Lebanon...J'adore!
I know it has nothing to do with Qatar, i just wanted to write this article over here :)
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"Quoted from Forbes Magazine"
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You could argue that, in a contest to choose the most civilized citizens of the world, it would be a travesty not to choose Beirutis. Multi-domiciled (New York, London, Paris, Beirut), automatically fluent in three languages (English, Arabic, French) and the literature thereof, exquisitely turned out, hospitable and generous by instinct, they conduct their lives in a physical setting so glamorous it rivals Istanbul. They should be U.N.-protected as international cultural treasures.
Conversing with them is a little like appearing in front of an Olympic committee that adjudicates finesse in everything from fine dining to dirty jokes. The financial and entertainment geniuses of the region, they're the last of the great historic Levantine communities, the kind Lawrence Durrell so loved. They speak a natural Esperanto, "Shu? Alors, what's it called, habibi, the tres gentil guy who owns Chanel here, my cousin's husband ... "
This has been my first visit to Beirut as a grown-up, indeed since the civil wars began in the mid-1970s. One week's past and already I've found myself trying to rejig my life so I can return incessantly again and again as the waves do below the Corniche, and as Beirutis never fail to do after each war.
I say this with gunfire crackling in nearby hills; it's a long weekend, and no doubt they're partying up in the Shouf mountains. In the space of two days, I've disputed over Foucault and Beckett, discussed Ottoman history, wine-tasted in the Bekaa, splashed into the Mediterranean, feasted like Xerxes, sung Anglican hymns at dinner, and witnessed furious political argument--all the while dazzled by the local beauties. Beirut invented the paradigm of the icy brunette, the unapproachable one in dark sunshades above perfect lips seemingly born into every VIP room and first-class lounge. Ahhh, Beirut.
Just before the Civil Wars intervened, I attended boarding school here at age 9 for perhaps the happiest year of my life, at the International College, the feeder school to the American University of Beirut (AUB). After that I left for the cold climes and grotty gruel of schools in England. As a boy, I remember watching a James Bond movie in a cinema up in the mountains in the morning and swimming at the legendary Saint George Hotel perched just above the sea and sun-dappled in the afternoon. And I knew what it might be like to live a James Bond life. My father tells me that at the Saint George we were once actually introduced to Bin Laden in his chain-smoking teenage playboy phase. I don't remember it at all.
It was of course absolutely imperative then, as it's always been in Beirut, to be encased in the grooviest garb. I still wear my father's suits from that time, beautifully tailored to suggest a hypothetical dinner-party evening somewhere between St. Germain and Fellini-era Piazza del Popolo. A year after my mother had purchased a shirt for me in a boutique on Hamra Street, I wore it to play at a park in a small town in England. A local scrubber (as such girls were dubbed) with a rare eye came up and gazed on me in awe. I was 10; she was 16 I wager. "Where'd you get that shirt, then, luv? It's gorgeous," she crowed in her local twang.
Recently I watched a documentary somewhere--in the U.S. I think--about the Black September gang, who caused the gruesome slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The ringleaders were a handful of privileged young lefty Beirutis, mostly Palestinian. (The Israelis killed them one by one in later years.) But the documentary showed a film clip of a Beirut press conference they gave then. They were so young and cool, so dazzlingly chic, with a kind of Cap d'Antibes glow. In those days, in Beirut, even warlords and terrorists had to keep up standards. I've racked my brain for years: What did it mean, that you could be at once so hip and so bloody?
Perhaps the chic-est of the warlords was Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, a hyper-intellectual, elegantly louche stoner of the time with long locks and a fab L.P. collection, or so one heard. He graduated from the AUB, as so many leftists did, and was resolutely anti-American. He joined the Socialist International. His Druze gunmen, belonging to a perennially embattled minority, were the fiercest fighters.
Jumblatt caused a sensation in a Playboy interview once when he said that crime in New York terrified him more than gun-battles in Lebanon--this was around 1980. The astonished interviewer pointed out that several of Jumblatt's nearest and dearest had been assassinated, including his father. Yes, he said, but in Lebanon you know who's trying to kill you; in the U.S. you don't. Jumblatt now declares himself to be anti-Syria, pro-U.S., pro the democracy movement. After all, the Syrians killed his father. But the shrug of his shoulders tells you something else, that you never know friend from foe here for very long, that it can all shift lethally in a trice.
And there's the rub. You would want that these heartbreakingly likable, erudite, cultivated people, many of whom went to school together, discoed and drank and wenched together, could look at each other and say, "Nah, I can't fight you, you're too fabulous. You're a Beiruti like me. Our first duty is to the muse of fabulousness--to conserve this lovely place and the life here, the intellectual brilliance, the exquisite brunettes, the mountain forests, the Ottoman houses, the almost derelict Saint George Hotel ... "
An impossible task, it would seem. Already, the reconstruction of recent decades followed by the influx of oil-money investment has wiped away swaths of old Beirut and replaced it with dense high-rise ugliness--always a sign of runaway municipal corruption.
Up into the mountains, and along the sea northward into the Christian area, helter-skelter urban sprawl shows how in this, as in other things, the locals haven't conserved their inheritance. In central Beirut, many say that the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri--who was blown up right beside the Saint George--played his part. He sold a chunk of that downtown area to his own private company, the story goes, and stood to profit from all development there.
That aside, political pressures on Lebanon from beyond its borders--from Syria, Israel, Iran and others--constantly pretzelize any internal will to leap forward. One half of Lebanon pulls toward the West, toward democracy, transparent government, cultural openness, fierce hard work, rule of law; the other half toward egregious regional habits, toward bureaucratic corruption, warlordism, political patronage, rule by the gun.
Lebanon has more of the West in it than any other Arab country. Beirutis know which way the solution lies; even Hezbollah has to operate with one eye on the democratic process. But there's no visible way to get there from here--at any rate none that involves a painless and risk-free passage. If progress means an Iraq-style nightmare en route, who would opt for it? Yet, there's no way back either--back to what or when? Thinking on that makes one feel for Beirutis all the more. In a purgatorial state--no looking back, no stable present, a crepuscular future--they keep returning, keep trying, living exquisitely well and setting an example for the Middle East, indeed for the world.
There is a way forward. The pro-democracy movement, the so-called Cedar Revolution, is not yet extinguished, despite the assassination of Hariri and his business shenanigans before that, despite the backstairs machinations among political factions since. There are poles of light still, not least the patriotic endeavors of former Speaker of Parliament Hussein al-Husseini, who helped the civil war factions compromise with the Taif Accords. It's a highly complicated challenge involving a very delicate political dance around minefields. But as the July 7 elections approach, we will all need to know its details. I will do my best to clarify its complications in future columns. Stay tuned to this space.
