But there is a major advantage to Beirut’s unnatural-feeling and now half-empty downtown. Like the Latin Quarter of Paris, cars are banished from most of it. The city desperately needs a little island of breathing space, because streets and sidewalks everywhere else are stressful, loud and even a little bit dangerous.
The rest of the city is a pedestrian nightmare. Streets are so narrow that cars often have to be parked on the sidewalks, forcing everyone on foot into roadways turned to rivers of steel by the worst drivers in the world outside of Albania.
Stop signs merely act as suggestions. Traffic lights scarcely exist and are only really obeyed when traffic is as its peak. Even then, drivers are constantly running red lights. Traffic is so out of control in Beirut that I suspect even the most ardent American opponents of red-light cameras at home would approve of Beirut’s after trying to cross the street a handful of times.
The city is currently installing parking meters for the first time in its history. Parking meters. In Beirut! They are as alien and incongruous there as a topless bar in Saudi Arabia or a Lamborghini showroom in Somalia. Nobody takes them seriously. I recently walked down a street where every parked car—one after another for several blocks in a row—had a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wipers. Citizens may eventually catch on and learn to drive and park like everyone else in the world, but until then, the city careens out of control.
Messiness aside, though, Beirut is the most cosmopolitan, liberal and even Western Arab city by far. Foreigners from Europe and the United States will find far more fragments of their own culture in Beirut than will Arab tourists from the Persian Gulf region, though plenty of Gulfies holiday in Lebanon anyway. To an extent, you can chalk up Beirut’s partial Westernization to the cultural influence of Lebanese Christians and imperial France, but the Sunni parts of town are no less culturally developed than the Christian side. Fantastic bookstores, art galleries, film and music festivals and even gay bars—unthinkable in cities like Baghdad and Cairo—proliferate in both parts of the city.
One reason is that Beirut isn’t very religious. It’s hard to say for sure what percentage of people believe in God and take religion seriously, but let’s put it this way: bars and clubs are much more crowded than churches and mosques. Beirut’s houses of worship aren’t as empty as Europe’s, where you’ll often find more tourists with cameras inside than the devout, but they’re close.
When Lebanese self-identify as Christian, Sunni, Shia or Druze, they aren’t telling you what they believe theologically. They’re telling you which community they belong to. Religious sects in the eastern Mediterranean function like ethnicities, just as they do in Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Atheist Sunni Muslims in Lebanon and Syria are just as much Sunni Muslims in sectarian terms as Jews in Israel are Jews whether or not they’re religious. Each sect has its own history, its own culture, its own aspirations and fears and its own constellation of allies and enemies.
The people of Lebanon, Syria and Israel can’t exempt themselves from all this just because they choose to be secular. Even the most liberal and cosmopolitan secular humanists find themselves trapped by their sectarian identity, sometimes willingly and other times not. It’s inescapable because during times of armed conflict, people can be killed for what’s printed next to Religion on their identity card—and nobody’s card says None next to Religion. Sectarian murderers do not ask, nor do they care, whether or not their victims believe in God or have even set foot in a church or a mosque. During times of armed conflict—and even to an extent during times of sectarian tension, which is near constant—people can only truly find safety amid the confines of their sect.
Lebanon’s diverse sects make up the constituent parts of its culture, and the sectarian boundaries define the human geography. The eastern half of the capital is almost entirely Christian. The western half is predominantly Sunni. And the southern suburbs are all but monolithically Shia.
The city split apart during the civil war into mutually hostile cantons. Christian militias squared off against Palestinian and Sunni militias across a burning gash known as the Green Line, which ripped through the center of the city on a northwest-by-southeast axis. Beirut wasn’t so neatly divided before the civil war, and today you’ll find Christians on the west side and Muslims on the east side, but the city remains mostly divided along the same line today.
Each half of the city looks and feels different. For a host of reasons, the Christian side sustained less damage during the war. Fewer buildings were destroyed, so it’s a lot more French-looking today. It’s also more culturally “French,” since many Lebanese Christians feel a political, cultural and religious kinship with France and the French language that Lebanese Muslims do not.
The west side of the city is more culturally Arab and architecturally bland, because so many of its buildings were flattened during the war. The Sunnis on the west side of town also never bonded as strongly with France. They’re more liberal and cosmopolitan than Sunni Arabs in most other parts of the region, but their culture, religion, language and loyalties are for the most part in sync with their more conservative neighbors.
East and West Beirut are nearly identical, however, compared with the southern suburbs. Collectively known as the dahiyeh, which means suburb in Arabic, this part of the metro area is the de facto “capital” of Hezbollahland. The central government has no writ there. Hezbollah provides its own security, its own services, its own hospitals and its own schools. Drive down the streets and you’ll see the Hezbollah flag and the Iranian flag but rarely if ever the Lebanese flag. It looks, feels and functions like a ramshackle satellite of Iran even though you can walk there from central Beirut in roughly an hour.
Once known as the “belt of misery,” it was and remains a slum, even if it’s a little less miserable than it used to be. Most of the buildings are shoddily constructed 12-story apartment towers built without permits and with no attention whatsoever to grace, style or aesthetics of any kind, especially not the French kind. There are places in East Beirut where, if you try hard enough and squint at the city just so, you could fool yourself into believing you’re somewhere in France, but there’s no chance you could ever get away with that in the dahiyeh.
The dividing lines between these three parts of Beirut are the flash points when armed conflict breaks out. A half-mile or so south of the city center along the old Green Line near Sodeco Square is what’s commonly called the Yellow House, at least what’s left of it. This once beautiful row of apartments and shops was the posh home of some of Beirut’s finest before it was shattered to the core early on during the war. The bullet-pocked stone skeleton still stands in a state of ruin that is hardly less advanced than that of the great gladiator coliseum in Rome.
It is finally being renovated after decades of sitting there like the blasted-up hulk that it is, but it’s not being renovated the way downtown has been renovated. The Yellow House will not look antiseptic and fake when it’s finished. The chewed-up facade will be encased in glass with only the inside fixed up and refurbished. It will become a war museum, its torn-to-shreds husk preserved as if in amber as a constant reminder that urban civil war is one of the worst catastrophes the human race can inflict on itself.
If they aren’t careful and wise, the Lebanese may end up inflicting it on themselves all over again. For the sectarian monster stalking Syria is again clawing its way to the surface in Lebanon. Sunni Muslims, by and large, support the Syrian opposition, while most of Lebanon’s Shia community backs the Assad regime. Hezbollah is now openly involved in the Syrian war—without anything even vaguely resembling an exit strategy—and is taking such heavy casualties that Michael Young, in NOW Lebanon, dubbed it “Hezbollah’s Vietnam.” Meanwhile, Lebanese Sunnis in the Bekaa Valley are giving shelter to their brethren in the Free Syrian Army. Some are even volunteering as soldiers.
Lebanese Sunnis and Lebanese Shias are killing each other right now in Syria. It may be but a matter of time befo
re they stop bothering to first cross the border and just start killing each other at home.
The reason both sides manage to restrain themselves despite it all is that both know neither can win an offensive war inside Lebanon. Amine Gemayel, the former president, summed up the futility of civil wars there when Lebanon was chewing off its own leg in the 1980s. “Everyone is against everyone else,” he said, “and it all keeps going around and around in circles without anyone ever winning or anything being accomplished.”
Eli Khoury concurs. “The beauty of Lebanon,” he says, “is that everyone is a minority and no one can kick anyone’s ass. If there’s a war, it won’t go anywhere. Everyone will protect their own area. Everyone realizes that if they start a war, they aren’t going to get anything out of it.”
Nobody wins wars in Lebanon, but unless Syria permanently breaks apart, Yugoslavia-style, one side or another will eventually emerge on top in Damascus. If Assad loses and doesn’t manage to take Lebanon with him, Beirut will finally have relief from the cascade of catastrophes that has been ravaging the city for the past 38 years.
Lebanon will still have Hezbollah to deal with, of course, but the so-called Party of God only has two supporters and allies in the world, and one of them is Assad.
Future TV talk-show host Nadim Koteich thinks the fall of Assad will be a catastrophe for Hezbollah. “For decades they’ve had this huge, stable state behind them, along with a corridor for weapons coming out of Iran. They had this enormous machine and all its tools at their back. It will be a tremendous blow for them when they lose it. I don’t know any bully who has a future. A bigger bully will eventually come along and kick their ass, or time will pass by and he’ll just realize that he wasted his life pushing people around, while those who were bullied graduated from MIT and Harvard. That’s Hezbollah’s future.”
* * *
Beirut looks and feels Middle Eastern when arriving from America, but it still looks and feels startlingly French when arriving from the inland Bekaa Valley, which has more in common with Syria than with the more cosmopolitan Mediterranean parts of the country. It’s still a mess, though. I’d love to say Beirut is back. The city has a special place in my heart. It’s the only foreign city I’ve ever lived in, and during the Cedar Revolution in 2005, I felt a rush of incredible optimism. The place looked and felt like I imagine East Germany must have when the Berlin Wall was knocked down.
Beirut, though, isn’t back. Beirut, on the contrary, is on its back. The economy is in worse shape than I’ve ever seen it. Tourism is one of the city’s primary industries, yet tumbleweeds are blowing through hotel lobbies. Governments all over the world are issuing terrifying travel warnings. Restaurants and nightclubs are closing because they don’t have enough foreign customers and the locals don’t have enough money.
And yet, paradoxically, the city in some ways looks better than I’ve ever seen it. It’s not Paris—not even close—but it’s harder than it used to be to find physical evidence that a terrible war took place there when I was a kid. The amount of reconstruction is simply astounding. While some of it looks like Miami, some of it looks like Dubai and none of it looks even slightly Parisian, all of it is superior to everything built in the city between the end of World War II—when the abundance of cheap materials and a cratering of aesthetic standards ruined architecture all over the world—and the end of the civil war.
All this progress was made despite Syria’s military occupation, despite Hezbollah’s terrible war against Israel, despite the invasion of Beirut in 2008, despite the global economic downturn that has dragged on for years and despite the civil war next door that is adding yet further insult to Lebanon’s already injured economy.
If Beirut can leap ahead into the future while enduring all that, it should be able to do even better with the Syrian boot off its neck. When the Iranian regime is eventually overthrown or reformed—it happens to all such regimes in due time—and Hezbollah finds itself with no support whatsoever from anywhere, then Beirut, whether it’s the Middle East’s Paris or not, might once again become a great city.
Chapter Thirteen
Across the Sea of Darkness
Morocco, 2012
The Arab Spring left chaos in its wake. Islamization, renewed state repression and the threat of starvation led to a military coup against Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi. The Libyan civil war finally put an end to Muammar Qaddafi’s Stalinist dungeon state, but terrorism, destabilization, assassination and precarious anarchy followed. Sectarian bloodshed approaching genocidal levels may destroy Syria whether ro not its tyrant Bashar al-Assad survives or the country is taken over by the black-clad head-choppers of ISIS. Internally driven regime changes in the Arab world don’t seem to have worked much better than the externally imposed regime change in Iraq.
But on the northwest border of Africa, change is coming to Morocco in a calmer and more gradual way. The ruling regime has been reformed instead of replaced, leaving institutions intact and creating no vacuum for thugs and fanatics to fill. Demonstrations sometimes occur, but they don’t degenerate into riots, armed conflict or mob rule. Nobody thinks civil war is coming, nor is there any danger of an Iranian-style revolution.
Morocco has been outperforming its Arab neighbors for years. Now that a political hurricane is battering the rest of the region, it looks better than ever. Morocco evolves instead of explodes, and while incrementalism doesn’t offer the instant gratification of uprising and revolution, it’s precisely what the Middle East and North Africa need.
* * *
After spending more time than was good for my health in Baghdad and Cairo, Morocco’s capital, Rabat, struck me as remarkably clean, well ordered, peaceful and civilized. While so much of the region wallows in dreariness, Morocco is awash with startling beauty and aesthetic perfection.
Few people love the largest city, Casablanca. It’s a bit chaotic and reminds me of the less fashionable parts of Beirut. But the city center looks and feels like the capital of a European empire, and the reason struck me at once. Unlike most Arab countries outside the Gulf region, Morocco never went through a devastating socialist or Arab nationalist phase. Nor has it suffered revolution or war.
Much of Cairo looks Soviet. Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus chewed themselves to pieces. Soviet-style tyranny and civil war wrecked Algiers. But Morocco passed through the post–World War II era with nary a scratch. It’s an astonishing thing to behold, and it’s impossible, for me anyway, to ignore why: Morocco has been ruled by a stable monarchy for over 300 years.
Americans instinctively hate monarchy. Our country was forged in revolution against the British Crown, and the nation’s founders established one of the most durable and resilient democratic systems in history.
Few Americans, however, are reminded of King George III when they consider the ruling Arab monarchs. The sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf are run by decadent medievalists at best and terrorist sponsors at worst.
King Abdullah of Jordan looks and is better. He’s a modern man who maintains his father Hussein’s peace treaty with Israel. Hussein’s widow, Queen Noor, is a feminist from America. Abdullah clearly wants to bring his country into the 21st century, but he might not survive the turmoil buffeting the region and his kingdom. Half the country wants him out—and wants him out now. His family isn’t even from Jordan. They come from the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia and were installed in 1921 by the British.
Monarchies are by definition not democratic. They are, however—aside from Jordan’s, perhaps—more stable than anything else in the Middle East and North Africa. Elliott Abrams, in an essay for Commentary called “Dictators Go, Monarchs Stay,” describes a meeting he had with former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak in 2005, when the Bush administration was pushing for elections in Iraq. “The Iraqis were incapable of democracy, [Mubarak] argued; you don’t understand them like I do; they need a general to rule them.”
But now the “big men” in the “fake republics,” a
s Abrams described them, have almost all been overthrown, while the monarchs remain. The kings on their thrones have staying power and are not come-latelies. They have tradition on their side, at least.
Morocco’s King Mohammad VI is said to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammad. I asked some people in Rabat if that’s really true. Everybody said yes. I asked how they know it’s true. The answer was always the same. “We just know.” Is it true? I have no idea. But everyone seems to think it is, or at least says that it is, and in any case the Alaoui family has ruled the country without interruption for hundreds of years.
The previous king, Mohammad’s father Hassan II, ruled more or less as an absolute monarch, and his Ministry of the Interior ran what basically amounted to a police state. The so-called years of lead, from the 1960s to the 1980s, were characterized by heavy state repression against opposition movements from both the left and the right, some of which were heavily armed. I don’t know if the word lead in that description refers to the use of ammunition or to just the general heaviness of the era. It works either way.
The lead years were rough. The lead years were brutal. The lead years made Morocco a sadly typical country in the Middle East and North Africa at the time.
Then in 2004, Mohammad VI, five years after ascending the throne, established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission—Instance Equité et Réconciliation—the only one in the world I’m aware of that didn’t follow on the heels of a regime change. Victims of internal repression by Hassan II were rehabilitated and compensated. The young king encouraged everyone to let it all out, to voice their complaints and their grievances, to do so in public and even to scream if they wanted—and he encouraged them to do so against his own father.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 23