Movement of the Dispossessed: See Amal militia.
Nasser, Gamal Abdel (1918–70): Fiery, charismatic president of the Republic of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. As the foremost champion of Arab nationalism and a vocal proponent of Arab unity, Nasser was an inspiring political leader for a generation of Arabs in newly independent nations of the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s. He enacted sweeping nationalization programs and ran a repressive regime domestically.
Phalangist Party: A right-wing Christian party (and militia) founded in 1937 by Pierre Gemayel. Dominated by the Gemayel clan, the Phalangists became a major force on the Christian side during the civil war, and strenuously opposed the Palestinian presence in Lebanon.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP): Soviet-backed Marxist — Leninist Palestinian resistance group founded and led by George Habash. At the time, the second largest organization in the PLO after Fatah.
Ravagers: An Israeli term for Palestinian militants.
Saad, Maaruf (1910–1975): A popular Sunni politician from Sidon who was allied with the Lebanese left and with Nasserism. He championed local opposition to the monopolistic privileges granted to Camille Chamoun’s Protein Company. In late February 1975, he was shot — possibly by a Lebanese Army sniper — during a protest and died a few weeks later. His death became a rallying cry for the Lebanese left and Palestinians opposed to the Lebanese government, and was one of the triggers for the outbreak of civil war that spring.
Sahat al-Burj Square: Sahat al-Burj, meaning “Tower Square”, was a central square named for its clock-tower. It was later renamed Martyrs’ Square, but the neighborhood around it was notorious for brothels.
Sa’iqa: A Palestinian militia led by Zuhayr Muhsin formed and controlled by Syria’s Baathist regime.
Salam, Sa’ib (1905–2000): Sunni Lebanese political leader who served as prime minister several times from the 1950s to 1972. During the civil war, he was a major ally of the Saudis in Lebanon.
Sentinels: See Mourabitoun.
Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP): A proto-fascist political party founded in 1932 explicitly modeled on European fascist groups, and promoting a national identity encompassing much of the territory historically known as Syria.
tarbush: The fez. Round red cap with a flat top commonly worn by men in the Middle East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Tigers: Short for “Tigers of the Liberals” (Numur al-Ahrar), they were a militia linked to the National Liberal Party, part of the rightist, Christian Lebanese National Forces coalition during the civil war.
zaatar: Arabic for ‘‘oregano’’. Also the name given to a spice mix used to flavor bread or olive oil.
Acknowledgments
Behind every book there are always other books, and people other than the author.
Whether through practical assistance or moral support, this book owes its existence to my wife, as well as Ra’uf Mas’ad, Mohi al-Labad and Muhammad Berrada.
As for the books, they are: Lebanon’s War, edited by Galal Mahmud and photographed by Abd al-Razzaq al-Said, who lost his life while doing his job following the Israeli destruction of West Beirut in 1982 (Dar al-Masarra, 1977); Diaries of the Lebanese War (Center for Planning Affiliated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, 1977); The Lebanese Crisis, by a group of scholars (The Arab League Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1978); The Great Bloodletting of Lebanon, by Sami Mansur (Cairo Arab Center, 1981); Tell Zaatar (Palestinian Women’s Union, 1977); The Litani Operation, by Ashraf Elias Shufani (Occupied Palestine magazine, 1978); The Tragedy of Lebanon, by Jonathan Randal (Hogarth Press, 1983); Autumn of Fury, by Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal (Beirut, 1983); The War and the Experience of the Lebanese National Movement, by Muhsin Ibrahim (Beirut al-Masaa, 1983); articles by Bakr al-Sharqawi in the magazine Ruz al-Yusuf, 1976, and articles by ’Isam Sharih in the magazine al-Duha, 1982; Capucci, by Haydar Haydar (Ibn Rushd, 1978); Good Morning, Nation! by Ra’uf Mas’ad (Matbu’at al-Qahira, 1983); People Under Siege, by Mahjub Umar (Dar al-Arabi, 1983); Pages from the Boy’s Workbook, by Hani Fahas (Dar al-Kalima, 1979); Beirut’s Nightmares, by Ghada Samman; Zahra’s Story, by Hanan al-Shaykh; Little Mountain, by Elias Khoury; and “Beirut — Up From the Rubble,” by William S. Ellis with photographs by Steve McCurry, National Geographic, February, 1983.
And thanks to my friends who were kind enough to read the manuscript and offer their opinions on it: Saad al-Din Hasan, Ghanim Bibi, Nadia Muhammad Yusuf, Yusra Nasrallah, as well as others whom circumstances do not allow me to name.
Sonallah Ibrahim, December 1983
Translator’s Afterword
It has been a privilege to translate Sonallah Ibrahim’s Beirut, Beirut, not only because it is a powerful work by a major author, but because it successfully blurs the genres of journalism and fiction, blending the rigor of the former with the narrative demands of the latter. Is this a work of fiction with a heavy dose of names and facts? Or is it a history lesson (like Antoinette’s film) in the guise of a novel? Either way we view Beirut, Beirut, it is obvious that Ibrahim’s own journalism background informs his approach to fiction, as it does in his other novels. As Robyn Creswell has pointed out in a 2013 profile of Sonallah Ibrahim in the New Yorker, “Ibrahim’s fictions are full of real or invented documents. They stick out of the surrounding text like exposed structural beams, as if he were purposefully drawing our attention to the archival labor involved in writing.”
The “archival labor” that Ibrahim put into Beirut, Beirut — with its tallies of civilian deaths, its enumeration of war crimes, and its revealing cinematic anecdotes — is amply demonstrated by his frequent quotations from headlines and the list of sources he includes at the end of the book. The republication of this novel in 2014 offers us an outsider’s contemporary view of the destructiveness and brutality that overtook Lebanon during a decade-and-a-half of civil war. What struck me most as I translated it is how it offers a window into a historical event that is at once very familiar and increasingly distant. On the one hand, the web of political relationships that launched and prolonged the Lebanese Civil War — a pattern of internal sectarian divisions manipulated by regional and international powers for their own ends — is a familiar one in our time. At the same time, the geopolitical alignments of late 1980 (the period when the novel is set) seem quite remote: the left/right affiliations of the various factions, for example, reflected an overarching Cold War reality that no longer sets an agenda for global politics. At the same time, Islamist political groups are notably absent among the factions the narrator describes and encounters.
Because so much of the book involves real events and public figures, the translation has involved a good deal of research on my part. I have made use of the author’s list of sources in order to locate and use the original wording of excerpts taken from those sources originally published in English.