al Awda - the Return

It's been so busy lately I haven't gotten around to posting on the topic I've most wanted to discuss - the Palestinian experience in Lebanon. And there are at least half a dozen other topics I haven't had time to address!

And today, with an internet connection that resembles an old 14 baud modem, with electricity going down continually, and with people coming for dinner soon and actually expecting some food, is still not that day.

Nevertheless, I'll spend a few moments on Palestine, although not on the topic I mentioned above.

A few days ago I had a fascinating interview with Dr Bayan al Hout. Dr al Hout is a well-known expert on Palestinian affairs who, among many other works, authored a (if not the) definitive investigatory work into the 1982 Sabra and Chatilla massacres. As a someone who experienced the dispossession of 1948 directly and as the wife of PLO co-founder, the late Shafiq al Hout, her experience of Palestinian affairs and Palestinian history is profound and very personal.

A couple of years ago Dr al Hout wrote an article which appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, "Evenings in Upper Baq’a: Remembering Ajaj Nuwayhed and Home". In this memoir, she describes her life as a child in Jerusalem and the events of 1948 and their aftermath. I found the article personally moving and very evocative of both the period and the events it discusses. In it, she paints a nuanced picture of the desire for return and its problems and contradictions. At the same time, she evokes a sense of loss that anyone can understand.

She also discusses the looting and decimation of her father's cherished library. Events of this kind, multiplied by the tens of thousands, constituted the very substance of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland. They have been widely discussed and documented even by Israeli historians, never mind Palestinians. Yet they are so little known, even now, in the US that I thought it might be of interest to present Dr al Hout's personal account here as an example. With her permission, here are some passages from her article, starting with what happened to their house after the family left,  thinking they would be returning within a few days or weeks at most:

Sitt Emily reported that they – the Israelis – were at first unable to open the door to our house (it was an indestructible solid iron door standing half-way up the staircase leading to the first floor). But they soon brought tall ladders they used to climb up to the large balcony, and managed to open the balcony door. Sitt Emily described her amazement at the Israelis’ persistence in entering the house in this manner: how could they inhabit a house accessible only by ladders? Then she went on to say that the reason for their behavior soon became apparent when a big, empty truck pulled up in front of the house, and she saw a large number of young men working together: some would toss down books from the balcony into the garden below, others gathered them in piles, while yet others would carry them to the truck, where the last group would stack them up. They worked tirelessly for several hours until they had looted the entire library. The Jewish family who seized and occupied the house later told her that they had found the bookcases completely empty.

Khaldoun, the author’s brother, with sister Jinan on the balcony
from which the Jewish forces gained access and looted the library.
Source: the author's family archives.

And here is Dr al Hout's discussion of the question of return (I should mention that both Bayan and Shafiq al Hout were advocates of a single, democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Jews and Christians. After years of collaboration with Yasir Arafat, Shafiq al Hout broke with him over the Oslo Accords and the decision to pursue a two-state solution in Palestine.):

What interests me is the issue that robs an entire nation of its sleep, the question of return. Some think that return means no more than going back to a house, farm, or orchard passed down from father to son. What manner of return would this be when Israel has transformed every one of Palestine’s landmarks and topographical features? It has destroyed entire villages, wiped out the names of cities, ripped up streets and torn down buildings at will, and plundered the contents of houses before seizing the houses themselves? 

What would such a return be like?

I wonder at such a question, and pose another of my own: when did we ever truly leave our country, to be able to talk of returning to it? Does not our country live in our hearts day and night? Is it not with us? Who says that the homeland is no more than a house, or stones, or a title deed, the kind of document we call “koushan” in Palestine?

(...)

I once asked my brother, if he were ever able to return to our house, found it just as we left it, and was allowed to bring back one thing only, what would he take? “The photo albums,” he promptly answered. I put the same question to my father, who answered with regret, “I’d bring the correspondence I had with my friends.” “What if you weren’t able to carry it all?” I asked. “I’d start with the letters from Emir Shakib Arslan.”

A view of the house at what is now No. 19, Rehov Harakevet.
Source: taken in the late 1990s by a diplomat friend of the author

Were I to ask myself this question I would say I would come back with the painting of Khaled ibn al-Walid. I admit that I have no wish other than to visit my home just once, even under the pall of occupation. I know that our garden has changed, that the apricot, pomegranate and elder trees are dead and gone, and that the earth has swallowed the blossoms of the morning glory that would creep up the walls and spread over every bit of garden soil. Recently I saw how a section of the garden was lopped off and turned into a parking lot. I also saw, in pictures and video clips made for me by a friend who is a European diplomat, that my house has a number now. It is No. 19 on Rehov Harakevet, or Railway Street.

Perhaps all this is no more than mere nostalgia – which is no sin. Nor is visiting one’s home. Yet the question remains: what is a home? What does the word mean? Home is the homeland. When Palestine is the homeland it is not so only for its people, but for those who love it, who believe its history, every era of its history with no exception, and place their trust in its heritage, its Aqsa Mosque and its Church of the Resurrection.

Calligraphy again - sign painting as an art form

In previous posts I've talked about the exquisite calligraphy of my late friend, Muhammad Hamady. As well as that of Dr Sami Makarem and his father, the great master calligrapher Sheikh Nassib Makarem.

And when we think of calligraphy we often think of it as a form of fine art, something we might find on the walls of a museum.

But, in fact, in our modern, literate and advertising-saturated world we're surrounded by calligraphy. Wherever one looks on sees signs, words, phrases, logos and other forms of lettering.

Of course, a lot of this clutter doesn't merit the term calligraphy. But quite a bit more than we might realize probably does. We just don't see its true value because of the clutter that surrounds it on every side.

In the Arab world, calligraphy is considered one of the highest of the art forms, due to its relationship with the Quran and with the God who began the universe by creating a pen and commanding it to 'write!".

Over centuries, Arabic has developed a wide variety of scripts, some of which emphasize vertical forms, while others emphasize the horizontal. Some are quite static, others musical in their lyricism and sense of movement.

As you can probably tell, I love Arabic calligraphy.

Fine art calligraphy is a beautiful thing. But there are humbler forms that can also be wonderful in their simplicity and eloquence. Even something as simple as a sign over a shop. Today, as I was arriving back at my apartment, I happened to run into this guy, working on a sign just a couple of doors down. Fortunately, I had my cam with me. If you have 5 minutes or so to spare, here's a guy who shows how a good eye, a steady hand, and lots of experience can produce true art...on a metal door!

BTW, the final product will almost certainly require another color over the white background. (I'll find out tomorrow.)  The whole phrase (visible at the end of the clip)? mo'asasat al intishar al arabi. Something like: The Institution for the Spread of Arabic.

Oh, yeah...all the chirping and tweeting comes from the bird shop next door.

Sabra & Chatilla; commemorating a massacre

Yesterday I went to the 31st anniversary commemoration of the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Chatilla refugee camp.

31 years! To me it still seems like recent history. For the children who paraded in their school uniforms yesterday it must be no more than a distant event in a long series of such tragedies. Being a Palestinian child in Lebanon is to share a history of massacres, betrayals, defeats and discrimination. Since 1982 an unending series of disasters has befallen the community.

For those who recall barely or not at all, the massacres at Sabra and Chatilla occurred during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, at a point where Israeli forces had seized control of the majority of Beirut itself.

Over two days, between the 16th and the 18th of September, right-wing Phalangist militias entered the camps and slaughtered somewhere between 1000 and 4000 people. When the light failed at sunset, they continued the killing under brights lights and flares.

The bodies were left lying where they fell or else bulldozed into shallow mass graves.

Starting the day after, aid workers and journalists began to recount what they discovered upon entering Sabra and Chatilla, and the controversy was immediate. The Phalangists were in open alliance with Israel. Was Israel to blame? What did the Israeli forces know? What did Defense Minister Ariel Sharon know? Was there in fact Israeli collusion in the massacre?


The Israelis, of course, denied any knowledge or involvement.

I was not one of the journalists to visit Sabra and Chatilla in the days following the massacre. I arrived in Beirut and visited Sabra and Chatilla a few weeks later, when the controversy was at its height, commissions of inquiry were being formed, and newspapers all over the world were headlining the issue.

Almost serendipitously, during that trip I was to settle the question of Israeli collusion to my own satisfaction once and for all and to at least help clarify it for my Pacifica audience.

To return for a moment to yesterday's commemoration, I climbed out of the service around 10:30 in the morning to find a parade forming in the main street outside the camp. In a way, it was eerily reminiscent of my kids elementary school days: troops of children in school uniforms holding various musical instruments being herded into formation by teachers, all accompanied by the cacophonous sounds of instruments being tooted, banged and honked in preparation. Flags and banners flew in the sun, kids ran about poking each other and laughing...as I say, it was momentarily and disarmingly like something out of my own children's childhoods.

A few moments later the drums and the bagpipes got going and the parade began to move. The kids headed down the avenue and turned left into Chatilla camp. Everything was quite changed from my recollections, yet I knew from major landmarks that this was the same entrance I'd used in 1982. However, I recalled a large, garbage-strewn expanse at the entrance where most of the bodies had been hastily buried just a couple of weeks before. That expanse was nowhere to be seen.

Another 50 meters or so and the parade took a sharp right turn through an arched gate, and I found my expanse - now walled off and preserved as a commemorative precinct. At the far end, a low marble table surrounded by banners and explanatory posters.

Back in 1982 the low shanties of Chatilla camp surrounded the empty field on three sides. From there, the tiny alleyways common to all Palestinian camps (due to draconian building restrictions imposed by the Lebanese government) wound outwards into the camp proper. To the north, the camp was more or less bounded by the then-ruined stadium and parts of Sabra. To the south lay the avenue the children had just paraded down - although much, much less built-up than today. To the east: Sabra and Horsch. To the west Chatilla was bounded by another large avenue, which appears on current maps with the surreal name Hafiz el Asad Avenue, and which will become important in a moment.

In 1982 I spent about an hour walking the alleyways of Chatilla. Most traces of the killing were gone, of course. Except for the thousands of bullet holes, often concentrated along walls where people had been lined up and shot at close range. What was left was the general destruction of the buildings, the remains of the looting, the missing doors and broken windows. A few survivors remained as well, and even a few children. Meanwhile, on the ground beneath their feet were the broken toys and torn clothing of children who hadn't survived.

Now, 31 years later, children dressed in neat school uniforms paraded and played marching music as we filed into the cemetery. Around them lay a refugee camp rebuilt, but just as stiffling, just as crippling to the spirit, as the camp that had been essentially destroyed by the maurading Phalangists back in '82.

And, next to the marble bier there is another banner commemorating the hundreds of deaths that took place during the 2006 fighting in South Lebanon between Hezb Allah and invading Israeli troops.

It was in this sad place that we came to a halt before the marble bier and the crowd filled in behind us. The music sputtered out and several large wreaths were brought forward and laid on the marble. And then came the most understated, and most affecting part of the ceremony. So understated, in fact, that many people, thinking everything was over, walked off.

I was almost among them. Then I noticed some older people moving forward through the crowd with photos in their arms. They approached the bier and simply placed their photos on it, holding them vertically so they could be seen. And they stood there, silently, stoically, quietly, while those of us with cameras snapped away or took our video footage. 31 years, and the look on their faces was as if it had happened yesterday.

Back in '82, even weeks after the event, being in Chatilla was too much for me. I remember how I stumbled out of the camp feeling short of breath. It wasn't until I got back to the main avenue that I even looked up again. At that moment I noticed a couple of tall buildings just west of the camp, across the large avenue. Looking at them I realized that they essentially overlooked the camp. As I said earlier, the Israelis were at that point denying any knowledge of the killings, while detractors were claiming that they had occupied positions nearby which would have given them the ability to oversee Chatilla. The Israeli response was that their positions were too far away to provide any clear view of the events.

With all this in mind I started walking up the hill towards the avenue and those buildings. At the intersection I ran into an Italian soldier, a member of the peace-keeping force that had been sent in just a little too late, after the massacres had already taken place. Using my non-existent Italian we began chatting, and I explained in gestures that I was planning to visit the nearest of the two tall buildings across the street. For whatever reason, he decided to accompany me and  together we crossed the avenue and entered the empty, trashed apartment building. Up we went, checking out the apartments, all of whose doors had been broken down. Almost immediately we ran into the detritus of war, all of it Israeli. Papers of various kinds, nearly all in Hebrew, were everywhere (a few things weren't in Hebrew - they were in English). Shells littered the floors. More papers. An apartment that had apparently been reserved as a toilet for the troops - and I don't mean that they used the bathroom for this purpose. Finally, we made it to the roof. Again, endless amounts of litter, trash, paperwork. I even ran into several large, bound manuals in Hebrew...one of which I kept as a keepsake.

Then we approached the eastern edge of the roof. As I expected, just on the other side of the avenue, there was a low wall. And on the other side of the wall...the alleys of Chatilla camp. I raised my camera, equipped with the longest lens I had with me - a mere 200mm - to my eye. From where I stood I could easily follow the winding alleys I'd just walked in Chatilla, and, at one point, even watch the children I'd just stood beside a few moments earlier, playing in the rubble.

Here is a panorama showing the buildings, the avenue, and the wall behind which lies Chatilla camp

This photo in Chatilla looks due west. Behind
the last buildings is the low wall and the avenue.

So much for that argument. And, of course, it later transpired that Israeli forces had provided night lighting for the Phalangist executioners and the bulldozers used to destroy the camps, that the IDF troops had been seen by multiple observers at various places directly outside the camps, and that the testimony of camp survivors placed Israeli forces inside the camps with their Phalangist allies. And yet, despite all that and despite a spate of condemnatory international investigations, Israel was largely successful in its effort to whitewash its complicity in the massacres and Ariel Sharon went on to become head of the Likud party and then Prime Minister of Israel.

And it was probably about a year later, at a press conference in Los Angeles, that Sharon said - in response to a question by my co-producer, Sarah Mardell - "I bomb Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan so that I don't have to bomb them in Bethlehem and Ramallah." Which, of course, Israel then went on to do - and has continued to do ever since.

Here's a video recap of yesterday's commemoration:

Woman rescued from stalled elevator. Visiting journalist saves her...but earns her undying enmity

Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while will remember a post I did a few weeks ago about the constant power cuts in Beirut. In that post I speculated what it would be like for someone to be caught in a stalled elevator during a power cut. The other night, I came face-to-face with it.

My friend May had invited me up for dinner and we'd just finished a truly delicious chicken and rice dish that she had  made. I was just about to leave, and May was out of cigarettes (May is eternally out of cigarettes!), so we were just leaving her 8th floor apartment together when everything suddenly went pitch black. Time for plan B. We grabbed a couple of tiny keychain flashlights and headed down the dark stairs. A bit like descending into a mine with only two tiny points of light as guidance.

A few floors down we started hearing banging coming from somewhere. Another floor and our tiny lights fell upon a woman and a small boy standing by the elevator. The boy was sobbing, while muffled calls came from the elevator.

It turned out his grandmother was stuck between floors in the elevator.

May went to work calming the boy while I went into problem-solving mode. Meanwhile, other tenants arrived and started milling about in the dark to no particular effect. Then, the wife of the conceirge arrived, bearing a somewhat larger light and an enormous pair of wire cutters. This was apparently the only tool in their possession that might be of help.

So far, things were looking quite unpromising. As I accumulated data, they got worse. First off, the elevator had come to a halt exactly halfway between floors. This meant there was no climbing down to the lower floor because the drop would have been dangerous for a healthy adolescent, let alone an elderly grandmother. On the other hand, climbing out to the upper floor was going to require a ladder or some other aid. If the person was elderly or had disabilities getting the door open might only be the beginning of the solution.

Things got worse. Elevator doors have simple latch locks that can be opened with a pretty basic key in case of emergency. But you have to have the key, and at first it seemed nobody did. Then, suddenly, someone turned up with one. We happened to be on the lower floor at that point and the triangular key exactly matched the door lock. Of course, that wasn't the door we needed to open. We rushed upstairs, only to dicover that somehow that door had a very differently shaped lock!

At this point we were all milling about rather uselessly for a few minutes. We seemed to be completely stymied by someone's incomprehensible decision to use different locks on different floors, not to mention someone else's incomprehensible decision not to supply proper keys to the tenants, for whom this danger is a nightly event!

But 'problem-solving' is my middle name (and a weird one it is)! And, just a few days before I'd done some electrical work in May's apartment to get a ceiling light working again.  And at that moment I recalled that I'd seen a pair of pliers among her tools.

The two of us trooped back upstairs in the dark and the humid heat, fished around til May found the pliers, then made our slow way back down.

With the pliers in hand, it was - as P G Wodehouse would have said if he'd been with us - a matter of but a moment to force the lock and open the door. Someone brought a folding chair which we passed down to the trappee. Using that, she was just able to reach high enough to get a grip on us and slowly work herself up and out.

Then I had the worst idea I've had in days, if not hours (I have them quite frequently). The sight of this women fighting to extract herself from a stalled elevator in the dark, illuminated by only a few flashlights, was so striking and so emlematic to me of everything that's crazy about life in Beirut that I grabbed my camera and prepared to take a picture.

What I failed to noice was that she was dressed in her 'housecoat'. Which, for her, might as well have been her underwear. She looked up just as she finally managed to get onto the floor...and saw my camera pointed at her. Even in the dark I could see the look of horror come across her face.

Two days later she was still talking about the foreign journalist who took pictures of her in her pyjamas. Hearing that it was him that had opened the door so she could escape only mollified her partially. To refer again to Wodehouse: she may have been somewhat less disgruntled, but she was very, very far from being gruntled.

Even more ironic: I failed to manipulate the camera quickly enough, because I only had one hand free. Thus, I never got the picture I was trying to get before she looked up. Had I gotten it, her face wouldn't have shown up, anyway. And thus I have no picture to add to this post!

Alibis Written in Blood

Once again, a piece from l'Orient le Jour. This time it's an editorial that appeared today, left and above the fold, by writer Issa Ghorayeb.

In the last few days I've had a series of depressing conversations with friends, new acquaintances, even service drivers. The theme has always been the same: the US strikes may not happen, but war is still coming to Lebanon.

The feeling of unfinished business is pervasive, disquieting and very troubling. As if it wasn't troubling enough in itself, there's also an inability to explain exactly why this has to happen, or what will cause it. People shrug their shoulders and smile tiredly. There are too many enemies, too many plots, too many causes, and....no more heroes.

I thought the piece below embodied some of that feeling, as did Walid Joumblatt's piece a few days ago, which I posted last week. This one is more generically about the Arab world as well as Lebanon. It touches on a lot of themes that keep coming up here: cyncial governance, manipulation of public opinion, lack of democracy and education, and something about the Arab world that makes it insist on walking against the current of history.

Alibi written in blood

As we like to say, the creation of Israel was the beginning of all our troubles. Not only does the Palestinian problem continue to haunt us exactly as before, not only have new territories been lost over the decades, but the convulsions of this conflict have generated any number of equally important crises over the years.

But, even so, how to ignore the enormous role played by the Arabs themselves in this frenetic march backwards against the tides of history?

It was supposedly to revenge the debacle of 1948 that corrupt monarchies were overthrown by officers who would soon prove even more despotic. As it was supposedly in order to better counter Israel's formidable war machine - but actually in order to better cement their hold on power - that these dashing, over-dressed revolutionaries made their populations live without bread so they could buy ever more canons.

And it was still in the cause of Palestine that the Palestinian guerillas somehow lost their compass bearings and, rather than taking the road to Jerusalem, ended up mucking about in Beirut and even Jouneh.

We Lebanese still haven't finished rubbing elbows with - and actually embracing - every kind of absurdity, brought to us live and in living color. Right next door a pitiless tyrant uses against his own people chemical weapons that were supposedly aquired to provide a balance of terror against Israel's nuclear arsenal. Caught red-handed, he accepts to give them up - or, at least, pretend to - in order to hold on to his throne which swims in the blood of innocents.

And it's to give a helping hand to this torturer that Hezbollah, under orders from its patron Iran, sends men off to fight in Syria. All the while invoking, without even the suspicion of an ironic smile, the imperative of resisting the Israeli enemy.

Still mouthing this slogan, it continues its guerilla action against the gears and cogs of our own state structures. And seeks to shadow - if not replace - those same state institutions. All the while explaining away its activities by the weakness of those institutions...while it works furiously to weaken them further. The courageous and healthy wave of protests in Zahle over the installation, reparation, or maintenance (who knows which?) of Hezbollah's private telecommunications network served to remind Lebanese of the rampant intrusion of the ever-encroaching spider's web of ears that can spy on everything.

And, of course, always and again in the name of resistance against the enemy.

If that excuse didn't already exist among the ruins of unfortunate Palestine, we'd have to invent it.

Issa Ghorayeb, in

l'Orient le Jour,

18 September, 2013

Travelogue...destination: Jezzine

It's been a few very busy days, together with such pathetic internet through-put pretty much everywhere that I didn't even want to try posting. Beirut is like that: the internet, even when it's working, will suddenly slow to a crawl and stay that way for days. Last week the pain actually drove me to call the company, Cyberia (aptly chosen name, were it spelled slightly differently), that supplies my home connection. After the usual transition from Arabic to English or French I discovered that 'very sorry sir, we are having broblems on our system. It will soon be fixed, inshallah.'

There's no 'p' sound in Arabic, so 'problems' becomes 'broblems'. Inshallah means 'hopefully'. It also could mean 'it's out of our hands and may be for the rest of eternity'. And in this case the problem went on for days. In fact, things are still not back to normal.

Of course, there's the cafe I'm currently sitting in, where I often come when the internet gets so bad at home that work becomes impossible. And, at the moment, all is well. The other day, though, things suddenly got really, really bad. To the point where I was debating going back home! The staff kept rebooting the router and the modem and I could see them talking on the phone several times. It finally transpired that someone just across the street in possession of the password had opened up a connection and was hogging all our bandwidth. A new password fixed the problem, but not before about 2 hours had gone into problem-solving.

Anyway, so much for technical issues. In the next day or two I have a couple of new things on the way, but first I decided to do another travelogue. The other day May and I jumped into the car yet again and finally made the long-postponed trip down south to Jezzine. The photos came out quite nicely, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to give a bit of a feel for Lebanon's topography. A lot of people think the Mideast is made up of desert and scrub, as in much of Syria and Iraq. Others might have a biblical image of the low hills and coastal plains of Palestine. Lebanon is quite different from either of these Mideasts, and quite spectacular topographically.

At the same time, as I mentioned in my travelogue to Byblos, there have been lots of changes in the last 40 years and the low cities and small villages of the Lebanon I knew then have given way in many places to large urban agglomerations whose uncontrolled scale dwarfs and overwhelms the natural environment. Fortuantely, it turns out that the road to Jezzine has been largely spared....so far.

Jezzine is the door to the South of Lebanon. It's a largely Christian town located at the head of an enormous valley that stretches northward through the hills and mountains of the Shouf region where I used to live. In fact, most of the trip will run through very familiar territory for me. The first big stop is Baaqline, where I used to live.

The trip begins with a short run along the coast road through the village of Khalde to Damour, where we head east into the Shouf mountains. Here's the coastal 'village' of Khalde, just south of the airport:

Back when I lived here, it was barely big enough to merit being called a village.

A few minutes later we reach what used to be the Christian village of Damour, where we used to stop and buy our vegetables before heading up to Ba'aqline. Damour is a town with a tragic history of its own. After the terrible massacres of Palestinian refugees at Tel el Zaater camp by Christian militias, Damour was overrun during the civil war by forces of the Lebanese left and the PLO. Many of its inhabitants were massacred and most of the rest of its inhabitants were driven out. Since the end of the war many have returned, and what used to be a small village has now become essentially a suburb of Beirut:

Visually, things start to get better as soon as we turn off the coast road at Damour and head east. The matresses look relaxing:

A few moments later, a huge relief. This looks exactly as I remember it, completely unchanged and just as beautiful as it used to be... the banana and citrus plantations of Wadi Damour:

From Wadi Damour it's uphill all the way. Here are a few pics to give a feeling:

Leaving Damour and heading uphill...

And more uphill...

And even more uphill...

Until, from the former village - now town - of Kfar Heem we get a good view of the rest of the climb. Baaqline is just visible at the top of the photo, the slowly rebuilding village of Deir Dourit is below. Deir Dourit was a stronghold of the Christian militias during the civil war. After the assassination of Druze leader Kamal Joumblatt in 1977 - almost certainly at the hands of the Syrians - Druze from Baaqline and other villages descended upon their Christian neighbors, killing several hundred and virtually wiping out Deir Dourit. Like so many things here in Lebanon, tragedy lurks just below the surface, no matter how bucolic:

About half an hour later, we arrive in my old village, Ba'aqline. Incredibly, the place looks almost unchanged:

And, indeed, we are in Druze country:

The view of the hills behind the village is just as green and rural it always was:

On the other side of Baaqline we have the village of 'Ain Baal. I always loved the place because it instantly tells you that the place name is not hundreds, but thousands of years old. It means, simply, 'the spring of Ba'al', who was Yahweh's main competitor in the god business back when. In other words, the place is as old as the Bible!

Next to 'Ain Baal is Semqaniyeh, which also used to be a tiny village. It's now become a suburb of Baaqline, more or less. What Yahweh and Baal together couldn't accomplish, man has done in just a few years. And just beyond, the village of Beqaata was transformed during the war into nothing less than a city. This happened because travel to Beirut was impossible for long periods, so the Shouf needed an urban center of its own to supply the region. Thank god (Baal, Yahweh, Allah) they didn't pick Baaqline:

The new city of Beqaata. What used to be Semqaniyeh is in the distance.

However, Beqaata is really the last place on our trip where the new world has so completely destroyed the old. From here on down to Jezzine the Shouf is very much as it's been for hundreds of years. Minus one clear reminder of the civil war, the statue to the Druze fighters. The interesting aspect is the guy on the right; he represents the religious fighting corps recruited by Walid Joumblatt to defend the Druze lands. Something like the fighting monks of various periods of Christian history:

After 'Ain Baal, Semqaniyeh and Beqaata, it's really the Shouf as it used to be. Here's the view looking south. The last ridge is approximately our destination: Jezzine. Beyond that, the mountains grow smaller and it's probably no more than 20 miles or so as the crow flies to the beginning of the Galilee. Lebanon really is a tiny country:

Sheer cliffs that have doubled for 1000s of years as terraces

In the wadi before the climb to Mukhtara

The village of Mukhtara is the feudal seat of the Joumblatt family - which could also be spelled 'Jounblatt family', 'Junblat family', 'Jumblatt family', and so on. Like everybody else in Lebanon, the Druze used to be fiercely divided into factions. For several decades, since the time of Kamal Jounblatt, the Joumblatts have enjoyed a political ascendancy. The village is one of the best-preserved in the area. Here's the road up to the village from the wadi:

And here's a view of the village from the hillside opposite:

Muhktara

And, a view looking up at the Junblatt palace, much enlarged over the decades by Walid Junblatt, Kamal's son:

After Mukhtara, there's a series of small villages, as the countryside gets starker and more sharply defined. Here's a view looking back north at the relatively green and lush northern Shouf:

And now the wadi starts to deepen progressively into an enormous gorge:

At the same time, the lush green of the Shouf begins to recede as we approach Jezzine. At Jezzine the Shouf ends and the topography with it. Instead of the deep north-south crease of the Shouf, the area beyond it is more oriented east-to-west, with the valley of the Litani river cutting across it. This is a view looking back north from near Jezzine:

Now the last few kilometers, on a newly-asphalted road:

What's wrong with this picture? Oh, yeah...a sheer cliff-edge for
several kilometers and no guard rail!

Finally, Jezzine! And a couple of views looking back north, really quite spectacular:

Dr Sami Nassib Makarem

It's time to eulogize one of Lebanon's truly great scholars. And a poet and artist into the bargain. And a man I had the enormous pleasure of knowing when I first lived in Lebanon, but who unfortunately passed away a year before I returned. This man was Sami Nassib Makarem.

I don't remember how I first met Sami Makarem, but it was during my time as a schoolteacher in the Druze village of Ba'aqline. I think he found my curiosity about the Druze and their officially secret religion endearing, and we both shared a love of traditional Lebanese mountain architecture.

For someone interested in the Druze, Sami was definitely the right guy to meet. To start with, he was Druze himself. Beyond that he was one of the Mideast's foremost scholars of Islamic history, and very possibly the world's leading expert in the history and beliefs of the Druze. In fact, Sami was one of a small group of 'young Turks' whose writings about the Druze began to tear down some of the barriers of secrecy and reveal the truly fascinating and heterodox belief system of this community (I discussed some of this in an earlier post, "Born Again"). Back in the 70s and 80s this was extremely controversial, but over time I had the impression (at a great distance, since I'd long been away from Lebanon) that Sami's approach won over most of the shyyukh, the holders of the religious tradition. And it seems that he died a beloved figure in the Druze community, both for his learning and for his art, his poety and a personal simplicity that was very engaging.

Sami and I used to drive around the Shouf and visit old, traditional homes. Often these were ruins, rather than residences. But it didn't matter to either of us, the amazing nobility of the old homes always shone through. As we wandered around some half-collapsed mountain home, I'd ask a string of questions about the Druze, their history, their beliefs, and so on. To this day I am sure that some secrets of this community are still secret (May assures me this is indeed the case). Nevertheless, I've read quite a few books about the Druze - including some of Sami's - and I've yet to find some fact that he didn't reveal during those conversations. So I think I came away with a pretty good take on the people with whom I lived for several years.

I last saw Sami Makarem in LA in the early 80s. Among other things, we went to Universal Studios with a bunch of American and Lebanese Druze kids of various ages. Since neither of us was particularly into the rides, I used the occasion to pick up where we'd left off among the ruins, and spent my one trip to Universal Studios listening to an explanation of the Druze view of the nature of God.

That was the last time I saw Sami, but a few days ago I felt like I'd come as close as possible when a person has passed on. I came face to face with the man's dedication and determination, and with the astonishing results of one of his life projects.

Among the many ruined places we visited back in the 70s was the home Sami hoped to rebuild in his village of Aytat, in the mountains above Beirut.  I well remember wandering around what had clearly once been essentially a small palace but was now an utter ruin. Sami, undaunted, took me from broken wall to debris-filled room, explaining all the while how he planned to transform it, reincarnate it, bring it back from the dead. It was clear that in his mind he already saw the end result, with warm light flooding through arched windows and filling the vaulted rooms. At the time I thought the man slightly mad, if in the best possible way. Last week I discovered how wrong I was.

What happened was that my friend May and I had planned to take a drive down to south Lebanon. Or as close as you can get to it. Given the realities of life in Lebanon, going to the extreme south is 'not a good idea'.

Our plan was foiled, though, by some of Lebanon's more mundane problems: my need to do a laundry vs Électricité du Liban's need to turn off our power. The result was that by the time I'd finished with the washing it was too late to consider going all the way to the south. We jumped in the car and headed out of town without any clear idea of where we were going. Various possibilities popped up and were voted down. Finally, May said, let's go visit Sami's house, which is really not very far.

May's maiden name is Makarem and she is Sami's first cousin, so the idea didn't come out of nowhere.

Before I continue talking about Sami Makarem, I want to digress for a few moments and talk about traditional Lebanese mountain architecture. And this for a couple of reasons:

• To my mind it's one of the most beautiful architectures in the world, perfectly rooted in its place, its local materials and the history of its peoples.
• While politics has provided endless tragedy in this region for decades, the disappearance of this form of building since the end of the Second World War has been an almost unnoticed tragedy in its own right. With it has gone an entire way of life, close to the earth, rooted in time and place, and completely genuine.

Mountain homes in Lebanon were always built of hewn local stone. They tended towards very simple exterior forms. Here's a good example from Ba'aqline:

Externally, these forms were relieved by rows of 2 or 3 arched windows, by graceful arched balconies, by shapely doorways and by other traditional details. Some more examples from Ba'aqline:

While tiled roofs became quite common in later periods, the earliest examples often had simple, compressed dirt roofs. These had to be recompressed regularly, especially in the winter, to prevent water infiltration. For this purpose, there was always a very heavy roller sitting in one corner of the roof. Here's an example from May and Karma's place in Ba'aqline:

 

A few more examples of the mountain style:

An old home in Baaqline under renovation.

A nice example of triple arched windows.

Inside, these homes were stunning, with high, vaulted ceilings. The vaulting kept the interior cool in summer, while the thick stone walls kept the heat in during the winter. Here's a beautifully restored example, the home of my old friend Adnan in Baaqline:

It wasn't until I learned how these houses were traditionally built that I understood they were a true example of form following function. Or, perhaps, of beauty following method.

The procedure was time-consuming but made perfect use of local materials. At the same time, it was methodologically brilliant in making use of the idea of what we'd call 'negative space'. The footprint of the house was marked out and leveled. The bearing walls were begun and gradually brought up. As this was done the interior was also filled - with rubble, sand, and the like. The house continued to rise in this fashion until the vertical walls were done. At this point more rubble and sand was heaped on top and formed into the shape of the rest of the interior space; i.e., into rubble domes. Once this was done, the stones that would eventually become the ceiling could be laid on top, ending with the final, cap stone at the peak of the ceiling. The capstone locked everything into place. This process was the province of acknowledged master stonemen, of whom there were only a couple left when I lived in the area. I'd be surprised if today there are any at all.

The process was similar to building a stone archway, but in four directions. If the stones weren't cut and laid correctly the whole thing was guaranteed to collapse of its own weight.

Once the capstone was in place, the walls could be finished off and the space above the ceiling filled, until the roof was filled and flat.

Then came the process which revealed how competent the craftsmen were: all the rubble filling the interior space had to be dug out and carted away, leaving an empty space held up by the vaulted stone ceiling. One can imagine that there must have been times, certainly in the early careers of future master stonemen, when the whole thing came crashing down and had to be restarted from scratch.

When it worked, the final result was spectacular. Here's a couple of examples from Adnan's house:

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Now back to Sami Makarem. When May and I headed up the hill to Aytat the other day I had no idea that the place I was about to see was the pile of stones I'd visited some 40 years ago. And proof that soft-spoken Sami Makarem must have had the determination of ten lesser men, to have succeeded in his dream while simultaneously pursuing a full-time career as a scholar, and artist and a poet.

It was as we rolled to a stop by the house - 'house' is definitely insufficient - that I had a strange feeling of deja vu. Things were so completely changed, however, that it wasn't until we actually entered the main courtyard that I realized it was the same ruin Sami had shown me decades ago.

At this point I'm going to simply add some of the pictures I took, and let them illustrate what I want to say, both about the house and about Sami. Here they are:

Sami's office, next to main house	Sami's office
Sami's grave, still unfinished

View from office	Windows in main house
Diwan, receiving room	Main house
View of courtyard	Window detail

View from main house

Courtyard

Main house, mashrabiye

Courtyard balcony

Mashrabiyeh, enclosed balcony

Both Sami and his father, Shaikh Nassib Makarem, were noted calligraphers. Sami's home exhibits some works by each. I tried to get acceptable photos, but given the low light and glass framing the quality is not very good. Nevertheless....

Calligraphy by Shaykh Nassib Makarem, Sami Makarem's father:

Calligraphy by Sami Makarem:

A few more pics of the house and the grounds:

Having written this, I realize it's really a double eulogy: one to Sami Makarem and another to the architecture he loved so much.