Relationship with the Past
My first threads of consciousness attach to memories of annual summer visits to my mother’s village in Southern Lebanon. The Mediterranean air brings in the sun through the tall, deep-set windows of my family’s flat, fills the large rooms and long hallways with the particular weight of Mediterranean light, the sea we see from the west-facing veranda as a pulsing blue-gray band in the distance past the layers of green that make up the citrus orchards that fill this part of the country. Wherever I am, I can taste that fruit, feel the hard stone floors under my tiny feet as I pad down the long hallways that connect the rooms where we spend our days, hear the murmuring of the observant among us as we lay out our prayer rugs in the bedrooms in response to the mosques echoing electronic prayers from the nearby village square. In these images that fill me to the brim, there is the quiet impossibility of childhood comfort and there are the days that blaze through memory, hours spent playing cards in the flat’s central sitting room, its nucleus, as bombs raged in the distance like thunder, afternoons on the east-facing veranda eating grapes as we waved to soldiers hanging from the tanks passing in the adjacent street, their semi-automatic weapons glinting at us in the sun.
Nearly three decades after the Lebanese War’s official end, I often feel like that small child, in shock and awe at the world around me, though supposedly I am an adult, a professor, a writer. Sights and sounds come before words, and translating sensations of Lebanon has fueled my writing life until now, permutating in short stories, essays, a novel I have been working on for ten years. The images repeat and transform again, confounding me with the question of what meaning to make.
My family’s flat now sits mostly empty, though it is still ours. For an hour last time I was there, six years ago now, I stopped in and was transfixed by the light, the floors, the prayer calls, and how it all felt very much the same. Though the rooms are no longer filled with siblings, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, countless visitors, photographs of such people abound, tucked in the corners of all the mirrors, under the glass tops of the small tables, and hung up on the glossy-painted walls, where the oldest black and white portraits show my ancestors, unsmiling, proud, women wearing scarves over their hair in black or white and long close-fitting dresses and men in small caps and dresses. When I was two and three years old and I peered up at them, I didn’t see people who had traveled to a studio for one of their few chances of being remembered for generations; I saw ghosts frozen in time. My favorite of these ghosts had a bright white fitted cap that rose from his head a few inches and encircled his forehead above his dark eyebrows and his trim white beard. He wore a white collared shirt and a black blazer, and I came to learn he was my grandmother’s father, Sheikh Ahmed Aref el-Zein. In his eyes and nose I see my mother’s eyes, my cousins’ heavy brows.
Somewhere between my childhood and adulthood, I’d been told that Sheikh Ahmed owned the first printing press in Southern Lebanon on which he printed a journal about Islam called Al-Irfan. The Library of Congress had copies of it, I was told, though I never looked for them. This felt like an absurd story, a fairytale. And though I can’t quite tell when that feeling shifted—Nine Eleven, maybe? The rapid uptake of the Internet?—it did, and the world changed. In the thick of this change and shift, my mother and her cousin collaborated on a Wikipedia entry about Sheikh Ahmed, and the man came in sharper, his story reframed:
Sheikh Ahmed was a pre-eminent Muslim scholar and thinker, who miraculously lived through three political versions of Lebanon—Ottoman rule, the French Mandate, and independence—and, yes, owned the first printing press in Southern Lebanon, which he used to print Al-Irfan (trans: “knowledge, awareness, wisdom”) monthly from 1909 through his death in 1960 and then was printed intermittently by his heirs until the 1990s. Among his main concerns were lifting the status of women, opposing polygamy, and appreciating the study of science and practicality as equal to religion and literature. His mission, it seemed, was to unify religious sects and elevate the perception of Islam in the modern world, something he sought to enact through the voices in his journal, which he saw a mirror of the voices in his community.
I am part of a Facebook group of his descendants, where family members post scans of old pictures of him (my favorite shows his diminutive body next to the wizard-looking man with beard and robe who the poster states is Archbishop Athenaguras of Antakya), news about my mother’s cousin presenting on her PhD dissertation concerning Sheikh Ahmed, photos of where we are in the present moment, digital memorials to new marriages and babies in Australia, France, the U.S., and Lebanon. Virginia Woolf acknowledges that the “most striking peculiarity” of words is “their need for change,” and that it is because of “this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive.” And though she is writing in English and about English, I want to know how she would have accounted for this change amidst diaspora and sectarian politics and digital media. But she is not here, and my stories of Sheikh Ahmed swirl, like the ice in the tumbler of whiskey I contentedly nursed that last time I was in Lebanon, as I stood in the doorway of a veranda in Beirut, listening to family members give me more, going further back in time. The words in my journal recounting that night:
“The Zeins were the first Shias in Jabal Aamel (another name for Southern Lebanon, trans: ‘Aamel Mountain’ or ‘Mountain of the Worker’), there since the 1660’s. Some say Shias first appeared in Jabal Aamel. Zeins=first Shias?”
“The printing press came from Germany in 1909. Worth of three villages.”
“Those who wrote for Al-Irfan were not only Muslim.”
“Sheikh Ahmed key player in Al-Nahda, trans ‘Renaissance.’ What happened to Al-Nahda?”
“Politicians used sects to divide the Middle East. Middle East as world-nucleus.”
“Disintegration of Islam/unification of Islam?”
After visiting the family flat that last time, we drove the few kilometers to Sidon, where Sheikh Ahmed lived, and wandered through the alleyways of the Old City, an ancient, shrunken neighborhood, half-preserved, half-ruined, somehow un-obliterated by the Lebanese War. Wandering the lanes where people have lived and died and loved and hated and sold their wares for hundreds of years, we ogled newly dried natural sea sponges, rows of brightly colored polyester underwear, fresh bread baked in ancient ovens, plastic toy cars from China. We followed a small passageway out into a courtyard, with some tables set up at one side, a small café selling sandwiches and tea, and my now Beiruti aunt pointed to a large wooden door opposite, bound shut by rusted chains. “That was Sheikh Ahmed’s shop, where he kept his printing press,” she said. I’d been here before, been told this before, but it felt different, new, like my first time. We passed quickly, on our way somewhere else, and I took a furtive photo, a stranger behind me—though of course I was the truer stranger there—asking what business it was of mine to take pictures of this place.
Looking back at the image later, I notice various fliers are stuck to the door, brandishing the photos and slogans of political and religious leaders. These fliers are just a sampling of the declared divisions in this tiny country, representative of Lebanon’s broken political reality, which many often projected through the sacredness of religion that is a sad opposition to what Sheikh Ahmed envisioned. But this division, this dispersion, is characteristic of something new that is happening in so many of our contexts, something that I want to look at and understand, if I can bear it.