Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  In 1926, my father-in-law Salaheddine Khayyat received his law degree amongst the third wave of Lebanese-Syrian students to receive university diplomas, becoming one of the few educated men of Sidon. He had left Sidon in 1920 to study law in Damascus as a Syrian Ottoman subject and now, at the height of this passionate Arab awakening, was returning to Sidon as one of the disenfranchised Lebanese in the freshly created ‘Republic of Lebanon’ under the French mandate. My father-inlaw’s commitment to a Lebanon free from the arbitrary rule of the French was tested soon enough as a young, freshly-minted judge in Nabatiyeh, the legal seat of South Lebanon.

  In 1936 the French were staging the charade of elections to install their puppets in Lebanon. As a legal officer, Salah Khayyat was appointed to authenticate the vote count at the end of the day to uphold the election’s transparency. Early on the morning of Election Day, the French mandate’s High Commissioner in Nabatiyeh, Comte Damien de Martel, sent after him for an urgent meeting. He complied, knowing pretty much what was in store for him. Upon entering the French High Commissioner’s office, Comte Damien de Martel glanced up arrogantly from his desk, whipped out a blank piece of paper and brusquely demanded Salah’s rubber-stamp legal signature to confirm the French mandate’s choice in the rigged election for deputy of Nabatiyeh. Salah Khayyat gazed quietly into the High Commissioner’s eyes and refused. This response was totally unfactored into the High Commissioner’s plan for the day’s proceedings.

  “Do you know what you are saying?” the High Commissioner sputtered angrily. The young judge repeated what he had just said, making it clear that he understood perfectly what he was saying. Glaring intently into the young Sidonian judge’s eyes, Comte Damien de Martel hissed, “This legal signature for our man is going to happen whether you agree to do it or not, so why not benefit from it, get a year’s worth of salary in gold pieces and every one will sleep well tonight.”

  “I will sleep well tonight knowing I have behaved as my conscience bids me to,” was Salah Khayyat’s unyielding and final statement. No amount of pressure, threatening or bribery could sway him to do as he was ordered.

  That evening Abu Bashar recorded and confirmed the name of the winner of the elections, Yousef El Zein, who was not France’s man. He awoke the next morning to read the name of the French mandate’s man, Mohammad Al Ass’ad, as the winner, splashed across the newspapers’ front page. The French got their way, but it did not happen through Salaheddine Khayyat. This rare quality of fearlessly sticking up for his principles would give him much grief later on in his life and would keep him from filling his pockets from the coffers set aside in the Lebanese Treasury for graft and corruption. It wasn’t easy, but he persevered in remaining an icon of truth and fairness in life, politics, and religion.

  Islam was a fascinating philosophy for Abu Bashar, one that he admired and respected in its profound and extensive deliberations on life and death. But he did not respect the application of Islam by the prevalent sheikhs and muftis with their restrictions on freedom of thought that included such matters as women’s equality and interactions between the sexes. Although he came from a long line of muftis (the top government post for a Sunni Muslim cleric), he opted to become an agnostic as a young adult, unheard of amongst men of his generation. His nature was to question everything in life, including his religion. Indeed, blind belief in the words attributed to God was one of his bête-noirs. Because he could not deal with hypocrisy of any sort, the double standard that men of religion applied to themselves and others disgusted him. He saw organized religion exactly as it was: politics for personal gain and glory. On many occasions he would tell me wistfully, “Just take a look at how happy the Christians in our neighborhood are when they go to church, especially the young. They dress in their finest clothes in anticipation of meeting other young people after the sermon in the churchyard. Why can’t our sheikhs and muftis allow our young people to do the same? I know for a fact that very few of our muftis and sheikhs are the paragons of virtue that they pretend to be!”

  The prevalent unfairness towards women particularly angered him and he did not suffer this feeling of outrage silently. Im Bashar recalls him coming home one Friday early in their marriage fuming at the rantings of a sheikh during noon prayers that focused on binding the honor of the Muslim man to the veil of his wife. “Munira,” he told her abruptly, “I hope its fine with you to stop wearing the veil from now on.” My mother-in-law remembers laughingly how it took her no seconds of deliberation before becoming one of the first women in Sidon to discard the veil and bob her hair (to the shock of the surrounding Sidonian society) at the hands of a fashionable young male hairdresser that my father-inlaw brought to the house. Whenever he chanced on an acquaintance or relative with a wife wrapped in the traditional Islamic veils, especially on hot summer days, he would tackle the issue of enforced cover ups by ordering his acquaintance to take off his wife’s veils and wear them himself. This courage in freedom of thought and religion continued on into his old age when all expected him to start playing it safe ‘just in case.’

  “I have a clear conscience,” he would tell me, “I have nothing to fear. My heaven is here on Earth. When I die I will stop existing. So I will enjoy life now and it is nobody’s business.”

  During the late 1930s, Abu Bashar broke the rules of established Sidon (again) and moved into a beautiful Ottoman-era villa in an entirely Maronite-inhabited neighborhood outside of the Old City walls with his young family. The conventional Sidonians viewed this as a highly irregular move but by then everyone who knew him came to expect the unexpected. Traditionally, all the established Jewish, Orthodox Christian, and Sunni families of Sidon had homes within the city’s ancient walls and that included my father-in-law’s extended family. The Maronites in this ‘new’ neighborhood outside of Sidon proper were descendants of Christians who had fled the civil war in the Chouf Mountains with the Druze back in 1860. My in-laws were met by a wary silence rather than the jovial welcome that is the traditional neighborly Lebanese custom. The ‘events’ of this bloody chapter in 1860 were still deeply embedded in the neighborhood’s collective memory, leaving them suspicious and mistrustful of any one not of their faith. However, it did not take the neighbors long to discover that here was a family who was radically different.

  Im Bashar threw open her door to young and old and a ready meal for anyone who was hungry. Her wisdom and common sense soon made her the trusted peacemaker of the neighborhood. Every Sunday morning, Im Bashar sent her children with their Maronite neighbors to the church down the street to attend the sermon. “They couldn’t lose,” she would smile as she recalled those long ago days, “The preacher told them stories with lessons on how to behave, they socialized with children their age, listened to beautiful music from the organ, and I had a chance to cook in peace.”

  Christmas would find part of a fir tree with tinsel and baubles in the corner of their living room. Easter would find Im Bashar helping her Christian neighbors in their kitchens coloring Easter eggs in a tradition that went back centuries. Fresh herbs were wrapped around each egg, held in place by filmy gauze. The wrapped eggs were then dipped in orange dye derived from onion skins soaked in water that traced the shape of the delicate lacy herb leaves onto the egg. Her neighbors would reciprocate and join Im Bashar in her kitchen to prepare labor-intensive date, pistachio and walnut semolina sweets on Muslim holidays.

  Im Bashar never learned to read or write only because she couldn’t deal with the boredom she had to suffer through traditional teaching methods of rote memorization (listen and repeat) and because of the interminable sewing and embroidery that females of her era had to endure. But when it came to enrolling her two eldest children Bashar and Bushra in school, she took the matter very seriously, keeping the rote memorization turn-off factor in mind, and began to visit the available schools to see what was best for her children – not a common pastime for women of her generation who were left immobile under the heavy shroud of domesticity that was impos
ed on them.

  After making the rounds of the French nun school, the Frères (Franciscan priests), and the Makassed (Orthodox Sunni), she secretly visited the relatively new Evangelical American School of Sidon and loved what she saw. The large airy classrooms with bright colors, child-sized furniture, and educational toys were a novelty she never knew existed in schools. This, she instinctively realized, was what children needed in order to love learning. She came to the final and revolutionary conclusion that only the American School would do. This was an especially unconventional and discordant step to make considering the background of Abu Bashar’s family (a succession of sheikhs and muftis) and his political leanings (Arab nationalist, against anything smacking of the West, especially the United States). Quietly, she slipped into the American school one day with little Bashar and little Bushra in tow. The principal of the school, Dr. White, an elegant theologian who spoke fluent Arabic, liked to reminisce in amusement to Adnan the unusual circumstance in which he met his mother.

  He recalled looking up from his desk to see a woman covered in the traditional Muslim veil which she had not yet removed, standing before him flanked by two shy elementary-aged children who were pushed forward to greet him. “These two children, Bashar and Bushra, are to be signed up in your school,” she told him decisively. “My children are very intelligent and deserve the best education,” she added, disarming him enough not to ask any further questions. That the school’s raison d’être in its establishment in Sidon was to woo what Lebanese they could to the American Protestant fold away from the Catholics who answered to France was unimportant to Im Bashar. She was never one to fear outside influences, having seen so many changes on her country’s soil. She was so firmly entrenched in her Arab identity that it never occurred to her that a school system or different religion could sway it. What Im Bashar saw was the future for her children in the new Lebanon that was quickly taking shape. Modern Lebanon was moving away from the slow pace of the pleasure-seeking, landed gentry which included her husband, into a world of business-oriented young men whom she observed were forging successful and lucrative careers. Determined not to let politics get in the way of her children’s education, she turned a deaf ear to the strident objections of the extended family of sheikhs and muftis in what they described as a sellout to the colonizers. Her decision was irreversible and she eventually won her husband to her side and enrolled all six of her children.

  9

  Go Up to Lebanon and Cry – Jeremiah 22:20

  “I’m going to show you exactly how tiny Lebanon is,” Adnan announced one Sunday morning. “We’ll be at my mother’s house by lunchtime after crossing it from tip to tip.” We began our drive from Beirut and headed north along the Corniche that led to the port area, then crossed over the Fouad Shehab bridge, a soon-to-be infamous landmark where ill-fated Muslims would line up at a Phalange checkpoint in 1975 thinking they were having their papers checked but had their throats slit instead. Three hundred Muslims died that cold December day in retaliation for four Phalange Christians who were found shot to death in a car outside the Electricity Company. The young warlord of the Phalange, Bashir Gemayel, was purported to have asked for forty dead Muslims in reprisal for the four murdered Christians. His gunmen gave him a bumper crop of 300.

  But on this refreshing Sunday morning in 1971, there was no hint of the evil that would soon befall this city as traffic began steadily increasing with weekend picnickers traveling from what would become ‘West’ Beirut, the Muslim-dominated side of the green line during the civil war, to spend the day by the Dog River in what would become ‘East’ Beirut, the Christian-dominated side of the green line. We finally reached the highway that would take us towards Tripoli, the northernmost city of Lebanon.

  All of a sudden the road improved dramatically. Potholes were replaced with wide smooth asphalt roads; what a luxury not to lurch left and right as we had on the southern coastal road to avoid gaping holes that spelled certain ruin for the unfortunates who ploughed into them. This luxurious northern highway fell under the home turf of the Maronite Establishment whose municipalities received a large part of the money coming from Arabia. “It’s half an hour more of Lebanon from here to the Syrian borders,” Adnan told me at the outskirts of Tripoli. “Keep that in mind, we’ve been driving for an hour, now we’ll start back through the mountains.”

  The route Adnan was taking back to Sidon was not the coastal road but rather the one that cut through the heart of Lebanon. We drove through sweetly-scented pine forests, the smell of the pine cones tickling our noses as it wafted into our car. Rivers and waterfalls gurgled along our winding mountain path. We were now in the midst of those villages that had twinkled so enchantingly from the folds of the Chouf Mountains on our first date in the Istiraha of Sidon. They were inhabited by Druze and Maronites who lived side by side in hand-hewn white limestone homes with deep-red roofs and brightly-colored wooden shutters. This bucolic co-habitation had another ten years before the picture-perfect homes would become rubble and their young generation lost, many of them killing before they touched puberty. Others would grow up in classrooms of abandoned schools without any education as ‘war-displaced’ victims of the ‘mountain war,’ a war of pointless battles of calculated convenience between two warlords, Jumblatt and Geagea.

  The hamlets dotting the hilltops were filled with rose bushes, fruit trees, mulberry trees, olive trees and thick trellises of grape vines. The mulberry tree, home to the humble silkworm that had catapulted the mountain Lebanese to the center of the highly lucrative silk trade hundreds of years ago, grew close to the villagers’ abodes spreading its welcome shade from the summer sun. Each home, no matter how modest, had an alfresco seating arrangement under its mulberry tree for family and friends to gather in their leisure hours. Some villages sported a muezzin spire, some a church tower, and many had both. Tall graceful pine trees with foliage concentrated on top and trunks bare and willowy, lined up along the far hills on the horizon, closely resembling the male lineup for the Lebanese national dance, the dabke. Even the trees of Lebanon did not escape the confessional divide of the Lebanese, Adnan informed me.

  “Those trees so integral to the Lebanese landscape are one of the rare items that both the Ottomans and the French shared for the good of the country, and both succeeded because of the confessional setup of the country. Where you see trees in large numbers is where the Maronites lived. The Ottomans gave a decree that those Christian families who planted forests around their properties would not be forced to give their sons to serve the Ottoman army. The French decreed that with every tree that fell, four must be planted in its place. The Maronite villagers under the counsel of their monks and nuns did just that. Where you see barren ground, is unfortunately around the Muslim villages, both Shi’a and Sunni.”

  As we drove further south, the sharp mountain edges of the north gave way to a range of gentle hills arrayed in multihued layers stretching to the horizon. Our car rose and dipped through hills and lush valleys carpeted with crimson red poppy flowers. Then without warning, the road abruptly ended and only thorn bushes could be seen ahead. We had reached Naqoura, the southernmost village in Lebanon.

  “That’s it,” Adnan commented with finality, “Lebanon ends here. Palestine starts there.” We turned back to Sidon, 45 minutes away, to join Adnan’s family for the Sunday lunch Im Bashar customarily prepared for at least twenty random guests.

  ***

  Romantic Drama

  My remaining years at university flew by as we crisscrossed Lebanon in all of its geographical, social, and political strata. The longer I stayed in Lebanon, the greater my attachment became to this arbitrary, impetuous, and reckless Arab country and to Adnan who exhibited the same characteristics. The looming date of my graduation in 1972 finally arrived and the inevitability of facing my parents over my relationship with Adnan raised its fearful head. Our relationship had been open to everyone in Lebanon but to none of the adults in my family. As I had feared, all hell bro
ke loose on my graduation day when

  I attempted to broach my parents with the fait accompli of our relationship and our desire to marry. My father flatly refused to accept the idea. A resounding “NO!!!!!!” was his expectedly vicious response. My mother, unsurprisingly, sided with his decision; there was no contest on that one. Adnan and I both had the same religion and Arab identity. But neither religion nor Arab unity figured in my father’s idiosyncrasies, only tribalism did. I was a Saudi Arab female and by Saudi Arab law, I was forbidden to marry a non-Saudi Arab man. He was fully aware that I would not be able to go ahead, as Saudi law also stipulated that I could not marry without the written permission of him as my father, of the Minister of Interior of Saudi Arabia and of the King. Suddenly the veneer of a modern education dropped and my father reverted to an extremely law-abiding Saudi Arab male citizen. How dare his daughter choose the man she wanted to marry?