In the context of modern Middle Eastern history, the varied peoples of the âGreater Middle Eastâ are often viewed through simplified notions of âArabâ and âMuslim,â sometimes to the neglect of other, pre-Arab pre-Muslim Middle Easterners otherwise lapsed from the prevalent paradigms on, of, and about the modern Middle East. To non-historians, a century or more of Western academic interest in the region seems to have yielded little beyond clichés and assumptions referring to ââArabs,â âArabâ fears, âArabâ hopes, âArabâ concerns, and âArabâ hang-ups â âArabâ being the emblematic âbe all end allâ of all matters Middle East.â1 Yet there exists a vibrant and venerable Middle East outside the dominant platitudes about which traditional Middle East scholarship remains largely mute. It is within this context that this paper offers the suggestion that the prevalent assumptions about an essentially Arab (or uniformly Muslim) Middle East be confronted with a more culturally and religiously diverse Middle East. In line with this, this paper focuses on the so-called âYoung Phoeniciansâ in Lebanon who in the early twentieth century put forward another interpretation of the history of the region and of their region, foregrounding non-Arab and non-Muslim interpretations of it.
1 Young Phoenicians, Old Lebanese
In Lebanon, the tendency towards valorising and celebrating the longue durée of Middle Eastern history and memory is referred to by the generic term âPhoenicianismâ. For obvious reasons, from the perspective of the keepers of Arabist orthodoxy Phoenicianism is deemed problematic, because it relegates âArabnessâ to a period â rather than an essence â of Lebanese history. Yet Phoenicianism is also a canonical, long-standing school of thought that resonates among large swaths of a Lebanese society not always enthralled with the assumptions of Arab nationalism. The current was elaborated by an early twentieth-century group of young Francophone philo-Phoenicians â mainly Lebanese Christians â who went by the sobriquet Les Jeunes Phéniciens â the âYoung Phoenicians.â2 In short, these latter-day Canaanites viewed themselves and the modern Lebanese as a singular, unique group, descendants of the Canaanite seafarers of antiquity (not the newly arrived Arab conquerors). From their perspective, they and their Phoenician ancestors were exemplars of humanism, at once skilled traders, intrepid mariners, subtle disseminators of knowledge, gifted cultural intermediaries, and fluid congenital polyglots straddling multiple traditions, multiple languages, and multiple cultural legacies.
An eminent âgraduateâ of the Young Phoeniciansâ intellectual circle, Michel Chiha (1891â1954), co-author of the 1926 Lebanese Constitution and a proponent of multiple identities, described the modern Lebanon of the âYoung Phoeniciansâ as a diverse, multiform, polyglot cocktail of cultures and languages. His was a conception of identity that valued composite, complex patchworks of ethnicities and historical memories; a millennial universe of varied civilizations, where peoples and times blended without dissolving each other, and where languages, histories and cultures fused without getting confused with one another. Lebanon of the Phoenicians, Chiha wrote,
is a meeting place into which peoples flock and assimilate regardless of their origins. Lebanon is the preeminent crossroads where varied civilizations drop in on one another, and where bevies of beliefs, languages, and cultural rituals salute each other in solemn veneration. Lebanon is above all a Mediterranean construct, but like the Mediterranean itself, Lebanon is a nation discerning and sensitive to the stirring music of universal poetry.3
This sort of discourse was part and parcel of Chihaâs worldview. It is an important element of his political writings, his journalistic output, and his public speaking engagements in various Beirut forums â such as the Cercle de la jeunesse Catholique (1929) and the Cénacle libanais (1946). There, Lebanese beholden to the creed of Arab nationalism often met their match in Lebanese Phoenicianists who, like Chiha, âthought of their country as a piece of Europe, at the foot of a splendid mountain, [savouring] the language of France.â4 Like his âYoung Phoenicianâ cohorts, Chiha recognized the Arabsâ and Muslimsâ presence in Lebanon (and the Middle East as a whole) as a matter of fact, as a cycle in the chronology of peoples and conquerors that took possession of the Middle East at a given time in its history. But Chiha stressed that a mere thirteen centuries of Arab and Muslim domination,
were not nearly enough to make the people of Lebanon oblivious to, or dismissive of, the fifty centuries that preceded the Arabs!-[â¦] Even if relying entirely on conjecture, the blood, the civilization, and the language of todayâs Lebanese cannot possibly be anything if not the legacy, the synthesis, and the sum of fifty centuries of progenitors and ancestors.5
From Chihaâs perspective the importance of the Young Phoenicians stemmed from their remarkable humanistic, elastic (spacious) conception of history and memory. Admittedly, this conception while opposed to essentialist Arab and Muslim interpretations, did not disown the Arabs, did not bespeak hang-ups regarding Muslims, and did not shun the rich Muslim/Arab cultural, linguistic, and literary patrimony â which the Young Phoenicians deemed an important (albeit lone) piece in a larger patchwork rather than a dominant motif. Indeed, Chiha and the Young Phoenicians were passionate about the preservation of the Arabic language in the pantheon of Lebanese polyglossia, which, from their perspective, constituted a splendid addition to Lebanonâs vaunted cosmopolitanism and linguistic humanism. What they repudiated, however, were linguistic dogmatism, national rigidity, and cultural coercion and regimentation. Arabic is a wonderful language, Michel Chiha stressed:
It is the language of millions of men. We wouldnât be who we are today if we, the Lebanese of the twentieth century, were to forgo the prospects of becoming the Arabic languageâs most accomplished masters to the same extent that we had been its masters some one hundred years ago ⦠How can one not heed the reality that a country such as ours would be literally decapitated if prevented from being bilingual (or even trilingual if possible)? ⦠[We must] retain this lesson if we are intent on protecting ourselves from spiteful [monolingual] nationalism and its inherent self-inflicted deafness [to other languages]; an affliction that may lead us to assured cultural mutism.6
There is arguably no more exquisite a celebration of cosmopolitanism, and no more forceful a rejection of nationalist jingoism than this text. Chiha, as a representative of the Young Phoenicians, certainly did not shun the Arabic language or its cultural trappings. Yet he remained uncompromising in his rejection of Arab nationalist linguistic authoritarianism and the cultural conformity that it demanded.
Charles Corm (1894â1963), poet laureate and éminence grise behind the Young Phoenicians, described his ancient ancestorsâ and modern compatriotsâ cultural and linguistic âpantheismâ as the founding elements of human civilization, at once human, humane, and humanistic, selflessly bestowing gifts through both time and space upon all peoples of the globe.7 This worldview of Cormâs â an element of the kind of benevolent nationalism that he advocated â would attain its finest incarnation in an address that he gave in Beirut in June 1949, at a meeting of the Cénacle libanais. In this, Corm noted that since the remotest antiquity, at a time when they were still known as Canaanites,
and later as Phoenicians, the Lebanese had created, preserved, defended, affirmed and advanced an expansive and liberal civilization with universal impulses and qualities so accessible to other peoples that some of those, even the loftiest and brightest among them, came to assimilate these attributes of Lebanese civilization as if they were their own, identifying them with their own national genius.8
This, in Cormâs view, was the incarnation of humanism. And in that sense, Lebanon was not only a most exquisite practitioner of humanism, but also an eloquent purveyor of that most human of human virtues, contributing to the âbuilding of a better human community, and a more humane humanity.â9
Although advocating â and indeed living â polyglossia as a defining element of Lebanese specificity and its Phoenician filiation, the Young Phoeniciansâ main linguistic-intellectual media remained French â and in certain iterations Arabic. They used French to escape the Arabic language and the stigma of âArabnessâ that is often attached to it.10 They also used Arabic in order to prove their detractors wrong: to affirm their proficiency in Arabic (alongside other languages,) and to stress that just like Irishmen, Scotsmen, Liberians, Nigerians and others who may be native Anglophones but not Englishmen, so could Lebanese be the avant-garde of Arabic linguistic revival and Arabic belles lettres, and yet remain distinctly Lebanese. However, there remained an impulse for âauthenticityâ that continued to animate the Young Phoenicians movement, an impulse which, although using the French and Arabic languages, often with the intimacy and alacrity of natives, still yearned for an âauthenticâ Lebanese language. This tendency followed two paths: one attempted to revive Syriac and Canaanite as the autochthonous, authentic, unique languages of Lebanon (Bnay Qyomo is a modern current endorsing and promoting this ongoing project);11 on the second path these revival movements were dismissed as futile and counterintuitive, with the argument that an authentic Lebanese language already existed, and that the Phoenician language and its Syriac iterations were already living presences, transmuted into the modern spoken Lebanese vernacular.12 In other words, as the argument went, the spoken vernaculars of modern Lebanon, as they had always been, were not âdefective Arabic dialects,â but indeed âevolved Phoenician dialects.â13 Thus, instead of ârevivalâ this last group advocated the âcodificationâ of this âLebanese languageâ in written form, in a modern incarnation of the Phoenician alphabet, as embodied in the Roman characters. Both these tendencies were born in the early 1920s; they co-existed with the establishment of Greater Lebanon and the birth of the Young Phoenicians movement. And although both became a reality benefitting from a coherent programme only in the middle of the 1950s â with the âcodificationâ track triggering a âdialectalâ and literary revival â the idea of a distinct, ageless, enduring âLebanese languageâ was the brainchild of Young Phoenician poet laureate Charles Corm himself. Although not a linguist, Corm wrote with the keen discernment of one, maintaining that, its hybridity notwithstanding, Lebanese was synchronically speaking a distinct language in its own right, deserving recognition and valorisation as such. By the early 1930s he was already advocating his âLebanese language,â in French.
In his 1934 Phoenicianist manifesto, the monumental La Montagne Inspirée (âThe Hallowed Mountainâ), Corm charted the rehabilitation and redemption of what he called âma langue libanaise,â âmy Lebanese language,â describing it âlyrically,â but addressing it like a living being. âNo, no, my mother tongue,â came Cormâs invocation:
You arenât a fallen corpse in the abyss of time! / For, I still can feel your verve, swelling up in my veins, / Rising up like springtide, surging up like a wave! / And I still can hear, your sparkling silver springs, / Churning up from the past, whispering to my soul ⦠/ ⦠Your soft and graceful inflexions, still slip their ancient drawl, in all the modern languages, swarming on our shores; / Your sparse and scattered caresses, still flow in my veins, and cuddle with my soul!! / ⦠For, even as I write, in someone elseâs language, and even when I speak, in someone elseâs tongue, / Itâs still you in my voice, My sainted Motherâs voice, / Snug like a loverâs warmth! / For, Man here below, in spite of having learnt, his brute oppressorâs tongue, / Has kept the looks the tone, Has kept the pitch, the pulse, / Of his forefatherâs inflections, of his ancient motherâs voice! / ⦠For, even these sweet words, stolen from Franceâs lips, / With impassioned affection, quivering in my heart, / Still taste on my lips, where my smiling sorrow sits, / Still taste of a Lebanese kiss.14
And so, even in lamentation, it seems Corm recognized a hidden vigour to his ancestral tongue, a living artefact which he claimed had fused with and were infused in the modern languages currently spoken in Lebanon. In Cormâs telling, a national language was like a timeless, warm, hallowed maternal voice, emanating from a distant past, reverberating in the present, emitting shudders of national pride and tales of forebears and glory. Therefore, even when they seemed to acquiesce in â even boasting of â their congenital polyglossia, the Young Phoenicians of Cormâs generation still yearned for an âauthenticâ national language and recognized the endurance and latent essence of this ânational languageâ in their modern idioms. The multilingualism flaunted in Lebanon was, in Cormâs words, simply a palliative, a borrowed outer garment, an artifice meant to ward off the dominance of any single âintruderâ language. Yet, the âLebanese languageâ that he spoke of â both an âinternalâ emotive language and an actual living competency â impregnated, metabolized, and transmuted the other idioms currently in use: i.e., Arabic, which, like other languages, Corm viewed as an intruder on pre-existing unique speech forms.
What is worth noting is that although written in French, and in the French mediaeval poetic tradition of the chanson de geste chronicling local heroic exploits, La Montagne Inspirée was, as stated by Corm, âtraduit du Libanaisâ â that is to say âtranslated from the Lebanese language.â Indeed, the introduction to each of the poemâs three âcyclesâ (or narrative âsagasâ) presented these as French renditions of an original Lebanese poem, thus suggesting that although âspeaking in tonguesâ as it were, and sounding French, Italian, or for that matter Arabic, the linguistic reservoir of the modern Lebanese people remained a single authentic ancestral âLebaneseâ language, a bequest of the ancient Phoenician progenitor. To wit, in his Hallowed Mountainâs âSaga of Memoriesâ Corm affectionately noted how his own grand-parents spoke Syriac â not Arabic â in late-nineteenth century Lebanon, and that this same Syriac, a relic of Phoenician, remains the language of Lebanon to this day.15 âGrief, good grief, O unspeakable grief,â he wrote,
My own grandparents spoke, Syriac in Ghazir. / Syriac, where the Phoeniciansâ flair, their vigour and their flame, are still extant today; / Alas, no one now can fancy finding shades / Of our grandparentsâ footsteps, in the shadow of ancient vines; / The bygone language of yore, is choked for evermore, in our scrawny muzzled throats. / And now our Mountain, Ever kind to her sons, / Beholds its splintering skies, riven by the sounds, of foreign Western tongues; / [â¦] For, languages like Italian, like English and Greek, / Like Turkish and Armenian, clutter and jam her voice, / While she willingly yields to the sweet tyranny of the language of France. / Yet, I know that in London, In Paris and in Rome, / Our writers can never hold the station they deserve, / That everywhere they go, despite their humanity, / They shall always remain, outside the human race. / For, a people is orphaned when it hasnât a tongue; / And the languages of others are borrowed outer cloaks, / In which one seems dubious, shameful, lifeless, frail, obnoxious and strange! / [â¦] Yet, these foreign-sounding words, which are taught to our children, / To us are not that strange; / For, it seems that our hearts can still recall remembrances, of having fashioned them, and styled their graceful sounds! / Indeed, it is they, who disowned their lineage; / Uprooted from us, torn from our embrace, / Embellished by exile, like beloved ingrates, they now disown their race.16
And so, following a drawn-out lamentation over Lebanonâs ostensible loss of its âauthentic, nativeâ language â be it Phoenician or Syriac-Aramaic â Corm concludes on a note of exuberant optimism, affirming that Phoenician-Syriac, that is to say a unique Lebanese language, âis alive and well and vibrant and living out-loudâ in his Lebanon. Again, this alludes to the axiom of Cormâs timesâ that synchronically speaking, and notwithstanding its mingling of Aramaic syntactic constructions with Arabic morphology, Lebanese is indeed a distinct language in its own right.17 Yet, Cormâs resonance and the impact of his work dwelt more in the realm of the cultural, the affective, and the symbolic, rather than the measurable and the purely linguistic. Ironically â and although cultural specificities ought to be evaluated not by way of genetic information but rather through historical accretions â recent studies have demonstrated that the Lebanese of today and the Phoenicians of classical antiquity share with each other some 90% of their genetic lineage, thus validating by science what Corm already knew in his heart.18
Thus, as time moves ever further away from the day La Montagne Inspirée was first published, wrote Ãlie Tyane in 1935, and as the tempests that had vigorously shaken the souls of those who came into contact with those sublime verses in 1934, Charles Cormâs Hallowed Mountain goes on acquiring new meanings and added gravitas.19 The poem is not only an âodeâ to Lebanonâs ancient glories and an optimist vision of its days to come, but also, as Tyane argued, was above all a confirmation of Lebanonâs high moral values and a restitution of the country and its people to their true selves and their true history. âLong had I stayed in awe of this book,â Tyane wrote,
unable to write or utter a single commentary on it, crushed and eclipsed as I was by the enormity and loftiness of the emotions taking hold of me as I ran through its pages, breathless, thunderstruck, euphoric. Today, however, with my soul finally composed, reasonably collected before the hallowed image that La Montagne Inspirée evokes, I feel myself ready to bear witness, not so much to the inherent beauty of this work, as to the filial piety that it exuded, conferring upon it an almost sacred aura.20
But Tyaneâs wonderment at the exalted lyricism (and realism) of The Hallowed Mountain was not an exception; it had become the prevailing emotion with most of those who came into contact with that epochal work. An energizing blast of energy and warmth âreminiscent of a Victor Hugo and an Alphonse de Lamartineâ runs through the pages of La Montagne Inspirée, boasted a 1934 editorial in Lebanonâs leading French-language journal, La Revue du Liban.21 Reading Charles Corm, La Revue wrote, one feels as if possessed, inflamed, entranced, and carried away on a breath-taking journey through the millennia, breathing love and nostalgia. Like many other Lebanese poets, Charles Corm drew divine inspiration from Lebanonâs mountains; yet, he remained so different from all those who came before him, and possibly all those who may follow, because,
nowhere, at any time in its history, has Lebanon been graced with a moving, tormented, passionate national cantor such as Charles Corm, and nowhere have we heard in Lebanon national inflections as vibrant and as powerful as Charles Cormâs! The Hallowed Mountain is truly a landmark of our literary history [â¦] worthy of the widest audiences possible. Indeed, one feels it is the duty of the Lebanese government to disseminate this work and make it required reading in Lebanonâs national schools.22
In many ways, La Montagne Inspirée was a book that strictly speaking went way beyond the realm of poetry and memory, wrote one reviewer in 1935; âit is a manifesto! A summons to Lebanese youthâ and an exhortation for them to draw faith, hope and energy from the living fountainhead of their proud lineage.23 Even the Anglophone press of the times had its say, with a review in Domestic and Foreign Research of November 1934 hailing La Montagne Inspirée as a âremarkable poetic composition of stirring religious strains [â¦]; an Epopoeia of sublimely inspired lyricism, setting forth the contributions of Phoenicia to this world civilization, from the remotest times to our days.â24 In this same vein, Eliahu Epsteinâs editorial in the Palestine Post of February 24, 1935, entitled âLebanese Renaissance,â perhaps merits being reproduced in its quasi entirety here. Not only because it concisely encapsulated Charles Cormâs thought, but also because it spoke to the intimacy with which Epstein himself understood Charles Corm â and indeed the intellectual bond that the two of them shared. ââLa Montagne Inspiréeâ is more than a mere collection of poems,â wrote Epstein:
It is an enthusiastic expression of an âidée mystiqueâ of the author, the idea of Lebanese renaissance. Charles Corm is a Lebanese patriot who preaches all through the pages the revival of the old Phoenician civilization. His dreams are like those of Astarte and Baal. His heroes are Hiram, Fakreddin, Emir Bechir, Youssef Karam, the emigrants and the peasants of the mountain. He is inspired by Byblos and by Ras Shamrah who speak to his mind and heart, in a more compelling voice than the cultures under which the Lebanese lived and developed since Phoenician days. Lebanon to him is not merely a part of the Arab world. He speaks of the Lebanese tongue, which is the old Phoenician. He speaks of âour leadersâ which to him are not the present leaders, but the heroes of old, to whom he would like to hark back, for the revival of that brilliant age which made Lebanon a power in the world, and his ancestors were the bearers of culture; when Tyre and Sidon, and Byblos were metropolises from which emanated knowledge and learning to the far-flung corners of the world. Corm is not a new name: he is the director of the Revue Phénicienne, one of the founders of the Association des Gens de Lettres of Beirut, and the promoter of Les Auteurs Libanais de Langue Française. There can be but little doubt that one of the factors which inspired the new Phoenician aspirations was the Zionist movement which has encouraged them to dream of reviving their own culture and traditions. Corm writes prose and poems. They are a mixture of the epic, sometimes weaved into lyric emotions. He recalls the greatness of the old Phoenicians whose Kings built the garden of Semiramis and the temples of the Near East; of the Phoenician colonies in Africa. Has the greatness of the Phoenicians been dimmed, he asks, because they were merchants and sometimes forgot that independence must be defended even by blood? We may expect more from the pen of Charles Corm. He is not only an able poet, but a man who battles for his ideas.25
Even those Lebanese not particularly enthralled with Charles Cormâs Phoenicianist affections could not help being charmed by the imageries he presented. Amin Rihani, for instance, one of Lebanonâs early twentieth-century exponents of Arabism, could not resist the profound humanism of Cormâs brand of Lebanese nationalism. Reading La Montagne Inspirée, Rihani wrote in 1934, one cannot help loving and identifying with Corm and his Phoenician Lebanon â even though Rihani would remain dubious as to whether or not the Phoenicians were truly worthy of Cormâs love and adulation.26 âYou are a lover of the human race,â wrote Rihani in praise of his friend and philosophical adversary,
your heart bears within it oceans of affection, and your soul shines like bright sunlight of affection. You abscond both Frenchmen and Arabs, but you regale us with canticles emanating from the depths of your heart and soul, singing with devotion your boundless love for the peoples of your land.27
Still Rihani was at a loss to explain Cormâs enthusiasm for the vanished Phoenicians while remaining lukewarm vis-Ã -vis the âliving Arabs.â Yet he could not help admitting that Lebanon was well deserving of Cormâs love, dubbing The Hallowed Mountain the âPhoeniciansâ Song of Songs,â writing that:
Lebanon and Charles Corm are a single inseparable moral and spiritual unit. Cormâs unbounded love for Lebanon is incarnate in Lebanonâs Cedars and Mountains, and in turn Lebanonâs Cedars and Mountains willingly prostrate and melt before him, rendering themselves incense and emanations of light to be offered at his exalted national altar. [â¦] I read Cormâs Hallowed Mountain and I feel as if transported from one festival of light to the next, from one orchard to the next, and from one raging volcano to the next; yet I remain firmly planted on Lebanese soil.28
Even Khalil Takieddine (1906â1987), another Lebanese Arabist, confessed his sheer inability to resist the charisma, energy, and affection that Cormâs work â and his person â exuded. Even for one committed to Lebanonâs Arab identity as Takieddine had been, the lure and temptation of Phoenicianism were rendered exquisite, irresistible, and profoundly compelling through the magic flowing from Charles Cormâs literary work. Khalil Takieddine admits to not being a fan of ânational literatureâ; yet Cormâs poetry, he stressed, commanded our attention because it broke free from the constraints of time and space and persons, and âit soared high above and beyond Lebanon, to heights far removed from narrow nationalism and into a most capacious universalism.â29 Cormâs work is universal and humanist in the true sense of the terms, wrote Takieddine, and it is the outcome of Cormâs own spacious, universalist, vigorously and profoundly humanist formation; âa fine, delicious culture that eludes a good many of our company of literati in Lebanon today.â30 And whereas Amin Rihaniâs Arabist leanings compelled him to criticize Cormâs use of French instead of Arabic, Khalil Takieddine merely wished Corm had written in Arabic, âif only to show those so-called Arabic-language poets of our times â who in reality are scribblers and poseurs and cheap wordsmiths â how true poetry makes the heart flutter, how it makes the eye yearn for the sublime, and how its music lets loose oneâs feelings and stirs the emotions.â31
In sum, La Montagne Inspirée was a stirring and exhilarating poem both to those who knew Charles Corm personally, and those who did not; to Lebanese who were invested in and sensitive to Cormâs themes, and to foreigners who were not. To the Lebanese, La Montagne Inspirée was a veritable epopée. the stuff of legends, evoking in living poetic form all the hopes, the emotions, the disappointments, and the yearnings and memories of a people. Indeed, if there were such a thing as a repository in book-form for the spirit of a nation, Charles Cormâs La Montagne Inspirée-had to be it; âa kaleidoscope of emotions,â wrote Albert Naccache, âwonderfully depicted; a book that bewilders at first, then grabs hold of your heart, parading before you cavalcades of the most diverse of centuries and the most contradictory of events, where Lebanon is restituted in all its glory and splendour.â32 Charles Corm is sometimes âtoo realisticâ in his depiction of historical events, often âtoo brassyâ in formulating his thoughts and his imageries, âyet he remains an idealist to a fault, supremely principledâ; an incarnation and confirmation of all that is great and graceful in Lebanon.33 The brassiness of Cormâs poem can perhaps be summarized in the three simple words that he casually throws out at the beginning of each cycle: Traduit du Libanais or âtranslated from the Lebanese language.â Therefore, while wielding all the languages of mankind, often with the intimacy of natives â as in the case with French â the Lebanese still breathed, clasped, sensed, and spoke a unique Lebanese language. And so ends Cormâs âsymphonic epopéeâ with the discloser that âeven these sweet words, / Stolen from Franceâs lips, / With impassioned affection / Quivering in my heart, / Still taste on my lips, / Where my smiling sorrow sits, / Still taste of a Lebanese kiss.â
2 Conclusions
The work of francophone Lebanese novelist and member of the Académie Française Amin Maalouf (b. 1949) beautifully summarizes (and pays tribute to) the cultural humanism and the diverse polyglot cosmopolitanism promoted by the Young Phoenicians. Indeed, Amin Maaloufâs personal trajectory, and even his literary characters, often read like ideas and ideals drawn from the Lebanon of Charles Corm and the Young Phoenicians. Maalouf even brought elements of this, his supremely Lebanese experience, to the acceptance speech he delivered at his induction into the Académie Française in June 2012. Sitting on the Académieâs Chair number twenty-nine â a perch once occupied by Ernest Renan (1823â1892), a hero of sorts to the Young Phoenicians â Maalouf pledged to bring to the legacy of this venerable French institution all that he had inherited from the land of his birth; his origins, his languages, his accent, his convictions, his doubts, and more than anything else perhaps, his dreams of humanist harmony, progress, and coexistence among contradictions and opposites.34
Even the engravings on Maaloufâs ceremonial sword illustrate âPhoenicianistâ ideals and the idea of contact and linguistic-intellectual intercourse between civilizations: on one side of the sword were featured an image of Marianne (symbolizing the French Revolution) grazing a Cedar of Lebanon, along with an engraving depicting the archetypal Phoenician princess, Europa, her abduction by an oxen image of the Greek god Zeus, and her establishment on the continent that would come to carry her name. On the other side of the ceremonial sword were etched the names of Maaloufâs wife and three sons, along with two words, âexileâ and âidentity,â written in Arabic letters.35
And so, Amin Maaloufâs Académicienâs themes (or dreams) are found to be not all that different from those advanced by his Young Phoenicians elders; the images of Zeus and Europa are a symbol of the millennial tradition of contacts and cultural intercourse between Phoenicia and indeed the East as a whole on the one hand (a notion illustrated by the princess Europa whose name she would bequeath to a continent and a culture), and the West as illustrated by the god Zeus on the other.
âThis inflection that you hearâ in my Lebanese rendition of the French language, began Maaloufâs speech to the Académie, is an accent that precious few ever hear any more in our France of today; it is certainly not the mode of speech in the confines of this bastion of French language and literature, the Académie Française.36 Yet, asserted Maalouf, the ârolled âRââ of his Lebanese-inflected French language had been the norm of all Frenchmen of times past: from the greats of seventeenth century French literature like La Bruyère and Racine, to sixteenth-century precursors such as Rabelais and Ronsard, to the very kings of France and the founder of the Académie himself, the Cardinal de Richelieu (ca. 1635), all of France once spoke with rolled âRs.â Therefore, Malouf claims:
This rolled ârâ is not coming to you from Lebanon; it is simply coming back from there. My [Lebanese] ancestors did not invent it. They simply preserved it in the form in which they had received it from the mouths of your forebears, [â¦] many of whom â like Volney, Lamartine, and Barrès, to name only those â visited us often. [â¦] Let me pause for a moment and reflect briefly on one of those Lebanese at heart: Ernest Renan. Renan wrote his âLife of Jesusâ in six weeks, in one sitting, at the foot of Mount-Lebanon. He had wished to be buried there, in Lebanon, near the coastal city of Byblos, in the vault where his beloved sister, Henriette, lay. [â¦] People often attribute the ascendancy and influence of the French language to Franceâs colonial era. That may be the case in many places in the world! Not so in Lebanon. [⦠Our] romance is centuries old. The love story between the homeland of my birth and my adoptive country owes little to military conquest and much to the skilled diplomacy of King François I [â¦] who took special interest in the peoples of the Levant.37
Therefore, this Franco-Lebanese romance, claimed Maalouf, is ongoing and has been evolving since at least the thirteenth century. Yet, he noted, its true origins were much more removed in time, going back to an era when gods and men walked the earth alongside one another, and when the god Zeus, assuming the likeness of an ox, seduced a Phoenician maiden named Europa and made off with her from the Lebanese coasts of Tyre and Sidon to the continent that would become her own, bearing her name.38 Later, Europaâs brother Cadmus, on his quest to find his sister and bring her home, transmitted to the Greeks the Phoenician alphabet, precipitating the development of the Greek alphabet (and with it Greek knowledge), and all that would follow in manner of human accomplishments. This was mythology of course, admitted Maalouf, but âmythology tells us stories that History itself might have forgotten; and this myth of the abduction of Europa in particular, is a codified acknowledgement of a debt â the cultural debt owed by ancient Greece to ancient Phoenicia.â39
Amin Maalouf concluded the âPhoenicianâ segment of his speech by borrowing a description of Cadmus from the man that he was replacing on the Académieâs Chair number twenty-nine â cultural anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss â who portrayed the Phoenician archetype as âthe civilizer [of Europe]; [the man who] had sown the dragonâs teeth [â¦] upon this land, scorched and burnt as it were by a monsterâs breath, [where] we awaited [and witnessed] the sprouting of mankind.â40
I would like to close with a quote from Amin Maaloufâs historical novel Leo Africanus, because I think the protagonist [Leo Africanus] serves as a model for Lebanon and the Middle East as a whole (past, and hopefully future), but also because Leo encapsulates the archetypal Young Phoenician of Charles Cormâs generation. Maaloufâs Leo saw his native land as a richly textured human, cultural, and historical space, composed of Arabs and Muslims (and their artefacts) to be sure, but teeming with non-Arabs and non-Muslims (and their artefacts) as well; a space with topologies, climates, histories, languages, geographies, and cultural monuments favourable to diverse human compositions, synthesizing centuries of intellectual, linguistic and cultural traffic. As one may discern, Amin Maaloufâs Leo Africanus may indeed be seen as an anthropomorphic Lebanon, a Lebanon of the Young Phoenicians certainly, but also a microcosm of the rest of the Levantine Middle East. This is how Leo introduced himself to his readers in Maaloufâs narrative:
I, Hassan, the son of Muhammad the scale master; I, Jean-Léon de Médicis, circumcised at the hands of a barber and baptized at the hands of a Pope, I am now called the African. But I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the âGranadan,â the âFezzi,â the âZayyati,â but I come from no country, from no city, from no tribe. I am the son of the road; a wayfarer. My homeland is the caravan; my life the most spectacular of pathways, the most riveting of travels ⦠â My wrists have rubbed, in turn, against the caresses of silk, the chafing of wool, the gold of princes, and the chains of slaves. My fingers have parted a thousand veils, my lips have made a thousand virgins blush, and my eyes have seen cities die and empires collapse. From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin, and Italian vulgates, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none.41
This is the Lebanon of the Young Phoenicians (and through it, the rest of the Middle East), a diverse universe that many of its children are still striving to preserve. This is ultimately the future of the Middle East; a recasting of identity and language and places of memory in a space that is anything but the monolith that we have come to perceive in these past one hundred years of encounters, discoveries, analyses and interpretations. Some may opt to forget history, or rewrite history, or even suppress and falsify history for political purposes. But âHistory is the collective memory, the guiding experience of human society,â wrote Bernard Lewis, and the Middle East, its motley crew of peoples, traditions, and cultures âstill badly need [the] guidanceâ of history as both an art and a science; a noble human and humanist endeavour.42 It is from this premise that muffled and concealed Middle Eastern voices â their languages and their stories â ought to be excavated, uncovered, restored, and recovered.
Bibliography
Akl, Saïd. âNetruk Baʾa l-Ê¿Arabiâ [Enough Already with the Arabic Language]. Lebnan IX,433 (August 10, 1984).
Antar, Ornella. âDepuis des millénaires le peuple libanais nâa pas bougé dâun iota.â LâOrient Le Jour (July 29, 2017). https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1064754/-depuis-des-millenaires-le-peuple-libanais-na-pas-bouge-dun-iota-.html.
Archache, Jeanne. âLa Bourse Egyptienne.â Extraits de la Critique, Alexandria (February 8, 1935).
Boustany, Fouad Ephrem. âLa trace du Phénicien Ugaritique dans le parler libanais.â Opera Minora; Studia Libanica 69â87. Beirut: Editions ad-daʾirah, 1986.
Charrier. âDomestic and Foreign Research.â Extraits de la Critique, New York (November 25, 1934).
Chiha, Michel. Le Liban dâAujourdâhui (1942). Beyrouth: Editions du Trident, 1961.
Chiha, Michel. Visage et presence du Liban. Beyrouth: Le Cénacle Libanais, 1984 (2nd edition).
Corm, Charles. âDéclaration de M. Ch. Corm.â In Les Principes dâun Humanisme Méditerranéen (Monaco, November 1935).
Corm, Charles. La Montagne Inspirée. Beirut: Ãditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 1934/1987.
Deeb, Marius. Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah: The Unholy Alliance and its War on Lebanon. Stanford, California: The Hoover Institution Press, 2013.
E.M. âLa Revue du Liban et de lâOrient Méditerranéen.â Extraits de la Critique, Paris (February 1934). Beirut: Ãditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 1935.
Epstein, Eliahu. âLebanese Renaissance: La Montagne Inspirée by Charles Corm.â Palestine Post, Jerusalem (February 24 1935).
Kedourie, Elie. âNot So Grand Illusions.â New York Review of Books 9,9 (Nov. 23, 1967).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1995.
Lewis, Bernard. From Babel to Dragomans; Interpreting the Middle East. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Maalouf, Amin. Léon lâAfricain. Paris: Livres de Poche, 1987.
Maalouf, Amin. âDiscours de réception et réponse de M. Jean-Christophe Rufin; Réception de M. Amin Maalouf.â Paris: Académie française, June 14, 2012. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-de-amin-maalouf.
Naccache, Albert. LâOrient (January 14, 1934).
Rihani, Amin. âJabal al-TajallÄ«.â [The Mount of Transfiguration] Al-MaÊ¿raḠ(special issue) 38 (July 4, 1934).
Salameh, Franck. Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East; The Case for Lebanon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
Takieddine, Khalil. âal-Jabal al-Mulham wa-al-Adab al-Ê¿ÄlamÄ«.â [the Hallowed Mountain and Universal Literature]. al-MaÊ¿raḠ(special issue) 38 (July 4, 1934).
Tyane, Ãlie. Lumière sur la Montagne. Beirut: Ãditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 1935.
Zalloua, Pierre A. et al., âIdentifying Genetic Traces of Historical Expansions: Phoenician Footprints in the Mediterranean.â American Journal of Human Genetics 83,5 (2008). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668035/.
Elie Kedourie, âNot So Grand Illusions,â New York Review of Books 9,9 (Nov. 23, 1967). No page number.
Franck Salameh, Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East; The Case for Lebanon (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 45.
Michel Chiha, Visage et presence du Liban, 2ème édition (Beyrouth: Le Cénacle Libanais, 1984), 49. All translations from Arabic and French originals are the authorâs own.
Marius Deeb, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah: The Unholy Alliance and its War on Lebanon (Stanford, California: The Hoover Institution Press, 2013), xivâxv.
Michel Chiha, Le Liban dâAujourdâhui (1942) (Beyrouth: Editions du Trident, 1961), 49â52.
Chiha, Visage et presence, 49â52, 164.
Charles Corm, âDéclaration de M. Ch. Corm,â Les Principes dâun Humanisme Méditerranéen (Monaco, November 1935), 25.
Corm, âDéclaration de M. Ch. Corm,â 25.
Corm, âDéclaration de M. Ch. Corm,â 24.
Throughout its modern history, Lebanese Arabists who saw the countryâs cultural accretions as corollaries of Arab-Muslim history used Modern Standard Arabic as their political and literary medium. Conversely, those Lebanese who saw their identity to be the outcome of a pre-Arab â i.e., Phoenician â progenitor were largely, albeit not exclusively, francophone.
See for instance the following websites related to the Bnay Qyomo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVrnWRDVLqk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fappJX7DX6U; https://www.facebook.com/BnayQyomo/posts/1679274845681410; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFzFwKhLzrU.
See for instance Fouad Ephrem Boustanyâs âLa trace du Phénicien Ugaritique dans le parler Libanaisâ in Opera Minora; Studia Libanica (Beirut: Editions ad-Daâirah, 1986), 69â87.
For instance, Lebanese poet and language reformer Saïd Akl (1912â2014,) a friend and mentee of Charles Corm and Michel Chiha, claimed âspoken Lebaneseâ to be a language sui generis â a Semitic language to be sure, but a distinct language â that is not an offspring of Arabic. The âLebanese language,â Akl argued, âcan best be described as the sum of centuries of a congenital bilingualism and a natural confluence between Canaanite, Aramaic, Latin languages, Arabic dialects, and Turkish.â Certain syntactic peculiarities of Lebanese, he noted, âare clearly Phoenician and Aramaic, while the lexicon may also draw heavily on Arabic, Latin, French, or Turkish.â And so, stressed Akl, âthe Lebanese language is not some vulgar form of an eloquent and arcane Arabic [â¦]; it is an indigenous and spontaneous outcome of a uniquely Lebanese experience [â¦], and it has always been the native spoken language of the Lebanese people.â It has certainly been transformed over the millennia, he admitted, to reach the modern spoken form under which it is found today; but it remains âan evolved form of Phoenician, not a vulgar or colloquial Arabic.â (see for instance âNetruk Baʾa l-Ê¿Arabiâ [Enough Already with the Arabic Language], Lebnan, (Beirut: Volume IX, Number 433, Friday August 10, 1984), 1.
Charles Corm, La Montagne Inspirée (Beirut: Ãditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 1934/1987), 105â6.
It is not within the scope of this paper, and neither is it my intent, to prove or disprove the veracity of Charles Cormâs claim. Many Lebanese Maronites of Cormâs grandparentsâ generation, into the mid- to late- nineteenth century, did indeed cling to remnants of Syriac â even if only for liturgical and ceremonial purposes. However, the focus here is purely on the context of ideas and intellectual history: the fact that such a claim was indeed made (and continues to be made) in modern Lebanon, and why. Thus, what concerns me are the socio-political and intellectual impulses behind such claims rather than their âlinguisticâ credibility or historical accuracy. Corm is obviously appealing to an âinternalâ language here; an emotive affective amulet with which he seeks to âresurrectâ his âancestral tongue,â even if only as a lyrical pursuit to satisfy personal (or patriotic/nationalist) yearnings for the âlanguage of the Phoenicians.â The fact that he prefaces each âsagaâ in his poem with the phrase traduit du Libanais (or âtranslated from the Lebanese languageâ) speaks precisely to the âsoul,â the âinspiration,â or the âinternal languageâ behind the poems; these are all sentiments that remain fundamentally Lebanese in Cormâs telling. Therefore, although Corm uses all the languages of mankind, often with the intimacy and alacrity of natives â as is the case with Cormâs French language here â the Lebanese of Cormâs persuasion (and generation) still breathed, clasped, sensed, and spoke a distinctly unique Lebanese language.-And so, Cormâs âsymphonic epopeeâ ends with the disclosure that âeven these sweet words, / Stolen from Franceâs lips, / With impassioned affection / Quivering in my heart, / They still taste on my lips, / Where my smiling sorrow sits, / Still taste of a Lebanese kiss.â
Corm, La Montagne Inspirée, 101â2.
Boustany, âLa trace du Phénicien Ugaritique,â 70.
Pierre A. Zalloua et al., âIdentifying Genetic Traces of Historical Expansions: Phoenician Footprints in the Mediterranean,â American Journal of Human Genetics 83, 5 (2008). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18976729. See also Ornella Antarâs âDepuis des millénaires le peuple libanais nâa pas bougé dâun iotaâ in LâOrient Le Jour, Beirut, July 29, 2017. https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1064754/-depuis-des-millenaires-le-peuple-libanais-na-pas-bouge-dun-iota-.html.
Ãlie Tyane, Lumière sur la Montagne (Beirut: Ãditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 1935), 7.
Tyane, 8.
See E.M., âLa Revue du Liban et de lâOrient Méditerranéen,â Paris, February 1934, in Extraits de la Critique (Beirut: Ãditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 1935), 3.
E.M., âLa Revue du Liban,â 3â4.
Jeanne Archache, âLa Bourse Egyptienne,â Alexandria, February 8, 1935, in Extraits de la Critique, 6.
Charrier, âDomestic and Foreign Research,â New York, November 25, 1934, in Extraits de la Critique, 4.
Eliahu Epstein, âLebanese Renaissance: La Montagne Inspirée by Charles Corm,â Palestine Post, Jerusalem, February 24, 1935.
Amin Rihani, âJabal al-TajallÄ«â [The Mount of Transfiguration] (Beirut: Al-Maarad, Special Issue, Number 38, July 4, 1934), 9.
Rihani, âJabal al-TajallÄ«,â 9.
Rihani, âJabal al-TajallÄ«,â 9.
Khalil Takieddine, âal-Jabal al-Mulham wa-al-Adab al-Ê¿ÄlamÄ«â [the Hallowed Mountain and Universal Literature] (Beirut: al-MaÊ¿raá¸, Special Issue, Number 38, July 4, 1934), 25.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid.
Albert Naccache, LâOrient, Beirut, January 14, 1934.
Naccache, LâOrient.
See Amin Maalouf, âDiscours de réception et réponse de M. Jean-Christophe Rufin; Réception de M. Amin Maaloufâ (Paris: Académie française, June 14, 2012), http://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-de-amin-maalouf.
âAmin Maalouf entre à lâAcadémie Françaiseâ in Le Monde, June 14, 2012, https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2012/06/14/amin-maalouf-entre-a-l-academie-francaise_1718861_3260.html.
Maalouf, âDiscours de réceptionâ.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1995), 141.
Amin Maalouf, Léon lâAfricain (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1987), 2. It is worth noting that Leo Africanus was a real life personality; his name was Hassan al-Wazzan, Leo the African, a sixteenth century Andalusian Amazigh Muslim diplomat and author, best known for his book Descrittione dellâ Africa (Description of Africa); he was born a Muslim and raised as a Christian in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was converted to Catholicism by Pope Leo X, who gave him his name.
Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans; Interpreting the Middle East (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 395.