Into Beirut
Powell Traveling Grant provides glimpse of a distant world

A 2009 recipient of the Helen M. Powell Traveling Grant, Sara Haji recounts her journey to Beirut and beyond.

We heard the first explosions of the evening and broke into nervous laughter. Standing by the window, we tried to gauge the depth of the sounds, their frequency and distance. We counted the seconds in between them—children counting between lightning and the ensuing clap of thunder. My flat mates and I exchanged weak smiles when a girl asked, “Are those fireworks or bombs?”

In a city weathered by unconscionable strife, we weren’t ever sure.

The next day, we would hear that a woman had been killed by crossfire in the nearby district of Aisha Bakkar; or, that some recent college graduates had set off celebratory fireworks from within tin barrels. Either way, the day would go on.

By the end of the summer, we were veterans of these and other oddities. They came to encapsulate the complex landscape of Lebanon, the dynamism of its political capital, Beirut, and the diversity of its many peoples.

Thanks in part to the Helen M. Powell Traveling Grant awarded to me by the School of Journalism, I was able to enroll in the SINARC Arabic Language and Culture program at the Lebanese-American University in Beirut. At the same time, I developed a thesis project on the ethics of contemporary war photography. There really was no better place for it.

LAU, chartered in the state of New York, has a small campus flanked on one side by the mansion of Prime Minister Saad Hariri and on the other by Beirut’s Hamra district. Stray cats lie in pathways, lazy in their knowledge that they were here before you came and will remain once you have left.

Outside the gates of LAU, men from the Lebanese army belie the calm; you’re stopped first by the glint of sun off of bold rifles and only then by their inquiries. They protect the current prime minister* from his father’s fate: Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in 2005, and the investigation into his death is still ongoing.

The protracted sectarian strife of Lebanon is the strange by-product of internal dissatisfactions and external pressures. The narrative of Lebanese history has, at its locus, a fear that the bonds tying the nation’s people together won’t withstand the inevitable interplay of domestic and international power shifts. When the communal identity is as important as—if not more important than—the national identity, peace is both precious and fragile.

The people of Beirut, at least, seem to have an understanding of life unlike anything I’ve ever encountered: They’re simultaneously connected to and separated from everyone around them; open, yet cautious; lighthearted, yet oddly burdened. There’s a shared experience that can’t be duplicated–the experience of 15 years of civil war, 30 years of military occupation by Syria, an assassinated prime minister, and a devastating Israeli invasion in 2006.

Largely because foreign powers in the early 20th century adopted local groups–with the Russians protecting the Orthodox Christians, the Brits protecting the Jews, the French protecting the Maronites and the Ottomans protecting the Sunnis–many of the ethnic groups today create alliances outside of Lebanon. They view each other as different states inhabiting the same system.

Then, too, there are the altogether common problems of mandate territories: arbitrary political boundaries, lack of a larger identity that can withstand factionalism, and a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape that forces exchange on a world stage.

There’s also the question of who the Lebanese are–whether they’re ancestrally Arab and Syrian, Phoenician, African, or Asian–and how feasible the political structure will prove to be, with the constitution mandating that the president be Maronite Christian, the speaker of the house Sunni, and the Cabinet and House seats split 50-50 between Christians and Muslims. 

After Lebanon’s tourism industry took a devastating blow last summer (Hezbollah-led militants took control of West Beirut and the international airport, resulting in a fresh bout of violence), the past year has proven calm and reconstructive. The country is expected to bring in 2 million tourists this year, but the calm is young, yet, and the nation’s foreign policy remains an enormous point of contention between local groups. The domestic balance of power changes with international alliances, and Lebanon’s political and historic position in the Middle East, as well as the personal beliefs of its citizens, are very much at odds with its desire to remain both (arguably) the most open economy in the region and a modernizing force in the eyes of the “West.”

Meanwhile, the country juggles its seeming contradictions: women in burqas who stroll along the main strip of the Corniche; the multitude of beach clubs at which Beiruti women, famous for their flawlessness, lounge half-nude among gawking tourists; the incredible personal wealth on display in every luxury vehicle that clogs the inner streets of Beirut; the electricity that stops intermittently in the sweltering summer, overwhelmed by the influx of foreigners; the subtle juxtaposition of spotlight from the Sky Bar, one of the world’s most famous clubs, and peaceful ambient light of the downtown mosque built shortly before Hariri’s assassination.

Beirut—and, indeed, Lebanon—contains the world. For an underestimated, understated little country whose actions are never center stage, it is a hub of simmering passions and resultant attempts at conflict resolution; of truly hospitable, resilient people; and, of trends toward a progressive Middle East.

*As of publication, Saad Hariri recently resigned from his post as Prime Minister, citing his inability to form a coalition government that pleases the many sectarian interests that comprise Lebanese politics.