Laws and social norms establish a range of acceptable behaviors that reinforce stability and respect for authority. Though such boundaries aspire to be absolute, attitudes about violations of norms are often contingent upon the circumstances in which such limits are overstepped. The perceived justice or utility of norms become more flexible in times of social disruption and change when new or extraordinary developments force a reassessment of the value of the social boundaries, particularly when such change causes the enforcing authority to lose legitimacy. In such contexts, behaviors that are technically illegal or unethical can gain contextual legitimacy within contested discourses of law, power and morality if they validate or conform to contrarian narratives. The rapid change that characterized Lebanese history in the 19th century and the traumas of crisis, imperialism and war in the 20th century provide ample evidence of this complex relationship between law and lore. By contesting the encroachment of state authority and global capitalism through self-interested smuggling operations, muleteers in 19th century Mount Lebanon were recast as social bandits in contemporaneous narratives and in social memory. Similarly, Ottoman maladministration and widespread suffering helped transform subversive crimes like smuggling into a form of political critique in the contemporary observations of the famine of World War I. Less traumatically, change in society during the French mandate inspired leftist intellectuals who comprised the activist iltizam movement to violate traditionally conceived boundaries of scholarly behavior in their effort to achieve political and social change. Moral boundaries were particularly flexible in wartime as well, wherein ideological martyrs of the Civil War like the communist intellectual 'Imad Nuwayhid were transformed by their compatriots into abstract, often contested symbols due to their willingness to violate peacetime norms during the conflict. This panel explores the history of such extralegal behaviors and their reception by Lebanese society as possible modes of resistance that extend beyond riot or rebellion. It asks: When do societies cling to social norms that conflict with an imposed law and when do social norms prove less durable? When does law alter them? Who determines what is moral? How does the collective that justifies the law-breaking individual come together, what kind of cooperation does it offer - and what motivates it? The deliberate transgression of social boundaries by the individuals discussed in this panel highlight the complex responses to crisis and change and the consequences thereof in Lebanese history.
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The Ottoman entry into World War I devastated the economies of coastal Syria and Mount Lebanon, tipping the region into a famine that would last from 1915 to 1918. Discontent with the Ottoman wartime administration increased as the situation worsened. Ill-conceived Ottoman policies and the state’s association with alleged profiteers eroded the state’s moral authority to enforce laws that were increasingly viewed as malicious by sufferers and outside observers alike. In the absence of normal economic opportunities, both desperation and opportunity contributed to the rise of adaptive coping strategies, including actions that skirted or blatantly violated the law. However, despite the moral and legal implications of such criminal behavior, contemporary observations and retrospective narratives about the period indicate that not all of this crime was seen as equal. Indeed, the exigency of the famine not only diminished the incentive to conform to legal and social norms, it eventually produced a wartime culture that saw the violation of purportedly unjust legal and physical boundaries like the “blockade of the mountain” as laudable, even heroic. The role of justice in this development was key, since certain crimes like smuggling were granted reprieve, whereas other economic adaptations like graft and profiteering were regarded as more reprehensible by their commission during the crisis because they were seen as inflaming the already terrible inequity of suffering in the crisis. The social endorsement of such behaviors suggest the existence of an “immoral economy” that developed as a subtle form of resistance to state and market authority. Unlike Hobsbawm’s notion of social banditry, such transgressors were not necessarily criminals by profession, merely by circumstance, and unlike the active collectivity of E.P. Thompson’s “moral economy,” violations remained subtle amid the repression of the war. However, the elevation of such behaviors within narratives critical of Ottoman policy implies a similar sense of critical solidarity inspired by the injustice of the famine and the apparent indifference of the authorities to address it. The prevalence of such subtle contestations of authority and the social acceptance of a specific set of crimes-against-injustice demonstrates that the authority of social and legal boundaries is not solely bound to their utility in times of crisis, but also to how they are socially perceived by the actors they purport to limit.
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Joan Chaker
This paper makes the case for a study of the social transformation of the countryside as it joins the global market over the long nineteenth century, told through the prism of a collective biography of the mule drivers of Ottoman Lebanon – those obscure peasants who, owning one or a few mules, made their livelihood in the transport of goods and persons rather than work the land. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, those agents mobilized for peasant revolts as a village-based economy turned to cash-crop agriculture, and as the central government embarked on building a new state apparatus that would insure its survival within global capitalism, rendering the peasants’ situation ever more precarious. As of the 1860s and to the First World War, as local resources were diverted to feed European industry and local petty-trade networks came undone, when elites at all levels struggled to assert their control over labor and resources, these same muleteers turned into social bandits – smugglers who defended the peasant against the state’s taxation and the capitalists’ extraction. Some of them accumulated wealth and ultimately integrated an emerging middle class.
Grounded in conventional archival work – within the collections of the Maronite Church as well as the documents of the local administrations governing the Lebanese mountain over the period – and expanding the conventional archive to include novels, folklore, and oral history, this account allows for a discussion of the moral as conditional on material conditions that go beyond parochial culture and local contingencies. By drawing parallels with other rural transport workers in the Anatolian and Romanian hinterlands of the Ottoman Empire, as well as with the gauchos of Latin America, ox-cart drivers of India, and rickshaw pullers of China, this local history links the cultural norms that shape the actions of actors in Lebanon to objective structural transformation observable across the rural global south.
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Dr. Sana Tannoury Karam
In the summer of 1943, 'Umar Fakhuri, a Lebanese intellectual and man of letters, ran as a candidate supported by the Communist Party for a parliamentary seat in Beirut in the Lebanese elections that preceded independence that year. Responding to criticisms that emerged against his involvement in politics as an ad?b, Fakhuri argued that if it were his role traditionally to safeguard human morals and values, shouldn't it also be his concern when these very values are being threatened? Shouldn't he react or even take sides? According to Fakhuri, most of the udab?' of his time might have been scared that by being engaged, they had to continuously change with the changing society. What they did not understand, Fakhuri argued, was that life and society were inevitably going to change. If the ad?b did not reflect and accommodate that change, he and his literature would cease to be relevant and would wither away; however, society and its life would continue to exist. Fakhuri, one of the pioneers of the literary movement of iltizam, argued for the political engagement of men of letters and intellectuals.
This paper explores how leftists during the Mandate period infused their perspectives on literature and its role in society with influences from the nahda and the times they lived in. It examines the way Fakhuri and others discussed literature and engaged with the debate on commitment, arguing that by doing so, they pushed the boundaries of literature, of their status as intellectuals, and of the public sphere itself. They also questioned the categories that allowed individuals to be involved in the public sphere, first by arguing for literature for and by the people, and then for conceptualizing a category of intellectuals (muthaqqaf?n) that pushed against the traditional category of scholars. By examining the pioneers of iltizam in Mandate Lebanon, this paper in turn pushes against the historiographic periodization of this movement of literary commitment and questions its limits and scope beyond the parameters of Soviet socialist realism.
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‘Imad Nuwayhid (1945-1975) was an impressive young man. After receiving his education from the Lebanese University in 1966, ‘Imad moved to Europe during the student protests of the late 1960s. At the bequest of a French intellectual, ‘Imad also translated from French to Arabic the work of a famous Belgian, Jewish, anti-Zionist communist, in a few months no less. And upon his return to Lebanon in the 1970s, he received his law degree, all the while writing in defense of the Palestinian cause and its armed struggle. Lastly, and the point at which ‘Imad’s life story became a tale known by those beyond his immediate network, he fought and died as a fighter of the Lebanese Communist Party during the first phase of the Lebanese Civil War. While clearly a unique individual, ‘Imad was also a microcosm of the early Lebanese Civil War era (1969-1976). With his transformation from intellectual to fighter, and more importantly for the purposes of this paper, from a living, breathing, young man to a nameless symbol for the communist cause, ‘Imad’s biography reflects broader strategies of agents of violence during wartime.
Through examining communist party sources, newspaper reports, the personal writings of ‘Imad Nuwayhid, and interviews with individuals around the life and death of ‘Imad, this paper argues that parties to Lebanon’s civil war appropriated “ordinary,” rank and file fighters and turned them into party symbols, but not without tension. Many people accepted the authority of the party, taking no issue with reducing individuals like ‘Imad to a rallying call for future young fighters. Yet some family members of martyrs questioned the appropriation of their child or sibling. In the case of ‘Imad, those closest to him criticized the party, wondering why this budding intellectual was sent to the frontlines—an act they deemed inadmissible, even in the context of wartime. These family reactions thus represent a challenge to the Communist Party’s wartime strategies and hegemonic power, instead claiming ‘Imad as an individual.
This microhistory, and practices of those people and parties surrounding ‘Imad Nuwayhid, first confirms literature on the role of martyrdom in mobilization for war. Equally important, however, a look outside the party machine demonstrates the boundaries that family members contested. Indeed, the story around the life and death of ‘Imad highlights the very human side of assigning meaning in death, public and private memory, and morality and grief during violent encounters.
