The work took up all of Khaled’s time but he refused Danny’s offer of a full-time position with Fatah and decided to keep on working at the bakery. Like his uncle, he disliked the chaos of Fatah with its blocs linked to the founding fathers. In fact he went even further in his position on this because he’d been raised in the Popular Front and had learned the necessity of iron discipline from the pupils of Dr. George Habash. Still, he found something irresistibly attractive in Dr. Othman’s eloquence and Danny’s culture and therefore decided to amalgamate his organization with their Fatah-affiliated group, unaware that it was closely linked to Abu Jihad — was, in fact, his leftist arm within that forest of diverse ideological arms that this leader knew how to exploit for a variety of functions, creating a breathtaking concord out of their ideological contradictions.
Khaled made no attempt to destroy the legend of his uncle the martyr. He had his reservations about the chaotic, off-the-cuff methods used by the hero of the Qubbeh district in leading his boys and was critical, especially, of the October 15 uprising against the increase in electricity charges, which had led to his uncle’s imprisonment and death. The rebellion indicated a naïve faith in the spontaneity of the masses, for while Yahya had been directing, from his hiding place in an apartment in Qubbeh, the groups of young men who threw explosive devices in the streets and in front of the Qadisha power station, he was also waiting for the people to rise and assume power in the city. But the people, instead of going out onto the streets, were terrified by the explosions and hid in their houses, so that in the end Yahya found himself besieged in his hideout. He tried to shoot his way out but was wounded in the stomach, taken captive, and condemned to death, the sentence being reduced subsequently to ten years. He died in prison three years after his arrest.
Abu Rabia had wanted to make October 15, 1971, a turning point in the history of the city. The Akkar peasants’ revolution had evaporated following the intervention of the Syrian-controlled Sa’iqa organization at the point when the peasants’ anti-feudalist struggle had appeared to be in danger of taking on a sectarian dimension, as though it were between Sunnis and Alawites. This had forced Yahya to withdraw from the area in which he’d believed he could establish the nucleus for a Guevarist revolution. He’d returned to Qubbeh, where he succeeded in restoring his image as a popular hero when a cholera epidemic broke out in the city. The Ministry of Health, whose duty it was to vaccinate all inhabitants free of charge, started distributing the vaccine to clients and supporters of the minister, who sold it on the black market. Faced with a worsening situation, Abu Rabia and a group of his boys took to making armed break-ins into pharmacies and the Ministry of Health headquarters and distributing the vaccine free to clinics. And Abu Rabia turned the bakery he’d inherited from his father into a vaccination center, to which people came in droves.
Following this experience, Yahya put on a display of political strength in the city, exploiting a festival held in honor of the anniversary of the death of Egyptian president Abdel Nasser. He brought in tractor-loads of his peasant supporters from Akkar chanting slogans against capitalism and feudalism and threatening a workers’ and peasants’ revolution.
In the wake of these two experiences, Yahya had become convinced that the time was ripe to proclaim the revolution. He wrote in his memoirs of “the necessity of depending on the principal of the Guevarist nucleus and of linking it to the factory workers’ struggle” via the Socialist Popular Rally. Yahya’s understanding was that the strike against the Qadisha Electrical Company would make it possible for the revolutionary nucleus to work in the city, and so he decided to proclaim the popular uprising.
In the event, however, things went in the opposite direction. “Authority can be overturned only through the building of a parallel authority, so Lenin taught us, and that was the reason for the failure of the uprising,” said Danny.
Khaled didn’t ask how a parallel authority was to be built or who would build it, or whether this new authority would be less repressive than its predecessor. Khaled was content to listen to Danny theorizing and drawing up plans, while vehemently refusing organizational interference by anyone.
“Khaled is like his uncle,” Danny wrote in a report he submitted to Dr. Othman, “but more aware and disciplined, and will probably meet with the same end.”
When Yahya went to prison with a bullet in his stomach he believed his time there would be an opportunity to take some rest. He was therefore overjoyed to meet Dr. Sadeq Jalal Azm, a Syrian Marxist intellectual living in Lebanon who’d been put in prison because of his book A Critique of Religious Thought.
In a letter to his wife, Hayat, Yahya wrote, “Yesterday, after being transferred to Ramal Prison in Beirut, I met Dr. Sadeq Azm in the dispensary and we had the following dialogue:
“ ‘You’re Dr. Sadeq Azm, author of Self-Criticism after the Defeat, aren’t you?’
“ ‘Yes, I’m Sadeq Azm. How did you know who I was?’
“ ‘I read your book.’
“ ‘You read my book? What’s your name?’
“ ‘I’m Yahya Nabulsi from Tripoli, leader of the Qubbeh uprising.’
“I was astonished to find that he knew a lot about me and was sympathetic to our movement but said we had to join a revolutionary party that could lead our struggle.
“I told him there weren’t any revolutionary parties in Lebanon or the region. He nodded and then asked me to read about the experiences of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets that had been founded by the Democratic Front in the city of Irbid in Jordan in 1970.
“I said the experiment had been a failure. He agreed with me and then asked if I’d read his book and when I told him I’d read it three times because it was the most important book to come out after the June defeat, I felt it made him happy. Then he asked me what had got me into prison and said he was charged with attacking religion and exciting sectarian tensions because of his book on the critique of religious thought.
“Meeting him, Hayat, was incredible. What a great man! An intellectual who’s gone to prison for his ideas. I told him when I got out of prison I’d like to invite him to visit us in Qubbeh. He asked how long my sentence was and I told him ten years, but I’d be getting out sooner than that. I asked how long his was and he said he hadn’t been referred for trial yet but was expecting a sentence no shorter than mine.
“I kept thinking to myself, what is this world? What is the value of thought in this society? Nothing. What does it mean that Sadeq Azm is sent to prison for publishing his book A Critique of Religious Thought? They talk of blasphemy? Of atheism? The coming revolution will not forgive the reactionaries who exploit innocent souls in the name of religion.”
Sadeq Azm’s book had caused a major fuss in Beirut at the time. The attack had focused on the Syrian writer for his authorship of an essay included in the book and entitled “The Devil’s Tragedy.” In this he had supposed, as a way of buttressing his deconstruction of religious texts, that the Devil, in refusing to obey God’s command to bow down to Adam, was carrying out God’s hidden purpose and that he had agreed to be the rebel and take the consequences out of extreme obedience. The Muslim men of religion had considered this mockery and sarcasm, while their Christian counterparts had joined the campaign against him because of another study in the same book in which he mocked the Virgin’s appearances in Egypt, describing them as a naïve compensation mechanism for the June 1967 defeat.