Whenever I followed one of the threads, it brought me to the complete sectarian divide that made Lebanon unique among Arab countries. The Lebanese, whose population has never grown beyond 3 million, are divided into nearly twenty sects, beginning with the Shiites, Sunnis and Druze, then the Maronites, Catholics and Greek Orthodox, and the Armenians and Syriacs (Catholic and Orthodox), then the Protestants, Assyrians and Jews. Dominating these sects is a limited group of clans and families whose influence is handed down generation after generation. It’s as though Lebanon were a country frozen in the Middle Ages.
Seen in the light of history, the civil war — which flared up in April 1975, and in which 75,000 have been killed and 140,000 wounded (not one of them carrying the name of one of the families that started the fight and that profits from the victims) — seemed like one link in a long series of conflicts and wars. As for how the war began, it had two origins: the moment the extended clans in the region fighting each other discovered that Mount Lebanon made an ideal refuge that could protect them from their enemies, and the moment that the ships of the invading Crusaders dropped anchor at the foot of the venerable mountain.
These first colonizers, who came from Europe raising aloft the holy banners of Christ, strove to establish special relationships with some of the religious minorities in the region. And they achieved their aim in an eastern Christian community that traced its founding to Saint Mar Maron. This community lived in relative comfort as a result of its monopoly on silk production. For its part, the Maronite community saw in European support protection for, and consolidation of, their economic interests.
The Turks applied the same policy when they occupied the Levant in the year 1516 in the name of Islam. They proceeded to embrace the Sunni Muslim community at the expense of the rest of the Muslim and Christian minorities. The Egyptians that Muhammad Ali sent to the Levant after 1833 abolished all the public dress and other symbols the Turks imposed on Christians to distinguish them by their clothing, and opened up government positions to them. The entire eastern Arab world seemed to be poised on the threshold of a new period that would bring it from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the broad horizons of the modern era.
But colonial forces were lying in wait for Muhammad Ali: the struggle between the French and British in the region ignited the well-known strife in the year 1840 between the Druze and Maronites. The former — Muslims who consider the Shiite Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-amr Allah divine — followed the example of the Maronites and established a special relationship with Great Britain, as a counterweight to the Maronites’ special relationship with France.
Five years later, the conflict widened when the Orthodox, Sunnis and Shia joined the side of the Druze. Conflict broke out again in 1860 when the Maronite peasants rose up against their feudal lords. Just as the attempts at an agreement were on the verge of succeeding, a band of Christians from the Matn region attacked Druze villages, and the Druze raided Maronite villages. The affair turned into a war between Muslims and Christians, and ended with the intervention of European nations, and the entry of the French Army into Beirut.
Historians attribute to Napoleon III a role in provoking this strife. During his reign, France had entered into a new era of rising expectations, and the emperor wanted to be seen as the defender of the rights of Christians in the Orient.
But France’s hopes were realized only after the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One. The British and French divided the eastern half of the Arab world between themselves, and defeated the forces of the Emir Feisal, who was on the way to founding a unified Arab state out of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.
France was entrusted with mandate authority over the regions of Syria and Lebanon; it preserved the confessional system and buttressed the position of the Maronites by giving them a number of special privileges and bestowing French culture on their children — something that gave them social opportunities unavailable to others.
The hope of a united Arab state emerged again in 1925, with the breakout of an uprising that had been started by the Druze under the leadership of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, calling for the unification of Syrian territories (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine), and their independence. But the French suppressed the Syrian uprising militarily, and they doused the torch of Arab unity by establishing a separate nation for Mount Lebanon.
In 1926, France announced the establishment of the Lebanese Republic, giving it a flag identical to the French flag but with the addition of a cedar tree. Some Maronites dubbed the new nation “Little France”.
After eighteen years, the French mandate over Lebanon came to an end, and it became an independent republic. With that, the Maronites realized that the era of the French empire had passed, so they gravitated towards making alliances with the British. Along with elements from the Sunni, Shia and Druze, it formed what was known in Lebanon’s political history as “the Constitutional Bloc”.
The entity known as Lebanon was effectively born in the embrace of the English in 1943, according to a formula agreed upon between Bishara al-Khouri (Maronite Christian) and Riad al-Solh (Sunni Muslim) that specified that Christians would relinquish their desire to seek protection from “the merciful mother” — as they called France — and emerge from their isolation in order to enter the Arab League. In return, the Muslims would relinquish their aspiration for annexation to Syria or any larger Arab unity.
And according to this unwritten covenant, it was agreed that the chief state positions would be distributed equitably by religious community, and that there would be a ratio of six Christians in parliament to five Muslims. This agreement guaranteed that the president of the republic would be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister would be a Sunni Muslim, and the leader of parliament would be a Shiite Muslim. This arrangement was given the name “the Lebanese equilibrium”.
However, from the beginning, the agreement carried within it the potential for an explosion. For one thing, it wasn’t only a balance of religious communities; at the same time, it was a regional equilibrium, a balancing act among large families, clans and institutions. For another thing, the prominent position the French gave to the Maronites allowed them to flourish. With the arrival of the agreement, it gave them the nation’s five main official positions: president of the republic, head of the army, president of the Deuxième Bureau intelligence office, director general of the National Bank of Lebanon, and director of public security.
Naturally, the upper social classes from the other religious communities, Muslim and Christian, felt cheated, especially the Sunnis, who formed the majority of the population of Beirut, and who from ancient times had worked in business. After their numbers noticeably increased, they also began to sense that they were no longer in the minority.
Thus, the confessional balancing was not a stage on the way to nationhood, but instead was a postponement of it. The nation had become the religious community, or to be more specific, the struggle between religious communities.
Personal status laws proliferated as a result of this situation, until most matters pertaining to the individual came to fall under the jurisdiction of the religious community. Every religious community became a nation within the nation, enjoying a legally recognized status and the right to legislate and to rule on questions of personal status for its members. If an individual wasn’t classified in one of the religious communities, he was deprived of the right to live within the personal status system, and was consequently forbidden from getting married on Lebanese soil.