Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (15 page)

While the civil war that ravaged the country came to an end in 1990, the alienation and humiliation of the generation of Lebanese who had come of age during the conflict persisted under a prolonged Syrian occupation of Lebanon. As long as the Syrians remained in Lebanon, Lebanese youth had little reason to believe in the democratic process of their country. They were under the impression—quite correctly—that Syrian politicians were making laws and ruling under the banner of the Lebanese government. In this context, elections mattered very little, as they were not believed to hold any potential for change. Democracy seemed to be a distant concept so long as the Syrian occupation persisted.

Nearly two years after the Syrians left Lebanon and the one-month war between Hezbollah and Israel ended in August 2006, Lebanon faced yet another challenge to its nascent democracy as Hezbollah moved itself into downtown Beirut in an effort to collapse the internationally recognized government. Nine months later, the relatively unknown Al-Qaeda affiliated Fatah al-Islam added fuel to the fire by launching an insurgency from the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon, reminding the world that Lebanon’s conflicts are multidimensional. And so the perpetual cycle of tension and violence continues.

T
he scene was awesome.
People danced on tables, hands were in the air, and the beats from the oversized speakers sent vibrations throughout my entire body. Every now and then the DJ would shut off the music and let the crowd drive the lyrics. The energy was magnificent. The place was packed and I had to weave my way through the crowds to find a small portion of the sand where I could find room to dance. The thought that I was in a Middle Eastern country didn’t even cross my mind as I looked around and saw girls wearing hardly anything, guys in their bathing suits, and couples making out all around me. At the bar, people lined up to do shots, not just out of the glasses, but off of each other’s necks and stomachs. There was nothing conservative about this place.

The beach party finally ended at six
A.M
. and Ziad, Walid, and their friend Naylah decided we should head to a club. We went to a place called B0-18; it had a retractable roof, Gothic décor, and thumping house music. As we walked in, I also noticed that there seemed to be a lot of men dancing with and kissing other men and a lot of women dancing with and kissing other women. Homosexuality has been banned by most Middle Eastern governments, but I would hear of gay youth in Syria, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and even Iran who would ingeniously use their Bluetooth cell phones to organize underground parties and raves.

The club closed at seven
A.M
. and as it turned out, on that morning Lebanon was holding the last round of its first elections since the withdrawal of Syria the previous year. After the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri—widely believed to have been perpetrated by agents of the Syrian government—the Lebanese people largely put aside their sectarian differences and began calling for the end of the Syrian occupation, which had by then lasted more than twenty years. Even before Hariri’s assassination, the United Nations had passed a resolution calling on all foreign troops to leave Lebanon; the international pressure brought by UN Resolution 1559 bolstered this new Lebanese nationalist movement. In March of 2005, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese came to Martyrs’ Square in Beirut to make their demands heard. They held Lebanese flags, painted the colors of Lebanon on their bodies and faces, and celebrated unity between Christians and Muslims. The only times Lebanese came together like this were for soccer matches and at nightclubs; these demonstrations, later named the Cedar Revolution for the image on Lebanon’s national flag, represented the first time Lebanese had come together to do something other than party. And the revolution was successful: Syria withdrew its troops and Lebanon was finally sovereign. The elections taking place that morning would be the first practical manifestation of that sovereignty.

I was at this point deliriously tired, but I was thrilled when Naylah insisted that we all drive together to northern Lebanon to witness the election in Tripoli.

Naylah was particularly vocal about the election, largely because she supported a different candidate than the rest of the group. Like Ziad and Walid, Naylah was a Maronite Christian, but reflective of Lebanese politics, she is part of a different Maronite political faction than the two of them. She insisted that she was the one to show me the elections. Naylah was one of the more energetic people I had met in Lebanon. She had curly black hair, lots of freckles on her nose, and her two favorite topics of conversation were house music and politics.

While we were driving, Naylah explained that voting in Lebanon was for coalitions and alliances. For instance, Michel Aoun’s predominantly Christian Free Patriotic Movement Party was aligned with Hezbollah, the largest Shi’a party and historic enemy of Aoun, against Future, the predominant Sunni party and ally to Aoun during the Cedar Revolution. None of this really made any sense to me. Naylah explained that the only thing I needed to understand was that just as groups had allied and fought with each other during the war, they were now aligning, realigning, and breaking alliances in the name of politics. Even with this in mind, I found Lebanese politics nearly impossible to understand. I had such a difficult time deciphering who was aligned with which party and what groups were affiliated with what platform or politician. Trying to appreciate the complex dynamics among the groups and the historical contradictions of many of the alliances was enough to give me a constant headache.

Naylah was a big supporter of Michel Aoun, who led one of the two dominant Christian parties in Lebanon. Aoun had been the interim president of Lebanon at the end of the civil war, but when he spoke out against the Syrian occupation, he was forced into exile. However, like everything in Lebanon, there are multiple sides to every story. Today, many Maronites believe that it was not his anti-Syrian rhetoric that forced him into exile. Instead, many suggest that Aoun’s actions merely prolonged the violence in 1989 and 1990, leading not only to the final and most devastating blow to the Lebanese Christian community, but also to Aoun deserting his troops and fleeing to the French Embassy in October 1990. Back in Lebanon for the first time in fifteen years, Michel Aoun was a very controversial candidate. A Christian and a staunch enemy of Hezbollah, Aoun shocked the Maronite community by aligning himself with the terrorist party in June 2005. Illustrating the complexity of Lebanese politics, Aoun needed Hezbollah support to gain enough votes from Shi’a to win the election in the north. Likewise, Hezbollah needed some Christian support. Even with all the phony alliances and marriages of convenience between Lebanese political parties, many felt that Aoun had gone too far.

As we drove up the highway, almost every car was adorned with the flag of one of Lebanon’s political parties. Some waved a white flag with a round circle and the Lebanese cedar tree in the middle: This was the flag of the Lebanese Forces Party, led by its incarcerated leader, Samir Geagea. I saw other cars waving the yellow flag with the green rifle in the middle, the signature symbol for Hezbollah. The Aoun supporters, or the Aounies, as they were called, adorned themselves in orange. As an Aounie, Naylah would honk her horn and raise her arm in the air every time we saw an orange flag coming out the window of a car. Fittingly for Lebanon, it was like a party all the way to Tripoli, as people rode on top of their cars and stood up through the sunroofs.

“Naylah, is it always like this during election time?” I asked.

“No, this is different,” she replied sharply. “This is our first election as Lebanese. Since I have been born we have never had elections without Syria occupying our country. Now we can choose our own leaders instead of these corrupt politicians that Syria puts in place to destroy our country.”

When we arrived in Tripoli, it was a spectacle. There were rallies and gatherings of all parties in parking lots, in front of stores, in clusters of cars, and in public parks. Naylah took me to a parking lot where hundreds of people stood with the orange flag of Michel Aoun. Most of these participants were young and seemed to be mere teenagers, so I assumed Lebanon had a low voting age. This didn’t seem so strange to me: In Iran, young people can vote when they are fifteen years old.

“How old do you have to be to vote in Lebanon?” I asked Naylah.

“Twenty-one,” she replied.

Most of the youth I saw out on election day were not even old enough to vote. For them, the election was about something more than voting and campaigning and taking part in the electoral charades; this election was about feeling truly Lebanese for the first time.

N
aylah wasn’t the only one
who opened up to me. Lebanese youth were very friendly and they were quick to welcome me to Lebanon and ask me what I thought of their country. Lebanese girls would flirtatiously ask me if I found them
“heloue ketir”
and I had to concede that they are very beautiful, although I got fed up with boosting their massive egos. Lebanese youth carry themselves with confidence and their self-possession is amplified by their possessions: Image-and status-conscious young Lebanese wear nice things and drive nice cars. I was shier than usual about approaching people randomly; I felt like an underclassman in a high school cafeteria, trying to get a seat at the table with the cool seniors.

I needed an excuse to break into the scene, especially once I realized that my Arabic would be less useful than I had anticipated. I had studied classical Arabic but found that it was unrecognizable in Lebanon. Speaking classical Arabic in Beirut was like going to New York City and speaking Shakespearean English, so I got myself a colloquial Arabic teacher to help me adjust to Lebanese Arabic. The lessons proved to be very helpful and certainly made me more comfortable approaching people, but on a subsequent trip to Morocco almost a year later, I approached a shopkeeper and said in the Lebanese dialect of Arabic,
“Keefak?”
meaning “How are you?” To a speaker of the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, the word is unrecognizable; he thought I was saying fuck you. The interaction became hostile and awkward and I ended up buying an ugly necklace to shut the shopkeeper up and calm him down.

I spent my first few days in Lebanon developing and distributing surveys that covered a range of topics that included the Syrian withdrawal, democracy, religion and politics, Hezbollah, and American foreign policy. I was certainly interested in the results, but I was really hoping to use the surveys as a way to strike up conversations with Lebanese youth. I had deliberately devoted the last section of my five-page survey to United States foreign policy, knowing that this topic would evoke passionate debates. Two students whom I had approached randomly at the American University of Beirut had even been kind enough to sit with me for three hours and translate the entire survey into Arabic.

Over the next week, I meandered around the university campuses of Beirut, distributing my survey to every young person I encountered. This was not Iran: I didn’t have to sneak into the universities and I didn’t have to be mindful of intelligence services or Revolutionary Guards who wanted to arrest me. I operated with ease. In fact, I wasn’t the only person handing out surveys: Lebanese youth take full advantage of their freedom of speech, and often mistaken for a student myself, I, too, filled out a number of surveys on issues like sex and religion.

Because I was handing out as many as fifty surveys a day, I was interacting with tons of young people. I exchanged phone numbers with many of them and it was not uncommon for students to ask if they could take me out at night or to their homes for dinner or to various parts of Lebanon. I received my first such invitation at the Lebanese American University, located in downtown Beirut and considered by many to be one of Lebanon’s better universities. Like the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese American University was founded by American missionaries in the nineteenth century and originally established as a school for girls. It was not until after World War II that it became an integrated four-year university. The university has a student body of more than six thousand students from various backgrounds, although Shi’a Muslims are the most highly represented.

It was a relatively slow afternoon and most of the students either were in class or had gone home for the day. In the lower part of campus, I noticed a stunning girl sitting at one of the picnic tables. Her curly hair was highlighted with blond strands and she had accentuated her big eyes and long eyelashes with mascara.

I approached her and asked if she would mind filling out a survey. After assuring her that it would only take about ten minutes, I waited patiently at a nearby table. After a few moments, she signaled that she had finished and I walked over to her.

“I have so much to say about this. You know, it can’t be explained so well in a survey,” she told me.

I took this as an invitation to ask more questions. She introduced herself as Hibah and we decided to meet later.

H
ibah and I sat at T.G.I. Friday’s
on Marrad Street in downtown Beirut. Marrad Street is one of the most popular spots for young people in Beirut; it is also one of the city’s best places to people-watch. I found it hard to believe that just eight years earlier it had been virtually deserted; the gorgeous outdoor restaurants had been mere rubble and the busy streets had been filled with weeds and mortar shells. Today, T.G.I. Friday’s is one of many Western fast-food chains in Lebanon; one has a better chance of finding a Starbucks (there are five in Beirut), Dunkin’ Donuts, or Pizza Hut in downtown Beirut than in just about any European city and even some American cities.