Arabs Who Look to the West

With guns and crosses, Lebanon’s Christians try to survive

At the placid Maronite monastery perched high above the Mediterranean, Patriarch Antoine Pierre Cardinal Khoraiche had convened a meeting of religious leaders from Lebanon’s Christian communities. Even as they discussed the worsening crisis besetting their country, the distant thud of heavy artillery sounded in the hills beyond, and reports circulated of mistreatment of Muslims by Christians and of Christians by Muslims. Before parting, the clerics called for a combined effort by Lebanon’s religious leaders to seek an end to sectarian bloodletting. Within hours, preparations were under way for an extraordinary “spiritual summit” between Christians and Muslims.

It was a rare sign of hope in a land that has been shattered by religious factionalism. In no small measure, the meeting was occasioned by the reversal of fortunes that the Christians have recently suffered. With President Amin Gemayel’s government on the brink of collapse, the religious leaders expressed fear that Christians would once again repair to their isolated enclaves and make national reconciliation even more difficult. Said former Prime Minister Amin Hafez, a Muslim: “After nine years of continuous conflict between the two sides, there are young Christian men who have never seen a Muslim.”

How the Christians meet these new challenges will be determined largely by their unique character and history. Like the country itself, divided between Christians and Muslims, poised between East and West, the Christians have a split personality. They are Arabs who often look to the West for inspiration and assistance, a minority that insists it must rule in order to survive, and nationalists in a land that is so fractured it can hardly be called a nation. Explains Camille Chamoun, a

Christian who served as President from 1952 to 1958: “We are part of the Arab world, but we are also apart from the Arab world because so much of our identity comes from the West.” The Christians’ affinity for the West is deeply rooted in their long struggle to survive, first as a religious community and then as a political entity. It was reinforced during two decades of French rule following World War I, which saw the establishment of Lebanon as the only Christian state in the Middle East. The Christians pride themselves on their cultural, economic and politicalties to Europe and the U.S., firm in the belief that they have helped make the country a bridge between the West and the Arab world.

There is more than a hint of superiority in these feelings. Many Christians, for example, prefer to speak French rather than Arabic, as if to say, “I may be Lebanese and an Arab, but I am different.”

A sense of embattlement and persecution is a motif of the Christian personality But the Christians’ sense of being unde siege in their own land did not begin in the past decade. From the Byzantine and the Crusades in the Middle Ages to the French and Americans in 1984, the Christians have repeatedly relied on foreign powers to guarantee their survival and political power.

The tangled skein of allegiances that gives Lebanon its bewildering complexity was many centuries in the making. It is a land that through most of its history has been overrun and ruled by outsiders, from Egyptian viceroys and Babylonian governors to Ottoman mutessarifs and French commissioners. In ancient times, it was inhabited by the Phoenicians, who took their name from the purple dye they plied around the Mediterranean. Later it became part of that smaller region known as the Holy Land. The cedars of Lebanon were celebrated by the Psalmists, and its mountains provided inspiration for religious mystics.

The Christians trace their heritage directly to Jesus. People from the coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre went to Galilee to hear Christ preach, and on at least one occasion Jesus visited what is now southern Lebanon. Later the Apostle Paul spent a week in Tyre, where the first Christian church is believed to have been established. By the 5th century, the region was solidly Christian. So it remained until 200 years later, when Muslim invaders conquered much of the Middle East and North Africa. Many Christian communities along the coast converted to Islam, but the mountains remained a Christian redoubt. In the shadow of the cedars, snowed in during the winters, the Christians became an almost fossilized community.

They developed clan loyalties like those of Highland Scotland, complete with tales of heroism and treachery. The legacy of the Crusades even now is reflected in the snipings, kidnapings and crossfire that recur in the mountains between Christian and Muslim militias. Part of this legacy is a penchant for violence, a belief that the gun as much as the cross is a source of salvation. Says Professor Majid Fakhri of the American University of Beirut: “There is something very medieval about the Christian outlook. A type of feudalism exists in which politics and religion are intertwined in a literal way.”

Modern Lebanon is a strictly sectarian society: citizens must carry an identity card giving their religious affiliation. Although the two main currents of religion are Christian and Muslim, each is a mosaic of supporting and frequently feuding parts. As a result, there are 17 recognized religious groups: five are Muslim, one is Jewish and eleven are Christian (among them Maronite, Greek, Armenian and Syrian Catholics and their Orthodox counterparts).

The largest Christian group and the one that has dominated Lebanese politics is the Maronites, with some 500,000 members. A rugged mountain folk and the most martial of Lebanon’s Christians, the Maronites take Suleiman Franjieh their name from John Maron, a learned monk who was Patriarch of Antioch in the 8th century. The Crusades brought the Maronites closer to Rome, and in the 1700s they were formally united, thus reinforcing their long and dearly held association with the West.

The next largest Christian group is the Greek Orthodox (170,000 members), who emerged from the split between Byzantine and RomanChristianity in 1054. An urbanized and well-educated community, the Greek Orthodox have frequently found themselves in a precarious position in Lebanon’s internal politics. Although embraced by the powerful Maronite politicians, they have no organized militia and as a group have stayed out of military conflicts. Next in size are the Greek Catholics (85,000 members), who include many bankers, merchants and financiers. The Protestants, though small in number (12,000), have been prominent in education and in social welfare.

When Lebanon became independent from France in 1943, Christian and Muslim leaders agreed on an unwritten National Pact whose purpose was to state their willingness to live together. The effect, however, was to ensure Christian political supremacy and Western influence. Political power, both in parliament and in major government posts, was strictly apportioned among religious groups. The Maronites got the presidency and command of the army, while the Christian community as a whole wound up with a plurality of deputies and key military and oeconomic positions. The apportionments have long been recognized as outdated and unfair. No official census has been taken since 1932, but Lebanon’s more than 3.5 million people are now believed to be 60% Muslim and 40% Christian.

Before civil war broke out in 1975, Maronite politics was dominated by two former Presidents: Chamoun, 83, whose political base lies south of Beirut, and Suleiman Franjieh, 73, who controls a part of northern Lebanon. When the civil war forced the Christians to form a coalition, the Lebanese Front, the third place at the table went to Pierre Gemayel, now 78, leader of the right-wing Phalange. Gemayel lacked the backing to become President, but he had two sons, Amin and Bashir, who were rapidly building an extensive military organization.

The Phalangists’ armed strength gave the Gemayels a power in wartime that they Shad never enjoyed in peacetime. The Phalangists soon controlled a virtual state within a state. They had also formed an alliance with Israel. Three weeks after Bashir Gemayel became President-elect, he was killed in an explosion at Phalangist headquarters. Amin Gemayel subsequently took his brother’s place as President.

Many Lebanese despair of the religious furies unleashed during the past nine years being quelled. Dozens of different armed groups are operating in Lebanon. They have fought for a variety of causes. They have made violence the way of Lebanese politics. The Christians may lose their predominant position, but whether in Beirut or among the cedars of Mount Lebanon, they will undoubtedly retain the stubborn will to survive that has made them both an asset and a menace to their Muslim neighbors for twelve centuries. —By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by William Stewart and Roberto Suro/ Beirut