Posts under ‘Lebanese Culture’

Just released December 2005

by Dr. Charles H. Malik

I respect all men, and it is from disrespect for none that I say there are no great leaders in the world today. In fact, greatness itself is laughed to scorn. You should not be great today- you should sink yourself into the herd, you should not be distinguished from the crowd, you should simply be one of the many.

The commanding voice is lacking. The voice which speaks little, but which when it speaks, speaks with compelling moral authority- this kind of voice is not congenial to this age. The age flattens and levels down every distinction into drab uniformity. Respect for the high, the noble, the great, the rare, the specimen that appears once every hundred or every thousand years, is gone. Respect at all is gone! If you ask whom and what people do respect, the answer is literally nobody and nothing. This is simply an unrespecting age- it is the age of utter mediocrity. To become a leader today, even a mediocre leader, is a most uphill struggle. You are constantly and in every way and from every side pulled down. One wonders who of those living today will be remembered a thousand years from now- the way we remember with such profound respect Plato, and Aristotle, and Christ, and Paul, and Augustine, and Aquinas.

If you believe in prayer, my friends, and I know you do, then pray that God send great leaders, especially great leaders of the spirit.

A great leader suffers in a hundred different ways, and keeps his suffering to himself.

A great leader survives both his suffering and the fact that nobody knows anything about it.

A great leader loves being alone with God.

A great leader communes with the deepest the ages have known.

A great leader knows there is a higher and there is a lower, and he always seeks the higher, and indeed the highest.

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History

Introduction:

Lebanese is the native language of the people of Lebanon. In addition to daily conversations, Lebanese is used in an extensive body of popular poetry, play production, popular music, television shows, and much more. Due to the huge media production in Lebanese, the language became instrumental in understanding the rest of the languages and dialects spoken in Palestine, and parts of Syria and Jordan.

The Lebanese Language belongs to the West and Central Semitic family of languages that includes Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Other forms of this spoken languages include the Palestinian dialects, the Coastal and Central Syrian Dialects and some dialects of Jordanian to a lesser extent. The Lebanese language is an amalgamation of various languages that passed over Lebanon. It is a result of centuries of cumulative linguistic assimilation, thus is the state of every living language today.
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From the Daily Star, February 2004

Dr. Antoine Emile Khoury Harb, ph.D in history and archaeology, secretary general of the Fondation du Patrimoine Libanais, is an authority in the history of the Lebanese people and patrimony. In 2000 he published his doctoral thesis, a research aiming to verify that there is such an entity as Lebanon and to define it, in Arabic. Recently, thanks to the initiative of the AUB Alumni Association in the US, the book has been translated into an English edition: “Lebanon, A Name Through 4000 Years: Entity and Identity”. The Association had seen with desolation the US government questioning Lebanon’s identity and right to its territory, and saw in the book a highly important document to set things straight. Five hundred copies of the English edition were mailed to US congressmen this New Year as a proof that Lebanon is hardly the “geographic mistake” Kissinger claimed it to be.

Undaunted by the torrential rains, a handful of history lovers made it to the Convent of the Franciscaines in Badaro on February 16 to listen to Harb presenting an overview of the material of his book.
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The Cedar of Lebanon, Cedrus Libani, is an evergreen of the family Pinaceae. This coniferous plant was first found in Lebanon, on the Mount Lebanon range at Sannine, Barouk, and the eastern and western mountain chains. The tree however is not only found in Lebanon, but forests of Cedrus Libani grow in Cilicia, the Taurus Mountains, Cyprus and Morocco, although many of these are considered to be different races of the same species. The Mount Lebanon chain used to be almost completely covered with cedars. In addition, many handsome specimens are cultivated in several countries of the world, notably in England and in France.

Cedrus Libani possesses an imposing trunk that may attain a height of 120 feet and a diameter of 9 feet. Such a trunk is often branching and having a dense crown with an inclined dark green head of characteristic flat growth in adult trees. Secondary branchlets are often ramified like a candelabra. Warberton, in his “Crescent and Cross”, described a Cedar of Lebanon with a trunk of 45 feet in circumference. Burckhardt speaks of twelve very ancient trees called the “Saints”. These had four, five, and even seven gigantic trunks” springing from the same base”, bearing, like American Sequoitas, leaves only at their very tops. The bark of the Cedar of Lebanon is dark gray and exudes a gum of balsam, which makes the wound so fragrant that to walk in a grove of cedars is an utmost delight. The wood is astonishingly decay resistant and it is never eaten by insect larvae. It is of a beautiful red tone, solid, and free from knots.

The terminal shoots are erect or slightly inclined. The tree blossoms in September or October, which is peculiar to the genus Cedrus among the conifers. It bears cones that require three years to mature. The cone is initially tiny and pale green. The second year it reaches its full size that ranges between 3-4.5 inches in height and has a characteristic violet purple color. In the third season it turns into a rich brown and scatters its seeds, which are minute, considering the size of the tree. The cones are born upright on the upper side of the branches.
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A great deal of debate has gone on regarding the identity of the Lebanese, many state that the Lebanese are Arabs and that Lebanon is an Arab state, whilst many argue that this is not the case, that the Lebanese are not Arab. In the Lebanese constitution the word Arab does not appear, the constitution only makes reference to Arabic as being the official language in article 11, yet this seemingly trivial matter was deemed of such importance that an entire sentence stating that Lebanon is Arab was inserted at the beginning of the Taif agreement in 1990.
In order to answer the question of Lebanese identity one has to look into the history of Lebanon so as to determine the origin of its inhabitants. Upon examination on finds that the Lebanese are ethnically a mixture of Phoenician, Greek, Arab, Persian and Armenian elements.

The earliest recorded texts refer to the inhabitants of Lebanon as Canaanites. Philo of Byblos claims that the Canaanites were autochthonous, i.e. born from the soil of a land, and so have inhabited Lebanon from the earliest times, and that they were not only men but also gods and that the whole human culture hails from their area. However many theories involving migration have been put forward as to Canaanite origins, which range form Eritrea, the Sinai, the Persian Gulf or as far away as Antarctica. Herodotus locates them on the Eritrean sea and Justin tells how they were driven from their original land by an earthquake and settled first on the coast of the Dead Sea and then on the Mediterranean. For migration theories to make sense they must presuppose that some kind of ‘nation’ must have existed for the Canaanites to migrate from before their appearance in the area of Lebanon, but there is no historical or archaeological evidence for such a ‘nation’ and so migration does not hold.
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When Lebanon labored in the United Nations to establish the dignity, rights and basic freedoms of the human being in the unique and magnificent formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the depths of Lebanese being spoke through the mouths of its representatives. The story of that labor has not yet been written; in its existential hidden aspects and secrets it will never be written.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins as follows: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…”

And Article One states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

The truth is that without that dignity and those rights, without that freedom and brotherhood, without that reason and conscience, Lebanon would not have been, and it would not have been able to live and endure in defiance of the ages and epochs.

That is what we have many times said, declared and recorded before the whole world, and what we have, finally, worked to incorporate in those texts. I assure you that the annual world celebration on December 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a celebration of Lebanon Day. The whole world knows Lebanon’s contribution; it testifies to it on that day, but, alas, we have not yet put it at the forefront of our official national holidays!
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Maronite history is coloured with the romance that attaches itself to a struggle of a determined people. Most nations in their history often have to make a choice between confrontation or cooperation and time has shown us that minorities usually pay for their continued existence through deformation of character or out right collaboration. The Maronites through perpetual resistance and the preservation of a precarious independence have escaped this fate. Not only have they survived, but they have survived uncowed. The remarkable nature of their history lies hand in hand with that of Lebanon, for centuries being their retreat and fortress. Lebanon and the Maronites are inseparably attached.

The Maronites have survived the storms of invasion, occupation, repression and suppression for over 1600 years, preserving their religion, traditions and state. Through the ages they refused to bow to their occupiers, at the height of the Umayyad dynasty the Maronites even exacted tribute as a price for their good behaviour, in due course their Christian neighbours all succumbed to Islam but not Lebanon, holding a Maronite majority well into the 20th century, even their Syriac (Christian Aramaic) language was widely spoken well into the late 19th century and still survives today in their liturgy and in some of their villages.

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The coming of the ship
Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.
And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld the ship coming with the mist.

Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.

But he descended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:
How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?

Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache
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George N. El-Hage, Ph.D. Arabic and Comparative Literature

Poetry and art are twins. Both are the offspring of suffering and joy. Gibran translated Blake’s “Innocence and Experience” into a “Tear and a Smile.” Nevertheless, the unending drama of human existence unfolds itself in the pages of both men. Only the elected and gifted soul is capable of creativity, of reading the world differently, and of rebelling against evil clothed in a lamb’s garment. Art knows no boundaries. It transcends all national limits and is only satisfied with the universal. There, time and place lose their ability to imprison the artist in a closed cell. The inspired poet becomes a winged soul floating over life, embracing the infinite. It is in the midst of this vast expanse where the responsibility of the artist becomes eternal and his mission turns holy that we can speak of Kahlil Gibran and William Blake together.*
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Notre Dame University has launched a new series, the Murex Series, under the headline Lebanon by Lebanese authors.

It is basically made up of selected works by great Lebanese authors ranging from literary to political to social and historical writings about Lebanon. The books are translated and published in an elegant cover that bears the slogan of the Murex connotatively and denotatively.

This project was introduced in 2003 and is ongoing with the publication of an average of one or two books per year.

LebanonPostcard is selling those literary masterpieces online on their website

Lebanonism encourages all its readers to buy those essential books that should be the basis of every library.

The Sacred Mountain - Lebanon in Itself
The Heart of Lebanon – If Lebanon were to speak
William Blake and Kahlil Gibran – Lebanese Truth