Samir Kassir
Histoire de Beyrouth
Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2003

Reviewed By Jens Hanssen

Since the end of the Lebanese civil war, Beirut has received an avalanche of articles in serious European and American newspaper columns, glossy travel magazines and television reports which all celebrate the revived joie de vivre in this city of death.[clxxvi] Beirut is narrated as a very trendy Phoenix from the Flames! The glittering downtown area rebuilt in less than ten years, is oozing urban confidence and is portrayed as somehow emblematic of a general positive mood swing, a an inviting, juvenile insouciance in Lebanon.

Of course this is a packaged commodity. On the one hand, much of this hype is based on the economic bubble billionaire and Prime Minister Rafiq al-Harriri blew up. On the other hand it was intellectually sustained by historical myths about Beirut’s blessed geographic position inbetween worlds and the city’s long-standing ability to overcome adversity, natural or self-inflicted. The current renaissance of Beirut invites comparisons and parallels in its long history, a search for previous epochs of resurrection, not least because for many the city stands for the triumphs of Arab modernity but also for its tragedies of self-destruction.

The Beiruti journalist-cum-historian Samir Kassir has set himself the unprecedented task to offer a deep historical perspective on Beirut, and what he has come up with in his monumental Histoire de Beyrouth is a marvelous synthesis of everything we always knew about Beirut’s long history but never had available between the two covers of a single book. In over 700 pages, Samir Kassir offers a tour de force chronology of Beirut from the first time Beirut went on historical record on the famous Tell al-Amarna tablets of the 14th century BC to the beginning of the 21. century. In doing so, the author ably brings together for the first time the results of many recent studies on isolated periods of Beirut’s history but also imports many of the gaps and some inconsistencies in the existing scholarship. Any engagement in Kassir’s book here is therefore a more fundamental assessment of the current state of affairs on Beirut research.

The Question of Urban Continuity

In antiquity, Egyptians, Hittites and – following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Syria – Satrap rivalries turned Beirut into contested territory while the rich historical record attests the town’s hellenization. In 64 BC Beirut fell to Pompei’s Roman legions and by the fourth century A.D. Beirut was “incontestably a Christian city” (p. 64), designated as one of the (many) places where St. George slain the dragon. It prided itself with a renowned Law School which connected the city not only to the intellectual networks of late Antiquity’s great cities, Constantinople and Alexandria but also to the Justinian Code which was compiled by its scholars in 538 and is considered the foundation of civil law in Europe.

Kassir shows us how, time and again, Beirut found itself on the edge of the volatile tectonic plates of religions and sub-civilizations: Roman versus Byzantine Christianity, Sunni and Shia empires, Crusader and Mamluk states, Mongol incursions, Ottoman paramountcy and Druze vassalship. Given the plethora of rulers and empires which Beirut belonged to over the enormous time span from 14th c. BC to 18th AD, what has kept this city together, what constitutes its historical continuity as a city (p.35)? How can we speak of one Beirut today, claim its many epochs – in literature, art and architectural style – as part of a single heritage? Kassir asks, is there “linearity” between periods of openness and tolerance and periods of violence and barbarity? With such talent and such promise destroyed on the altar of sectarianism, how can the historian write the epic story of Beirut other than as tragedy?

1. Cumulative History

The rupture between one regime and its successor, between one epoch and the next was never total. Even after the most devastating blow to Beirut’s urban continuity in the 6th century AD when, just as Beirut was making a mark on the cultural life of Byzantine civilization, multiple earthquakes punished every heroic effort of reconstruction with new, more violent destruction in 551, 554 and 560AD.

Beirut was conquered 19 years after Muhammad left Mecca but it was not until the growing fame of another Beirut-based school of law around Imam `Abd al-Rahman bin `Amr al-Uza`i and his son Muhammad in the second century Hijri that the town made its mark on “the mental geography of Muslims” (p. 73).

The 171 years crusaders’ stay in Beirut was short-lived in the grand scheme of things as Mamluk dynasties filled the vacuum after the ousting of the crusaders. Two Mongol invasions and innumerable epidemics and famines later, Syria in general and Beirut in particular were unstable places and a dangerous trade destination. The Ottoman conquest in 1517 brought peace and prosperity came to provincial towns and port-cities of the Ottoman Empire as transit routes became safer and maritime trade resumed. Gradually, local dynasties emerged within a system of government that continued to remain fiscal, not territorial in nature.

In this context, Samir Kassir introduces the central figure of Lebanese historiography Fakhr al-Din al-Ma``ani not as the founder of modern Lebanon as he is seen still on account of merging Mount Lebanon and coastal Beirut, but as an efficient landholding bureaucrat whose political authority reached so far inland – way beyond the Orontes and Beqa`a valleys that it threatened Damascus’ authority. Like so often in Beirut’s and Lebanon’s history, the quest for autonomy meant not a challenge of Ottoman rule but rivalry with regional powers.

Up to this point then, the temporal and territorial ruptures in Beirut’s political fortunes were neither predictable, nor absolute nor irreversible. What guarantees cities’ stability and continuity is urban myth.

2. Myths and Identity

Rome, Athens and Baghdad are famous cities that suffered enormous ruptures and long periods of lifelessness. From the sacking of Rome in 476AD to the Renaissance, its barely 20.000 inhabitants experienced a thousand lackluster years in the shadows of the monuments of past glory. In the 16th century the popes began to tear these monuments down to make room for history’s greatest urban reconstruction … until Haussmann’s Paris, that is. It may be ironic – though certainly not unique given Solidere’s manners – that this renaissance destroyed most of the remaining memorabilia of the very period it set out to ‘revive.’ The point is that the will to instrumentalize the past created historical linkages and the myth of urban continuity.

In Athens that other great city of Antiquity, this act of instrumentalizing the past took place in the name of nation-building. For centuries, Athens had been an insignificant outback town at the foot of vast archaeological ruins – constant reminders that history had passed on. After a cathartic uprising against the Ottomans in the 1820s, the Concert of Europe imposed a set of new rulers – an odd string of Bavarian kings and the new state’s capital was moved from Nauplion to Athens. Grand Hellenistic construction schemes projected urban continuity and a distinct identity as the cradle of European civilization while historical processes inbetween downplayed as irrelevant to the national project.

Finally, as every American pupil knows, Iraq is considered the cradle of urban civilization – an honour which recently turned into a burden when exiled Iraqis in Washington appealed to president Bush’s elementary wisdom to attack their country. However, unbeknownst to Americans whose textbooks duly traced the unstoppable westward march of civilization, Abbasid Baghdad became the pinnacle of Islamic high culture. Although Baghdad was completely ransacked by Mongol armies in 1258 subsequent Mamluk and Ottoman rulers reinvested heavily in its urban fabric and thus ensured Baghdad’s urban continuity long after Western production of knowledge had abandoned Iraq.

The examples of Rome, Athens and Baghdad show that how ever abrupt cities change or how ever devastating a disaster strikes, the gel that keeps cities coherent historical entities are myths of urban continuity and past glory. There is nothing objectionable about urban myths. Myths are not malicious lies or silly mistakes. Kassir recognizes that the desire to instill a unique identity and loyalty to a place dictates the meaning and relevance of a given historical event. This takes place well after the fact, actually, mostly after historical contiguity has been erased. To study urban myths historically, then, is to trace how people identify with the places they live in how they make sense of it.

One can either reject one myth over another and claim mutually exclusive rights to the city or deconstruct urban myths entirely as the fabrication of the ruling elites to perpetuate their grip on power. Or, as Kassir does so well, one can contextualize urban myths, embed them in their specific historical process and allow history’s cumulative effect free reign. This way, Kassir and other postwar intellectuals allow Beirut to possess a deeply-rooted, authentic identity distinct from both other Arab cities and from Mount Lebanon without taking recourse to cultural exclusivism. This mnemonic strategy presents a place where all the diverse elements of society see themselves reflected in the past. This history heals and is tolerant of the Other.

3. The West: The only engine of modern history?

But if the past serves to give Beirut a stable and authentic essence, what accounts for its history of dynamic transformation in the nineteenth century? Here a methodological problem occurs in Kassir’s Histoire de Beyrouth that is common in scholarship on identity of places that are deemed of the west but not in it. While the first part of the book ascribed “Beyrouth avant Beyrouth” a connective and inclusive identity-endowing quality and function, subsequent parts ascribed modern Beirut the ability and compulsion to imitate and draw in the transformative powers of the West and modernity itself. Whether it be “Entre Rome et Boston” (chapter 8), as “La ville française,” (chapter 12), “petit Paris” (chapter 13), or, of course, the cliché of “La Suisse de l’Orient” (chapter 15), Beirut is declared “a space of Mimetism” (p. 247) where the things copied from the west are material proof of progress and a conscious stepping-out of centuries of unproductive identity accumulation.

If we want to move beyond repeating such clichés of collective memory, we need to find new perspectives and new sources of history – forgotten texts or new archival evidence –that subvert the identitarian master narrative of the history of Beirut. It is particularly urgent because historical documents are hard to get by in Beirut, in part because of wartime destructions, in part because archives are jealously guarded by community guardians lest something untoward about their community is revealed.

In Kassir’s book and in every study he draws upon, the curtains of Beirut’s modern drama open only in the 1830s, when the Egyptian occupation opened up the Eastern Mediterranean to European capitalism, in particular the silk trade, made Beirut the port-city of Damascus and people started to adopt “western customs”. It is certainly true that foreign consulates and companies began to settle in Beirut from this period onwards. As Leila Fawaz’s important study has shown, at mid-century, Beirut was a place where foreigners dominated the economic and political sphere.[clxxvii] The massive influx of Christian refugees into Beirut after the civil war of 1860 – over 10.000 according to Kassir (p. 275) – brought in European relief workers and more missionaries.

However, it has been overlooked that the devastating war which left an estimated 12,000 Ottoman subjects dead, also ushered in a deep crisis for the imperial government in Istanbul and pushed it to accelerate provincial and municipal reforms. And this they did with considerable success. Thus, by 1871, the British consul cabled to his superior in Istanbul that “the days when Governor Generals trembled before Consular Dragomans had passed  - never it is hoped, to return … no Governor General would submit to the subserviency of a Consul which was common twenty years ago.”[clxxviii]

Zuqaq al-Blat; Cradle of Arab Modernity

After 1860, social relations were caught up in what Kassir calls a “cold war of the communities.” It was “the fruit of minority militarism” (p. 278-80) and exacerbated by the cult of the qabaday (p. 280-284). Meanwhile well-to-do Beirut was concentrated a world apart in the beautiful east Beirut quarter of Gemayzeh. Here the Sursuqs, Bustrus and the Trads built giant palaces and generally upheld the virtues of liberalism in trade and leisure.

Christian Gemayze continues to epitomize our view of historical Beirut thanks to the forty years of preservation activism by Lady Cochraine. However, the constant search for urban continuity, in particular the search for physical traces of it, denies that the history of Gemayze does not represent all of nineteenth-century Beirut and that its wealthy inhabitants took little part in non-economic aspects of modern Arabic literary production other than fund it occasionally. Any serious examination of the urban geography of the nahda al-`arabiyya reveals that not Gemayze but Zuqaq al-Blat – little-known and much-destroyed during the civil war of 1975 – was the centre of modern Arab literature, culture and education in the nineteenth century.

It was here that the Yazijis developed Modern Standard Arabic as we know it, taught and wrote about Ottoman, Arab and Syrian patriotism. Butrus and Salim Bustani pondered the centrality of their country in the global economy as well as the geographical division of labour between ‘Bab’ Beirut and ‘Batn’ Syria (which for them included Mt. Lebanon) in the 1880s.[clxxix] `Abd al-Qadir al-Qabbani and Khalil Sarkis, the publishers of the two main newspapers, Thamarat al-Funun and Lisan al-Hal, lived here. Al-Imam Shaykh Muhammad `Abduh found asylum among the literati of Zuqaq al-Blat when he was exiled by Lord Cromer in 1882.

It was here that the Maqasid was founded, and where the Wataniyya, Sultaniyya, `Uthmnaniyys and Patrakiya Schools were located, four of the most prestigious secondary schools in Bilad al-Sham. Even the Syrian Protestant College was located here in its first four years of operation before it moved to the barren lands of Ras Bayrut in 1870.[clxxx] When Kassir talks about the emblematic openness, cosmopolitanism and intellectual fervor of nineteenth-century Beirut, they mean confessionally mixed Zuqaq al-Blat but credit Christian Gemayze.

During the French Mandate period, Lebanese nationalists realized that they needed Arab nationalism to get rid of the French but needed the French connection to maintain autonomy vis à vis a Syrian or Arab entity. In the light of the above, it is not surprising, then, that another long-term resident of Zuqaq al-Blat, Michel Chiha, should base the most accepted version of Lebanese nationalism on the notion that historically Lebanon has been an open Mediterranean society rather than a closed mountainous one or an undifferentiated Arab one.

The Chimera of Mimetism

From the chapters on the Mandate period onwards (p. 300-494), Kassir is most interested in national politics and tourism as a historical force of cultural change. Despite interesting enumerations of intellectual circles, avantgarde publications and political parties during the 1930s, Beirut’s apparent imitation of Paris is the driving force of urban history behind which all else recedes into the background. “Parisianism” – a sub-theme of westernization and apparently a Beirut-specific form of ‘mimetism’ – is the process of cultural diffusion by which all of Beirut imitates some Parisian way of life. Thus Beirut assimilates into a pre-existing Western modernity which itself is apparently unaffected by its encounter with the East.

All of this was made possible by “the arrival of technical civilization” in Beirut. According to Kassir, this brought about individualism and the emancipation of the self from deep traditions. The implications of this logic are, of course, both highly problematic and paradoxical because in Kassir’s story Beirutis became free-thinking citizens by copying the West!

In this lengthy middle part in particular, Kassir’s valuable points about Beirut’s recurrent contributions to Arab modernity were overshadowed by pages and pages on cinemas, bikinis, fast cars, party zones and other frivolities of westernization. The more one reads on, one cannot help but think that this is not actually a study of urban history! Beirut seems incidental to national, regional and international politics, in particular where there are scholarly gaps on Beirut – most glaringly its significant municipal history. Thus there is never any real sense how Beirut worked as a city, how it was financed or taxed. Towards the end Kassir’s book veers off into a consumers’ guide for tourists who like to relive the roaring sixties and who share with his generation the paradoxical idea that tourists brought cosmopolitanism to Beirut (p. 363-9).

A pladoyer for Municipal history

Kassir’s book largely ignores the crucial history of Beirut’s municipality. This gap is understandable because no academic research on this important aspect of modern Beirut had been available to the author. But Kassir dismisses the Beirut municipality as a powerless institution and bases this claim on the myth that Beirut was modeled on Paris which also famously lacked municipal authority for the longest time (p. 499). To take a gap in the extant literature as a lack in Beirut’s history is a grave error. To argue this point through a weak analogy with Paris only makes it worse.

The flipside of Beirut’s alleged Parisianization is Lebanonization (p. 402). It is true that the post-1860 the refugees from Damascus and Mount Lebanon have contributed to an atmosphere of fear and loathing in Beirut where sectarian identity – to paraphrase Samir Khalaf – became both emblem and armor. However, it is necessary to acknowledge that unlike the Mutasarrifiyya of Mt. Lebanon, Beirut’s main institution of government, the municipal council, was not institutionalized into confessional quotas (what is referred to in Lebanon as the “sitta sitta mukarran” logic) until the French Mandate period.

A chart of the composition of first one hundred popularly elected municipal councilors between 1868 and 1908 demonstrates how widely the religious affiliations of its twelve members oscillated. Generally, elections which were held every two years for six councilors were based on a combination of residential and confessional factors. Two things stand out from the chart: first, although Sunni, Greek Orthodox and Maronite representation was strongest throughout, the ratio of the communities was not predetermined and fluctuated greatly. Second, unlike municipal councils in Istanbul and Alexandria, after 1877 foreigners were barred from municipal elections in Beirut.

It is impossible to write a history of modern Beirut without an assessment of who was elected to the municipal council, how it operated and how it defended the interests of the city against European capitalism and colonialism, and against the Ottoman imperial government. Only a deep understanding of Beirut’s checkered municipal history from Ottoman elitism to French sectarianism to independent PanArabism can offer a critical perspective on the current urban crisis of Lebanon’s capital.

Jens Hanssen is Assistant Professor in Middle East and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. This article first appeared in Arabic in Mulhaq al-Nahar (665) December 5, 2004 under the title “al-Wa`i al-tarikhi fi-Bayrut.”