Identity
 

Who are the Lebanese

Akram Fouad Khater’s lecture examines roots of confusion surrounding expatriates’ sense of self.  Dr. Khater is Director of International Programs @ North Carolina State University.

Nana Asfour
Special to the Daily Star 2003

Who are the Lebanese? Ask this question of any native and you will likely hear various answers: “We’re Arab;” “we’re Phoenician;” “we’re European.” Why is Lebanese identity today such an intangible concept?

What are the roots of this discord, and how long have we suffered from this crisis? These are all questions that Middle East historian Akram Fouad Khater tried to answer during his hour-and-a-half talk at the City University of New York on Dec. 11.
Lebanese ethnicity is a subject that Khater, author of Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920, has studied extensively. Much of his presentation at the City University of New York, which was organized by the Middle Eastern American Center and co-sponsored by the American University of Beirut, stemmed from the research he conducted for his book. His investigations have shown, as he noted in his opening remarks, that it was the wave of immigrants from Mount Lebanon to America from 1890 to 1920 who were first confronted with the issue of self-classification in a modern sense. “About 120,000 came to the US, which is a very significant number considering that the Lebanese population in 1916 was 400,000,” said
Khater, himself a Lebanese immigrant, having lived in the US since 1978. “These were peasants who had a little money and saw an opportunity to make more, then go back and be richer peasants ­ they didn’t expect to stay more than 10 or 15 years. They had no vision of where they were going and how could they? Surely, none of them expected that the trip would change them in a radical fashion.” Upon entering Ellis Island in New York, these newcomers were forced to denote their origin. At first, they called themselves “Turks,” because the region they inhabited was part of the Ottoman Empire. But soon thereafter, they grew dissatisfied with the label. Around 1895 or 1896,
according to Khater, the word Syrian for someone from Greater Syria, which incorporated what is now Lebanon, emerged but many found it also an inaccurate representation of where they came from: “There was a sense of confusion about who they really are,” Khater added. Unfortunately, the disorientation did not stop at the immigration office. American society in the 1900s was scrutinizing and it looked
unkindly on these Mount Lebanon villagers who “ate too much garlic and dressed differently,” Khater said. “It tried to mold them into good little Americans” ­ meaning white, middle class Anglo-Saxons. Out of this grew a desire to develop a distinct identity for themselves, and they sought to create boundaries to differentiate them from the Americans but, more importantly, from their fellow Arabs. Very quickly an Arab-American press appeared but many papers had editorial policy leaning to one religious sect or another.

“It was full of invectives at each others’ priests,” Khater said. This indicated they were initially looking to demarcate themselves by their religious sects. Along the way, a political consciousness sprung up, and for the first time the immigrants were arguing about nationalism. “Language becomes very important,” Khater said. “They began to
ask, “Who are we as a nation?” It was around then that some Lebanese, wanting to distance themselves from the “Turk” marker ­ synonymous with violence and barbarism in the West ­ began claiming they descended from European ancestry. This soul searching had far-reaching consequences. About 30 to 50 percent of these immigrants went back home and they brought their trappings of new middle class American wealth and their newly-formed ideas with them. The issues of nationalism they were raising “became pertinent to the dialogue going on in Lebanon,” Khater said. Because so
many natives had left and returned, the number of people discussing the topic was far higher in Lebanon than in any other Arab country. These returning immigrants helped to shape and change their society. For one, fathers no longer made their sons plow the fields (they hired employees for that task and sent their children to universities
instead). Gender roles shifted. The number of girls’ schools increased and more women began to work. Those who traveled to America toiled as peddlers or in factories while their husbands stayed in Lebanon. Their new position as bread winners gave them control over family decisions. Suddenly, “the woman was calling her husband and saying ‘Buy Abu Toni’s land’,” Khater said. “It was not ‘what do you think of buying About
Toni’s land?’”

More than a 100 years later, Lebanese culture remains in flux and ever-
changing because of the shuttling back and forth of immigrants. The
past 25 years saw another large exodus of Lebanese who were fleeing the
war. Many of them returned in the early 1990s, carrying back with them their
Westernized cultural mores. Not least, because of them and their peasant ancestral travelers, Lebanon today is caught between modernism and conventionality, a country and a people still trying to find its identity.
According to Khater, “the experience of immigrants in the late 20th and
early 21st century will define what Lebanon becomes in 20 years.”

Who Were The Phoenicians?  National Geographic article Oct 2004

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/features.html

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

We know they dominated sea trade in the Mediterranean for 3,000 years. Now DNA testing and recent archaeological finds are revealing just what the Phoenician legacy meant to the ancient world—and to our own.

"I am a Phoenician," says the young man, giving the name of a people who vanished from history 2,000 years ago. "At least I feel like I'm one of them. My relatives have been fishermen and sailors here for centuries."
 
"Good, we can use some real Phoenicians," says Spencer Wells, an American geneticist, who wraps the young man's arm in a tourniquet as they sit on the veranda of a restaurant in Byblos, Lebanon, an ancient city of stone on the Mediterranean. The young man, Pierre Abi Saad, has arrived late, eager to participate in an experiment to shed new light on the mysterious Phoenicians. He joins a group of volunteers—fishermen, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers—gathered around tables under the restaurant awning. Wells, a lanky, 34-year-old extrovert, has convinced Saad and the others to give him a sample of their blood.
 
"What will it tell you?" Saad asks.
 
"Your blood contains DNA, which is like a history book," Wells replies. "Many different people have come to Byblos over the centuries, and your blood carries traces of their DNA. It's going to tell us something about your relationships going back thousands of years."
 
Wells has no doubts about the power of the new genetic techniques he is bringing to our understanding of ancient peoples. Nor does his bespectacled colleague standing beside him on the veranda, Pierre Zalloua, a 37-year-old scientist with a dark goatee and an intense passion for his Lebanese heritage. The two men hope to find new clues to an age-old riddle: Who were the Phoenicians?
 
Although they're mentioned frequently in ancient texts as vigorous traders and sailors, we know relatively little about these puzzling people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"—a name that became Phoenicians—after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported. But they would never have called themselves Phoenicians. Rather, they were citizens of the ports from which they set sail, walled cities such as Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre.

The culture later known as Phoenician was flourishing as early as the third millennium B.C. in the Levant, a coastal region now divided primarily between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. But it wasn't until around 1100 B.C., after a period of general disorder and social collapse throughout the region, that they emerged as a significant cultural and political force.
 
From the ninth to sixth centuries B.C. they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, establishing emporiums and colonies from Cyprus in the east to the Aegean Sea, Italy, North Africa, and Spain in the west. They grew rich trading precious metals from abroad and products such as wine, olive oil, and most notably the timber from the famous cedars of Lebanon, which forested the mountains that rise steeply from the coast of their homeland.
 
The armies and peoples that eventually conquered the Phoenicians either destroyed or built over their cities. Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated—so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.
 
Acting as cultural middlemen, the Phoenicians disseminated ideas, myths, and knowledge from the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian worlds in what is now Syria and Iraq to their contacts in the Aegean. Those ideas helped spark a cultural revival in Greece, one which led to the Greeks' Golden Age and hence the birth of Western civilization. The Phoenicians imported so much papyrus from Egypt that the Greeks used their name for the first great Phoenician port, Byblos, to refer to the ancient paper. The name Bible, or "the book," also derives from Byblos.
 
Today, Spencer Wells says, "Phoenicians have become ghosts, a vanished civilization." Now he and Zalloua hope to use a different alphabet, the molecular letters of DNA, to exhume these ghosts.