Syria's Disabled Future

by Edward Thomas | published May 14, 2013

Jamal is not yet a teenager. His school closed in 2011, soon after the Syrian revolution turned into an armed conflict, and his father found him a factory job. One day in 2012 as he returned from work there was a battle going on in the main street near his home. Jamal immediately started carrying wounded children smaller than he is to shelter in a mosque. Then Syrian army reinforcements arrived, clearing the streets with gunfire and hitting Jamal in the spine. The youngsters who took him to the hospital advised him to say that “terrorists” had caused his injury. But Jamal did not want to lie -- he told the doctors that a soldier had fired the bullet. The doctors told him to shut up and say it was the terrorists. But they treated him anyway.

Books on Lebanon

by Carolyn L. Gates
published in MER149

Wade R. Goria, Sovereignty and Leadership in Lebanon 1943-1976, (London: Ithaca Press, 1986).

Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985).

CERMOC, Mouvements Communautaires et Espaces Urbains au Machreq

by
published in MER140

Mouvements communautaires et Espaces urbains au Machreq (Beirut: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain, 1985).

One of the tragic ironies of the protracted Lebanese crisis is the fate of CERMOC and of Michel Seurat, one of the authors represented in this volume. Suerat was kidnapped in May 1985, and the Islamic Jihad group announced in early March that they had executed him as “an enemy of God.” CERMOC, located directly on the Green Line near Beirut’s Museum Crossing, has been unable to function for the last year. Both Seurat and CERMOC are victims of the social crisis which they sought to understand and relate in this important book.

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Ajami, The Vanished Imam

by As'ad AbuKhalil
published in MER144

Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

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Fissures in Hizballah's Edifice of Control

by Mona Harb , Lara Deeb | published October 30, 2012

On August 15, Beirut awoke to the news that more than 20 alleged members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had been captured by a group calling itself “the military wing of the al-Miqdad family.” The group had sent footage to the al-Mayadin television network, which was quickly picked up by other local and international channels. In the clip, men dressed in camouflage and black ski masks, and gripping Kalashnikovs, surrounded two prisoners seated in a dark room. A man with his back to the camera posed questions to the prisoners, who replied that they worked for the FSA, on orders from Khalid al-Dahir, a Lebanese parliamentarian affiliated with the Future Movement, the Sunni-majority political party led by Saad al-Hariri.

Iran and Lebanon

A Conversation with Ahmad Baydoun

by Irene Gendzier
published in MER156

What are current relations between Iran and Lebanon? What has been the import of Iran’s revolution on Lebanon’s Shi‘i community? These were the questions we put to Ahmad Baydoun, poet, man of letters and professor of history at the Lebanese University, in Boston in late October.

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"We Discovered Our Nation When It Was Nearly No More"

An Interview with Elias Khoury

by Barbara Harlow
published in MER162

Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist, writer and critic. A lecturer at the American University of Beirut and the cultural editor of the Beirut daily al-Safir, Khoury is also a frequent contributor to literary and cultural journals throughout the Arab world. An English translation of his second novel, Al-Jabal al-Saghir (Little Mountain), has just been published (University of Minnesota, 1989). Barbara Harlow spoke with him in Austin, Texas, in November 1989.

Could you articulate some of the changes that you’ve seen over the last decade and a half, particularly as a writer working in the midst of the civil war?

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"No Forum for the Lebanese People"

US Perceptions from Lebanon, 1945-1947

by Irene Gendzier
published in MER162

Forty years of history and the issues appear to be remarkably the same: national identity, the confessional system, electoral reform, the viability of the state, economic reconstruction and ideological realignment. What is Lebanon? Does it exist? Can it survive? The questions are not new. More than four decades ago, British and US officials were pondering the very same questions.

World War II was over. Lebanon celebrated its formal independence on December 22, 1943, but it was not until 1946 that the French were persuaded to abandon their occupation of the country. In the interim, French pressure to hold on to its privileged status led to conflict not only with Lebanese nationalists but with British forces.

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'Akkar Before the Civil War

Lebanon's Gateway to Syria

by Michael Gilsenan
published in MER162

The plain and mountains of the ‘Akkar are the northernmost part of the Lebanon, beyond Tripoli and the Koura region to its south and east. Partly because of the insistence of some influential Maronites, and with misgivings on the part of only a few French critics at the time, it was included in le Grand Liban in 1920 by the French League of Nations Mandate authorities, along with the Bekaa Valley and what is now south Lebanon. ‘Akkar’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population (in one of the most thinly inhabited areas of the country) led some to fear that its incorporation would lead to later problems of confessional balance since it was also the hinterland of the Sunni and nationalist city of Tripoli, whatever its advantages as a granary.

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Class Formation in a Civil War

The Druze of Mount Lebanon

by Nazih Richani
published in MER162

The state is the cohesive factor in a social formation. But what happens to the social formation where the state disintegrates? This is not a mere polemical question if we consider the Lebanese experience.

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