CHAPTER 3
A Tale of Two Lebanons
In 1931, the neighbors decided to organize a social club, the Sons of Lebanon. The purpose of the club was to teach the children the Arabic language, help immigrants learn English, collect funds for charity, and discuss common concerns.
However, when the Christians wanted to use the Lebanese flag which pictured the Cedars of Lebanon, the minority (the Muslim element) objected. The Muslims wanted to use a flag which represented a united Arab world, or the "Arab Flag" (the colors of red, green, black, and white).
The question of which flag to use stirred up old country political/nationalistic/religious loyalties. There emerged two separate religious identities or traditions which necessarily involved different political/geographic loyalties peculiar to the complex history of Lebanon/Syria. One man, whose father was a founding member of the Sons of Lebanon, put it this way:
"One Arab would say, `We don't want to walk under the Lebanese flag!' And the other would say, `Well, we don't want to walk under the sword of Islam.'"
Only a brief analysis of the divergences of the Sunni Muslim and Christian factions will be necessary for the purpose of this study. It is also understood that not all Maronites/Melkites or Sunni Muslims had the exact same perceptions of Lebanon as they are depicted here for the sake of simplicity. The conflict of identity, whether to call yourself Lebanese or Syrian, was a consequence of the frustration over the state of Greater Lebanon in the 30's, and occurred within religious factions as well as between different religions.
Although many powers had sought to rule the region of Mount Lebanon with its Christian enclaves, it had always escaped overbearing tyranny of its internal affairs. Under Ottoman rule, Mount Lebanon was considered a millah. A millah is defined as a "religious community... with virtual autonomy in religious and social matters." It was the Turkish way of recognizing the status of religious minorities. In certain areas of the Ottoman Empire like Mt. Lebanon, this system allowed minorities to "build their own sense of identity, while assuring their participation in the larger corporate whole, and it guaranteed freedom of religious expression."
In the early 1920's, under the League of Nations, the entire system was replaced by the French Mandate of Lebanon. The frontiers of Lebanon were extended to include other parts of the Vilayet of Syria where many Muslims lived, including the cities of Tripoli and Beirut, and in their surrounding areas north, south, and east in the Bekka region. Under French rule, Lebanon and especially the Maronite Christian element, enjoyed a sense of self-determination and separation from the rest of the Arab world.
The Muslims viewed the alliance between the Christians and French as an obstacle to Arab unity. Throughout Turkish rule, the Muslims of the region held that the nature of Lebanon/Syria/Palestine was as a part of a united Arab World and could never be separate.
Although the Christians had sewn the seeds of Arab nationalism in the mid-19th century, they opposed it at the turn of the century. The Muslims (Sunnis in general) had become its main leaders. A.H. Hourani explains the tensions between the two faith traditions at the critical time when the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse:
"For them (Christians Lebanese) the ideal in the political as in other spheres is that Lebanon should be self-subsistent, but if that is impossible they would wish her to be dependent upon a Christian European State rather than be part of a Moslem Arab State."
"Many of the nationalists (Arab) believe that this attachment has been used by her (France) as an instrument in a policy of dividing, weakening and in other ways opposing the nationalist movement (of the Arabs)."
"Among some of the Christian minorities there is a further tendency to regard the West as their spiritual home, to which they can belong in a way in which they could never belong to the Arabo-Islamic world to whose fringes they have so long clung..."