An astute student of the Arab world reviewing my most recent book, The Syrian Rebellion, wrote that after years of “judgmental aloofness toward the Arab world,” I had “finally managed to get into, rather than under, the skin” of my protagonists. The reviewer was John Waterbury, he had spent years in Egypt, he had presided over the American University of Beirut. He had a long trail in Arab studies, he had come to the Arab world through immersion in Moroccan affairs. He learned and mastered the language, and in a field filled with acrimonies of all kinds, he had managed to stay above the fray and the feuds. His work was always cool and cerebral, he was the sympathetic outsider.
I could claim no such legacy. I was born in Lebanon, grew up in Beirut in the 1950s and early 1960s. I had left for the United States in my late teens, the Arab world was no disinterested field of study for me. In truth, I had never intended to write about Arab affairs. When I quit Lebanon, I knew I would never return. We had a legend in our small country: all those who packed up and gave up on the place swore that their sojourn abroad would be brief. The academic degrees completed in America, or the fortune scraped together in West Africa, the traveler would return. A house of stone would be built in the ancestral village, a parliamentary seat would be secured, the right bride from the proper family would be found. The time away, the foreign interlude, would be forgotten. Our country—suffocatingly small, its people filled with dreams and ambitions the country could not sustain—insisted on the myth of its completeness. Our elders and ancestors beheld the foreign world with condescension and indifference. My grandfather, Shaykh Mohamed Ajami, a tobacco grower, a man of our ancestral village in Southern Lebanon, had once known adventure. He had gone to South America, he had lived in Montevideo, and fathered a daughter there. It must have been in the years of the Great War. He had come back, married the woman who would be my parental grandmother, said very little about his time in South America. We didn’t know where Montevideo was, that kind of curiosity was not part of the world of our elders.
In quitting Lebanon, I was eager to be released from its hold. I was not alone in that, my peers, my older brother, scrambling for an “I 20” form, a student visa from the American embassy, had come into greater awareness of things. The embassy was approached with awe. Its officers with crew cuts, narrow ties, and white short sleeve shirts were the emissaries of a distant, glamorous power. These men held the key to a magical world. I can’t imagine what they thought of us—eager petitioners in pursuit of an escape from our country. We knew that our country was small, a gossipy place where people eyed and circled one another. In that passage to America I never thought I would become a chronicler of Arab woes. I became an academic, and bigger subjects, I insisted, would beckon me. I needed the distance from the Arab world, and I found it in a field that sounded reassuringly antiseptic and large: international relations. I found shelter in the material, and the distance from the Arab world was healing. Air travel was different then, more forbidding. It was a dozen years after my departure that I would return for a summer in Lebanon. I had missed so much of my family’s life, there had been marriages, new children and deaths aplenty. My beloved grandfather had died two or three years earlier. He had been my solace and protector when so much around me had given way. He had been a man stoical, unperturbed by the tumult of our family. In his younger years, perhaps after his South American interlude, he had gone to the Shia holy city of Najaf, in Iraq. His mother, a strong-willed widow who had married a Persian who had come into that hill country from the city of Tabriz, had wanted him to become a religious scholar. He had indulged her, but the life of the seminaries was not for him. The students, the talabeh, were wretchedly poor, and the arid curriculum could not hold him. His mother had accompanied him to Najaf, he had lived a privileged life when compared to that of the other seminarians: the Persian father had left money and land for his widow and son. My grandfather had deep reservoirs of religious skepticism in him. He honored the traditional world—he built a small mosque in his village, and a Husseiniyya, a place of religious observance, named after Imam Hussein, the iconic figure of Shi’ism. But he knew that the old world was giving way.
With my grandfather’s death, I had no mooring in the old country. It could make no claims on me. Yet there came a time, in the late 1970s, when the Arab world began to tug at me. Its material became my abiding concern. I had escaped the Shia world—its hurts and lamentations—but I would find myself writing of the life of a celebrated Shia cleric, Imam Musa al-Sadr, who had come to Lebanon from his birthplace in Iran, transformed and re-interpreted Lebanese Shi’ism, and disappeared in Libya in the summer of 1978, a victim of foul play by Muammar Qaddafi. The rich life he led, and the mystery of his disappearance hooked me. The book I wrote forced me into a deeper encounter with Shi’ism and its history of grief and disinheritance. Shi’ism had contained and anchored the life of my mother, and I had been nearly neurotic in my determination to wash myself clean of that heritage. That war against the past, though, had failed. In the summer of 2006, my inquiries into Iraq took me to Najaf. I had come to examine and write about the American war in Iraq, but I had that older connection to that holy city. I could feel the presence of my grandfather, I could understand why the place weighed on him and drove him away; he was a restless man who loved his horses and excursions to Acre and Safad, and the Syrian coast. It would be idle to pretend that this Iraqi world, and its seminarians, were purely new to me.
I had written of Arab nationalism. My first book, The Arab Predicament, (1981) had defined me. The Arab intellectual class hadn’t thought much of that book. The book had the requisite scholarly apparatus—after all, it was my major entry into the academic guild. But Arab nationalism, and the belief in that one Arab nation with an immortal mission—that was the intellectual banner of that movement—was the sacred, unexamined inheritance of two generation of Arabs. I had felt the pull and the call of that idea in the mid-1950s, and had wept in the summer of 1967, after the defeat of the Arab armies in the Six Day War. I can never forget that day, I was in California, anxious to find summer work in the canneries. I sat there, shell-shocked, with a couple of my Arab friends, reading the papers and taking in the magnitude of the defeat that had befallen the Arabs. A decade earlier, as a young boy, I had defied my elders, and taken a bus to Damascus, to catch a glimpse of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. A union had been forged between Syria and Egypt, and Nasser had cast his spell over politically conscious Arabs. The Syrians had pleaded for the union, and then had plotted against it. The union had been dissolved. But for one brief shining moment, the dream of Arab unity seemed within reach. We could hardly catch a glimpse of the great man. From a balcony, he greeted the crowds, and the trip from Beirut seemed all worthwhile. A nemesis awaited that dream, and in that catastrophic summer of 1967—a mere nine years after that bus ride—there we were taking in that defeat and its sorrow. The author who wrote The Arab Predicament was, in part, writing of the unmaking of a dream he once shared.
So for more than three decades, I would return to old memories and associations and turn them into less personal material. But unlike the Arabists who had honed their craft through academic preparation, I was falling through trapdoors into my own past. The reviewer who wrote that I had been getting under the skin of the Arabs had it right. I had broken with the orthodoxy of Arab nationalism; I had uttered, in public, and in English, truths about the Arab world that were to be kept unnamed and unacknowledged. I no longer shared the fidelities of the Arab intellectual class; I didn’t thrill to the passions of that fabled “Arab Street.” I did not partake of the Arab obsession with the Palestinian question. The Arab exiles in the diaspora, in Western Europe and North America, were passionate in their attachment to the causes of the Arab world. Exile politics are like that, and unforgiving. In the writings of Joseph Conrad, I found this sublime reflection on home and betrayal: “No charge of faithlessness ought to be lightly uttered . . . It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal.” Over the past four decades, the world of the Arabs was laid bare, no author could prettify it, or give away its old secrets. Violence had overwhelmed it, no ship of sorrow could take the Arabs to the verities and the world they knew. The authors and their quarrels no longer mattered. The dictators and the strong-men who had been hailed and acclaimed had wrought ruin and grief in their wake. Arabs had been the authors of their own demise.
Today in the Arab world I am (almost) a stranger. If the songs and lyrics are old, I can recognize them. I know the writers and the poets of the 1950s and 1960s, the bearers of a modernity that was our lodestar as my generation came into its own. Beirut was not as brilliant, as worldly, as the obituaries would make it after its fall. But it was our home, and in its modern neighborhoods we could partake of the fragments that the city jumbled together—pieces of America and of France, Arab nationalist doctrines, an easy divide between the Muslim and the Christian neighborhoods. There was movement in our world: we were stepping out of the world of our elders. They were not a forgiving lot, they insisted on obedience, and woe to those, particularly among the young women, who ran afoul of them. The elders had to be humored, and tricked. A flamboyant young girl who would in time go on to become a daring novelist wore her headscarf in front of her parents then stuffed it into her schoolbag when she was safely outside her neighborhood. A new generation of Arab writers, Cairenes for the most part, was opening up our world, defying the old forms of expression and the worn-out pieties.
There are promptings that come an author’s way that could, in retrospect, be seen as opening up whole writing endeavors. I had started The Arab Predicament with the tale of a Lebanese journalist, Salim al-Lawzi, who had been found dead and mutilated in early March 1980, on the outskirts of Beirut. Lawzi had been an outspoken critic of the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad, and his murder foreshadowed much greater cruelties to come. This was still an Arab world easy to shock, and Lawzi’s writing hand, disfigured by acid, was all that was needed to tell what this crime was about. My account of the man’s death was something of an outline, I did not possess a fuller narrative of Lawzi’s life, and the things that led to his murder. I had what I needed then, an entry into the new culture of dictatorship and cruelty.
In retrospect, Lawzi’s tale had given me a measure of daring. The Arab political world was coming apart—and how! A civil war that had broken out in Lebanon in 1975 had grown in savagery. It was both a war among the Lebanese, and a war among the Arabs. Beirut was a garden without fences, an astute Palestinian political operative said of the city that had been, in its better days, a center of Arab modernity. And there it was being claimed by religious and sectarian atavisms. The atavisms were unleashed, embarrassed at first, then with abandon. Indeed, the book I would write, meant to be an indictment of a political tradition, was outpaced by the realities descending on the Arabs. I was justified in my sense that Lawzi’s murder was the prelude to a new, more unforgiving time, for the Arabs.
It was many years later, thanks, in part, to a book published in Cairo, in 1997, by the author Faiza Saad, entitled From the Secrets of Journalism and the Intelligence Services, I would pick up his trail, the drama of his life and times had not dimmed with the years. Lawzi had scaled the heights of Lebanese journalism. He had become a publisher of his own magazine, Hawadith, Events. He was a man of substantial means, then based in London, where he had gone to escape the furies of Lebanon and the wrath of the Assad regime. But Lawzi’s beginnings were humble, he had risen out of the destitution of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city, on its northern coast. He was born in 1922 to a Sunni family, the dominant faith in Tripoli. His father had been a street peddler of confections, and in the journalist’s legend the boy had taken to the printed word from reading the newspaper wrappings of his father’s sweets. He had been schooled in the old-fashioned way of the Muslim poor, learning to read the Koran at the hands of a religious teacher. He had an ear for Arabic, and a determination to quit Tripoli for the lights and opportunities of Beirut. He enrolled in a vocational school, but was quick to abandon it. He made his way to Jaffa in 1944, as a young man of twenty-two, found work with a radio station. It was a short stint, and Salim then set out for Cairo. He joined a thriving magazine, Ruz al-Yusuf.
In Cairo, the method that would serve him and see him through was to emerge: “listen and learn,” seek out the mighty. It was his luck that he would befriend an ambitious military conspirator, an army officer by the name of Anwar el-Sadat. The officer was on the run when Lawzi met him, he had been part of an assassination ring that had targeted an ancien regime politician, a friend of the British rulers, Amin Othman. This would have been around 1946–47, a few years before the coup d’état that brought the Officer Corps to power. Sadat was to go through a celebrated trial, he was cashiered out of the army and then reinstated. (It was the fame acquired during the trial that brought him to the attention of a beautiful young woman of British-Egyptian stock, a decade younger, the future Jihan el-Sadat, who would defy her parents to marry a man without prospects, already married, with children and burdens aplenty.) Lawzi had sheltered and helped Sadat, and this would come in handy in the future.
Back in Lebanon, Lawzi had found his niche, “society journalism.” He was in awe of the rich, in a city where glitter trumped all else. The “listen and learn” method would serve him well. He managed to make it into the entourage of Henri Pharaon, arguably the country’s most influential merchant-aristocrat. Pharaon had a love of horses and horse racing; his stables boasted the best horses in the region. From the poverty of Tripoli’s alleyways, Lawzi was a stranger to all this, but he was a sponge, he turned himself into a raconteur in Pharaon’s entourage.
The transforming event in Lawzi’s life was his acquiring a license for a magazine. Such licenses were difficult to obtain, the press in Lebanon was an affair of the barons of Beirut, and the foreign embassies that sponsored rival publications. This was where that old, blessed connection to Anwar el-Sadat paid off. Both Sadat and his boss, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had a sense of themselves as men of the written word. Sadat had been given an editorship of one of Cairo’s major dailies by his colleagues in the junta. Lawzi offered his services to the Cairo regime, the launching of a magazine that would be a mouthpiece of theirs in the press wars of Lebanon; Beirut had emerged as a coveted prize in the “Arab Cold War” that had broken out between Cairo and its rivals in Baghdad and the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudis had their newspapers that they subsidized, Cairo had its own. A seven-story building that belonged to Hawadith arose in the city. The Tripoli boy had fulfilled his dreams. The Egyptian embassy was a mighty force in Lebanon, Gamal Abdel Nasser was a darling of the crowd, and Lawzi was on the side of the angels. He plowed through personal tragedy—a young child of his had died in a freak accident, fell out of a restaurant window in Damascus.
The press wars were not always genteel. In 1966, a celebrated journalist, Kamel Mroue, himself a publisher of a noted daily, Al-Hayat, was assassinated as he sat down in his office to write his daily column. Mroue was a figure of great talent and controversy. In Lawzi’s fashion, but a decade earlier, Mroue was a self-made man. He had emerged out of the poverty of Shia southern Lebanon to the apex of Lebanese journalism. He had led a colorful life, he had the gift of a fluent pen. He had fled Lebanon for Nazi Germany when the Free French and the British had evicted the Vichy forces. His newspaper, Al-Hayat, was known to be close to the House of Saud. Mroue had stirred up the wrath of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the man was not a journalist, Nasser said of Mroue, but a political party. A well-known thug from the Sunni street of Beirut had pulled off Mroue’s assassination. A dark role was played by Lawzi in this affair. He incited against Mroue, he enlisted a prominent lawyer, an ally of his, to defend the ringleader in the assassination.
Candor visited Lawzi now and then. In 1967, in the aftermath of the Six Day War, he described Gamal Abdel Nasser as the defeated leader of a defeated nation. A Nasserite operative reminded him how the seven-story building of Hawadith had been acquired. One of my favorite and most telling anecdotes about Lawzi was a column he wrote in which he bragged about the Mercedes Benz given him by the Emir of Kuwait. This was Beirut, and no shame attached itself to the revelation.
Beirut’s world was turned upside down in the 1970s. Cairo had pulled back from Beirut, it had wearied of the inter-Arab wars. Ironically, it was Lawzi’s old patron, Anwar el-Sadat, who had altered Egyptian policy. The ground in Lebanon had been cleared for the Syrians. A cunning ruler, Hafez Assad, had used Egypt’s retreat to insert his regime, full force into the quarrels of Lebanon. Lawzi’s luck had begun to run out. His magazine, so eager to please the Egyptian rulers, was now at odds with Damascus. His Tripoli roots were a factor in this antagonism. His hometown was a conservative, hidebound place. Its people didn’t think much of the rest of Lebanon; they had been forced into the state of Greater Lebanon that the French had put together. Their cultural and political allegiance belonged to Syria, now across an international frontier. Tripoli was (and now remains) the setting of a sectarian feud between its Sunni majority and the Alawi minority. The Alawis of Tripoli were now emboldened, they were riding the coattails of the Damascus regime. The Syrian mukhabarat had the run of Tripoli and Beirut. The Damascus strongman had made it clear that Lebanon now lay within his sphere of influence, that Egypt, and the Western powers as well, had pulled up stakes in Lebanon. Lawzi was in the crossfire: He ran for cover, left Beirut for London. In London, he took up the craft he knew. He published Hawadith, this time in English, Events. Arabic journalism was now putting down roots in London and Paris, driven into exile by official terror in Arab lands.
From London, Lawzi grew more strident about the Syrian regime. He spoke openly of a grave matter that the master in Damascus was desperate to finesse: Assad’s Alawite identity, and the sectarian basis of his regime. A Sunni insurgency was gathering force in Syria, and the journalist from Tripoli lent this insurgency his support. In Paris, Lawzi was to meet one of the two historic figures of the Baath, Salah al-Din al-Bitar. Bitar, a Sunni, and his partner from the days of the Quartier Latin in Paris, the Greek Orthodox Michel Aflaq, had lost out in the deadly struggle for Syria, and its cycle of coups and counter-coups. Bitar, who would be killed by the Syrian mukhabarat in Paris, warned Lawzi against the follies of playing with fire. Stay away from evil, and sing to it, Bitar told the publisher, an Arabic maxim that sprang out of the deeper recesses of a culture that knew the force of evil.
Lawzi was undeterred: he wrote his best on the matter of Syria under the new dictatorship. He warned Hafez Assad against the nemesis of arrogance. Syria will be visited by the same sectarian furies that had undone Lebanon, he warned. He was dismissive of the secular claims of the Baath. He wrote that Damascus was a difficult city—that it does not bare its secrets, and is not easily seduced or frightened. Damascus had confused the great Gamal Abdel Nasser, he wrote. “Nasser had entered Damascus as a legend and left it as a tragic figure.” The reference here was of course to the short-lived union between Syria and Egypt, 1958–1961. The Syrians had agitated for the union and then began to conspire against it. Hafez Assad had set out to break the spirit of a once-rebellious country, he knew his country more than did the publisher in London. Distance provided no safety from the wrath of the Syrian ruler. In the midst of this vendetta, the Syrian mukhabarat struck: they killed Lawzi’s younger brother Mustapha in mid-1979. Mustapha was on the beach, in his hometown, in his swimming trunks, he was gunned down in broad daylight. Lawzi’s sister-in-law, in her grief, had held the older brother responsible for her husband’s death. Salim al-Lawzi knew it to be so, his guilt over his brother’s death would stay with him to the end. He threw caution to the wind after that murder, and the anti-Syrian writing grew more embittered.
It would have been the better part of wisdom to heed his brother’s fate and put Lebanon behind him. But his mother’s death intruded, and he felt the obligation to go back for her funeral. More careful friends warned him about the risks of a return visit. But there was duty to the dead, and a family’s honor. He returned on the last day of the rites of farewell for his mother. He was set to leave the next morning, but this was Salim al-Lawzi, he delayed his departure when told that he had been given an appointment with the president of the republic. The appointment did not materialize, he made the best of the day, he visited the campus of the American University of Beirut and the offices of the newspaper An-Nahar.
On Sunday (February 25, 1980) he set out for the Beirut airport, his wife was with him and some family and friends in another car. At a checkpoint, he was separated from his wife and could be seen driven in the direction of the southern coastal town of Damur. His wife was blindfolded and let out in a wooded area.
The search for him was a big story. His wife sought out the powers in the country. She tried Yasir Arafat, he had a kingdom of his own in Beirut then. But he was helpless, he said, because of his own “terrible relations” with Hafez Assad. The Lebanese authorities offered no help either. It was all to no avail: on March 4, a shepherd boy reported that his dog had come upon the corpse of a man that the shepherd did not recognize. It had been a gruesome end for Lawzi: the pathology report established that he had been subjected to punishing torture. He had been shot in the jaw with the aim of wounding him but keeping him alive for the torture. More importantly, there was that writing hand, burned and dipped in acid. (The shepherd was murdered a few days later.)
Lawzi had foreseen his own end. His wife said that he had told her that she had to learn to live without him. In London, he had penned the following lines—this was wisdom beyond knowing emirs and Beirut barons: “I came to you, oh world, as a stranger. I lived as a guest, I leave you as an echo.”
* * *
Salim al-Lawzi had been part of my luck as an author. In the years that followed, the truths about the sectarianism of the Arab world that had been papered over were laid bare. I had held out scant hope for the Arabs’ political condition. The 1980s would make a mockery of what had been said and taught in Arab political writings. “Arabism is love,” Michel Aflaq had written. He had said that in an infinitely more hopeful time when he, and his partner Salah-al-Din-al-Bitar, fresh from their years in Paris could still hope that the text and ideas of modernity could overcome the sectarian fault-lines and phobias of that world. Aflaq and Bitar couldn’t have imagined that a boy of the Alawi mountains, Hafez Assad, would emerge to sweep aside the ideas they had brought with them from France. By the Syrian political annals, Assad had been born in utter rural destitution, but had come down from his birthplace to the coastal city of Latakia then to the military academy and to Damascus. He was a stranger to the world of the merchants and the landed bureaucrats who ruled his country. Assad had not cared for theory. The political refinements of Aflaq and Bitar were not for him. There was a political tradition of the urban elites and that tradition had contained the life of Damascus, as it did the life of Aleppo and Homs, and our own West Beirut as well. There were urban notables, men of property and social and political standing. They exuded confidence, heirs to a tradition that harked back to the Ottoman world. Assad bore that tradition burning animus. It had been the tradition of a social class that had looked with contempt on the countryside and on the Alawi sect from which Assad hailed. The cunning officer indulged the ideologues all the while as he was plotting the undoing of that older world. A thin veneer of ideas, of modernist pretensions, was being emptied of any truth. The sectarianism could no longer be hidden as it had been when Salim al-Lawzi confronted it.
* * *
There had been violence in the Arab world, assassins had struck down emirs and noted men of politics. Military seizures of power had upended ruling regimes, there had been, in the 1950s and 1960s, the “Military Communiqué Number One” that announced the demise of old rulers and the rise of new masters. One such coup, in 1952, in Egypt, had been a genteel affair. A feeble monarch was sent into exile aboard his yacht, from his palace in Alexandria, and had been given the respect and decorum befitting a monarch. Six years later, in Baghdad, on a summer day, the Hashemite monarchy was swept away without mercy, a boy king, Faisal II, and his family were gunned down, and the body of the Regent had been dismembered and dragged through the streets.
It hadn’t been pretty or safe, that Arab political condition. But it was in the 1980s, as some of the essays assembled here intimate, that the world of the Arabs succumbed to greater brutalities. There had been politico-religious movements aplenty—the Muslim Brotherhood dates back to the late 1920s, and its secret apparatus was no stranger to assassinations and foul play—but a new stridency came into the intersection of faith and politics. From one end of the Arab world to the other, old verities were being undone, old surplus swept out of the way. Some attributed this to the demographic explosion that hit the region—newly urbanized young men jostling for a place in the world, their pride coming up against scarcity, in conflict with older generations who had fallen into things and acquired turfs of their own. The world of the Arabs had closed in on itself. For all our distress in the 1950s and 1960s, my generation of Arabs could still hold onto the idea of progress and advancement. On the whole we had a discreet and proper relation with Islam. It was the faith of our elders, but secular, irreverent ideas held us and guided our lives. We paid the men of religion scant attention, the mullahs who visited my family home inspired no awe in me or in my siblings and cousins. The books they knew, the narrative they told, the incantation—they all seemed to fly in the face of reason. We had Baathists and Communists and Arab nationalists and self-avowed skeptics aplenty. The two generations to come would know no such ease or confidence. The social peace was shattered, the cries of pain were audible to all but those who preferred to bury their heads in the sand.
I had been lucky to escape, the New World had given me the opportunity to write, and the safety. It would be my fate to return to the material of that older world that I had quit—a world that would continue to tug at me in my new surroundings.