“homeland” in a part of the Ottoman empire which had hitherto been a homeland for Jews, Muslims and
Christians. Oddly, Lebanon survived with more freedom than most of its Arab neighbours. The primary
task of government, Makdisi points out, was “to harmonise relations between communities, not
democratise relations between individual secular citizens.” To Arab thinkers in Beirut and Damascus,
including many Christians, ‘Arabism’ should be defined “not by ethnicity, blood or race...but by a common
culture”.
All essays must have their end. Makdisi’s conclusion is scarcely optimistic: “At the very moment...when the
vexed question of Muslim and non-Muslim appeared to have finally exhausted itself, at the cost of great
human suffering and displacement in Turkey and the Balkans, British-backed Zionism obsessively and
aggressively demarcated Jew from non-Jew. Colonial Zionism, in effect, created an “Arab’ question in
Palestine and a ‘Jewish’ one in the Mashriq [sic] where neither had previously existed.” This may be a little
too innocent, even twee.
Suspected Isis and Taliban militants are
brought before media during a press conference
in Jalalabad (AFP/Getty)Certainly, Makdisi does not avoid the creation of the Arab dictatorships. “The tragedy of the military
nationalists in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt,” he writes, “was that their commitment to revolution was far more
energetically manifested in their construction of post-colonial security regimes than it was in building
postcolonial democratic secular states.” The founder of the Arab Unity Studies Centre in Beirut, Khair El-
Din Haseeb – a former governor of the Iraqi Central Bank, tortured and jailed by the Baathists until he
wisely took exile in Lebanon – wrote that “the secular reformist impetus within the postcolonial Arab world
had been overwhelmed by the ‘officer’s cap and the sheikh’s turban’.
In other words, while the military men destroyed modern Arab politics, Islamists threatened to destroy
modern Arab culture. Mosques and churches could stand in this sparse environment. Political parties and
trade unions were smashed. One of the great late 19th-century Lebanese intellectuals, Boutros Boustani, a
Christian translator of the Bible into Arabic, founded a school for Maronite Christian, Sunni and Shia
Muslim children to educate pupils in a non-religious environment. In his self-financed newspaper, he
preached that knowledge led to enlightenment which led, in turn, to “the death of fanaticism and the birth
of ideals held in common ... the fundamental cause of the trouble was the intolerance that is born of
ignorance, and that the only way to peace among the sects lay across the untilled field of knowledge.”
Or, as we would say today with Blairite repetition: education, education, education. Perhaps that is why
Lebanon, the most educated population in the Arab world, recovered from its 15-year civil war in the late
20th century. Humanist education remains the watchword of Tarif Khalidi. It’s a lonely battle in a landscape
of generals and autocrats who will use history but never acknowledge its lessons. That is why the Sharif
Hussains and the King Faisals and the Salibis and the Boustanis and the Makdisis are so valuable.
Then I am reminded of a walk along a Manhattan pavement during the Iraqi civil war atrocities after the