The Oral History and Memory of Ras Beirut: Exceptional Narratives of Co-Existence

Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Conference Washington, DC, November 2014 The Oral History and Memory of Ras Beirut: Exceptional Narratives of Co-existence Maria Bashshur Abunnasr, PhD This paper is a very condensed version of my past dissertation research and my current project on the oral history and memory of Ras Beirut sponsored by the Neighborhood Initiative at the American University of Beirut. For those of you who do not know Beirut, Ras Beirut is the western-most extension of the city and is most renown as the location of the American University of Beirut (AUB) founded by American missionaries in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College. To many Ras Beirut is a place famous, indeed exceptional, for its association with tolerance, education, and cosmopolitanism. And that association is largely credited to AUB. The focus of this paper, however, is not on AUB’s role in Ras Beirut. It reverses the lens to consider the local community’s role in making Ras Beirut’s past through what I term, “narratives of coexistence.” Comprised of primarily (though not exclusively) Greek Orthodox Christians and Sunni Muslims, Ras Beirut’s local community claims its foundation is based on ta’ayoush, Arabic for coexistence. They consider their history of peaceful coexistence the bedrock of Ras Beirut’s exceptionalism that distinguished Ras Beirut from other parts of Beirut, of Lebanon, and of the region. While they recognize the presence of the AUB as momentous to the future shape of Ras Beirut as a cosmopolitan hub, their narratives insist on the influence, if not the determination, of their 1 coexistence on the missionary choice of Ras Beirut as the site for the College in the first place. No missionary records substantiate these claims and Ras Beirut narrators avoid specificity inasmuch as their memories “resist correction by others.”1 But it is the very fallibility of their recollections, as oral historian Alessandro Portelli argues, that suggests deeper meanings and provides invaluable insights into “the interests of the tellers, and the dreams and desires beneath them.”2 The repetition of these “narratives of coexistence” highlight the local agency in the making of Ras Beirut’s exceptionalism and serve to preserve the intangibility of Ras Beirut’s past as a tangible “repository of peoples’ memory.”3 Furthermore, these “narratives of coexistence” extend over time and take shape as a nuanced challenge to the Anglo-American missionary “discovery” of Ras Beirut that AUB’s founder Daniel Bliss’s memoir describes, on the one hand, and as a rejection of any association with the sectarian brutality of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) on the other.4 In a representative example, the late Ghassan Tueni famously remarked that during the Lebanese Civil War there were three Beiruts: Christian East Beirut, Muslim West Beirut, and Ras Beirut, the latter defying any confessional categorization.5 This portrayal of Ras Beirut as exceptional within both Beirut and Lebanon perpetuates the enduring clichés of Beirut, as the cosmopolitan Paris, or of Lebanon, as the multi-confessional 1 David Lowenthal, “History and Memory,” The Public Historian 19 2 (Spring 1997), 34. 2 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (CUNY, 1991) 2. 3 Barbara Mitsztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Open University Press, 2003)16. 4 Daniel Bliss, Reminiscences of Daniel Bliss (Revell,1920) 190. 5 Ghassan Tueni (1926 – 2012) headed one of Lebanon’s leading newspapers (and was son of its founder) An-Nahar; he was also a prominent Lebanese spokesperson, journalist, academic, and politician. 2 6 mountainous Switzerland, of the Middle East. In his memoir Munir Shama‘a, a third generation Ras Beiruti, goes as far as to define Ras Beirut as an independent state, in Arabic a dawla, “of small size, large impact, a pioneer in liberty, justice, equality, and democracy.”7 Perhaps unwittingly, his definition of Ras Beirut fits the definition of American exceptionalism that presents the U.S. as unscathed by authoritarianism, class conflict, and as a model to be emulated by the world. The difference between these two exceptionalist discourses, however, is the cultural superiority inherent to the Anglo-American one as compared to the sense of alienation and loss that haunts local Ras Beirut expressions of exceptionalism. For these “narratives of coexistence” conjure up a social landscape unique in time and place where neither class nor religion mattered and where all lived as one Ras Beirut family, or ahl Ras Beirut. They act as what Michel de Certeau calls as “spatial trajectories” that travel through time and “carry out a labor that constantly transforms spaces into places” as they delineate Ras Beirut as a “practiced place,” where Muslims and Christians lived together as one family.8 Because of time constraints, I can only share a few examples: many are from my oral history interviews, but the oldest ones, necessarily come out of published memoirs of those now deceased authors, such as the aforementioned 6 C. Nagel, “Reconstructing space, re-creating memory: sectarian politics and urban development in post-war Beirut,” Political Geography 21 (2002): 717. 7 Munir Shama‘a, Take off and Landing: the Lifestory of a Doctor from Ras Beirut (Riad el Rayess, 2000) 101-114. 8 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (California, 1988) 115-118. Ras Beirut described as “one family” in almost every interview conducted. 3 Munir Shama’a, Kamal Salibi, renown historian of Lebanon, and Kamal Rebeiz, colorful Ras Beirut mukhtar (or elected neighborhood headman). 9 Indeed, Mukhtar Kamal Rebeiz went as far as to say that, “Even the sun in Ras Beirut is different!” In 1986, in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War, Rebeiz published his folkloric history of Ras Beirut, entitled Rizq allah ay-haydeek al- ayyam…ya Ras Bāyrut, idiomatically translated to Those good ol’days…Oh, Ras Beirut. Though laden with ubiquitous clichés, his book makes invaluable contributions to local history in the voices captured through the individual biographical sketches grouped under the heading “Families of Ras Beirut - Their Memories.” One of the most quintessential and, as far as I can tell, oldest “narratives of coexistence” is the one Rebeiz includes in his sketch of Al-Hajj Abdallah al- ‘Itani, or Abu Abed (not to be confused with the jokester!).10 At some point in the 1940s, Abu-Abed, who headed the al-‘Itani Family, Ras Beirut’s largest Sunni family, led a contingent of Ras Beiruti family representatives, both Sunni and Greek Orthodox, to visit Lebanon’s first Prime Minister, Riad al-Solh on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr. When Prime Minister al-Solh asked al-‘Itani to present him with a list of needy families from Ras Beirut, the Prime Minister reacted with surprise when he saw that it included both Muslim and Christian names. He questioned the inclusion of Christian names on a Muslim feast and noted that Christian families usually received alms during their feast. Al-Itani responded that in Ras Beirut there was no distinction between whose feast was whose and that, 9 Kamal G. Rebeiz, Rizqallah ‘ala haydeek al-ayyam…ya ras bāyrut (Beirut: al-matbu‘at al mussawarat, 1986). 10 If al-‘Itani had not told Rebeiz the story himself, Rebeiz’s father, Girgi Nicola Rebeiz presumably did as a member of the Ras Beirut contingent that al-Itani lists who visit to Prime Minister al-Solh. “Al-Hajj Abdallah Itani,” in Rebeiz, 107. 4 “we celebrate together, we are happy together, and we cry together, like we hunger together and are satiated together; if it is not possible for you to provide for those on the list, then forget the whole list (baleha, in colloquial Lebanese dialect).” With tears in his eyes, the Prime Minister responded, “I wish all of Lebanon was like Ras Beirut.” Several of Rebeiz’s individual sketches make reference to the milk kinship that existed between Muslim and Christian families thus further underlining Ras Beirut’s description as one family. The common scenario features a Christian or a Muslim mother who, unable to nurse her baby, takes it to her Muslim or Christian neighbor to be nursed. The ensuing milk kinship (ikhwat bil-rida‘a) established legally recognized, though non-obligatory, relations between the families. Despite the fact that milk kinship, even across confessional lines, was not limited to Ras Beirut, it is used in these “narratives of coexistence” to showcase the fraternity integral to Ras Beirut’s exceptionalism. Even Kamal Salibi alludes to this in his autobiographical essay: he explains that, In Ras Beirut, among the oldest established Christian families, which were Greek Orthodox, the Aramans considered themselves relatives of the Muslim Shatilas, and the Bikh’azis relatives of the Muslim ‘Itanis. The families in question, and others like them, were actually unrelated by blood, because no intermarriages were possible between them. Foster kinship, however, was believed to serve as a replacement for blood kinship. Several Ras Beirut Muslim and Christian families, it was said, made a point of having their babies nurse, at least once, from the same breast, so that they became foster siblings. […] How many Aramans and Shatilas, Bikh’azis and ‘Itanis, had actually been nursed as babies from the same breast was moot. The story existed, and it was believed.11 11 Kamal Salibi, “Living With Changing Times,” In Franco-Arab Encounters: Studies in Memory of David C. Gordon, eds. L. Carl Brown and Matthew S. Gordon (Beirut: AUB, 1997), 169-170. 5 In one paragraph Salibi contrasts Ras Beirut to the mountains, historicizes the Orthodox Christian-Sunni Muslim community, and attributes their harmonious coexistence to the belief in the deliberate ties of milk kinship. In his authoritative capacity as historian, Salibi gives credence to Rebeiz’s collection of individual anecdotes.

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