Read an excerpt from “The Agony of Lebanon” below, then read the full story.
Flying into Lebanon from the west, one is immediately struck by one of the most dramatic scenic sights in the Eastern Mediterranean. Beirut, the capital city, nestles on a long, narrow coastal plain in the shadow of a lofty mountain range rising from sea level a few miles to the east. But, besides contributing to the scenic beauty of the landscape. these twin geographical features have also determined much of Lebanon’s history and political structure.
Looking westward. the coastal plain faces Europe, thus accounting for Lebanon’s historic links to that continent. The mountain range to the east, however, has acted as a buffer, tending to seal the country off from the rest of the Islamic Arab world. The very contours of Lebanon make it a haven. And that is precisely what it has been for centuries, particularly for a large Christian community, which has been able to find there a life unhampered by discrimination and free of persecution.
While Lebanon proudly asserts its identity with the Islamic Arab world, its population includes members of twenty or so different religious sects. The proportion of Christians to Muslims generally is reckoned to he equal, but whether a Lebanese is Christian, Muslim or Jewish, he enjoys equal rights before the law. It is the major religious sects – rather than Western-style political parties – that are represented in the national Parliament.
For the Christian, this unique political structure has meant that Lebanon was the only country in the Middle East where the Christian community did not face the danger of becoming engulfed in an Islamic sea to the detriment of its political, economic and social rights. Whatever the defects in Lebanese society – and there are indeed many – it has managed to weld together a variety of religious and ethnic groups and promoted, to an astonishing degree, religious tolerance and cultural freedom.
But that society is now under attack, or so it would seem. Population balances have a habit of shifting, and the Lebanese Christian community no longer enjoys the tenuous majority it once had. For a Year, Lebanon has been in a state of intense turmoil induced by a vicious civil war that has taken at least 10,000 lives and left at least 30,000 others maimed. The reasons behind the carnage (if, indeed, irrationality can have its reasons) are many and complex. Among them is certainly the desire of the Muslim community (which now represents the slight majority of the population), and of not a few Christians, to change the political system by secularizing the national political life. Indeed, it must be admitted that the present political structure favors the Christian community – and one element of that community in particular, which for historic reasons still dominates the political, economic and social life of the nation.