BEIRUT — If you want to appreciate a common malaise that afflicts the entire Arab world, look at its cities, which project an external veneer of urbanism while in reality returning to lives lived mainly according to militarized village and tribal values. During the past generation, we have witnessed bigger and bigger Arab cities that lack the core element of urban greatness: a sense of cosmopolitanism, of transcending one’s local space to interact with and be part of the larger world.
Before the 1970s, before most Arab regimes were taken over by soldiers and thugs, most leading Arab cities reflected several profound traditions: they were open to foreign and regional traders, absorbed immigrants from other lands, welcomed and benefited from foreign institutions that were often established by religious missionaries, such as hospitals and schools, easily absorbed new ideas and norms from abroad, and were naturally comfortable with a very wide variety of local and foreign lifestyles manifested alongside each other.
Then, unlike today, you rarely saw armed soldiers on every other street corner. And never did a soldier stop you at the entrance of a government building and ask you where you came from or where your father was born, i.e., the armed guards of the narrow sectarian state did not need to determine if you were legitimate or otherwise on the basis of your territorial or tribal origin. Now they do, especially at airports, government departments and other landscapes of crude power projection.
To me this is the single most irritating example of the frailty and brutality of today’s centralized Arab security state: afraid of its own citizens, it must categorize them by their primal affiliation, rather than by their identification with the country itself. By behaving this way, the typical Arab government degrades or even invalidates the citizenship of its own citizens. It signals to them that their equal rights as citizens have been replaced by their relative rights as members of tribes that enjoy different levels of personal esteem and civil privileges, in an essentially caste system of first, second and third class citizens. In return, we all get to go to a new shopping mall every other month.
Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Algeria and other Arab lands that have suffered serious internal warfare are the most extreme examples of a trend that pervades most of this region. As the central state authority fractures or becomes a belligerent against some of its own people, the nationals of that country no longer see the government and central armed forces as their protectors. Ordinary people seek protection and identity in many other forms that are available and pertinent: tribe, clan, neighborhood, religion, ethnic sect, ideological group, criminal gangs dealing in drugs or guns, and other such groups and collective defining identities.
It was not always like this, though, as we are reminded in a timely and incisive new book — Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj — by Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf, who heads the Center for Behavioral Research at the American University of Beirut. Just published by London’s Saqi Books,Heart of Beirut recounts how Beirut’s traditional central square, the Bourj, developed its pivotal public role over the centuries, and, more significantly, how it repeatedly absorbed local and foreign influences to reinvent itself as a vibrant, cosmopolitan and fun place that also reflected collective norms and identities.
The richness of the Bourj was precisely its eclectic but tolerant diversity, accommodating many different activities carried out by people from different backgrounds. Here within a space of less than a square kilometre was the urban epicenter of religious edifices, several large commercial markets orsouqs, publishing and media houses, hotels, houses of prostitution, government agencies, elegant retail shops, cafes and restaurants, political meeting places, cinemas, urban transport hubs, art studios, and port-related maritime offices.
The Bourj has always had the capacity to both affirm and transcend narrow identities, allowing the natives to assert themselves while wandering into adjacent and shared landscapes defined by Lebanese, Arabs and foreign people, a place where people go to satisfy their “need for wonder, exhilaration, exposure to new sensations, worldviews and the elevation of our appreciative sympathies — which are all enhanced through connectedness with strangers.”
The most constituent or defining element of a public sphere, Khalaf says, is inherent “precisely in its ability to transform closed or cloistered spaces into more open ones and thereby to facilitate the voyaging, traversing and crossing over.”
There is not much “crossing over” taking place in Arab cities these days. The opposite is happening, as communities retreat into their own cloistered spaces, often guarded by kids with kalashinkovs. Beirut’s Bourj epitomized Arab urban civility and cosmopolitanism for nearly a century, due to several elements which Khalaf summarizes as follows: “First, the predisposition of the Bourj to incorporate and reconcile pluralistic and multicultural features; second, its inventiveness in reconstituting and refashioning its collective identity and public image; third, its role in hosting and disseminating popular culture, consumerism, mass entertainment and often nefarious tourist attractions.”
The next time an Arab official or soldier asks me where I come from, I am going to tell him: I come from the Bourj, from a place where very different people forged a common strength, where individuals from separate traditions shared a vibrant collective space, and where the vulnerabilities and fears of small groups and tribes dissipated in the shelter of a transcendent Arab conviviality.
And if that same Arab soldier or official asks me where I am going, I will also say: I am going to the Bourj — to reclaim an Arab legacy of urban sensibility, coexistence, civility, multicultural fun and basic human decency that was here before his guns arrived, and that will flourish again, after he surrenders to our shared humanity.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 08 April 2006
Word Count: 957
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