Part 2. Background: “Rainbow over the Levant”

Note: This is the second part of the historical background of my novel “Rainbow over the Levant”, published on my blog 5 years ago. You may read the first part on  https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/background-rainbow-over-the-levant/.

Before the Arabic Empire, the Near East region (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine) paid its tribute to the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople.

During the Arabic hegemony, after around the year 640, the Christian people within the Arabic Empire paid their tribute to the Caliphates in one of the successive capitals such as in Mecca, Damascus, Baghdad or Cairo, and later they paid it to the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul later on till 1918. The Moslems didn’t pay taxes and it were the non-Moslems who covered the budget for running “governments”. 

In modern times, the people in the Near East were under the colonial powers of either France (in Lebanon and Syria) or Great Britain (in Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt).

Nowadays, the entire region is mostly under the control of the USA, with Israel playing the role of a lesser junior partner.  Indeed, a Zionist State was created as a standing mercenary army to keep the region under close control.

In the period of our novel, the Mamluks’ dynasty had conquered all of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine with the exclusion of Iraq, which was under the Mogul and later the Tatar invaders.

The Mamluks established 6 Viceroys in Damascus, Aleppo, Hama (in current Syria), Tripoli in Lebanon, Safad and Karak in Palestine. Most of the coastal cities in Lebanon were ruined because of the successive attacks to dislodge the remaining Crusaders and also because the trading caravans stopped passing through them.

The Mameluks did not invade Mount Lebanon militarily at this stage, but made sure to collect the requisite tribute and set up special coastal guards of Turkmen and Kurdish origins to prevent any recurring European invasions.

While the feudal nobleman outside Mount Lebanon was an appointed Mamluks’ military officer, whose sole interest in the land was to collect his due profit because the appointment was temporarily allocated to him, the feudal landlord in Mount Lebanon was a native and actually resided in his property and was the authority in organizing the life of the residents who usually were of the same religious denomination.

The current borders of the Republic of Lebanon were drawn by the French General Gouraux in 1920 after his army defeated the nascent Syria army in Maysaloun and entered Damascus at the end of the First World War.

What was formerly known as Lebanon encompassed only Mount Lebanon. During the French mandate other districts were attached to Lebanon:

1. The northern regions of Tripoli and Akkar were part of the “Wilayat” of Tripoli (the city of Tripoli was the capital of the “Wilayat” of the Viceroy of Tripoli that extended in Syria to include the towns of Homs and Tartus and the Lebanese littoral including Beirut).

2. The Bekaa Valley was part of the “Wilayat” of Damascus,

3. The southern regions, including the cities of Sidon and Tyre were part of the “Wilayat” of Acre in northern Palestine.

The Viceroys of Tripoli, Damascus, Safad and Acre paid allegiance to either the Sultan of Egypt in Cairo, Istanbul in Turkey, or the Shah of Iran depending on which empire was the master of the Middle East at different periods in history.

In the sixteen century, at the start of the push of the Ottoman empire to expand toward Syria, there have been attempts for a self-autonomous status in Mount Lebanon.  The Druze chieftain Emir Maan the First, of the Maan tribe in the Chouf’s county, managed to unite all the counties in Mount Lebanon and then expanded toward Syria in the north and Palestine in the south.

The Ottoman Sultan became suspicious of his intentions, militarily quelled his ambitions and decapitated him in Istanbul. His grandson Fakhr El Dine (Emir Maan the Second ) succeeded to reunite Mount Lebanon and expanded his authority even further to include the Bekaa Valley after crushing the army of the Viceroy of Damascus in Anjar.

Emir Maan II opened negotiations with Florence to supply him with modern weapons and expanded trade to Europe and Egypt.  Again he overshot his potentials and was defeated by the Ottoman Sultan, was exiled to Istanbul and put to death within three years of his captivity.

A century later, Emir Bechir Chahab the Second, in the Chouf district, reunited Mount Lebanon, expanded his authority, and allied himself with General Napoleon Bonaparte and Mohamed Ali in Egypt against the Ottoman and the British Empires.  His ambition was foiled and was exiled to Malta for the remaining of his life.

These Emirs of Mount Lebanon extended the dominion of Mount Lebanon to parts of Syria and Palestine once they secured the unity of Mount Lebanon but they failed to go beyond maintaining law and order during their reign and no viable administrative structures or solid social and public institutions were established toward building a stable and lasting state nation.

In the Antiquity, the Phoenicians City-States of Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre expanded their dominions to Syria and Palestine at different periods in their separate ascendance. While wealth was amassed from integrated maritime enterprising complexes such as warehousing, ship repairing and trade transports by sea and land, the real source of power of these city-states resided in trained skilled workers, inland bread basket plains (Bekaa Valley), timber from the adjacent mountain forests and ready stones for constructing magnificent temples and for fortifying almost impregnable maritime castles.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a local reformist by the name of Tanios Chahine lead a commune of peasants at the town of Antelias against the feudal and clerical privileges in the Metn district. His movement resisted two years against the onslaught of the powerful enemies of the people until the latter forces of both denominations, Christians and Druze, masterminded a civil war in Mount Lebanon in order to strengthen confessionalism and their hold on power.

The civil war started in 1860 in Mount Lebanon between the Maronite and Druze and was localized in the Chouf and part of the Bekaa Valley including the town of Zahle; it lasted two years and opened the doors for the European interventions in our internal affairs that secured and maintained the old system.

The Levant was called by various names throughout history; the Arab Empire called it either the Fertile Crescent starting with the Euphrates and Tiger Rivers and ending with the Al Assy, Litany and Jordan Rivers encompassing Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. It was known as Al Sham (currently referring to the environ of Damascus) because the region was on the left of Mecca so that the region on its right was labeled Yemen.

The European colonialists called it Levant because it is where the sun dawned on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

The first wave of Levantine immigrants to the United States and Latin America was identified as Turks because they were a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, then the second wave of Levantine immigrants that spread to Africa and Egypt was identified as Syrians regardless of their present nationalities after the defeat of Turkey in the First World War.

There were many Syrian luminaries at the end of the 19^th century, immigrants and locals, who wrote extensively of the need for reforms and the rejuvenation of the nation among them Jubran Khalil Jubran, Kawakibi, Youssef El Azam, Boutros Boustany, Shebly Chmayel, and Ibrahim Yaziji.

However, there were few leaders for organizing the people into political parties. In the late 19^th century, two overseas organizations from Levantine descendents proclaimed that the Syrian Nation is constituted of Lebanon, the actual Syrian State, Palestine and Jordan and published their reforms and ideologies in newspapers.

The first group, located in New York (1899) and calling itself “The Young Syrian Party”, was led by Emir Youssef Shadid Abi Lameh and based on the following principles:

1.  Striving toward an independent Syria with natural borders from Ras Aqaba to El Arish;

2.  Working for a comprehensive agreement to unify the Arabic Nations;

3.  Instituting a total separation between the religious and civil authorities;

4.  Nationalizing the riches and properties of the religious clergy and assigning for them the necessary funds for their subsistence;

5.  Unifying the schooling programs throughout the Nation;

6.  Imposing mandatory military enlistments to reflect the will of the citizens for holding on to a Nation.

The second group was formed in Sao Paolo, Brasil, in 1922 and was lead by Jamil Maaluf and Asaad Bechara.  They named their political association the “Syrian National Party” which adopted the basic principles of the former group but added more principles with detailed exposition.

For example, the “Syrian National Party” specifically advocated:

1. the requisite of civil marriages among the different religious sects,

2. adopting the Arabic language as the national language in all the private and public schools,

3.  giving Lebanon and Palestine self administrative autonomy

4. prohibiting the religious clergy from interfering in the civil status laws and executive decisions.

Unfortunately, these two political parties were never transplanted in their original homeland and did not take roots as formal political organization in Lebanon, Palestine or Syria.

This section will raise controversies among both the isolationists and greater Pan-Arab nationalists save that current facts should not be sacrificed at the altar of the whimsical confessional minds:  we have a disposition of fabricating our history on flimsy emotional exigencies.

The only political party that is disciplined and grounded on solid ideological principles that proclaims Syria as a complete Nation and survived today is called the “Syrian National Social Party”.  This political party was founded in 1932 by Antoun Saade, a native of Dhour Choueir in the Metn, during the French mandate of Lebanon as an underground party.

Saade was an immigrant in Brazil where his father Khalil published an Arabic daily.  He relocated to Lebanon and taught at the American University of Beirut and founded his party.  He was then forced to exile in 1936 by the French colonial authority and settled in Argentina during the Second World War.

Saade returned to Lebanon in 1947 to an unprecedented mass welcome at the airport to reorganize his party and affirm its ideology after a few discrepancies in views among its leaders emanating from the independence of Lebanon during his exile.  The members of this party celebrate in July 8 the martyrdom of its founder, Antoun Saade, who was summarily executed in 1949 when he was in his late forties, after a kangaroo trial that lasted barely 48 hours.

Saade represented a serious danger as an organized force that exposed the forces of the defeatist isolationists and sectarianists in our communities.

While the Communist party in Syria was the first truly secular organization established in the first quarter of the 20^th century, Antoun Saade was the first leader to create a secular political party affirming that Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq form one nation and one society. The ideology of the latter political party was based on a comprehensive project, politically, socially, philosophically, culturally and economically.

This party believes that the Syrian Nation is one of the four Arabic nations; the three other Arabic nations being: the Arabic Peninsula Nation of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the Arab Emirate Union of States, then the Nile Arabic Nation of Egypt and Sudan, and then the North African Arabic Nation of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania.

The “Syria National Social Party” was and still is secular in its ideology and practice, and even during Lebanon civil war of (1975-1991), it did not participate in the killing on confessional basis.  The Syrian National Social Party exists officially in Lebanon and lately in Syria with substantial Palestinian adherents.

Antoun Saade was less successful politically to share responsibilities in any government or to unite our nation against Zionism and the colonial exploitation to our main national resources in oil with no significant strategic political and economic returns.

One characteristic that stand out in the concept of secular nationalism in the Levant, especially in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, is that almost all the nationalist political party leaders or founders were from minority Christians.  For example:

Michel Aflak, the founder of the Baath Party, still in power in Syria and for three decades in Iraq; George Habache the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Naef Hawatmeh the founder of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Antoun Saade the founder of the Syrian National Social Party.

It appears that the Moslems could not shed out the notion that their allegiance might be to any power that did not wrap itself up with the mantle of the Caliphate of Islam. Even during the First World War, the British had to seek support from the so-called House of the descended of the Prophet Mohammad in the tribe of El-Hashemite in Mecca.

It is no surprise that the cornerstone of the doctrines of the salafit Sunni Moslem political parties is the restitution of the Caliphate in the Moslem world.