The Making Of Modern Lebanon

Helena Cobban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000303179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a vivid and readable account of Lebanon's development since its first emergence in 1585, unravelling the intricacies of the sectarian/religious groups and the special kinds of communities which have sunk 900-year-old roots in the remote fastnesses of the Mount Lebanon interior.

1 Introduction

Lebanon: the name means 'milky-white' - apparently in reference to the snowy caps which grace the country's mountain peaks for more than half the year.

How apt that the country should take its name from an attribute of these peaks! For it is the steeply soaring uplands of Lebanon which have, throughout history, provided that refuge for the heterodox which is the very basis of 'Lebanon'.

History is important in Lebanon, and doubly so in sorting out the apparent paradoxes of the recent period of troubles. For example: between 1975 and 1983 something like 2 per cent of the entire Lebanese population was killed by their fellow Lebanese citizens - to say nothing of the many thousands more who died at the hands of the Israelis, the Syrians, Palestinians or other outsiders. It was a period of chronic personal trauma for most Lebanese, of deep social and political upheaval, as well as mass violence.

Yet throughout that same period there was never any serious challenge to the bedrock of the country's political system.

Certainly, separate groups within Lebanon did indeed, in recent years, welcome the interventions of Israel or Syria in their country's affairs. But no significant Lebanese group called, during that whole period, for the integration of their country into the political system of either of these larger and more powerful neighbours.

There were political killings aplenty, and the national army disintegrated completely twice during that period. But the only coup attempt which took place, in early 1976, was at best a half-hearted affair, intended more as a theatrical adjunct to the civilian political process than as a serious attempt to bring the military to power.

More surprising than all this: not only were there no serious challenges in this whole period to the liberal democratic constitution under which Lebanon has been governed since 1926, but in 1976 and then twice in 1982 the Lebanese Parliament was able to hold presidential elections in full accordance with this constitution. True, the Parliament's own claim to legitimacy was becoming increasingly tenuous, since it had been prolonging its own term yearly since the original date of expiry in 1976. And true, in 1976 it had been able to meet only under the barrels of Syrian guns, and in 1982 under Israeli guns.

But despite all these well-understood weaknesses in the electoral process, none of those three presidential elections had its basic legitimacy seriously challenged even in the midst of the political mayhem which continued unblunted after the votes had been cast.

Thus, despite all the years of violence after 1975, a very deep political consensus still persisted in Lebanon. It reflected broad agreement not only on the basic question of the separateness of the country from its neighbours, but also on the maintenance of some kind of unitary political system which should be liberal, republican and in some way democratic. Lebanon was clearly no mere artificial 'banana republic'.

The paradox of how these elements of consensus were maintained amidst the continuing violence can be resolved, like all the other paradoxes which greet the eye of the observer in Lebanon, only through reference to Lebanon's long history. As an example, another seeming riddle: how could a young man not yet thirty be catapulted overnight into the leadership of Lebanon's most socially conservative sect - despite the fact that he had shocked all the sect's elders with the scandals of his marriage and his subsequent divorce?

The answer, in 1977, lay in the young man's family name. He was Walid Jumblatt, heir to a name endowed with some 300 years in the leadership of the Druze sect.

The continuity apparent in the Druze sect, as exemplified in the above conundrum, is paralleled by important elements of continuity in the country's other major sects. And it is these deep currents of continuity at the level of the sect which have historically provided the underpinning for the continuity of the system of sectarian coexistence which is the essence of the Lebanese system.

For about a millennium now, the major present-day sects have been living in the Lebanese Mountain, each with its own quite rich and varied inner life. The idea of the interaction of a number of these sects, which lies at the heart of the concept of 'Lebanon', persisted from the late sixteenth century down to the 1980s.

Even after the emergence of a 'Lebanese' polity, however, the sects continued to live out their own inner lives. And right down to the middle years of the present century many of the apparent manifestations of Western-style 'democracy' which made their appearance in Lebanon were themselves still built on basically sectarian foundations. The stresses and strains of the years following 1975 forced most of the political parties to drop what remained of their 'ideological' masks, revealing the solidly sectarian structures remaining underneath.

Ideological 'parties', an active and sometimes scurrilous press, and all the other paraphernalia of Western democracies - even the appearance of democracy itself - might come and go in Lebanon, and indeed frequently did. Only the sects, and the politics of the sects, seemed to live on for ever.

If history is crucial to understanding present-day Lebanon, then some grasp of the country's basic geographical dilemma is also important. Mount Lebanon has always had a tantalizing and difficult relationship with the world around it. True, its fastnesses have always offered a haven to the heterodox: but this haven has also been continually plagued by the fact that it is located right at the East Mediterranean intersection of some of the world's most strategic and jealously fought-over trade-routes.

The sensitive location of Mount Lebanon has ensured that none of the successive empires which contended for power around the Mountain was ever able to ignore what was going on inside it. The Muslim rulers who dominated the region from the seventh century onwards quickly found a way of dealing with the Mountain which caused the least damage to their own interests. Jealously guarding the coastal cities and the major inland trade-routes, they left the Mountain interior largely to its own devices, keeping the mountaineers on their toes by periodically inciting one clan or faction to go and fight another.

When the Ottoman Turks came to the area in AD 1516 they further refined this method of dealing with the Mountain, by recognizing the primacy of a single leader within it. Backed by his own local system of feudal control, this leader then became the 'Prince' of the Mountain.

The Prince was supposed to act as a kind of free-wheeling taxfarmer for the Ottomans inside the Mountain, while still recognizing the Ottomans' overall suzerainty. However, his bargaining power in this relationship was vastly increased by the ease with which the Mountain could defy any attempt by the Empire to subdue it. This meant that the Ottomans generally allowed the Prince of Mount Lebanon much more latitude in the way he ruled than they did their many other tax farmers.

If the imperial armies, from Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Istanbul or Cairo, had ever been able easily to subdue the Lebanese Mountain, then 'Lebanon' would never have come into existence. But the tortuous mountain terrain eventually defied even the greatest of imperial generals. (Indeed, the Ottomans never thought it worthwhile to try to exercise direct control in the Mountain.)

Woe to any ambitious outside power which ventured where the Ottomans feared to tread, and hoped directly to mould the Lebanese system to its own plan! Rapidly would it find itself tied up in the persisting clan rivalries of a Lebanese system as tortuous and tangled at the political level as its terrain was for the military.

In turn, each of these ambitious outsiders would be forced to back off from the plans they started out with in Lebanon. In the 1830s, it took Egypt's Muhammed Ali just eight years to jettison his ambitions in Lebanon. A century later, it took the French twenty-three years and the internal crisis of the Vichy regime to back out of Lebanon. In more recent years, the Syrians, the Israelis and the Americans were each forced to implement a drastic scaling-down of amibitions entertained in and for Lebanon.

Between and after each of those earlier periods of foreign intervention in the country, some regime specifically local-Lebanese in its origins would prevail in the country. These regimes, moreover, showed a remarkable degree of historical continuity, with the only major change in the system occurring with the overthrow of the Shihab dynasty in 1842. (Even after 1842, Shihab family members continued to play an important role in Lebanese public life. From 1943 onwards, General Fuad Shihab was an important architect of independent Lebanon. In 1958 he became president; and his disciples continued to wield strong influence within the administration through to the early 1980s. Certainly, most of the achievements of this modern Shihab could be credited to the breadth of his own personal vision. But his entry into the ruling circles, and at least some of his popular appeal thereafter, both stemmed directly from the associations of his family name.)

Throughout the centuries of Lebanon's emergence, the local Lebanese regimes would generally tip a formal knee in the direction of imperial reality by paying some form of titular tribute to the outside imperial power, or powers. But their defence, in bad times, like their raison d'être at all times, continued to be provided by the refuge of Mount Lebanon.

The limestone bulk of the Mount Lebanon range rises steeply out of the Mediterranean, leaving only a thin, intermittent band of fertile alluvial plain along the coast. At its northern end, the range rises out of the Akkar plain, which historically formed a choice invasion route from the coast towards the Syrian interior.

Immediately south of the Akkar, the Mount Lebanon range quickly soars to its highest peak, at a height of 3556 metres (11,025 feet), right above the present-day 'Cedars' tourist resort. It then continues southwards for a total of 140 kms (88 miles), in a series of slightly lower peaks whose summits are never more than 25 kms (15 miles) from the Mediterranean coast. South of the road linking Beirut with Damascus, this same range then becomes known as the Shouf Mountains; and in south Lebanon, it becomes known as Jebel Amil. (It then continues south into present-day Israel as the Upper Galilee region.)

Rain clouds travelling in over Lebanon from the Mediterranean hit the mountain range with some force. The mean annual precipitation recorded in some mountain resorts comes to well over 1400 millimetres (55 inches). Much of this precipitation occurs as snowfall in winter. Then, each spring, as the snow melts, torrents of water race down the two sides of the mountain range. Over the millennia these spring melts have cárved out stupendously steep and winding valleys in their rush westward, to thesea, and eastward into the Beqaa Valley.

These torrents were renowned in the ancient lore of the region. The Phoenician and Hellenic occupants of the Byblos area considered that the rich red hue assumed by one local stream in the spring represented the blood of the dying hunter Adonis. Throughout history, the valleys scoured out by the torrents have also helped greatly in making the Mountain's upper reaches unassailable.

For example, from the mountain village of Ras al-Metn one can signal easily to friends (or foes!) in Baalshmay, 3 kilometres away. But to travel between the two, one must take the road which winds a total of nearly 20 kilometres, first eastward into the fold of the valley, then doubling back upward and westward again. The entire length of that road is studded with ideal sites for a guerrilla ambush. This same picture is repeated over and over along the scores of valleys which twist and fork into each other crazily along the range's length. Small wonder that outside invaders often become hopelessly dependent on their local guides!

The Akkar plain, which abuts the Mount Lebanon range to the north, also lies within the present-day boundary of Lebanon. But it remains one of the country's least developed regions. Never more than 1000 metres above sea-level, the Akkar is still regularly traversed by clans of semi-nomads. The villages which dot it are small; in the early 1970s, one dozen of them remained the only villages in the whole country not tied into the national road system.

On its eastern side, the Lebanon range plunges steeply down to the Beqaa Valley. The Beqaa is a flat and fertile plain some 1000 metres (3000 feet) above sea-level, which apparently forms an extended northern branch of East Africa's Great Rift Valley.

Just north of Baalbek, a scarcely perceptible watershed divides the Beqaa. The waters to its south drain slowly southwards, gathering force until, as the River Litani, they burst eastwards through a ste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The emergence of inter-sect rule (1516-1920)
• 3 Foundations of the modern state (1920-43)
• 4 The experience of independence (1943-67)
• 5 The breakdown starts (1967-75)
• 6 Eighteen months of civil war (1975-6)
• 7 A troubled inter bellum (1977-82)
• 8 The battles of Beirut (1982-4)
• 9 Conclusions: the inter-sect system enters its fifth century
• Select bibliography
• Index