Lebanese History

Inaugural lecture for the American Druze Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Henley began by highlighting how religious communities served as the building-blocks of modern Lebanon. He then focused his discussion on one of these building-blocks—the Druze community—and the history of the Sheikh al-Aql, its top religious office. Henley explained how the Sheikh al-Aql—similar to the muftis or patriarchs of Lebanon's other communities—is the figurehead of the sect, a symbol of its distinctive identity, and the defender of its sovereignty, yet also the product of a very Lebanese idea of what a religious leader should look like. Lebanon's communal building blocks, Henley argued, were reshaped by the state-building process, transforming rather than simply preserving their institutions.  Henley closed by impressing upon the audience that neither religious leaders nor the sects they represent are "fixed in time" or isolated from the modern world, but rather are defined by constant negotiation with their surroundings.

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Hezbollah is the archetype and so far the most important and efficient of all Iranian proxy forces in the Middle East, and it demonstrates all the traits that eventually became the trademarks of Iran’s proxy networks in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and beyond. While embedding itself in the national government of Lebanon, Hezbollah receives its portfolio from Tehran and advances the agenda of the Islamist regime of Iran. While pressing the regime’s interests at the expense of the West and its regional allies through widespread terrorism and proxy warfare, Hezbollah provides Tehran with just enough plausible deniability to still appear as a somewhat “respectable actor” on the world stage.

Il aura suffi de l’annonce par le gouvernement d’une taxe sur l’application de messagerie WhatsApp pour qu’éclate un mouvement de contestation populaire inédit dans l’histoire du Liban contemporain. En ce 17 octobre 2019, trente années après l’accord de Taëf, censé mettre un terme à la Guerre du Liban et permettre au pays exsangue de renaître de ses cendres, une limite est franchie. Des citoyens en colère se rassemblent sur une des artères principales de Beyrouth, le pont du Ring Fouad Chehab, jadis ligne de démarcation entre l’Est et l’Ouest de la capitale. Très vite, les grandes places de la ville répercutent l’onde de choc dans un élan spontané assimilé à un sursaut, à une prise de conscience fulgurante.
Il va sans dire que ce ras-le-bol cache un mal plus profond. Celui-ci prend racine dans les graves dysfonctionnements qui sévissent depuis la fin des hostilités armées en 1990 et l’installation de la tutelle syrienne. La fin de cette dernière, suite à l’assassinat de l’ancien Premier ministre Rafic Hariri en 2005, laisse la place à une crise de pouvoir et à une paralysie politique nées des rivalités inter et intra-communautaires sur fond de corruption généralisée et institutionnalisée (y compris au sein du pouvoir judiciaire), de clientélisme et d’impunité qui ont marqué les années 1992-2005. L’afflux massif des réfugiés syriens fuyant la guerre qui se généralise en Syrie à partir de 2012, exerce une très forte pression sur les ressources du pays, d’autant plus que les réfugié…

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party devoted itself to reviving and unifying the Syrian nation and establishing this nation’s complete independence over its historical homeland, Greater Syria. It continues its struggle today, influencing and shaping Lebanese and Syrian society and politics. Yet, the party remains largely unknown and misunderstood, a condition that stems from the lack of any comprehensive study of it. This book fills this gap.

Based on an extensive and thorough examination of Arabic, French, and English primary sources, the monograph is the first comprehensive, systematic history of the SSNP to date, detailing its struggle to fulfill its nationalist vision and establish a secular, independent state in Greater Syria through a thorough analysis of its formation, evolution, and political activities in Lebanon and Syria.

This study discusses the concept of the performance of Lebanese companies in particular the role that governance plays on this performance. A good performance is a target in the eyes of management, shareholders and even employees. The study aims to analyze the performance measures, compare the results found in the literature to validate or challenge assumptions of the study.

This article examines the role of Lebanon as an oil transit country facing regional and international crises. From the transit policy, one can deduce foreign policy, neutrality, and the challenges that confronted Lebanon in the past, and still do. The article analyzes two case studies from the early 1970s, just a few years before the Lebanese civil war. The first is the Tapline Affair, in which Syria blocked the oil flow in the Saudi-Lebanon line in 1970. Lebanon found itself between East and West and had to maneuver between different aspirations, those of progressive Syria and those of conservative Saudi Arabia and the American oil company. The second is the nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company installations by the Iraqi government in 1972. Lebanon found itself once again between East and West, but also had to deal with the progressive Arab states. In both cases, Lebanon’s neutrality was put to the test, with Lebanon having to forge a path between the various antagonists. While historians usually depict the period in which the transit crises took place as an era of weakness and decline, the transit crises demonstrated strength, which was derived in part from the Lebanese policy of neutrality.

Boom review of Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn, Rebellion, Myth Making and Nation Building: Lebanon
from an Ottoman Mountain Iltizam to a Nation State, 61 pp. Tokyo: Research Institute for
Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 2009. ISBN 978-4863370272.

This article traces the institutional and political origins of the garbage crisis in Lebanon as well as the organizational and strategic dynamics of the protest movement that manifested in the summer and fall of 2015. [Please see above link for URL to online version of article.]

In Spheres of Intervention, James R. Stocker examines the history of diplomatic relations between the United States and Lebanon during a transformational period for Lebanon and a time of dynamic changes in US policy toward the Middle East. Drawing on tens of thousands of pages of declassified materials from US archives and a variety of Arabic and other non-English sources, Stocker provides a new interpretation of Lebanon's slide into civil war, as well as insight into the strategy behind US diplomatic initiatives toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. During this period, Stocker argues, Lebanon was often a pawn in the games of larger powers. The stability of Lebanon was an aim of US policy at a time when Israel’s borders with Egypt and Jordan were in active contention.
Following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the internal political situation in Lebanon became increasingly unstable due to the regional military and political stalemate, the radicalization of the country’s domestic politics, and the appearance of Palestinian militias on Lebanese territory. US officials were more deeply involved in Lebanese affairs than most outside the region realized. After a series of internal crises in 1969, 1970, and 1973, civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. The conflict reached a temporary halt after a Syrian military intervention the following year, but this was only an end to the first stage of what would be a sixteen-year civil war. During these crises, the US sought to help the Lebanese government in a variety of ways, including providing military aid to the Lebanese military, convincing Arab countries to take measures to help the Lebanese government, mediating Lebanon’s relations with Israel, and even supporting certain militias.

Édition digitale du chapitre III, campagne de Tyr, de la Mission d'Ernest Renan en Phénicie dans les années 1860-1864. Cette édition est annotée en particulier avec:

• Des correspondances de toponymes avec les dénominations actuelles

• Des éclaircissements sur les noms de mois, saisons et vents mentionnés sur la mosaïque qui est maintenant exposée au Louvre

The Lebanese Emigration Research Center (LERC) at the Faculty of Law and Political Science (FLPS), Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU), the World Lebanese Cultural Union (WLCU) of British Columbia Council, and the Irish-Lebanese Cultural Foundation (ILCF) formed the ‘International Lebanese Titanic Committee (ILTC)’ in 2012, the year marking the centennial of the Titanic’s tragic sinking. The committee was established to identify, commemorate, and pay tribute to the Lebanese aboard the Titanic, as well as work on revealing their names and stories.
The current ILTC committee members, as of 2016, are the following: Dr. Nick Kahwaji, DDS representing the WLCU BC Council; Guy Younes, Chairman of ILCF, Ireland; Dr. Guita Hourani, Director of LERC, Lebanon; Carla Zarifeh, representing the Lebanese Canadian Society of British Columbia (LCSBC), Canada; Dr. Josyann Abisaab, M.D., USA; Raed Charafeddine, First Vice-Governor of the Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon; and Sid Chedrawi, Founder Lebanese-Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Nova Scotia, Canada.
With the spirit of enriching the previously established collection on the Lebanese aboard the Titanic at the Lebanon and Migration Museum (LMM) at the LERC, NDU, in Lebanon, the committee collaborated with Vestiges D’Orient and the LERC in its call for paintings dedicated to the memory of the Lebanese who perished aboard the Titanic. The call encouraged artists to “[…] participate in the artistic expression on Lebanese emigration and the tragic Titanic incident.”
The Lebanese Aboard the Titanic Art Exhibition Catalog features the various pieces of art within this collection, including testimonies from a family that lost a loved one aboard the ship as well as personal reflections following the tracing of the Titanic voyage one hundred years later.

Despite the vast recent research on religious minorities in the Middle East, surprisingly little comprehensive work is published about the Druze as a political entity. Especially the current position of the Druze communities in the respective states is under-researched. The overall impression that emerges from the existing literature is contradictory and partly advocates an image of a uniform Druze political behaviour guided by the principles of religiously sanctioned dissimulation. However, this approach tends to generalize while neglecting the individual factors as well as broader political trends which shape each Druze-state relationship. The aim of this paper is to explore the position of the Druze communities of Syria, Lebanon and Israel on the political landscape of each state. This paper argues that the position of the Druze community in the three states is very different in each case and depended on many individual factors mainly demographic features, geography, collective memory, leadership and especially the type of the respective political system.

Despite a few scholarly and popular contributions, the story of the Jews of Lebanon remains outside dominant narratives of the country’s recent past and the recent revival of memory studies on the Jews of the Arab world. The Lebanese Jewish story does not fit the chronology of other populations which saw major declines after the creation of Israel in 1948, as Beirut in particular became a home for other displaced communities. Exploring the richness of recent documentary films on the subject, the present study argues that the very category of ‘Lebanese Jew’ became increasingly difficult to articulate after Israel’s creation, despite Jews’ profound participation in the Lebanese mosaic and Beirut’s geography and cultural life. Examining the nuances in narratives of why Jews left, both from their own perspectives and from those of other Lebanese, we find that the efforts to recreate the memory of the community are very much connected with those to articulate a national project for all Lebanese.

This article mines an early history of modern Lebanon by placing a special focus on the country's Jewish community and examining inter-Lebanese relations where Lebanese Jews take centre stage. Like Lebanon's Christians – Maronites in the main – Lebanon's Jews reveal themselves to have played an important role in the establishment of the Lebanese republic as a ‘confederation of minorities’. But the role of Lebanese Jews was a discreet, low-pitched one, and their ‘voices’ and ‘stories’ seem to have been left out of traditional history books. This article is an attempt at correcting a lacuna of exclusion vis-à-vis Lebanese Jews, mending their memory and restoring them to their rightful place as a foundational element of modern Lebanese history and socio-cultural production.

The analysis of religious or sectarian violence has always been a very problematic issue in historiography, especially that on nationalism and modernization. This is because some historians have depicted sectarian rivalries, especially in the Middle East, as the antithesis of modernization and nationalism, without giving those sectarian clashes any meaning in themselves. Sectarian violence, identities and politics are, accordingly, depicted as being ahistorical, and more primordial than political. Based on this perspective, sectarianism is presented as the greatest impediment and hurdle for modernization in the Middle East. This perspective on sectarianism has been accompanied by a set of questions as: " why has the Middle East failed to modernize, develop, and most importantly, to secularize? " ; and the answer would be also reduced to the triumph of traditions, manifested in sectarianism, over the universal and modern, aka Western values of tolerance and coexistence (Makdisi, 2000, P.5). On the other hand, other historians such as: Ussama Makdisi have projected sectarianism in the Middle East as one of the outcomes of modernization in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire; and not as something that is primordially entrenched in the Middle Eastern societies. In 1839, the Ottoman Empire embarked on a set of reforms, known as: the Tanzimat reforms, which marked the start of the modernization era in the Ottoman Empire. These reforms placed the Empire in direct encounter and confrontation with the Western world, to which the Empire was already subdued. This urged the Ottoman Empire to adopt the Western " modern " values, exemplified in secularism and equality between its citizens regardless of their religion. With the increased European intervention in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, European powers were granted the right to protect their religious communities. This, accordingly, altered the economic and social statuses of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Hence, religion became a tool of economic and social demarcations between the different communities in the Empire. Multi confessional societies in the Ottoman Empire were the most affected by such changes since sectarian/religious identity became the foundational basis of any political claims, and of economic and social mobility (Makdisi, 2000, P.2-3). Mount Lebanon, a multi confessional rural area and the cradle of the modern Lebanese state, is a perfect example to understand how the nineteenth century reforms in the Ottoman Empire brought changes to the power dynamics and the politics of the Mountain, by empowering communities that were previously disadvantaged (the Maronites) and marginalizing others that were formerly dominant (the Druzes). Mount Lebanon is also an interesting case because one can understand how the different communities in the Mountain (mostly the Maronites and the Druzes) responded to and internalized those changes. Were they peacefully accepted or did violence erupt on different occasions as a way to show reluctance to accept such changes? Can we look at the massacres that happened in Mount Lebanon in 1860, where thousands of Maronites were massacred by the Druzes, as a reaction to the nineteenth century changes in Mount Lebanon? Why did what happened in 1860 is sometimes called " massacres " and in other times and chronicles it is called " events " ? Do these two different terminologies denote different connotations? Does this differentiation in naming what happened serve certain interests of two different groups? Most historians have failed to give those massacres any specificity, or scrutinize them in the context of the social, economic, political and cultural developments that were taking place in Mount Lebanon, especially in the two decades preceding the massacres. They have looked at those massacres as the culmination of decades of sectarian hatred and animosities between the Druzes and the Maronites.

Статья основана на неопубликованных материалах из Архива внешней политики
Российской империи. В работе исследуется деятельность русских сотрудников школьных инспекций – одной из самых эффективных структур Императорского православного палестинского общества (ИППО) на Ближнем Востоке. Методика исследования имеет междисциплинарный, историкопсихологический характер: история определенных структур (сирийских школьных инспекций) описывается с точки зрения психологической мотивации сотрудников. Расширение деятельности инспекций, достигнутое благодаря энтузиазму отдельных людей, было поддержано институциональными основами в нужный момент. Наиболее значимыми группами сотрудников в составе инспекций стали выпускники Казанской духовной академии и различных педагогических институтов. Почти все сотрудники инспекций в большей или меньшей степени сумели добиться
успеха. За этими достижениями стояла трудная работа, требовавшая от русских служащих честолюбия, сообразительности, осмысленности и умения решать самые разные проблемы в малознакомой для них обстановке. Личностные устремления сотрудников имели не меньшее значение, чем финансовая и правовая обеспеченность и возможность создать семью. Исследование
мотивации и реальных достижений сотрудников инспекций позволяет получить обильный эмпирический материал о повседневной деятельности русских на Ближнем Востоке в течение продолжительного времени: оценить человеческий капитал, вложенный в этот проект. В инспекциях Императорского православного палестинского общества получили возможность проявить себя люди самого разного склада: стратеги, идеалисты, карьеристы, ученые, литераторы. Различные мотивации сотрудников способствовали вариативности и гибкости в деятельности учебных заведений ИППО – важного слагаемого их успеха на Ближнем Востоке.

The article is based on unpublished materials from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire. The research examines the activities of Russian employees of school inspectorates-one of the most significant structures the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IOPS) in the Middle East. The research methodology has an interdisciplinary nature-historical and psychological. The history of certain structures (Syrian school inspectorates) is described in terms of the psychological motivation of employees. The successful activity of inspectorates, achieved through the enthusiasm of individuals, was supported by the institutional foundations at the right time. Graduates of theological academies and pedagogical institutes were the most significant groups of employees of inspectorates. Almost all Russian employees were more or less successful. These achievements were reached thanks to the ambitions, intelligence and hard working of the employees who were able to solve a variety of problems in an unfamiliar environment. The employees's personal aspirations were as well important as financial and legal security and the ability to create a family. The study of the motivation of these people and their real achievements allow us to obtain abundant empirical material about activities of Russians in the Middle East for a long time and evaluate the human capital that was invested in this project. In the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society Russian employees were able to prove themselves as strategists, idealists, careerists, scientists, writers. Various employees' motivations promoted the variability and flexibility in the activities of IOPS educational institutions as an important component of their success in the Middle East.

This article examines anti-sectarianism and the technopolitics of labor mobilization at the facilities of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) company in Lebanon between 1950 and 1964. It argues that although Tapline helped sustain a Lebanese elite strategy of cross-sectarian power-sharing, it also unintentionally fostered specifically anti-sectarian labor mobilization. Pursuing a line of inquiry into the technopolitics of worker mobilization around oil infrastructure opened by Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy, this article specifically examines how Lebanese Tapline workers construed their actions, and did so in anti-sectarian terms. It also proposes that similar studies of labor and the technopolitics of infrastructure could offer productive avenues for inquiry into the origins of anti-sectarian politics in Lebanon.

In the summer or 1978, the tale of Sayyid Musa al Sadr, or Imam
Musa al Sadr as he was known to his followers in Lebanon, came to a
fitting Shia end: The cleric born in Qom, Iran, who had turned up in
Lebanon in 1959 disappeared in Libya while on a visit to Libya's ruler,
Colonel Muamar al Qaddafi. Musa al Sadr, a politically active and
controversial cleric, had arrived in Libya on August 25; he was last
seen on August 31, in a Tripoli hotel. He was on his way to a meeting
with Colonel Qaddafi, he told a group of Lebanese who ran into him.
He and two companions—a cleric and a journalist—were never
heard from again. Musa al Sadr had come to Lebanon as a young
man, thirty-one years of age. He was in his fiftieth year when he
made his fateful trip to Libya. The Libyans claimed that he had left for
Italy August 31 on an Alitalia flight. The Italian evidence belied the
Libyan claim. Only his baggage arrived in Rome, checked into the
Holiday Inn by two Libyans—one of them dressed in clerical attire
—posing as Musa al Sadr and his lay companion.

Note: The article that follows is part of a much broader book project on the construction of " terrorism " over the last 40 years. This article was posted online on May 7, 2018. The claims made herein about the public discussion that followed publication of Ronen Bergman's book Rise and Kill First and, specifically, about media coverage (or lack thereof) of car-bombing attacks by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, therefore apply only to the time period leading up to early May, 2018. It is of course very possible, indeed it is hoped, that this car-bombing campaign (and the role senior Israeli officials played in it) will, in the following weeks and months, start to receive the kind of media coverage they should have received a long time ago.

Digital edition of Renan’s book, in order to facilitate its access to a larger audience; enhanced with hyperlinks to digitized sources.
Cette édition numérique de l’ouvrage d'Ernest Renan paru en 1864, vise à permettre son accès à un plus large public. L'exploitation de la richesse du livre, en particulier ses nombreuses annotations de bas de page, est facilitée par les ressources informatiques comme la recherche plein texte et les liens hypertexte, de manière à gagner du temps pour le chercheur ou le simple curieux qui s’intéresserait au sujet…
La puissance des outils de recherche et archivage bibliographique disponibles de nos jours, comme Gallica, Google-Books, ou Internet Archive, a permis également d’ajouter des approfondissements et des rapprochements avec d’autres sources mentionnées par Renan, devenues accessibles à tous quelques cent-cinquante ans plus tard.

Due to a bug with Academia uploads, up-to-date version is stored on https://www.academia.edu/43273403/Mission_de_Ph%C3%A9nicie

Digital edition of Renan’s book, in order to facilitate its access to a larger audience; enhanced with hyperlinks to digitized sources.
Cette édition numérique de l’ouvrage d'Ernest Renan paru en 1864, vise à permettre son accès à un plus large public. L'exploitation de la richesse du livre, en particulier ses nombreuses annotations de bas de page, est facilitée par les ressources informatiques comme la recherche plein texte et les liens hypertexte, de manière à gagner du temps pour le chercheur ou le simple curieux qui s’intéresserait au sujet… 

La puissance des outils de recherche et archivage bibliographique disponibles de nos jours, comme Gallica, Google-Books, ou Internet Archive, a permis également d’ajouter des approfondissements  et des rapprochements avec d’autres sources mentionnées par Renan, devenues accessibles à tous quelques cent-cinquante ans plus tard.

French rule over Syria and Lebanon was premised on a vision of a special French protectorate established through centuries of cultural activity: archaeological, educational and charitable. Initial French methods of organising and supervising cultural activity sought to embrace this vision and to implement it in the exploitation of antiquities, the management and promotion of cultural heritage, the organisation of education and the control of public opinion among the literate classes. However, an examination of the first five years of the League of Nations-assigned mandate, 1920-1925, reveals that French expectations of a protectorate were quickly dashed by widespread resistance to their cultural policies, not simply among Arabists but also among minority groups initially expected to be loyal to the French. The violence of imposing the mandate 'de facto', starting with a landing of French troops in the Lebanese and Syrian coast in 1919 - and followed by extension to the Syrian interior in 1920 - was met by consistent violent revolt. Examining the role of cultural institutions reveals less violent yet similarly consistent contestation of the French mandate. The political discourses emerging after World War I fostered expectations of European tutelages that prepared local peoples for autonomy and independence. Yet, even among the most Francophile of stakeholders, the unfolding of the first years of French rule brought forth entirely different events and methods. In this book, Idir Ouahes provides an in-depth analysis of the shifts in discourses, attitudes and activities unfolding in French and locally-organised institutions such as schools, museums and newspapers, revealing how local resistance put pressure on cultural activity in the early years of the French mandate

`This excellent study is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the inter-war mandates of Syria and Lebanon. Ouahes focuses on the cultural institutions through which the French authorities imposed their rule, ably demonstrating the ways in which the mandate system was transformed into a political and cultural framework akin to colonialism. While tracing the disillusion and contestations that ensued, he nonetheless discusses the impact and disparate legacy of the period on both the French and the diverse populations of the two mandates.' - Patricia M.E. Lorcin, Professor of History and Samuel Russell Chair in Humanities, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, `Resisting the imposition of French imperial control in 1920s

'Syria was never solely a matter of violent opposition. Ranging from classrooms and museums, to archaeological sites and vernacular journalism, in this richly evocative text Idir Ouahes reveals how Syrians contested the imposition of French Mandate rule in the realms of cultural heritage, educational provision and print media.' - Martin Thomas, Professor of Imperial History, University of Exeter

Christopher Buck, “Kahlil Gibran.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement XX. Edited by Jay Parini. Farmington Hills, MI: Scribner’s Reference/The Gale Group, 2010. Pp. 113–129.

KAHLIL GIBRAN
(1883–1931)
Christopher Buck

The Arab American author and artist Kahlil Gibran was a best-selling writer whose work has yet to receive critical acclaim equal to his popular appeal. There is no question that Gibran’s work in Arabic was central to the development of twentieth-century Arabic literature—in that Arab Romanticism begins with Gibran, the pivotal figure in the Mahjar movement of émigré Arab writers centered in New York. There is also no question that Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet (1923)—a small volume of aphorisms (wise sayings) offering pithy wisdom of an almost prophetic quality—belongs to world literature, for it is known and loved the world over. As an American man of letters, however, Gibran has received scant attention by American literary critics. Since The Prophet has yet to be widely recognized as an American classic, and the author yet to be fully accepted as an American writer, Gibran’s inclusion in the American Writers series requires some justification.

Eminent scholars including Irfan Shahid (professor emeritus at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.) and Suheil Bushrui (professor emeritus and current director of the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace at the University of Maryland at College Park) have made the case for Gibran’s recognition as an American writer worthy of note. According to Bushrui, America is entitled to claim Gibran as one of its sons (even if not a native son) as fully and as authentically as his native Lebanon can lay such claim: “In his work, he became not only Gibran of Lebanon, but Gibran of America, indeed Gibran the voice of global consciousness” (1996, p. 10). After all, the young Gibran spent only the first twelve years of his life in Bsharri (a village near the famous “Cedars of God”), where he was born in 1883, before emigrating with his family to the United States. Apart from a two-year study in Paris and two brief return visits to Lebanon, Gibran spent his entire adult life—the last two-thirds of his life, in fact—entirely on American soil, dying in New York at the age of forty-eight. In The Prophet, the city of Orphalese is often said to represent America (or New York).

Shahid underscores the fact The Prophet was America’s best-selling book of the twentieth century, not counting the Bible, and that Gibran outsold all other American poets, from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost. According to Gibran’s New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, The Prophet has sold more than ten million copies. The book’s success was due entirely to its own appeal, as Knopf never promoted it. Strangely, Gibran is arguably America’s best-loved prose-poet, whose market appeal continues despite critical indifference. It’s true that Gibran had what might be called a double psyche, and inhabited two thought-worlds at once. As an Arab American, Gibran wrote in two languages: English and Arabic. Arabic was his mother tongue, and English his second language. As an accomplished man of letters of considerable influence in the Middle East, Gibran inspired a literary renaissance in the Arab world, such that all modern Arabic poetry bears the marks of Gibran’s. Yet Gibran’s work has had little influence in American letters, despite its enormous popular appeal. Notwithstanding, Shahid thinks that Gibran has not been fairly treated as an American writer. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that, categorically, The Prophet exists in splendid isolation, severed from its Arabic cultural roots. And so The Prophet will have to be evaluated, or reevaluated, on its own literary merits and for its singular contribution to the American literary heritage.

Cet article se propose de dégager les aspects essentiels de l’écriture de Maalouf dans Origines. Nous tenterons de mettre en lumière un récit d’une trajectoire à la fois individuelle et collective. Il s’agit aussi de soulever la question de la représentation du soi dans un récit de vie : Qui suis-je ? D’où viens-je ? Cela nous conduira au but primordial de l’écrivain dans cet ouvrage : écrire pour se reconstruire. Nous verrons dans cet article comment l’écriture joue un rôle important dans la reconstruction identitaire de Maalouf. Dans ce texte, la fiction se combine avec l’écriture historique. La fiction, à son tour, joue un rôle de comblement imaginaire en l’absence d’éléments tangibles et d’archives. À travers cet ouvrage, Maalouf a pu en quelque sorte se situer, se repérer et réfléchir sur son soi et son passé.

After conquering large swaths of Syria and Iraq, the IS undertook an aggressive sectarian campaign in which they not only enacted horrific violence against the Shia people, but also damaged or destroyed several key Shia mosques and shrines. Drawing on Social Movement Theory (SMT), this article analyzes the response by various Shia nonstate actors—militia leaders, religious clergymen, populist preachers, and seminal poets. It argues that they used the IS threat to Shia holy sites to develop and deploy a mobilization frame that has come to be referred to as the “shrine protection narrative.” The article also documents the manifold consequences of the shrine protection narrative: it underpinned a mass recruitment drive that saw tens of thousands enlist; it legitimized foreign Shia militias to enter the conflicts in both Syria and Iraq; it justified the formation of entirely new militias who declared the centrality of shrine protection to their mandate; and it mobilized them to enact political violence. In doing so, this article extends existing studies of SMT to demonstrate that “sacred spaces”—and particularly the need to protect religious sites from specific threats—can serve as a powerful mobilization frame towards political violence.

Despite its inevitable entanglement in regional turmoil, Lebanon is now viewed as the most stable and safe country in the Middle East. This reflects on its media environment which enjoys the same relative safety, even in a context that has become increasingly polarised and radicalised. Currently the Lebanese media landscape is in fact an arena of political patronage and domestic and foreign influence peddling.

This book contains translations into English of the documents of the Ottoman Umur-i Mühimme Defteri, or Register of Public Affairs, which bear on the history of Lebanon – or, rather, the parts of Ottoman Syria that ultimately came to form Lebanon – in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the period in the Ottoman history of the country that has hitherto received the least scholarly attention because local documentation for it is, at best, scarce and uneven and, for the most part, lacking. This is not the case for the history of Lebanon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when local documentation becomes more plentiful. Consequently, scholars of Lebanese
history during the Ottoman period have tended to focus their attention
on these two latter centuries and barely touch on the two preceding ones.

This is a French written research for my anthropology/sociology studies in the Lebanese Universities, the Aramaic Syriac is considered the base of the Lebanese Dialect in our days , so many words and names derive from the ancient language of the middle eastern natives

Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1805/1806–1887), one of the most important Arab intellectuals in the nineteenth-century, published his masterpiece Al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq (Leg Over Leg or The Turtle in the Tree, Concerning the Fāriyāq, What Manner of Creature Might He Be) in 1855 in Paris. This landmark of modern Arabic literature confronts the reader with numerous word lists.
From the perspective of Literary and Cultural Studies, this book approaches al-Shidyāq’s lists as a fundamental social and cultural critique of his time. It develops a set of analytical tools to describe the epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of ‘exposing words’, and to make sense of the plentiful word lists found throughout Arabic literature and unveil their social and cultural relevance. In the framework of the ‘return to philology’ (Edward Said), the book discovers in al-Shidyāq’s language thinking an intellectual radicalism and artistic experimentation, which sheds new light on the Nahḍa, the Arab renewal movement on the eve of modernity

La communauté arménienne du Liban représente près de 100 000 âmes au Liban et à peu près autant d'expatriés en France, au Canada et aux Etats-Unis. Éminemment tournée vers la francophonie, elle contribue largement à la vita-lité de celle-ci comme en témoigne la parution, à l'occasion du centenaire de la présence arménienne au pays du Cèdre (avant même son indépendance), d'un précieux ouvrage paru aux Presses de l'Université de Saint-Joseph (USJ). Les relations familiales entre la communauté arménienne restée au Liban et celle qui a émigré, notamment en France, en Suisse et au Québec, ren-forcent largement les échanges et le dynamisme d'une véritable francophonie arméno-libanaise.