The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (22 page)

Fawaz’s vision of what Lebanon stands for—as a model of Middle Eastern coexistence and openness to Western as well as Arab influences—was shaped by Lebanese history. There were the Maronites, an Eastern Catholic rite, whose ancient ties to the Vatican had kept channels open between Lebanon and the rest of the Mediterranean basin for hundreds of years.
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There were also the Druze, a minority Muslim sect whose early-seventeenth-century leader, Fakhr ad-Din (1572–1635), found refuge from the Ottomans in Florence with the Medicis—the influence of whom can be seen in the architecture of Beiteddine, a Tuscan-inspired Ottoman palace in the Shouf Mountains, the Druze heartland. Typically credited as the father of modern Lebanon, Fakhr ad-Din, as some historians have argued, opened up his country to Europe.

Even the Sunnis along the Lebanese seacoast were different from their co-religionists across the region. They were merchants and traders whose commerce was not with the great ocean of the Arab sands, its desert ports stretching from Jerusalem to Damascus to Baghdad and the Arabian Peninsula, but facing outward, to the Mediterranean Sea. In the twentieth century the Sunnis would try to join Lebanon to the larger Arab nation, which is why the Christians resisted them and fought their Palestinian proxies, but unlike many of the other Arab states Lebanon was never ruled by an Arab nationalist regime. Instead, after the country’s 1943 independence, Lebanon had a constitution, a national pact laying out a power-sharing scheme between the country’s eighteen sects that allotted the largest shares to the largest communities (the Sunnis, Maronites, and Shia), and the makings of democratic governance. Fifteen years of war and another decade and a half of Syrian occupation had tested the theory of Lebanon as a model of coexistence, but by the time I got to Beirut a few months before the Cedar Revolution in the winter of 2004, the White House’s talk of democratic reform in the region had found an eager audience here. The Lebanese believed that Washington had learned from 9/11 what it should have learned in Lebanon in the 1980s—that you can’t blink in the eye of terror. Now the Americans were back and were serious about protecting their own citizens, interests, and regional allies, and Beirut was flush with possibility.

Of course, the buoyancy of that moment wasn’t always easy to distinguish from the normal course of Lebanese joie de vivre, in the spirit of which at least a few women are sure to jump up on the bar to dance during any evening out. This was part of the Lebanese difference, what distinguished the Land of the Cedars from the rest of the Arab world: a tradition of intellectual curiosity and ambition reflected in the country’s highly competitive, if not altogether free, press that represents all of the many political parties and even features the region’s first gay lifestyle magazine; a thriving book-publishing industry; a large, well-trained middle class educated in
either the Arabic, the French, or the American system; an internationally renowned cultural milieu distinguished by architects like Bernard Khoury and fashion designers like Elie Saab; a French- and Ottoman-inspired cuisine; a local wine industry that dated back several thousand years; and the most famously beautiful women in the region, maybe all the world.

“Maybe it is the wars that make them so beautiful,” Fawaz conjectured. “The hardness of it leaves only the strong. But there is no doubt that Lebanese women know how to present themselves.” Even in the small mountain towns—all contending that their daughters, wives, and sisters were the most beautiful—the women dressed in the latest fashions, long fur-lined leather coats and high heels, and in the cities, well, women danced on bar tops. Ground zero of the Lebanese avant-garde was Torino, a small, loud, and smoky club in Gemmayze, a nightlife area in East Beirut only a fraction the size of the East Village but many times more alluring simply because it was in an Arab city pulsing with eros. Musicians, filmmakers, actresses, writers, and students became more scandalous by the drink, a posture that in reality revealed their sweetness and naïveté as they walked the tightrope between traditional Arab mores and Western trends.

The Saudis loved Lebanon as much as anyone. They relaxed and enjoyed themselves openly here as they could not even in Cairo or the other Arab cities they visited for recreation. The men in their long white robes hunted in packs for Lebanese women, or they dined with their families, or both. The Saudi women also loved the country. Some were cloaked entirely in black, others simply covered their hair, their dark eyes dilated with smoke from the water pipes they sucked on publicly. Almost everything was allowed in Lebanon, even for Saudi women, some of whom wore their hair teased like Jersey girls out for a Saturday night in the West Village and dressed themselves in tight jeans and gaudy black stiletto-heeled boots that clacked on the cobblestoned streets by the clock at Nejmeh Square.

The Saudis were protective of Lebanon, a refuge that they’d
helped rebuild after the war through the offices of Rafiq al-Hariri. Born in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon, Hariri went to Saudi Arabia and got involved in construction work, so impressing the royal family with his energy and ability to finish on time and under cost that they made him their man in Lebanon. In 1994, he founded Solidere, a company for the reconstruction and development of the Beirut Central District, where boutiques and luxury chain outlets lined the crowded sidewalks along with dozens of restaurants, Lebanese, Moroccan, Italian, French, and American chains like T.G.I. Friday’s, where the waitstaff sang “Happy Birthday” to patrons in Arabic, French, and English.

Fawaz and I spent nights downtown in the wet Mediterranean air, watching women and tourists, and eating and smoking cigars among rows of colorful Ottoman-era limestone villas, bullet pockmarked from the wars. This part of downtown had been controlled by the Palestinians, Fawaz explained, and then fell into the hands of Christian fighters, led by one of his neighbors, an old family friend in his late fifties now with powerful hands and gray thinning hair bearing no traces of the furious Afro he wore in a photograph of him and his cadre, among them a beautiful, lethal young woman brandishing a Kalashnikov.

During the first years of the war, the Christians and Palestinians came down here at night with their guns and drugs and fought, and then by day went about their ordinary business, until the conflict erupted into a full-scale war. A rumor grew up among Fawaz’s fans and rivals that during the wars he was a captain in the Lebanese Forces, the main Christian militia. This seemed to explain why after Sagesse victories, large, piston-fingered men with shaved skulls and leather coats walked onto the court to embrace him. In reality, he’d spent part of the conflict sharpening his basketball skills at a junior college in Kansas. His father was ecstatic that his boy was going to learn firsthand how the Americans valued work and rewarded merit. “Even in the Lebanese league,” says Fawaz, “I always played against
the Americans. I always got the toughest matchup on defense, and that meant some guy from an American college.” In Kansas, the Greek Orthodox Fawaz attended his first Baptist service, and he was the first Arab his classmates had ever met. “I had Palestinian posters all over my room, and the school administration brought me in for a talk.”

It wasn’t until after his return to Lebanon that his political transformation began as he started to reconsider the Arab nationalist commonplaces he had been reared on in what was then a mixed West Beirut neighborhood. The problems of the Middle East, he realized, weren’t the result of colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, or the United States. They were the product of the inability of Arab societies to respect the individual and the difference of every individual. Still, the Americans could help, he figured. And they had to since it was in their own interest to do so. “I have to admit it, but when the planes hit the towers September 11, I was happy,” he says. “I knew that the Americans could no longer afford to ignore the problems of the Middle East. The bargains you’d made with dictators, and the political culture it had given rise to, was untenable. Finally, you had to deal with the real problems.”

Fawaz cheered on the invasion of Iraq, which he saw as a war to bring down a pillar of Arab nationalism, a totalitarianism as destructive of the individual human being as communism. The onetime leftist who used to sport Che T-shirts now took as his role model a former Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky, whose book
The Case for Democracy
became President Bush’s manual for Middle East reform. A state that does not respect the human rights of its own citizens, Sharansky argued, will not behave better toward its neighbors or peers in the world community. Freedom for the Arabs would mean security for the rest of the international community—including Israel, where Sharansky had moved after the Soviets released him from prison.

If Sharansky’s nationality made some of Fawaz’s Lebanese
friends uneasy when he pushed the book on them, Fawaz himself saw the Jews of Israel as just another Middle Eastern minority, like the Christians, Shia, Druze, and Kurds. Fawaz had met a reporter from one of the major U.S. papers when he came through Beirut and seemed surprised at the journalist’s patent dislike of Israel. I noted that the journalist was uncomfortable, if not hostile, like many American Jews about the idea of a Jewish state. “Then that is a problem with his personal identity,” said Fawaz. “But it has nothing to do with the region. If he’s hostile toward the idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East, it means he can’t understand us either. The Jews were here before the Christians, who were here before the Muslims, so if the Jews don’t belong in the Middle East, then neither do Oriental Christians, and that is not possible, because we definitely belong. My father is buried here, as was his father, and his father before him. And I will be, too.”

Fawaz related the history of his ancestors, their fights against the Ottomans and storied figures like Ahmad al-Jazzar, “the Butcher,” an Ottoman official with a reputation for violence that struck fear into the hearts of the Christians. “But it wasn’t just the Christians who were terrorized by the Ottomans and the Sunnis,” Fawaz said. “It’s all the minorities, all of us here. It’s our story—fear of each other. If you were walking on the same side of the street as a Sunni,” Fawaz explained, “they’d tell you to move over and get to the left,
ishmal.

“But if they killed a Christian,” he continued, “the Christians would take their revenge, and the Ottomans would chase them as far as the mountains. If they followed them up the steep passes, they’d be cut to ribbons. My grandfather used to be involved in that game, but my grandmother gave him a choice: it’s either your children or your guns.”

 A
ll of Lebanon is armed, every family in every sect in every quarter of every town, but only Hezbollah was allowed to
hold on to its heavy weapons after the conclusion of the civil war. There had been a national agreement and several UN Security Council resolutions calling for all Lebanese parties to disarm, but the international community was not going to disarm the Party of God, and neither was the government of Lebanon, since it had become a Syrian puppet regime ever since the war’s end, and Damascus had no interest in weakening Hezbollah, even if foreign officials were eager to be deceived otherwise.

When Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, for instance, decided in 2000 to end his country’s eighteen-year-long occupation of Lebanon, he thought it was both possible and necessary to get Syria to stop supporting Hezbollah. If not, he thought, “there was the unmistakable risk that attacks from Lebanon would continue even after withdrawal, especially because Syria always used Lebanon as a pressure point against Israel.”
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It apparently never occurred to the Israelis, the Americans, or any of the other pillars of the international community that this was precisely why the Syrians would never willingly divest themselves of a valuable strategic asset. Their sponsorship of Hezbollah meant that all parties had to go through Damascus even to discuss concessions, and disarming Hezbollah would force Syria to forfeit that leverage.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, had its own reasons for keeping its guns. The Islamic Resistance’s self-described raison d’être is to defend Lebanon against Israel, and as Hassan Nasrallah’s gloating over Israeli corpses proves, Hezbollah takes real joy in killing Jews. However, its deepest fear is not of the Zionist state founded in 1948 but of the Sunni sea that has engulfed the Shia for more than thirteen hundred years. The Christians may be terrified of the Sunni majority, but in Sunni orthodoxy Christians and even Jews enjoy a protected status as “people of the Book.” The Shia, on the other hand, are considered merely heretics, or worse, a point that the Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi made in his last published statement before his death in the spring of 2006. He said he saw through Hezbollah’s
charade. It was just a cover for Israel and protected the Jews from the wrath of the genuine, Sunni resistance. The Shia were not real Arabs, only the Sunnis were; he called the Party of God Zionists.
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Hezbollah’s warring against Israel shows that, despite Zarqawi’s invective, the Shia are Arabs in good standing and warrant a place in a Sunni-majority Middle East that has been at war with the Zionists since 1948. Indeed, after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and later after the July 2006 war, Hezbollah was able to claim with some justice that only it had ever made Israel taste defeat, a triumph denied the various Sunni defenders of Arabism over the last half century of their loss and humiliation.

Most historical accounts of Hezbollah, authored by the group itself or by fellow travelers among the Western left, claim that the resistance was indigenous, rising out of the Shia community’s natural right to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. In fact, from the very beginning Hezbollah was a collaborative venture between Iran and Syria. The Party of God binds their four-decade alliance and made these two non-Sunni regimes—Syria is ruled by Alawis (a non-Sunni Muslim minority sect) and Iran is Persian Shia—relevant in a Sunni-dominated region. Backing Hezbollah also permitted them to make war against the Jewish state and burnish their resistance bona fides without risking war on their own borders. Fighting through Lebanon was natural for them: Iran’s ties to the Lebanese Shia community dated back to the fourteenth century, while Damascus had never considered Lebanon anything but a Syrian province.
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Moreover, Beirut’s weak central government made Lebanon a clearinghouse of resistance.