The French Language in Lebanon

                                   by Dr Dennis Walker, CRS Monash University [email: dnnchdh@gmail.com]

                           I have just spent two months in Lebanon, mainly in the Jabal (Mountain) area with the kind hospitality of the Maronite monastries of Ghusta and Kafifan, researching plural cultures and movements among the Maronites up until

1925.  It is a rich intellectual and literary heritage still understood only in simplified ways in the West and its academia. 

                           Following World War I, the Maronites were divided.  After the trauma and famine during that conflict, most Maronites were in no shape

to think or agitate about politics, Yet a surprising number did.  This sharp interest in politics has always been a central aspect of the Maronite Lebanese. 

                           The brutal choice was whether (a) to take a risk of standing with King Faysal and the Arab nationalists in Damascus --- the issue was whether they could trust Arfab Muslims after 1860 and the World War I famine --- OR (b) opt for a mandate under the bled and exhausted French whose language quite a few Maronites had learned but with concealed opponents among them..

                           I have left Lebanon with a folio of issues of the magazine _La Revue Phoeniciene_ published  by a circle of Lebanese nationalists after World War I who had chosen France.  I found it relaxing reading.  The French style was clear with articles on French literature that took in even writers in medieval French such as Villon.  Some of these Lebanese had learned a range of aspects of the people who produced that language: it was an acquired language for Lebanese Christians but some of them were not just in iFrench language for what they could get out of it in commerce or politics --- the money and jobs.

                          _La Revue Phoeniciene_ published  quite a quantity of poetry in French.  It was a particularist-nationalist poetry that detailed the national scenery and vegetation of the Lebanese Homeland.  There was some real lyricism about it.  _La Revue Phoeniciene_ published articles assessing the economic and trading resources and prospects of Lebanon, hoping that Mandatory France could oversee and guide the capacity of the Lebanese to develop their country and achieve Progress.

                          The attitudes of French officials by the mid-1920s had lost them any support from most Lebanese including Maronite Patriarch Ilyas Butrus al-Huwayyik who had supported a take-over by them to the Western powers at the Versailles Peace Conference.  Yet France provided a Constitution and carved out communications that enabled the Lebanese to advance to independence as a relatively modern polity.  It was a stated marred by structural sectarianism which most Lebanese had preferred, and the French only ratified.  Overall, the French deserve some credit for providing some of the means that Lebanon needed to advance into modernity.

 Researcher on Christians in Lebanon.

                               I am an Australian,  although Celtic and a pensioner, and thus not like our current leader whom Monash students love. Abbott is our fellow-Australian. But unlike him I pray that Scotland will free itself forever from England in the imminent referendum.  Our England-born Prime Minister Anthony Abbott, though, has used the name of our multi-ethnic country to advise Scots to reject the statehood now very close to them.  “As a friend of Britain, as an observer from afar, it's hard to see how the world would be helped by an independent Scotland”.  

                                   It may at any rate help the Scots wrest back for good their national languages Lallans --- and the Gaelic which is now the medium, after forty years of unremitting Anglo-Saxon ridicule and race-hate as Scots built, of a full-scale modern university.  Contribute to the world?  In Australia --- certainly.  The rich Gaelic culture that independent Scotland will pen will be for us Celts here also.  And after Scotland gives the English their marching orders back to the provenance-homeland of the minds even our Anglo ultras here may just start taking Scots-Australians and Irish-Australians a bit seriously, at last, also.

                                   Anglomorph Australian culture continues to despise Celts although muting the race-hate it bellowed before 1945 . An example is the article  “Clan Turnbull again at odds with Tony Abbott, this time over Scottish independence”, published by Tony Wright in _The Australian_ of August 19, 2014.

                                      Wright’s article applied images from Scotland’s language and history to shrink Turnbull down to a mirthful porcelain Celtic gnome in an English city garden of narrow dimensions.  “Malcolm the Turnbull rejoices in the knowledge that the very name Turnbull comes, at least in legend, from a wild act of courage that saved the life of the Scottish King, Robert the Bruce, only a year after Bruce had led his forces to victory over the English at the Battle of Bannockburn during the First War of Scottish Independence in 1314.  Malcolm's distant ancestor, a fellow named William of Rule, is credited with wrestling a charging bull and turning it away from Robert the Bruce in 1315” --- hence the name and coat-of-arms of Malcolm’s family, “a wild fighting mob from the Scottish borders”.  Was Malcolm Turnbull one more Scots mad-bull who must charge everything English again when he conducted the movement to abolish the English monarchy in Australia, Wright wondered. 

                                    When Scotland is independent, Scots- and Irish Australians will cop less taunt-humor from those who distort the liberal, integrative essence of Anglo-Saxon culture to hint that we Celts ineluctably can never amount to much that could be positive here in our shared beloved country, Australia.

by Dr Dennis Walker, PSI, Monash University

  The situation in  Egypt is dangerous because the secular-educated are evenly split between (a) Islamists and (b) Secular Nasserites, Marxists and Liberals.  Each side wants to eliminate the other from politics.  In the past year we have had hundreds of thousands of (a) Ikhwan and (b) Nasserites + Leftists on the streets.  Huge demonstrations. If the two categories of demonstrators ever ran into each other, then torrents of blood could flow.

 The military is playing on this fear to win back the power they had under Mubarak.  They want a new system that will still revolve around them = state monies.  I found ordinary people crammed into buses in Cairo had fond but hazy memories of "Gamal" --- "there was justice between people in that time".  They didn't like the class-caste system under Mubarak.  So Seesy is presenting himself as "the new Nasser". He won't be. Nasser's generation of officers came of poor petty-bourgeois origins, had been ill-paid, and knew  something of what ordinary people suffered> built welfare state and wider education.  Seesy and his fellow officers have never suffered.  He might prove the new Mubarak, though.    The Army wants money. 

 Egypt is to some extent a broken country now.    I have a book on pre-1952 Egypt to complete there, but at t my age it might not be good to go back.  I had grown to like it in recent visits.

 It looks that most Arab countries are failed states which I deeply regret.  Learning Arabic didn't pay off for in some aspects at least.. 

by Dr Dennis Walker, PSI Monash University.

I am in Southern Thailand.  The Muslim shop-keeper class, and their customers, are viewing the turmoil in Bangkok with great interest live from the Bangkok TV stations.

The chaos and disorientation of "the Siam infidels" is very encouraging to the Patani Malay nationalists.  One of their slogans is "Thailand akan di-hanchurkan dan Patani akan Merdeka" (Thailand will destroy itself and Patani will become independent).

However, the majority of conscious Muslims here seem to believe that the Thai polity will survive the crisis, drawn-out though it has been, but hope that the Thai system's weakening might one day make it present for serious negotiations for the autonomy solution.   The Muslims of Southern Thailand want provincial devolution and Arabic-script Malay to be made a medium of governmental administration.

            By Dr Dennis Walker,  Researcher,

                  Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Caulfield 3145. 

                   Email: --- dennis.walker@monash.edu

                   Phone: 9540 8441 (mornings).

WORLD WAR I’s IMPACT UPON IDEOLOGY

              The havoc of WWI was assessed --- or experienced --- by many in Lebanon as an end of hope and of meaning in history.  Preceding assumptions among Lebanon’s Catholics that God or alternatively Progress (both as conceptualized from Europe) would order history towards human welfare faced a severe challenge from the death of millions.  Clericist Catholic ideologues had to restructure Catholic Christianity to make it find meaning in such slaughter and prevent or contain future conflict.  The War had similarly devastated secular world-views in the Arab East.  The Western states that had claimed to stand for Enlightenment, rationality and Progress had shown their capacity for atavistic devastation against each other.  Thus, Lebanese and other Arab quasi-secularists now searched for supplementary meanings from established religions, although mostly in a theosophical way. 

                 As disrespect spread in the world towards European states and cultures, the Maronite clerical writers responded to the maneuverings of Muslim apologists, the Arab theosophists and freemasons and the Arab post-Christian anti-clerics to highlight their creeds, not Catholicism, as the solutions to conflict.  Both post-Christian anti-clericists and modernist salafi Islamists had long cited the crusader wars and the Inquisition as past violence and terror by the Church of Rome.  An _al-Mashriq_ article by Fr Butrus Faraj Sufayr, “The Church and Resistance to Wars,” welcomed that a group of eminent Englishmen were launching a League of Religions.  Its ambitious aim was to organize spiritual forces in the world to strengthen general peace and the joint interests of nations.  _al-Mashriq_ recognized among those attending the England conference names of people representing different religions and sects, bishops and rabbis, as well as major thinkers and people working for social reform.

                Fr Sufayr had been budged somewhat by the slaughter of the War from _al-Mashriq_’s previous robust faith in the capacity of Catholicism to go it alone in history.  He welcomed the League (and greater readiness to consider religion of the Mason Jurji Zaydan’s _al-Hilal_ that publicized it) as opening the way for an expanded role for the Church in international relations.  Only through religion as the force with the most influence in the world over people could humanity be led to the peace that had so long eluded it.  “Those who in ancient and modern history worked most to end wars, or at least lessen their horrors, were the men of religion, and in particular the high clerics of the most widespread religion in the world, the Catholic Church”. 

               Fr Sufayr had partly penned his article out of fury at an essay by the West-acculturated Indian Syed Ameer ‘Ali (1849-1928), translated in Egypt’s journal _al-Bayan_, which had striven to contrast Islam to the failure of Christianity after the Roman Empire adopted it to at all lessen the horrors of wars, oppression and extermination: Christianity had refused to address issues of international relations and reciprocal duties between peoples.  Sufayr retorted that Jesus set up the Church in the first place as the mechanism to establish in this world, after He ascended, his social teachings, and peace in given societies and in international relations.  As Paul had put it, there no more remained amongst those who accepted Christ Jew nor Greek, not slave nor freeman, neither male nor female: all of them have become equal and one in the Messiah (Galatians 3:28).  Sufayr cited NT verses that exhorted to forbearing pacifism even towards enemies: “do not allow evil to overwhelm you but overwhelm it by goodness".

             The writer challenged the Islamic apologists to muster for Islam clear verses on this level.  The saying of the Prophet Muhammad that Ameer ‘Ali had cited, “bind yourself to he who cuts you off and be charitable to those who injure you”, had been established by _al-Mashriq_ magazine years before to have been all lifted from the Bible to the very letter.

               In face of all the death of World War I, Sufayr argued that the Universal Catholic Church was the force most able to bring the world peace.  Far from being part of past or recent violence in Europe, the Church and its Popes had acted as the arbitrator to decide between kings and princes whose proclivities could have ignited war and social conflict. In the middle ages, popes in Rome, when they saw ill-treatment by some Kings against their subjects, defended those who had been oppressed without any fear of the power that those tyrants exercized.   Henry IV, the Emperor of Germany who ignited in Europe a war that inflicted catastrophes on its lands, finally was forced to submit and desist before the wise old man of Rome.

              This characterization by Sufayr ignored that Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) was no such wise arbitrator who only intervened to bridle kings after they became violent and expansionist or repressive at home.   Rather, it was the simultaneous drives of both he and Henry IV to expand their respective power-systems that drew them to their collisions.   Gregory may have founded the Papacy’s long-term supremacy over the Catholic churches and its claim to supervize the secular rulers of Europe, but in his life-time his drive to reduce kings to vassals sparked grotesque situations of double-popes and alternate kings or emperors for Germany and fighting and looting in holy Rome that far from fostered peace or stability or any regard for religion and the Church.   When Henry, in the last bout, marched into Rome, he put his anti-pope on the throne of the abandoned Gregory who then died with little dignity in exile in 1085.  Pope Gregory was close to the paradigms of the Arabic freemasons, anti-clericists, freethinkers and the Muslim polemicists that the popes and Christian churches in general could not stop themselves from intervening destructively in politics and intellectual life, from which religion had to be excluded.

               Sufayr argued that the papacy carried its immemorial arbitrative role in international high politics forward into modern history when its mediation by Pope Leo XIII in 1885 settled the conflict that developed between Germany and Spain over the Caroline Islands.  Peru and Chile, too, made Pope Leo and then Pius X arbitrators for the demarcation of borders between them. 

              Given the Church’s track-record in settling a host of disputes and wars, the sidelining of it from modern peacemaking had to be ended.   “Would not the world have avoided all the terrors and hatreds of the last World War, had Austria and Serbia both taken to the Holy See the issues of that conflict that set off all these wars and caused so much suffering?”

             Sufayr was being selective.   The Italian nationalists had in 1861 made papal territories in Rome their capital: then Leo XIII (1878-1903) had indeed labored to build for the papacy an important role in international affairs, stressing the high cost of an armed peace.  But the Carolines in 1885 had been his only success, and he was not invited to the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 because of objections from the Italian government.  Leo had been reduced to courting support from post-Kulturkampf Germany and from positivist France for a settlement of the Roman question.  Sufayr fleeted over the extent to which the international Catholic church had been cut down, sidelined, marginalized and hit by secularist, anti-clerical or downrightly anti-Christian regimes in Europe and Latin America that were determined to transform their national societies and their world standing without any trammels or meddling from the Church.

              Lebanon’s clericists remained on the defensive against Arab secularists who held up modern Europe’s secularism.   Sufayr had something of Louis Shaykhu’s animus against Europe’s modernity and strove to turn the late War against it to argue a religious imperative in history:

“Today the illusion is dying away that Science and cultivation and civilisation can ameliorate customs and bring people’s natures under control, and so eliminate the causes of conflicts.  The events of the last few years have shown that all the development of modern sciences only turned them into a terrible instrument that have made War unprecedentedly barbarous and destructive.  It all proved that nothing can now free humanity from wars other than religions”.

            He rebutted the charges from Islamists and Christian-born Arab free-thinkers that the church had itself exercized military aggression or whipped up violence by others.  The popes had maintained properties to sustain the church, and this understandably led to the creation of a state which the Pope of Rome then had to defend by force if it were invaded.  (Answering radically secular Italian nationalists?)  The crusader wars were only defensive and proportionate.  The Islamic states as their territories widened were threatening the Christian kingdoms until they became very close to their great capitals.  The aim of the crusader wars was only to deliver the holy places from the hands of those who had usurped and violated them.  Fr Sufayr made this argument easy for himself: the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah --- considered an insane non-Muslim by the world’s Sunnis --- had destroyed 30,000 Christian churches after the Church of the Resurrection in noble Jerusalem.  Could anyone really blame the church for trying to wrest back and then defend the holiest lands of its religion?  The same thing applies to all its actions to beat off from Europe the advancing tide of the Turkish state which the Muslims themselves [=Arab nationalists including Rashid Rida, Egypto-Syrian editor of _al-Manar_] as well as the Christians condemned.  Some charges of the Arab free-thinkers and such salafists as Rida and his mentor Muhammad Abduh and the acculturated Muslim apologists had cut close to home: “we are far from approving the height of the injustices that some Kings of the Christians reached, like the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre and some aspects of the Inquisition in Spain.  The Church [leaders] not only did not incite such acts but was the first to rebuke them”  FN[[Fr Butrus Faraj Sufayr, “al-Kanisah wa Munahadat al-Hurub” (The Church and Resistance to Wars), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 pp. 524-534.   Before the 1572 St Bartholemew’s Day massacre of Protestants, only one of several, France’s king Charles IX shouted “Qu’on les tue tous”, and viewed from his palace the killings that carried off most of the Huguenot nobility.  The slaughter, though, had been triggered by political events and factions rather than preplanned: W. J. Stankiewicz,  “St Bartholemew’s Day, Massacre of”, _Catholic Encyclopaedia_.  Arabic writers, post-Christian or Muslim, hostile to the Catholic Church could indeed have exaggerated wrong acts by the Inquisition. Early post-modern  historiographies were to reassess that institution, although with some institutional projection from a Catholic Church now more prepared to admit that there might have been some faults or mistakes in the past.  See eg. Henry Kamen, _The Spanish Inquisition : a historical revision_ (Yale University Press: 1999).   In 1998, an International Symposium on the Inquisition was organized in Rome: see “Facing the Inquisition”,   _The Tablet_ 7 November  1998; “Vatican meeting examines dark chapter of the Church”,  _National Catholic Reporter_ 13 November 1998; “The Inquisition requires calm objective analysis”, _L’Osservatore Romano_ [English]  11 November 1998.  References from Rosalie Cotter, Deputy Librarian at Catholic Theological College, Melbourne]]FN.

                   We should not overrate ecumenical glimmerings in Fr Sufayr that such devastation in the late War now could force clergy of varied religions to work together.  Sufayr might indeed accept even the odd token rabbi, but he voiced no sense that Muslim clerics might have to be inducted into the peace-making, or that Lebanon’s Catholics had anything to learn from the Islam massively flowing around them.  He reflected that such Muslim polemicists as Ameer ‘Ali when denouncing Catholicism confused it with the atrocities of the Protestant churches in history, and tapped the writings of that West’s anti-Catholic freemasons and freethinkers as well as its Protestants.   Ameer ‘Ali (and Muhammad ‘Abduh, also) certainly painted vivid snapshots of the Inquisition’s burnings, and of the mass slaughters of 70,000 Muslim and Jews by the crusaders when they took Jerusalem and against such groups as the Huguenots --- and the Albigenses whom Sufayr retorted were the aggressors whose “flood” the pontifs of Rome blocked FN[[See Sufayr, “Munahadat” p. 532 as against Ameer ‘Ali’s portrayal of both Catholic and Protestant history as “an uninterrupted chain of intolerance, bigotry and fanaticism” down to the extermination of Amerindians and the USA’s lynchings, in his 1922 _The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam, with a Life of the Prophet_ (London: Christophers’ 1922) pp. 218-221 and his 1889 _Short History of the Saracens_ (London: MacMillan & Co Ltd 1951) pp. 350-372.  Yet ‘Ali discreetly allowed that the Catholic Church after the break of Luther and Calvin made its peace with science, and thus offered a lesson to the restrictive “Sunni Church” of 1922 (_The Spirit of Islam_ p. 454) --- nuances towards the West in acculturated Muslim “apologetics” that Lebanese clerical intellectuals have often missed.   From _al-Manar_ in 1902, Muhammad ‘Abduh assailed persecution and expulsion by Catholics and Protestant Churches alike of Muslims, Jews, proto-scientists and freethinkers: _al-Islam wal-Nasraniyyah ma‘al-‘Ilm wal-Madaniyyah_ (Cairo: Muhammad 'Ali Subayh & Sons, n.d.) pp. 40-41, 64-65.  The Albigensian Crusade proclaimed by Pope Innocent III early in the 13th century had swept away perhaps one million humans and a brilliant Provencal civilization by the time the Church extirpated the Cathar religion in Languedoc: see Christine Thouzellier, _Catharism et Valdeism en Languedoc_ (Louvain: Editions Nauwwelaerts 1969) and Arno Borst _Die Katharer_ (Stuttgart: Hiersemann 1953)]]FN.

                Secularist and Muslim discourse about wars had thus put clerical Catholic writers in Arabic on the defensive.   Yet, though he tried to keep up a granite-hard Catholic apologetics, World War I had buckled Sufayr’s frames of reference in places as it had those of all the factions of Arabic.   His semi-quietist passages that religion and the Church could only ameliorate, not end, social injustice could have been closer to Christianity’s New Testament and sense of original sin.   But the WW1 havoc and the taunts from the Islamists had pushed him to make Jesus the founder of International Law as he claimed a role for the Catholic Church in international relations and politics like that that Islam’s modernists were now imaging for Islam.

              It needed strenuous footwork to deny after 1918 that Christianity and its institutions had failed to motivate its adherents in Europe and the West towards peace and constructive solutions.  Catholic writers and media in Lebanon were restructuring Catholicism in order to maintain it, but many felt that other instruments and groups had to be synthesized with Christianity to save humanity.  Thus, _al-Mashriq_ also gave a hearing to the new international mechanism of the League of Nations, more neutral and secular than the Church, which it saw as set up by governments in response to pressure from the populations that had lost so much blood. The author, Emile Tayyan, was a student at the French Law School who was to become a lecturer in Law at St Joseph’s College.   In 1920, the young Tayyan was in places Francophile in a way conventional among Maronites at that time.  France had acted rightly to exclude Germany from the League of Nations following World War I.  Some had expressed surprise that the Central States and their allies were not accepted into the League, when such a League “by definition… could hardly preserve the peace if it took on the appearance of an alliance of some peoples against others”.  Tayyan retorted that a League meant to promote freedom and justice and the observance of international undertakings could not admit states that had constantly broken their contracts and undertakings and barbarically swooped down upon others [=Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France].  Since actions by the League had to be adopted in advance by unanimous vote, it had been right to exclude such states as Germany and Soviet Russia that it had to control.

           In places, though, Tayyan’s youthful essay diverged from the battered secular-ameliorist ideology of the French State whose language he loved.  Could so purely legal an institution as the League unaided establish and preserve peace?  The young Maronite writer decried the exclusion by the founders of the League of the Papacy, which had immense moral authority over more than 250,000,000 inhabitants of the civilized world.  That exclusion cost the League of Nations what could have been one of the most effective means to achieve its aims. 

            However Catholicist, Tayyan’s view of international relations still privileged the France whose language was his preferred medium of formal expression. He wanted France to be exempt from the disarmament into which the League was to lead its members in order to prevent any future World War.  The League’s Executive Council would let a state surrounded by enemy states hell-bent to seize its lands maintain a standing army much larger than that of a state that did not face such pressure.  France is the state that safeguards the borders of civilization as President Wilson put it: in this function, it had to have a stronger military machine than those of other states such as Italy or indeed the U.S.A.  The League’s inspections could not cope with concealed military equipment [=Germany] and the capacity of states to mobilize and attack swiftly.  Because collective League decisions had to be unanimous, its members were unlikely to act together to defend France from an attack by Germany.  When Persia, one of the League’s members, appealed for its help when Bolshevik troops attacked it, the other League members only held repeated meetings to get out of their undertakings.

            Tayyan’s arguments --- well-presented for a young man --- at least here amounted to a dispiriting characterization of the West’s Christian states as weak, mendacious, cunning and violent.  Intentionally or not, he might have been feeding the reaction among Christian Lebanese against Westerners in general in the wake of WW1, sparked by international realpolitik, contempt from French personnel and military in Lebanon, and by cultural incompatibility.  In a critique of a range of Western states, not just Germany alone, Tayyan condemned the colonialist expansionism that Britain had carried forward through WW1.  He feared that her takeover of Germany’s former colonies (eg. South West Africa and Cameroon) with the League’s ratification would become permanent since none of its texts gave it either the title or the means to supervise and end such supposed “protectorates” or “trusteeships”.   Even if the League had such a function nominally, who was there to compel the imperial state to withdraw from a trustee territory as its population became more able to govern itself?  While dislike of Britain and being Francophile could go together in the 1920s, Tayyan then denounced Rome as a precursor of “civilized” states bent on conquests in his day.  The nature of human beings has not changed for thousands of years: the ancient Romans when they conquered a town, depriving it of its liberty used to then term it free or allied.  “We only hope that the new words will amount to more than a veil”.  Whatever his exact intention, Tayyan had got very close here to France which presented herself as the Latin successor of imperial Rome in the Levant, and some of whose Christian Lebanese admirers gave her title to use Roman-like severity to crush all local resistance as a prelude to the prosperity both Latin powers brought to those who cooperated in the Fertile Crescent FN[[In a 1922 _al-Mashriq_ article, Fr Rene Mouterde imaged that Pompey’s 64 BC conquest was welcomed by many in the Hellenized classes in Syria as an end to the debilitating wars with Egypt, local tyrants and raiding tribes.  Mouterde likened the latter to the Shi’ite groups that attacked Lebanese Christians in the wake of WW1, and which Rome’s successor France was ending: Mouterde, “Musalamat al-Ruman li-Suriyyah wa Difa‘uhum ‘anha” (The Romans’ Pacification of Syria and their Defence of it), _al-Mashriq_ March 1922 pp. 272-280.  This article skilfully cited some archaeological data from Western and local scholars, but could hardly be trusted given that Mouterde was encouraging the Syrians, in thanks for the “kindness” that Latin France was doing them, to volunteer in her armies as their ancestors had flocked into those of the original Roman State: p. 280]]FN.

          Yet Tayyan was highly French-cultured in scanning centuries of France’s history for ideas that had directed humanity towards the more valid impulses in the League project.  The concept of the League of Nations was not original to U.S. President Wilson.  In the wars of religion that devastated the continent, and then the Thirty Years War, Sully (1559-1641) and Abbe Saint-Pierre (1658-1743) called for Europe’s kings to form some confederal council of states to arbitrate international disputes between them and support any of their members facing any aggression.  Tayyan praised Saint Pierre as the first of those pioneer authors to detail a mechanism of a peace-keeping army.  In modern times, continued Tayyan, the French politician Leon Bourgeois a few years before WW1 published a book [_Pour la Societe des Nations_ 1910] in which he projected a League of Nations for compulsory arbitration, good offices and mediation in international disputes and which would implement its decisions through a peace-keeping army drawn from all states.  However, Tayyan also took some account of discussion of a League mechanism by various U.S. politicians prior to 1918 FN[[Amil Tayyan, “Jam‘iyyat al-Umam” (The League of Nations), _al-Mashriq_ October 1920 pp. 754-768]]FN.

              Tayyan wanted to connect the papacy into any international peace-keeping mechanism, but could have well known the ambiguity of the French ideas he reviewed.   The radical freemasonic post-Catholics in Lebanon had made most literate Maronites aware of the Saint Bartholemew’s Day massacre of Protestants that even Sufayr had not tried to defend.   Did so confessionally ambiguous a figure as Sully, who escaped it but converted, or his equally ambiguous monarch Henry IV represent a Catholic stream of French thought or had they prefigured a more secular one?

             All groups of literate Lebanese Catholics had the strong bond of language to the thought and the survival of France.  Yet most writers sometimes hinted edginess towards the hierarchical imperialism of the Western states.  WW1 had shown again that constructive ideologies articulated from the West might not be able to contain violence, or its Catholic and secular streams be synthesized.

                  By Dr Dennis Walker,  Researcher,

                  Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Caulfield 3145. 

                   Email: --- dennis.walker@monash.edu

                   Phone: 9540 8441 (mornings).

 LEBANESE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF GERMANS

               Wilhelmian Germany became more and more unattractive to pro-clerical Maronites well before WW1 because of its tightening alliance with the central government in Constantinople that from 1908 was usually led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).  The new Young Turk elite gave much more scope to threatening secular ideas throughout the Empire than had Sultan ‘Abdul-Hamid with whom Maronite Patriarch Ilyas al-Huwayyik had built up a live-and-let-live alliance in which he conceivably may have helped the Ottoman government repress local Maronite secularists FN[[Dennis Walker, “The Relations of Catholic Maronite Patriarch Ilyas Butrus al-Huwayyik with the Ottoman Turks”, _IslamoChristiana_ 28 (2002) pp. 109-123]]FN.  The CUP also had centralizing impulses, and Germany was helping it improve its military capacities: as soon as they brought the Ottoman State into the War, the CUP militarily ended Mountain Lebanon’s autonomy.  After WW1, Christian authors in Arabic rapped “Germany, the aider of Turkey” for “allowing” sweeping violence by Turks, Kurds and Circassians against [mainly Syriac-speaking and Armenian] Christians in Mesopotamia and [in today’s Turkey] Diyar Bakr, Mardin, Tur ‘Abdin etc during the War --- criminality by association rather than having taken part FN[[Review of the 509-page book _al-Qusara fi Nakabat al-Nasara_ in _al-Mashriq_ January 1920 pp. 71-2.  Dr Gabriele Yonan of Germany was in 2000 researching links between Wilhelmian ministries and military and Ottoman attacks on Syriac-speakers during WW1]]FN.

              In most Catholic Arabic reviews of World War 1, the German side is portrayed as expansionist  --- it is led to attack by a materialist drive for resources and trade, but more out of some anti-human barbarism or by the personal despotic decision of the Kaiser, and is almost anti-Christian in this portrait that drew so heavily on propaganda in the French media.

             Generally, _al-Mashriq_ in the new particularist statelet rarely voiced nuances about Germany’s pre-War situation and her economic motives, but did very briefly glimpse an intellectually muscular pacifist counter-discourse in Britain.  This tradition was represented by pacifist Norman Angell, one of whose works in French translation was reviewed in _al-Mashriq_.   Angell had from the 1900s been urging Britain not to demonize the Hun Kaiser Wilhelm II, but rather to take his Anglophilia on face value.  While Angell had recognized that Germany’s 1914 thrust into Belgium and attempt to conquer France amounted to aggression, he interpreted it as motivated by her relentless population increase and pressures caused by the refusal of the Triple Entente states to grant industrializing Germany constructive economic outlets  In the wake of WW1, _al-Mashriq_ noted, Angell was arguing that the articles of the peace that the Allies concluded in Versailles “could expose Europe to terrible chaos because they have sentenced the Axis states to pressure, degradation and slavery, although their level of development and the extent of their economies and resources would suffice to rescue the states of the world in general from their economic crisis.”  The _al-Mashriq_ review concurred that even defeated milch cows, once even their teats are torn out, can never yield milk again FN[[Review by Fr G.  Levenq of Norman Angell, _Le Chaos Europeen_ translated from the English by Andre Pierre (Paris: B. Grasset 1920), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 pp. 553-4]]FN.

             More forward-thinking voices from among even the ranks of the vengeful French themselves were nudging Lebanon’s Catholics to a more sympathetic understanding of the deep harm the late conflict had caused to Germany as well.  To be sure, an _al-Mashriq_ review of a 1919 French work by Dr Ambroise Got ascribed the continuing suffering of the German people as “completely the result of the pomposity of the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm and his transgression of all limits of moderation and equity”.  Still, the Alsatian-French author Got had reached the conclusion in his on-site researches with the French Mission in Berlin that Germany would never be able to lift itself to its feet again, however favorable the conditions, except after long years given the reparations it had to pay back to the Allies as compensation for everything it had destroyed in other countries. Thus, the Treaty of Versailles had to be revised.   As one of the sons of [marginal, bilingual] Alsace, Got had been well equipped to write an incisive overview of all the diversity of political parties, class conflicts and insatiable revanchist movements that had arisen since the deposition of the Kaiser FN[[Review by Fr Gabriel Levenq of (Dr) Ambroise Got’s _L’allemagne apres la Debacle_ (Strasbourg 1919), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 p. 553]]FN.  (Got was overly pessimistic: the German currency was to restabilize in 1923, and the following year the Allies agreed to evacuate the Ruhr and grant Germany a more realistic payment schedule for reparations: by 1927, German industry had regained its 1913 high, but then the Great Depression hit all the world).

               _al-Mashriq_ apprised its readers of the debate between (a) John Maynard Keynes and others who argued that the terms imposed by the  Allied powers had not merely harmed Germany but the economy of Europe as a whole, _and_ (b) French authors who argued that the Germans had the means to pay the reparations they owed for the losses of life and property that their aggressions had cost France, Belgium, Rumania and Italy FN[[Review by “J.L.” (=Fr Gabriel Levenq?) of Keynes _Les Consequences economiques de la Paix_ (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Francaise 1920 --- 9th printing!) and of Raphael Georges Levy, _La juste Paix ou la Verite sur le Traite de Versailles_ (Paris: n.d.), _al-Mashriq_ December 1920 pp. 1031-1032]]FN.  But guidance from _al-Mashriq_ to critical and undecided European works on Germany and on the recent conflict and its ongoing effects in the 1920s were a margin constricted in the space allocated.   The stray items were almost drowned out by the tendency of Shaykhu and other clerical Lebanese writers to relay the French mentors’ hatred of Germany and its people. 

_Connections through Catholicism to Germans_

             Catholic universalism finally reasserted itself over the French nationalism, given a Christian patina, to which their auxilliary language had drawn these clerical Lebanese.  In one brief note, Shaykhu did rap “some extremists” in the victorious Allied powers who were expelling Catholic German missionaries from their Third World missions “lest, it is contended, they misuse religious evangelization as a means to propagate… love towards their homeland”.  Shaykhu added his “weak voice” to that of the Pope and others to protest at restrictions that were further depriving a number of lands of the blessings of evangelizing “Christian civilization”, given that the World War had cut down so many missionaries.  The Allies could still try any Germans charged to have deformed the religion into an instrument for temporal aims, so alien to the thinking of Catholic missionaries FN[[Shaykhu, review of J. Neuhaesler, _Appel aux catholiques de l’univers pour sauver les missions allemandes_ (Munster 1920), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 p. 554-555]]FN.  [As though some Francophone Western missionaries had not inculcated love of the French state in the Fertile Crescent!]

             In 1922, the science-aware Rafa’il Nakhlah al-Yasu‘i tried to supplement or modify the hostile image of Germany that the French language had so deeply implanted in the opinion-makers of “the Catholics of the East” whom he now addressed. Nakhlah voiced understanding of the hatred that came from all corners against the people of the “covetous” Wilhelm II from its brilliant triumph in the 1870 war with France to its igniting of the flames of the late World War that had spread death and destruction over all areas of Europe.  He took issue, though, with some who “have exaggeratedly dismissed Germany as in its entirety a purely materialist civilization that uses intellectual powers or the progress of the sciences and arts only to increase material prosperity and to expand the country by violating the rights of neighboring nations.”  In correction [to this particular Catholicist view of Germany in the Arabic lands], Nakhlah highlighted as an instance of “real eternal civilization --- justice, mercy [religion and ethics]” --- in German life the association of Catholic pupils in German secondary schools, the Neudeutschland or Young Germany, founded immediately after the War and which by 1922 now had 25,000 members. High Church clerics appointed all leading office-holders of the youth movement they had started.  Resolved to spread “Chastity” in “insolent” Weimar Germany, the students [as did the clericist Maronites] fought all that could foster promiscuity and prostitution in literature, cinema, theatre, public art, and fashions FN[[Rafail Nakhlah al-Yasu‘i, “Almaniyal-Fatat: aw Jam‘iyyat al-Talabat al-Kathulik” (Young Germany or the Association of Catholic Pupils), _al-Mashriq_ July 1922 pp. 626-641]]FN.  [Jesuits organizers inculcated the rational and intellectual side of Catholicism; but most of the middle class youths may have been drawn by the sports, country strolls and holidays the Association conducted, more than its spiritual retreats]. 

             Bismarck’s --- Protestantism-motivated? --- Kulturkampf against Catholic schools was in the memory of Lebanon’s Catholics when WW1 came.  The less France-bound Nakhlah, who had some real Catholic universalism, liked Young Germany’s stress on science beside religion.  This and its retention of Homeland at the side of religion helped shape predilections he passed on to the Maronite discursive tradition. (Some Germans were to assess long afterwards that such Catholic German youth movements and schools paved the way to the conversion of their middle-class youths to Nazism because they taught nationality and sniped at the urban, pluralist society of modernity emerging under Weimar) FN[[Friedrich Heer, _Revolutions of Our Time_ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1974) p. 60]]FN.

               Rafa’il  Nakhlah hoped, wrongly, that Germany could be redeemed into a polity in which Catholicism could flourish after the War.  Yet, many Maronites had swallowed whole French nationalism’s view of Germany under the stimulus of WW1, although with adaption to their own clericist priorities.

                The Catholic clerical media in Lebanon tended to support the most hard-line French positions towards Germany well into the 1920s.  In early 1923, _al-Bashir_ rapped strikes by miners, boycotts and passive resistance against the French occupation in the Ruhr, and claims that by seizing coal mines and factories France had paralysed commerce and industry there.  In refutation, _al-Bashir_ set out the assessments of the French ultrist politicians.  In occupying the Ruhr after WW1, France had only been matching Germany, which in 1870 occupied provinces of France that she only evacuated after getting reparations for her losses in that war.  France had to protect herself lest Germany catch her off-guard again.  _al-Bashir_ did not just approve France going beyond the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which had only approved destruction of fortifications on the left bank of the Rhine, for security.  It further relished all the harm France’s seizure for “reparations” of one of the few remaining sources of coal for Germany did the latter’s industrial economy, and connived at impulses in the French elite  to set up a puppet “Republic” of the Ruhr for the long term --- here, _al-Bashir did not consider any right of its 445,000 Germans to self-determination FN[[“Mushkilat al-Ruhr: Mal-Tariqah ila Halliha?” (The Problem of the Ruhr: What is the Best Way to Solve it?), _al-Bashir_ 24 March 1923 p. 1; “Fil-Ruhr” 24 March 1923 p. 1]]FN.  Militarism: _al-Bashir_ excerpted accusations by War Minister Maginot in the French parliament that Germany was trying to rebuild its forces.   Thus, France had to apply conscription to build a strong army of 52 divisions with “brutal” budgetary allocations FN[[“Faransa Turidu Jayshaha Qawiyyan: Innahu Khayru Daman li-Sawn al-Salam” (France Wants Her Army to be Strong: that is the Best Guarantee for Protecting the Peace), _al-Bashir_ 10 March 1923 p. 1]]FN.

                Culturally and in thought, the engagement of Maronites who preferred high Arabic with France was often glaringly superficial.  Yet, the high drama of France’s struggle for survival in WW1 implanted in the literate discourse of the Maronites and Melkites many anti-German motifs from French nationalism.  Some Lebanese Christian writers remained jumpy in the 1920s that the violence and mayhem of World War I could resume at any time.  They continued to worry about France’s safety from the expansionism of Germany, towards which they would remain suspicious and hostile in its Nazi period, in common with Muslim liberal intellectuals in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent FN[[An instance of the relaying of the most radical French nationalist hatred of Germany during Hitler was “Germany Has to Be Dismantled to Build a Peace that can Last: the French Press Warns About Repeating the Mistake of Versailles” (Yajibu Tafkik Jarmaniyyah li-Tawtid al-Salam: al-Sihafat al-Faransiyyah Tuhadhdhir al-Wuqu’ fi Khata’ Versailles), _al-Bashir_ 18 September 1939 pp. 1, 4.  The Lebanese Francophiles predicted a French triumph over Hitler too soon: Yusuf Natur, “Bayn Ghilyum wa Hitler: wa ‘alal-Baghi Tadur al-Dawa’ir” (From Wilhelm to Hitler: Only Catastrophes Befall Those Who Aggress), _al-Bashir_ 18 September 1939 p. 3.  _al-Bashir_ relayed some tawdry disinformation from Allied propaganda offices via a Damacus paper: “Across History Germany has always been and remains the Enemy of the Arabs and Muslims” (‘Abr al-Ta’rikh: Almaniyah Kanat wa ma Zalat ‘Aduwwat al-‘Arab wal-Muslimin), _al-Bashir_ 18 September 1939 p. 5]]FN.

                 By 1920, a friends-enemies dichotomy --- “liberal” France versus militarist, post-Christian Germany --- had been set for the long term in the Lebanese Catholic ethos.

            By Dr Dennis Walker,  Researcher,

                  Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Caulfield 3145. 

                   Email: --- dennis.walker@monash.edu

                   Phone: 9540 8441 (mornings).

PERCEPTIONS OF WW1 CONFLICTS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE _

1: THE WAR IN LEBANON.

   _The Functions of the Indigenous Martyrs_

            The formal execution or murder by some Turks of Catholic or Muslim Lebanese/Syrians soon before or during World War I could define in two ways the indigenous nation-community that the clericists would henceforth strive to achieve.  On one hand, if the items defined the Turks as Muslim and the victims as Christian, the events could alienate the Christian readership from not just the Turks but from Muslim Arabs of the Syrian interior and longer littoral.  In the other direction, if Muslim Arab victims were also perceived as covictims because of the literary Arabic they shared with the Maronites, then that could foster political community with wider Islamo-Arab populations --- and perhaps Lebanon’s affiliation to some pan-Syrian or pan-Arab entity.  

            Of the two possibilities, most items on pre-1918 Catholic victims that _al-Mashriq_ carried fostered Lebanonism, but sometimes in an incomplete way. _al-Mashriq_ published a retrospect in 1921 on the lives and execution of the two brothers Filib and Farid al-Khazin (from a feudal family).  It represented Filib al-Khazin (1865-1916) as from his youth having protested abuses of the Turks under the mutasarrif Wasa Pasha (governed Mountain Lebanon 1883-1892) from the Egyptian press.  Once the French Consul appointed Filib an honorary dragoman, the two brothers were emboldened to launch the newspaper _al-Arz_ (The Cedar) which fiercely defended not just Lebanon’s internationally-guaranteed autonomy but, perhaps equally, the ancient “sacred rights” (al-huquq al-muqaddasah) of the protector France in the homeland.   When Italy seized Libya from the Ottoman Empire, its armored cruisers sank two Ottoman torpedo ships in Bayrut harbor.  Filip’s lament at that time was that it had not been done by France, which alone among the Powers had the right to conduct such actions “in these lands”.  Clearly, the Ottoman central government one day might have more to fear from the pair than words or editorializing, but the early perspective of _al-Mashriq_ in 1921 was of a recent Ottoman system in which the printed page could muster immense political power in itself and thus had to be controlled or repressed.  The _al-Mashriq_ retrospect speculated that it was the publication by the brothers in several volumes of Arabic translations of the correspondence between the Powers establishing France’s maternal role and rights in Lebanon that made Jamal Pasha, the Turkish governor of Syria, decide to execute Filib and Farid.

            The martyrs who sacrifice their lives for the particularist homeland are simultaneously sustained by a Christianity acculturated to the Catholicism of Europe’s Latin peoples, eg. France.  The two brothers had expected from the first day of the sitting of the court that it would sentence them to death as it had all others. They were sustained in jail as they prepared themselves for their final journey to their Creator and that other “heavenly Homeland” by their regular reading of Thomas Akempis’ _The Imitation of Christ_, as well as prayer and meditation.  There was a touch of hagiography in some details of the last weeks of the al-Khazin brothers: for example their refusal to eat more than the needed minimum of the prison fare so that they could donate the rest to the poor.

              In regard to current political context and functions, the _al-Mashriq_ tribute was stylizing the death of Filib and Farid al-Khazin to make it of use in the mobilization of Maronite audiences to the side of France in the ideologically much less clear-cut situation that was developing as France’s imposition of her non-pious rule hit the Arabic culture, the political dignity and the solid, simple Christian religious values of the Maronites.  French mandatory rule was turning out to be not quite the expected liberation or Pan-Catholic conjunction with a Christian protector.  At least some Maronites had been showing signs since 1918 of now wanting to distance France by some sort of linkage to mainly Muslim Arabs in Syria’s littoral and hinterland with a polity to be centered around Damascus.  Ritual commemoration of model martyrs oriented to Latin Catholicism and to France could help contain such swings among _al-Mashriq_’s elite readership.

              Greater political openness to Muslims in a context of the reaction against France after 1918 would be no new thing for Maronites or Melkites.  Before 1914, various secular-minded groups (and Maronite Patriarch Ilyas Butrus al-Huwayyik before 1908 and CUP rule) had at points sought closer political relations with Turks and/or Muslim Arabs in the sprawling, potentially lucrative Ottoman Empire.  Such subversive precursors of alliance with the Arab lands at expense of France had to be excised from Lebanon’s history.  The Francophile particularists mustered the strong narrative of suffering and martyrdom for God and Homeland to nullify the plurality of pre-1914 Lebanese Catholic history and ideologies that had to be dealt with covertly.  For a range of Catholics, martyrdoms during World War I finally showed the impossibility of affiliating to at least some Muslims in a political community, with distancing of the West’s Christian powers, which integrative Ottomanism by some Maronites had already tried.

            In the _al-Mashriq_ retrospect, those martyred under Turkish rule during World War 1 decide what had been a long-running struggle for power between two ideological categories of Maronites.  Thus, following the 1908 Committee of Union and Progress coup in Constantinople and the hopes that a parliamentarist Ottoman polity could get off the ground, “the Turks and their tools [=some establishment or secular Catholics] became more enraged than ever against the two brothers because they were so effectively obstructing their realising of their wish to completely annex Lebanon to the Ottoman Sultanate”.  The (pre-WW1) memory that enraged the writer most was “the day that Lebanese faction rose up in the wake of the proclamation of the Ottoman constitution [after the CUP coup of 1908] to insist that Lebanon had to elect representatives to represent it in the [restored] Turkish parliament” in Istanbul.  In this, the secularist-Ottomanist faction among the Maronites was being manipulated by Turkish officials and politicians to “deny Lebanon its independence and thereby prevent the European states from intervening in the affairs of this land/these lands” (_hadhihil-bilad_).  The two al-Khazin brothers blocked “those of the other doctrine” with the “unrelenting” (but not very physical) war they waged in their newspaper _al-Arz_.  Their “logical” territorial nationalism (wataniyyah) presented legally airtight refutations: sending representatives to Constantinople would have violated Lebanon’s autonomy ("self-independence") granted under a Constitution guaranteed by the great powers.

             The holy blood of the saint-particularists whom Jamal martyred opened the way to dismiss those who had worked for a humane political community with Ottoman Muslims as materialist opportunists in contrast.  Yet these very denunciations underscored institutions and processes that had been operating to integrate Muslim Turks, Muslim Arabs, and Arabic Christians prior to the War and the martyrdoms.  Archbishop ‘Abdallah al-Khuri’s 1921 elegy denounced “public posts (_al-waza'if_) that make people remiss from serious work, inclining them to prefer personal interest over the collective interest.  Everyone knows how widespread this disease became in Turkey and Lebanon, leading to the degradation of people’s souls and the violation of people’s rights”.  But, the pure love of the two brothers for their homeland had made them spurn all posts the government offered to win their silence about its evil deeds.  The two brothers’ construction of patriotism (al-wataniyyah) only allowed them to court the protection of France which alone would actualize the homeland’s interest. 

            _al-Mashriq_ imaged that the blood of the martyrs ended any possibility of some humane political community with Turks.  For this, the Archbishop defined the group the two martyrs defended as Christian --- yet it did not so fuse the Turkish enemy with Islam as to include Arab Muslims.  The sufferings of Arabic, Syriac and Armenian Christians during World War 1 could activate ideas that would polarize those all together against Muslims in general or Islam.  But the anti-Turkism of 1920s clericist-Catholic Lebanese writings that reconstructed memories of WW1 repression, martyrdom and suffering to fuel a new nationhood could keep up some affiliation to the hinterland’s Arab Muslims.  A sense that Syrian and other Muslim Arabs had been colleagues with Lebanese Christians in a joint linguistic-cum-ethnic coalition against the Turks in the wide Ottoman Empire was still vivid in _al-Mashriq_’s 1922 tribute to “the two martyrs of Lebanon.”

             As soon as their interrogation began, Archbishop ‘Abdallah al-Khuri wrote, Filib and his brother knew that they were heading for the same fate as “an elite of the [leading] men of Syria and Lebanon who were detained with them, and who were driven either to Damascus (al-Sham) or to Bayrut for sentences of execution to be carried out against them --- figures like Shafiq al-Mu'ayyad and ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Zahrawi whose bravery and preparedness to sacrifice their lives for the suffering homeland the Syrians will long remember.  By the blood of those heroes the land [or lands --- _al-bilad_] won title to be purified of the Turkish element” [=Ottoman phraseology] “and the corruptions it wrought”.  True, the Catholic writer remained aware of the separateness of faith of those recent allies.  However, he felt obliged to “richly praise the patriotism of our Arab Muslim brothers who  --- despite their religious bonds with the Turks --- were not deceived by their lying promises but kept up their fury at the injustices and terrible crimes they committed.”  Jamal Pasha’s ill-advised repression dug “a deep ravine that irreversibly separated the two [Ottoman] elements/ethnic groups (_al-‘unsurayn_)”.

             In this sector, the tribute to the two bearers of the standard of ultra-particularism and a sort of spiritual fusion with France, does have a sense of commonality in the face of the Turks at least that could blur the nation in Lebanon out into some wider Arab political nation.  The memorization of martydom here could activate the sense of al-‘Arab as a cherished wide classical community in which Father Luwis Shayku had stressed the membership and roles of many Christians.  This quicksilver margin of the tribute to the two al-Khazin brothers could veer either way --- to Lebanese particularism or to a wider Arab linguistic nationalism.  This was, though, a margin. FN[[Archbishop Abdallah al-Khuri, “Shahida Lubnan: al-Shaykh Filib wal-Shaykh Farid Qa‘dan al-Khazin”, _al-Mashriq_ June 1921 pp. 401-408.   There was a youthful radical, post-Christian element among the forces that called for Lebanon’s inclusion into Ottoman parliamentarism after 1908, but also “a group of the eminent/powerful/established figures” (_qawm min al-kibar_): see _al-Ahram_ editor Dawud Barakat’s obituary speech for Patriarch al-Huwayyik in _al-Huda_ 1 February 1932 pp. 4-5.  Thus, a section of the established Maronite feudal class was engaged with an Ottomanist integrationism which could slash the patriarchate’s power]]FN.

_Patriarch Ilyas Butrus al-Huwayyik versus Jamal Pasha_

                During his 1922 account of Armenian suffering and death that he witnessed, the Maronite Juzif Tawtal already termed Jamal, the Ottoman governor of Syria during WW1, as “Jamal Pasha the Murderer” ("al-Saffah"), the epithet that would henceforth accompany his name in Lebanonist and Arabist nationalist discourses FN[[Juzif Tawtal, “Hawadith Dayr al-Zur fi Zaman al-Harb” (The Events in Dayr al-Zur during the War), _al-Mashriq_ June 1922 p. 567]]FN.  

             During WW1, Jamal Pasha as governor of Syria was intent to modify procedures to symbolize a partial shift of power from the Maronite church and from Mount Lebanon’s autonomous institutions towards himself and the Ottoman central government. The Empire’s central Turkish authorities had abolished the capitulations; Jamal sent his troops into Mountain Lebanon and at one point imposed a blockade that starved many ordinary people there.  The food-blockade came at a high-point of a long personal trial of wills between him and the Maronite Patriarch Ilyas Butrus al-Huwayyik (appointed in 1899): Jamal’s troops were in the Jabal but he did not disarm the Maronite population, conscript them widely or prohibit them from leaving it: this suggests that he meant to let food flow in again if al-Huwayyik made some gestures of subordination, which the Patriarch inventively avoided as long or as much as he could.

             In early 1922, Archbishop ‘Abdallah al-Khuri published in the Jesuit-founded newspaper _al-Bashir_ a defence of stances that al-Huwayyik had adopted towards Jamal during the War.  al-Khuri conceded that a section of the Maronites felt that the Patriarch had shown weakness at one point of his protracted confrontation with the man who symbolized Turkish rule when in October 1916 he signed a statement to the effect that Jamal had treated the populations of Lebanon and Syria well, particularly the Christians.  [The well-attended demonstrations by Catholics after 1918 for a Greater Lebanon unit under French tutelage were in part upward pressure from Maronite populations that had been radicalized by the war-time suffering: it was not just that the Patriarch organized them].

             Yet, while ‘Abdallah’s 1922 memorization did not focus that aspect, it looks from his data that Jamal had been acting in geographical Syria without much control or monitoring from Constantinople.  ‘Abdallah, an intermediary for al-Huwayyik to Jamal, recalled the latter as seeking written statements from local Christian leaders to counter articles appearing in the French press in 1916 that “the Turks” were determined to starve the Christian people to extinction in Lebanon and Syria, “that he had set up gallows” --- the latter was the simple truth ---, “and that the Maronites were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the French so that they could join them and expel the Turks and turn their country into a French colony”.  Such international reports had apprised the CUP leaders away in the capital that Jamal had so alienated all the Syrians, the Muslims perhaps even more than the Christians, as to make their discontent threaten the Ottoman State’s hold in those lands.  Jamal Pasha’s repeated efforts to force Patriarch al-Huwayyik into rituals of respect towards the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Istanbul that all non-Maronite Christian clerics accepted were to assure his faraway CUP superiors that his provinces were non-rebellious and quasi-normal.

             Maronite clericist negotiators were concerned with their position and that of their populations before Turkish power.  During the discussions with Jamal on behalf of the Patriarch, ‘Abdallah replied that newspapers during wars strive to blacken the reputations of the enemy states.  But the numbers of Lebanese people really were falling because at least 50,000 had died in the famine and with Lebanon now on the threshold of winter much food would have to be brought in by its close or the country would lose half its population.  In al-Khuri’s narrative, the statement of good treatment from Governor Jamal that the Patriarch would now sign was the latter’s response to the existential crisis of Maronites in general that was now forcing him to negotiate and concede.

             None of the Catholic Lebanese sources in Arabic we scanned recorded that Jamal was rather pro-French culturally and that he may have regretted the CUP’s entry of WW1 on the German side FN[[Characterization of Jamal by liberal-Lebanonist historian Yusuf Mu‘awwad 21 May 2001]]FN.  For the Patriarch, and for his subordinate Archbishop ‘Abdallah in his 1922 commemoration, the connection with France was both a threat to the Maronites given the mood of the hard-pressed Turks, and a proud emblem of identity they flaunted in their face.  To aspersions of disloyalty to the Ottoman state, ‘Abdallah responded that France had out of “love” of the Christians established many institutions in Lebanon such as the theological college in which he had learnt.  The Maronites had duly loved her back, but, ‘Abdallah told Jamal, that love had far from fostered in him “any inclination on my part for my country to become a French colony”.  When Jamal voiced the same concern of loyalty to the Patriarch in a meeting on 21 July 1915, al-Huwayyik similarly put the relationship with benefactor France within a frame of the Maronites’ adhesion to the Ottoman State --- which may have been his real stance up to 1908.

            Jamal Pasha was concerned in 1916 with his deteriorating standing in Istanbul, or his place in world Francophone history or perhaps how he would fare before some trial by the Allies if they won.  He refuted at length images in the French press that could be construed to link him to an artificial famine.  He rhetorically asked Abdallah if he had sent the locusts in 1915 or stopped rain from falling in 1916 or organized the sea blockade by the Allied navies that cut off the flow of food and funds from the Syrian diaspora?   He now sounded eager to shower the Patriarch with grain, and did get the letter of commendation out of him that the Maronite side assumed would be understood in Europe and the Americas as having been coerced FN[[Archbishop ‘Abdallah al-Khuri, deputy of the Patriarch, “Safhah Ta’rikhiyyah Min Ayyam al-Harb” (A Page of History from the Days of the War), _al-Bashir_ 1 March 1922 pp. 1-2.  For al-Huwayyik on the Maronites’ loyalty before Jamal Pasha on 21 July 1915 see Yusuf Mu’awwad, “Exercise de dhimmitude: Patriarche Ilyas al-Huwayyik versus Jamal Pasha” (Paper: c. 2000) p. 8]]FN.

               ‘Abdallah al-Khuri in 1922 had characterized the non-Muslim Lebanese in religious terms as Christian vis-à-vis Jamal and the Turks. Going further, fairly secularist-liberal historian Yusuf Mu‘awwad (c. 2000) interpreted Jamal as motivated by a Muslim communalism seen as having persisted among elite Ottoman Turks amid sweeping Westernization: Jamal was trying to maintain the ancient pattern of relations of “dominant and dominated, people of the majority and those tolerated, Muslim and _dhimmi_” --- a late echo of themes in the Mandate-period early Kata’ib.  For Mu‘awwad here, the conflict was not originated by issues articulated by the two men such as new taxes or whether or not the Ottomans should disarm or conscript the Christians: rather, the Ottoman officer Jamal was mustering pressures and issues to bring the _dhimmi_ to heel and call him to order FN[[“Exercise” pp. 1-2]]FN.  Archbishop al-Khuri did not formally characterize Jamal’s maneuvers thus in 1922 soon after the events, but many Maronites in the 20th century saw such a dhimmifying ethos constructed upon Islam as determining the attitudes of Turks and Muslim Arabs to Lebanon’s Catholics.   Tendencies in early mandate-period Catholic memorization to denounce oppressive Turks in terms of Islam were contained by the sober al-Huwayyik’s lack of much animus against that religion, and by Lebanese Catholics and Muslims Arabs having faced Turkish ill-treatment together --- affinity that had to be highlighted to foster new Lebanonist or loose Arab political communities after WW1.  During his trials of will with Jamal, al-Huwayyik had tried to present himself as in some ways an intercessor-representative for Druze/Muslim Lebanese individuals as well as for the Maronite sect: the clerical archivist Fr Ibrahim Harfush retransmitted it in 1934, in a period in which Greater Lebanon’s Christians and Muslims had to be led to unifying images of their common past if the Lebanese state was to be viable in its coming independence.

                 But Jamal and his sometimes post-Muslim new Turkish elite had concerns apart from religions and sects.  Pro-France sympathies among a purposeful, compact population such as the Maronites amid a World War could provide a bridgehead against the Ottoman state.  His state-prescribed functions thus bound Jamal to find ways to contain Maronite clerical leaders, whatever the extents to which Francophone Turks of his type still believed in Islam.   One stake was the security, sovereignty and survival of a State that existed and was refusing to be dismantled.  No doubt, as a schizoid sadist, Jamal relished his power to exile the Patriarch from Lebanon at any time and harm humans who were Christian Lebanese.  On another plane, as an acculturated Muslim or post-Muslim, Jamal may have felt all he and his category of Turks had in common with Francophone elite Lebanese as against traditional Muslims.  After the suffering he had ran ordinary Lebanese through by manipulating the flow of food, a crestfallen Jamal --- so Fr Harfush’s 1934 memorization ran --- in a December 1917 meeting with al-Huwayyik confided his tensions with the German military, and seemed understanding of the Maronites’ preference for the French as mentors.   In this swing, Jamal was treating al-Huwayyik as a peer in a common Francophone culture that would promote modernity, and such a respect or admiration towards the Maronites may have always been latent in his pressurizing of their leader FN[[Yusuf Mu’awwad, “Exercise de dhimmitude” pp. 15-16.   Mu‘awwad based his analysis of the conflict between Jamal and the Patriarch on Michel Shibli’s biography of the Maronite Archbishop of Bayrut Mgr Butrus Shibli, _Tarjamat al-Mutran Butrus Shibli_ (Bayrut: al-Matba’at al-Kathulikiyyah 1929) which carried extensive passages from the Archbishop’s journals; and on church archivist Fr Ibrahim Harfush’s _Dala’il al-‘Inayat al-Samadaniyyah_ (Juniyah: Matba‘at al-Mursalin al-Lubnaniyyin 1934)]]FN.

             When facing Jamal Pasha, in his untiring post-WW1 drive for a Greater Lebanon under French direction against resistance from some secularist Maronites as well as Muslims, and in the analytical sweep of his Arabic theological and political writings and addresses, Patriarch al-Huwayyik today bulks large in any memory of Lebanon’s history. The liberal Lebanese nationalist Dr ‘Isam Khalifah, a Maronite, in 1997 historiography he also tailored to help bring all Lebanese back together after their 1975-1990 War so that they could take back sovereignty, focused on al-Huwayyik’s “resistance” to the war-time famine.   Khalifah stressed the Ottoman troops’ [war-imposed] exactions of livestock, wood and money from the Jabal populations, that Enver Pasha set out to suppress the Lebanese by inducing famine as the Turks already had suppressed the Armenians with “steel”, that the Patriarch tried to intercede for and get relief to local Druze/Muslims as well as Maronites during the famine, that he associated non-Catholic sects with his lobbying for expanded Lebanon, separation from Syria and the French mandate after the War, and that he wanted to minimize France’s new control.   Khalifah traced the complexly-attuned political skills with which al-Huwayyik mustered non-religious as well as Catholic sectors of the French establishment, and the Vatican, to help persuade France and the Powers to impose Greater Lebanon FN[[Dr ‘Isam Kamal Khalifah, _Shakhsiyyat Barizah fi Ta’rikh Lubnan al-Mu’asir_ (Bayrut: np. 1991) pp. 6-13, 15]]FN.  Gouraud’s 1920 proclamation of that state was the first of two crucial turning-points for the construction of Lebanese sovereign nationhood, yet current inclusive Lebanonist intellectuals and academics do not then proceed to celebrate al-Huwayyik as an icon-founder of Lebanon: his clerical function, and his long relation with the French, rule out acceptance by descendants of the Muslim populations that were incorporated by his efforts abroad more than by choice from them.

             The sufferings of Mount Lebanon’s Christians during World War I in the aftermath fueled support among Catholics for a mandate by France.  In the first item of the first issue in which _al-Mashriq_ resumed publication in January 1920, Shaykhu argued for France as the coming mandatory with reference to the war-time sufferings of the Christians of Mount Lebanon.  The break of five years that “the calamities” (=war-time conditions) imposed upon _al-Mashriq_ had been borne by its editors with [religion-inspired] _sabr_ (patience/resignation/endurance/steadfastness).  Although a Christianity-inspired ethos, Shaykhu’s language here was certainly, as ever, tinted by Islam and its classical Arabs at every turn  (“_al-sabr ul-jamil li‘ilmihim ann Allah ma‘as-sabirin” --- a straight collage by Shaykhu of the language of Qur’an  2:249, 8:46, 8:66, 12:18, 12:83!).  Now, though, the aesthetic links to Arab Muslims were outweighed by the recent sufferings and the Francophone links as Shaykhu and his readers entered the new era of “hopes” that was transforming the world (“al-‘alam al-jadid”, “inqilaban ‘aziman”).  Shaykhu hailed the Allies for having “entered the havoc of the war to defend civilization and the rights of the weak peoples and to break the yokes holding down those that had been enslaved”.   France “in the time of its war did not lose sight of our experience” and had spirited through “vast sums that saved from death thousands of people who were tottering with hunger”.

                Shaykhu’s editorial viewed Turkish repression and ill-treatment of his group during the war as a heightening of a long-standing struggle in which France had for centuries been the “refuge” of the Empire’s suffering [Christians].  France’s protection had won for “the remnants of Christianity in the [Ottoman] East” capitulatory privileges that reduced their sufferings but made the Turks envious.   Shaykhu here had half-insight that the relationship with imperial France itself sparked some repression from the Turks who wanted to maintain their state or empire, but he could not grasp the manipulative economic motives of France’s expansion when he depicted her as always shedding her blood “for every noble principle” in the “purity of her intentions”. 

             This editorial said that France offered relief from early after the Turkish collapse to “those in need from every sectarian group”.  But its overall presentation of France as acting in West Asia to promote as well as protect the Catholics there could alienate Muslim Arabs incorporated into the expanded homeland-unit from not just France but those Catholics who allied to her FN[[Luwis Shaykhu , “Tahiyyat al-Mashriq li-Qurra’ihi” (The Greeting of _al-Mashriq_ to its Readers), _al-Mashriq_ January 1920 pp. 2-3]]FN. 

             Shaykhu’s harsh binary oppositions here of (a) local Christians and a France that alone can modernize them against (b) Muslim Turks are intelligible in terms of the contraction of the Lebanese population during World War I, and the destroyed economy that that disintegration had bequeathed.  

             In one fleeting item, Shaykhu did connect “the famine [caused by] the Turks” and post-War clashes between some Shiite Arabs and some Maronite and other Christians in Southern Lebanon.  The wartime “famine has turned into the war of the sharp swords” of those shedding torrents of “the blood of our murdered Christian brothers” in Marja‘yun, Akkar, Tyre [all incorporated into Grand Liban] and the areas of Mar‘ash [Southern Turkey: massacres of Armenians 1890, 1917] and Cicilia.  This pan-Christian twinge at least of Shaykhu could conflate the Turks who systematically harmed his people and other non-Arabic Christians during World War I into various sets of local [Arab Muslims] who were more small-scale in the harm they did.  Shaykhu was disturbed, though, that the French “second mother” was taking a long time to crush these [Arab Muslim] enemies as a deterrent example FN[[Shaykhu, _al-Mashriq_ June 1920 p. 477]]FN.  This item fused France with Lebanon’s Catholics, and indeed a range of Christian populations scattered over the Middle East, but failed to name the enemies it lumped together as all “the Muslims”.

              The context of items after 1920 about Turkish or Muslim hostility or atrocities in WW1, and France as a consequent protector was the growing reaction against France and in favor of community with Muslim Arabs among educated Maronites.  Interpretations of WW1 were important motifs mustered in these disputes.  Some writers in the Catholic-clerical _al-Bashir_ itself, and in the quasi-secular _Lisan al-Hal_, were calling for the Arabic language to be given the central place in local administration and education, not French.  These calls fitted in with politicized attacks upon the French mandatory in the Lebanese parliament. The mandatory power’s imposition of French made Druze deputy Amir Fu’ad Arsalan characterize the overall French-Lebanese relationship as like France’s treatment of sub-Saharan Africans in her colonies FN[[“al-Majlis al-Niyabi: Muwazanat al-Dakhiliyyah” (Chamber of Deputies: Budget of the Ministry of the Interior) _al-Bashir_ 16 November 1922 pp. 1-2]]FN.   _al-Bashir_ countered with an apologia for France’s colonial administration in black Africa, citing (a) the consequent gratitude to France the Africans showed by their loyal combat in World War 1, and (b) the profits France permitted Lebanese traders in her sub-Saharan African colonies FN[[“Law Sa'al al-Amir Arsalan” (Had the Amir Arsalan Asked), _al-Bashir_ 18 November 1922 p. 3]]FN.  The total French empire community was the core of the humane camp of Entente nations that had been fighting in the macro-history of WW1.

 by Dr Dennis Walker, Researcher,

 Monash Asia Institute/PSI, Monash University Australia,

                                    

                               I have for the last ten years been writing on computer a series of three books covering the whole 19th century and twentieth-century history and cultures of Lebanon's Catholics --- primarily the Maronites.  I did the basic research for this book from microfilms of Catholic newspapers in Arabic, notably _al-Bashir_,  that I read in the Department of Middle East Studies at Melbourne University from 1971-1974.  I have since 2002  visited Lebanon five times to gather data and fill in gaps for my book, living in the German Orient Research Institute in Bayrut and in Dayr Ghusta doing my research under Rev Dr Yusuf Azzi.

                               I am due to travel by air to Beirut on 15 September 2013 --- in three weeks! --- to complete the first volume of my three-volume study of Lebanon’s Catholics.  I will spend eight weeks in Lebanon (unless too many exploding bombs delay my departure!).  The published book should total 350 pages.  It will be titled _Lebanon’s Catholics to the End of the Ottoman Period and the Coming of French Mandatory Rule_.

1:  _CONCERNS AND STRUCTURE OF MY BOOK ON LEBANON_

                          My first book, the first volume of the three, will be titled _Culture and Community Ideas among Lebanon's Catholics, 1850-2000_.  I must stress that my study will focus on Arabic and French high cultures and intellectual discourses among the Maronites.  Thereby, it will pull discussion somewhat away from the factional-political and economic dimensions, and International Relations, on which recent historical works about the Maronites published from the West since 1980 have concentrated.

                    Volume I will contain five chapters:

          CH 1: The Maronites in the Ottoman Period from 1800 to 1918 [concentrating on the post-1900 period].  This chapter will assess (1) the spread of missionary  institutions and the French language in the 19th centyry, (2) the Maronite clergy's development of Arabist scholarship and creative literature (_Adab_)  and Catholic theological learning and journalism in Arabic, (3) the crystallization of radically modernist and anti-clerical ideas among intellectuals influenced by freemasonry and French anti-clericalism and (4) the modernization and integration of general Lebanese society under the Ottomans.  However, my discussion will direct some attention to events in 1860 and suffering of the Lebanese during World War 1.   

          BK  2: France's Imposition of her Limited Rule on Lebanon after World War 1 and Early Pan-Catholic and Particularist Ideas among its Catholics under the Mandate.  The Maronite Church's role in the mobilization of local and international support for the creation of Greater Lebanon.  France's role in establishing modern infra-structure and the evolving Maronite merchant class' developmentalist concepts of economic affiliation to the French Empire and West Europe in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Ottoman rule.  The main conservative pan-Catholic intellectual examined will be Fr Butrus Ghalib, author of the 1923 book _Sadiqah wa Hamiyah_ that reviewed the Lebanese Catholics' whole historical relationship with France and West Europe.  However, I am giving some coverage of early crude motifs of Phoenician identity in the 1920s.

          BK  3: Social Change and Arabist, Syrianist, and anti-Clerical/Modernist Ideas among Lebanese Catholics in the 1920s.  Anti-French cultural identifications among Lebanese Catholics in the 1920s.  This Chapter will primarily be an impressionistic view of the rapid changes in Lebanese society and culture under early French mandatory rule.  I hope to draw a lot of the data from Maronite belles-lettres of the period.    

          BK. 4: The crystallization of ideology.  The Widening roles of the Maronite church under the leadership of Patriarch Ilyas Butrus al-Huwayyik, the Father of Lebanese Independence. Amin al-Rayhani as a modernist and a Pan-Arab, but with close attention to counter-critiques of him from the Maronite high clergy.  That should give a richer context of Catholic civil society as a whole, and the development of religious Lebanese particularist nationalism in reaction to wider Arab linguistic nationalism.

          BK 5: The foundation of Lebanon’s political parliamentary democracy and private-enterprise economy.

 _APPROACHES OF MY PLANNED THREE-VOLUME SERIES_

          My post-modern study of the modern Christian Lebanese to 2010 will seek out inner dividedness or many-mindedness in the psyches of many Maronite politicians and intellectuals.  Lebanon was a meeting-place for the whole Middle East and between the Arab World and the West.  Maronite personality has beeen formed out of a multiplicity of cultures: (a) standard high Arabic dating back to pre-Islamic Arabia; (b) colloquial Arabic which voices a recent post-classical ethos defined by place (Lebanon/the Fertile Crescent); (c) Syriac and Syriac Christianity; (d) Latin Catholicism; (e) French and the post-Christian radical secularism that flourished in France's intellectualism and republican polity; (f) Anglo-Saxon cultures associated with globalizing modernity since World War II and (g) the neighboring entity of Islam whose Arabic discourses Lebanese Catholics constantly overhear.  This diversity of influences in the make-up of Lebanese Catholics greatly explains the divergent --- or complex --- attitudes of their writers.  Most Lebanese Catholics have wanted some sort of community with the West, but the studies in Western languages have missed the tensions and cultural depersonalization this too often entailed.  Not all quality Maronite discourse has always closed meaning or dichotomized (a) the Maronite entity as an affiliate of the West against (b) the Arabo-Muslim world in the radically separated way that a substantial school of Lebanese politicians/writers, and some Western scholars, has.  I aim to show the protean diversity of Maronite discourse before 1950 in order to present the problems and divisions, but also to show successes by the Maronite ethos in balancing commitments to (a) Lebanon, (b) the wide Arab World, (c) the West and (e) bilingualism and high Arabic.

          My book will draw somewhat more from high literature than political communications.  I also want to shift the focus from the three small elites of politicians, writers and entrepreneurs to the day-to-day life and ethos of wider sectors of Catholic populations.  Ordinary people do have their own rueful and iconoclastic perspectives.

          I want my book to be different from the other histories of Lebanon written in Western languages.  The way that I hope to do this is by mixing images and passages from Catholic Lebanese high literature into the discussion of historical, political and ideolological issues. I want my 350-page book that goes up to 1925. and the subsequent two volumes, to give a sense of the personal lives and thoughts  of Catholic individuals.

                   _The West_.

          The ongoing responsiveness to the wide Arab World was inherent in Lebanon's geographical position and international role as an economic as well as cultural junction between East and West.  This link-role, though, equally entailed ongoing, changing, evolving relations with not just France but a widening range of Westerners and their cultures.  I shall accordingly trace the mixed and ambivalent, shifting, attitudes of various categories of Maronites and Melkites to France after 1935 in the period of her imperial decline and her destruction as a great power by Nazi Germany.  I want to measure and assess how close Maronite writers and observers could get to realistic understandings of France's society and culture on their own terms --- beyond use of France as an instrument to secure the interests of a Maronite people vis-a-vis hinterland Arabs and Muslims.  I believe that my further research in Lebanon will show that the fundamental strains and difficulties for integrating the Maronites' special Catholicism with secular aspects of French society and thought remained in the period in which Lebanon achieved independence, despite the much more West-tinted and secular nature of Lebanese society by 1939 compared to 1918.  I shall try to evaluate the increasing focus of Lebanese Catholics on Anglo-Saxon societies, cultures and states: the geopolitical context is the role of the British in Lebanon's achievement of independence, and the attempt by the Kamil Sham'un administration to ally with America against the camp of Arab nationalism through the Eisenhower Doctrine.  As always in my book, though, I shall be pulling my discussion over into works of high literature in Arabic and French, and the lives and perceptions of ordinary Lebanese.

               _Economics_.

          The economic stance remained fairly constant under Bisharah al-Khuri and Kamil Sham'un: most Maronite intellectual leaders wanted the newly-independent country to develop a radical laissez-faire capitalism that few Western states followed by the 1960s.  The deflationary, free monetary structure and flexible foreign exchange and low tariffs that the Lebanese state fostered after 1945 were an economic liberalism original to Lebanon at a time when the Western states were moving to greater intervention by their governments in economic matters.  Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s anticipated the whole world's deregulation and globalization of economies in the 1980s and 1990s.  Rather than an uncritical Westernism, it is these points of originality that to my mind make the twentieth century history  of Catholic Lebanon truly worth studying.

2: MY SECOND AND THIRD BOOKS ON LEBANON’S CATHOLICS:

      _Tensions and Conflicts between Christians and Muslims_

          Much literature published about Lebanon in the West has focused on political tensions between Lebanese sects in government and parliamentarism, fighting between those Lebanese sects, and conflicts between categories of Lebanese Christians and intervening foreigners.  My own focus will shift somewhat to those factors that, by the early 1970s, were working to integrate as well as polarize the Lebanese groups: the somewhat unsatisfactory Lebanese state might have survived with reforms had not the Palestinians and Israel confronted it with problems beyond any reasonable capacity.  I do not intend to quote Muslim Lebanese much in my Maronite-centric book: to the extent that I do, I will assess pan-Arab word-games of still underprivileged Sunni sub-groups in the independent Lebanon polity as mostly a protest rhetoric for getting into a mainstream whose Maronite establishment had long been a covert model for Sunni malcontents.

          On the whole, my book will stress interesting successes of independent Lebanon's state and society in integrating a new multi-sectarian national community.  The new Lebanese state did not lift ordinary Sunnis to parity with the quickly-progressing Maronites, but its expanding state educational system did make even poorer Sunnis literate.  Thus, the Sunni sect's prospects were improving in the free-wheeling economy.

      _The Kata'ib and the Quwwat Lubnaniyyah_

          My book will attempt a revisionist account of the evolution of the Kata'ib from 1936-1995 that will be culture-orientated in contrast to John Entelis' organizational focus.  I will give prominence to the Catholic-Christian drives of the Kata'ib, and to the Party's perceptions of its interactions with the Maronite clerical hierarchy, and its images of Western countries and Western cultures.  Entelis and other analysts have focused on the Kata'ib's roles in different periods as a rallying-point during polarization between Lebanese Catholics and Muslim Arab forces.  While I will of course take due account of such themes in Kata'ib discourses, I will also seek formulations in them that are fairly open or constructive to outside Arabo-Muslim states and high cultures.  (The early Kata'ib had some good interactions with pre-1952 Egyptian and 'Iraqi pan-Arabs).

          Above all, I want to scan the Kata'ib's French and Arabic publications in mandatory and early independent Lebanon for evidence of its function as a framework from which new rising Catholic strata could assert themselves against established rich, powerful Catholic groups.  The early Kata'ib definitely had this anti-establishment role as a rather anti-parliamentary paramilitarist youth movement (1936-1942).  In its period of party-paramilitarism synthesis in the developing Lebanese national state and its institutions in the 1950s and 1960s, the Kata'ib moderated its early protest functions.  Its main activity was directed to increasing its representation in parliament; and in 1958, while standing against pan-Arabism, it was closing ranks with other Maronite and Christian groups.  Yet, after 1975, the Kata'ib produced a new off-shoot that tried to take over or sweep away the old Maronite parliamentarians and their party-structure.  Thus, the Kata'ib has been a forum or matrix for attempts to radically restructure and reintegrate Maronite society that have to be researched.

          The final section of my book will have in it a review of the motifs and proto-ideology of the new Catholic micronationalism that developed around the Lebanese Forces in the context of sieges and evacuations in Mountain Lebanon in the 1980s.

                  I have been receiving data and resources from the Lebanese community here on the development of Lebanese society and intellectual cultures from 1975 to today.  I appreciate this help that the Maronite and Melkite communities in Australia have given me in order to help me to help them by producing English-language books on their history that will help a new generation here who cannot read Arabic understand the country of their forefathers, Lebanon.

                   Any very modest financial help from Lebanese Austra\lians towards my expenses in Lebanon will be welcome and acknowledged in my printed book.  I’m going at my own expense into a Lebanon I like and which the tourists are leaving.

                  Dr Dennis Walker,  Researcher,

                  Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Caulfield 3145.

                   Email: --- dennis.walker@monash.edu

                   Phone: 9540 8441 (mornings).