Departamento de Estudios Árabes e Islámicos

During the Second Lebanese Republic (1943-1975), the Maronite Community was perceived as the country's leading sect, holding an almost hegemonic role within the state's confessional framework. By analyzing three key historical events (the 1952 " Rosewater Revolution " , the 1958 Crisis and the 1970 presidential elections), this essay will try to prove that neither the Maronite Community held a disproportionate control over Lebanon's politics, nor sectarianism was the predominant factor defining its political system, but one among other traditional ties, whose influence was even bigger.

Perturbadas, endemoniadas, desobedientes... tales han sido los adjetivos aplicados a las místicas a lo largo de la Historia. Desprovistas de voz por las interdictiones paulinae en época premoderna, la modernidad, con su visión de la realidad bajo el prisma de un racionalismo reduccionista, las ha confinado exclusivamente al ámbito de la psiquiatría, manteniéndolas, pues, efectivamente privadas de agencia. El artículo que aquí se presenta pretende romper con esos límites médicos y teológicos para, centrándose en las figuras de la española Santa Teresa y la libanesa Hindiyyah 'Ujaymî, situarlas en su contexto histórico, revelando el carácter profundamente revolucionario de los movimientos encabezados por éstas, en tanto que mujeres dotadas, efectivamente, de voz en la escena pública y creadoras de solidaridades femeninas alternativas, en los márgenes- o incluso al margen - de las normas imperantes en las sociedades patriarcales de la época.

The Druze leader Kamal Junblatt once said that the Maronites were a Minority obsessed with its sense of being a minority, and perhaps his statement was right when observed during the Civil War, an era which exposed the community to the real weakness of its geopolitical position. However, for most of the twentieth century, the Maronites did not hold such a pessimistic vision of themselves, asserting instead a triumphalist self-perception that proclaimed proudly the separateness of the Lebanese nation and its belonging either to the Mediterranean or to the Western worlds. One of the promoters of such a vision was the poet-cum-entrepreneur Charles Corm, whose literary endeavors ("La Montagne Inspirée", "Contes érotiques", etc.), alongside those of other authors - especially Michel Chiha and Saïd Akl - provided the Maronite community with a sentimental geography highlighting both its authenticity ("je suis le vrai Liban, chrétien et pratiquant...") and the character of its Lebanon as a quasi-crusader State, on the Eastern frontier of the Western world.

This presentation will examine these self-perceptions and, at the same time, try to determine whether such points of view remain en vogue within Lebanon's post-war Maronite community's vision of itself.

After the demise of Maronite feudals during the civil disturbances that agitated Mount Lebanon between the beginning of the 19th century and the establishment of the Mutasarrifiyyah (1861), the Maronite Church emerged as the only institution truly representative - perhaps as the only surviving institution after more than sixty years of an almost continued war that tore down the Mountain's traditional social fabric - not only of her own flock, but also of the Mountain as a whole, and used its political, social and economic paramountcy to promote her vision of Lebanon as a Christian homeland in a sea of "Arab-Muslim hostility".

The Church's combative stance in defense of her rights and interests, as a true Ecclesia Militans or "Militant Church", as well as her skillful use of her foreign influences, particularly with France, the "secular friend of the Maronites", led her to become not only the Mountain's primary political player, but also the best champion for Lebanon's independence after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. However, the establishment of a Lebanese State under French Mandate, first, and an independent - and multiconfessional - Republic thereafter drove the Church into relative obscurity and ceded the central stage to lay politicians, whose inability to cope with the consequences of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) led to a renewed prominence of the Church both during the conflagration and throughout the postwar era.

This presentation will examine these historical episodes and, at the same time, try to prove that the Church conceives of herself as the ultimate deposit of "the true" Lebanese identity, whose defense, whenever it is perceived as threatened by internal or foreign forces, is the ultimate ratio for her growing involvement in the political - and military - arena.

Tras las dos décadas de laissez-faire y a-nacionalismo representadas por las presidencias de Khoury y Chamoun, en las que la corrupción, los antagonismos personales y la alienación de grandes sectores de la sociedad respecto a la realidad nacional libanesa, acabaron por dar lugar a un conato de guerra civil en 1958, el ascenso al poder del General Chehab, como figura neutral, capaz de aunar el consenso de amplios sectores de una sociedad fuertemente dividida, representó el primer - y hasta la fecha, único - intento de reformar el sistema libanés, manteniendo, al mismo tiempo, sus elementos esenciales.

El fomento del desarrollo de áreas del país y sectores demográficos hasta entonces olvidados, la vinculación, en pie de igualdad, de los musulmanes al común devenir del Estado libanés y una política internacional estrictamente neutral, se erigieron en elementos básicos de un modelo político con el que Chehab pretendía construir un Líbano viable en el largo plazo.

La desparición de su protagonista del tablero político en 1964 y la elección de Sulayman Frangié, prototipo de za'im feudal, como presidente en 1970, así como la prematura muerte del General en 1972, truncaron la única oportunidad real del Líbano para reformarse. En su lugar, quince años de guerra civil, dos décadas de ocupación y una condena perpetua a la inestabilidad ocuparán la cotidianeidad del Bilâd al-Arz.

Esta investigación analizará las principales características del chehabismo tanto desde el punto de vista ideológico como desde el punto de vista de su aplicación práctica, intentando probar, asimismo, que su fracaso no se debió ni a las deficiencias endógenas del sistema libanés ni a las carencias del planteamiento chehabista, sino a la aparición de un conjunto de fuerzas, internas y extranjeras, que sobrepasaron las capadidades de respuesta del "pequeño" Líbano, impidiendo la consolidación del "Líbano posible" propuesto por el General.

Ever since the successful partnership between the Maronite Bishāra al-Khūrī and the Sunni Riyaḍ al-Ṣulḥ that led Lebanon to independence in 1943 and until the outbreak of the civil war thirty years later, the Lebanese Republic and its institutions were sustained by an Islamo-Christian “coalition of the elites” that, in spite of punctual breakdowns, managed to create the most socially and economically developed State in the Arab world, as well as the only one with a functioning democracy, notwithstanding its undeniable flaws. By analyzing the evolution of the Lebanese system throughout the three decades commonly identified as its âge d’or, this paper will argue that the inter-sectarian power-sharing agreement that underlined most State institutions contributed directly to the appeasement of confessional hatreds and led the way to a growing cooperation across the religious divide. Finally, this paper will try to demonstrate that the sectarian system set up by the National Pact, by leaving aside Western-defined concepts of modernity, managed to provide a democratic formula adjusted to the peculiar circumstances of the Lebanese State, offering, perhaps, a good role model for other multi-religious countries, such as war-torn Syria or the equally distressed Iraq.

The creation of Greater Lebanon, solemnly proclaimed by General Gouraud on 1 September 1925, remains, both in popular and academic opinion, one of the foremost examples of Franco-British arbitrariness in the drawing up of Middle Eastern borders, despite the fact that the new State encompassed an area (the Mountain) possessing a long and consolidated history of local autonomy that few among the newly invented Levantine countries could rival with.

It was precisely this difference in political culture between the Mountain and the regions annexed thereto - which had, until then, fully participated in the ideological developments common to the entire Ottoman Middle East (Ottomanism, Pan-Arabism, etc.) - that was to leave a long-lasting mark on Lebanon's daily life, impeding its consolidation as a nation-state, which stands in contrast to other countries in the area, whose complete artificiality did not preclude such a process.

This presentation, by analyzing the position and attitudes taken by the different actors in the political arena in the period (1968-1975) conducting to the Lebanese Civil War will try to prove that it was not the religious divide or the confessional system, so often deprecated as the cause of all of Lebanon's evils, but the difference in political culture, as was hinted before, what prevented Lebanon from developing its nation-ness and, in turn, led the way to the falling of the State in the turmoil of a protracted civil war.

On October 25, 1919, the Peace Conference assembled in Paris attended to a most extraordinary event: a delegation of black-clad, long-bearded Oriental bishops, under the command of the Patriarch of Antioch, Iliyas Huwayyik, pleaded vehemently and successfully, after long months of backstage manoeuvring, for the independence and territorial enlargement of Lebanon. The definitive establishment of Greater Lebanon, on September 1, 1920, seemed, thus, to fulfil the historic aspirations of the Maronite Church and community, which had been striving, for well over a century, for the creation of a sovereign, Christian State on its traditional homeland.

By then, the Church was accompanied by a secular élite that defended Lebanese statehood in the distinctively cosmopolitan terms of their rediscovered Phoenician heritage. In spite of their apparent intellectual humanism, theirs remained, nevertheless, an essentially Christian vision of Lebanon, possessing full identity with the Church’s idea of the country as a Christian fortress “within a sea of Arab-Muslim hostility”.

The creation of the Lebanese state and, later on, full-blown independence was, paradoxically, a mixed blessing for the Maronite Church, which receded into relative obscurity, leaving the centre of the stage to lay politicians, who were able to reach a modus vivendi with Lebanese Muslims, enshrined in the famous National Pact. However, their inability to cope with the consequences of the Civil War (1975-1990) led to a renewed prominence of the Church both during the conflagration and in its aftermath.

This presentation will examine these historical episodes while trying to prove that the Maronite Church conceives of herself as the ultimate deposit of the true Lebanese identity, whose defence, whenever such an identity is threatened by internal or foreign forces, is the ultimate ratio for her involvement in the political – and military – arena.

Albert Hourani defined the Levantine in quite derisory terms, as living "in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either", as an almost a-cultural creature straddling across the civilizational divide of the Mediterranean described by Braudel long before Huntington's apocalyptic analyses.

Pre-war Lebanon, founded upon that a-national pact of the "élites meeting in the marketplace", to retake again one of Hourani's formulations, that has passed down into History as the 'National Pact', represented, in this sense, the summit of Levantinism. The Republic established in 1943 was not based on any predetermined and exclusivist approach to nationhood, but on the cosmopolitan, pluralistic and mercantil attitude that had been the trademark of Levantine cities since, at least, the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In this context, it is the goal of this presentation to prove that the downfall of the Lebanese State in 1975 was not due to some inherent defects in its constitutional or political formation, or even less to the alleged flaws of its laissez-faire economic system - this being one of the mainstays of Levantinism, contrary to Meir Zamir's views on the subject - but to the external pressures exerted by its neighbors on a State whose open and non-ideological Weltanschauung contrasted sharply with the radical political and social environment of post-war Middle East. In a region where the likes of iron-fist-ruled Syria, Nasser's charismatic rule and Israel's austere Zionism were the rule, Lebanon had become a shocking exception: the remaining bastion of Levantinism.

Ever since her establishment in the upper, inaccessible ranges of Mount Lebanon, at some undefined point around the 9th century, the Maronite Church has developed a self-referential identity, with strong apocalyptic undertones, as the self-reliant outpost of orthodox Christianity against a background of heresy (the non-Chalcedonian Churches), schism (the Melkite Churches of Antioch and Constantinople) and impiety (Islam). A true theology of revolution whereby the small community of goatherds and peasants, as Kamal Salibi once described her, would constitute herself in the evangelical pusillus grex, the true remnant of Christendom against an ocean of infidels.

Naturally, such a self-perception would translate to a permanent attitude of defiance against the established powers, exemplified already in the 15th century by the anti-Islamic undertones present in the work of the theologian and bishop Gabriel ibn al-Qila'i, and reinforced by the influence of the Western missionaries that, from the Council of Trent (1545-1563) onward transferred to the Levant the triumphalist spirit of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Strengthened in their exceptionalism by the missionary preaching and by their growing exposure to the West, the Maronites entered the path of modernity and took full advantage thereof to press for the realization of their long-term political goals – namely, independence in their Mountain. Through a series of revolts, spanning over fifty years (1805-1858), and preceded by a long and complex process of internal renewal, the Church managed to eventually establish herself as the dominant institution in Mount Lebanon.

It is not, however, the purpose of this paper to explore the historical development of Maronite identity in itself, but to analyze how this self-perception influenced the position of the Church and community in the post-independence era. Thus, it will be argued that the Islamo-Christian understanding embodied by the 1943 National Pact did not replace the original Maronite identity, but merely submerged it under a new, Arabized State identity which pushed the Maronite rank and file to an attitude of permanent opposition to the institutions of the new Republic, in a repetition of the community’s historical role. Moreover, this paper will also defend that the essentials of Maronitism, as a political theology of resistance and opposition, remain at the bottom of the community’s spirit, emerging in all those cases where her very survival as a distinctive ethno-religious group are at stake, such as happened during the Civil War and, more recently, during long years of Syrian occupation over the Bilad al-Arz.

The downfall of the Interbellum liberal order in the Middle East, in the aftermath of the 1948 war, had long-standing consequences in the area and beyond. The arrival of a younger, humbler and politically radical pan-Arab leadership, exemplified by Egypt's Nasser or by the successive military leaders of Syria, capable of galvanizing the masses around a revolutionary program, became a matter of deep concern among conservatives from the Ocean to the Gulf.

Nowhere else was this preoccupation more deeply felt than within Christian circles in Lebanon. Supported by a communal opinion ferociously attached to national sovereignty, Christian leaders in the country came to develop a plurality of positions vis-à-vis the new Nasserist, pan-Arab program. In this context, this presentation will examine how Michel Chiha, father of the 1926 Constitution and factotum behind the National Pact, came to espouse, through the pages of his daily Le Jour, an alternative to Nasserism rooted on political and economic liberalism, and centered on a preferential option for the West, which called for a NATO-inspired Mediterranean Alliance, extending itself from Spain to Turkey and beyond.

It will, moreover, be argued that Chiha's position not only reinterpreted the discourses of the - now largely deposed - pre-war Arab élites, but also accommodated, by rephrasing his proposals under the familiar clout of anti-Communism, US attempts at regional hegemony in the context of the 'hot' Cold War lived in the Middle East of the 1950s.

While the Arab people took center stage in the 'Arab Spring' protests, academic studies focus on state structure, regime nature, militaries, and external powers to understand popular uprisings in the Middle East. Contentious Politics in the Middle East redresses a gap in focus as it analyzes the complexities of popular agency through the framework of contentious politics theory, without neglecting the negotiations between the people and structural factors. The book's chapters apply familiar questions raised by theorists to the under-researched case study of the Middle East after the uprisings. Edited by Fawaz A. Gerges and featuring insights from top scholars, this collection seeks to answer these important questions as it advances contentious politics theory.

En este artículo vamos a dibujar la historia decolonial del anarquismo en Egipto y Túnez a través del estudio comparado de los movimientos 'Asian (Desobediencia) y al-Haraka al-Ishtirakiyya al-Taharruriyya (Movimiento Libertario Socialista). El estudio de estos dos casos nos ayuda a romper con la mirada eurocéntrica del anarquismo y a situar la reemergencia de estos movimientos sociales a escala mundial en un contexto aún inexplorado como es la región sur mediterránea. Para ello vamos a realizar un estudio comparado de las historias del movimiento anarquista egipcio y tunecino con un análisis histórico, historiográfico y etnográfico que nos ayude a entender las causas de la reemergencia del anarquismo en la última década y las claves de la descolonización de estas narrativas en las costas del sur del Mediterráneo.

Since the end of the 19th century, with the arrival of Greek and Italian political exiles into the South of the Mediterranean, the concept of “anarchism” has been adapted, reformulated and disseminated into Arabic (Khuri-Makdisi, 2011; Gorman, 2005, 2008, 2010). Along the 20th century, we have seen the use of three different terms to refer to the concept of “anarchism”: fawdawiyya, lasultawiyya and anarkiyya. The use of each of these terms vary according to the context, the reception and the purpose of the user, and it has undergone semasiological, onomasiological and referential changes along its history.

This paper will explore the history of the concept of “anarchism” in Arabic through out the theory of conceptual history as stated by Reinhart Koselleck (1967). The paper will be divided into two parts. The first part will explore the way in which “anarchism” was adapted and reformulated (therefore “translated”) into Arabic through out the methodologies studied by Stetkevych (1970); and secondly, it will explore the historical changes that the concept has undergone in the South of the Mediterranean through the process of “democratization”, “politization”, “ideologization” and “temporality”. Our main goal is to understand how “anarchism”, as a concept, has come to terms with it own experiences in the Arab world, both in language and in practice. This will help us to clarify the processes by which different political actors have disseminated and practiced this political philosophy in different contexts in and how this has helped to broaden and decolonize the meaning of “anarchism”.