A MINOR SCANDAL
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which I began to feel that I understood the mechanism of their dream.
The Lebanon, they said, was not for nothing at the very source of
the Arab R enascence; it was no accident that the first Arab printing press
was assembled in their Mountain, and that the country had scattered its
publicists and poets in every corner of the Middle East. The Lebanon
was the land of tolerance, where Christians and Moslems shared the
common heritage of Arabism and lived together in peace. Edde stressed
-for what murky ends?-the jealous particularism of the Mountain,
its Christianity, its special economic status. But what of its democratic
universalism? Could not this tradition, rooted in the mingled history of
several peoples, all speaking the same language, unite the Arab world
in a transnational and progressive culture? ... The great obstacle, for
the moment, was Zionism, with its racist and theocratic state, expropriat–
ing an Arab land, provoking nationalist and xenophobic reactions in the
Arab masses.
And Islam? The best elements of Islam, they told me, were in
Arabism; the rest would be transformed by the Lebanese catalyst and
the ardor of the Moslem youth. The immediate problem was to con–
vince the Moslem masses that the Lebanese were with them, and that
the particularism of the Mountain was a thing of the Past.
Alas! This was even worse than Edde's fierce separatism; there was
no honesty in it. My young intellectuals spoke easily of convincing the
fanatical tribesmen of Arabia, and the slave-masses of Egypt. Meanwhile,
they allied themselves with Ibn Saoud and Farouk, who were active and
unconvinced and, surely, more subversive than were the Zionists to
"democratic univeralism." And here, of course, we come to the crux.
My friends assured me that they were
also
inalterably opposed to Farouk
and Ibn Saoud. Their revolution in the Middle East would not succeed
until the Hachemites and Saoudites and, indeed, all the feudal dynasties
were done with. For the moment, however, one could not-being Chris–
tian--denounce the Arab rulers in public. The latter were Moslems, after
all. To denounce them would mean to sin against tact.
This, then, is the content of the famous Lebanese tolerance. The
Republic, for want of a better bond, is united in a community of tact.
But this tact only pretends to be tolerance: it is reaIIy terror.... The
problem is not one of motive. We know, in any case, that tolerance
operates in society
as though
it proceeded from a basic love and respect
for the human creature. It expresses itself, whatever its subjective sanc–
tion, in types of social behavior which allow for difference, conflict,
polemic. But polemic is unthinkable in the community of tact. Here,
every angle is carefully rounded off; every inquiring movement is ar-
