Tribes with Flags by Charles Glass

Author:Charles Glass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Had they reconciled their [the Lebanese factions’] differences, which they might have done, they would have had for allies all the countries from Egypt to the Curdes, who, probably, would have joined the league, and the army they could have brought into the field would have been more numerous than that of the Sultan; they would have been masters of Damascus, Aleppo, and all that part of the empire.

Masters, as the British and French had been in our century, but for how long? As I watched the Russians, I heard behind me the voice of a guide explaining in English that we were standing in a market street, much like the souqs in Damascus, where ancient merchants sold their wares. “And whenever a caravan arrived,” he said, pronouncing “arrived” with three syllables, “all the merchants would gather here in the outdoor agora. Do you know what is agora?”

The guide, a short-haired Syrian in a grey suit and horn rim glasses, was giving a tour to a man and two women. The man wore white bermuda shorts. He was tall and stout and looked like any American tourist, but he wasn’t. Michel Smaha was a Lebanese politician whose fortunes had taken more turns than Zenobia’s. When I had first met him in 1983, he tried to convince me that Lebanon’s first priority was to resist Syrian occupation. Four years later, he was a Syrian ally, unable to go safely to the Maronite Christian heartland he had once so defiantly represented. His hair was a little greyer, and there was less of it, than when I had last seen him in his flat in Christian east Beirut.

“The agora,” the guide said, “was the marketplace. All the business, all the debating, it was done here. Now, let’s go and see the amphitheatre.”

“You see that castle?” Samaha asked me, after we had walked awhile through the ruins. He was pointing to the mountains several miles away, where there was a stone citadel clinging to a summit. It was of much later construction than anything in Palmyra. “That was Fakhreddine’s castle.”

“Fakhreddine came here?” I asked. The Emir Fakhreddine was a seventeenth-century Lebanese leader, a Machiavellian prince, who had briefly united the tribes of Mount Lebanon, defied the Ottomans and asserted his control over nearby provinces. Some people called him the father of modern Lebanon, a dubious distinction in light of what happened three centuries after his death.

“Yes,” Samaha said. “That was the western limit of Lebanon. You see? We Lebanese are expansionists.” He laughed.

I thought of seventeenth-century Lebanese soldiers on the hilltops overlooking Palmyra, far from their seacoast in the middle of the desert near the border with Iraq. It made the modern presence of Syrian troops on the mountaintops above Beirut and in Beirut itself seem but a passing phase. In a century or two, who would play the role of occupier and who the occupied?

“Now,” the guide said, “we will visit Zenobia’s palace and see where she had her bath.”

We left them to their tour and went into Tadmor town.

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