HOME / books: Reading between the lines.

Liberalism in the Levant?One man's dreams suggest some lessons.

By Alexander StarPosted Monday, June 16, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

Related in Slate

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan described rivalries between Christian groups in Lebanon. Daniel Engber shed light on the relationship between Syria and Lebanon. Elisabeth Eaves explored the region.

Maalouf does not present his grandfather as a historical role model, fit for a marble bust. On the contrary, in his telling, Boutros was vain, touchy, mercurial—an individual who imprinted his idiosyncrasies on everything he touched. He wore a black cape, which he fastened with a gold buckle. He refused to put on the traditional turban or the Western hat, preferring to go bareheaded. To the disbelief of village neighbors, he insisted on naming his first child Kamal, after Kemal Attaturk, even though the child was a girl.

Yet Boutros was also very much a man of his era. The conflicts he faced were emblematic of an age of ideological and physical migration, when the competing claims of religion and freethinking, village and diaspora, had to be worked out by trail and error, as if for the first time. Boutros refused to baptize his children, determined to let them decide the matter for themselves when they reached maturity. His brother, a Greek Catholic priest, stole into his house and nearly succeeded in baptizing the children anyway. Meanwhile, he rejected his émigré brother's repeated entreaties to join the family business in Cuba. Boutros did not wish to leave: He wanted to bring the ideals of the West to the East. "Hold your head high, wear the clothes of your century, and proclaim: The time for turbans is past!" he exclaimed even as he also warned: "It is not enough to want to imitate the West; it is also important to know what is worth copying and what is not!" In Maalouf's words, Boutros sought to create a new America, where "diverse communities could co-exist, where everyone would read the newspapers, and where corruption and arbitrary rule would no longer prevail."

Village crank or man of the world? Boutros was a little of both. And ultimately, Maalouf implies, he was defeated by the weaknesses of his personality as well as by the intractability of local traditions and the mischief of outside powers. It's a judgment that could apply to many of the liberals of his era, who became disillusioned by French and British rule in the 1920s. Several especially influential thinkers turned to Arab nationalism, and in so doing turned Enlightenment ideals upside down. The alternative to parochialism and superstition became membership in the Arab nation, not the human race. Lebanese Christians were, once again, at the forefront of this movement.

Maalouf does not explicitly explore these themes in his memoir. But in 1996, he published a book-length essay, "In the Name of Identity," that eloquently castigates tribalism in all its forms. Our identities are "complex, unique and irreplaceable." Yet when one identity is threatened, it hardens and becomes homicidal. The command to "assert your identity" is, in his estimation, "a recipe for massacres." Lebanon is both a model and a warning, he proposed. With its many jostling creeds, "you are constantly having to question yourself about your affiliations, your origins, your relationships with others, and your possible place in the sun or in the shade."

In today's Lebanon, the prospects of escaping sectarianism are few. Every citizen must belong to one of 17 sects, and can run for office (or marry) only within the sect. The civic peace is purchased, when it is purchased, at the price of a system that entrenches feudal leaders and enforces religious boundaries. Boutros dreamed of a Levant where it didn't matter whether you were a Presbyterian or Greek Catholic or Freemason, never mind Christian or Muslim or Jew. Maalouf warmly pays tribute to those ideals even as his memoir acknowledges his grandfather's frailties—and even as Lebanon's recent strife testifies to the gap between the promise of a liberal cosmopolitan state and the reality. In preserving the memory of one man's Enlightenment project, as quixotic in his own time as it would be in ours, Maalouf suggests a sobering message: If Boutros' ideals, and the words that expressed them, strike us as embarrassing or out of place, perhaps the fault is in us.