Tradition more than identity

Phoenicianism may have been debunked but we still carry a proud legacy

When I was growing up in Britain in the 70s and 80s (a much less cosmopolitan place than it is now, I can assure you), it was a struggle to explain to people what it meant to be ‘Lebanese’. The Civil War was regularly on the news, but many people were still hazy as to where Lebanon actually was on the map and it was often mistaken for Muamar Gaddafi’s ‘Libya’, which also wasn’t exactly flavour of the month.

Then there was the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, which created a caricature of the deep-pocketed, Arab trading in his camel for a Rolls Royce and buying up London, while the decade ended with the Iranian revolution which gave us turbaned, bearded mullahs. All in all, it wasn’t a great look for the region, let alone poor old Lebanon, a country that had prided itself on its unique brand of cosmopolitanism but which now found itself being thrown in with everybody else.

How, amidst all these lazy clichés, could I explain that I was a Christian (forget trying to explain what a Maronite was) from a mountain village in the Metn; that my mother was a Melkite, whose family had moved from Zahle to Cairo in the 19th Century. These were surely nuances for the aficionado only.

And yes, we were part of the Arab world because we spoke Arabic, but that was the only common factor. To say that all Arabs were the same was like saying a Dane was the same as a Greek, because they were both European.

So is it any wonder that the Lebanese, who can be found all over the globe, and who have adopted so many other cultures alongside their own, are often plagued by identity insecurity? How many Mohameds, Alis or Bashirs who moved to the US are now Mikes, Als or Bobs? How many Oussamas rushed to change their name after 9/11?

In the late 80s, I was at a smart lunch party in London’s Chelsea, hosted by a Christian Lebanese woman. Amid the heady aroma of cigarettes, perfume and whisky, I heard her utter the immortal line “Bas, habibti. We are not Arabs; we are Phoenicians”.

Eureka! For someone who had struggled to blend in, I now had a brilliant and easy explanation of who I was that had nothing to do with RPG-toting, bearded fanatics. We weren’t Arabs (as the West understood Arabs), we were the descendants of ancient Canaanite traders, who sailed westward across the Mediterranean on boats laden with glass olive oil and purple dye and even wine. Yes. That’s right. The Phoenicians, who established city states along the Levantine coast and whose heyday was from 2500 BC to 64 BC, were among the first winemakers, a full 1,500 years before the French. We even appeared as a character in the Asterix books in the shape of Ekonomikrisis, the portly merchant from Tyre.

All this sat very nicely with the idea of the modern day Lebanese exiled by war who sought out their fortunes abroad. We weren’t refugees; we were adventurers!

But it appeared I had been living under a rock. ‘Phoenicianism’, to give it its proper name, was nothing new. Little did I know that this quaint notion was a powerful and popular nationalist ideology that first appeared in what is now Lebanon in the mid-19th century and was embraced by mainly Christian Lebanese around the time of the creation of the state in 1920. It would be used to counter Pan Arabism (especially the views espoused by the Syrian Social National party) and Pan Islamism and would later be the cornerstone of many of the ethno-ideologies adopted  by Christian, political groups during the civil war.

A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics reported that the modern Lebanese share about 93% of their DNA with ancient Canaanites. But DNA aside, the Phoenician cultural identity claim is now widely regarded as a romantic fantasy that has since been rejected by historians including such luminaries as Albert Hourani, Amin Al-Rihani and Kamal Salibi who said that “between ancient Phoenicia and the Lebanon of medieval and modern times, there is no demonstrable historical connection.”

But the historical and the scientific are separate from how each of us feels. While I no longer consider myself Phoenician (I like to think of myself as Levantine, if you must know) there is definitely a national characteristic defined by business acumen, resilience and self-sufficiency that can be traced back 3,000 years. In that respect, any Lebanese who goes to work either in Lebanon, under the crushing pressure of political and economic instability and the threat of conflict, or those who have travelled to seek prosperity, is the proud inheritor of a Phoenician tradition.

It’s a work ethic like no other, and no-one can take that away from us.