by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Social restrictions follow from political ones. Walking around Beirut, I noticed four or five posters in the windows of travel agencies featuring happy-looking couples against a beach backdrop; looking more closely, I saw that these were adverts for wedding trips. Only religious marriages are recognized and performed in Lebanon, and the laws governing marriage between people of different sects are complicated; for example, a Sunni or Shia Muslim man can marry a Christian or Jewish woman, but a Muslim woman cannot marry a Christian or Jewish man unless he converts to Islam. The laws governing the religion in which the children should be brought up are equally complex; in the light of this confusion, couples who belong to different sects often travel abroad for a civil marriage – nearby Cyprus is the most popular choice, and is often advertised as a convenient three-day package.
In February 2009, Rana Khoury, who was born into a Maronite family, and Rayan Ismail, born a Shia, decided to stage a mock wedding in a bar to protest Lebanon’s laws prohibiting civil marriages. They got married legally in London two years later but continue to campaign.
‘We set up a solidarity group for civilly married couples. It was to say: “We are many, we exist, so why can’t we just get married here in our country?’” Rana told me.
I met the couple at a popular Armenian restaurant in south Beirut. Rana is the step-daughter of Samir Kassir, an outspoken journalist who was assassinated in 2005, and she has continued his legacy of activism, founding the political platform Beirut Madinati (‘Beirut, My City’) in 2015 to challenge Lebanon’s archaic voting system.
The group grew out of the infamous ‘You Stink’ 2015 garbage protests, during which over 100,000 people took to the streets to protest the failure of the Beirut municipality to deal with a closed refill site. The garbage symbolized a greater problem: corruption, mismanaged resources and the laziness of an unfairly elected government. Less than a year after Rana co-founded Beirut Madinati, the party managed to get 40 per cent of the vote in the municipal elections of 2016, winning one electoral district but losing the other two. They got no seats.
The dynamism and outlandish optimism of Beirut Madinati reminded me of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey, before the party was effectively dismantled. With a 50:50 gender ratio, a strikingly young rostrum of parliamentary candidates and a huge support base among Kurds in the south-east of the country, as well as with secular voters in the big cities (neither group is the AKP’s favourite), the party stormed into parliament with eighty seats in the general election of 2015 (the same summer, incidentally, as the ‘You Stink’ protests in Beirut). That was, arguably, the beginning of the end for Turkey, at least for the foreseeable future – the moment when Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party lost their ruling majority and decided to put a stop to all opposition, starting with the HDP: many of its members are now in jail. That has not yet happened to Beirut Madinati; perhaps it would if it gets more successful, but Rana remains stubbornly optimistic, saying that she and the other founders are changing Lebanese politics in a way that is only positive, and irreversible.
In a bar in the popular Gemmayze district of Beirut, I met Ayman Mhanna, another young political activist setting out to change his country.
‘I dream of the day when sect-specific positions in government are not needed and it is entirely secular, but of course I recognize this is not feasible at this stage.’
Ayman reminded me of Midhat Pasha, who dreamed up the Tanzimat reforms in the late 1830s, envisaging an Empire where ‘there would be neither Muslim nor non-Muslim but only Ottomans’. This oddly modern dream has always struck me as the equivalent of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, much more so than Atatürk’s dream of a secular republic (although a Muslim identity has always been a presupposed component of the Turkish identity). Ayman told me of the increasing sensitivity among Lebanon’s minorities to the language in which they are spoken of, and how that relates to their political treatment.
‘It is no longer politically correct to say “minorities", for example. They are “religious groups”.’
Why?
‘Because the Sunnis don’t like being the majority [biggest minority], as though it cheapens life. They feel that the smaller, favoured minorities – for example Christians – are protected but a Sunni life is cheap.’
Again, I think how typical of Lebanon that there is even competition among minorities to be, if not the most special, at least not the most common, the most overlooked.
Many of Lebanon’s institutions are shackled by imposed religious strata. In theory, the armed forces, like parliament, should consist of 50 per cent Christians and 50 per cent Muslims, but the French-imposed system gave more power to the Christians, who have traditionally had little interest in sharing power with other religious groups; by the time civil war broke out in 1975, there was an entrenched imbalance across the armed forces. The commander of the entire army – around 72,000 strong – is traditionally a Maronite (like the president), while the Chief of Staff was a Catholic until 1959, at which point Muslim officers complained and a Druze commander was appointed in response, a tradition that has continued to today. I found myself wondering about the Ottoman predecessor to the modern Lebanese army: the janissaries, formed in the 1380s as the Sultan’s special cohort. ‘Recruits’ were Christian boys taken by force from their parents in newly conquered lands, like the Bosnia-Herzegovinan boy who went on to become Grand Vizier Mehmet Pasha in the mid-16th century. They were sent to the homes of Turkish families to be schooled in Islam, were expected to be fiercely loyal to the sultan, given decent pay and food and organized within a scrupulous hierarchy – the result was an astonishingly effective elite force. Over time, Muslim recruits were taken too, and by the mid-17th century janissaries were conscious of their enormous power and had begun to mutiny over pay. In 1717, Lady Mary Montagu wrote to a friend that ‘the government here is entirely in the hands of the army. The Grand Signor [Sultan Ahmet III], with all his absolute power, is as much a slave as any of his subjects, and trembles at a janissary’s frown.’50
Subsequent sultans endured this humiliating state of affairs for another century, but in 1826, Sultan Mahmud II announced he was disbanding the janissaries, a decision based on his need to replace an increasingly unbiddable army with one that was more modern and – crucially – loyal, to help him implement the Tanzimat reforms. The maverick soldiers did not go down without a fight – a revolt led to an apocalyptic fire and thousands of executions, known as the ‘Auspicious Incident’.
If the janissaries were too powerful, the Lebanese army is arguably not powerful enough, racked by infighting like many of the country’s institutions. I had a chance to observe the Lebanese army life first-hand when I joined a unit of soldiers near the town of IS-held Arsal, near the Syrian border in the Beqaa valley.
An Islamic State Enclave
In May 2017, I travelled with the artist Richard Mosse, who was taking thermographic photographs of the refugee camp of Arsal from the army outpost on a hill above the town. Because the region was so volatile, we would never had been allowed permission to visit the area alone. Instead, we went under the protection of Nora Joumblatt, the Syrian, non-Druze wife of the warlord Walid Joumblatt, who is the de facto head of the Druze minority in Lebanon.
Nora is a prominent patron of the arts and Richard was donating his art to her refugee charity, but it was still far beyond the call of duty for her to personally escort us to an area prone to gunfights between the army and local IS militants. She cut an incongruously stylish figure in a bright lemon silk shirt, cream slacks and immaculately coiffed hair as she shook hands with the officers in their dusty fatigues at the outskirts of the town: the embodiment of explicitly feminine power in a military-macho setting. I had met her in Beirut the previous evening, and she stood out even in that superlatively glamorous city – here, she moved with incredible assurance among the tanks and sandbags as though viewing exhibits at the Venice Biennale, where she had been a few days earlier. She had spe
nt much of the journey relating recent military developments to us as we set off at the crack of dawn from Beirut in an ungainly motorcade: the three of us in a non-armoured Range Rover driven by her bodyguard, joined by open-topped jeeps full of armed soldiers as we approached the outpost.
Listening to her explain the troubled relationship between the Shia militant group Hezbollah and the Lebanese army, and the political obstacles she encountered with her local charity work, it struck me that she should make the leap from warlord-wife to world leader at the earliest available opportunity – it would be a continuation of the political family tradition that saw her father Ahmad al-Sharabati negotiate Syria’s transition from French rule between 1946 and 1948, just as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out.
The Beqaa Valley has traditionally been controlled by Hezbollah; just across the nearby hills from Arsal is Syria. Driving through the surrounding villages, it is impossible not to notice the posters of Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, plastered on every lamp post. In 2014, IS forces took Arsal and at the time of my visit were still in control since Hezbollah withdrew, leaving the area to a small outfit of Lebanese soldiers who kept well out of town. I noticed that the soldiers were even more nervous than I was. They refused to take us into the town itself, or the camp (which held around 120,000 Syrian refugees); predictably, there was a burst of gunfire directed at the outpost while we were up there, making sense of the sandbags. Many of the refugees in the camp were the families of IS fighters, who stored their weapons in the tents before going to fight over the border.
Two days before our visit, a local woman had been kidnapped and knifed in the neck by IS because they suspected she was a spy for Hezbollah – the mayor showed me horrible photos on his phone. He seemed bowed down by his responsibilities: ‘If there is no gunfire for a day or two, I get worried – maybe something bigger will happen’. The mayor before him was dismissed over fears he was colluding with the group. His deputy, Rina Krounbi, is a Communist and the first woman to win the post by popular vote; she told me she received daily anonymous death threats because she refuses to wear the headscarf. The two of them met our party with a group of local village elders, who wanted to petition Nora to apply pressure on her husband Walid to lobby for extra government funding for sanitation and education. Within days, Nora had managed to get the ministry of education to allocate money for a new school; so, a Muslim majority town had successfully appealed to a powerful Druze-aligned woman to intervene on their behalf, having drawn a blank with their own political representatives – one of many signs that ‘representative’ tribal Lebanese politics do not work.
Up at the army outpost – a bleak, sandy, sun-blasted outcrop of land with no shrubs for miles around, and no internet or phone coverage – I noticed lovesick graffiti etched in to the barrack walls: ‘Ahmet <3 Nadim’. Sentry duty is a lonely job, particularly without access to the internet. As I waited for Richard to take his photo, a lengthy process requiring a 120kg military-grade thermographic camera which aroused the suspicions but also the respect of the soldiers accompanying us (Wow, how much is the CIA paying you?’), I got chatting to Joseph, an officer who spoke excellent English thanks to the Lebanese army’s practice of sending officers to America and Europe on a kind of military Erasmus exchange programme.
Joseph revealed himself to belong to the Greek Orthodox Church; he claimed that among the lower ranks of his particular division, 90 per cent of the men were Muslim and 10 per cent Christian, and that the latter only socialize among themselves. He did concede, however, that most officers were, like himself, Christian. As we talked under the beating sun he gradually revealed his ambitions to rise up to Greek Orthodox division general. I asked him if he had ambitions beyond that. ‘Higher than that?’ he smiled at the ludicrous question. Well, I could be the defence secretary in the cabinet – that is also reserved for a Greek Orthodox.’
Again, the paradox of Lebanese society struck me: that in a bid to accommodate various religious groups by ensuring each has some role in public life, some worthy position of responsibility, there is in fact a bizarre system of segregation that all too often teeters into entrenched discrimination. No single group ever thinks they have got the best deal; everyone envies the lot of others, like a playground game in which children fight over whose turn it is to play the hero. It is, in fact, an infantile system dressed in adult garb and policed by old men.
Ain Dara
I wanted to see Lebanon’s religious coexistence in a less political setting, so one morning I headed to the village of Ain Dara, about an hour east out of Beirut, halfway to the Syrian border. It lies at 1,300m above sea level on a hill, an unpretentious collection of little houses with vine-covered verandas overlooking tilled fields and vegetable patches; originally a Druze village, it is now predominantly Christian, with three Orthodox churches, two Maronite churches and an Evangelical Baptist church.
I arrived with Richard and our translator Suzan, a diminutive woman in her fifties, who wore impressively shiny gold platform shoes and a leopard-print top, a cursory white scarf for our church visits, and arresting red lipstick. Her look is pure Beirut, and failed to raise any eyebrows but mine – I felt like a frump in comparison, in my standard baggy ‘places of worship field trip’ outfit. First, we wandered into the St George Melkite church, built in 1890, where I found an Iraqi Christian sweeping the floor, from one of the twenty-five Iraqi Christian refugee families in this village. He told me he was from Qaraqosh, a Christian town near Mosul, and came to Lebanon to join relatives after IS invaded his home in 2014.I have noticed non-Muslims have much stronger ties with their extended and far-flung families than Muslims in the Middle East, probably a relic of millet groups in Ottoman times looking out for each other and managing family businesses across the empire.
On a hill above the rest of the town is the newest of the three Eastern Orthodox churches, its foundations laid in 1974; the civil war started the following year and construction was put on hold until 2012. Now it appeared to be finished, but we found it locked. On the roof of a house opposite the church, an elderly couple were sitting at a plastic table shelling beans and watching us with amusement. Suzan called out and the old man – Yusuf, as he later introduced himself – disappeared and returned with a ladder which he placed between his roof and the porch of the church, above a twenty-metre drop to the street below. ‘No!’ we cried in unison, as he prepared to cross. He chuckled, settling his ‘Australia!’ cap firmly on his bald head and clambering over despite our protestations, as his wife placidly continued to shell beans.
Yusuf produced a key to the church. The cavernous interior had the unmistakable empty smell of a building that had never been used. ‘It’s nearly finished – we are still waiting for some decorations,’ Yusuf told me, via Suzan, who was perched on a pew, resplendent in her white scarf. I asked him about his cap – did he get it from Australia?
‘No – my relatives in Australia visited and gave it to me.’
Later I learned from Yusuf and his wife that their Eastern Orthodox community used to be the majority in Ain Dara but many emigrated to the US and Australia. All of the roughly one hundred families that remain here pay eighty dollars to the church every year, and relatives abroad often pay more, proportional to their greater income, reflecting the sense of community spirit of many diasporic communities I encountered. Yusuf’s family came to the village in 1860, soon after the Tanzimat reforms which dramatically improved life for Ottoman subjects in this part of the world – although Yusuf the Elder may well have had his own reasons.
Father Ghassan Haddad oversees all three Orthodox churches, and is also the principal of the Ain Dara school. He is a handsome man in his fifties, his black beard tinged with grey, and welcomed us expansively into his office above the St George Orthodox Church, insisting we take some of the bread he gives out in Sunday service – it smelled and tasted, disconcertingly, like lemon cologne. Walking around sedately in his long black robes, he talked about his congregation with touching
enthusiasm. He has been the resident Orthodox priest since 1994, and in 2016 set up a YouTube channel where he livestreams Sunday services to the Ain Dara Orthodox diaspora across the globe. He says it’s particularly popular in America and Canada. ‘My parents in Los Angeles watch every Sunday.’ I find some archived videos of Easter services stretching back to 2011, plentifully attended by smartly dressed locals (the regular Sunday services are less well attended, but still dutifully streamed to some of Lebanon’s vast Christian diaspora).
The internet sensation of Ain Dara jokingly attributes his You-Tube prowess to his degree in electrical engineering. After leaving university, Father Ghassan received Canadian immigration papers in Cyprus but at the last minute decided to return to Lebanon; when I ask him why, he replies, ‘Ask God.’ The former star student now teaches English and French to 165 children in his school, including local Druze children (because ‘there is no Druze school’). Most of the local Druze children, however, go to the smaller Maronite school in the village which also accommodates the handful of Catholic children. I sense some local politics, just beyond the bounds of polite enquiry. He is more forthcoming about the ‘roughly one hundred’ Syrian refugee families who have come in recent years, all of them Sunni Muslim.
‘They come and live twenty-five in one room. Maybe in fifty years, the Muslims will be more than Christians in Europe. They have too many children.’
My interest is piqued when Father Ghassan insists that ‘there is peace between the Maronites and Orthodox people here’ before returning to the subject of the ‘cold and closed’ Druze community.
‘The Druze went to Africa in the 1940s, looking for diamonds,’ he says darkly, refusing to elaborate (I drew a blank on a subsequent Google search). Clearly, the Druze keep to themselves; luckily, I soon had an opportunity to find out more about them when Nora Joumblatt invited me to dinner with her husband Walid, leader of the Lebanese Druze.
