Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (29 page)

Damascus under the current regime has exerted such a toxic influence on Lebanon for so long that regime change there may do wonders for Beirut, even if the aftermath of the Syrian war is disastrous—which it probably will be.

*  *  *

Beirut recovered somewhat from its own Syria-style destruction even during the Syrian occupation, and not all the reconstruction and recovery has taken the form of erasure. Most of downtown has been rebuilt, although the results look and feel a bit odd. Stone buildings that delightfully blend Parisian and Ottoman styles have been lovingly restored, but the area is a bit antiseptic and fake-looking, almost as if it were built yesterday as a faux imitation of a past that no longer exists.

But it wasn’t built yesterday. It is authentic. The city center sustained such heavy damage during the civil war that all the buildings had to be completely resurfaced, making them look brand-new even though they are not. They are so clean, unblemished and unmarked by time that they don’t quite look real, especially compared with the rest of the city, which is chaotic and wild. Downtown Beirut looks even more pristine than the most pristine parts of Paris, giving the impression that it’s trying too hard. After 20 more years of weather and age, it should look properly broken-in and lived-in again, but right now it looks like a Levantine Disneyland.

The company responsible for downtown’s renovation, Solidere, was founded by Rafik Hariri, the former Sunni prime minister whose assassination in 2005 sparked the Cedar Revolution against the Syrian military occupation. Not everyone is happy with Solidere, and not only because downtown looks and feels like a theme park. Solidere has a near monopoly on the reconstruction of the city center and uses considerable muscle against property owners and residents who get in the way of its plans. I’ve seen billboards and graffiti saying “Stop Solidere” around Beirut for years.

The first time I visited the city in 2005, the area immediately northwest of the restored downtown was a wide urban blank space laid waste by war. Today it has been rebuilt from scratch as the new Souks of Beirut, in a style that never existed before. It sort of looks and feels like a traditional Middle Eastern bazaar, but not really. It’s more like an open-air mall with a hint of traditional style to give it some flavor. Most of the shops are well above the price range of not only most Lebanese citizens but also of middle-class Americans like me. The new Souks of Beirut cater almost exclusively to wealthy Gulf Arabs on holiday. The area certainly looks better than the rubble field it replaced, but most Beirutis feel a bit alienated by the place, as do I.

There’s another problem too. The new Souks of Beirut sucked half the merchants out of downtown, and they have not been replaced. Lebanon’s economy can only sustain so many high-end restaurants and stores at a time before they’re spread out too thin. Solidere, it appears, rebuilt too much too quickly.

But there is a major advantage to Beirut’s unnatural-feeling and now half-empty downtown. Like the Latin Quarter of Paris, cars are banished from most of it. The city desperately needs a little island of breathing space, because streets and sidewalks everywhere else are stressful, loud and even a little bit dangerous.

The rest of the city is a pedestrian nightmare. Streets are so narrow that cars often have to be parked on the sidewalks, forcing everyone on foot into roadways turned to rivers of steel by the worst drivers in the world outside of Albania.

Stop signs merely act as suggestions. Traffic lights scarcely exist and are only really obeyed when traffic is as its peak. Even then, drivers are constantly running red lights. Traffic is so out of control in Beirut that I suspect even the most ardent American opponents of red-light cameras at home would approve of Beirut’s after trying to cross the street a handful of times.

The city is currently installing parking meters for the first time in its history. Parking meters. In Beirut! They are as alien and incongruous there as a topless bar in Saudi Arabia or a Lamborghini showroom in Somalia. Nobody takes them seriously. I recently walked down a street where every parked car—one after another for several blocks in a row—had a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wipers. Citizens may eventually catch on and learn to drive and park like everyone else in the world, but until then, the city careens out of control.

Messiness aside, though, Beirut is the most cosmopolitan, liberal and even Western Arab city by far. Foreigners from Europe and the United States will find far more fragments of their own culture in Beirut than will Arab tourists from the Persian Gulf region, though plenty of Gulfies holiday in Lebanon anyway. To an extent, you can chalk up Beirut’s partial Westernization to the cultural influence of Lebanese Christians and imperial France, but the Sunni parts of town are no less culturally developed than the Christian side. Fantastic bookstores, art galleries, film and music festivals and even gay bars—unthinkable in cities like Baghdad and Cairo—proliferate in both parts of the city.

One reason is that Beirut isn’t very religious. It’s hard to say for sure what percentage of people believe in God and take religion seriously, but let’s put it this way: bars and clubs are much more crowded than churches and mosques. Beirut’s houses of worship aren’t as empty as Europe’s, where you’ll often find more tourists with cameras inside than the devout, but they’re close.

When Lebanese self-identify as Christian, Sunni, Shia or Druze, they aren’t telling you what they believe theologically. They’re telling you which community they belong to. Religious sects in the eastern Mediterranean function like ethnicities, just as they do in Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Atheist Sunni Muslims in Lebanon and Syria are just as much Sunni Muslims in sectarian terms as Jews in Israel are Jews whether or not they’re religious. Each sect has its own history, its own culture, its own aspirations and fears and its own constellation of allies and enemies.

The people of Lebanon, Syria and Israel can’t exempt themselves from all this just because they choose to be secular. Even the most liberal and cosmopolitan secular humanists find themselves trapped by their sectarian identity, sometimes willingly and other times not. It’s inescapable because during times of armed conflict, people can be killed for what’s printed next to Religion on their identity card—and nobody’s card says None next to Religion. Sectarian murderers do not ask, nor do they care, whether or not their victims believe in God or have even set foot in a church or a mosque. During times of armed conflict—and even to an extent during times of sectarian tension, which is near constant—people can only truly find safety amid the confines of their sect.

Lebanon’s diverse sects make up the constituent parts of its culture, and the sectarian boundaries define the human geography. The eastern half of the capital is almost entirely Christian. The western half is predominantly Sunni. And the southern suburbs are all but monolithically Shia.

The city split apart during the civil war into mutually hostile cantons. Christian militias squared off against Palestinian and Sunni militias across a burning gash known as the Green Line, which ripped through the center of the city on a northwest-by-southeast axis. Beirut wasn’t so neatly divided before the civil war, and today you’ll find Christians on the west side and Muslims on the east side, but the city remains mostly divided along the same line today.

Each half of the city looks and feels different. For a host of reasons, the Christian side sustained less damage during the war. Fewer buildings were destroyed, so it’s a lot more French-looking today. It’s also more culturally “French,” since many Lebanese Christians feel a political, cultural and religious kinship with France and the French language that Lebanese Muslims do not.

The west side of the city is more culturally Arab and architecturally bland, because so many of its buildings were flattened during the war. The Sunnis on the west side of town also never bonded as strongly with France. They’re more liberal and cosmopolitan than Sunni Arabs in most other parts of the region, but their culture, religion, language and loyalties are for the most part in sync with their more conservative neighbors.

East and West Beirut are nearly identical, however, compared with the southern suburbs. Collectively known as the
dahiyeh
, which means suburb in Arabic, this part of the metro area is the de facto “capital” of Hezbollahland. The central government has no writ there. Hezbollah provides its own security, its own services, its own hospitals and its own schools. Drive down the streets and you’ll see the Hezbollah flag and the Iranian flag but rarely if ever the Lebanese flag. It looks, feels and functions like a ramshackle satellite of Iran even though you can walk there from central Beirut in roughly an hour.

Once known as the “belt of misery,” it was and remains a slum, even if it’s a little less miserable than it used to be. Most of the buildings are shoddily constructed 12-story apartment towers built without permits and with no attention whatsoever to grace, style or aesthetics of any kind, especially not the French kind. There are places in East Beirut where, if you try hard enough and squint at the city just so, you could fool yourself into believing you’re somewhere in France, but there’s no chance you could ever get away with that in the
dahiyeh
.

The dividing lines between these three parts of Beirut are the flash points when armed conflict breaks out. A half-mile or so south of the city center along the old Green Line near Sodeco Square is what’s commonly called the Yellow House, at least what’s left of it. This once beautiful row of apartments and shops was the posh home of some of Beirut’s finest before it was shattered to the core early on during the war. The bullet-pocked stone skeleton still stands in a state of ruin that is hardly less advanced than that of the great gladiator coliseum in Rome.

It is finally being renovated after decades of sitting there like the blasted-up hulk that it is, but it’s not being renovated the way downtown has been renovated. The Yellow House will not look antiseptic and fake when it’s finished. The chewed-up facade will be encased in glass with only the inside fixed up and refurbished. It will become a war museum, its torn-to-shreds husk preserved as if in amber as a constant reminder that urban civil war is one of the worst catastrophes the human race can inflict on itself.

If they aren’t careful and wise, the Lebanese may end up inflicting it on themselves all over again. For the sectarian monster stalking Syria is again clawing its way to the surface in Lebanon. Sunni Muslims, by and large, support the Syrian opposition, while most of Lebanon’s Shia community backs the Assad regime. Hezbollah is now openly involved in the Syrian war—without anything even vaguely resembling an exit strategy—and is taking such heavy casualties that Michael Young, in
NOW Lebanon,
dubbed it “Hezbollah’s Vietnam.” Meanwhile, Lebanese Sunnis in the Bekaa Valley are giving shelter to their brethren in the Free Syrian Army. Some are even volunteering as soldiers.

Lebanese Sunnis and Lebanese Shias are killing each other right now in Syria. It may be but a matter of time before they stop bothering to first cross the border and just start killing each other at home.

The reason both sides manage to restrain themselves despite it all is that both know neither can win an offensive war inside Lebanon. Amine Gemayel, the former president, summed up the futility of civil wars there when Lebanon was chewing off its own leg in the 1980s. “Everyone is against everyone else,” he said, “and it all keeps going around and around in circles without anyone ever winning or anything being accomplished.”

Eli Khoury concurs. “The beauty of Lebanon,” he says, “is that everyone is a minority and no one can kick anyone’s ass. If there’s a war, it won’t go anywhere. Everyone will protect their own area. Everyone realizes that if they start a war, they aren’t going to get anything out of it.”

Nobody wins wars in Lebanon, but unless Syria permanently breaks apart, Yugoslavia-style, one side or another will eventually emerge on top in Damascus. If Assad loses and doesn’t manage to take Lebanon with him, Beirut will finally have relief from the cascade of catastrophes that has been ravaging the city for the past 38 years.

Lebanon will still have Hezbollah to deal with, of course, but the so-called Party of God only has two supporters and allies in the world, and one of them is Assad.

Future TV talk-show host Nadim Koteich thinks the fall of Assad will be a catastrophe for Hezbollah. “For decades they’ve had this huge, stable state behind them, along with a corridor for weapons coming out of Iran. They had this enormous machine and all its tools at their back. It will be a tremendous blow for them when they lose it. I don’t know any bully who has a future. A bigger bully will eventually come along and kick their ass, or time will pass by and he’ll just realize that he wasted his life pushing people around, while those who were bullied graduated from MIT and Harvard. That’s Hezbollah’s future.”

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Beirut looks and feels Middle Eastern when arriving from America, but it still looks and feels startlingly French when arriving from the inland Bekaa Valley, which has more in common with Syria than with the more cosmopolitan Mediterranean parts of the country. It’s still a mess, though. I’d love to say Beirut is back. The city has a special place in my heart. It’s the only foreign city I’ve ever lived in, and during the Cedar Revolution in 2005, I felt a rush of incredible optimism. The place looked and felt like I imagine East Germany must have when the Berlin Wall was knocked down.

Beirut, though, isn’t back. Beirut, on the contrary, is
on
its back. The economy is in worse shape than I’ve ever seen it. Tourism is one of the city’s primary industries, yet tumbleweeds are blowing through hotel lobbies. Governments all over the world are issuing terrifying travel warnings. Restaurants and nightclubs are closing because they don’t have enough foreign customers and the locals don’t have enough money.

And yet, paradoxically, the city in some ways looks better than I’ve ever seen it. It’s not Paris—not even close—but it’s harder than it used to be to find physical evidence that a terrible war took place there when I was a kid. The amount of reconstruction is simply astounding. While some of it looks like Miami, some of it looks like Dubai and none of it looks even slightly Parisian, all of it is superior to everything built in the city between the end of World War II—when the abundance of cheap materials and a cratering of aesthetic standards ruined architecture all over the world—and the end of the civil war.