Lebanon

The Fragmented Nation

David C. Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138923300
• eBook ISBN: 9781317411215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Even up to the eve of the civil war, some observers saw the Lebanese system as essentially stable, and exhibiting some of the virtues of liberty and pluralism which had been commended by the French traveller de Volney a century before. But for others its structure was so seriously flawed as to be resolved only by revolution. The civil war resulted ultimately from a conglomeration of interdependent factors – the religious conflict of Christian and Shi'a Muslim, the social divisions exemplified in the 'Belt of Misery' around Beirut, and the ethnic frictions between the Arab host culture and the Occidentalised Maronites. This book, first published in 1980, is a lively and incisive study of one of the most ravaged countries of this generation.

1 LEBANON: A MARGINAL STATE

‘Sometime in the future all the nationalities in the world—all their customs and their habits—will be universalized. As Communists that is our ideal. If our ideal is realized, we will hold a grand celebration.’

Wang Yi-chung, head of Yunnan Institute for Nationalities (quoted in the New York Times, 6 June, 1976).

Marginalism, Minorities, Nationalism

In this book the term marginalism refers to the situation or condition of a person or a group living within a society with which the individual or the group feels only partial identification, while nourished and sustained by a culture that differs from that of the majority, of the mainstream. The group may be either an ethnic minority among the majority or it may be a class of modernizing individuals who have rejected or transcended the conventions and traditions of their society. Essentially this is the use of the term made by Robert Ezra Park, perhaps the father of the term’s sociological use, by E. V. Stonequist in his The Marginal Man (1937) and by latter-day students such as Harold J. Abramson.¹

The marginal condition has both an objective and a subjective aspect, it is relative, and it takes many shapes and forms. Objectively, a marginal group is regarded as different, and subjectively it feels itself so to be. If this group finds its situation intolerable, it may opt either to assimilate to the host culture or cultivate its ethnicity, to become ‘nationalistic’, and to seek to embody its ethnicity, with its symbols, rites and associations in an independent state, or join the state of a culture similar to its own. If it is a ‘sociological minority’ of modernizing individuals, it may opt to transform its own society by persuasion or revolution, or it may choose to migrate, physically or psychologically.

Marginality is relative in the sense that it is contextual. The marginal group’s sense of itself, and the way it is regarded, is conditioned by its presence as a ‘minority’ within a larger society—separated, living a sovereign existence, it ceases to be marginal as it ceases to be a minority. A Jew in Israel, for example, ceases to be the marginal person he may have been in Germany or in France, and in Switzerland a Protestant or a Catholic, a French speaker or a German speaker can, even as a member of a minority, feel at peace in a larger unity and so be free of any sense of marginality.

The marginal condition takes various shapes and forms depending upon objective factors—overt hostility and persecution at the hands of the majority, for example, or toleration that might invite assimilation. There are many possible ideal-types of marginality. Abramson suggests three such types in his typology of ethnicity: the socio-cultural convert who has abandoned the symbols of his past as well as the institutions of his community to seek assimilation to the host culture, but who remains an ‘outsider’ for want of having fully internalized the symbols of his new culture; the socio-cultural exile who is separated physically from the sustaining structures of his community but maintains its symbols; and the socio-cultural eunuch who belongs to no culture. Useful as such a typology might be, it does not pretend of course to exhaust reality’s many variations and combinations along a continuum. It does not, for example, cover the case of the ‘Levantine’ to be considered below—the man of two or more cultures—nor does it cover the case of the member of a sociological minority, product of a traditional society in the process of modernization.

The marginal condition, in regard to ethnic minorities, is, negatively, often uncomfortable and sometimes painful. The marginal man does not enjoy the security and comfort of belonging to the mainstream or, often, the possibility of participating fully and freely in its political and cultural life. At the extreme he may be subject to genocide. And psychologically his condition might serve to paralyze the will, induce a destructive sense of inferiority or defensiveness, lead him to lack sincerity and to adapt apishly to norms that are not his own. In some ways the situation of the marginal man resembles Erik Erikson’s stage of adolescence except that it is more permanent and reaches into adulthood.²

Positively, the marginal man may be creative to an unusual degree, being more aware of weaknesses and possibilities in the dominant culture than others. He may be more cosmopolitan, more of a citizen of the world than those who take their culture for granted. And the marginal man may make valuable contributions to the mainstream host culture. Christian minorities, for example, helped to renew classical Arabic in the early nineteenth century and to contribute to the ‘Arab Awakening’ and the rise of Arab nationalism, as, in the early years of Islam, they contributed to the cultural wealth of the Arabs by helping to acquaint them with the treasures of Hellenic and Hellenistic culture through translations and commentaries. It was a Christian, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (died 873), for example, who translated Galen, Plato and Aristotle into Arabic.³ Other marginals who have proven creative as leaven to modernization have been the Parsees of India, the Scots of Great Britain, the Armenian and Greek merchants of the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese of Southeast Asia.

In regard to the ‘sociological minority’, it is possible for such a group, with modernity, to lose confidence in all values and traditions and for the nourishing symbols of culture to cease to have meaning or potency, for life itself to come to seem ‘absurd’. At this extreme, we encounter the ‘protean man’ with his ‘polymorphous’ versatility, as Robert Lifton has put it, J.P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man or Bellow’s Augie March.⁴ But in the present study we are not concerned with marginality in this sense of extreme modernity, but rather with the situation of individuals or groups who have relatively recently been introduced to modernity as first manifested in the West, and who, as a result, find themselves betwixt and between their own more traditional culture and ‘Western’ culture, objectively and emotionally.

The Marginal Psyche

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the existential experience of marginality is through literature.⁵ In the contemporary Arab world, the main concern of the present study, one of the major themes of novels written in the years following the First World War has been the love-hate relationship in regard to the West. The protagonist is often the author in disguise who finds himself as a student in Paris or London, torn between distrust and fascination for what he finds, as well as nostalgia and disgust for the culture he has left behind. This is the case, for example in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s ‘Usfur min al-Sharq (Bird from the East) (1938) and Al-Tayyib Salih’s Mawsin al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North), translated by Denys Johnson-Davies into English (London, 1970). Another theme is a disgust with one’s own culture and a desire to explore it and to recover its authenticity. Examples are Naguib Mahfouz’ Al-Tariq (The Road) (1954) and Thartharah fawqah al-Nil (Smalltalk on the Nile) (1966). Also concerned with problems of marginality is Yahya Haqqi in Qindil Umm Hashim (1944), translated by M. M. Badawi as The Saint’s Lamp and Other Stories (Leiden, 1973). Of himself and his fellow novelists Halim Barakat has said with disarming simplicity, ‘We are all schizophrenic.’⁶ These themes will be explored more fully in later chapters.

Out of the interaction between a traditional culture and the challenging West can come a large continuum of reactions and responses, both from among members of the mainstream and of minorities. Two archetypic responses are those of the modernizing nationalist, and at the opposite pole of this continuum, that of the ‘Levantine’.

The Levantine

The term ‘Levantine’ was first used to refer to a person, usually of minority and mixed national background of the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean, who served as an agent, a comprador, to Western business firms and consulates. The term was pejorative, the image was of a shifty, rootless person with no loyalty but to himself, a polyglot with no real culture, a person, in short, marginal both to the West he aped and to the mainstream Ottoman culture to which he felt superior. Chi vuol fare la sua rovina, ran a well-known aphorism, prende la moglie levantina. It was Albert Hourani who first provided the term with the dignity of becoming a sociological label. He did not limit it to members of minority or ethnically mixed groups, but employed it to describe a state of mind, a cultural condition any society might succumb to. Thus he warned of the danger that the hinterland masses of the Islamic world itself might ‘all be drowned in a common Levantinism’.⁷ His famous statement on what it was ‘to be a Levantine’ is regularly quoted in works on the subject. Recently I was talking to a Canadian professor of Spanish origin who had spent his youth in Lebanon where his father, a banker, and also Spanish consul, spoke about seven languages with equal facility. I asked the professor about his exotic past. He answered, ‘See Hourani, page 70.’

To be a Levantine (wrote Hourani) is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through all the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. It is no longer to have a standard of values of one’s own, not to be able to create but only to imitate; and so not even to imitate correctly, since that also needs a certain originality. It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals itself in lostness, pretentiousness, cynicism and despair.⁸

And along the same lines in another book, Hourani wrote of the Levantine class that it was

…slavishly imitative of Europe at least on the surface, and more often than not despised the Oriental life around them. Often they had no loyalties at all, certainly no political loyalty to the State in which they were living. They tended to attach themselves to one or other of the foreign Governments with interests in the Near East, to imitate the French or English way of life and even serve foreign Governments with a feverish and brittle devotion.⁹

The capital of Levantinism in the nineteenth century was Constantinople.¹⁰ ‘Constantinople’, wrote President Gates of Robert College, ‘is a city where the Oriental loses his virtues and the Occidental adds to his vice.’¹¹ And his fellow missionary, Henry Dwight, with Protestant indignation, described the city as a ‘hodge-podge of races’, a city

full of men who make the name of Christianity a byword [sic] by their profligate lives, [people who were] not really Europeans at all…half bloods…such as throng the outskirts of every European colony in Asia…Levantines…[with a special] swagger [and a] polyglot fluency…[but limited in conversation] to the celebrated Levantine Quadrilateral of Society, Shop, the Turk, and the Table.¹²

Vincent Sheean describes a representative Levantine who offered himself, in Morocco, to be his guide:

I was beginning to be aware, through the clouds of his abundant French, that Muhammed ben Haddu had all the braggadocio and untrustworthiness of the Arab character without any of its virtues. He had spent his short life being educated in French schools at Tlemcen and Algiers — an occupation that had given him no time to acquire the ruder, but more useful qualities of his own people.¹³

Such statements, of course, smack of the stereotypic and in part reflect Western ethnocentrism and nationalism born of the nineteenth century. The qualities attributed to a ‘Levantine’ nevertheless have a practical if not an objective reality if they are felt to be real by the ‘Levantine’ and by his mainstream observer.

If the Levantine is at one extreme of the spectrum of marginality, the ‘modernizing nationalist’ is at the other. He is, in his aspirations, intent upon overcoming the condition he most despises, sometimes even in himself, the condition of his mirror-image, the Levantine. Such a nationalist, depicted by Elizabeth Fernea in The Guests of the Sheik, is her radical Iraqi engineer, Jabbur, whose counter-part is the local Shaykh Hamza, girl chaser and whiskey drinker, ruthless to his peasants, proud of his plastic cake and walls decorated with girls from Coca-Cola ads, and of himself shown boarding a KLM plane for Lebanon, standing beside a pert airline hostess and grinning fatuously, and bowing before Nuri Said, the strongest figure in Iraq’s conservative E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Personal Note
• 1. Lebanon: A Marginal State
• 2. Independent Lebanon: 1946–75
• 3. Lebanon: Polity, Economy, Society
• 4. Lebanese Identities
• 5. A Foreign Education: The American University of Beirut
• 6. Personal Encounters
• 7. Lebanon Aflame: 1975–76
• 8. Reflections in Nostalgia
• Postscript
• Select Bibliography
• Bibliographical Addendum
• Index