2
February 2007
Beirut and the sad autumn of the Arabs
In
March 2005, Samir Kassir wrote a column titled, "Beirut, the springtime of
the Arabs." Martyrs Square was then awash with people protesting Rafik
Hariri's murder, and Samir felt confident enough to affirm: "Today, Beirut
declares that death is not the only path open to the Arabs." Of the grim
outfit ruling in Damascus, he noted, "Beirut's renaissance is by far more
important than maintaining a regime that leaves only desolation in its
wake."
Yet
in the space of only two months, since early December last, the Lebanese
capital has been transformed into a new Arab autumn. Sunnis and Shiites are
increasingly wary of living in the same neighborhoods, while Christians are
beginning to look to crossing points between the eastern and western halves of
Beirut as barriers against instability from "the other side."
Beirut's renaissance remains desirable, the impact of sectarian conflict on our
city would have calamitous regional consequences, multiplied by its occurring
in the Arab world's laboratory of modernity (another Kassir formulation); but
no one has been able to alter the behavior of those purveyors of desolation of
whom Kassir wrote, and who, in the end, liquidated him and vandalized his
optimism.
There
are countless ways to explain the ongoing Lebanese crisis, but the most
essential one, it seems to me, is that it is a battle over the destiny of
Beirut. Will the city ever return to being that shambling, ill-disciplined
showcase of modernity that it has always said it was, a laboratory of
bastardized Arab liberalism (but liberalism nonetheless)? Or will it fall back
into the lap of a decaying Baath regime in Damascus, in league with an
ambitious Iran, whose local allies deploy a language of death and the austere
habits of those movements created by a security apparat?
To
fully understand these contrasting visions for Beirut, we should also admit to
their shortcomings. Take only the most dramatic way the city has been used in
the ongoing political confrontation between the parliamentary majority and its
adversaries. It would be convenient to interpret the descent of the mainly
Shiite opposition to the Downtown since early December solely as the
desecration of an island of wealth by angry masses of poor. In some respects,
that's what it is. There has been unwarranted hatred in the standoff, a sense
that urban prosperity is something to be ashamed of, to be punished. As if the
way to distribute justice and equality were by turning a pot of gold into a
lump of coal.
However,
though we can reproach opposition sympathizers for their obvious delectation in
trashing the Solidere area, it's also true that Beirut is paying for its past
faults. A city that cannot properly integrate its different communities is one
bound to suffer. A vast majority of Beirut's Shiites never had much of a say in
Beirut's sundry identities. Shiites were largely excluded from the mostly Sunni
Arab nationalist plotline of the 1950s and '60s; the so-called
"Palestinian revolution" of the 1970s visited nothing but misery on
Shiites in the South and Beirut; and the postwar Hariri reconstruction plan,
while in theory designed to benefit all, was little focused on creating a
social safety net, one that could have helped pry the community away from its
reliance on Hizbullah aid.
For
many Shiites, the movement to Beirut has been devoid of an underlining
narrative that any intellectual would find invigorating. It's been largely a
tale of wretchedness, of escaping the violence of the South or scraping up a
better living. In Beirut proper, the Shiite advance into those areas of the
capital straddling the old "green line" was the result, principally,
of war and displacement. That is why we will continue to see Beirut's original
inhabitants treating Shiites as being in the city but not of it - a sad
leitmotif heard last week after the Thursday clashes. In this particular case
it is Beirut that is to blame, through its imposition of too selective a
prevailing spirit - not those outsiders drawn to it.
A
great difficulty, too, is that Hizbullah has turned itself into the sole
mediator between Beirut and the Shiite community. The autonomy of the southern
suburbs can surely be blamed on the unbalanced way the city has developed; but
Hizbullah has also found it convenient to separate the area from the rest of
the capital. This isolation has allowed the party to better exercise control,
to block the dissemination of subversive ideas that any modern city tosses up,
to avoid the sort of integration into Beirut, indeed into Lebanon, that
threatens to make Hizbullah redundant. If Beirut is to ever truly become the
springtime of the Arabs, Shiites need to break the filter that Hizbullah is
placing between them and their own city.
That
won't be easy. After the rioting last week, several disturbing messages were
sent to the Shiites: that access to Beirut from Shiite population centers in
South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley could be easily cut off; that Shiites inside
Beirut might be trapped between Sunni and Christian quarters; and that in the
event of war, Beirut's southern suburbs would find themselves under the guns of
their foes. That is what the city is disintegrating into: a conversation on
comparative military positioning.
Even
language has been corrupted. For a place that once prided itself on literary
output, a glance at news shows or newspapers will show the chronic use of
shoddy, loathsome terminology: the opposition is referred to as "the
coup-plotting forces" in outlets controlled by the majority; majority
parties are refereed to as "the militias of the state" by Hizbullah
and the Aounists. The airwaves and broadsheets are filled daily with threats.
Media have become instruments of war and mobilization, sources of division -
even in terms of who watches which TV channels. So much for the unifying nature
of modern communications; so much for Beirut's ability to inject liberalism
even into the most recalcitrant of its sons.
And
yet liberalism is precisely where Beirut's salvation will come from. It will
come once Shiites are truly accepted as part of the city, but also when they
accept the city in all its anarchic permutations - not as the representation of
a mortal adversary to be violated. For Beirut to have any meaning, it must
remain free, disobedient, disorderly, able to take in any strange idea and
grind it down into food the city can digest. Perhaps most importantly, Beirut
should be spared the intrusions of God, because religion, so utterly
suffocating in its Lebanese manifestations, can only suffocate what makes
Beirut interesting and different.
There
are many in the Middle East who would prefer to see Beirut destroyed rather
than emancipated. They should be careful. Beirut may be dumb prey, but like any
city that also doubles as a powerful idea, it tends to take down those
conceited enough to imagine that they can kill it.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=79092#