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Civil society busts you in your email

Hey friends, did you know that "civil society" invites you to attend a march that will take place on the 13th of April from the Mar Mikhael Church in Chiyah to Martyr's Square in downtown? The objective is to remember the 'martyrs' who died during the CIVIL (i.e. clan VS clan of people calling themselves Lebanese) war.

I just got the press release by email. That's another thing "civil society" can do in Lebanon, it can reach any 'citizen' inside the country without having to ask for his email. But that's not my main point here. My point rather is actually made up of several sub-points:

1- Who the hell is civil society? Some day, we will need a dedicated person to do a genealogy of this term, especially through its use in post-colonial societies.

2- Why on the Arabic press release it is signed "civil society" whereas on the English one there is no signature. Why on the English press it is "civil society organizations invite you to" whereas on the Arabic one it is "civil society invites you to"? Maybe because in Arabic we are required to believe that such an abstract and absurd concept exist somehow floating, transcending, our miserable lives, whereas in English, we're pragmatic enough to know these are just a bunch of organization that are trying to mobilize people into identifying to some aspect of what would be called the common "Lebanese experience".

3- What's really nice about this event is that once on Martyr's square, amidst the security guards, military personnel, secret service rascals of all creed, we will have a television (don't bother mentioning which one) that will broadcast a "host various journalists to discuss the themes of suffering, heroism, and hope". Great, more journalistic stupid rants in an overall moralizing discourse, that's what we need. Seriously sometimes I miss the priests, sheikhs, or what we commonly refer to as "religious" figures.

4- But what's really even nicer, is that the television broadcast "will close with a joint prayer with representatives from Lebanon’s religious communities and will be transmitted simultaneously by all the television networks". Isn't that cute? it reminds me of Gebran Tueni (grand racist and right wing frustrated individual)'s slogan (that he must have rehearsed for days in his office before pronouncing it during the successive theatrical and pathetic speeches of March 14) that says something like" We swear to God, Muslims and Christians that we will stand by our nation Lebanon". The bottom line is: Make sure that Confessionalism is something to rest upon, to pray upon, to praise, to worthy, in order to achieve peace. Good luck.

If someone needs the press release please let me know. I can email it.

Fath al Islam: a quick update

Itani has a little update on the state of affairs regarding the bad guys in the north and their friends in the south, in the Palestinian camp of Ain el Helweh. I just want to point out one or two things that I think we can conclude from everything that happened pre and post the Nahr el Bared debacle.

1- Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the US voluntarily and involuntarily had a hand in making circumstances ripe for Fath al Islam and other darker versions of "Islamists" militants to emerge. Syria, by kicking "al Qaeda" elements out of its country in order to clean its landscape and throwing it back on us. the US through the Mustaqbal movement, and actually the Mustaqbal movement on its own by trying to co-opt these wild creature and try to tame their zealousness with a bit of cash and status promises, and Saudi Arabia by simply sending official delegations to Lebanon for some conference who never went back. It seems also that the international "Rafic Hariri" airport of Beirut has unfolded red carpets for many of these dudes.

2- When something happens, like a crisis or something, the stupidest thing to say is "he's the guy responsible for it". Even in the case of an assassination or the start of a war. What's important is why in the first place such an event is possible and in this case political circumstances are many, are multi-faceted and at the end of the day, what counts is who gets to gain from it, and who gets to lose.

Do you prefer a "Secular" or an "Islamic" State?

Al haqid, during a lunch we just had, defied me to defend the idea that an Islamic State would be better than a Secular one, especially in the case of the protection of minority rights. Of course here by "minorities", I mean any group that derive its imaginary sense of belonging from a different tradition (discursive that is) than the Islamic one. So in the case of Lebanon, most importantly religious minorities. This leads me to first make several claims that I think are crucial before defending my position:

1- There is no basic difference at the theoretical between a Secular and an Islamic state. It is only in terms of the institutions empowered and the repartition of power that difference could arise. there is nothing intrinsically more 'democratic' or 'just' in one or the other.
2- The conceptualization of an Islamic state is an imaginary one that include a lot of the secular tradition, especially as elaborated by Islamists. Today, the debate between both 'systems' is not a normative one because they are not clear cut and one discourse component has penetrated the other, this leads me to the two last points:
3- The question of an Islamic state is mostly tied to a question of belonging to a specific history and not to a form of governance
4- The secular state should not be the point of reference in terms of efficiency. The secular state hides many unresolved questions such as the one of the justification of nationalism, the resulting discourse of difference and the treatment of 'national' subjects especially in the age of growing minorities in the West.

So my argument goes as follows. In the case of the Middle East. Or what has been labeled as the Middle East, an Islamic state is not something to outrightly condemn, something that if probably well implemented may be more adequate than a 'secular' system. First of all because there no one 'type' of Islamic state, second because the claim for an Islamic state has to do more with a 'national' configuration of territory (imaginary sense of belonging), drawing on tradition, social practices, etc. And it is my belief that a political system that mirrors and travels well with age old institutions in place will be more efficient than any other. And in terms of minority treatment in the area we call the Middle East, we know for a fact that the Ottoman Empire area was one of the most peaceful between confessions, 'ethnicities' etc. So far as I can recall our biggest problems started with the colonialist quests, the subsequent breakup of the region and the formation of the 'secular-state'.

Christian desperation to be "different"

A disproportionate number of the Middle Eastern country's Christian men carry a Y chromosome that is clearly of Western European origin, which scientists believe was carried to the region by Crusaders and pilgrims between the 11th and 13th centuries.
This genetic signature is more often seen among Christians, and more rarely in Lebanon's Muslim or Druze communities. The Y chromosomes of many Muslim men trace their ancestry to earlier migrations from the Arabian Peninsula, as Islam spread during the 7th and 8th centuries.
The findings, from a study of 926 Lebanese men, suggest that both Christian and Muslim communities in Lebanon owe their origins, at least in part, to different founding events.
Study co-leader Pierre Zalloua, of the Lebanese American University in Beirut, said: 'This (has) revealed new insights into the complex history of my country.'
The research, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, focused on the male Y chromosome, which can be used to chart patrilineal descent. It found 10 per cent of Lebanese Christian men belong to a Y group known as R1b, which is of Western European origin. Just 6per cent of non-Christians had this kind of chromosome.
This indicates that more Christians than non-Christians have at least one male ancestor from Western Europe, and fits with the region's history.
More than 250,000 men from Europe travelled to the Middle East during the four Crusades.

Now ok this is a very funny article treating a very pathetic concern but there are things important to note here:

1- The study was conducted by some Christian 'academic' from a public university in Lebanon. This tells you a lot about the presence of a knowledge industry that searches and elaborates through scientific legitimating methods the presence of particularities.
2- I really love how this contradicts a lot of Christian claims saying that those who really 'made out' with the crusaders were the Shi'a (la'ano keno feltenin) who obviously have a higher intensity of blonds, blue eyed and round cheeks (of course this is another bullshit theory but in this case not being pushed for legitimation).
3- Maronite Christians historically come from the Arab peninsula whether you want it or not. Now in the process was there any fornication that followed that I am sure it sometimes happened with whomever was on the way and depending on a case by case basis. But Maronite Christians are the most Arab types of Christians through their rites, their use of the language, their social practices, etc. (I'm talking historically, because today and especially since the civil war, they changed a lot in all these practices).

Tchouang Tseu said

One has to accept everything as it comes,
Take account of people as humble as they can be,
Execute your tasks even without surveillance,
Formulate laws, even if incomplete,
Accomplish your duties, even if without enjoyment,
Respect the other,
Develop love for all creatures,
Follow rites without being constrained by them,
Know the just measure of an elevated conscience.

Adapt unity to change, this is the Tao.

Some thoughts on Hizbullah since Mughnieh's assassination

Don't ask me exactly why but I changed my mind. I woke up this morning thinking about the blog. I thought that the beast could probably heal. For those who know me personally, they have seen how lunatic I can be. So I will start with Ms Levantine's note. I will summarize what I think should be remembered following Mughnieh's assassination. There are several events that need to be taken into consideration:

1- Hizbullah's reaction to the assassination
2- Hizbullah's reaction to how the assassination was reported, and how Mughnieh was represented in the press and through other producers of information
3- Israel's reaction and US reaction

First of all, it is with few hesitations that I think that Israel carried out the assassination. By that I mean secret service cells working for the Israeli or Mossad in one way or another. Syria killing a guy of that stature for some hypothetical deal with the Americans especially with the given power configuration is just absurd. But let's leave this consideration as an open question so that I am not taxed of dogmatism. However, trying to answer this question distances us from the more important political and social development happening on the ground, post-assassination.

1- Hizbullah has focused on its likely constituency. What the party calls its Mujtama' el Muqawama, its "the society of resistance" (an interestingly changing discursive construction that scholars on Hizbullah mistakenly read literally, at its face value, more on that later). Mughnieh was quickly transformed into the greatest hero in the line of Ragheb Harb and Abbas Musawi. Billboards, ceremonies, and an elaborate discourse on martyrdom and how important it is to the community, was quickly deployed in all directions. This formidable production of meaning for events is in a way fascinating. It is not much different from any type of media production although here the narratives and the issues at stake are specific to the particular geography of the party. Dying for the cause becomes a triumph, a victory for the community. "the more you kill of us the stronger we become and the weaker you show yourself to be". This is what Hizbullah constantly tries to elaborate. The blood of the Shahid is imagined to feed into this organic whole that nurtures the bond of the community. That is the modern elaboration and practical political use of the concept of Shahada. And although it is translated as "martyrdom" I don't think it refers to the same political dynamics. Just check the recent history of state formation in Europe, nowhere is there something resembling this culture of the Shahid. This I think is one of the particularities of Post-Colonial State-formation, i.e. in the backdrop of occupation and prolonged oppression. But the end-result of these political discursive articulations are probably the same in the age of the "nation"-State (again nation here is not in its European meaning): Strenghtening the sense of belonging to the same imagined community.

This is why, most importantly, the campaign of Hizbullah is geared towards its own constituency, and here it gets tricky because Hizbullah is trying to maneuver between a discourse aimed at the Shi'a constituency and one that targets all the "Lebanese". So now Hizbullah adds a "nationalistic" dimension to its construction of the community. If you read the (constantly proliferating) publications of party members, intellectuals, etc. Like the vice-secretary general Naim Qassem, or simply the last couple of speeches of Hassan Nasrallah then you can clearly see that (and especially post july 2006 war) the resistant society is not just the 'downtrodden' but all the segments of the "Lebanese people" (on these discursive shifts I will write more later on). The party is trying by all means to push forth this 'unitarian' version of resistance. There is this idea that "we lived it this way. we know it is possible to lift ourselves from the opressed state, and so you can do the same". Although resistance is based on Shi'ite idioms, the cause now encompass all those who think that Israel is not the invincible enemy that it was once supposed to be. Hizbullah wants to spread this idea also as a fighting force against 'confessionalism'. People come from different religious backgrounds, but everyone should be concerned with the political problems this country is facing, and understand the big issues being played out in the region.

2- Western representation (and through that other "Lebanese" representation) have been stupidly concerned with the question of whether Mughnieh was a "terrorist" or not. Hizbullah has been arguing vehemently the contrary making the argument that there was no centralized Hizbullah organization in the beginning of the 1980s, which is totally true (although Hizbullah ideologues try paradoxically to push forth a very coherent image of the organization across time, so it really depends on the situation). What's truely remarkable is that Hizbullah is not justifying as much as it was doing before. Probably for the simple reason that it has lost interest in what “the west think”. So the focus is completely on the 'national' constiuency, the region (Arabs and others), and the Israelis. This whole discussion is making Hizbullah loose a lot of time and Western medium to stay biased and wrongly moralistic. I participated as a discussant at a conference that was supposed to 'shed light' on who the hell was Mughnieh (in vain, nobody said anything new amongst the brilliant speakers we had which is rather promising for those who want to write about Hizbullah!). Moreover, the debate turned to be focused on these ideological concerns, geared for a western audience that needs to distinguish between the bad guys and the good guys, or probably help their policy makers define the bad guys in order to aim better next time they shoot.

3- Hizbullah quickly entered in a psychological war with Israel. It does not mean like many have said, that Hizbullah will attack Israel. It just means that it tried to quickly achieve a symbolic position of strength in the face of a hypothetical US, Israeli attack. This comes at a time when Cheney was arriving in the Middle East, the Gaza murderous adventure was a total failure, and in the advent of the Arab summit. Hizbullah is always trying to convince the rest of the Arab States that Israel is not the threat it was, that Israel can be beaten or at least neutralized politically and diplomatically, that Israel could be forced to compromise and accept a fairer settlement of the Palestinian question. The most important way this was done at the symbolic level (the most virulent and for me the most interesting) is to elaborate the argument that Israel as it is today cannot last. Nasrallah makes sure in his last speech to say that beating the “Zionist project” is not a “Lebanese responsibility” but that it should be its “culture”, that Lebanese “awareness” should be geared towards this evidence. In all his last speeches, Nasrallah argued this idea forcefully. Many Hizbullah members and people around the party are avid readers of Israeli politics and society. Nasrallah speeches contained a wrap up of these analyses. I will write more on Nasrallah's recent speeches, and other key party members' discursive articulations.

A note to the reader

I think that this blog has reach its final stop, like an endlessly dying beast that I couldn't resolve myself to kill. But I probably should, for I see myself thinking of so many things but not writing any of it, thinking that I should save all that for this work that I hope to finalize at some point, but also because I keep on amending their content. I do spend a lot of time and energy thinking if I should blog about this or that. And I end up writing little anecdotes happening that don't reflect the extent of what I have been observing in this little country that came to be called Lebanon, and beyond. So now you know the beast's mortal disease.

I would like to thank the few that kept on coming back and those who encouraged me to keep the beast alive.

Samir Kassir

Has anyone seen the new statue erected right next to the Al Nahar building in downtown representing Samir Kassir philosophizing with one hand in the air? I just want to point out one thing: Apart from the very bad selection of sentences from his work that are inscribed on the large stone that is next to the statue, there is a little biographical note that mentions Kassir as a Lebanese journalist. What? The guy is Palestinian! Or let's say that he was born as part of those people that came to be called Palestinian and not as part of the population that came to be registered as Lebanese. Well, probably the fact that he was Christian, anti-Syrian, married to a Lebanese Force sympathizer, and living in Ashrafieh would qualify him to become some sort of "Lebanese" you tell me... Maybe they thought they were doing him a favor, lifting him up a step on the ladder of social recognition. Sad ending to the story. Even sadder than his actual assassination.

Creating disgust based on projected cultural and class differences

In a couple of years, the history of the recent 'upheaval' years of this country that came to be known as Lebanon, will mainly be remembered through this dark spot that is the history of the Mustaqbal movement. It will probably be the first and (hopefully) last Sunni chauvinistic movement in the history of the Middle East. I wonder to what extent will the Mustaqbal party succeed in producing a somewhat nationalist Lebanese discourse, given the pan-arabist antecedent of Sunni Lebanese movements. If it does it will be built on the hatred of the Syrian people and other sects (in Lebanon) affiliated with it. The politics of Lebanese-Syrian relations may change with the changing wind of interest and influence, but the worldviews and understandings of the Lebanese followers may well stay chauvinistic with or without a rapprochement. The days where most Lebanese thought they were either Syrians, or simply not very different from Syrians (and others in the region) are very much gone.

Now I've looked a long time to get a picture of this because for some reason they quickly removed that particular ad from all of Beirut's billboard. I had to wait until I went to the Bekaa yesterday in order to capture some pictures of remaining billboards in the Dahr el baydar area.

This picture is part of the desperate campaign to mark the territory of what was dubbed the Cedar revolution. The objective here is simple: Do you want these ugly and dirty dudes to come back in our opulent backyards? Please, think a bit about this image. It is not a picture of the Syrian president, it is not one of any decision maker in Syria or even the picture of some murderous act the Syrian could have committed, but simply poor simple soldiers who look, well, "Syrian". And the slogan says it all: "Come down so that they don't come back". Yes, this is the only reason why people should come down, because those ugly bastards you see in this picture could come back. Of course here, one can clearly see, beyond the works of the party, the actual efforts and morbid talent of advertising agencies professionalism in playing on people's most obscure emotions, if not creating them and nurturing them. They excel at the task of crystallizing the idea that feeling of disgust must be associated with something you can now point out that is called "Syrian". Certain extreme types nationalism (the fascistic trend of Europe for example) start out like that.

On another billboard ad, there is a picture of the 14th of March rally in martyr square and the following slogan: The field (al sa7at) is ours, and the martyrs are ours (al sa7at sa7atouna, wal shouhada2, shouhada2ouna). Horrible possessive exclusionary types of slogans. I think I don't need to comment here, and that's without mentioning how desperate this campaign looked, as I decided to only focus on the formation of differentiation based on feelings of superiority.

Un interlude avec Henri Michaux

Descends, oui, descends en toi, vers cet immense rayonnage de besoins sans grandeurs. Il le faut. Après tu pourras, tu devras remonter.

Henri Michaux, Pôteaux d'angles

Poésies sur ce blog:

Abul Hassan al Shushtari 1
Billy Collins, 1
Mahmoud Darwish, 1
Ounsi El Hage, 1
Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, 1
Ghérasim Luca, 1, 2
Henri Michaux, 1, 2
Marianne Moore, 1
Pablo Neruda, 1, 2
Sharon Olds, 1
Theodore Roethke, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Dylan Thomas, 1
Richard Wilbur, 1, 2, 3, 4

Another face of hegemony

Check out this excellent article by an Israeli PhD student in Cambridge on the politics of naming and labeling that is prevalent in the Israeli press. For one thing, it shows very well how standards to judge if a press is "free" should be put into question: it has nothing to do with what a 'political regime' allows or not, but with what a political system end up imposing as non-questionable, as hegemonic. So stop talking about the freedom of the press. Actually, stop talking about 'freedom'. It is a word that does not mean much, and if you look at reality, those who use it as a sign of difference are most likely to be those who oppress the most.

On our way back from Damascus

Yesterday I was in Syria. And before yesterday too. I liked how at the Syrian customs they have a poster of Imad Mughnieh that's the size of Bashar Assad's portrait, with Nasrallah stickers here and there on the windows that separate employees from the travelers. I also noticed that they have sidewalks in Damascus unlike in Beirut. And most of the Arabic language books they print in Beirut are sold there at half their original price because Lebanese are mostly busy reading in French and English.

But what I liked the most was this: On our way back they stopped us at the Lebanese customs and asked us to open the trunk of the car. I explained to the soldier that the bags he saw were musical instruments so that he does not go crazy and starts opening them randomly. After a short glance, the guy says that it's ok and that I can go, but then all of a sudden another guy jumps from behind him and starts mumbling about the fact that we had to declare our instruments when we were leaving the country and that because we failed to do so, we should pay (the other guy who stayed silent the whole time) a little something and he'll let the matter pass. So I told him that we had our bags checked on our way out and nobody told us anything about declaring. The guy answered that "maybe they thought you weren't coming back"... But what kind of lie was that? I did not realize at first. So my friend who had no patience to argue took out a 10,000L.L. bill and paid the guy (who stayed silent). Very pissed, I looked at him and said "shame".

But I wanted to know how things worked. So I went to a superior and I asked about the declaration and he said that it exist as a legal requisite. So, actually, given the fact that the custom officers that were there when we left did not ask us for anything although they knew we were coming back (we had to fill special papers of 'return'), did that on purpose so that we fall in this little trap and pay a little ransom...

Anyway, a short while later once we finished checking our passports, the taxi driver comes back with the money and says that the officer returned it to him for some reason. We spent the drive back home questioning ourselves on the possible causes that prompted the guy to return the 10,000L.L. bill. We soon had a flat tire after falling in an enormous hole in the road (you know how it is), that took 2hr (I'm not exaggerating) to remove because the wheel was stuck.

Hegemony: an illustration

This just in:

CBNNews.com - JERUSALEM, Israel - Iranian missiles are making their way to Lebanese-based Hezbollah terrorists via Turkey, according to intelligence reports.

Ok, let's try something:

XXXNews.com - BEIRUT, Lebanon - USA missiles, cluster bombs, and uranium-rich weapons, are making their way to the Palestine-based Zionist terrorist army, via USA, according to intelligence reports.

Does it work? Does it make sense? If it does, it means you could escape dominant hegemonic discourse. If not, then you're still unconsciously subjected to it. And don't be too quick to say that it does, because you don't know to what extent is the hegemonic insidiously ingrained in the very way you think. You're never fully above it.

How to pass time

Time that passes has inevitably been at some point or another for each one of us a basic puzzle to address. Boredom, can be thought of the backdrop of life anxiety in the face of death. Now let's try to think of what happens to a person that spends 5 years of his life in prison. But not any type of prison, the type that resembles those supervised by Israelis. The Khiam prison was one of those, before the liberation of South of Lebanon territories in 2000. Two days ago, I had a long conversation with one former prisoner. The marks of these five years are on his face. A prison with no bed but the cement, where when there is food, it is Israeli products that have expired two years before. A prison where there is no light, where, if you pass out because they've been hanging you to an electric post, standing on your toes throughout a winter night, they wake you up with electric shocks. A prison where during interrogation (interrogating about nothing they really want to know) they stand on your face with all their weight and their ringer boots and make sure they break you nose. A prison where you could be locked in a little cube of concrete where you can only fit in if you're in a foetus position, for several days.

A prison where there is nothing to do. Nothing to do. So much so that you start rubbing olive pits on the wall and make rosaries and count the pearls endlessly. Or when you get cardboards as mattresses after two years because you pressured the 'authorities' in place to soften the impact of the cement, you discover that you can make needles out of the staples by rubbing them on the wall for a month or so so that they get sharp. Then by banging one side of the prison door on the needle for another month, you flatten its extremity and then can create a little hole for the string to pass. You can then pull the strings out of your shirt and with the needle saw all kinds of things. For example, do a backgammon with the cardboard, saw the triangles using different colors, then use chunks of soap that you wrap with cheese metallic-colored wrap (think of Picon for those familiar with Lebanese products) to distinguish players. You can become very good at this, according to this person, blending tastefully colors and shapes to create beautiful backgammon cardboard tables. Unfortunately nothing is left to testify of these aesthetics because as soon as the Israeli found out that prisoners found activities, they confiscated one after the other every invention these guys were coming up with. First the olive pits were counted and taken right after each meal. Cardboards were taken out, and prisoners were back to sleep on the cement.

Has anyone read The Player of Chess by Stefan Zweig? I read it a long time ago, you can find it in French, I don't know if it was translated to English, or to Arabic. It's the story of this guy who gets locked in a prison room that's as big as the ones in Khiam and then has nothing to do for quite some time until he succeed, during an interrogation, to steal a book from the desk of the officer in charge. When he's back in his cell he finds out that he stole a chess manual. He does not know how to play chess. and... Actually I'm not going to tell you the story, you should read it. This is one of my favorite books by far. When I was 15 or so I read it like three times. Zweig was an Austrian Jew. He committed suicide along with his wife in 1942 while he was in Brazil, fleeing from Nazi Germany.

March 14

A lot of people ask me why I don't write anymore. I don't like writing when a lot of things are happening at the same time. This tends to obscure my attention. Also I prefer things to cool down before I can talk about them. For example, I won't write on Imad Mughnieh's assassination before next week I guess. But I have a lot to say about it. The other reason why I don't write is that I am trying to write a thesis. This means saving thinking-typing skills for this activity.

The other thing is that I started teaching at the American University of Beirut and I must say that everyday I feel like writing pages on this fascinating experience. What I am exposed to here, in terms of student life style, intellectual background, faculty interaction, the politics of the university, but also teaching in itself, is just so overwhelming. For someone who thinks his main activity is 'observation', well, AUB is like a microcosm of "Lebanon". A microscosm of post-colonial discourse too. I hope to write more on that.

Let me leave you now with an anecdote. Do you know what happened on March 14 apart from a 'cedar revolution'? On March 14, boys and girls, Israel invaded Lebanon for the first time in 1978. On this day houses were destroyed in some parts of the south, people got killed, etc. and on March 14 1995, the parliament issued a book entitled 14 March: Lebanese International Day for the South and Western Bekaa with a foreword by Berri. I'm sure this book was the result of the works of Amal and Hizbullah affiliated Parliamentary members, but I'm still investigating on it because it has a huge archive of Israeli aggression on Lebanon (prisoners, territory, water, etc). The main idea here is that these guys are actually contributing to the writing of Lebanese "causes" and history through the use of the sanctified institutions (Parliament).

Isn't it a bit ironic? The conflicting histories of the "Lebanese" entity.