From The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East
© 1991 Kenneth Cragg
Reproduced from The Arab Christian
Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.

I

I have been quietly dining in a monastery when shouts have been heard and shots have been fired against the stout bulwarks of the outer walls. . . which had but little effect in altering the monotonous cadence in which one of the brotherhood read a homily of St. Chrysostom from the pulpit.. . in the refectory.1

ROBERT CURZON WAS WRITING in 1849, visiting monasteries in the Levant in search of manuscripts for museums and gleanings for his pen. He reported a world of monks and guns, of high walls and ancient liturgies. Faiths could be traditional because bulwarks were intact. The years around his travels, and 1860 most notorious of all, were beset with turbulence and communal strife in a Lebanon already caught in the toils of Ottoman decline and the conflicting wiles of western powers. Chrysostom of golden tongue, of Antioch and the fourth century, exhorted his listeners of the nineteenth behind ramparts of continuity surviving the attentions of Persians and Byzantines, Arabs and Turks, crusaders and Latins through more than a thousand years. Curzon found custodians retentive of their manuscripts but capable of yieiding them to a curator from the West, who did not pause to note the theme of the homily.

He was an exuberant traveler and considered himself brave. Did he register the pathos in the episode or read the future in it-a future in which the bulwarks would no longer hold, in which the bastions of faith and community would disintegrate and homilies surrender to hate? Intent on what he wanted from the hospitality, he could regard the incident as trivial. But in that very quality the episode captures what imagination must now entail in the story of Lebanon-religions indulged and entrenched, immunities prized and threatened, liturgies and weapons, traditions and encounters, partisans and aliens, devotions and shouts, walls under siege.

The sober reader begins to suspect excess of sentiment, ill-suited to proper history. But no. What is proper to history is realism and right measure. The Lebanon of the final quarter of this century is a scene of infinite tragedy, a desperate indictment of religions and their role in the bankruptcy of politics and the strangling of hope. Beyond the historian's task of bare analysis, the rehearsal of factors, the puzzle of clues, is the measure of what might have been. The tragedy lies not only in what has eventuated but in what has been forfeited, or the one in the perspective of the other, the anatomy of despair at the autopsy of hope.

II

Precarious, no doubt, the promise always was and, as some would say, ill-founded, fragile, and even dishonest. Yet, given time, given exemption from the strains of Palestinianism and, within these, the malevolence of Israel, the Lebanese venture of Christian-Muslim and Maronite-Sunni "Concordat" of autonomy might have survived and solidified. We must explore the issues at length; the 194Os must be assessed from the 1970s. They are shattered in the 1980s, but the miscarriage of what might have been born to thrive belongs in the history.

Lebanon has sometimes been imagined as the Switzerland of the Middle East. Mountainous, special, exempt from surrounding tensions, a haven with a hinterland, cantonized perhaps but containing its tensions in a will to one identity, alert to adjacent worlds but wary of their conflicts, secured by commerce-a symbolic nation. The symbol-Lebanese-style-would be a Muslim-Christian amity holding promise of happy contagion in other Arab states with their slender, tenuous, and exposed minorities of Christians, a land in which freedom of religious converse of thought and publication could provide a foothold of sanity and patience in the strife of faiths.

It was not to be, and, by the same token, its negation where it might most readily have eventuated denies its hope elsewhere. Switzerland has no maritime shore, no Mediterranean to distract, no Islam to integrate with a chronically divided Christianity. Nor, as some might add, is it Phoenician in its temper, nor Arab in its rhetoric. There are endless imponderables in any such equation, but the point is the prospect of the parallel adjusted to the vagaries of a different historical and religious context.

How might it have obtained? In the 194Os Lebanon reached at least a form of independence. The French were finally dislodged politically in the wake of the Second World War. They had related to Lebanon from times before the Crusades, and they left behind a culture among many Maronites more Francophile than Arab. It was a legacy liable to threaten the politics they bequeathed in a nation at least nominally independent. The nation's boundaries had been enlarged at French initiative by the addition of mainly Shi'ah areas in the far south by Tyre, and Sunni and other Muslim elements in the north. These changes were at the expense of political Syria, helpless under Mandate to do other than demur. They ensured that Syria would always claim a stake, if not a dominance, in Lebanese affairs, and they gave emotional occasion to the notions of "greater Syria" as a menace to the viability of an independent Lebanon.

The situation in the late 1940s has to be assessed in the light of those deep tensions between Arabism and Islam, between nationhood and erstwhile dhimmi status, which have been discussed in chapter 7. By its very nature, fragmented but more evenly balanced, as well as territorially ambiguous, Lebanon was uniquely beset by those vexations. Christians were ostensibly the majority, though no census after 1946 would be allowed to resolve by how much, if at all. Sunni Muslims predominated within Islam, and the Shi'ah were disadvantaged economically and socially. Christians other than Maronite were small minorities-Orthodox, Monophysite, Uniate, Latin, and Protestant, with a non-Arab dimension in Armenian refugees and citizens. The third dimension was the Druze community with its long tenure in the Lebanese mountains and a history of mingled enmity and coexistence with the Maronites.

In the flush of independent aspiration and the sobering retrospect of strife, aware of the surrender of old instincts for "protected" status-for some a reluctant surrender-the major parties resolved on the National Concordat, an agreement of mutual accommodation based on a confessional order of power. While the president would always be Maronite, the prime minister Sunni, the speaker of Parliament from the Shi'ah, Parliament would consist of representation according to fixed ratios. This structure had to live with the feudal loyalties that cut across confessional lines, but it was hoped that it would curb if not tame them. Sanctioned by old commercial instincts, this new Phoenicia might ride out its centuries of fragmentation, of communal distrust, of Mamliik, Ottoman, and European misadventure.

There was an initial confidence. The architects and first mentors of the agreement, the Maronite president, Bishara al-Khoury, and the Sunni prime minister, Ri'ad al-Solh, augured well despite a last fling of French intransigence. Able Christians such as Charles Malik could give rein to their romanticism and hail the historic destiny of Lebanon mediating between East and West.2 Left alone, the elements might have coalesced at least sufficiently to give stability and to keep the incipient factions quiescent.

It is true that the underlying fragility of a confessional structure had to be faced but was readily ignored. Purists could say that all was archaic, a surrender to convenience, a false pragmatism, but was the secular option ever really viable in the given complexity of Lebanese tradition, its chronic complexity of tribe, sect, and cult? Might it not be argued that tacit solutions, avoiding the precipitation of crisis and contention, would best serve the hope of more permanent decisions requiring stronger nerve and a more confidently mutual identity? Neither the political instincts of Islam nor the age-old defensiveness of Christians was ready for the radical secularity of the modern state-and only the possible is politic.

Whether the confessional structure could ever have been effectively redrawn must be left to vain conjecture. Formidable as were the vetoes on such change within Lebanon itself, the most crucial factors were outside the country's control-in the politics of Syria, the claims of the Palestinians, the postures of Israel and, through all these, the stakes of the major powers. Within three decades of the hopes and devices of 1946 came conflict and disaster. It is important for the study of Arab Christianity to read those decades aright in the broad perspective that a tortuous story must be made to yield. Only so can we pass to the more intimate study of its Christian ingredients. Why could Beirut not make good its bid to be a sort of Geneva-cum-Zurich of the Middle East and Lebanon its context?

The central issue is the fact of the Arabness of Lebanon, its range and the proper liabilities. There could be no doubting Lebanon's location, its language, its Islam, or its experience. These all confirmed it as belonging in the Arab world, but with what degree of indulgence for its particularity? Lebanese Christians, and Maronites especially, were concerned for the country's panicularity, to the partial compromise of their membership in the Arab world, if need be. How might such "need be - arise and, if it did, how far could the claims of a Lebanese special identity be conceded? The questions were always latent within the general issue we have earlier studied as to the relation of Arabness to nationhood and of both to Islam. On every count Lebanon was the territory where it was most acute. What made it incorrigibly more so was the political, emotional, and military fallout from the fact of Israel.

The modus vivendi of mutual balance of interest and influence came under severe strain in the late 1950s in the heyday of 'Abd al-Nasir's pan-Arabism. Ephemeral though it proved, it loomed large at the time, fanned by Anglo-French-Israeli turpitude at the Suez crisis. The government of Maronite president Chamoun, with the Orthodox Charles Malik as his Foreign Minister, sought to take Lebanese policy too far in the pro-western direction, in their apprehension aiming to offset the menace to their view of Lebanon. So doing, they drew down on themselves the suspicion of treachery to Arabism-the more so when, if only briefly, armed U.S. intervention occurred to support them. Happily the tensions of 1957/58 were for the time being soothed by the tact and common "trustability" of General Shihab, bearer of a magic name in Lebanese history and still able to hold both government and army in some sort of two-sidedness.

In the 1970s it was different, and there was no feasible Shihab to hold the ring and unbreed suspicion. The issues were sharper and more intractable, and to grasp them requires a review of the Palestinian story. In the immediate aftermath of exile in 1948, the world saw Palestinians as refugees set on repatriation - an aim that made them also nationalists, for, in their identity, they still cherished a patria. The steady perpetuation of their refugeedom as years passed was cruelly interpreted by some as a wicked device to perpetuate accusation of Israel. Dispersal, it was said, was their obvious future. They were obtuse and their mentors callous in not conceding it to be so, though dispersal in a precarious world was precisely what Zionism, for its part, was set to disavow.

But dispersed, effectively, they were and so remained. Lebanon -Jordan apart-had the largest share of them, and they were hospitably, if pitiably, received. They waited patiently - and, for long, in vain - for the world community to realize their nationality. They waited, still more in vain, for salvation through their Arab kin in Arab states. Indeed, those states ineptly aggravated the tragic condition of the Palestinians, and intensified the futility in their dispersion. In the wake of 1967-the nadir of such futility as of Arab ebullience-they began to repudiate their long passivity as refugees and concert their own salvation. The P.L.O. emerged.3

Guerrilla violence, or the suspicion of it, against Israel only kindled the vengeful vigilance always near the surface of Israeli minds imbued with the long retrospect of the world's-and the Arabs'-enmity. The Zionist state has an instinct of inveterate suspicion, a determination never to be taken with impunity. How grim, how resolute, and how cruel, Palestinians were soon to discover. After 1967 their resistance to Israel hinged on Arab territory. The first and best option was obviously Jordan, where Palestinians were one in every two of the population, thanks to the double exodus of 1948 and 1967. But Palestinian military operations from Jordanian territory incurred Israeli retaliation against Jordan, while Palestinian training camps, demanding unfettered freedom of action, called in question Jordanian sovereignty. The issue of a state within the state became acute. King Husain had the resolve and the competence to end it by the costly expulsion of the Palestinian militants in Black September, 1970.4

There followed the export of the identical issue to Lebanon, where, cynically escorted through Syria,5 the P.L.O. withdrew. Merged in the existing Palestinianism in Lebanon, the militants, embittered and more fervid, were set to embroil the Lebanese in their unrelenting cause-and in the venom of Israeli self-defense. Given all that was already fragile and febrile in the Lebanese condition, this new dimension of stress and tribulation plunged the country into the disintegration of civil war from 1974.

The reasons are tragically plain. Here in the P.L.O.'s need of facility against Israel was the most urgent and strident claim of a pan-Arab task. Were not the Palestinians fellow-Arabs? Was not Israel the common enemy? Had not Jordan betrayed its honor? Should Lebanon follow suit? Christians in Lebanon, however, mainly but not only Maronite, saw in the most menacing form the old spectre of forfeited identity, of Arab-Muslim dominance, and themselves a crippled, broken minority in a state no longer their own. A Palestinian state within the state must not be allowed to become the Trojan horse to seize the city. Torn as it was by this fundamental stake and plagued by feudal loyalties and regional quarrels, Lebanon was in no shape to emulate Husain. The Black Septembers of Lebanon would bloody their own calendar as recurring months of conflict, massacre, and outrage-a cycle of P.L.O. action, barren of result, and of surgical and deadly Israeli retaliation. In all the given factors of the Arab scene, the tragedy of Lebanon is the neighborhood of Israel.

The narrative is tortuous and its detail bewildering, as factions and causes shifted and changed. Sunnis, the Shi'ah, Maronites, and Druzes conflicted, bargained, dallied, aligned, and realigned with fickle tactics or brutal cynicism. Assassinations took their steady toll both of leadership and hope. The old confessional structure of the state crumbled into the strife of impasse to which, realists would say, it had always been liable. Palestinianism ensured its utter collapse and created circumstances in which no viable alternative could be debated, still less concerted and achieved. The former sanctions of trading prowess with its assumption of tolerable peace, as well as human counsels of reason sharpened by common adversity, were overborne by passion and dogma.

Israeli policy, set to perpetuate Palestinian dispersion by refusing Palestinian repatriation, was necessarily engaged within the Lebanese scene. Some of its interests could well be served by Lebanese clients, just as the interests of Syria predominantly and of other Arab states generally could be transacted by Lebanese proxies. Such entanglements only deepened suspicions and compounded hatreds. Among the worst instances of Israeli connivance with Christian Lebanese was the breakaway "army" of Colonel Haddad, an Orthodox Christian, on the southern border. His militia, armed by Israel, not only impugned Lebanon's sovereignty but compromised the integrity of the national army and seemed to proclaim that Lebanon was unable to defend its own on its own. The Shi'ah in the south were bitterly resentful in their greater exposure.

But incriminating connivance with Israel, as "true Arab" patriots saw it, was even more sinister in politics at the heart than from insubordinates at the border. Might diehard Christian Lebanese be susceptible to the temptation of an independent cliency to Israel? There could be logic in the thought. Was not Israel itself a sort of paradigm? In a sea of irreducible Arabism the right course lay in creating a vigorous, defensible, separate enclave of common identity, such as Israel was, beleaguered no doubt but redoubtable. Might not a Maronite Lebanon emulate Zion? Israel's need for such a client to the north argued for its creation if Maronites were resolute and united enough to seize on the idea. By the same token, the slightest suspicion of any such intention spelled a base treachery, and protested repudiation of it only tended to sound less convincing, or convincing only as deception.

There is no doubt that such calculations in Israel played their part in Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. "Peace in Galilee" was the code name: war on Lebanon was the reality - to do for Lebanon what it could not, or would not, do for itself, namely, Maronitize itself with Israeli prompting. The twenty-five-mile zone needed for "peace in Galilee" was quickly over passed. Indeed, there had been peace in Galilee de facto since 1978. The speeches of Menachem Begin recalled the bunkers of Berlin in 1945 and the grim end of Hitler in clear anticipation of a parallel "final solution" for Lebanon by the eviction of the Palestinians. The element of grim triumphalism in the Israeli psyche was unmistakable. Reckoning in Lebanon would be vicarious vengeance for the Holocaust. By such legacies was the tragedy of a divided war-torn Lebanon compounded. The Palestinian presence which was, differently, the bane of both would be expelled to satisfy both Jewish mood and Lebanese Maronite dream.

In retrospect, despite the temporary withdrawal of the P.L.O., the mood and the dream-only controversially indulged as they were-were alike frustrated. But the sanguinary bid for success that Israel had made against the wiser counsels of her peace-seeking minority only further intensified the Lebanese imbroglio. The dark shadow of Zionism lay more somberly still on the politics of Lebanon.

The effective partition of the country continued despite the six-year presidency of Amir Gemayel, begun in the autumn of 1982, with its semblance of the form of the confessional state. By the time it drew to its mandatory conclusion in the summer of 1988, even that façade of constitutionality became well-nigh defunct. Illegal ports for the import of arms, serial assassinations of key figures, such as the moderate Sunni premier, Rashid Karameh, and the Druze leader Kamal Jumblitt, indiscriminate shellings and bombardments, through patched and broken truces-some two hundred of them in fifteen years-fed an agonizing cycle of enmity, futility, and despair, in which ordinary folk had forlornly to retrieve what remnants they could of personal existence. There is no point here in rehearsing the grim toll of those bitter vicissitudes in which Lebanon experienced the agony of its own divided Arabism and the criminal ineptness of Arabism at large, with external paymasters and patrons serving their own ends in shifting confusion and discordancy.

Even the constitutional form of Lebanon became symbolically the victim of attrition. Death and intimidation diminished the legal Parliament, which alone could choose a successor president. The National Army was confessionally compromised beyond possibility of effective action and, despite the Syrian presence, separatist militias sundered and plundered the population. A national agreement cobbled together in late 1985 was quickly repudiated with intractable Maronite resistance to any alteration of the confessional structure that would concede greater power to Muslim and Druze. Embroilment only served to intensify division within the conflicting parties themselves, and Maronite intransigence hardened despite the pleas of the Maronite patriarch, Nasrallah Sfeir, for a will to moderation. Only late in 1988, when the speaker's term of office ended with no parliamentary quorum to replace him, was a surviving muster of deputies persuaded or cajoled at a conference under Saudi auspices to agree to a formula modifying the Maronite place in constitutional confessionalism and attempting to resolve the tangle of rival cabinets and competing militias. When Rene Moawad was finally elected president in line with this "solution" he was murdered within days. His successor, Elias Hrawi, has happily survived but for another eighteen months was frustrated by the resistance of General Aoun, in his "presidential" bastion, to the "legitimate" forces of the 'presidency and of the national commander Samir Geagea. When General Aoun finally capitulated in October 1990, after sanguinary exchanges with Syrian forces, he found ambiguous sanctuary in the French Embassy-an irony true to the long story of Christian ambivalence-where legitimate Lebanon claims him for "crimes against the state" and France holds him a legitimate refugee.

In the wake of his surrender, the militias agreed to leave Beirut, but the shape of the further future is obscure. How will Syria interpret its longstanding interest in the Lebanese scene? How will the precarious constitutionalism, still confessional in shape if concessionary to Muslim and Druze, survive the aftermath of years of anguish and the retrospect of death and despair? The Christian presence is desperately attenuated by emigration, slaughter, forfeiture of leadership, and internecine distrust - the old feudal tradition of Lebanese history. There is also deeply ingrained a sense of betrayal by a tarnished and implausible Arabism and even more by the seeming indifference or cynical aloofness of the international community. Lebanon emerges, if it does, as the tragic, self-wounded, self-pitying, and self-distraught victim of a wretched trauma, and there is the guilt as well as the cost of their treatment of the Palestinians.

Contemporary history writing is notoriously hazardous, that of the Middle East more than most. It is enough to ponder the enmities and their antecedents through the long years, in particular that dark Palestinian factor and the Israeli connection behind it.

The Phalange and the National Party of Maronite lineage were increasingly implacable in their hatred of Palestinians as the chronic destroyers of their country. Fierce massacres at Tell al-Zaater, Chatila, and Sabra vented this anger on the helpless camp inmates and intensified the Palestinian fighters in their desperate will to retain and exploit the only terrain from which they could respond to Israel. That they grossly abused Lebanese hospitality in their insistent demand for freedom of action few would deny, but they claimed, almost in the mood of Zionism, the right of indisputable legitimacy. No Lebanese curbs-especially as Lebanese were not unanimous about them-should be heeded. There was Palestinian retaliation, as at Damour, against the enemies of their presence, the more desperately because the militant Palestinians knew that most of their people otherwise were hapless hostages of the situation, as they were to Israeli vengeance on the militants.

The only way in which Lebanon's appalling cycle of disaster and its descent into chaos could have been halted and perhaps painfully reversed would have been the repatriation to Palestine of the Palestinians. But that policy, never remotely practicable from the outset of their exile-given the Israeli logic of Zion-was abysmally the more anathema in the wake of the events of 1982. Israel could only concede its departure from Lebanon in terms of the still further removal of the Palestinians into political limbo and physical diaspora. The deep conscience of the peace-lovers in Israel6 could be given rein only when the ultimate issue of the war policy led to a weary readiness to withdraw. Israel was then frustrated by the return of the Palestinian fighters, the shelving of the idea of a client state, and a return to the pattern of attrition and reprisal.

In the meantime, however, factors long endemic in Lebanon and native to its soil, for which Israel was not responsible, had been fatally aggravated. Syria had maneuvered throughout in terms of how the labyrinthine situation might be manipulated to its own satisfaction in line with its long claim to the decisive voice in every Lebanese eventuality. Syria sided alternatively with Palestinian and Maronite elements in calculated concern to outwit others, to ensure that shifting political factors were engineered to Syria's ends and to repay the stake of military risk invested by its forces.7 The will, on Syria's part, to impose peace was never free from subtle calculation to frustrate any emerging result that was not to Syria's advantage, with the fear of Israel always in view. Inter-Arab rivalries elsewhere took devious form in the conflicts of the Lebanese and by their presence contributed to the descending spiral of cynicism and desperation.

The Shi'ah Muslims in the south and increasingly in Beirut sharpened their communal image. Long denied due place in the economic stakes, growing rapidly in population and maximum victims of the state's incapacity to defend its people, they found a new militancy and with it a more factious character. The Druzes with tactical advantages of terrain sharpened both their ancient feud with the Maronites' and the passion always latent in their identity. All groups and alignments were plagued with inner stresses of local, tribal, or economic origin, made the more virulent by atrocity, hatred, and mutual defiance. Truces innumerable were quickly shattered by utter distrust of the parties, using them both for political maneuver and military guile. Hope of any internal authority, governmental or otherwise, capable of imposing order or meriting trust was steadily extinguished. It was-and is-as if the very concept of "Lebanon" had been surrendered in a welter of ungovernable and irreconcilable division, for which de facto partition was the only, and the bitter, fate. But how it might be accomplished de jure simply eluded the passions the very notion aroused. For it was a notion that destroyed the image of an identity that could be had only by being shared-an identity which each element might wish to control but which none could unilaterally possess. Staying together was mandatory on every realistic count of geography, the man dated frontiers, the political constraints, the Phoenician tradition, and the commercial realities. Yet all of these were hostage to the crucial inter-Arab, interreligious, and intersectarian issue of where such a single Lebanon belonged in the definition of destiny which the challenge of Israel had made at once so imperative and so divisive.

III

There was deep romance in the psyche of Lebanon, yet unrelenting realism in the denial that contemporary history gave it. Sa'id 'Aql wrote in 1947:

On the doorstep of Asia. . . a homeland for the truth. . . Six thousand years of patience, thought, contempt for the material, self-denial, aspiration and careful scrutiny of detail have led us to a unique mission which qualifies us to libanize the world.9

That idealism needs to be critically understood by realists minded to see in "libanization" the disintegration more usually exemplified in the Balkans. But, given the Maronite dimension, how could it survive in the setting of the insistence of which Yassir 'Arafat made himself the strident spokesman?

The battle we are fighting in Lebanon is for the preservation of the country's Arab character. I declare in the name of the Palestinian revolution and the Lebanese and nationalist and progressive movement that every inch of Arab land will remain Arab and Lebanon will remain Arab.10

Bashir Gemayel gave a cryptic response: "Liban-il y a un peuple de trop" ("Lebanon has one people too many"). This captured the anguish and the paradox of what could only survive in the pluralism and the compromise of which Lebanon was proving inherently incapable.11

To grapple with the Christian liability in that impasse requires a long retrospect over the Maronite church-the most assertive form of Arab Christianity in "national" terms and the most significant organ of western, Christian and Latin relation to the Arab world. There is a certain irony in the likelihood that the Maronites originated from Arabia shortly before the rise of Islam. Among the many south Arabian tribes who emigrated to northern Syria, history first encounters them in the valley of the Orontes in north Syria. Long before their migration to Lebanon and the movement of their settlements within it, they reportedly held the Monothelite doctrine about Christ.12 It is not clear whether they arrived in the far north as Christians already. But, whatever its origins, their Christianity became as rugged a communal identity as the faith of those Shi'ah Muslims and of the Druzes who shared their place of origin in the far south. Their tradition likes to date their tenure in Lebanon from the earliest times in the Islamic calendar, but it is more likely to have been in the ninth century A.D., at which time there is continuing evidence of their presence in the Aleppo region.

From the outset of their Syrian locale their identity had the strong tribal quality that has always characterized them, whatever their sectarian differences from the Orthodox and the Monophysite groupings around them. It may have been resistance to the former that inspired their move into Lebanon, if this occurred in the wake of the advance made by Byzantine forces into their territory when Nicephorus Phocas recovered much of it from the Muslims, if only briefly. Once they were ensconced in Lebanon, the mountainous terrain somehow married with their clan tenacity to make the strong fusion of place and people history knows, a tenacity destined, despite odd vicissitudes, to define itself in sharp distinction from Muslim and Druze and from other Christians.13

The First Crusade occasioned the initial contact with the Latins, their papacy, their liturgy, and the image they brought of a power-proud faith with its pilgrimage stake in the East. There was no consistent pattern in their relations with the crusaders in the two centuries of their presence in the Maronite world. On some occasions they won the admiration of western warriors for their aid and qualities. On other occasions Maronite marauding and intrigue gave pause to the crusaders' amity. But something of the legacy of the crusading image, its kingdom in the East, and its battling symbols seems to have passed into Maronite mythology to be disastrously revived in the psyche of the Phalange. An ingrained belligerence and a sense of a western church tied into the emotions and the power equations of the East took root in the Maronite soul.14 That western church had repudiated the Monophysites; it was rival to Byzantium, "orthodox" in its own idiom of papal power; and it had stakes that suggested a will for clients in the East. On all those counts it had appeal.

If history can rightly be guessed proleptically in the light of sequels, those were the hidden imponderables of the crusading centuries. In the fourth decade of the twelfth century Maronite patriarch Gregory and a papal legate discussed the idea of a link with Rome. The papacy had attraction, not least for the Maronite hierarchy, as an exponent of the kind of authority that could discipline communities liable, as rank-and-file Maronites were, to follow their own devices. This refractoriness was fully proved when, around 1180, several higher ecclesiastics made formal espousal of Roman allegiance.

The papacy encouraged the "unionists" when adversaries voiced opposition. Pope Innocent III invited Patriarch Jeremiah to the Lateran Council held in Rome in 1215. Armed with the prestige gained, he returned to Lebanon with a papal bull that, in effect, treated the Maronite accession as already made by absolving the nonunionists of their "disobedience to the Mother Church," save for those of them who had committed violence or murder against the clergy. However, those opposed to Rome were not quelled, and schism within the church followed late in the century and the issue was overtaken by the end of the crusading presence and the arrival of Mamluk rule-a factor that tended to make the western, papal association even more desirable than in the days of mixed intrigue with the crusaders. Commercial interests between Venetians and the Mamliiks helped to foster relationships and to bring other western Christian elements into the region, notably the Franciscans, through whom further contacts between Maronites and Rome could be concerted.

However, the papacy did not perceive-or at least develop-the full significance of the Maronite potential as a Christian bastion in the East until after the failure of the Council of Florence in the 1440s when hope of mending the schism with Byzantium was ended and the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 changed the whole complexion of ecclesial affairs. Earlier relations with the Maronites had not entailed formal recognition of their orders or their orthodoxy. At that time a resident advisor from Rome was posted with the Maronite patriarch, now partially recognized-in default of the Orthodox-as "Patriarch of Antioch" Maronites began to travel to Rome for study under Franciscan or, later, Jesuit auspices. A century later this initiative ripened into the establishment of the Maronite College in Rome by Gregory XIII in 1584.

This institution proved a crucial element in the Latin nurture of the Maronites and, in turn, of their European orientation. Looking to the Catholic West, they were able to indulge a degree of defiance of the Ottomans (as of the Mamluks earlier) at least in neither seeking nor receiving investiture of patriarchs at their hands. Their scholars in, or from, Rome wrote their early history as never heretical but as the true orthodoxy of the saintly John Marun, a Syrian villager in the fifth century, from whom they took their name. On this score they had no Arab origin, despite the fact that their spoken tongue seems always to have been Arabic and their Syriac liturgy in Arabic characters.15

But the role of the Maronite College, and of earlier Lebanese students in Rome, was much more than image making in popular history. It produced some eminent scholars whose repute and influence not only enriched the Maronite soul but contributed notably to western learning. Jibra'il al-Sahyuni (1577-1648) became Professor of Semitic Languages in Paris. Ibrahim al-Haqilani (1600-1664) edited the Polyglot Bible, while Yusuf Sima'an al-Simi'ani (1687-1768) became librarian at the Vatican.16 Their latinized names-Sionita, Ecchelensis, and Assemani, respectively-became symbolic in the West of the lore of the land of their birth. The currency of Latin, French, and Italian in Maronite Lebanon brought a lively sense of Europe, and the transit of scholars to and fro, together with the Latin missionaries who played so large a part in the exchanges, fortified the spiritual autonomy vis-à-vis both Ottoman Islam and non-Latin Christianity, by which the Maronite identity was nourished, though it did not preclude the forming of Uniates from within the Orthodox and Monophysite communities. Rome's cultivation of the Maronites was never an exclusive policy. For their part, the Maronites were to find in their Latin ecclesial ties an increasing escape from the insecurities of dhimmi status, which was to stand them in good stead as Ottoman power declined, while still leaving ample scope for their local and internal rivalries.

The latinization became complete in liturgy and dogma, thanks to thorough supervision by papal legates sent by Rome, and given facility by the Maronite hierarchy to inspect their documents and practices and ensure that nihil obstat was met and all lingering traces of Monophysitism expunged.17 In 1649 the Maronites were placed under the protection of Louis XIV of France and his consuls were active in promoting the Roman allegiance, even recruiting leading lay Maronites for the office. Finally, in 1736, with Sima'an al-Simi'ani as legate and chairman, the Council at the Monastery of Louiza confirmed the Latin rite and usages. The absolute supremacy of the pope was acknowledged, Maronite "patriarchs" became "bishops of Rome" and the hierarchy pledged allegiance first to the Supreme Pontiff and only then to their "patriarch." There was some internal resistance, but its only success was a continuation for another century of the custom of mixed monasteries of which Rome disapproved. Pope Benedict XIV in 1741 confirmed the council's decisions, and formal adherence was sealed.

The final replacement of the ancient, Syriac focus of Antioch by the Latin authority of Rome had abiding consequences for the mentality and ethos of the Maronite church. It estranged them from their own Syriac roots and from the rest of eastern Christendom and gave them a western orientation at odds with the logic both of geography and politics. It made them suspect as "Europeans" in Ottoman domain. Under the Druze emirs in whose hands the Ottomans were content to leave local rule, notably Fakhr al-Din II (1590-1634), the Maronites prospered commercially and politically and moved their communities more firmly into middle Lebanon. Fakhr al-Din (known as Al-Ma'ni) favored their advancing fortunes and intensified their ambitions and their pretensions to the right of possession of Lebanon. These were further enlarged when Emir 'Ali al-Shihabi, a Druze, converted to Maronite Christianity, thus bringing an important clan into its story and into its feudal rivalries. His principality within the Ottoman system came to be increasingly dominated by Maronites and they, thereby, with Lebanon per se. Even when Muhammad 'Ali and his son Ibrahim established their power in Syria, from Egypt, in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, another Shihabi, Bashir II, was able to hold his own, consolidating Maronite influence at the expense of the Druzes-and indeed of all others-only being forced to abdicate at the end of the Egyptian hegemony.

There followed two decades of increasing antagonism, with a sequence of massacres, culminating in 1860. Maronite peasantry provoked their Druze landlords and an enflamed communalism, religiously encouraged, brought on a situation verging on civil war in which Druzes vented accumulated wrath on a Maronite population whose will apparently was to arrogate Lebanon to themselves. The tragedy of 1860 sharpened the involvement of European powers. Intervention with the Ottoman sultan resulted in a new administrative pattern, which, under mutasarrifs, or governors, from outside the country, allowed a degree of communal tolerance-with continual maneuvering-until the First World War brought on direct Ottoman control. Prewar and postwar Arabism and its struggle for decision within Ottomanism we have traced in chapter 7. Precisely because of its distinctive character, Lebanon had a crucial role and stake in that history.

The actual political shape it took in the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon-with the frontier changes we have noted-served to fulfill the instincts of the Maronites in that they now had their traditional French protector in governmental charge of their destiny and a potential statehood closely identified with themselves. But the political self-interest of the French was too circumspect to admit of an unbalanced penchant toward the Maronites, who would be their clients anyway. The redrawing of the frontiers indicated as much. For, while resisting (mainly) Muslim ideas of "greater Syria," the French in creating "greater Lebanon," with its added non-Maronite areas clearly complicated the equation Lebanese equals Maronite. Nevertheless, the French period, with its confessional constitution promulgated in 1926 and implemented in 1946, gave ample occasion in education, culture, and society for a further Maronite marriage into "the French connection" while postponing-and thereby aggravating-the essential decision as to Lebanese identity and the discipline of communities within it.

IV

Basic decisions deferred tend to intensify the issues they concern. So it was in the decades between 1920 and the civil war of the 1970s, leading up to the collapse into chaos already summarized. The lesson of a retrospect beyond it simply underlines the heavy liability of Christianity-in Maronite form-for the bitter tragedy of a Lebanon impaled on sectarian strife. It encouraged-or at least it quite failed to dissuade-other communities, Sunnis, Shi'ahs, and Druzes, in their will to emulate its drift to final incompatibility. No doubt intransigence elsewhere "justified" the Maronites. Yet had they not also merited a reciprocal intransigence? It was clear from long history that Muslims would always be prone to political solutions determined by themselves and that Lebanese Muslims would therefore need to be patiently wooed away from these by a bold and honest will to mutuality such as Maronite Christianity quite failed, with rare exceptions, either to conceive or to afford. How signally they failed may be briefly told below. The tragedy of Lebanon is the tragedy of the Maronites writ large.

It is time to ask concerning the other Christianities in Lebanon, which means, primarily the Orthodox in the Greek tradition. All other groups are relatively small, and none has either the weight or the image, with respect to Lebanon, which the Maronites possess.18 The Greek Catholics and the Latins, with their French and Italian connections, are more open to ecumenical and communal perspectives that elude the Maronites and are more alert in their scholarship and education.19 The Protestants whose educational stimulus to Arabism we studied in chapter 7, are least numerous of all. But the impact of the education brought by their mentors from the West-more diffused than that of French and Jesuit educators20 has profoundly influenced, even molded, generations of Lebanese of all communities through a century and a half. Indeed, it is illuminating to set the tragedy of Lebanon within the framework of the American University of Beirut (A.U.B.). As a pivotal institution, American in inspiration and Lebanese by locale, at once academic and cultural, two worlds in one, it ministered to the romantic vision of Lebanon and plumbed the depth of its tragedy. Its own institutional history serves eloquently to state both the dimensions and the elements of that tragedy.

They have their epitome in the career of Charles Malik (1906-1987), one of its most distinguished Christian alumni and professors, Greek Orthodox by conviction, a philosopher by vocation, a diplomat and a politician by adoption. Personal biography is often the most telling form of larger history. It allows perspective to be seen in both clarity and pathos. Charles Malik embodied an ideal Lebanon of his dreams-Christian in "the mystery and freedom of Being," mediating between East and West, in "the dimension of transcendence one with Islam," and requiring to "be and feel secure in her existence."21 By the last he meant, in effect, American guarantees. After a brilliant period in philosophic tuition of Arab youth,22 he became Lebanon's first Ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, following independence in 1946. In that capacity his personality, in the Chair of the General Assembly, became familiar to Americans and helped somewhat to counterbalance U.S. sponsorship of Israel by a sympathy with an articulate, Harvard-trained leader able to evoke and reassure American sentiment toward "sensible Arabs," with Lebanon as the paradigm and the A.U.B. the beneficiary. His image helped to soften anti-Arab prejudice and to remind America of the fact of Arab Christianity.

For his part, saluted-indeed lionized-with honorary degrees as a kind of Abba Eban of the Arabs, Malik became enamored of the American dimension as the hope of his native land. His philosophic mind believed such a vista to be viable with Muslims and-no less important-amenable with Maronites. Consequently, when he returned to Lebanon and, in the late 1950s, became Foreign Minister in the government of Camille Chamoun, he sustained the president in attempting to align Lebanon too far to the West, provoking the 1958 crisis and war between the communities. It was the first postwar violation of the national pact and, though the Shihab regime rescued the situation, it generated communal distrust.23 Maronite propensities were the more aroused when other pressures aimed to redress and then reverse the balance in the pan-Arab direction. Later came the more intransigent Maronitism of Sulayman Frangieh reinforced by internecine feuds in the saddest Maronite tradition.

Malik's political orientation could plead, of course, the menace to his Lebanese vision of 'Abd al-Nasir's championship of pan-Arab emotions. He could also plead the moderation of the then patriarch of the Maronites, Bulus Ma'ushi (1955-1975). Unlike his predecessor, Antun Arida (1932-1955), who had interfered constantly in politics and sought to decry and impede the national concordat,24 Patriarch Ma'ushi sought Muslim- Christian amity, visited Muslim mosques, and gave ample evidence of a desire for a Lebanon, secure in its character but cautiously cooperative with Arab states and Muslim interests. He was not supported by many of his clergy, nor by prominent laymen, including Chamoun himself. Despite his prestige and tenacity, he represented a minority position that appeared suspect to the rooted confessionalism of the monks of his church and the scheming sectionalism of most of its politicians. Though president and patriarch were on opposite sides in 1958, Malik may have thought that the degree of western reliance he sought could be reconciled with both Maronite and Muslim views. If so, he was disappointed and in the events that followed increasingly disillusioned when in his old age the land of his dreams headed into near anarchy. He had written in 1965 of his beloved Orthodoxy that "a certain degree of anarchy is . . . apparent. . . ."25 But he was then thinking of things imprecise in faith not calamitous in experience. A splendid representative of Lebanese Christianity, its quality and promise, he was defeated by the intractable facts of his heritage and betrayed by his confidence in faithful reason.

The American University of Beirut, founded in 1866 as "the Syrian Protestant College" may be said to have exemplified in institutional form the same paradox and irony that belonged biographically with Charles Malik. The university certainly has its crucial place in the modern story of Arab Christianity. Its matrix was the missionary impulse of American Protestantism, which, as early as 1823, had brought an Arab printing press from Malta and which played a vital part, as noted in chapter 7, in the growth of nineteenth-century Arab consciousness, journalism, and literature. More incisive and prestigious than the numerous agencies of Christian evangelism and philanthropy that came to Lebanon in the wake of the massacres of 1860,26 it came to occupy a unique place in the annals of Lebanese education, together with its younger offshoots, International College and the Beirut College for Women. It was the intellectual nursery through more than a century of much of the political and professional leadership of the Arab world from Aleppo to Khartoum. It antedated the Lebanese National University by more than eighty years. Its French speaking counterpart, Université St. Joseph, had a more confined French and theological orientation.

But, for all its massive service to the Arab world, the American University of Beirut labored under two crippling constraints. It is part of the tragedy we are studying in this chapter that it was probably so fated-like all authentic tragedy-by the elements of the situation. The one was the Christian motive in Lebanese pluralism; the other was the American connection.

As the progeny of mission, the Syrian Protestant College intended Christian nurture in a context of intellectual freedom and enquiry.27 It was, ipso facto, offering a highly coveted commodity - English-speaking education - with a Christian concern whose theological and spiritual criteria were neither Muslim, nor Druze, nor Maronite, nor Greek Orthodox nor Latin in their ethos and whose impact, however irenic, circumspect, and considerate, would inevitably be read as questioning if not threatening the presuppositions and authority of all those other organs and houses of belief and conduct. Here was the perennial quandary of "mission" in every context. The increasing sophistication of education itself and the national Arab consciousness it did so much to foster only sharpened the issue. In the post-First World War presidency of Bayard Dodge (1922-1948) the policy of his predecessor, Howard S. Bliss (1902-1920), of emphasizing moral and civic virtue while muting at least partially and officially specifically Christian nurture was further applied. It would be fair to say that the crux of interreligious coexistence was never really tackled nor yet the critique of religions-especially in the Lebanese context-in terms of their sharing the guidance of a deconfessionalized society.

Perhaps that more fundamental addressing of the religious problem would have been impossible at the time. "Dialogue" had not then become the code word, often hiding, as it still does, the realities in which it is involved. Certainly a benign and enlightened ethicism was the easier option in the context, avoiding explicit "christianizing" and assigning religious faith to the private-or, more likely, the communal-sector, while science, literature, and learning had their urgent opportunity in the stream of youth. Yet urgent problems do not always pass because they are not addressed, nor do deep issues yield to intelligent neglect. The A. U .B., it might be said, only experienced the abiding dilemma of Christian motivation in the plural world and did so in the peculiarly vexing setting of a Lebanon that so urgently needed the will and the wit to face the strife of its religions and discover how to tame them into fruitful coexistence. In avoiding being theological, the A.U.B. (the Near East School of Theology was mission-based and concerned with the nurture of pastors and clergy) coincided with Lebanon's religious diversity rather than with its religious dilemma. Yet could the university in situ have done otherwise?

That question leads into the second crippling constraint-the American factor. It could be said that America's earliest missionary commitment served it best in terms of personal quality. Its personnel came with a genuine love, which fulfilled itself in long service and inner rapport, paternalistic perhaps but in the best tradition of American warmth, vigor, and integrity.28 Their literary, medical, and historical contributions to the Arab world had the quality of magnanimity and zeal. There could be little legitimate civil about an "Americanism" of that caliber and temper. Charles Malik's faith in the American dimension even by the 19405 had eloquent warrant.

Yet in the post-Second World War period, especially under the presidencies of Paul Leonard (1957-1961) and of Norman Burns (1961-1965) there came an increasing reliance on U.S. government funds (as distinct from direct philanthropy). One notices the brief tenure of men who had government connections and came not as career teachers but as administrators close to U.S. interests. Leonard described his presidency as "a challenge to keep the Arab world free and a friend of the U.S.A.," and Burns came as a former head of U.S. operations and mission in Jordan. Staff members also became short-termers spending a few years in an interesting locale; they were not deep lovers of Lebanon's soil and soul. There was an unwillingness to have an Arab as president despite the marked stature of Constantine Zurayq as acting president for the three years preceding Paul Leonard.

The times, of course, were changing and hardening. The campus became embroiled in political tensions in spite of sturdy efforts to keep the seething world outside at bay. Student groups began to reflect the passions of the Palestinian and Lebanese factions. The university came to be seen-at least by accusation-as a nesting place for C.I.A. agents, a foothold for U.S. governmental ends, or simply a luxury enjoyed by an Arab elite, false or indifferent in their privilege to the genuine grievances of the Arab poor. The university could argue that its increasing dependence on governmental resources was entailed by its massive extension program in response to urgent educational demands outrunning private funding. But such growth, questioned by some on technical grounds as ill-considered, found no acceptance with the likes of Laila Khalid, a student in 1962 and later a high-jacker, 29 nor with George Habash before her, a Greek Orthodox of the P.F.L.P. (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).30 The tribulations of a much-battered, much-maligned, and much-harassed institution found their ultimate symbol in the assassination in 1984 of President Malcolm Kerr in College Hall, the first of Daniel Bliss's buildings.31 The son of parents who had served in halcyon days, he represented all that was finest in the old tradition, the order that registered its own desolation in his tragic end. College Hall had stood, in the 186Os as a beacon of hope on the Ras of Beirut, far out from the confines of the city near the harbor. It had been surrounded and engulfed by the sprawl of an overgrown capital comprising more than half a nation. Those changes have dwarfed, but not quite extinguished, the meaning of its presence in the skyline. The shape of human intercourse has inevitably to concede the sufferings entailed in the strife of politics and the enmity of religions as these afflict the making and unmaking of nations. As a foreign entity in origin and ethos, the American University of Beirut has lived by the goodwill of a Lebanese authority that has itself disintegrated. Its auspices and its constraints have always made its ministries ambiguous.

As one of its eminent alumni observed in a Founders' Day assembly in 1971, there had been two Americas:

. . . the foster-carer for academic freedom, the liberal nurse of the arts, and the American with power-interests and political exploitation. . . . Our criticisms stem from the common heritage, the innate sense of justice and historical devotion to the fundamental rights of man. . . .32

It was an ambivalence inseparable, in the Lebanese context, from that encounter of West and East which Charles Malik read as a destiny Lebanon, with American aid, could resolve into unity. Now the A.U.B. campus stands in the Muslim sector of a sundered city and a self-partitioning nation. On every count of achievement and immolation its own tragedy stands within the tragedy of Lebanon. That is its place in Arab Christianity.

V

If the A.U.B. nurtured many politicians, it also helped to educate church leaders.33 It is time to turn from the self-limiting stance of A.U.B. Christianity to the role of the churches in general. We have sufficiently outlined the Maronite dimension and noted the exceptional role of Patriarch Ma'ushi in striving for a temperate attitude within it. Greek Orthodoxy for long felt the uncertainties of intent and result within the Protestant presence of which initially the A.U.B. was a powerful symbol. Its pupils, such as Muslims and Druzes, sought its educational assets while reserving their spiritual and confessional privacies, though influenced by teachers of their own, or other, allegiance, such as the Orthodox Charles Malik and Constantine Zurayq and the Quaker Roger Soltau. Inevitably their inward loyalties were tempered by factors that would not otherwise have affected their lives or churches, but those leavening factors were always subject to the reservations implicit in cherished identities caring for an image and a heritage.

Ecumenical cooperation developed when in 1974 the Near East Council of Churches, which in origin had been a missionary initiative, was enlarged by the entry of the Orthodox Church and, in salute, renamed itself the Middle East Council of Churches. Embracing many countries, it had its headquarters in Beirut-or alternatively in Cyprus-and pursued the kind of interchurch action of which Lebanon, by its very character, had long been the symbol and haven. Its energetic, long-serving general secretary, Gabriel Habib, struggled valiantly with the burdens and agonies of a deteriorating situation in which the council's association with the World Council of Churches in Geneva helped to sustain its will to courage and sanity. Prior to its 1985 assembly in Cyprus, the Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius IV, one of its presidents, invited the heads of all the Middle East Christian churches to a meeting at which to prepare a pastoral message to all their communities in unison. Patriarch Ignatius leads a church that, in the long anguish of Lebanon, has always avoided and repudiated violence. He has called for a will on the part of all to return to a pre-Chalcedonian (i.e., Nicean) formula of faith, leaving patient resolution of the issues which Chalcedon made divisive to future intent, in an effort to bring communities out of their instinctive habit of separation.34

The Youth Movement of the Orthodox in Lebanon, founded in 1942 by (now Bishop) George Khodr, has brought new vitality and vision into the church through deepened awareness of its spiritual meaning, through social action, and by fostering an alert laity and a clergy close to the people. It has also sought to aid the Maronites to interrogate their partisan tradition and wrestle more fundamentally with the guilt and issue of the Lebanese tragedy and how heart searching might find the springs of hope. How do Latins and Uniates see their bond with Rome in relation to the life and liturgies deriving from the undivided centuries? Can the urgency of common distress bring all into a "common pastorate" in which the actualities of the local churches draw them into a true oneness able at length to resolve ancient formulas and diversity of jurisdictions? For its part the Middle East Council of Churches struggles to retrieve from the political calamity of Lebanon the enabling vision of Christian renewal, "cast down but not destroyed."

It will be well to defer to chapter 12 some study of what the Lebanese tragedy entails upon the Christian churches with respect to relations with Islam. It is inevitable that the strife of communities has desperately impeded and desolated both the hopes and the efforts of intercommunal faith relationships - in the very context where they had most expectation of fruitfulness before the agonies supervened. Precisely where Arabness might have found more evenhandedness with its religious dimensions, through factors unique to Lebanon, it has most binery prejudiced them, with repercussions everywhere else in the Arab world.

But the fact that presses-and oppresses-here and is inseparable from all interfaith intellectual and spiritual relation is the indictment of religion in the behavior of religions. It may be claimed that the elements of the strife in Lebanon were such that no church or tradition, no order of doctrine and liturgy of worship, could avail to discipline or control or resolve. To agree might be some measure of absolution but only as also a measure of futility. The plea of incapacity to have history otherwise, apart from evacuating religious faith of positive healing relevance, cannot hide or excuse its ample capacities in contributing to the situation as a whole. There is no exoneration either way.

So it is that Lebanon belongs darkly in recent history as a symbol of religions as the malady rather than the remedy in their societies. Obscurantism and bigotry on the part of any tend to provoke the like in others. Belligerence is reproduced where it is waged. Lebanon has become progressively the victim of its discordant faiths. Where their enmities could be laid at the door of economic disadvantage, personal cupidity, or human passion, as distinct from sectarian allegiance, the alibi-even if it holds-is still a pan of the condemnation. Innocence in the situation could not be pleaded without thereby conceding guilt-the guilt of failure to subdue the circumstantial to the claims of the Spirit.

Sociology has often pondered the distinction between a church and a sect. The difference is often clouded by the fact that the former behaves like the latter. Presumably a sect has the instinct to tighten, to foreclose questions, to let fear override generosity, to intensify allegiance in exclusivism, whereas a true church has dimensions of patience, charity, compassion, and hospitality. May it be that the long feudal, tribal, and martial instincts of the Maronites-"church" though they undoubtedly are-have made them essentially sectarian despite the papal connection? Orthodoxy in its Greek ancestry, for all its tensions, comes closer to the dimensions that distinguish church from sect. Yet how, in turn, does a veritable "churchness" cope with the wider ecumenical destiny that other faiths require of it-prone as all other faiths are to the "sectarian" disease?

Lebanon this century (because of long strains in all its centuries) has become the arena of this unresolved issue. Asked about his modus operandi in 1925, Chaim Weizmann of the Zionist Executive wrote: "If I want to take a decision, I stand in front of a mirror and hold a conference with my reflection and that is how the organization is run."35 The mirror into which the Maronites all too often looked gave back in reflection not the features of the wounded Christ, as in some Turin shroud, but the lineaments of communal willfulness and passion. There was a harshness about their response to western influences outside the Latin aegis. As early as 1825 the Maronite patriarch required his people, on pain of excommunication, to have no dealings whatever with American missionaries and not to handle their publications or attend schools or meetings.36 Their church tended to bear down heavily not only on outside Christian associations but also on Maronites showing enthusiasm for Ottomanism as a dimension of the self-awareness of thoughtful Arabs in the nineteenth century.

The career of Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-1887) is a case in point. His brother, As'ad, had consorted with the American mission and was sent to prison by the patriarch, where he died. In indignation, Faris emigrated to Egypt and fled later to Malta. He became a Protestant and wrote extensively on Arab and religious themes. But his "conversion" within Christianity, in the context of his ex-Maronite distresses, brought him no final inner peace. Nor, in perspective, could it resolve the problem it only aggravated, namely, that of the true destiny of the loyal Arab. His ultimate decision led him to embrace Islam and to champion the Ottoman option, within loyalty to the caliphate, as the only viable course for the Arab spirit. The bitter virulence of his autobiography against Maronite intransigence and his personal sense of the tensions within Arab Christian existence were a measure of the anguish that was to come in the land he forsook to become, finally, a pensioner of the sultan.37

Emigration, of course, was seen as salvation by many Christian Lebanese, though the story of the Hijrah cannot detain us here, except as an index to the unease of unresolved dilemmas. Some notable Lebanese exiles, like Khalil Jibran (1883-1912) and Mikha'il Nu'aymah (1889-1975) took refuge not only in foreign lands but in a kind of spiritual monism which aimed to repudiate and transcend the dogma of ecclesiastics and the turmoil of politics.38 Escaping thereby the burden of these, they absented themselves from its bearing.

Perhaps theirs was the true wisdom. Exile at least was surely preferable to the excesses of the Maronites. When Pierre Gemayel founded the Phalange in the late 19305, he was inspired in part by a visit in 1936 to Nazi Germany, where he was impressed by uniforms and paramilitary zeal. His vision-though sometimes moderated in his later years-was a Maronite view of Lebanon, "Fatherland and family" in the fascist terms of Vichy France, flourishing crusading symbols and idealizing "the one Catholic nation in Asia." "The Knights of the Virgin" and "the Wood of the Cross" were hardly slogans of peace in the stresses of - supposedly - a national concordat.

Camille Chamoun had a more suave and politic image but earned no less justly the taunt of Kamal Jumblatt, the Druze leader, calling Maronites "that minority obsessed with their sense of being a minority."39 Chamoun defied his own patriarch, Bulus Ma'ushi, and resisted more moderate Maronite politicians, like Raymond Edde, who recognized the danger of their community becoming a hated ghetto. Chamoun openly hated 'Abd al-Nasir and deplored the failure of the Suez venture. As seen by Odd Bull of the U.N.O. peace force, he had "the impertinence [in 1958] to call in American armed forces to protect his personal interests."40

Sulayman Frangieh, a successor as president, who aimed to Maronitize the army, was corrupt and incompetent, a vowed foe of ideas of concordat and given to clan warfare in his stronghold at Zghorta. Three hundred Muslims were massacred in one day in the Matn region in revenge for four Maronites found slain. Bashir Gemayel, in a speech on the morning of his assassination, days after his inauguration in 1982, avowed: "We must today conquer all Lebanon, all its 10,452 square kilometers," despite his earlier hints of an awareness that intercommunal cooperation was indispensable for all, and for Maronites most of all.

Such was the church, self-crucified on its own intransigence, which -perhaps more than any other factor - polarized Lebanon into tragic anarchy. The despair at the spectacle has to be a despair about religion, about the ultimate consultation with the mirror. This was the community that, as early as 1799 had sent a delegation to meet Napoleon in Palestine and was said to have received from him the greeting: "I recognize that you have been French from time immemorial."41 Perhaps the most ironical index of the Maronite will to separatism and the latent desperation of it, in the light of the Arabism studied in chapters 7 and 10, is to be found in the evidence of Archbishop Ignace Mubarak of Beirut to the United Nations Commission on Palestine in 1947. He denied that Palestine was Arab: it was Jewish homeland from which Jews had been driven. There were two religions -Judaism and Christianity. Palestine and Lebanon were the Jewish home of the one and the Christian home of the other, in mutual support. As "a Christian sanctuary," Lebanon must be "out of the clutches of surrounding nations. . . That is the opinion of the Lebanese whom I represent."42 Thirty-five years later that reading of the autonomy of the one enclave became victim to outright invasion by the other. History has a way of identifying folly, but at what cost!

The best minds in the Orthodox church in Lebanon have sought to respond to compounded tragedy by interpreting the Christian role as that of an intercommunal ecumenism seeking to offer a Christian version of Arab identity that would avail to merit and to elicit from Arab Islam (at least in Lebanon) the quality of partnership, which could ensure a patient, constructive transition into an understanding of religion free from the sanction of state power. The hope of doing so entails an intra-Christian freedom from the sect mentality, in pursuit of a will to churchness that reconciles its historical diversities and their passions by a common dedication to the paramount task set by Islam as the ultimate factor in their Arabness.

They realize how pluralism is inescapable, that a purely Christian "nationalism" is invalid on every score and that Christian resistance to the marginalizing they traditionally experience, under the Islamic dhimmi theory of contracted sufferance, must try positively to develop those aspects of Islam which might sustain equal citizenship within a state understood as being itself "under God" Orthodoxy of the Byzantine tradition must be aware of "the wounded historical consciousness" of non-Byzantine churches. Christians must learn to overcome the psychological separatisms that are even more persistent than the doctrinal ones. Relinquishing the illusion of being "privileged partners of the West," they must be ready for that recognition of others which means feeling "vulnerable to their being different." Arabism, which in the nineteenth century renewed itself as a strategy to deal with Ottoman polity, must now find, out of the trauma of Lebanon, the way to be at once plural and free.43

Brave sentiments in the grim actualities Lebanon presents. We have to remit to chapter 11 the interior resources that belong with the soul of Arab Christianity there and elsewhere in its liturgies, its poetry, and its art- resources from which, if at all, must spring their fulfillment. Hope belongs where politics-for all its damning and dismaying reach- cannot bring a final veto and where even the political can be rescued from tragedy. It will fall to chapter 12 to take further such Christian future with Islam.

Notes

1. Robert Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (1849; London, 1983), pp. 25-26.

2. See n. 21 below. For example, Malik insisted that Lebanon's "basic idea was not political" ("The Near East: The Search for Truth," Foreign Affairs 50, no. 2 [Jan. 1952], p. 239). Rather, Lebanon carried "the burden of mediation between East and West." Internally, it was precisely in being so intensely "political" in confessional terms, that Lebanon succumbed under the burden of"non-mediation" effectively- between the "east" and "west" within it. Yet his romanticism was part of the equation, as love is in divorce. Malik could be deceived in his judgments, as when he wrote in the same article concerning Faisal II of Iraq: "Nothing seems to be more firmly established in Iraq than this house [i.e., Faisal's] and the love of the people for their boy-monarch" (p. 237). Six years later, Faisal and his "house"lay brutally murdered.

3. The Palestine Liberation Organization dates, effectively, from the trauma of 1967, which disclosed how deceptive were hopes centering on the Arab states. It had, however, been in embryonic existence some two years earlier. The long years of Palestinian refugee-status quiescence are often forgotten. See Jonathan Dimbleby, The Palestinians(Boston: Charles River Books, 1979).

4. It was a very sanguinary expulsion after pitched battles between Palestinian fida'iyun and the, mainly bedouin, army of Jordan. Hence the "Beds/Feds" usage to describe the encounter.

5. Syria had received the fewest refugees from 1948 of the three neighboring countries and had always kept a tight rein on the militants, mainly Al-Sa'iqah, which it allowed to operate.

6. Israel has never lacked persons of conscience both inside and ouuide the army (always significantly called Israeli Defense Forces, there being no aggressive army), as, for example Oz va Shalom and Soldiers for Peace. But while they have helped the image of Israel, they have not availed politically except in the withdrawal from Lebanon, when political factors of exhaustion and frustration played the major part.

7. Those risks were, of course, significant, not least because of the Israeli factor in every Syrian calculation. Syrian policy went through a variety of changes both before and after the so-called Cairo Agreement of 1976, relating to the operations of Palestinians on Lebanese soil. Syria's tactic was to try to obviate any Arab influence other than its own within Lebanon. Syria's (major) share in the Arab Peace-keeping Force and its (later) single-handed policing served, to a degree, to "hold the ring," but not to resolve the strife. The intrigues of the factions were aggravated within Lebanese politics and in the Lebanese Army by the conflict of wider interests both regional and global. There was throughout a cynical hypocrisy in requiring Lebanon to bear the burden -and be the battleground- of the challenge of Israel, via the Palestinians, to Arabism as a whole. Lebanon was the one Arab country least qualified to sustain it yet forced to do so by the devious patterns of action and inaction.

8. Despite the impact of the massacres of 1860 on the mind of the West, Maronite suffering -in perspective- was by no means one-sided. Maronite movement into fresh territory, the tensions within peasant economy, Maronite arrogance, and, from time to time, belligerence at Druze cost helped to provoke the widespread Druze retaliation and vengeance. The Druze identity had its long tradition of militancy, and the aura of its secretive beliefs served to foster an image of the sinister. But through long decades the communities had given proof of viable relations of coexistence, if not amity.

9. Sa'id 'Aql, Qadmus, 2nd ed. (Beirut, 1947), p. 22. In this verse tragedy the poet-author sees Lebanon as enshrining a threefold heritage -Phoenician, Hellenistic, and Roman. Phoenicia first gave the East -and the world- an alphabet.

10. So 'Arafat is reported to have said on Nov. 30, 1975, in a speech to the Administrative Council of the Palestinian Student Association (Saut Falastin, Dec. 1, 1975;Jerusalem Post, Dec. 3). By contrast there were Lebanese who denied that either Palestine or Lebanon was "Arab," totally disowning Palestinianism in order to possess Lebanon as "non-Arab." See, e.g., n. 43.

11. Bashir Gemayel in Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), June 19, 1982, p. 62. 12. Monothelitism was the doctrine that tried to obviate the conflict within Christology as to the unity of the divine and human "natures" by relocating the issue in "the will." Some historians have thought that if the Maronites originated from Arabia their "heretical" strain might bear out the old image of Arabia as ferax haeresis, "fertile ground of heresy." But the Monothelite doctrine belongs with the post-Chalcedon tensions in the Orient. Maronite writers deny that their church ever held it; see Matti Moosa, The Maronites in History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

13. One may say odd in that, for example, the redoubtable Druze Fakhr al-Din al-Ma'ni at the end of the sixteenth century positively favored the Maronites and encouraged them to come into territory he controlled as an appointee of the Ottoman sultan. Further, the adoption of Christianity by the Druze Shihabis paved the way for the long dominance of Emir Bashir al-Din II, the princely Lord of Bait al-Din (1788-1840), who, sitting lightly to his religion, was able to survive elegantly, if also cunningly, the stresses of Maronite/Druze feudal politics, Ottoman dominion, European interests, and the Syrian adventures of Muhammad 'Ali in Egypt, through five decades before final exile to Istanbul. Almost legendary in popular Lebanese history, it was nevertheless his regime that excited in delayed reaction the Druze massacres of Christians, which culminated in 1860.

14. The double sense of protégé-status and emulation characterizes militant Maronitism in its relation to Rome and to France. It spells for some an identity "because of . . . and on behalf of" which sees the raison d'étre of Lebanon as western not Arab, seaward not landward. Beirut, as a grossly overgrown coast city, divided by the hinterland it shares, may be read as a symbol of that issue.

15. John Marun, from whom Maronites take their name, as tradition has it, was their original founder. A monk of the fifth century, friend of John Chrysostom, saint of the monastery that bears his name, he spent his days, perhaps somewhat in the tradition of St. Simon Stylites in the Orontes valley area of northern Syria. See Moosa, Maronites, pp. 16-38.

16. In 1583 Vatican presses printed the first Arabic Bible. Ecclesiastical connections westward encouraged the Maronites to venture political ovenures, as when, for example, the Maronite patriarch in 1527 wrote to Emperor Charles V pledging entire suppon if he would come to Syria. Francis I of France was also solicited, and in the next century the princes of Italy. Such links gave promise of a way of escape from the dhimmi pattern of the Ottoman system and an alternative way of "security." Unlike other Christians, the Maronites long contrived to avoid accepting investitute of their patriarchs by the sultan.

17. It is notewonhy that the legate, Giovanni Eliano, had earlier failed in a similar mission to the Copts of Egypt. His success as an "inspector" of the Maronites was completed by the next emissary, Jerome Dandini.

18. The breaking away of the Uniate Greek Catholic diminished the Orthodox. Though there were Maronite elements scattered outside Lebanon, it was the strength of their concentration there that made them dominant locally. Also in the nineteenth century there was a considerable migration of Orthodox from Syria into Egypt.

19. One of the most famous of scholars from the Université St. Joseph earlier this century was Henri Lammens, whose interpretation of Syro-Lebanese history did much to influence the Maronite "image" of the Christian "nation" at the time of "mandating" to the French. His academic strictures on Islam may be part of the same thesis.

20. These tended to foster the sympathies congenial to the Maronites in their French context and the lines of their historical research and spiritual orientation. Their journal, however, Al-Mashriq, has a deservedly honored place in Arabic letters and theology.

21. See Charles Malik, "The Orthodox Church" in Religion in the Middle East, ed. A. J. Arberry (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Books on Demand, 1969), 1:297-346; cf. Al-'Amal, Nov. 22, 1955: Lebanon "understands the holy of holies of the West, with love, patience and profundity, in a manner the East cannot grasp and in the best way by which the West can communicate its story. . . . It understands the holy of holies of the East, with love, patience and profundity in a manner the West cannot grasp and knows best how to have the East disclose its own secrets."

22. The writer recalls vividly the impact of Charles Malik on a generation of philosophy students in his weekly "Sophomore" lecture, using his mentor of Harvard, W. E. Hocking's Types of Philosophy. He brought to life the thrill of study and the pursuit of meaning. He made even his hyperbole (cf. n. 21) convincing by the man he was.

23. See the comment in 1977 of Bashir Gemayel on the events of 1958: "If the year 1958 was the beginning of the infection of the formula of the National Pact with cancer, 1975 should be considered the date of its real sickness" (cited from Moosa, Maronites, p. 291).

24. Patriarch Antun Arida was a staunch champion of a radical Maronite reading of Lebanon, crossing swords even with the French High Commission and his own Maronite lay leaden from time to time. See n. 43 for the lengths to which his suspicions of Arabism could go, Bishop Mubarak there being his personal emissary to the U.N. Commission.

25. See Malik, "Orthodox Church," p. 310.

26. Among them, notably, the Blind School of the British Syrian Mission.

27. There was never proselytism, but in the Dedicatory Statement, Daniel Bliss, the first president, wrote: "It will be impossible for anyone to continue with us long without knowing what we believe to be the truth and our reasons for that belief." See S. B. Penrose, Jr., That They May Have Life: The Story of the American University of Beirut 1866-1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univenity Press, 1941), p. 46.

28. See, e.g., Penrose, That They May Have Life; Fred J. Bliss, Reminiscences of Daniel Bliss (New York, 1920); and H. H. Jessup, Fifty-Five Years in Syria, 2 vols. (New York, 1910).

29. She describes her year on campus in her autobiography, My People Shall Live (1969; Arabic ed. Beirut, 1973). She saw the university as a nest of C.I.A. spies.

30. George Habash, a Greek Orthodox student, was president of Al-'Urwa al-Wuthqa, a radical society, in 1950 and subsequently a leader of Palestinian resistance.

31. His assailants were Iranian-linked militants using brutal murder to repudiate the long associations of culture and service for which the university stood and doing so in its first towered and symbolic edifice of 1866.

32. Tueni is a Greek Onhodox layman, newspaper editor (Al-Nahar), and diplomat, both student and critic of Charles Malik, and Minister of Education, and of Labor and Social Affairs.

33. Notably, for example, Ignatius Hazim, philosophy student in the mid-l940s, who became Patriarch Ignatius IV.

34. From an address (given in French) to the Catholic Institute of Paris, June 2, 1983.

35. See The Essential Chaim Weizmann: The Man, the Statesman, the Scientist, ed. Barnet Litvinoff (New York: Holmes &: Meier, 1983), p. 211.

36. Quoted in Maroun 'Abboud, Saqar Lubnan (Beirut, 1950), p. 38.

37. Faris al-Shidyaq, Kitab al-Saq 'ala-l-Saq fi ma huwa al-Fariyaq (Paris, 1855; Cairo ed. 1919). The high-sounding title might be read as a play on his names with the implication of a restless energy in the pursuit of being Fari . . . yaq, an auto-biographical medley on the move.

38. Mikha'il Nu'aymah's autobiography was published in 3 vols. (Beirut, 1959-60), under the title Saba'un: Hikayat 'Umri (Seventy: The Story of My Age).

39. Kamal Jumblatt, I Speak for Lebanon, trans. M. Pallis (London, 1982), p. 39.

40. Odd Bull, War and Peace in the Middle East: The Experiences of a U.N. Observer (London: Seeley Service &: Cooper, 1976), p. 20.

41. In E. S. Stevens, Cedars, Saints and Sinners in Syria (London, n.d.), p. 257.

42. In a letter of Aug. 5, 1947, to the Commission of Enquiry, in U.N.S.C.O.P (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) Official Records (New York, 1947), pp. 57-59.

43. Quoted and summarized from a talk by Metropolitan George Khodr, as bishop of Mount Lebanon, at U.N.E.S.C.O., Paris, Dec. 21, 1983.