Beirut Is the Spring of Arabs

By Samir Kassir

Annahar - March 4, 2005

There is a banner on the Salim Slam Street that reads: “Beirut is too big to be contained.” The slogan is undoubtedly beautiful, on the condition that we don’t forget the concerns of its author. These concerns become clearer as you read slogans on other banners in the same street. The slogans revive [Arab] national utterances that even [Syrian Information Minister] Mahdi Dakhlallah, former editor-in-chief of the Baath newspaper and the current custodian of the publicity of what is left of the two Baaths, find hard to buy. Even if the signature under the slogan was by one of the fossilized dinosaurs of what was known one day as “the Beirut Street,” something like Abou El-Abed with the least of innocence and a lot of hidden intelligence [agencies] effort behind it. The one who signed it was right even if unintentionally.

Indeed, Beirut looks today too big to be contained by anything, even by the banners of old times. These slogans are even more complicated than to be restricted in the typical “Beirut Street” like some jargon whose date has expired claims, if this jargon ever expires.

Beirut has come back today as a big symbol in the Arab world. It suddenly grew without anyone predicting it. Nothing can contain it and nothing can dwarf it anymore. It can address, once again, its sisters in Arabism: Look, I got rid of fear and stood up again, I defied silence and its guards, I dared oppression and here I tell you that your renaissance is possible again, oh ye Arabs!

Beirut never needed a certificate in Arabism. Not a long time ago, Beirut – the city of luxury and spoils – embraced the Arab cause like this cause had never been embraced before in any other Arab capital, like Palestinians can tell. It thus became the screaming agony of Arabism, before it decorated its chest with the medal of resistance when it became the first Arab city to expel the Israeli occupier by force.

But what Beirut is doing in the few last days might be more important even that its resistance. It offers an invention for the Arab tomorrow.

Beirut today is the face of promising Arabism. And it has become like this because it could never be limited to the typical “Beirut Street.” Perhaps the most precious proof that Beirut has been offering these days is that the face of Arabism is not a synonym of frowning for the young men and women who dared curfew and made the government fall were those who we were used to hear criticism about their frequent hanging out at the pubs of Mono Street and other fun places. We apologize to those because we have doubted their ability.

Of course these are not alone. And it is more correct to say that the protestors and the demonstrators do not belong to a single social group, or of course a single sect – despite how some might want to depict it otherwise. But they all intersect at one point: their love for life, which leads them to demand a free life.

Behold, life has become beautiful, oh ye Arabs!

Thirty years ago, Beirut was the first victim in the sequence of Arab deaths. Thirty years later, Beirut announces that the love of death has not become the only way for the Arabs. That’s why, perhaps, the future of a living Beirut has become more important to the Arabs – far more important – than this mummified Arab system that has reached its ugliest incarnations in a regime that insists on strangling two people claiming that they share a destiny. That’s why, Beirut’s resurrection has become far more important that the survival of this party that has claimed revival but only brought destruction, insisting during its last days to sow death.

This dimension of Beirut’s Uprising might not be evident for some of those who have been participating in its making. But, whether they realize it or not, what they have done has gone beyond the Lebanese borders and the evidence for this was the salute that they received from the Prince of Qatar – who we hoped could have transferred his joy to the always frowning and doubting workers at the satellite station which is said to be mostly owned by him – so that they give up on marketing the lies of the Iranian intelligence and other groups.

It has been said that Lebanese and Syrian intelligence apparatuses have been trying to fake “ethical” scandals at the Martyrs Square that would defame the reputation of its demonstrators. As if the guards of destruction have the right to talk about ethics while everyone knows what sums of money has this public or that private director general illicitly collected through the half dozen of security apparatuses that have kidnapped the republic.

As if there is nothing more pressing that sending professional prostitutes to the area of the demonstrators’ tents hoping for a “slip” that they might be able to exploit for the sowing of a social “mutiny” after the failure of the sectarian mutiny, a mutiny between the conservative mediums and others who might tend to behave in the most intimate manners of the Ukrainian experience.

And even so. Isn’t the history of Beirut, its actual history that a historian knows? Isn’t this history the best proof that social freedom is the best gateway to national freedom? Wasn’t the first biggest leader in the history of modern Beirut, Salim Ali Slam – the same person whose name is on the street where these national banners were raised – the foremost modernizer, say the most prominent supporter for the first lady that had removed her veil in public, his daughter Anbara?

Isn’t the economic and social project of the last leader that Beirut has known – that is Rafik Hariri – a project of openness Based in principle on Beirut regaining its role as the Mecca of Arab tourists who are looking for social freedom, even if this included some perversion (and sometimes professionalism)?

Isn’t the social freedom, with all the opened toward the Arab world, is the thing that makes Beirut the best mediator between velvet and orange revolutions while this Arab world looks away from any change at the time the whole world changes?

Arab tourists might have escaped Beirut after the murder of the killing of Rafik Hariri, but they will be back with the Beirut Spring, and this time they will not be satisfied with shopping and life pleasures, but they will also come after the red and the white that today crowns the capital of the Arabs.

Our Syrian brethren – including workers, businessmen and intellectuals – might have felt distant for a while from what they first thought was an offensive targeted against them while it was in fact the result of the oppression that strangles them and the Lebanese. But they will come back to learn, more than others, that the Spring of the Arabs, when it flourishes in Beirut, actually announces the time for roses in Damascus.