BEIRUT — When you can hear the mortar and artillery of active warfare in the same car ride as the pestle and mortar pounding raw meat into a legendary culinary treat, you know that you are in the Arab world, specifically in Lebanon. Glory and tragedy coexist naturally here: epic human valor, passion and an indomitable love for life, alongside the most cruel and violent behavior.
Despite decades of political tension and wars, Lebanon remains the most dynamic, culturally effervescent, intellectually stimulating and economically entrepreneurial place in the Arab world. Last Sunday, it set a new standard for affirming its best and worst attributes. I had the pleasure of experiencing the former — a food festival, in the renowned tough-guy mountain stronghold of Ehden, celebrating the famous Lebanese dish called kibbeh.
The first annual Ehden kibbeh festival Sunday was newsworthy in its own right — where else can you taste 15 different kinds of kibbeh at once? But it was more striking for its juxtaposition against the ongoing fighting in the Nahr el-Barid refugee camp north of Tripoli, at the foot of the mountains below Ehden. For three months now, the Lebanese army has been fighting to uproot and arrest or kill the several hundred fanatic fighters of the Qaeda-like Fateh el-Islam group holed up in the camp.
Nahr el-Barid is a horror story for all concerned. The refugee camp has been totally destroyed, and its 30,000 or so Palestinian inhabitants have been displaced yet again, with little chance of resuming a normal life anytime soon. Nearly 140 Lebanese army soldiers have been killed and many others wounded, as have a similar number of militants. Rebuilding or moving the camp elsewhere will rekindle Palestinian-Lebanese political sensitivities. Only suffering, death, and political discord and disjuncture emanate from Nahr el-Barid. You hear the shooting and bombing as you drive by.
The artillery mortar of Nahr el-Barid contrasted sharply Sunday with the large stone-carved mortar in Ehden’s central square in which Susanne Dweiheh was pounding raw meat, spices, onions and cracked wheat into the famous kibbeh niyyeh (raw kibbeh, similar to French steak tartare). She was one of a dozen contestants who entered 15 different kinds of kibbeh into the tasting contest.
She was the only person who made her kibbeh niyyeh on the spot in the traditional hand-pounded way. Other contestants produced 15 different kinds of baked or fried kibbeh, in two other judged categories — flat kibbeh in a pan, and rounded balls of kibbeh.
Festival organizer Kamal Mouzawak of Souk et-Tayyeb, an organic food cooperative that has sponsored a series of other food festivals around Lebanon (for bread, fish, orange blossoms and mezze appetizers), expects more competitors and varieties next year. They organize these festivals, and their hallmark weekly organic food markets, to highlight the importance of food traditions, recognize the important role of small farmers and producers, and bring a divided country together around the common denominator of a good meal and a good time.
His group organized this festival in cooperation with the Lebanese non-governmental organization Inma’ (‘development’), with partial funding from the US international development agency, and with the cooperation of the Ehden municipality. Getting all the parties to cooperate on holding the festival was a huge challenge, but Mouzawak and colleagues succeeded in the end. Food triumphs politics, and Ehden — Lebanon’s kibbeh capital — did not want to miss this opportunity to strut its culinary wares.
I made the 90-minute drive to Ehden from Beirut because I am one of those who believe that among Lebanon’s greatest contributions to world civilization have been the alphabet and the raw, pounded, magically spiced kibbeh niyyeh. I wanted to experience in a new form the enigmatic Arab legacy of exuberant, warm humanity and festive communalism, alongside death and destruction. Ehden and north Lebanon around Tripoli offer both these days.
The streets in and around Ehden and the central mountains leading to it are full of gigantic posters of past political leaders who have been assassinated — from the Christian Franjieh, Gemayel and Muawad families — alongside posters from current claimants to power, including Hizbullah, Michel Aoun, Semir Geagea and lesser others. Death, assassination, murder, long-running clan feuds, and bitter political contestation hang in the air of central Lebanon’s hill country, just like the smoke from the nearby battle wafts over Nahr el-Barid.
Last Sunday, though, Ehden offered an interlude of culinary extravaganza, where all Lebanese gathered and reveled in a kibbeh jamboree. This was not so much a truce — for the political contests and military battles continue — but more like the affirmation of a parallel track of life: tough guys eating well, offering warm and legendary hospitality, using mortars to pound spiced meat instead of each other. Those who view our Arab world from afar should not ignore either of these realities, for together they define our integrated and often contradictory complexity.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 22 August 2007
Word Count: 806
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