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- [00:01]
Event Moderator
I really want to welcome all of you to another event organized by the Middle Eastern Center. And I never say. I never say anything about the Middle Eastern center, but because of tonight's special event, I want to say a few words about who we are. As you all know, we were established two years ago, almost over two years ago, and really one of our major goals has been to promote and advance critical debates on state and society in the Arab world and the Middle East. I'm not suggesting in a very humble way expand the parameters of the debate. And to do so, we have made a conscious decision not to invite politicians and diplomats. We have not invited a single politician and diplomats in the last two years. We have decided, and this is not because we can, but we have decided to invite critics and scholars and writers who really do research on the Middle east from the inside out as opposed to the outside in, and basically who challenge what we think is the dominant narrative in the region here and there. It's not just in the West. Remember, there are many more challenges in that part of the world about the dominant narrative. And I think the reason why I say what I say because I think it's in the spirit that tonight's event is really organized. And I'm delighted to invite to introduce tonight's speaker, Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi, who is a critic, an academic and also a public intellectual, one of the leading public intellectuals in the Arab world. Fawaz is a professor of history and political science at the Lebanese American University, the American University in Beirut. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, Columbia University, Cairo University and my own School at St Anthony's College, Oxford. So even though he has spent many years in the West, Fawazi is one of my, myself, my respect for Fawaz, that he has lived most of his life in the region fighting and battling progressive causes in the region. Fawaz is one of the voices that he has never changed his color. He remains a, what I call a progressive democrat and that's a testament to his fiber and intellectual depth. Again, I don't really have the time, because I know our time is very precious to elaborate on how prolific he has been. His most recent book is called A Modern History of Lebanon was published last year. And this is tonight's lecture is on Lebanon. This is the topic of his lecture tonight. What's really important about the modern history of Lebanon is that Fawez not only provide a synthesis of the modern history of Lebanon, but also a critical reinterpretation of the history and what's fascinating about the book itself is that he also talks about the challenges and the complexity that he faced in writing the history of Lebanon as a Lebanese, in particular, as a Lebanese who's living in a jungle of sectarianism and communalism in Lebanon, as you all know, in contrast to many of us who work on purely academic topics, historical topics, political science, I think Fawaz has also been, has, has written extensively on what I call popular culture and also counterculture. One of my favorite books by Fawez is called Fayroz and Arahabina. I don't need to tell you about Fayrouz, a cultural icon in Lebanon and the Arab world. And that's really, if you have the time. Has it been translated or. He's also, as you all know, I said that he's not just a critic and academic. He's also a public intellectual and a commentator. He writes a weekly column at the Safir newspaper in Arabic. And he's also the editor of a magazine, a quarterly magazine called Al Bidayat Beginnings, which was launched last year. I mean, we're trying very much to promote Al Bidayat, the Beginnings. So I hope some of you who speak Arabic, who read Arabic, you subscribe to Al Bidayat. I think this would be a wonderful way to see and read what's been written by Arab scholars and critics in that part of the world. Today he will speak on the history of Lebanon Revisited. On Wednesday, he's going to give a talk on the Arab uprising, the population uprisings, and as I understand, he's speaking tomorrow at Soas University on a similar topic. Please join me in welcoming Fawaz Tarabulisi to the London School of Economics.
- [06:04]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
Okay, Good evening. I would like to thank Fawaz judges for this invitation and for his kind words and of course, thank the Middle east center at lse. And thank you for joining me this evening. I can't not tell you when was the last time I was at LSE. It was during the British Spring of 1968, and we, the nasty students of SOAS, had participated in the occupation of LSE. So I don't know if that gives me honors or should put me in prison, but that's a fact. Now, I always like to start when I talk about history with an Arab proverb that took me years to discover. And it is the following. It says in Arabic, then I'll translate. It says, People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers. And I think that's one of the possible blasts against Orientalism. Patrimonialism patriarchal society, what have you. At least we have something to hold on to, which is a very good definition of what history is about. History is about time and what time does to people. I came to history from political science and I came to history from the war. So I'm. Let's call newborn historian. I wasn't a historian by any discipline, I became a historian, and if that's of any use, but at least I'd like to say that it was mainly the Lebanese wars that pushed me into moving from, let's call, political sociology, political science, international relations to. To history. So the book in question was initially meant to be a follow up of a number of works which were all based on the idea of how to express a civil war. So I've written about the war in terms of diaries, I've written in terms of political thought, I've written in art and politics, a book about Guernica and Beirut, a comparison between Lebanon at War, Beirut at War and the Mural of Picasso, which is also a study about telling the Lebanese the story of a similar war. And with time I discovered that the science of all sciences is history, and one should answer the challenge of exactly revisiting the history of Lebanon. So the book was initially meant, or was mainly a pretext to write a history of the 1975, 1990 wars, because there are wars and going back a little bit, ending up with producing a history of Lebanon. Now, of course, that was an interest in itself because since 1965 nobody had written a comprehensive history of Lebanon. 1965 was Kemal Saleeby's A Modern History of Lebanon, which of course is a pioneering and excellent work, but very much limited with what we know about Lebanon. Then of course, Saleebi, the late Saleebi, in the 80s, produced a critique of Lebanese historiography, a real revisiting of the history of Lebanon, but put it in forms of separate chapters, did not write a book of history or a history book. Now, having said that, one of the main problems when we talk about time is that history is about continuity and change, continuity and breaks. And the immediate thing to discover is that myths are always in history, are always related to the idea of continuity, of essences. And if I were just to give a personal testimony, I think history has taught me, and because writing history became a way of learning, has taught me that there are no essences, there is no human essence, and there are no everlasting essences. Of course there are continuities and changes. But the worst thing I receive from Readers is to tell me, we read your book and what we're witnessing now is the same as you're talking about in the 19th century. It is not. It is not. But anyway, anyway, one of the main tasks of a historian is to make the difference between where is continuity and where changes have met. And that's one of the main challenges, if you want, in writing the history of any history, but especially the history of Lebanon, which is full of myths of origin, which is full of myths of origin, and which is full of myths of what people like to call founding myths. So there's this idea that if you can create a semi lie about something that happened in history, it will unite people around it. And it's been tried more than once in Lebanon. It divided people. Phoenicia does not unite people. Amir Fakhreddin does not unite people, people, etc. So this attempt to create myths of origin, at least in the Lebanese case, was not a very successful one. But it created a number of stereotypes for looking at Lebanese history, which needed to be debunked. Now I should say that the great service that was done to any history of Lebanon was the fact that the war itself, the 75, 90 war, produced an enormous amount of historical, economic, political, cultural, sociological production on the war. I would definitely say that all this could have been and should have been incorporated in any real history. So if I were to define my choices, the first choice was to say history has been written as the history of politics and the history of rulers. Most of Lebanese history is political history, history from above. What it lacks, if you want academically, is a discipline. It lacks political history, political economy, sorry, it lacks sociology, it lacks social movement, it lacks an attempt to periodize at least the important period I was interested in, which is the 19th century to the 19th, 20th century. How do we decide what should be highlighted and what is less important? Since history is about causality, since history is about interpretation, one of the important tasks was to decide what are the moments that of change, what are the moments of what are, where do things break? Definitely in the history of Lebanon, as in any you have, you have, you have, for example, the collapse of the tax, tax forming system, tax farming system, what we call the Muqataji order in the mid 19th century, which. Came about through a number of popular movements and a number of civilians, disorders ending in the famous or infamous war of 1860, 1861. Strangely enough, since I'm using this case, that I mean if you look at the production on Lebanon, on the history of Lebanon before Before the last war, before the last civil war. You'll be surprised at how much literature there is on this period, innumerable literature. One of the big problems was to revisit this phase. So is it only massacres, which is what, hundreds of documents, or were there wars? So one of the very difficult things that one had to do, not completed, was to reconstruct who attacked whom and what is the military history of a minor, tiny Civil War of 1860. And on the basis of a lot of documents that existed, but which have nothing to do with the mainly French orientalist dominated production on that period. So just to tell you, a lot of the critical work of a historian is always to first work on.
- [18:22]
Audience Member / Questioner
What.
- [18:22]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
I call historical facts. There are historical facts. I mean, now, of course, with postmodernism, everything gets confused and there are only discourses. How do you judge discourses? I mean, is my discourse the same as yours because it's a discourse, or is there one way? At least one means one set of criteria by which I can discriminate between one discourse and the other. Now, having said that, I don't want to go definitely into this polemics, into this discussion, but also a historian is somebody who can characterize some of the main aspects of the life of people or the history of a people. Of course, there are many peculiarities about writing the history of Lebanon. The first is that the Lebanon we know, the Lebanon created in 1920, did not exist in history. So any chunks of Lebanon have different histories because they belong to different regions. That's one, one thing. So what is the history of Lebanon? Until now, the history of Lebanon had been either the history of Mount Lebanon or the history of the Lebanese state. And both do not amount to this space that was called Greater Lebanon and to which a population belonged. So at least the first obvious thing, that you cannot write the history of Lebanon without putting it in the context of the history of the region. Let's say Greater Syria, let's say the Arab east, whatever you want to call it, that's one thing. On the other hand, you need micro history to reconstitute a lot, a lot of the history of the regions that were annexed to Lebanon, to Mount Lebanon, 1920. I don't want to go into great detail that a few, a few not very much mentioned things about the district of Lebanon. First, most of the occupants of this, of the people came from the hinterland, came from inside. Second, there are movements of religious conversion, very much underestimated, though they're huge in the history of this country where the population usually came either through the south or through northern Syria and moved from north to south. The third characteristic which will affect modern Lebanon is what I call the contradictory social locations of Lebanon's sects. So a sect is formed in this case in the Mukhataji regime of Lebanon where the commoners in their majority were Christians and the rulers and the Manasib as they were called, the orders were Druze and were revolts of anti tax revolts or peasant revolts. In some parts of the country were necessarily revolts between Christian commoners and Druze overlords. Hence what we call the sectarian system started as this contradictory location between rulers and ruled, between those who control the economy and those who do not, or those who are influential in the economy but not politically, because commoners in the sense does not include the poor people. Only a rich merchant in their or Zahli was a commoner and the overlord would be indebted to him, but yet political power was not granted to him. Now that led me of course to rethink what sectarianism is on a totally different basis, which I'd like to share with you in a minute after some time. So what, what was necessary and which is still necessary necessary is that this country, like any other country, has a political history, but it also has an economic history, it has a cultural history, it has a social history. And it is people who made that history that we should study. And those are definitely not six or seven rulers. That's one obvious thing, but that's not obvious at all once you start looking into those subterranean movements that made, that made the country. So the, the other, the other thing is that this country is a modern country, is a relatively modern in the sense that it has been produced in 1920. So one of the main challenges and one of the main needs to be debunked myths is to declare is to work into how did Lebanese come about. And that has very little to do once you start working on what makes history, which means documents, firsthand reports, etc. Very little to do with what we know. For example, we don't have proofs that the Christians wanted Greater Lebanon, though it's discussed as if it's ipso facto Greater Lebanon was created for the Christians. A good section of the Christians thought it was too big for them and modern Lebanon. Greater Lebanon had equality, a parity in numbers between Christians and Muslims. And Emile Eddi had this theory since 1938 that we should have a middle Lebanon. The other thing is that we don't know apart from the bourgeoisie of the literal. Anybody really interested in what was called a Greater Lebanon. You had people who wanted Mount Lebanon as a French Dom Tom is a French department and the Druses in it should learn French or leave the country. So I mean you are to. Once you, once you, you're into real history, I think you're, you're necessarily have to explain in which conditions the country was made. And of course, another thing, Albert Hourani, the late Albert Hourani, the great Albert Hourani, called this Lebanon the merchant Republic. I mean merchants. We don't talk about merchants, despite the fact that there is a historian who says this is a republic made for merchants. So where are the merchants in Lebanon's history? So that has pushed me to try and write a history of the economically dominant classes of the country. That's a very small contribution. I plan to spend as much time as possible on this. But we know now that some 10 to 30 families took over economic power with Char al Khoury in the 1940s. And they constitute, they radically changed the structure of the Lebanese economy from a productive structure to a merchant, to a third sector, to a tertiary sector. Those were conscious decisions, those were conscious legislations, and we have the record of them. So the Lebanese were not born from Phoenician times as traders. They became. Of course there's nothing to do with being one. But I mean, at least for historians, you can't tell me that there's a long tradition which is 60, which is 6,000 years old without, Without a break. Now, two, two last things. I don't know how much time I have to, to. To come to the war. I mean, the, the main reason for initially writing the, the war. The first thing is of course to take upon yourself that challenge of writing about the whole period 75 till 90. At that time, when I was writing the book, you did not have such books. The late Samir Asir had attempted a book which ends in 82. So my idea was to go to the end. That's one. Before that, very little production exists on the period 6470. And this is the period which at least throws a lot of light on why the war happened, especially in the light of the fact that 64 to 74 were dominated by social movements. And then suddenly you have a sectarian war. At least a chapter, a long chapter is to try and explain this shift. How do you shift from the social to the sectarian? And why now also concerning the war, the first challenge was how do you periodize a war and at least the choice I took was to use two criteria. The first is what is the major event that might constitute a break in the war? Well, that was easy to find and I think that was still legitimate. What I did. 1976, Syrian military intervention made a break in what used to be called the two years war. 1982, the Israeli invasion made a break in the period between the two wars. And of course the Ta' if agreement put an end theoretically to the, to the war that is not obvious. I mean, now it might look obvious, but anyway, the other criteria, which I think, criterion which I think is more important, more relevant is what were the Lebanese fighting about? I mean, in Lebanon when you talk about the war, you're talking about a big black hole where you know details of violence and you make theories about the need for collective memory. We can talk about that later. The important, the important thing is if war is a great turbulence in the history of a people, so it must, it should have any very radical causes to get people to kill each other. Unless you believe in the dominant amnesia that is imposed on the Lebanese and that is that the Lebanese, that the wars are the wars of others, order the war for others, which, which is a very, any widely spread and widely nourished belief which of course serves the post war leaders who were the ones who led the war. But anyway, the important thing is that a historian has to answer questions about why, what are the causes of the war. He has to answer questions, does this war have a logic? Is there an order in this war? I think there was. One of the orders is to try and reveal what were the Lebanese fighting about, how they invited outside interventions. All civil wars invite outside intervention. It's not a great discovery. But how did the war end and why? And perhaps what are the lessons of the war? Well, at least here history raises a big question that of the difference between memory and history. Are they the same? Is memory the same as history? I mean, the best job you can get now is to make an NGO in Lebanon about memory that disappeared. Fantastic. But I mean, and, and the question of memory is collecting material mainly about violence. Fine, but I mean you never, you never stop any collecting material about violence. I mean, you have 15 years of any incidents of battles, etc. I don't know to what extent. I mean, this idea that knowing violence would stop wars, at least history discovers much more serious radical reasons to make wars than the absence of knowledge about what happened in the other war. Whatever. We do live under a regime of amnesia where the war, the war very Little talk about the war. And the war is looked upon as according to the famous formula of the Lettres Saint Laguerre Desotre or Laguerre Poor Lesoth. So my question is, why would 120,000 Lebanese kill each other or be dead, kill each other to serve the others? I mean, there should be reasons, there should be causes, at least the other thing, the other thing. So I mean, I do make a big distinction between memory and history. History serves memory, but memory does not necessarily produce history, at least in the case we are discussing. So one other thing is that war is looked upon as if it is a period of conflict between two sects, let's say, well, there is a phase of this war, which is the 82, 90 or 89 period, where there was very little wars between the initial protagonists. But the wars were inside each sect for the military control of the sect. So not only the sects were being reproduced during the war, but something new was happening. Is that the pretense that the sect should have one unique leader and that created too many civil wars within the war among the Shiite population and the Christian population, where I think most of the victims of the war fell during that period. And this is what would bring the Christians, semi defeated, to the solution after the strong fighting between General Michel Aoun and his army and the Lebanese forces. So anyway, the idea here is to emphasize that it's not enough to make a register of the violence. Violence in itself does not. Is not a guarantee. Knowing the horrors of the world is not in itself alone a guarantee that the war will not be repeated. At least wars have some logic. Special war, civil wars are a very difficult topic. I mean, I teach civil war in Lebanon for the. I've been teaching it for the past 10 years. Most of the material you'd find would be material on classical works, very little theoretical production on. Now I want to conclude with this, of course, very difficult question, very difficult challenge, which is sects and classes. Is Lebanon any different from the rest of the world? Because this is a country where people are not divided according to their incomes, their. Their fortunes, whether they own means of production or not, whether they are wage laborers, rentiers, etc. If you live in Lebanon, you have the absolute conviction that Lebanon is an exception. I mean, I was asked to give in a sociology cafe or run by the sociology department of the AUB a talk about which I mean cynically entitled do Classes exist in Lebanon? And of course the idea was a pun to say that of course they do. But I mean, all I said was to talk about the class structure. The two major newspapers in the country wrote that I said the classes don't exist in Lebanon there is any sects. So which gave me the occasion to send long, whatever you call them, long corrections to them and really publish a semi article in each. I mean, I think history has. Which I think history has taught me. If you look historically at sects, there are plenty of things to say. First, definitely they're not. I mean, they're not essences. They are reconstructed and constructed on the basis of particular societal and political events. And this is why nobody's going to convince me that now Syria has discovered that it has sects or that any sects in Lebanon existed as political institutions since the time of the Phoenicians. Second, and perhaps more important is that sectarianism and sects cannot be understood as far as I'm concerned, without reference to inequalities which are, if you want, outside what is usually called class inequalities. Sects treat inequalities within the division of labor or the access to a government post. In Lebanon, sectarianism as a network of patronage caters for social promotion outside the real levers of economic social promotion. Sectarianism is greatly enmeshed with the inequalities in the regional distribution of wealth and of power. Sectarianism is definitely linked or based to inequalities in the provision of services of the state or of the excess to natural resources. And finally, the sectarian system which works through the state influences social distribution. I mean, if the. In the. In a very similar way, one can say the Lebanese state works with two mechanisms. One reproduces sectarian inequalities or sectarian privileges for the few for some and inequalities for others. In the same sense as it reproduces the class structure that's the function of the state. And those inequalities related to sectarianism, I would still say, are the small inequalities within the greater class inequalities. And not only that they are used to simply. Simply cover up those other inequalities. I also happen to have ventured to teach a course on classes at aub. And when I posed the question to the. To my students, who are the rich people in Lebanon? All of them, said the politicians. So I needed to bring to them statistics about how five families of bank owners make some and a billion dollar profit. It's all right. Some. Some billion billion dollars profit per year for them to realize that there are other rich people. And then the politicians and some politicians Are not rich anyway, I mean, I'm just throwing, throwing ideas. This is a very sketchy attempt, but this is an attempt at least, at least to say that the religious dimension also goes up and down within those creatures that we call sects. And definitely, definitely Maximo, Rudda and Soheda. Very interesting way of saying. He said sects. The borders of sects are defined religious, but not necessarily any the sects in politics. Now one thing that has become very important in Lebanon is that religion has become the majority component in the mobilization and solidarity of the sect, which is a post war phenomenon to my mind, very dangerous in itself, but at least which shows that. What we're talking about are transient creatures, historical factors which can be, which can be weakened, which can be at times even changed. And on this I thank you very much.
- [44:59]
Event Moderator
As you can tell from Tawaz has left us with so many questions and very few answers. And that's probably the way to go. I mean he has basically raised many questions, critical questions about the history of Lebanon, how to write the history of Lebanon and where do we go from here? We have plenty of time. We have about 45 minutes. So we'll take four questions in every round and then we try to be as precise as possible. So we'll take as many questions, please. No commentaries please. So we can take as many questions as possible, please. Yes, you like. Can I have you. Can I. Would you kindly help? Thank you.
- [45:54]
Darien Hajj
My name is Darien Hajj. I have two questions. First one, there's this idea of that there are three big religious group in Lebanon which is Christians, Shia and Sunni and that throughout history the dynamic between those three groups is too ally against the third one. I was wondering whether through your examination of the history of Lebanon if you were able to detect such a pattern or not.
- [46:23]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
And what is the pattern? Sorry?
- [46:26]
Darien Hajj
The pattern is like there are three religious groups in Lebanon and throughout history two would lie against the third one and then they would alternate throughout history. So I was wondering whether there is a pattern in your book that would reflect that or not. And the second one is you have mentioned that history is also about causality. So if we want to do a kind of forward, like two years from now, 20 years from now, what do you think the features that would be lost by Lebanon? Like what features Lebanon would lose in 20 years from now?
- [47:07]
Yusuf Sharif
Hi, thank you. Yusuf Sharif, King's College, London the first question, I have two questions, sorry. The first question is if the Syrian regime falls, do you think the history of Lebanon will be rewritten? Again, through the data that would come out from the Syrian regime. And the second question, you spoke about how before the war we were talking about social issues and then it became sectarian war, or at least that's the common view. This is a little bit similar to the Arab Spring. Now we were talking about social issues and now it's religion, all sects fighting. Thank you.
- [47:44]
Lean Henchom
Thank you, Professor. It's Lean Henchom from soas. My question is basically about the personal status codes in Lebanon, which are probably the major site of intersection between sex and sect, gender and sect. So this is how citizenship is constructed through personal codes, mainly through the axes of gender and sect. And this is why different types of citizenships exist. So my question is this legal history of Lebanon, since you mentioned different kinds of histories of Lebanon, precisely this legal history, how is it impacted by economic, religious and political elites and precisely by French colonialism?
- [48:22]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
On the gender issue or not?
- [48:23]
Lean Henchom
No, on the legal, the legal history of Lebanon and precisely personal status quo, how was it before French colonialism? After and precisely under the impact of elites in Lebanon? Thank you.
- [48:40]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
Hello, Doctor, you, you mentioned during the 1964-70, we moved from social to sects. How did it. Concerning the idea that you have three sects in the history of Lebanon and usually two ally against one is a myth because the three mentioned are important in the post war. So this is a retrospection from the post war on history, you know, a projection. I mean, all I've been trying to say is show how there is no way to understand Lebanon, if you accept, to begin with, that the major actors are sects in themselves. That is a product of at best the fact that after the war each sect has one or two leaders. Each major sect, which you can say that we have six or seven people who run the country. I mean, and they're the ones who are not discussing how to divide parliamentary seats among them. But this is not the history of Lebanon. This is one phenomenon which is the post war phenomenon. That's one, one thing. What would Lebanon lose and how many, how much time? I said, I said, I said history is about causality. I did say it was about prophecy. But I can, I, I can, I can without being very pessimistic, but I think the Lebanon, I mean, also, also because there is no continuity. Of course, one illusion in Lebanon is that you make a war. I mean, there's something, I don't know what it is in Arab, in English, but I mean, there's a belief that you make a war after the war ends. The best situation comes back to you. After you make a war, you spend decades, you sacrifice a country, you sacrifice generations, and you spend decades paying the price of the war. So your question is valid in the sense that I think Lebanon has already lost a lot. Some of it, some of it has nothing to do with its people. For example, the Lebanon we know was a construct not in the intellectual so or the reconstruction of a mainly economic role which survived as an intermediary role between the 40s and the 70s. It was a liberal globalized economy that was an economy which is based on trade, services, finance. In fact, during the discussions when the Lebanese decide Lebanese government decided to secede from the economic unity which the French had created. Independent Lebanon and independent Syria were one economic unit and it's the elites of both countries that broke it. But during that debate, there's a famous journalist called George Naash who was telling the Syrians, you have the economy, you want the intervention of the state. At that time it was to back to defend the nascent industry. So he told them, we are nousom mondialyse. Lebanon is globalized. So I mean that role actually was lost partially and is being lost progressively because of changes in the region. Very little to do with the Lebanese. I mean, the flow of capital that came to Lebanon, either to be left there or to be invested abroad now goes directly to the different western metropoles. Doesn't need the Lebanese intermediary. And you have of course, huge, huge shift in, in those roles. You have Dubai Mr. Rafi Hariri. Hariri had this idea of making Lebanon Dubai number two. It seems that when you have Dubai number one, you don't spend your time proliferating Dubais, but just to give you an idea about the inversion of roles. So that's one question now, if the Syrian regime falls, would we write Lebanese history differently? No, I don't think so. First, and I'm not sure the Syrian regime is going to fall in that sense, any thanks to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States, not to speak of Britain. But more importantly, I don't. I mean, there is a period of Syrian intervention in Lebanon, of course, which has not been well documented. It should be documented, it should be worked. I mean, the Lebanon of post Ta' if should have its history, but we're still too close to it. I mean, I'm always asked, why don't you write a continuation of the book? And I say it's still too early and it's still. We lack a lot of the material needed. Mainly, mainly material related to the Syrian rule. But I don't think you need to rewrite the history of Lebanon. You would enrich parts of this history. You would add to it now lean legal history. If you're talking about the personal statuses. It's a long story, but I'll. I'll put it in short. The main legalization of sects happened in 1936, despite the fact that those sects existed in the 1926 constitution. The 1926 constitution is a French Third Republic constitution in which the Lebanese legislators, mainly Michel Sheha, added three articles. One is Article 9, which is the article concerning personal statuses. Article 10, which says that the state should defend private religious education, and Article 95, which says that the distribution of posts among the major sects in the post of government should be on a fair basis or on a just basis, which doesn't mean anything except. Except in its application. That meant according, practically, according to their weight among the population. That's how the Maronites, being the larger section, became the sect of the presidency. Now, personal statuses number nine were never touched since then, but in 1936, and that's one of the funny things about Lebanese history. In 1936, the Muslims were afraid that they're going to become a minority in a Christian state. And because it was obvious that once the French. 1936 is when Lebanon and Syria signed an independence agreement with the Front Popular in France. The idea the Republican High Commissioner in Lebanon said now that we're legislating that political sectarianism is the rule in personal statuses. There should be a place for a civil code for personal statuses. This is called arete Decree Number 16 of the High Commissioner 1936. Now you can use this as a basis for the current demands which exist since the 40s, by the way, for a civil law for personal statuses. The big problem is that many constitutional. If that's. I think this is your question. Many constitutional lawyers and experts would tell you this decree is part of the French legislations. Those French legislations which did not become Lebanese laws are not laws anyway. So just to the thing about this Article 9, which is rarely mentioned, actually is very strange because. Because this article introduces God into the constitution, because the state, as it says, in doing its duty of reverence to the Almighty, should guarantee absolute freedom of religious belief and should defend and protect personal status laws of the different sects. The idea is very interesting because a text about an article which talks about absolute freedom has become the imposition on the Lebanese to follow not only the personal statuses but to be defined in life, in public life, according to their biological descent from the Father. Okay, so that's very quickly the story, If you want. I mean, I would reduce it to two things. One, aggravation in a country where your rights are defined according to your belonging to sect. When social tensions aggravate, we have discovered, and they are not meant and not accepted, not read, not treated as social demands. The importance of this period 64 to 74 is that there is not one sector of the Lebanese population which was not in the streets calling for some form of change. Not one sector that you can imagine. You can talk, I mean, I just give you an examples, examples. You can talk about villages that were owned by individuals in the south who were in rebellion. You can talk about Christian peasants in rebellion against the church, claiming the right to land, whose parents have been cultivating them for centuries. And continue to the whole range of social demands for any on top of it, daily demonstrations of students, all categories, teachers, all categories. And of course a formidably strong trade union movement which at that time had a whole program of social and economic reform. The first time that the trade union movement was unified was during those days a very, a very upward mobile middle class, considering that it has the right of political representation. All those were met by rejection at times by arms and two famous killings, one in a big factory in Shia, the other the army shooting at. Tobacco cultivators in the south. Political permeability of the political system and 1972 elections in which not all this, nothing of no trace of all that's happening, infiltrated the Lebanese parliament. So the idea is that you slip into from the social to the sectarian. At least that's one hypothesis just presented to say, I mean, let's try and find what happened. I mean, just. It's just one possible hype, one working hypothesis at least to fill in the gap of the absence of any. And this idea that the Lebanese accepted to wage the war of the others, or the conspiracy itself.
- [64:35]
Audience Member / Questioner
Hello, thank you so much for coming and giving this talk. I'm learning a lot, as I'm sure many people are here. You mentioned earlier that history is transient, that history is about causality. And with Lebanese history I'm having my own challenges understanding Lebanese history, as I'm sure we all are. But at any rate, when we look at Lebanese history, we have a number of incredibly complex, complex considerations to keep in mind that resurface and that occurred in the study of Lebanese history. For instance, for instance, sectarianism, mechanisms of patronage, economics among Other competing themes and how, excuse you, how do we strike the balance between these competing or complementary theories and ideas while also accepting and acknowledging all the complexities and ambiguities that characterize the study of people?
- [65:59]
Thank you. Dina Milhem. I would like to ask questions about. You mentioned from 82 to 89, most of the killings happened within sex, intra sex killings. And does my question is mainly in the Christian and the Shia sects? Does this have to do with the fact that they are minorities within the Arab region? And is this a phenomenon or sort of, you know, trap that might minorities fall into in war?
- [66:29]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
Hello, I'm Algerian.
- [66:32]
Algerian Audience Member
Basically I'm totally ignorant about history of Lebanon. I was in Lebanon in 2005 and you can see the contrast between the Christian side and the Muslim side. When you go to junior, you see the streets are clean, see the people, the work, the system works. If you go well, if you go to Sindelfi, for example, you can see the big contrast. My question is, the first one is do you think if Lebanon is like 90% of Lebanese are Christians, do you think the war will actually happen in Lebanon? The second question, I believe in terms of history, language plays a great role. You mentioned briefly about the Phoenician language. Basically, is there any work done by linguists in Lebanon to revive the language, Phoenician language? And knowing that a lot of Lebanese are mad, some of them, they distance themselves from the Arab, from the Arab world. They want to identify themselves as Phoenicians. Thank you very much.
- [67:48]
Audience Member / Questioner
Hi Dr. Shabazzi, my question is about history and the national curriculum in high schools in Lebanon. Yeah, it's about history and national curriculum in Lebanon in high schools. Do you think that it's possible to reconcile differing views into one textbook? And if so, how do you think that this can be done? Yes, I would like to go back to the issue of your experience of the social movements having started in Lebanon turning into sectarian. I would like to know from you if you see that a pattern that could happen anywhere else. I think it was mentioned before that it can happen elsewhere in the Arab world. And I'm particularly concerned with the situation in Egypt where, well, the uprising started as social and the situation is very quickly deteriorating into, I don't know, I mean, sectarianism. It could go up to sectarianism. Do you see that would happen, it would happen in Egypt. You see a civil war coming to Egypt.
- [69:00]
Event Moderator
We're going to really need one more round. So we want AJU to start. But before I want to take. Thank you for the questions. And I know this is more of a speculative question because one of the major points, and I know you talked about why did the Lebanese kill themselves between 1975 and 1990? What were the major causes? What were the drivers? And you also talked about the war started with a vision, with a particular ideological roadmap, yet the war itself mutated after first couple years. And my question to you, Fawaz and I know this is difficult to we know that the Syrian revolution started as hierarchy, as political. We know the aspirations and we know the grievances of the Syrian revolution. Are we seeing a mutation in the Syrian revolution? And this is really, I mean, we know what happens in the various phases. Can you, can we make any comparison between what happened in Lebanon between 1975 and 1976 and in Syria between 20 and 2012 and the present?
- [70:17]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
First, obviously, obviously we need to work on any, let's say, rejuvenating concepts and terms. For example, patronage also shifts. I would talk, I mean, I talked about the 82, 92 period as a period where the mafia, where the militias were transformed into mafias in the scientific sense of imposing, of imposing by military and political force a rentier relationship with inside, inside the sects. And the different militias now started pumping revenue from their own sects and From Corinth about etc. Activity. Etc. That's a. And from hashish, where all of them took part in the hashish business, which, which I'm talking about hashish, you should talk about drugs because the, the, I mean the war, the war created, created an opium cultivation and heroin laboratories. But anyway, now you have, I mean, we don't like to think about sectarian parties, but the country is run on a party basis. I mean, seculars don't like them because they like a secular party. But any parties are very strong. I mean, the two major parties of the country are Hezbollah and the haunts, the Tayal Watan Al her. And those are very strong parties and not to speak of other ones. So patronage, patronage I think has mutated, if you want, into a much more elaborate mafia style and is no more the personalized patronage that of, of the Zaim. There are no more, more zaims. We have, we have warlords who rule the country. I mean, the term is not the lord, but I mean warlords in Arabic it becomes emirs. Now, Dina. I think, I think no. 82 to 88, they were fighting within the two major sects because the idea which was leaked from Bashir Ismail is that each sect should have one leader. And there was fighting between the different factions of the Lebanese forces on who should be that leader. And in the same time there was bloodletting within the Shiite community which started for. Which lasted for years, between Amal and Hezbollah. The results were not conclusive in both senses, but I don't think it had much to do with the fact that they were the main sects in the country. But I don't think it was highly relevant about the fact that they were minorities themselves. Now for Algeria there are attempts to revive Phoenician language, but it's not very convincing for the Lebanese. And unfortunately The Christians are 35% and not 90. Now, history in textbook is a very good topic. Of course, within the 0.3 seconds that I have, I can only say this. One of the things that encouraged me to write the history book is a contribution to this, to the idea that of course the Lebanese should have not one textbook. I think that's too much any French Jacobin style, but should know more about their history. And the way to do it has nothing to do with the formal way in which the textbooks were formed, which is to create committees of the representative of the six major sects and build accordingly. Which means that it's a permanent compromise on what you write. I mean, one way the Lebanese should accept their history as it is. I mean all nations kill each other. I mean, they don't all put so much any taboos on admitting struggle fighting wars. But anyway, I mean, this brings the idea of what is a historical fact and how do you put a minimum of chronology and facts and how you deal with history as irrespective. Irrespective of the present. You don't project the present on history. That's a difficult task, but it can be done. I believe it should be done by a variety of historical contributions, not necessarily on the basis of one textbook. The problem is that there is not much historical production being done now after the war. Plenty was done during the first, but anyway, now. The two questions are related. Social movements, can they degenerate or can they mutate into civil wars? And Fawaz, about Syria, quickly, I would say. Egypt is still far from civil wars for the simple reason, unless you have a different interpretation, I mean definition. What I mean by civil wars is that in society you have two military forces fighting for the control of the state, for at least for imposing wills by military means. Egypt is still very far from it. We're still in the period of any civilians battling with not even the army. And the solidity of the Egyptian army, as far as I'm concerned, is, is not yet put into question. But in Syria, I think that movement for change in Syria has produced, has a military civil aspect, which we don't like to talk about for two reasons. I mean, let me say it bluntly. There is a civil war war in Syria in the sense that you have two military camps of Syrians killing each other. I mean, that you find a few, the people who are from Chechenia or Pakistan or Yemen does not change the fact. I mean, foreign intervention is nothing in civil wars. All civil wars attract fantastically foreign intervention. So we're not talking. But in Syria, the way civil wars are being now presented in, let's say, the Western media or among the powers that want what is called a political solution is to consider that both sides are in the wrong, since they are using military violence and obscuring, let me say, the legitimacy of the demands of millions of Syrians who wanted a real regime change. That's one aspect why the Syrian opposition doesn't like to use the term, which doesn't necessarily mean that we should refrain from using the. The other thing in Syria to the difference of Egypt, where of course there might be incidents of any conflict between Copts and Islamists. Let's say in Syria, if you say this is a civil war, you're implying what exists but which is not dominant yet is that the regime in its rests on one sect. The majority of the opposition is Sunni. Hence the idea that this is a sectarian war. It's not yet that. I mean, there are massacres, there are movements of population. But knowing how intricate the social fabric of Syria, we cannot say that the military fighting runs along sectarian lines. Whereas in Lebanon, for example, which you could easily talk about this.
- [80:28]
Event Moderator
Three more questions.
- [80:37]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
Hello, my name is Mandy Johnson.
- [80:41]
Lean Henchom
To what extent do you believe the colonial France contributed to the formation of modern Lebanon?
- [81:01]
Yusuf Sharif
Anfiras, I'm interested in your last point in the lecture, which was about the intersection of sects and classes and in the sense that basically to do so would require us to study economic inequalities also and how they intersect with sectarian dynamics. As a Syrian, as someone who's looking closely at the Syrian revolution now, what are some of the lessons we can learn from Lebanon in that respect?
- [81:41]
Event Moderator
Good evening, I'm Abhijit Malik. I'm originally from India and a student of international history here at the lsc. Is the modern history of Lebanon the international part of it only about the west and the Arab speaking world? Or were there Interactions about and influences from other parts of the world as well. There's a question here, young woman, please.
- [82:11]
Audience Member / Questioner
I'm from King's College, London. My question about the reconstruction of Beirut after the civil war. I'm thinking about Solidair and about Dahya reconstructed by Hezbollah. Do you think that this reconstruction, how has it affected the communal relations between Lebanon? And do you think that creating common spaces for or shared spaces between the Lebanese would exacerbate the conflict or maybe lead to reconciliation between the Lebanese people?
- [82:51]
Event Moderator
Question about sacred and class. One of the most alarming points I think I got out of your talk is that you quoted, you cited Rodinson by saying that sects are only defined religiously on the Martians and yet by their borders. It's marginally, but yet what you did say that in fact now they are fundamentally defined religiously in the sense what, what you're really implying is that has Lebanon become now more of a religious state? And one of your articles in the Safiyyah you highlight is that what's really alarming to you is that we are witnessing the consolidation of a religious state in Lebanon. And this. What does it say then about class and sect in Lebanon?
- [83:44]
Dr. Fawaz Tarabulsi
First, I should thank all of you for very challenging and interesting questions. So I need to come out more outside Lebanon to get such challenges. Now, just before I forget, to the gentleman who spoke, the Algerian gentleman, about his comparison between Christian and Muslim sectors of Beirut. But you want, I mean, you're making comparisons between two incomparables. You went to Sunni and you went to Dahi. You didn't go to Sin Alfil, you didn't go to Jdeidi. You didn't go to New Jdeidi. You did. Sorry. Yes. And Adasinnfield and Juni are not the same. No, no. I'm just saying that if you want to. I mean, Beirut has. The suburbs of Beirut exist all around Beirut and they're Christian, Sunni and Shiite. Now it's become a tradition to talk about the sovereign south suburb as Ad Dahi, as the suburb. We have many suburbs. I can't safely say that the situation of the mass of Christians is better than the situation of the mass of Muslims in Lebanon. And definitely, definitely does not represent the real. The real. No, I mean the real consumer and rich and wealth that is deployed all over the country. I mean it used to at one part of the world, but not anymore. Anyway, what do we have? Yeah, I mean that's also a trend. Definitely, definitely by export, by not exporting what is now called Colonial modernity, at least colonial modernity did not make a nation state. It did not create a. A Jacobin state. It definitely, definitely based itself on a vision of the world which considers the people of the east as sects. And that was manipulated because by creating Greater Lebanon, the French discovered that they had a vision for the region that Lebanon was Christian. But by creating Greater Lebanon, Lebanon was no more Christian. Hence the use of the famous definition of Lebanon as by parliament as a country of religious minorities. So the biggest minority happened to have been the Maronites. It was given the privilege of representing both Lebanon and the Christians. So just one. I mean, the period of French colonialism was not that long. It was mandatory. They were very disturbed about the way they created this big entity. But I mean, the real problem for the French was Syria, what to do with Syria. And I should remind you, I mean, the vision for the creation of the region of Syria was that it should represent the five sects that the French pretended to defend, which is Shiites, Halawites, Druze, Christians, sorry, four. And they created in Syria, as you know, one state for the Alawites, one state for the Druze. The problem about southern Lebanon and created, creating one state for the Shiites was posed but never implemented. All those who said Lebanon is too big to many Muslims in it, in that same memorandum I mentioned of Emil Eddi, he did say that the south, the Jabal Am region, should become an autonomous zone related to Syria, so that Lebanon would become 80% Christian. Apart from that, they did an interesting thing in the sense that they united the whole Syria economically. Our national heroes broke the unity. Now. Reconstruction of Beirut. I'll go at the end to the Syrian law lessons. The reconstruction of Beirut was based on two assumptions which did not work perfectly. But I mean, the first is this idea that Lebanon, Beirut was the hub of Lebanon's prosperity. If we reconstruct it, we can reconstruct this prosperity. This is the idea behind Rafi Al Hariri's plan to build a 2 million square meter of office space in what is called downtown. Of course, it was built on a wrong political assumption, which is that there is going to be peace. Arab, Israeli peace is coming. Lebanon needs a share of the. How shall I put it, of the dividends of the peace. And that's how we do it. By this, of course, the peace did not come. The other thing, the other thing. This reconstruction in fact increased the divisions, the social divisions, rather than create communal spaces. I mean, you don't create communal spaces by considering that one tiny bit of the country should invest in it that much at the expense of others. So I wouldn't consider that and at the end result of the reconstruction as related to bringing people together was a great success. I mean, of course, of course what was not reconstructed were the damage in the human element and the relations between people. And that is something which is not within the real interests of the reconstruction. Now, I believe plenty of lessons for the Syrian opposition, for the Syrian people can be taken from the Lebanese experience in more than one way. If you disregard a bit the idea of each evolution says we are particular nothing. I mean, we heard this from the Iraqis. We are not like Lebanon. There is no sectarian. We have always lived together. I mean, if you go beyond that hypocrisy. First, first the Syrian opposition is in denial about sectarianism, whereas I think sectarianism should be admitted to get rid of it. And you don't get rid of it the Lebanese way. No, you don't abolish it. You create institutions, processes to the accumulation of food of which would move you to a more a society more based on equality. So that's one. The other thing is exactly the transformation of a movement of change into a civil war. I think this is happening Syria and I mentioned why I don't think it should. I mean, why it's not very appropriate to call it a civil war because of the meanings allotted to civil war. But. The drastic thing about a social political movement requiring basically a new relationship between ruled and rulers on a democratic basis, let's say this is how the mass movement of Syrian opposition did now is being internationalized. And I have no illusions what scenario, what scheme is there? I mean, it's all, let me put it in a more positive way. I think a lot of the Lebanese and Yemeni experiences are there to be applied to Syria. And I would advise, and I've done that the Syrian opposition to study them. Well, first, how you can simply siphon out anything that is young, youthful, valid in a revolution and transform it into a reconstruction of the same regime minus a few individuals or a few institutions. That's the Yemeni thing, where the president leaves but is still the most influential man in the country. His vice president becomes acclaimed unanimously in elections as a president and so on. And the Lebanese experience, where the issue of reconstituting a regime in Syria on a blatant sectarian basis, where the question becomes there is a Halawi president, how do we reduce his prerogatives to the benefit of a Sunni prime minister? This is not A logic I'm inventing. This is what people are talking about. And the question is, how do you. What answers does the Syrian opposition have to those? So I would say without any pretentious modesty, that the rejection of larger parts of the Syrian opposition to recognize. I mean, let's call the state of denial of the sectarian question by saying it's not in our traditions or by saying, look, I mean, we have George Sabra where Christians are represented and we have, I don't know, Samaria's big. The Alawis are there, Kurds. A few codes are here and there. We had some. Whereas the complexity of a situation which is even hundred times worse than Lebanon needs very complex, not complicated, but complex answers. How do we deal with the Kurds? I mean, from the beginning at least, I felt there was a great uninterest. Nationalist answers, telling them it's not time for you. We talk about it after the victory of the revolution. What is this Western Kurdistan you're talking about? I don't think, I don't think the, the opposition, the Arab opposition was very successful in, in getting in the, the, the, the Kurds into, into the revolutionary process until now they've become a de facto factor in Western Kurdistan saying, we're there, we're armed. Bashar Al Assad even gave us the license to take over parts of the country. Until you start talking business, we're here and we participate. I don't want to say more. I think that's more than enough from any solidarity position, as is well known.
- [98:00]
Event Moderator
Thank you.