended
with the destruction of the German, Austro-Hungarian,
Russian and Ottoman empires, it was possible for the
victorious Allies to redraw the political map of much of the
world. In Europe, Germany and Austria-Hungary, defeated
in the war, re-emerged as the German, Austrian and
Hungarian republics. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik revolution
was already beginning to transform the Russian empire
into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. From European
territories formerly German, Austro-Hungarian or Russian,
new European states emerged. The overseas colonies of
Germany, in Africa and elsewhere, were divided between
Britain and France as mandates under licence from the
newly organized League of Nations.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman empire, as a result of its defeat
in the war, had virtually ceased to exist. The Turkish
heartlands, successfully reclaimed from Allied occupation
by the Kemalist revolution, were ultimately reconstituted
as the Turkish R but the Arab provinces in
historical Mesopotamia and Syria were irretrievably lost,
and subsequently divided between Britain and France,
again as mandated territory, with the provision that they
must be prepared as soon as possible for independence.
Here, as in Central and Eastern Europe, new states were
formed, but with an important difference. In Europe, where
nationalist thinking was already a firmly established
tradition, the sense of separate nationality among the
former subject peoples of the German, Austro-Hungarian
and Russian empires was already in existence, and in most
cases such clear and well-defined expectations were to be
heeded in the formation of the new states. This was not the
case with the Arab subjects of the Ottoman empire, where
national consciousness, to the extent that it existed, was
blurred and confounded by traditional loyalties of other
kinds which were often in conflict with one another. The
Allies felt they could ignore such rudimentary and
confused national sentiments among the Arabs of their
newly mandated territories as they set out to reorganize
them into states, redrawing the political map of the Arab
world in the manner which they thought suited them best.
By the spring of 1920 agreement had been reached
between Britain and France at San Remo on how the
former Arab territories of the defunct Ottoman empire
would be divided between them. The principal considerations
taken into account were oil and communications. During
the course of the war, the British had gone to considerable
trouble to occupy Mesopotamia. The onset of the war had
brought home the supreme strateg the
British already had command over the vast oil resources of
Iran, and they were determined to prevent the Germans,
who were major shareholders in the Turkish Petroleum
Company, from gaining access to the proven Mesopotamian
oil resources of Kirkuk. In 1916, an agreement negotiated
between Mark Sykes on behalf of Britain, and Francois
Georges-Picot on behalf of France (the so:called Sykes-Picot
Agreement), had assigned the Vilayet (Ottoman province)
of Mosul, in northern Mesopotamia, to the French, and the
vilayets of Baghdad and Basra, in central and southern
Mesopotamia, to the British. In Syria, France was to get
the Vilayet of Aleppo and the northern parts of the
Vilayets of Beirut and Damascus, leaving the southern
parts of these two vilayets essentially to Britain, with the
understanding that the Holy Land of Palestine would have
an international status. During the last months of the war
however the British, who already occupied much of
Mesopotamia, took occupation of Palestine. Now, at San
Remo, the wartime Sykes-Picot Agreement between the
two sides was scrapped.
By the terms of the new agreement, France gave up her
claim to the Vilayet of Mosul in return for a major share in
the Turkish Petroleum Company, which had been confiscated
by the Allies and reorganized as the Iraq Petroleum
Company (IPC). Moreover, the older agreement had specified
that France would have direct control over the coastal
parts of the Vilayet of Aleppo and its share of the Vilayet
of Beirut, but only a sphere of influence in inland Syria
where an Arab state or states of independent status would
be established. Under the new agreement, the French were
to have a free hand in the whole area which they were to
hold as a mandate under the League of Nations - a
continuous stretch of territory extending from the Euphrates
river to the Mediterranean coast. On the other hand, the
British, in addition to keeping the whole of Mesopotamia
as a mandate, were also to have the mandate over all the
southern parts of the vilayets of Damascus and Beirut - a
territory which they first called the Palestine east and west
of the J then, more simply, Transjordan and Palestine.
In effect, Britain came to control a stretch of north Arabian
desert' territory which secured the required contiguity
between its Mesopotamian and Palestinian mandates, and
an uninterrupted overland route all the way from the
borders of Iran to the Mediterranean.
Apart from its agreement with France over the partition
of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire, Britain had
made promises during the war to other parties concerning
the same area. In central Arabia, there was a standing
British alliance with Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud, the Wahhabi
Emir of Riyad who was subsequently to become the founder
of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism was a
movement of militant Islamic religious revival which had
appeared in central Arabia in the middle decades of the
eighteenth century, and the house of Saud had been
politically associated with it since that time. In conflict
with this British-Saudi alliance was the wartime alliance
reached between Britain and Sharif Husayn, the Emir of
Mecca, who enjoyed a special Arab and Islamic prestige as
a recognized descendant of the Prophet, and whose family
were called the Hashemites.
In return for leading an Arab revolt against the
Ottomans, the Sharif had been promised recognition as the
head of an Arab kingdom the exact nature of which was
left undefined. The Sharif, however, was led to understand
that it would include all of M all but a
negotiable strip of coastal S and the whole of
peninsular Arabia, except for the parts which were already
established as British protectorates. While the British
relations with Ibn Saud were maintained by the British
government of India, those with the Sharif were initiated
and pursued by the British Arab Bureau in Cairo.
Meanwhile, the British Foreign Office, in close touch with
the World Zionist Organization, had by 1917 formally
committed itself to viewing with favour the establishment
of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.
Naturally, it was impossible for Britain after the war to
honour simultaneously all these conflicting commitments
fully. The need to reach a settlement with France over the
area was most pressing, and this was taken care of by the
San Remo agreement. During the last months of the war,
as the British drove the Ottoman forces out of Syria, with
the forces of Sharif Husayn's Arab Revolt protecting their
right flank, the Sharif's third and most popular son,
Faysal, was allowed to enter Damascus and establish an
Arab government on behalf of his father in that ancient
Arab capital. As the Allies met at San Remo to redraw the
map of the Arab world, Sharif Faysal was proclaimed King
of Syria, with a view to place Britain and France before an
accomplished fact. Once the San Remo agreement had been
concluded, however, the French, already in occupation of
Beirut, made a show of trying to reach an accommodation
with King F they then crushed his forces at
Maysalun, outside Damascus, forcing him to abandon his
short-lived Syrian kingdom. To compensate their gallant
wartime ally for his loss, the British created another Arab
kingdom for him out of the old Ottoman vilayets of
Mesopotamia, which now became the kingdom of Iraq.
The British wartime commitment to facilitate the
establishment of a Jewish National Home in the Palestine
west of the Jordan, which again received high priority, was
formalized in 1920 and included as a special article in the
statutes of the British mandate for Palestine, as registered
in the League of Nations. For the Palestine east of the
Jordan, or Transjordan, a special administrative arrangement
was soon made. In 1916, when Sharif Husayn
solemnly declared the start of the Arab Revolt against the
Turks in Mecca, he also proclaimed himself king of the
Arabs, and the British actually recognized him as king of
the Hijaz, which was the furthest they felt they could go at
the time. After the war, however, Ibn Saud, with his
Wahhabi forces, began to attack the Hijaz, and completed
its conquest by putting an end to Sharifian rule there in
In the earlier stages of the Saudi-Sharifian conflict, the
Sharifian forces, led by the Sharif's second son Abdallah,
suffered a serious defeat in battle. Sharif Abdullah
thereupon left the Hijaz in 1921 and arrived in Transjordan,
where the British soon recognized him as the sovereign
emir. With British military help, Abdullah succeeded in
repelling Wahhabi attempts to extend the Saudi domain
northwards in the direction of Syria, thereby securing the
extension of Transjordan eastwards continuously to the
border of Iraq. In the south, Abdullah's Transjordanian
emirate extended beyond the borders of the old Ottoman
Vilayet of Damascus to reach the Red Sea at the strategic
Gulf of Aqaba, and so include the northernmost parts of
what had formerly been the Ottoman Vilayet of the Hijaz.
In the east, the border of the emirate, in the Jordan valley,
set the limits beyond which the projected Jewish National
Home in Palestine could not extend.
The British at the time knew what they wanted, and
they got it: control over the oilfields of I unimpeded
access from there to the M control of the Red
Sea and the Persian Gulf (which were the two vital
maritime highways leading to the Indian Ocean). To secure
their interests, they naturally preferred to deal with
parties in the area, or concerned with the area, who also
knew what they wanted, and who were willing to make
realistic accommodations to achieve their ends. During the
war, the British had made a point of encouraging Arab
nationalist activity in Syria against the O and it
was partly through British intermediaries that the Arab
nationalists in Syria were put in touch with Sharif Husayn
and his sons, which subsequently gave the Sharifian revolt
in the Hijaz the extra dimension it needed to gain
recognition as a true Arab Revolt. After the war, however,
it became clear to the British that the claims of Arab
nationalism were most urgently pressed either by romantic
dreamers who were unwilling to be taughe that politics was
the art of the possible, or by unprincipled schemers who
were out to secure personal rather than national interests.
In either case, the nationalist claims, it was felt, where
they threatened to embarrass British interests, could be
discounted at negligible cost.
However, there remained Britain's wartime Arab allies
to deal with. In the Hijaz, King Husayn was demanding
more than the British were prepared to give. He wanted to
be recognized as king of all the A considered himself
the rightful claimant of the caliphate of I and was
unwilling to recognize the arrangements which the Allies
were determined to introduce to the area in accordance
with the San Remo agreement. More than that, he was
adamant in refusing to recognize the Jewish claims in
Palestine, as approved by the British. His two sons,
Abdullah and Faysal, took the so did
his great rival in Arabia, Ibn Saud. Those were practical
men who were willing to give and take, and settle for what
was ultimately achievable in given circumstances. In the
arrangements which the British made in the parts of the
area allotted to them, or where they already wielded
dominant influence, all three were readily accommodated.
In their own mandated territories, which they called the
Levant, the French took the same attitude as the British:
they were willing to attend to reasoned and concrete
demands by parties who knew what they wanted, but had
no patience for the claims and clamours of those who did
not. In Mount Lebanon and the adjacent parts of the old
Vilayet of Beirut, the Maronites - a Christian communion
with a long tradition of union with the Roman Catholic
church in Europe - were one party whose demands the
French were prepared to listen to. Of all the Arabs, barring
only individuals or politically experienced princely dynasties, they appeared to be the only people who knew
precisely what they wanted: in their case, as they put it, a
'Greater Lebanon' under their paramount control, separate,
distinct and independent from the rest of Syria. Behind
them, the Maronites had a rich and eventful past which
will be reviewed as a separate story in due course.
In 1861, with the help of France, they had already
secured a special political status for their historical
homeland of Mount Lebanon as a mutesarrifate, or
privileged sanjak (administrative region), within the
Ottoman system, under an international guaranty. Since
the turn of the century, however, the Maronites had
pressed for the extension of this small Lebanese territory to
what they argued were its natural and historical boundaries:
it would then include the coastal towns of Tripoli, Beirut,
Sidon and Tyre and their respective hinterlands, which
belonged to the Vilayet of B and the fertile valley of
the Bekaa (the four Kazas, or administrtative districts, of
Baalbek, the Bekaa, Rashayya and Hasbayya), which
belonged to the Vilayet of Damascus. According to the
Maronite argument, this 'Greater Lebanon' had always had
a special social and historical character, different from that
of its surroundings, which made it necessary and indeed
imperative for France to help establish it as an independent
While France had strong sympathies for the Maronites,
the French government did not support their demands
without reserve. In Mount Lebanon, the Maronites had
formed a clear majority of the population. In a 'Greater
Lebanon', they were bound to be outnumbered by the
Muslims of the coastal towns and their hinterlands, and by
those of the B and all the Christian communities
together, in a 'Greater Lebanon', could at best amount to a
bare majority. The Maronites, however, were insistent in
their demands. Their secular and clerical leaders had
pressed for them during the war years among the Allied
powers, not excluding the United States. Af'ter the war, the
same leaders, headed by the Maronite patriarch Elias
Hoyek in person, pursued this course at the Paris Peace
C and in the end the French yielded. On 1
September 1920 - barely four months after the conclusion
of the San R barely two months af'ter the
flight of' King Faysal and his Arab government from
Damascus - General Henri Gouraud, from the porch of his
official residence as French High Commissioner in Beirut,
proclaimed the birth of the State of Greater Lebanon, with
Beirut as its capital. The flag of this new Lebanon was to
be none other than the French tricolour itself, with a cedar
tree - now hailed as the glorious symbol of the ancient
country since Biblical times - featuring on the central
Following the establishment of the State of Greater
Lebanon, the French turned to deal with the rest of their
mandated territory in the Levant, where they were at a
loss what to do. In the case of Lebanon, the Maronites had
indicated precisely what they wanted. Elsewhere, no
community seemed willing to speak its mind unequivocally,
which lef't the French to their own devices. To begin with,
in addition to Lebanon, they established four Syrian states:
two of them regional, which were the State of Aleppo and
the State of D and two of them ethno-religious,
which were the State of the Alouites and the State of Jebel
Druze. In response to strong nationalist demands, the
states of Aleppo and Damascus were subsequently merged
I l to form the State of Syria, later reconstituted as the Syrian
Republic, to which Jebel Druze and the Alouite country
were ultimately annexed. Meanwhile, on 23 May 1926, the
State of Greater Lebanon received a Constitution which
transformed it into the Lebanese Republic.
Thus the two sister republics came into being, Lebanon
and S both under French mandate, sharing the same
currency and customs services, but flying different flags,
and run by separate native administrations under one
French High Commissioner residing in Beirut. Before long,
each of the two sister countries had its own national
anthem. But are administrative bureaucracies, flags and
national anthems sufficient to make a true nation-state out
of a given territory and the people who inhabit it? What
about the question of nationality?
To the Maronites and many other Christians in Lebanon,
there were no doubts about the matter. The Lebanese were
Lebanese, and the Syrians were Syrians, just as the Iraqis
were Iraqi, the Palestinians Palestinian, and the
Transjordanians Transjordanian. If the Syrians, Iraqis,
Palestinians or Transjordanians preferred to identify themselves
as something else, such as Arabs united by one
nationality, the but the Lebanese
remained Lebanese, regardless of the extent to which the
outside world might choose to classify them as Arabs,
because their language happened to be Arabic. Theirs, it
was claimed, was the heritage of ancient Phoenicia, which
antedated the heritage they had come to share with the
Arabs by thousands of years. Theirs, it was further
claimed, was the broader Mediterranean heritage which
they had once shared with Greece and Rome, and which
they now shared with Western Europe. They also had a
long tradition of proud mountain freedom and independence
which was exclusively theirs, none of their neighbours
ever having had the historical experience.
Unfortunately for the Maronites, however, not everybody
in Lebanon thought or felt as they did. There were even
many Maronites who dissented and freely expressed their
divergent views. After all, who could reasonably deny that
Lebanon, as a political entity, was a new country, just as
the other Arab countries under French or British mandate
were? Certainly, Lebanon was as much a new country as
the others, but with an important difference: it had been
willed into existence by a community of its own people,
albeit one community among others. Moreover, those
among its people who had willed it into existence were
fully satisfied with what they got, and wanted the country
to remain forever exactly as it had been finally constituted,
without any territory added or subtracted.
The Syrian Republic, it is true, had also been finally put
together in response t in fact,
following a nationalist uprising which lasted more than
two years (1925-7), provoking a French bombardment of
Damascus. In Syria, however, the nationalists were only
partly satisfied with what they got, and continued to aspire
for much more. They knew what they did not want rather
than what they wanted, and what they were opposed to
more than what they were in favour of. For a brief term,
they had had an Arab kingdom, with its capital in
historical Damascus, once the seat of the great Umayyad
caliphs and the capital of the first Arab empire. The French
had destroyed their kingdom and established statelets on
its territory, among them Lebanon. The Maronites, they
argued, were perhaps entitled to continue to enjoy the sort
of autonomy they had enjoyed since the 1860s in the
Ottoman Sanjak of Mount Lebanon, although they had no
real reason to feel any different from other Syrians or
Arabs. On the other hand, they had no right securing
for their Greater Lebanon Syrian territory which had
formerly belonged to the vilayets of Beirut or Damascus,
and which had never formed part of their claimed
historical homeland.
>From the Arab nationalist point of view, it was not
permissible to accord the French-created Lebanese Republic
recognition as a nation-state separate and distinct from
Syria. Moreover, from the same point of view, the Syrian
Republic itself was not acceptable as the final and
immutable achievement of the aspirations of its people.
The Syrians, after all, were Arabs, and their territory,
historicallv. which had alwavs included Palestine and
Transjordan along with Lebanon, was not a national
territory on its own, but part of a greater Arab homeland: a
homeland whose ancient heartlands were Syria, Iraq and
Arabia, but which, since Islam, had also come to include
Egypt and the countries of North Africa all the way to the
Atlantic. During the war years, the Allies had cheated the
Arabs. The British had promised them national independence
on their historical homelands, but they had failed to
honour their promises. Instead, they had partitioned this
Arab territory with the French, and committed themselves
to hand over a particularly precious part of it, namely
Palestine, to the Jews.
To accept all this, or any part of it, would be nothing less
than high treason. Equally unacceptable in principle,
though admittedly problems of a less pressing nature, were
the continuing British control of E the Italian
colonization of L and the French and Spanish imperial
presence in the remaining parts of North Africa. This
concept of one indivisible Arab national homeland extending
all the way from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic was
expressed by the Damascene nationalist and man of letters,
Fakhri al-Barudi, in a song which enjoyed wide circulation:
The countries of the Arabs are my homelands:
>From Damascus to B
>From Syria to the Yemen,
to Egypt, and all the way to Tetuan.
Significantly, the Syrian national anthem written by
another Damascene nationalist, Khalil Mardam, did not
sing the virtues of Syria as a nation-state standing by
itself, but as the 'lion's den of Arabism', its glorious
historical 'throne', and its sacred 'shrine'. By contrast the
Lebanese national anthem, written by the Maronite poet
Rashid Nakhleh, sang of the old men of Lebanon and the
young, in the mountains and the plains, responding to the
call of the historical fatherland and rallying around the
'eternal' cedar flag to defend 'Lebanon forever'.
Clearly, in the case of the Syrian Republic, the French
had put together a state but failed to create a special
nationality to go with it. The same, in a way, applied to
Lebanon where, contrary to the claims of the national
anthem, the concept of a natural and historical Lebanese
nationality was meaningful to some people in the country,
but not to others. The case was no different in the countries
created by the British in their own mandated Arab
territories.
In Palestine, which was assembled from what was
formerly the Sanjak of Jerusalem and the southern parts of
the Vilayet of Beirut, the British had deliberately attempted
to recreate the Biblical Land of Israel, 'from Dan to
Beersheba', where the Jews were to have their national
homeland. The immigrant Jews actually called the country
Eretz Israel, and looked forward to the day when it would
be transformed into a Jewish state. To them, Palestine as
a country was meaningful, but only as a prelude to something
else: the Zionist concept of a Jewish nationality,
reconstituted on what was conceived to be its historical
home grounds. To its native Arab population, however,
Palestine was no more of a natural country than Lebanon,
Syria, Transjordan or Iraq, and might as well have been
given another shape or size.
Transjordan, formed essentially out of the southern parts
of the old Vilayet of Damascus, but with bits of Arabia
added, was certainly not a natural country. Apart from a
few towns and small clusters of villages scattered along the
highlands east of the Jordan valley, and some pastoral
areas and grainlands here and there, this Arab emirate
consisted mostly of open desert. Even its founder, Emir
Abdullah, did not regard it as a real country. To him it was
no more than historical Arab territory salvaged for the
cause of the Great Arab Revolt, to serve one day as a base
for the re-establishment of a Greater Arab Syria. Significantly,
Emir Abdullah called his army not the Transjordanian,
but the Arab Legion. To the British and others,
Abdullah's emirate may have appeared as a recreation of
the Biblical territory of Edom and Moab, or of the Roman
province of A but such concepts, certainlv at the
time, were meaningless to the Transjordanians and did not
readily contribute to a sense of separate historical nationality
among them.
The British had hoped that Abdullah's younger brother
Faysal, who was widely regarded in 1920 as the preeminent
Arab national hero, would be a man of sufficient
stature to make a real country out of Iraq, made up of
the former Ottoman vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad, Basra
and Shahrazor. Faysal's territory was declared politically
independent almost immediately after its organization as a
kingdom. Separated from other Arab countries by desert,
and having the potential of enjoying a rich revenue from
oil, Iraq could become a country on its own more easily
than the others, as it had indeed been in ancient times, in
the days of the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Internally,
however, the Iraqis, apart from the Christian and Jewish
minorities among them, were divided between Sunnites
and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds. As King of Iraq, Faysal was
surrounded by veterans of the Arab Revolt who had
followed him to Baghdad in the flight from Damascus, and
he himself never forgot his lost Syrian kingdom. His
regime was more Arab nationalist than specifically Iraqi in
character, dominated by the Sunnite Arab element and
resented by the Shiite Arab element as well as by the
Kurds. Much was indeed done under Faysal and his
successors to assuage these resentments. Nevertheless, to
the extent that it did develop, the sense of special
nationality among the people of Iraq remained rudimentary
and confused.
This was a new beginning in the history of the area: five
countries formed out of Arab territory which had formerly
been Ottoman, and none of them with a true or unarguable
concept of special nationality to go with it. All things
considered, all five of these countries were artificial
creations established and given their initial organization
by foreign imperial powers. Of the five, however, common
Arab opinion singled out Lebanon as being an artificial
creation of foreign imperialism in a special way. No one
denied that the other four countries wer
the point lay elsewhere. Among the Syrians, Iraqis,
Transjordanians and Palestinian Arabs, no one seriously
advanced a thesis in support of the national validity of the
given country. Among the Lebanese, however, there were
those who did, which amounted to a serious aberration, and
one which could not be allowed to pass. By refusing to
accept the national validity of their given countries as a
matter of Arab nationalist principle, the other Arabs,
paradoxically, did manage in time to secure an accepted
legitimacy for these countries as states. By the ready
enthusiasm with which many Lebanese - but not all -
accepted the validity of their country and the new
nationality that went with it, what was immediately
achieved was the exact reverse. The legitimacy of Lebanon
alone as a state, for the Arabs in general and also among
the Lebanese, remained in full question.
By willing not only a separate country but also a
separate Lebanese nationality into existence, against the
wishes of their neighbours and without the consent of
people who were forced to become their compatriots, the
Maronites and their overwhelmingly Christian supporters
in Lebanon had broken the Arab consensus - more
particularly, the Syrian Arab concensus - and they had to
pay the price. This price was to be significantly heavier as
the Maronites had actively solicited the help of France to
even more so, because they had
knowingly exhibited a marked insensitivity to Arab
frustrations around them. In October 1918, when French
forces landed in Beirut to put an end to the short-lived
Arab government of Sharif Faysal there, Maronites and
other Christians waving French flags had cheered their
arrival at the port, hailing France as the 'tender, loving
mother' (Arabic, al-umm al-hanun) who was to be their
saviour. Among the Muslims of Beirut, who had watched
the arrival of the French with grave apprehension, this
was not a matter to be easily forgotten. Between 1918 and
1920, while these same urbane Muslims of Beirut stood
sullenly by, or kept to their homes, rough and fierce-
looking Maronite mountaineers had descended from their
villages to demonstrate in the streets of the city which they
already took to be their own, clamouring for an 'independent'
Greater Lebanon, and threatening to migrate to
Europe in a body if they did not get it. Going beyond their
demand of Lebanese 'independence', by which they meant
independence from Syria, not from the French mandate,
the Maronites at the time had not hesitated to express
their continuing hostility to the Arab regime which was
still established in Damascus. Before they could attain
their Greater Lebanon, France had first to actualize its
control over the rest of its Syrian territorial claim, and the
Arab regime in Damascus had to be destroyed. At the
battle of the Maysalun Pass, in the Anti-Lebanon, the
French did crush the forces of King Faysal in July 1920,
which finally opened the way for their occupation of
Damascus. Maronite volunteers reportedly fought with the
French in the battle, and there were open Maronite
celebrations of the French victory, or rather of the Arab
defeat. This was not to be forgotten in Damascus.
The creation of the new Arab state system had hardly
been completed by the late 1920s and early 1930s when
political inertia and vested interests began to give it a
reality. As men of political ambition began to compete for
power and position in the different countries, and as each
of these countries came to have its own ruling establishment
and administrative bureaucracy, the lines of demarcation
between them, hardly any of which was a natural or
historical frontier, began to harden. Everywhere, circumspect
rulers and career politicians who actually worked for
the consolidation of the system, as their interests dictated,
made a point of denying its immutable validity, and never
missed an opportunity to denounce it as an imperialist
partition of the single Arab homeland. Palestine in one
way, and Lebanon in another, stood out as exceptions. In
Palestine, Arabs who aspired for leadership could only make
their mark by yielding to popular nationalist pressure,
because of the Jewish threat. This forced them to obstruct
repeated attempts by the British mandatory authorities
to provide the country with a political government, because
in any such government the Jews, with the international
influence they wielded, were bound to be greatly over-
represented. Thus, the politically ambitious among the
Palestinian Arabs had to compete for the leadership
of the nationalist opposition, not for power and position
in an actual ruling establishment. In Lebanon, while
the Christian political establishment dominated by the
Maronites was fully determined to make a success of
the state, there was a Muslim opposition which was
equally determined to make of it a failure. Here the
Christian ruling establishment, secure with the backing of
France, spoke its mind freely and acted accordingly, while
the opposition, with the moral backing of the prevailing
nationalist sentiment in Syria and other Arab countries,
did the same.
It was not only the Christian political establishment, but
also France who wanted to make of L and
France was fully alert to the country's fundamental
problem: unless the Christians managed to sell the idea of
Lebanon to their Muslim compatriots, Lebanon as a state
could not gain the required minimum of legitimacy it
needed, politically, to be truly viable. France, as the
historical friend of the Maronites, was willing to do for
them and their fellow Christians all it could do. It had
already established for them the Greater Lebanon they
wanted, to some extent against its better judgement. It now
helped them to organize their state, and for the time being
provided it with the needed power protection. More than
that France could only give advice, because one day they
would be on their own: the advice was given, and even
pressed. Maronite leaders who accepted it, and began to
show prudence in speech and action, were given all the
necessary backing to reach office. Those who did not accept
the advice and when they happened to
be in office, they were left in political isolation, and their
wiser opponents were helped to bring them down.
Originally, the Maronites had wanted Lebanon, politically,
for themselves. When the country received its
Constitution and became a parliamentary republic, the
French saw to it that a Greek Orthodox Christian rather
than a Maronite became its first president, with a Sunnite
Muslim as a speak but the Maronites
nevertheless managed to secure for themselves all other
key positions in the government and the administration,
and ultimately the presidency of the republic as well. What
made this possible, at the initial stages, was the effective
boycott of the state by all but a handful of the Sunnite
Muslims, who were the only community in the country who
could have stopped the Maronites from achieving their
virtual monopoly of power at the time. Stage by stage,
however, the French saw to it that the effectiveness of this
Muslim boycott of the state was eroded, and pressed on the
Maronite leaderships the vital necessity of giving the
Muslims enough stake in the country to encourage them to
help maintain the state. To many Maronites, this appeared
as an outright French betrayal of their cause. Others were
willing to learn, though not always as much as needed.
In Lebanon, however, the Christians on the whole had an
advantage over the Muslims. By and large, in rank and
file, they were socially far more developed or, more
correctly, far more familiar with the ways of the modern
world. This placed them in a position to provide the
country, for a long time, with most of the needed
infrastructure. It also enabled them to provide a social
gloss which covered the fragile and faulty structure of the
state and the social tension which lay underneath, mainly
due to the glaringly uneven development of the different
Lebanese communities and regions. Outside Lebanon,
except for Egypt, this kind of gloss at the time, on the
required scale, was not to be found elsewhere in the Arab
world. It certainly existed in Palestine, even more so than
in L but there it was provided largely by the
European Jewish settlers rather than by the Palestinian
Arabs, among whom development was limited to a small
middle and upper class.
What further helped to cover up the faults of Lebanon
was the stunning natural beauty of the country, coupled with
its pleasant Mediterranean climate. Lebanon, moreover,
was relatively green, and could appear lush green - a
veritable paradise - by contrast with the desert which
began as one crossed the eastern borders from the Bekaa
valley into Syria. Where else, in the Arab world, could one
see majestic peaks capped with snow for much of the year,
rising hoary above terraced mountain slopes dotted with
the red roof-tops of countless villages nestled among
orchards or vineyards, set against a stark blue sky, and
directly overlooking the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean?
Yet another initial advantage of the country was
its geographic location, which could make of it the ideal
gateway from the West to the Arab world. In addition to all
this, there was the experienced mercantile initiative and
exceptional adaptability of the people, and the cultural
tolerance which they generally exhibited, most notably in
the coastal cities, and most of all in cosmopolitan Beirut.
All that Lebanon needed to be a success was political
accord and an even social development among the different
communities which had come to form its population and in
the different regions it had come to comprise. However, for
two reasons, it was exactly these conditions that proved
hard to reach. First, the Maronites in Lebanon were
determined to maintain their own paramount control of the
state, and were fundamentally unwilling to have Christians
and Muslims share in the country their
argument was that the Muslims were naturally susceptible
to the strong influence of their co-religionists in other Arab
countries, and could therefore not be trusted with the more
sensitive political and administrative positions in Lebanon,
such as those which involved national security and
ultimate decision making. Second, the prevalent nationalist
mood in the Arab world, especially in Syria, was against
Lebanon achievi and within the country,
the Muslim sector of the population could easily be swayed
by external Arab nationalist influence, and could be used
by other Arab countries as political leverage to keep the
Lebanese state perennially unstable. For the duration of
the French mandate in the Levant, Lebanon was adequately
protected against such destabilizing Arab interventions in
its affairs. The real problems of the country, however, were
to come blatantly into the open as soon as the French
mandate came to an end, leaving an independent Lebanon
at the mercy of external and internal forces acting in the
name of Arab nationalism with which the Lebanese state,
in the long run, was unable to come to reasonable terms.
Thus in Lebanon, from the very beginning, a force called
Arabism, acting from outside and inside the country, stood
face to face with another exclusively parochial social force
called L and the two forces collided on every
fundamental issue, impeding the normal development of
the state and keeping its political legitimacy and ultimate
viability continuously in question. Each force, at the
internal level, claimed to represent a principle and ideal
involving a special co yet in each case
one had to look behind the articulated argument to
discover the real nature of the quarrel. True, there were
individuals in Lebanon who sincerely believed in the
historical and political validity of Lebanism, and others
who were committed to Arabism with equal sincerity. But
it was certainly no accident that the original proponents of
Lebanism in the country were almost exclusively Christians,
and for the most part Maronites, while the most unbending
proponents of Arabism, as a community, were the Muslims.
Clearly, in both cases, what was actually said by way of
argument on the surface covered something else underneath:
the source of the problems. What was this underlying
element in each case, which made the declared positions of
the two sides so irreconcilable as to keep the question of
Lebanon. interminably, an outstanding one?
is the foremost living historian of Lebanon, and his new book is even more important than his earlier one because it throws light on the present and future of the country as well as its past. With unique knowledge and insight, he shows how the ideas of the various communities and groups about what Lebanon is and should be are rooted in very different visions of history.
Albert Hourani, St Antony's College, Oxford
Created 970131/ Last modified: Fri Jan 31 14:41:57 MET 1997