by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Warlords and Sheikhs
Some of the old men who police Lebanon’s political system are more heavily guarded than others. The Joumblatts live in the Armenian district of Beirut, near the Apostolic Church (there are roughly 15 6,000 Armenians in Lebanon, many of them descendants of those who fled Turkey during the 1915 genocide). To reach the Joumblatt residence, I pass two checkpoints at either end of a deserted street; I’m late, and walk as quickly as I dare, clutching a bottle of champagne under the gaze of armed guards.
Walid Joumblatt has the air of quiet dignity which befits a retired warlord with nearly half a million Twitter followers. He greets me under a life-size portrait of his younger self, his enormous blue eyes and hawk-like nose unchanged at the age of sixty-seven. Dinner follows: a riot of anecdotes about the Lebanese Civil War, in which Joumblatt controlled a sizeable militia, which at one point rained shells on American marines sent by President Reagan to Beirut in 1983. ‘Ah, la belle epoque,’ he sighs, topping up his tiny cup of sake. Those were the days.’ Now, Joumblatt follows Middle Eastern politics less actively, from a Twitter account rich with emojis and photographs of his beloved dog, Oscar – who also serves as his alter ego in written communications, as I later discover.
Despite formally handing over power in March to his son, Taymur, Walid is still the de facto political leader of the Druze, who form one of Lebanon’s eighteen minorities. There about 300,000 in Lebanon, and Druze politicians act as kingmakers in parliament, navigating between the Christian and Muslim blocs. The Joumblatts have represented the interests of the Druze both politically and militarily for decades; in 1977, Walid took over in true feudal style after his father, Kamal, was murdered at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad. In an interview given to Playboy in 1983, Joumblatt gloomily accepted the likelihood of his own future assassination – hence the checkpoints.
Joumblatt is a curious mixture of idealist and weathervane. Despite representing a religious minority in a far from socialist country, he is an avowed socialist and secularist. He speaks passionately about particular events like the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, or Trump’s eye-wateringly expensive 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia, yet he is pragmatic in his alliances and highly cynical about the theatre of politics. In the Playboy interview, which took place in Geneva during infamous peace talks which failed to resolve Lebanon’s civil war, Joumblatt admitted freely that the negotiations were a total waste of time – ‘rubbish’, in fact. ‘Maybe I’m crazy!’ he tells his interviewer, laughing. Despite this levity, he was a serious player in the war – his well-armed militia forces were accused of multiple atrocities, and of driving thousands of Christians from their homes. He comes across as a kind of Macbeth-like figure, ambitious and ruthless, but, somewhere beyond the surface, horrified by the inevitability of conflict – and perhaps by his own part in it.
‘Who is not bloody and ruthless in Lebanon? Who is not? Everybody in his own way is bloody and ruthless. We are all ruthless; everybody is a warlord! Who is not responsible for crimes and destruction?’
During dinner, I soon become aware that my host is still heavily prone to both cynicism and intellectual excitement, sometimes in the same breath. ‘Ba’athism was the worst thing to ever happen to the world!’ he shouts at one point, referring to the secular Arab nationalist movement that emerged in Syria and Iraq between the two world wars. ‘The Ottoman Empire was fantastic because it was the East standing up to the West,’ he declares later, sounding not dissimilar to Erdoğan, and indeed many Muslims across the Middle East – I am surprised by this unusually hackneyed opinion from a maverick who quickly moves the conversation on to the origin of bananas (‘I am convinced they came from Latin America’ [they do not]) before moving on to his visit to Bobby Sands’s cell in the Maze, and, finally, his enduring disappointment that the Playmate on the cover of his famous 1983 interview was ‘not very beautiful’. As he said this, I glanced over at Nora who was smiling with regal unconcern. Joumblatt is known for his love of beautiful women – his wife is the ultimate testament to this – and her equanimity amuses me.
After dinner, I pluck up the courage to ask for an introduction to the religious elders in the south of the country, who are notoriously wary of outsiders. Joumblatt nods gravely before picking up the phone, and within minutes, everything is arranged: tomorrow Richard Mosse and I will head to the foot of Mount Hermon on the Israeli border, to meet Sheikh Saleh Abou Mansour and his brethren.
Unlike their decidedly candid warlord leader, the Druze are known for their pacifist, puritanical faith and the fierce secrecy with which they protect it. Persecuted since the founding of their religion a thousand years ago, and scattered across Syria, Lebanon and Israel, the Druze may only marry other Druze (a rule most famously flouted by Amal Clooney, née Alamuddin), and outsiders cannot convert or be taught their doctrine. As well as following the teachings of the Bible and Koran (officially classed as Muslims, they call themselves ‘Unitarians’), the Druze believe in reincarnation and give the teachings of Plato and Pythagoras equal weight to those of the Abrahamic prophets. I am optimistic that Sheikh Saleh, who is surprisingly forthcoming over WhatsApp, will tell me more.
The sheikh – ‘call me Saleh, please’ – proves to be a genial man in traditional Druze garb: a high-collared, black tunic, baggy shalvar trousers and a white skullcap. In a mild American accent, he describes himself as ‘a liberal and a progressive’ who has studied extensively abroad; he is also the youngest president of any federal administration in Lebanon, the Jabel Sheh Municipalities Administration of the south-east. When I arrive at his office, he is engrossed in a meeting with government representatives, discussing how to democratize the archaic local councils of the region.
‘I am thirty-six, leading a council of men in their fifties and sixties,’ says Sheikh Saleh, wearily, when the representatives have left. ‘Imagine! There is a lot to change.’ I ask how he got his position. ‘I was put forward by a minister who is a friend of the Joumblatts.’
As I hoped, the young sheikh is unusually open; our conversation veers between the personal, the political and the religious. I ask him why he is being so open – I have heard that the Druze are very secretive about their faith, bringing to mind Muslims who are permitted by the Koranic principle of taqiyya to conceal their faith if threatened.
‘I am a liberal,’ he says proudly, before telling me about his education in America (‘the food almost killed me, can you imagine – coming from Lebanon’) and his progressive views.
But why are the other Druze so secretive?
‘Our progressive faith has not been welcomed. Also, we believe knowledge has to be reached step by step. Faith can be misunderstood, so faith is only taught gradually to the Druze. Outside the Druze community, there is no point sharing the deep secrets of the doctrine. You cannot become Druze, you can only be born Druze.’
At one point, the sheikh informs me that Judgement Day is coming soon. We know this because of how quickly humanity is changing, with technology and so on – we are expanding our humanity. Soon it will be time.’
I ask how I, a non-Druze, will fare on Judgement Day.
‘Sadly, you will not be saved. You are not a Druze because of the choices you have made over the past hundreds of millions of years – yes, we believe the Earth is that old, not what the Bible claims. We are reincarnated according to the choices we make in these many lives.’
Could I not be reincarnated as a Druze in my next life?
‘No,’ says the sheikh, with gentle finality. ‘It is too late.’
There is an awkward silence after this, so I change the subject – I want to know why the Druze generally do not worship in mosques or indeed in any kind of obvious place of worship, just a room in an unmarked building with a piece of fabric dividing men and women. Nora Joumblatt had told me about this and hazarded a guess that it was a legacy of having been persecuted for hundreds of years and wanting to escape notice. Sheikh Saleh respectfully disagrees with Mrs Jo
umblatt:
‘No, it is not for secrecy, it is more because we do not like to be showy. We have a culture of saving money for good works – instead of spending money on a mosque we give it to the poor. However, we have begun spending on big domes and burial grounds for the prophets recently and, personally, I disagree with this.’
How does the Druze community view the Joumblatts?
‘Religious leaders are not political and vice versa. He’s doing good for the community, I’d say sixty to seventy per cent of the Druze respect him, while the others support his rivals. But sixty to seventy per cent is good! American presidents only have fifty-one per cent popularity after all. And Mr Joumblatt is not a conventional politician.’
Later, Richard and I have lunch with his deputy and the state-issued policemen who follow the sheikh wherever he goes – apparently for his own protection, though he seems irritated by their presence. During the meal, which to my surprise involves blobs of raw liver, he is delighted to discover that Richard is a Quaker, and by the end of the meal has developed a theory that Quakers are the Western equivalent of the Druze – passive, tolerant, modest and misunderstood, both eschewing the pomp and ceremony of decorated places of worship in favour of a bare room, and communing directly with God instead of doing so via priests.
To illustrate his point, the sheikh decides it is time to show us the khalwa – a monastery-like centre of worship – where he studied for several years. We drive several miles further south before climbing a steep winding road and reaching a gate where we are told to go away, as there is a secret meeting of the elders taking place.
‘Never mind,’ says the sheikh cheerfully. We will go and see my teacher.’
Sheikh Majed Abou Saad lives in the nearby village of Hasbaya and greets us with plump benevolence as we arrive at his whitewashed, modest house. The policemen troop in, too, awed by the honour of the occasion – I have not realized they were Druze until this point – and we all sit, cross-legged, on the floor with our backs against the walls of a large, empty sitting room. Sheikh Majed’s wife, shrouded in a white sheet which covers her mouth, hands me a sheet, too – I wrap it awkwardly around my lap, and she goes to sit in the furthermost corner of the room, only her nose and eyes visible in a diamond-shaped wedge of face. I keep looking at her silent form while her husband explains the respect accorded to women in the Druze faith. The genders are equal, he insists. Really?
‘Yes. But they are not the same, of course. Sperm has the same sixteen minerals as earth – it is the most important agent in creating new life. We must not forget that. Also, we refer to God as Him. That is significant.’
I hesitate and quail at the prospect of challenging the surreal logic of this ancient wisdom, and instead ask the sheikh why the Druze have been persecuted for so long.
‘There are two reasons. The first, which we are not responsible for, was that people were suspicious of the Druze keeping their doctrine secret. The second, which we are responsible for, is that the Druze do not concentrate enough on ritual, too much on theory. That is why there is now a new focus on building mosques.’
Later, as we’re leaving, he poses for a photograph with Richard, shaking his head regretfully when I step forward. Living in Turkey for years, I got used to the conservatism of certain men who would refuse to shake my hand when I held it out to them; I quickly learned not to offer my hand. Similarly, I learned not to take it personally when men would not meet my eye, or talk directly to me, instead addressing any man I was with. I understood their behaviour as a complicated cocktail of respect and misogyny, exacerbated by Islamic doctrine. But there was something uniquely annoying about the attitude of this sperm-obsessed Druze sheikh, who lectured me about the equality of the sexes while his silent wife sat swaddled in a modesty-sheet in the corner, and who refused to appear in a photograph with that totally equal but dangerously immodest of creatures: woman.
We depart for the khalwa again, up the winding mountain roads, passing villages shelled by Israeli forces a decade ago. Sheikh Saleh informs me that these villages in fact got off relatively lightly, because religion trumped the nation state; the Druze soldiers serving in the Israeli Defence Forces were reluctant to bomb their own (the presence of the Druze in the IDF is a factor of their status as a ‘favourite’ minority in Israel, another reason they are often viewed with suspicion by other Arabs). By the time we arrive back at the khalwa, the meeting is over and at the gates I’m given a black robe to wear before we walk up into a kind of bucolic open-air monastery. Men wander round the gardens, looking like Greek Orthodox priests. Three women gather round me silently like Biblical Graces in their white sheets; one of them leads me into a doorway and up to a table laden with food; she presses biscuits and dried fruit into my hands insistently. I am an alien, but the laws of hospitality hold strong. Sheikh Saleh steers me discretely away from the central prayer hall, where I glimpse seated figures; just outside is a stone circle, and the policemen accompanying us take their shoes off and step inside to pray.
‘This circle is a howeita, it is believed your prayers are heard more clearly inside it,’ he explains. ‘Even if they are silent.’
Driving through the village on the way down from the khalwa, we pass houses with Druze families sitting and eating on their terraces. Most adults wear the traditional black tunics and white sheets, while the children run around in Western clothes, and one young man strolls out of a pastry shop in a wife-beater. It is a strange splicing of the ancient and the modern, like the landscape – we pass mosques flanked by centuries-old churches and concrete apartment blocks where Shia, Sunni, Maronite and Orthodox Christian denominations live side by side.
Individuals like Sheikh Saleh are the future of Lebanon – community leaders who understand that it is important to cooperate with representatives of other faiths. The sheikh even seems mildly apologetic about the strictures that some of the Druze still impose upon themselves; compromise, he implies, is necessary for survival. No one understands that better than Walid Joumblatt, a former warlord who poses with the Pope and posts the photo on Twitter to the delight of hundreds of thousands of followers across the globe.
After my trips to Palestine, Israel and Lebanon, I found myself wondering what to make of the troubled overlapping of the region’s minorities; having been eager to find Ottoman parallels in the social frameworks of the countries I visited, I realized there was too much overlaying the past hundred years – imposed borders, huge numbers of refugees and internally displaced people, meddling from neighbouring countries like Saudi Arabia as well as Western colonial powers and, more brutally, war.
There is no real equivalent of the Ottoman millet system today, but I still came away with one conviction: that its social and cultural legacy is most obvious in the Levant, not in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans. Perhaps this is because the Levant has the greatest significance for the three Abrahamic religions. The earliest churches, synagogues and mosques are here, and with them the oldest legacy of coexistence – and of conflict.
In his book The Jews of Islam, Bernard Lewis identifies a particular kind of symbiosis between connected religion and culture, arguing that Jews have historically flourished only ‘under the aegis of one or the other of the two successor religions of Judaism – Christianity and Islam [. . .] There were occasional Jewish settlements in areas dominated by other civilizations and religions, such as India and China, but – despite the very large measure of tolerance they enjoyed – they did not flourish.’51
Lewis seems to have identified the same reason as Klein for why this was: shared culture.
‘They had no great share in the life and culture either of those countries or of the Jewish people, and appear to have produced nothing of any real importance for the one or the other. In India, it was only with the advent of Islam that the small Jewish communities of that country received a modicum of attention and played a small part [. . .] The main center of Jewish life and activity since the early Middle Ages have always been in the land
s of Islam and Christianity.’52
Today we can see a Western version of multiculturalism in cities like London and New York, but these, however successful, are comprised of geographically displaced minorities. Diverse Ottoman communities were based on a common geography and background, giving a kind of coherence and shared culture which is difficult to identify in the former empire today.
What made the millet system work? One tentative conclusion is that harmonious coexistence between minorities is all about a practicable power balance, which under the Ottoman system of course meant a form of (generally) benign tyranny. It worked because all non-Muslim minorities were on the same footing – none of the governed minorities had a stick with which to beat the others, and it was in no single group’s interests to cause trouble. The Ottoman millet system was tough – it kept a variety of ethnic and religious groups living in relative peace, but only because dissent was met with the severest of punishments. The result was a working mix of people. Clearly, we need something different for our times; we can aim higher than the millet system, the apartheid system of Israel-Palestine and the bogus pluralism of the Lebanese system. New movements like Turkey’s HDP and Lebanon’s Beirut Madinati – Icarus-like though they may be, for now – show that we could be on the brink of a new form of representative power and cohesion. But for now, the world is frustratingly resistant to change.
Memleket
Homeland
‘Memleketim, memleketim, memleketim,
ne kasketim kaldl senin ora işi
ne yollarini taşimiş ayakkabim,
son mintanin da sirtimda paralandi çoktan,
Şile bezindendi.
Sen şimdi yalniz saçimrn akinda,
enfarktinda yüreğimin,
alnimin çizgilerindesin memleketim,