From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  'And yet despite this,' I said, 'the Christians are apparently still emigrating from here en masse.'

  'True. But the reason they are leaving is no longer because they are threatened, or because their country is going to disappear. It is because - how to put it? - they are weary. There is a feeling of fin de race amongst Christians all over the Middle East, a feeling that fourteen centuries of having all the time to be smart, to be ahead of the others, is long enough. The Arab Christians tend to be intelligent, well qualified, highly educated people. Now they just want to go somewhere else, make some money and relax. I can understand it. There is discrimination - sometimes very subtle - against them in almost all Middle Eastern countries. Sometimes when I am with Arab scholars there will be sly digs against Arabs who are not Muslims, doubts about how Arab they are, how patriotic they may be.'

  'And do you think it really matters if the Christians do leave?'

  'It is a very serious matter,' said Salibi. 'Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place, and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world. It is the Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world "Arab" rather than "Muslim". It is the Christian Arabs who show that Arabs and Muslims are two different things, that not all Muslims are Arabs and not all Arabs are Muslims. You see, many Muslims regard Arab history as having little meaning by itself, outside the context of Islam. In that sense we are the Arab world's guarantee of secularism.'

  Salibi leant forward on his desk. 'Since the nineteenth century the Christian Arabs have played a vital role in defining a secular Arab cultural identity. It is no coincidence that most of the founders of secular Arab nationalism were Christians: Michel Aflaq, who founded the Ba'ath Party; George Antonius, who wrote The Arab Awakening. If the Christian Arabs continue to emigrate, the Arabs will be in a much more difficult position to defend the Arab world against Islamism.'

  'But isn't that battle already being lost?'

  'Everyone is very frightened by the spread of fundamentalism,' said the Professor. 'And of course it is unsettling to read about what is happening in Algeria and Upper Egypt. But this is not the end of history.'

  He smiled. 'The battle,' he said, 'is not over yet.'

  It was raining heavily when I left the university, and Beirut's streets were suddenly awash. The water sluiced down the steep incline of the roads and the cars slewed through the streets, horns blowing, up to their gunwales in water.

  'It's the fault of the Syrians,' explained the taxi driver. 'When they resurfaced the roads after the war they covered over the drains by mistake.'

  Now the only drain was the sea, and the water - in some places nearly a foot deep - was flowing fast downhill towards the corniche. Getting from the car to the door of the restaurant was an operation that really required fishing waders.

  Fisk was already at his table, an unexpectedly boyish figure with a coif of springy hair swept back over his high forehead; only the odd grey strand betrayed the fact that he was actually in his late forties.

  'See out there?' he said by way of introduction. 'During the siege Israeli shells used to land all the way along that stretch of road.'

  'So you had to forgo the pleasures of pasta during the siege?'

  'No, no,' replied Fisk. 'They kept the place open and I used to come here regularly. Always have. Its got a wonderful view -though of course during the hostage crisis I tended to keep my back to the window so I wouldn't be seen by the kidnappers.'

  For all his slightly self-conscious bravado, Fisk proved an unexpectedly kind and avuncular figure. Throughout lunch he freely offered advice and was generous with his contacts, flicking through his address book to pass on the phone numbers of warlords and archbishops, patriarchs, torturers and mass murderers. Nevertheless no amount of kindness could disguise the fact that Fisk was clearly a chronic war junkie, suffering from all the usual side-effects of an addiction to bombs, kidnapping, loud explosions and unhealthy quantities of adrenalin. This first became obvious when, at the end of the antipasto, I asked about the possibility of interviewing one of the Phalangist commanders.

  'Well,' he said, puffing at a huge cigar he had just ordered at my expense from the maitre d’. 'It's not easy. Most are dead: assassinated. The rest are in jail, or in Geagea's case about to go there.'

  'Who's Geagea?'

  'One of the Phalangist leaders implicated in the massacres at Sabra and Chatila. He's going on trial after Christmas.' 'For the massacres?' 'No, no. For blowing up a church.' 'But I thought the Phalangists were all Christian.' 'They are.'

  'So why would they blow up a church?'

  'It was Geagea's way of warning the Pope not to visit Lebanon. He thought it would be too dangerous for His Holiness.'

  'So there are no senior Maronite militia leaders left for me to talk to?'

  'Well, I suppose there's still General Lahad of the SLA.' 'The SLA?'

  'The South Lebanon Army: the Israelis' puppet Maronite militia in the zone they've occupied in the south of Lebanon.'

  'And you think I could get to see him?'

  'Piece of cake,' said Fisk, embarking on a lengthy explanation on how I could make contact with the SLA. This involved going to some obscure scrapyard in the suburbs of Beirut and asking for a man called Haddad.

  'Don't talk to anyone else. Leave your name and details. Three days later go back. If Haddad gives you the go-ahead - fine. Have you got a map?'

  I nodded and reached in my bag for the map of Lebanon I'd bought in the hotel. It was a simplified tourist chart dotted here and there with optimistic little pictures of the country's principal archaeological monuments.

  'Well,' said Fisk, wrinkling his nose as he examined my chart, 'for a start you'll need a better map than this. But this will have to do for the time being. Drive south along this road through the Chouf. Then take a left along this little road here. Leave your car there, at that spot: you see? I'll mark it with an X. Get out - very slowly, no sudden movement, they'll have their snipers trained on you already - and walk the final five hundred yards to the SLA checkpoint with your hands on your head. You'll be all right. As long as your name is on the list, that is.'

  'It doesn't sound very safe.'

  'I would do it - no problem. I went to the SLA headquarters in Marjayoun last month, as a matter of fact. There are Hezbollah all round, of course. They might take a potshot at you, but they generally don't shoot unmarked cars. At least not normally. It's not as if you'd be travelling in an Israeli army convoy, ha ha.'

  'Ha ha.' I shuddered at Fisk's idea of an easy assignment and privately made up my mind to forget interviewing Lahad, and to keep well away from the SLA.

  Over coffee (for me) and vintage cognac (for Fisk) I mentioned that I had just been to see Salibi and that we had talked about the problems of the Arab Christians.

  'The Arab Christians' principal problem is that the West is Christian,' said Fisk, 'and in one way or another since 1948 the West has humiliated the Muslims of the Middle East over and over again. The Christians simply cannot divorce themselves from the West, however many times they tell their Muslim neighbours that Christianity is really an Eastern religion.'

  According to Fisk it was nevertheless a myth that the Lebanese civil war was in essence a clash of civilisations, Christian against Muslim. It was, he said, more a case of the Maronites against everyone else.

  'The Maronites brought the war down on their own heads. The first event of the civil war was a massacre of Palestinians by a group of Phalangists trying to win power. The Greek Orthodox always realised that the different communities in Lebanon would have to learn to coexist, but the Maronites never came to terms with this. They are a very immature community politically, very stupid, and always letting themselves be used - first by the French, then by the Israelis, now by the Syrians. The Maronites have always really wanted a francophone Lebanon that they can dominate, totally separated from the Arab world, with the Muslims reduced to some sort of folkloric survival tolerated to please the tourists. Is it any wond
er that the Hezbollah headbangers now want to kill them all?'

  'But all the same, quite a lot of the war did seem to have a Christian-Muslim clash behind it, didn't it?'

  'In the course of the war the Phalange attacked the local Armenians and the Greek Orthodox - who themselves quite often fought with the Druze against the Maronites - as well as the Christian Palestinians and other Maronites. Then, at other points, the fighting was almost entirely Muslim against Muslim: in the Camp Wars from 1985 to 1988 it was Shiites against Sunni Palestinians. It's a ridiculous oversimplification - in fact a total misunderstanding - to see the war as a simple Christian-Muslim struggle.'

  It had stopped raining as suddenly as it had started and the sun was now shining brightly. So after I had paid the bill, Fisk offered to take me on a tour of his favourite ruins. This didn't turn out to be the sightseeing trip around the archaeological remains of ancient Beirut that I had been expecting. Instead it was a nostalgia tour through the scenes of Fisk's civil war glory days, carefully avoiding any part of the city which still had a house with its roof intact, a window in situ, or whose facade was not thoroughly honeycombed with shrapnel holes.

  'Look,' said Fisk, nodding excitedly from the back seat of our taxi at a ruinous building opposite. 'Classic sniper's nest.'

  'There?' I asked, pointing to a window on the third floor.

  'Never ever point in Lebanon,' hissed Fisk. 'You'll get yourself killed very quickly if you break basic rules like that.'

  'What...'

  'People will think you're an informer, and shoot you. And me too if I'm with you.' 'I'm so sorry ...'

  'But you had the right window. Look again. What do you see?' 'A pile of old sacks?'

  'Sandbags, with a crate in between.' Fisk was in his element now, like an overexcited trainspotter let loose in the sidings at Crewe. 'That crate is where the sniper would have rested his rifle. During the war that line of buildings would have had corridors knocked through the houses so snipers could move from one house to another without venturing onto the street. Of course, all that is over now,' he added, with what seemed a touch of sadness.

  We drove on, Fisk pointing out sites of interest: 'See that spot? That's where a mine went off, killing a Lebanese journalist. Friend of mine. Horrible business. Blood everywhere. Couldn't even identify the body afterwards ... And over there, see? That's where Terry Anderson was kidnapped. He was taken off screaming down that road. Didn't get released for years . . . And there: that was the French Embassy. '

  'God. What happened to it?'

  'Car bomb, shells and everything else. But it's still there, sort of. Which is more than you can say about the American Embassy. It used to stand there.' Fisk nodded at a huge empty lot. 'It was bombed by Islamic Jihad. They finally pulled down what was left last week.'

  We drove on, and soon came to a warren of narrow streets. Garbage lay uncollected all around, and every building was badly peppered with shrapnel. It looked as if pretty well everything had gone off here: small-arms fire, mortars, howitzers, aerial bombardment, suction bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, car bombs, the lot.

  'Gives you an idea what Beirut used to be like,' sighed Fisk, 'before they started messing around trying to clean it all up.'

  'Why are there so many pin-ups of the Ayatollah Khomeni everywhere?'

  'This used to be the Jewish area of Beirut. That was the synagogue. But the Shiites have taken it over now. You don't want to come here on your own.'

  'What happened to the Jews?'

  'After the creation of Israel they stayed on. But after the 1982 Israeli invasion and the siege of Beirut, Jews came to be seen as legitimate targets, so they had to, er ... leave.'

  From the opposite direction a huge armoured personnel carrier rumbled toward us. It was followed by an army truck full of heavily armed Lebanese troops in their camouflage jumpsuits. We pulled in behind the charred carcass of an old Citroen to let them through.

  'These patrols go through to make sure there are no armed militia men around,' said Fisk. 'There are, of course, hundreds of them, but they keep out of sight. In fact there's not a family here without a stash of Kalashnikovs and couple of mortars hidden away in their back yard. But they keep them tucked away and the army don't poke around too much. It's an unspoken agreement.'

  Fisk gave instructions to the driver and we headed into a great wide square, desolate and empty but for a bronze statue at its centre.

  'This was the Place des Martyrs. It was like Dresden until they pulled it all down. Shame, really. In the old days there was almost total silence in this area. No traffic. No people. Just the gentle crack, crack of snipers. Wonderful'

  We got out and walked over to the statue. Like everything else in the vicinity it was thoroughly peppered with shrapnel and small-arms fire.

  'They're going to leave the statue as a memorial,' said Fisk, 'but everything else is going to go. They're planning to bulldoze it all into the sea.'

  He explained about the plans to redevelop the area: the Downtown Project. It all sounded very Levantine. If I understood correctly, the monopoly to redevelop the entire centre of the city had just been awarded by the Prime Minister to a company called Solidere, in which the Prime Minister happened to be a major shareholder.

  We walked over to the corner of the square, where a roofless Maronite church stood looking onto the wasteland.

  'Follow me,' said Fisk, 'and don't stand on the piles of rubble. You never know where there might be a landmine or a UXB.'

  'UXB?'

  'Unexploded bomb. Hundreds of them all over Beirut. And landmines. Scattered like confetti all over the shop.'

  Following closely in Fisk's footsteps, I was led up to a platform. From it you could look down into a deep hole, thirty feet below. At the bottom, amid the puddles and the rubbish, lay a jumbled pile of old Roman pillars.

  'That,' said Fisk, gesturing at it dismissively, 'is all that's left of five hundred years of classical Beirut.'

  'It's not much, is it?' I said.

  'No,' said Fisk. 'Mind you, had the war continued much longer, modern Beirut wouldn't have looked so different.'

  He pointed to the edge of the square. There stood the wreck of what had once been a neo-classical public building dating from the early years of the French Mandate. All that remained was a line of pillars; even the pediment had been completely blown off. The wreck was indistinguishable from the ruins of a classical temple.

  'See what I mean?' said Fisk.

  Beirut, 30 September

  Few ancient cities give off less historical resonance than Beirut. Its post-war high-rise hellscape immediately conjures up some terrible Apocalyptic vision of the future, but the city's past casts few shadows over the shellshocked present. Everything old has been swept away or blown up. There is nothing on which the historical imagination can find purchase. It is difficult enough to imagine the city as the elegant Ottoman port it must have been only eighty years ago; the ancient classical past now seems hopelessly distant, almost impossible to visualise.

  Nevertheless, in the early Byzantine period the Metropolis of Berytus was one of the principal cities in the Empire: as an intellectual centre it was the site of the Empire's leading law school, while as a centre of commerce it was one of the most prosperous trading ports in the eastern Mediterranean, a major focus of Byzantine silk manufacture and export. Its harbour would rarely have been empty, and during the sailing season - from April to October -would have been cluttered with galleys from Gaul and barques from as far afield as Alexandria, Athens and Carthage.

  In Byzantine times a law degree took five or six years to complete, and was a course of study open only to the children of the very rich. Libanius of Antioch mentions one law student, a certain Heliodorus, who was 'a retailer of fish sauce', but such cases were most uncommon: the law students who congregated in Beirut accompanied by their armies of household slaves and concubines were the children of senators, provincial governors and landowners from across the Empire. They came be
cause a Beirut degree was the quickest way to rapid advancement in the Imperial Civil Service, the Byzantine equivalent of a diploma from Insead or Harvard Business School. Indeed Libanius complains loudly and angrily that modern parents were more interested in the prospects of quick promotion afforded by a Beirut law degree than in the more rounded (and old-fashioned) education in rhetoric he offered at Antioch. It is the same cry professors of Classics can be heard uttering today as their brightest students desert them for vocational degrees in economics or the law.

  One of the most curious aspects of the history of the east Mediterranean is the way that the character of its cities often seems to remain strangely constant, despite the long series of cataclysmic invasions, genocides and exchanges of population that make up their history. Jerusalem, for example, has always been a centre of religious fanaticism, whether inhabited by Jews, Byzantines, Arabs or Crusaders. In the same way Beirut has always had a reputation for hedonism, sharpened, then as now, by occasional outbreaks of aggressive fundamentalism.

  That it was so in the Byzantine period is demonstrated by the fifth-century Life of the Monophysite Bishop Severus of Antioch, written by his friend and companion, Zacharias the Rector. The two friends began their secondary studies in Alexandria, where Zacharias comments with a shudder on the number of professors involved in occult activities: many of the senior members of the faculty were apparently in the habit of secretly visiting a clandestine temple of Menuthis packed full of wooden idols of cats, dogs and monkeys.