A
MINOR SCANDAL
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stractions a western synthesis involving, in each case, a fusion of people,
language, mythology, and an ancestral attachment to a given land. But
the concept, however made supple, refused to fit. These nations did not
exist.
The first loyalty of the intellectuals was to their "means of produc–
tion," the rich and beautiful Arabic language, to the mastery of which
they had given up all the ycars of their youth; they thus kept alive an
ideal of cultural unity in peace which had vanished from Middle
Eastern reality since the Ommayyad and Abassid Khalifates, in the early
Middle Ages. They refused to be Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian ; they were
Arab.
On the other hand, there was nowhere-except, precisely in the
Lebanese Mountain-anything comparable to the western peasant's at–
tachment to his land, or to the sacred character of the frontier, which
was a consequence of it. Islam was the creation of camel-riding tribesmen
-tradesmen and nomads-from Arabia; the islamized peasants despised
their land and tilled it in a spirit of irremediable hopelessness and de–
gradation. "This instrument is vile," said Mohammed of the plowshare,
according to Ibn Khaldoun. "Art thou Arab or fellah?" says the mock–
ing ragamuffin nomad to the miserable cropper who, for the sake of
peace, pays him tribute. Pillaged by the nomad chieftains on the fron–
tiers of the desert, drained by the cool green garden-like cities which
gave the Moslem his imagery of paradise, the land lies scorched and
half-abandoned, stony, unproductive, back-breaking wastes-the image
of
hell. Even so, it is everywhere enclosed-except, again, in the Lebanon
-in a fantastically complicated, religiously sanctioned system of owner–
ship, elaborated over the centuries by the slick Koran-quoting lawyers of
the cities. In some regions, the peasant-workers receive as much as eighty–
five percent of their crop; in others as little as five percent. The differ–
ence, one finds, is determined by an extremely simple principle: the
peasant's share has in each case been fixed, after centuries of trial and
error, at the barest subsistence-level.
If
the fertility of his land increases,
he knows that his landlord, or his urban "protector," will find legal
means of expropriating the surplus. Why, then, should he attempt to im–
prove his land?
He is long past attempting. Perhaps he dreams of recovering his
nomadic freedom. Or he burns madly in the mystic fervor of a new
heresy. How is one to know what this mute fellow dreams? He labors,
reproduces and dies. Is it not significant that aristocracy, amongst the
Arabs, has no reference to the land? One is not Duke of this place, or
Viscount of that. One traces one's ancestry back to a roaming tribesman
