Jasmine and Fire (33 page)

On my fifth day, I take a break from work and decide to do some exploring. First I take a half-hour walk along the two-lane road that leads north from Amsheet to a bakery I’d heard about, called Furn al Sabaya. It’s down a twisty path that leads away from the road, and is marked only by a small sign in Arabic. The place is run by four sisters who bake using organic flours and who, among their specialties, have perfected an unusual dessert and also invented meatless versions of Middle Eastern meat pies. The bakery has a few shaded seats on a patio and some gingham-covered tables inside, and I sit chatting with one of the bakers as she steers me to what I should try. I find I’m not wild about the meatless
lahmbajin
flatbread, the ground meat replaced here with bits of crunchy wheat, but what I do instantly love is the
muwarraka
pastry that the bakery is known for, made with layers of phyllo dough wrapped around a filling of crushed walnuts and sugar, then rolled, shaped into a long cylinder, and twisted around and around like a coiled snake. I munch on the crisp, salty-sweet
muwarraka as I walk back out to the road and follow it to the main Amsheet town intersection.

My path forks from there along an uphill road that leads into the hills of Amsheet, dotted with spectacular old houses overlooking the sea way down below, through purple jacaranda trees and pink hibiscus bushes. This time my walk takes more than an hour, and when I reach the top, I wind around through quiet residential streets and stop to look at houses built in the nineteenth century by the rich silk merchants who once lived here. The houses are made of yellow or white stone and have classic Lebanese features: balconies with wrought-iron railings in a variety of colors and designs—mint green, or lavender, or turquoise, with straight or swirled bars—and those arch-topped windows capped with fan-shaped glass that I hope never disappear from houses in this country. The views down across the valley and toward the sea are breathtaking.

A thought blows through my mind:
I love Lebanon. I really love it here
.

What does it mean, to love a country? Especially a place like Lebanon, which doesn’t always make it so easy. Is loving your country the same as nationalism? My feelings for Lebanon—admittedly stronger on some days than others—seem more visceral than ideological. My love of Lebanon is not love for the idea of Lebanon, or in any case not the way the country was envisioned in the early twentieth century as a protected Christian homeland, or the way it’s currently run. In any case, I’ve always had trouble with the idea of nationalism, anywhere. I understand that nations can’t function without the loyalty of their citizens, but nationalism seems to me a lot like organized religion. Do I have to believe this
is a great country, just because I was told to as a child, or because I was raised here?

But despite its past or present political baggage, Lebanon is an enormously diverse and complex place, a country with phenomenal—if mostly abused so far—potential as a meeting place for a great variety of cultures and ideas and ways of life. It also covers an undeniably beautiful patch of land. And the truth is, I do love this patch of land, even more now than ever before. I might love other countries, too, and believe in some of their political ideologies more than I believe in Lebanon’s dysfunctional system at the moment. But I love what Lebanon could be, if it could ever clean up its political mess. If it could ever start putting its incredible diversity, talent, and beauty to better use.

And I do love this coastline, and these hills and valleys and mountains and trees and flowers, and this sea. Always this sea.

I return
to Beirut on a mid-May weekend so I can show up at a political demonstration I’ve been hearing about, scheduled for that Sunday. I almost never go to demonstrations in New York, a reflex left over from my Berkeley days, when my friends were always en route to one protest or another and the contrarian part of me got bored with the everyone’s-an-activist culture. I’m not exactly proud of this. But here, the more I complain about the endlessly murky, corrupt political system, the more I feel I should walk the walk a little more. Adding one more body to a thin crowd of Lebanese optimists feels, even if it’s hopeless, still somehow vital.

On Sunday morning, I walk down to the Corniche to join the rally, calling for a secular political system in Lebanon. It’s organized by a group called Laïque Pride (
laïque
means “secular”), responsible for organizing the first big demonstration for the
cause last spring. This time last year Lebanon’s secularist movement—it also goes by the terms
antisectarian
or
anticonfessional—
was a mostly low-profile idea. This year it’s picking up momentum, partly because the revolutions around the Arab world have inspired more vigorous stock taking in Lebanon, along the lines of:
We may not have a dictatorship here, but it’s time to get rid of the religion-based division of power
.

Another secularist organization called Isqat al Nizam (Down with the System) has recently been setting up a daily stand in front of the Ministry of the Interior headquarters. The group also held a few well-attended rallies of several thousand people while I was visiting California this spring. The time seems ripe—maybe, finally—for the secularism movement to get some traction.

The Laïque Pride rally today is a march, starting from a central spot along the Corniche near the huge McDonald’s and the Hard Rock Café, heading to downtown and the parliament building. It’s a strong turnout on this Sunday afternoon, at least several thousand people, it looks like—teens up through the elderly, and families with their kids, and women in the hijab and others in skimpy tank tops, and stray passersby joining up midway, a whole eclectic mass. Banners with secularist messages are everywhere, hand-written or produced on fancy print-shop computers. The Laïque Pride organizers, a small group of men and women who look to be in their late twenties and early thirties, are sitting on the back of a pickup truck at the front of the crowd, holding megaphones and chanting:
“Shoo deenak? Ma khassak!”
What’s your religion? None of your business! The whole troupe of us marches, following the truck and chanting, for the hour it takes to walk slowly through the streets that run from the starting point on the waterfront and into the center of downtown.

The confidence and momentum of the crowd keeps gathering strength along the way, with alternating hollers of
“Shoo deenak? Makhassak”
and
“Al sha’ab urid, isqat al nizam,”
“The people want the fall of the system,” a chant inspired by the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. We also call out a plea to parliament members to vote yes on draft legislation to update the personal status law. That change would allow mixed-sect couples like Mona and Jia-Ching to wed in Lebanon in a civil marriage, instead of having to convert or marry outside the country, and could open the way for more secular-minded legislation.

Even though the Lebanese government still seems a long way from turning secular, the concept itself isn’t new in Lebanon. It sprang to life and died a quick death over and over again before and during the civil war; the treaty drawn up to end the war, 1989’s Taif Accord, specified a phase in which Lebanon would do away with the sectarian quotas in government and move toward a nonsectarian system. But this obviously hasn’t happened yet, and beyond the renewed calls from activists and the occasional politician, it seems nowhere near happening.

Ending the religion-based system that is strangling the Lebanese government won’t be nearly as linear as the process, however long and arduous, that led to Mubarak’s fall in Egypt. As usual in Lebanon, when it comes to making changes, there are no credible strategies yet, a scant few inspiring political candidates to back, and no immediate hope of making real and sustained progress. Getting rid of the sectarian system is, for the time being, still a somewhat utopian goal. No politician is backing it in any vocal or significant way. Sectarianism is too deeply ingrained, the habit of thinking in terms of one’s own tribe—Maronite, Sunni, Shiite, Druze, Orthodox, Protestant, or whatnot; Christian or
Muslim—is simply second nature to too many Lebanese. Electing politicians who profess loyalty to various sects is still widely seen as the only way to avoid persecution and advocate for day-to-day basic needs (electricity, water, and so on) in the various religious enclaves. Not to mention that most political and religious figureheads of every sect in Lebanon gain too much from the status quo; marriage procedures, for instance, currently require red tape that’s simply too lucrative for the priests and imams and religious powers-that-be to surrender without stubborn resistance.

Some of those skeptical about getting rid of Lebanon’s religion-based setup argue that a secular one-person-one-vote system that does away with the prearranged distribution of power among religious groups would be doomed. That it would, for instance, allow a radical Islamist government to take over, if Shiites are now the most populous group, as most estimates guess, and if the conservative or Hezbollah-supporting voices among them end up winning. Or else a right-wing Sunni regime could take over, if conservative Sunni politicians were to win. Or else a Muslim-baiting Christian administration could end up running the government—although Christians are by virtually all estimates no longer a majority, so a secular Lebanon would mean the long-overdue end of a locked-in Christian presidency.

It’s a tangled issue on all fronts, with no easy way forward. But even if I have my doubts that getting rid of sectarianism is a realistic goal anytime soon, showing up at the Laïque Pride rally, and marching and chanting with the crowd, felt like an adrenaline kick.

But, funny thing about Sunday’s Laïque Pride rally: even though it drew a big crowd—around ten thousand, according to an estimate in the French-language Beirut daily
L’Orient—Le
Jour
—and even though it blocked the streets in a busy part of the city and drew tons of attention from passersby and drivers trying to get through, there was virtually no other coverage of the march apart from that article in the paper. Why? Because the Laïque Pride rally happened to take place on May 15, the anniversary of the establishment of Israel as a state in 1948—commemorated across the Arab world as Nakba Day, the “day of catastrophe,” when millions of Palestinians were dispossessed of their land.

Thousands of Palestinians and other sympathetic protesters from around the Arab world marched from Lebanon and Syria to the Israeli border on Sunday, and although the Nakba protests were nonviolent and the demonstrators unarmed, some of them tried to breach the border. Israeli soldiers shot at them and killed fourteen protesters and injured more than one hundred. It was major news internationally. The antisectarian march in Beirut? Barely a blip on the radar of the local media.

Shortly after the Laïque Pride and Nakba Day rallies, I’m scrolling through QifaNabki.com, a blog run by a Lebanese graduate student at Harvard. The writer says he “couldn’t help but notice the sad juxtaposition of the two marches scheduled for last Sunday,” and adds: “A friend of mine regularly chides me for imagining that any of Lebanon’s problems will ever be solved before the Arab-Israeli conflict is settled. On days like yesterday, I think he’s probably right.”

That
following Monday I was planning to leave Beirut again and start the second half of my rural exile; I’d decided to go back to Marjeyoun, my great-uncle Cecil’s town down south. He and Zelfa are back in London now and the house is empty, but they’d left me a set of keys in case I ever wanted to return. Since the town
is right near the Israeli border, I decide to postpone my trip by a few days, to see if the Nakba Day events will ignite any further violence down south.

Meanwhile I sign on to take a road trip with my cousin Josette and aunt Marcelle up to Akkar, a region in the far north of Lebanon, considered an eternity away by most Beirutis. If you’re Lebanese and not from Akkar, you’ve probably never been there, even though it’s just two and a half hours by car from Beirut. This week a group called the Association for Protecting Natural Sites and Old Buildings has organized a rare free tour to take anyone interested up to Akkar to visit Tell Arqa, a hill thought to have been inhabited by a series of ancient civilizations and currently the site of a major archaeological dig, and to see the spectacular forests and waterfalls farther north.

When I arrive that morning to meet Josette and my aunt at the departure site, in front of a church in Achrafieh, I find three vans waiting to take the signed-up guests. From what I can tell, the crowd gathered in front of the vans is virtually all Lebanese. I overhear only one foreigner, a French graduate student studying at AUB.

The roads winding up from Beirut to the far north are dicey in parts, and the drive is tiring and sometimes treacherous, so even though the trip isn’t so long, it makes sense that car-weary Lebanese who have never been to Akkar would jump at the chance to take a rare, not to mention free, sightseeing bus tour up there. The organization hosting the tour normally sets aside just one van for its various trips around the country, but apparently more people than expected were interested in seeing Tell Arqa and the Akkar landscape. When we arrive at Tell Arqa, the vans let us out, and we climb up a steep hill covered in pink thistles and red poppies.
An archaeologist from the Sorbonne, the university sponsoring the dig, is waiting for us at the top.

He explains that the dig is attempting to uncover houses and artifacts dating back thousands of years, to the ancient Romans and beyond. Right now only some stone structures are visible in the dug-out sections of the hill, possibly used at one time as baths or rooms. Even though ruins of ancient civilizations are scattered up and down the eastern Mediterranean—and construction sites in Beirut still often turn up stone formations from centuries or millennia ago—Tell Arqa seems to hold extensive and still-unexcavated remnants of past civilizations. It feels like a rare privilege to be here as the dig is under way. Depending on what they find here, I wonder if one day in the near future, Tell Arqa will become as important a stop in Lebanon as Baalbek or Byblos.