A MINOR SCANDAL
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Arabic culture, and on a certain democratic ethos which may be read
into it. In short, they repeat the slogans of their fathers, for whom the
"Arab Renascence" was a weapon against the Ottoman Turks. But, for
the Moslems, Arabic culture is simply a function of Islam; and there
can be no future until the Islamic land-system is swept away.
Here, precisely, is the knot of the Middle Eastern "Question."
Without attacking the land-system, nothing can be done. But Islam is
a walIed city; to attack any part of it means war. And here, too, we
approach the very source of my excitement. Why is Islam untouchable?
Because, in this distantly familiar Orient, creeds are not simply com–
munities of disinterested belief. They are, as the Turks called them,
"nations," tightly coherent patterns of ritualistic practice and social
organization. This fact, in a land where religion has for 5,000 years been
a pretext for mutual butchery, is absolutely capital. And it must be
seen in the light of another: the Maronite "nation," the Greek Ortho–
dox "nation," the Alaowite "nation," are not coextensive with any par–
ticular territory: centuries of wars, invasions and religious dissensions,
alI marked with the ancient self-righteous ferocity of the semites, have
scattered almost every sect, far from its place of origin, across the en–
tire land. This means that each of these countries, which the AlIies so
cavalierly carved from the corpse of the Ottoman Empire, is a mosaic of
mutually suspicious, if not hostile, religious groups. Each of these groups,
including the orthodox (Sunnite) Moslems, has been and is, some–
where in the Middle East, a persecuted minority.
North of the Lebanon, in what is called Syria, there is a moun–
tainous region which supports about 350,000 people.
If
you ask these peo–
ple what they are, they refer not to the name of their country but to
their sect. For the most part, they are Alaowites, Sunnite Moslems and
Greek Orthodox Christians ; but there are also communities of Mar–
onites, Ismaelis, Gregorian Armenians and Greek Catholics; and, in
lesser numbers, Catholic Armenians, Protestants, Roman
C~tholics,
Sy–
riacs, Chaldeans, Druzes and Jews.
The diaspora
is
not, except in the
West, a Jewish phenomenon. It is the normal mode of communal exis–
tence in the Middle East.
So I went to see Edd6, one evening, and asked him what should
be done. His answer was interesting, but obviously insufficient, since it
bore only on the Lebanon. The rest of the so-called Arab world, he
told me, was
indecrottable:
nothing could be done. The Lebanon, the
real Lebanon, which was to say the Mountain, was Christian, literate,
inherently prosperous; its role was to maintain its identity and mediate
