Ragheb Harb was a prominent Lebanese Shi’a cleric, political activist, and resistance figure who played a central role in mobilizing opposition to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon during the early 1980s. Known for his religious leadership and grassroots influence, Harb is regarded by many in southern Lebanon as a symbol of popular resistance. He is frequently cited as an early figure whose ideas and activities contributed to the emergence of organized Shi’a resistance movements in the country.

Early Life and Education

Ragheb Harb was born in 1952 in the southern village of Jibchit, a region historically associated with Shi’a scholarship and political activism. Raised in a religious household, he focused on Islamic studies from an early age, attending elementary public school in Jibchit and later continuing his middle school education in Nabatieh.

In 1969, at the age of 17, Harb relocated to Beirut to pursue advanced religious studies and engage with local clerical circles. Seeking further specialization, he traveled to the Islamic Hawza in Najaf, Iraq. There, he studied under prominent teachers, including Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, whose intellectual framework left a lasting impact on his religious and political outlook. However, his studies in Najaf were cut short by the political suppression of clerics by the Iraqi regime at the time, forcing his return to Lebanon in 1974.

Social and Religious Role

Upon his return to Jibchit, Harb began teaching religion and leading prayers, building a local following through his communicative approach. He expanded his activities beyond his hometown into surrounding villages and established the Sayede Zeinab Islamic School under his patronage. Later, following a move to the town of Al Sharkiah, he actively participated in building a two-story elementary school for the village children.

Beyond his clerical role, Harb established social and charitable projects to counter economic hardship and state neglect in the south. His most notable initiative was “The Treasury of the Muslims,” a local financial program designed to mitigate rural poverty by providing interest-free micro-loans ranging from 100 to 500 Lebanese pounds to families in financial distress.

By 1978, Harb publicly aligned with the aims of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He also played a foundational role in launching the Martyrs Foundation in Lebanon to support communities affected by civil conflict and external aggression. Through these community networks and religious programs, Harb actively worked to raise political consciousness and counter competing secular or nationalist ideologies among the southern Shi’a population.

Political Involvement and Resistance

Harb became closely associated with the Amal Movement, one of the first major Shi’a political organizations in Lebanon. When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, Harb was attending an Islamic conference in Iran. He promptly returned to the south to organize non-cooperation and civil resistance initiatives against the occupation, utilizing Friday prayers at local mosques as a primary platform for public mobilization.

Harb explicitly rejected any formal communication or compliance with Israeli military forces, emphasizing non-recognition via his widely known phrase: “

A position is a weapon and a handshake is an acknowledgment.”

In line with this stance, local accounts state that he publicly refused to acknowledge or shake hands with Israeli officers during patrols in his village.

This persistent civil defiance drew significant scrutiny from occupation forces, leading to a series of escalating security measures against him. In December 1982, Israeli troops raided his residence but did not locate him. He was eventually detained after midnight on March 8, 1983, by an Israeli military unit. Following his arrest, Harb was initially held at the intelligence headquarters in Zebdeen, transferred to the Ansar concentration camp, and subsequently moved to Tyre.

His arrest triggered widespread civilian protests, commercial strikes, and a continuous sit-in at the local Hussayniyah hall. Due to the escalating public pressure and local instability, Israeli authorities released him after seventeen days of detention. Following his release, localized armed resistance against the occupation intensified across the region.

Assassination and Legacy

On February 16, 1984, Ragheb Harb was assassinated on a Friday night in Jibchit. The operation was widely attributed to Israeli intelligence targeting influential operational and ideological figures in the southern resistance network.

Harb’s death had a major impact on Lebanese society, particularly within southern communities where he is commemorated as a foundational figure and often termed the “Cleric of the Martyrs.” Interpretations of Harb’s final legacy continue to vary across Lebanon’s multi-confessional political landscape, mirroring ongoing national debates concerning the role of independent armed resistance, sectarian identity, and modern state authority.

His methodology, however — uniting religious authority, institutional social work, and civil non-cooperation — significantly shaped the ideological and operational framework of subsequent Shi’a resistance movements in Lebanon.

To most people today, the name Karlheinz Stockhausen sounds like a footnote in classical music history. Yet, his ideas completely changed modern music. If you have ever listened to the tape loops on The Beatles’ albums, the spacious sounds of Pink Floyd, or the electronic rhythms of Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder, Ryuichi Sakamoto, you have heard his influence.

Stockhausen was a radical German composer who abandoned traditional melodies. Instead, he pioneered spatial music, treating pure sound as something you could physically move around a room using loudspeakers. His face sits on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, right behind Lenny Bruce — a nod from Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who studied his early electronic work. Miles Davis credited Stockhausen with shaping his electric jazz period, and the founders of the rock band Can were his actual students. In November 1969, his sonic revolution arrived in Lebanon.

The 1969 Jeita Grotto Concerts

In the late 1960s, Lebanon was in a cultural golden age — a vibrant hub where global art met Middle Eastern modernism. The Jeita Grotto, with its stunning limestone caves north of Beirut, had recently opened its upper galleries. To celebrate, Lebanese cultural institutions began hosting bold art events, and Stockhausen saw the caverns as the ultimate natural acoustic laboratory.

Along with a group of musicians, including the noted Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös, Stockhausen came to stage a series of concerts deep inside the earth. The site offered something no normal concert hall could: a massive, irregular space with a natural echo lasting up to eight seconds.

Stockhausen rigged the ancient stalactites and rocky vaults with a complex multi-channel speaker system. The audience did not sit in neat rows. Instead, Lebanese artists, intellectuals, and curious listeners walked through the dimly lit caves, completely enveloped by electronic tones bouncing off millions-of-years-old rock. It completely broke the rules of a traditional concert performance.

Captured on Film

This unusual meeting of ancient geology and new technology was captured in a 45-minute documentary called Karlheinz Stockhausen: In den Höhlen von Jeita (In the Caves of Jeita), co-directed by Anne-Marie Deshayes.

The film highlights the heavy physical labor required to haul primitive, sensitive electronic gear into a damp underground labyrinth. On camera, Stockhausen discusses his goals with intensity, praising Lebanon for its openness to atypical ideas and viewing Jeita as a unique place where the primordial past and the musical future could synthesize.

The Echo in Beirut’s Underground

Stockhausen’s visit was not just a temporary event; it left a lasting impression on the local landscape. Decades later, Beirut became the main hub for experimental and improvised music in the Arab world, carrying on that same spirit of pushing boundaries.

Sonic Waves from Jeita to Today

When Stockhausen sent electronic waves through the Jeita Grotto in 1969, he showed that Lebanon was at the center of global cultural innovation. Today, as Beirut’s independent musicians continue to play in unusual spaces — from underground bunkers to independent galleries — echoes of that November weekend remain legible in the city’s unique music scene.

In the cliffs of Lebanon’s Qadisha Valley, where monasteries cling to the mountainside and centuries of Maronite history survive in stone, one of the country’s oldest textile traditions lay hidden for more than seven hundred years.

In 1990, archaeologists excavating the cave of ‘Asi al-Hadath near Hadath al Jibbeh uncovered a remarkable discovery: the naturally mummified remains of villagers who had sought refuge during the Mamluk campaigns of the late thirteenth century. Alongside the mummies were manuscripts, leather shoes, wooden objects, seeds, and an extraordinary collection of textiles preserved by the cave’s unique conditions. Rarely does fabric survive so long in the eastern Mediterranean. These garments thus offer an exceptional glimpse into the everyday lives of medieval Maronite communities.

Among the discoveries were embroidered linen garments whose subtle beauty belies their historical importance. Overshadowed by Lebanon’s celebrated monasteries and illuminated manuscripts, these textiles preserve another dimension of the country’s heritage: the artistry of domestic life. Together, they represent the earliest known surviving corpus of Maronite embroidery and one of the oldest surviving collections of medieval counted-thread embroidery in the Levant.

Expressions of Thread

The embroidery was stitched directly onto linen using counted-thread techniques comparable to modern cross-stitch. By counting the fabric’s weave with remarkable precision, medieval embroiderers created balanced geometric compositions that united technical skill with artistic expression. Their work was more than decorative. Every motif reflected a visual language shaped by faith, identity, and tradition.

Although time reduced the garments to fragments, enough survives to reveal nine distinct decorative motifs. These include cross-centered compositions, diamonds and lozenges, stepped borders, lattice patterns, stylized birds, angular quadrupeds, floral-inspired forms, and symmetrical border ornaments. Designed as repeating units, the motifs once extended seamlessly across sleeves, collars, cuffs, and hems, giving rhythm and coherence to each garment.

Some of the most captivating designs depict birds and four-legged animals rendered in striking geometric forms. Rather than pursuing naturalistic representation, the embroiderers reduced living creatures to their essential shapes, reflecting a broader artistic tradition found throughout medieval Eastern Christian art, where symbolism often took precedence over realism.

Geometry, Devotion

Geometry lies at the heart of these embroideries. Crosses rarely appear as isolated emblems; instead, they emerge from diamonds, latticework, and repeating borders, becoming inseparable from the overall composition. The resulting patterns blur the distinction between ornament and devotion. Repetition suggested continuity and eternity, while symmetry expressed harmony and divine order. Every stitch contributed to a carefully balanced whole in which faith found expression through geometry.

Reconstructing a Lost Tradition

Reconstructing these damaged designs required more than artistic interpretation. Surviving stitch sequences, thread counts, repeating units, and axes of symmetry provided the evidence needed to restore missing sections with confidence. Only those elements supported by the underlying geometry were completed, ensuring that the reconstructed patterns remain faithful to the archaeological record rather than modern imagination.

The result is the first complete reconstruction of all nine known medieval Maronite embroidery motifs from Hadath al Jibbeh. By transforming fragile textile fragments into historically accurate digital cross-stitch charts, Lebanese fashion researcher Joe Chalitta has made it even easier for these designs to be studied, exhibited, and stitched once again after centuries of silence.

A Living Heritage

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Hadath embroideries is how familiar they still feel. Diamonds, stepped borders, latticework, and cross-centered compositions continue to appear in traditional Lebanese embroidery, particularly in mountain communities where geometric ornament remains central to local textile traditions. While these traditions evolved over the centuries, they preserve echoes of the same visual vocabulary.

Unlike monuments or manuscripts, embroidery survived through practice. Patterns passed from one generation to the next, adapting gradually while retaining their underlying structure.

Threads Across Seven Centuries

The embroidered garments of Hadath al Jibbeh remind us that Lebanon’s history is preserved not only in monasteries, churches, and manuscripts, but also in the artistry of everyday life. Every geometric border, stylized bird, and carefully balanced cross bears witness to artisans whose names have long been forgotten, yet whose work continues to speak across seven centuries.

Today, these reconstructed motifs are more than archaeological evidence. They restore a lost chapter of Lebanon’s artistic heritage and return a medieval visual language to contemporary hands. Once confined to fragile fragments preserved in a mountain cave, these designs can again be studied, stitched, and appreciated, ensuring that one of the country’s oldest surviving embroidery traditions remains a living part of its cultural memory today.

Among the architects who contributed to Lebanon’s architectural development during the French Mandate and the early years of independence, Mardiros Altounian (1889–1958) holds an important place. Best known as the architect of the Lebanese Parliament Building in Beirut’s Nejmeh Square, his work extended far beyond a single landmark. Over a career spanning four decades, he designed civic buildings, churches, mosques, hospitals, monuments, and private residences, contributing to the architectural character of a country undergoing profound political and urban transformation.

Education and the Making of an Architect

Born in Bursa in the Ottoman Empire to an Armenian family, Altounian studied architecture in Bulgaria before completing his education at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, graduating in 1918. The school’s emphasis on classical composition, proportion, and civic planning provided a rigorous foundation, but it did not define the limits of his practice. After marrying in 1919, he settled permanently in Beirut, arriving at a moment when the city was being reshaped under the French Mandate. New boulevards, public squares, and government institutions transformed the capital, creating opportunities for architects who could reconcile European planning with local traditions.

Beirut and the French Mandate

Altounian was one of several architects working during this formative period, alongside figures such as Youssef Aftimus, who had introduced Beaux-Arts principles to Lebanon in the late Ottoman era, and later architects including Antoine Tabet and Michel Ecochard. Collectively, they helped shape Beirut’s evolving urban identity. Altounian’s contribution was distinguished by his ability to adapt European academic training to the materials, proportions, and architectural vocabulary of Lebanon.

The Lebanese Parliament Building

His most celebrated work, the Lebanese Parliament Building, was completed in 1934 at the heart of Beirut’s redesigned civic center. Conceived during the French Mandate, it sought to embody a modern state while remaining rooted in local architectural traditions. Instead of reproducing European civic architecture, Altounian adapted Beaux-Arts planning to Lebanese forms, combining local limestone, triple-arched windows, arcades, and restrained ornament to create a building that was both monumental and unmistakably connected to its setting.

The Parliament Building demonstrates a careful balance between formal symmetry and regional character. Its disciplined composition reflects Altounian’s academic training, while its materials and architectural language evoke the historic houses and palaces of Mount Lebanon. Rather than relying on grand gestures, the design achieves its authority through proportion, clarity, and restraint. Nearly a century after its completion, it remains one of Lebanon’s most recognizable civic landmarks and continues to serve its original purpose.

The Al-Abed Clock Tower

Completed the same year, the Al-Abed Clock Tower forms an integral part of Nejmeh Square. Donated by Lebanese-Brazilian businessman Michel Abed, the tower was conceived as more than an ornamental monument. Together with Parliament and the surrounding urban plan, it helped define the architectural identity of Beirut’s civic center. Its elegant proportions and understated detailing exemplify Altounian’s preference for harmony over excess, reinforcing the coherence of one of the city’s most important public spaces.

Beyond Parliament

Although Parliament is his best-known achievement, it represents only part of Altounian’s architectural legacy. Throughout his career he accepted commissions from a remarkably diverse range of religious and civic institutions. His work includes the Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq Mosque in Beirut, the Cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator in Antelias, the Saint Paul Basilica in Harissa, the Armenian Sanatorium at Azounieh, and the Lawhat al-Jalaa (Evacuation Stele) commemorating Lebanon’s independence from foreign military presence. He also designed private residences, among them the Villa Asmahan in Aley, and the Melkonian Benefactors’ Mausoleum in Nicosia, Cyprus.

The breadth of these commissions reveals an architect comfortable working across Lebanon’s religious and cultural communities. Designing churches, mosques, charitable institutions, and civic buildings required sensitivity to different traditions rather than adherence to a single stylistic formula. Altounian approached each project individually, adapting his designs to their function while maintaining a consistent emphasis on proportion, craftsmanship, and context.

Architectural Philosophy

No formal architectural manifesto survives, yet his buildings reveal a clear and consistent approach. He favored disciplined planning, careful composition, and materials drawn from local building traditions. His Beaux-Arts education provided structure, but never became an end in itself. Instead, he used its principles to organize spaces that responded to Lebanon’s climate, urban fabric, and architectural heritage. This measured synthesis distinguished his work from both historical imitation and the increasingly international modernism that gained prominence after the Second World War.

Legacy

Altounian died in Beirut in December 1958 after a career that spanned the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the French Mandate, and the first decade of Lebanese independence. His work survives as part of the architectural record of a period when Lebanon was defining its institutions and its public image through the built environment.

Recent efforts to document and preserve Beirut’s architectural heritage have renewed interest in architects of the Mandate era, including Altounian. While he was one of several figures who contributed to Lebanon’s architectural development, his work remains notable for the balance it achieved between European academic training and Lebanese architectural tradition.

Hidden among the rocky slopes of Lebanon’s highest mountains lives one of the country’s most distinctive reptiles. Fraas’s lizard (Parvilacerta fraasii) is a small lacertid that has adapted to cool, high-altitude environments where few other reptiles can thrive. Although seldom encountered because of its secretive habits and restricted range, it represents a unique component of Lebanon’s biodiversity and an important part of the eastern Mediterranean’s natural heritage.

Taxonomy and Discovery

Fraas’s lizard belongs to the family Lacertidae, commonly known as the true lizards. It is one of only two recognised species in the genus Parvilacerta, a lineage that differs sufficiently from other lacertid lizards to warrant its own genus. The species was first described in 1910, and later taxonomic and genetic studies confirmed its distinct evolutionary relationships.

The specific name fraasii honours the German palaeontologist Eberhard Fraas, whose geological expeditions in the Levant contributed significantly to the scientific exploration of the region.

Distribution and Habitat

The species is endemic to Lebanon, with a distribution centred on the country’s central and northern mountain ranges. It inhabits rocky limestone slopes, alpine meadows, and sparsely vegetated hillsides, generally between 1,200 and 2,550 metres above sea level.

These elevations experience cool summers and long, snowy winters, creating conditions unlike the warmer Mediterranean lowlands. Fraas’s lizard is particularly associated with exposed rocks, scree slopes, and stone outcrops, where countless crevices provide shelter from predators, harsh weather, and temperature extremes.

Appearance and Behaviour

Adults are relatively small and slender, with a body length of only a few centimetres excluding the tail. Their colouration consists of shades of brown, grey, and olive, often marked with darker flecks or longitudinal patterning that blend remarkably well with weathered limestone.

Fraas’s lizard is a diurnal species, becoming active during the warmest hours of the day. Like most lacertids, it relies on basking to regulate its body temperature, alternating between sunny rocks and shaded refuges as conditions change. When threatened, it disappears rapidly into narrow cracks between stones, where its flattened body allows it to evade predators with remarkable efficiency.

Diet and Ecology

An agile predator, Fraas’s lizard feeds primarily on insects, spiders, and other small terrestrial invertebrates. By controlling populations of these animals, it contributes to the ecological balance of Lebanon’s mountain ecosystems. In turn, it provides food for snakes, birds of prey, and other native predators, making it an integral part of the alpine food web.

Because reptiles are highly sensitive to changes in temperature and habitat quality, the species also serves as a valuable indicator of the health of Lebanon’s high-altitude environments.

Reproduction

Fraas’s lizard is oviparous. During the breeding season, females lay small clutches of typically three or four eggs beneath stones or in sheltered patches of loose soil where warmth and humidity favour successful incubation. The hatchlings emerge fully independent and begin hunting tiny invertebrates soon after leaving the nest.

The species’ relatively short active season, imposed by the long mountain winter, means that feeding, breeding, and growth must all occur within just a few months each year.

Conservation

Fraas’s lizard has a naturally restricted distribution, making it particularly vulnerable to environmental disturbance. It is currently classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Habitat degradation resulting from quarrying, road construction, tourism infrastructure, and other forms of development threatens many mountain habitats, while climate change may gradually shift suitable environmental conditions to ever higher elevations.

Continued research, habitat protection, and effective management of Lebanon’s mountain landscapes will be essential for ensuring the long-term survival of this specialised reptile.

As for schooling, my clients are my teachers. They’re the ones who bring me the design problems. Schools get too easily divorced from the real world. In many places students graduate and become teachers without ever making a living from their work. They grow stale. There’s a preciousness I see in a lot of student work that comes from having too many hours to put into it. Perfection is fine, and nothing has left my shop that I’m not proud of, but you have to produce if you are going to make a living. I’ve heard people say they have to put a piece of wood aside until the spirit hits them. That’s procrastination. Pick it up and work it – you’ll feel the spirit. No, I think it’s an advantage being self-taught.

— Sam Maloof, December 1980, Fine Woodworking

In the history of mid-century American design, studio furniture makers generally divided into two camps: those who prioritized experimental art, and those who focused on functional production. Sam Maloof managed to bridge this divide. Over a fifty-year career, he established a workshop model that emphasized batch-production quality, ergonomic utility, and distinct joinery, influencing the trajectory of American studio craft.

Born in Chino, California, in 1916 to Lebanese immigrant parents, Maloof did not attend formal design schools. He spoke Arabic at home and learned basic construction skills through domestic necessity. Following his service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Maloof began building furniture for his home using surplus materials and salvaged dunnage. By the early 1950s, this utilitarian hobby transitioned into a full-time commercial enterprise as regional demand grew for his custom hardwood designs.

Design Mechanics and Woodworking Technique

Maloof’s furniture is defined by its rounded joints and hardline geometry. While contemporary mid-century designers utilized molded plywood and industrial plastics, Maloof worked almost exclusively in American hardwoods, particularly black walnut.

His production relied heavily on a band saw to rough out shapes, followed by extensive hand-shaping using rasps and scrapers. The distinctive aesthetic of his chairs comes from the joinery: he used a modified tongue-and-groove joint reinforced with long wood screws, which were then hidden by matching wooden plugs. This method allowed him to shave down the wood where the leg meets the seat, creating a smooth transition that became a visual hallmark of his work.

Ergonomics dictated his proportions. Maloof did not use formal blueprints; instead, he relied on prototype templates and adjusted measurements based on the physical feedback of the sitters. His rocking chairs featured elongated, curved runners that distributed weight evenly to prevent tipping while maintaining a low center of gravity.

Business Model and Production Ethos

Despite his rising profile in the 1970s and 1980s, Maloof rejected mass production or licensing agreements. He maintained a small workshop in Southern California, employing a few assistants to rough out components while he handled the final shaping, assembly, and oil finishing.

This small-scale approach created a backlog, with waiting lists often extending several years. To manage production, Maloof prioritized orders based on immediate human utility rather than client prestige; for example, orders for infant cribs were systematically moved to the front of the queue to ensure delivery before birth.

He resisted the label of “artist,” consistently listing his occupation on tax documents and business cards simply as “woodworker.” This distinction reflected his belief that furniture should be judged by its utility and structural durability rather than its conceptual value.

Institutional Recognition and Legacy

Maloof’s insistence on manual production did not limit his institutional reach. In 1985, he became the first craftsman to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. The award marked a shift in how major American museums viewed studio craft, validating furniture-making alongside fine arts.

His pieces were acquired by major permanent collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His rocking chairs were also selected for the White House Craft Collection during the Carter administration and remained in use across subsequent presidencies.

The historic Maloof home and workshop compound in Alta Loma, California, which he expanded by hand over several decades, is now a California Historical Landmark. Managed by the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts, the site functions as a museum and an educational center for wood design. For the global Lebanese diaspora, Maloof’s career serves as a case study in how traditional manual precision and disciplined workshop management can establish a lasting footprint in modern international design.

“I am a bishop. And a bishop is the good shepherd, not a mercenary who flees when the wolf comes.”

• Hilarion Capucci, interview with El País, 1981

Few churchmen of the twentieth century moved so visibly between altar and political storm as Hilarion Capucci. To some, he became a symbol of moral courage in a land defined by dispossession. To others, he crossed a line the clergy are not meant to cross at all. Neither image fully contains him.

Capucci was a Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop formed in a tradition where theology is lived inside history, not above it. His life unfolded in a region where political change is not an abstraction but a rearrangement of everyday space — movement, access, borders, and memory.

To understand him is not to resolve a verdict, but to read him against the conditions that shaped his world: a changing Levant, a transformed Jerusalem, and a Palestinian question experienced differently by the communities living through its consequences.

From Aleppo to Jerusalem

Hilarion Capucci was born in Aleppo in 1922, to a Melkite Catholic family. His early formation in the Basilian Aleppian Order placed him inside an Eastern Christian world where identity is communal and historical continuity is always fragile.

He entered priesthood during a period when the region was still absorbing the end of empire and the rise of new states. The Palestinian question, at that stage, was not yet a fixed diplomatic architecture but a rupture already visible in population movement, displacement, and contested belonging.

In 1965, he was appointed Archbishop of Caesarea and Apostolic Vicar of Jerusalem by Pope Paul VI. The position placed him in a city where sacred geography and political control overlap in ways that cannot be separated in practice.

After 1967, that overlap became more pronounced. Jerusalem was not only redefined administratively; it was reorganized in terms of mobility and access. Movement between areas became regulated, and daily life increasingly unfolded within layered systems of permits, jurisdiction, and separation. For clergy and residents alike, pastoral and social life took place inside these constraints rather than outside them.

A Theology of Justice

Capucci’s public voice emerged gradually from pastoral presence into explicit political language. His public statements increasingly reflected the view that silence in the face of dispossession was incompatible with Christian responsibility.

This conviction was not abstract. It was shaped by encounters with communities whose daily life was directly affected by displacement and political restructuring. His reading of the Gospel increasingly emphasized justice not as a theme alongside peace, but as a condition for it.

He began to speak publicly in defense of Palestinian rights, criticizing occupation policies and appealing to international attention. In the Arab world, this made him unusually visible: a high-ranking Christian figure speaking in moral terms about a conflict often treated in institutional language.

Over time, he became widely referred to as “the Archbishop of the Palestinian Cause,” a phrase that reflected public perception more than ecclesiastical designation.

The Trial That Changed Everything

In August 1974, Israeli authorities arrested Capucci after weapons were discovered in his official vehicle.

The arrest was not treated uniformly across contexts. In Palestinian political memory, it entered an interpretive field where legal categories and political struggle were already deeply intertwined and unevenly defined. In Israeli legal and institutional framing, it was a case of serious breach involving misuse of ecclesiastical privilege in support of armed networks.

Capucci did not present himself as an operative. Throughout his public life, Capucci distinguished between armed resistance and terrorism. In a 1981 interview, he stated, “I reject terrorism, but I support resistance,” arguing that people living under occupation retained a moral right to resist.

In court, he framed his actions through moral conviction and solidarity. The prosecution argued criminal facilitation of militant activity. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison.

The case quickly moved beyond legal procedure. It became a symbolic event in which religious authority, state security, and political struggle intersected in ways that could not be contained within a single narrative framework.

Exile Without Silence

Capucci served approximately three years and three months before his release in November 1977, following diplomatic negotiations involving the Holy See and international actors. His release came with a condition that defined the rest of his life: he was barred from returning to Jerusalem. Capucci later summarized the experience with characteristic brevity:

“I left a small prison only to enter a larger one.”

The remark referred not to imprisonment itself, but to the exile that prevented him from returning to the city where he believed his pastoral vocation belonged.

But this exile did not diminish his public presence; it redistributed it. He traveled widely, addressing audiences across Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. His interventions increasingly framed the Palestinian question as a matter of rights and political structure rather than a localized dispute. He repeatedly argued that the issue should first be understood in human rather than purely diplomatic terms, describing it as “at its root, a humanitarian problem that later became politicized.”

The tone of his speech was often moral in register, reflecting a conviction that political arrangements must answer to ethical judgment.

In 2009, long after his ecclesiastical career had formally ended, he joined a maritime mission attempting to reach Gaza. The vessel was intercepted before arrival. The significance of the act lay less in its outcome than in its continuity: a sustained willingness to remain publicly aligned with a cause he considered unresolved.

His relationship with the institutional Church remained intact but asymmetrical. Vatican diplomacy maintained distance in tone and method, while never fully severing recognition of his ecclesiastical identity.

The Arab Christian Voice

Capucci also reflects a dimension of Middle Eastern history often flattened in external narratives: Arab Christianity as an active historical presence within political life, not merely a parallel religious minority.

He did not treat Arab identity and Christian identity as separate registers. They operated together, shaped by language, liturgy, and historical belonging to the same geographical space. His public role made visible a reality often overlooked: that Arab Christians were not observers of the Palestinian question, but participants shaped by the same structural conditions of the region.

Years after his exile, Capucci continued to define episcopal leadership in pastoral terms, arguing that such responsibility could not be separated from human suffering. Speaking in exile in 2004, he explained his understanding of the episcopacy:

“A bishop is not a master. A bishop is a servant. A bishop is a father. When a father sees his son suffering, he rushes to help him whatever the cost.”

Faith in the Midst of History

When Hilarion Capucci died in Rome in 2017, reactions reflected the same uneven landscape that had shaped his life. In parts of the Arab world, he was remembered as a consistent voice for Palestinian rights and a prominent Arab Christian figure in public life. Elsewhere, his memory remains bound to unresolved questions about the limits of clerical participation in political conflict, institution and conviction, and the relationship between theological interpretation and political reality.

Hilarion Capucci spent his life insisting that faith and moral conviction could not stand apart from history. History, in turn, ensured that neither could he.

She’s bought a hat like Princess Marina’s

To wear at all her social affairs

She wears it when she’s cleaning the windows

She wears it when she’s scrubbing the stairs

But you will never see her at Ascot

She can’t afford the time or the fare

But she’s bought a hat like Princess Marina’s

So she don’t care

These lyrics, written by Ray Davies for Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), were taking shape in the spring of 1969. Around the time this song was written, during the recording sessions for the album Arthur in fact, The Kinks left London to play a concert at a venue they had never played before.

Today, they are remembered alongside The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who as one of the groups that shaped modern rock music. Yet unlike many of their contemporaries, The Kinks spent much of the second half of the 1960s following an unusual path. Unable to tour the United States because of an American Federation of Musicians ban and moving through one of the most creative periods of their career, they accepted engagements in places that now seem unexpected. On 17 May 1969, one of those places was Beirut.

More than half a century later, bassist John Dalton — who had then only recently joined The Kinks — recalled the visit for Melkart Magazine. His memories offer one of the few surviving first-hand accounts of the band’s forgotten Beirut performance.

Beirut and The Kinks

The Beirut that greeted The Kinks in 1969 was a city at the height of its reputation as a cultural crossroads. International performers like Louis Armstrong regularly passed through Lebanon, and the city’s hotels, theatres and nightclubs hosted artists from across Europe, the Middle East and beyond.

The concert took place at the Melkart Hotel in Ramlet al-Bayda, one of Beirut’s best-known seaside districts. Looking out toward the Mediterranean, the hotel sat on a stretch of coast where visiting performers often stayed while passing through the city.

The band arrived in Lebanon at a pivotal moment in their career.

Between Village Green and Arthur

Only six months earlier, The Kinks had released The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. The album sold modestly and attracted little attention outside dedicated fans. Yet over the following decades it was gradually reappraised and is now widely regarded as one of the key British albums of the period.

Rather than embracing the psychedelic experimentation that dominated the late 1960s, Ray Davies turned his attention to memory, community, ordinary lives and a disappearing England. The songs were intimate, observational and deeply English, qualities that gave the record a lasting appeal far beyond its original audience.

When The Kinks arrived in Beirut, they had already begun work on their next album, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), during sessions at Ray Davies’s manor in Borehamwood. The album would be released five months later in October 1969.

If Village Green was an inward look at a fading England, Arthur was an outward turn toward the forces reshaping it. Through the story of an ordinary family, Davies explores themes of emigration, class, war and the fading certainties of post-war Britain. Together, the two albums came to represent the moment when The Kinks moved beyond hit singles and produced some of the most ambitious songwriting of their career.

What Did Beirut Hear?

No complete setlist from the Melkart Hotel performance appears to have survived. Yet concerts from the same period provide some clues about what Lebanese audiences likely heard that evening.

The band were still performing many of the songs that had made them famous: You Really Got Me, All Day and All of the Night, Tired of Waiting for You and Sunny Afternoon regularly appeared in their live shows.

Contemporary setlists suggest that newer material almost certainly featured as well. Songs such as Days and Plastic Man were part of the band’s repertoire at the time, while selections from Village Greenmay also have appeared.

John Dalton Joins The Kinks

John Dalton had first moved into The Kinks’ sphere in 1966, when he was brought in as a temporary replacement for Pete Quaife after Quaife was injured in a car accident. At the time, Dalton was already an experienced working musician, having played in The Mark Four, part of the London beat circuit that produced a generation of mid-1960s groups. His initial role with the group was straightforward: cover the bass duties until Quaife could return. He did so for live performances and early recording sessions, before stepping back when Quaife rejoined the band later that year.

Three years later, the situation had changed. Quaife left The Kinks permanently in 1969, and Dalton was called back — this time not as a stand-in, but as a full-time member. From that point onward he became the band’s bassist through one of their most creatively productive periods. He played on Arthur and remained through the years that followed, including the era of Lola and Muswell Hillbillies, when The Kinks re-established themselves internationally after their return to the American touring circuit.

John Dalton Remembers

For a concert that has largely disappeared from the historical record, John Dalton’s memories of Beirut are refreshingly ordinary.

He does not recall the setlist, nor does he have any pictures, posters, or promotional material from the event. Rock history has a habit of turning ordinary events into mythology. Yet one of the few surviving first-hand memories of The Kinks’ visit to Beirut involves neither music nor mayhem:

“Nothing much happened in Beirut apart from the fact I walked into a plate glass window in the hotel, and was lucky that I didn’t have a scratch on me from the broken glass!”

His impression of the city itself is equally direct.

“I didn’t know anything about Beirut, so was surprised when we landed there were soldiers with guns everywhere.”

For many British musicians of the era, Beirut was not yet the familiar reference point it would later become through news coverage and political events. It was just another cosmopolitan stop on a tour schedule, somewhere beyond the usual European circuit.

“I do remember there wasn’t many people at the show, and I don’t think we got paid.”

Which gives the event a rather embarrassing place in the city’s history. Fortunately for Beirut’s reputation, Dalton adds that such incidents were not unique.

“But that happened a few times with The Kinks!”

Perhaps the promoter disappeared. Maybe there was a dispute. It’s possible the accounting simply never worked out. More than fifty years later, nobody seems entirely sure.

Other published accounts claim that the band members had their passports confiscated by hotel staff until the hotel bill was paid, and that some equipment was even left behind in Beirut. But Dalton’s final observation of the ordeal isn’t bitter.

“It’s a shame we couldn’t spend more time there because it would have been nice to see some places.”

Unlike other touring musicians of the era, the band did not develop a lasting relationship with the city and never returned.

Yet, while the concert itself left few physical traces, The Kinks’ presence in Lebanon survives in another, more tangible form.

A Lebanese Village Green

Among record collectors today, one of the more intriguing artefacts associated with the band’s history is a Lebanese pressing of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Issued for the local market, it stands as a reminder that Beirut was not simply a stop on an unusual tour itinerary but part of a wider international network through which music circulated during the 1960s.

That a Lebanese edition exists at all says enough on its own. At a time when the album struggled commercially in Britain and America, copies nevertheless reached Lebanon, where local listeners could engage with the same music that would later earn a place in the rock canon.

A Small Chapter in Beirut’s Story

By the end of 1969, The Kinks’ American ban had finally been lifted. The band returned to the United States and entered a new phase of their career.

Most of the physical traces of the concert in Beirut have vanished. The Melkart Hotel is gone. No recording of the concert has surfaced. No complete setlist survives. Even Dalton’s memories are remembered in fragments.

The Kinks spent much of their career writing about places threatened by time, events remembered imperfectly, and reconstructed through scattered details and fading recollections. In an unexpected way, their Beirut concert has become one of those stories too.

Although the Kinks’ experience in Beirut was less than ideal, the fact that the city remembers them more than half a century later is a kind of consolation of its own.

History is often written by those who pull triggers, but it is made possible by those who provide the means. In the coastal town of Guanabo, Cuba, in the mid-1950s, a Lebanese immigrant named Ángel Chaljup Barquet — known to locals as El Turco (The Turk) — altered the course of the Cuban Revolution. He did so not with a rifle, but with a direct question spoken to a young, destitute revolutionary:

“Do you need any money? Tell me, what you need?”

The Diaspora and the Dissident

By the 1950s, the Lebanese diaspora in Cuba was thoroughly integrated into the island’s commercial fabric. Like thousands of compatriots who departed the Levant following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Ángel Chaljup established himself as a respected trader. His shop in Guanabo served as a hub of daily community life, run with the characteristic business acumen and open-door practice typical of Levantine merchants.

In 1955, Fidel Castro arrived at a critical juncture. He had just been released from prison following the failed 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks. Broke, heavily surveilled by Fulgencio Batista’s secret police, and lacking resources, he faced the immense challenge of rebuilding a movement from scratch.

While much of Havana’s established elite closed their doors to the radical young lawyer, Chaljup offered support. Recognizing an intense determination in Castro, the merchant looked past the immediate political risk to assist a figure challenging the status quo.

Financial Backing

Chaljup’s financial assistance was not a calculated political investment or a transaction for future leverage. Instead, it was an instinctive extension of support to someone facing an asymmetrical struggle against an oppressive state apparatus — a reality familiar to many families who had emigrated from the politically turbulent Levant.

While the exact sums exchanged in the backrooms of Guanabo remain family history, the practical impact was clear. Chaljup’s funds helped sustain Castro and his inner circle during a vulnerable period of regrouping before they were forced into exile in Mexico. It was from Mexico that Castro would later return aboard the Granma yacht to launch the guerrilla warfare that ultimately overthrew the Batista regime.

A Promise Kept; The Rebel Returns

History contains many examples of revolutionary leaders who distanced themselves from early benefactors once power was secured. Castro, however, maintained his ties to the merchant from Guanabo.

In January 1959, rebel forces entered Havana in victory. Amid the immediate chaos of setting up a provisional government and navigating international scrutiny, Castro traveled to Guanabo to visit Chaljup and his family. He arrived not with the heavy military escort of a head of state, but as a individual returning to express formal gratitude. This reunion, documented in Cuban diplomatic records, established a permanent link between the family and the new administration.

The Diplomatic Legacy

Today, the story of Ángel Chaljup Barquet serves as a foundational narrative for the contemporary relationship between Cuba and Lebanon.

Decades later, the two nations continue to maintain diplomatic and cultural ties, often anchored by a shared history of resistance and survival.

There is an animated version of the Peanuts comic strip in which Snoopy develops a fear of the dark.

Distressed, he visits Lucy’s famous five-cent psychiatric booth and explains his anxiety. Lucy listens before asking a simple question:

Is it dark outside, or in your mind?

The joke lasts only a few seconds, but the question endures because it captures something fundamental about human experience. We do not encounter reality directly. We encounter it through memory, expectation, fear, hope, and habit. We respond not only to what is happening, but to what we believe is happening and what we imagine is likely to happen next.

This is true of individuals. It is also true of nations. Countries develop stories about themselves. Over time these stories become more than descriptions. They become assumptions. They shape politics, influence public expectations, and determine how societies interpret both success and failure.

Some nations imagine themselves as engines of progress. Others imagine themselves as victims of history. Lebanon occupies a more complicated position. It is a country that has experienced enough catastrophe to make pessimism seem reasonable, and enough resilience to make pessimism seem incomplete.

A Nation That Contains Opposites

To listen to Lebanese conversations is to encounter two countries at once.

The first is a country permanently on the edge of breakdown. Its institutions are weak, its politics paralyzed, its economy fragile, and its future uncertain. Every crisis appears to confirm a familiar conclusion: nothing works, nothing changes, and nothing lasts.

The second country exists simultaneously. Universities continue producing talented graduates. Businesses continue operating under extraordinary constraints. Artists, writers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and professionals remain influential far beyond the country’s borders. Restaurants are crowded, new initiatives emerge, cultural life persists. The diaspora continues to invest emotionally and financially in a homeland that has disappointed it repeatedly.

Neither is false. Lebanon often appears to function despite the very conditions that should prevent it from functioning. Yet this observation raises a difficult question. Is Lebanese pessimism merely a distortion of reality? Or is it the rational response of a society that has repeatedly learned how fragile reality can be?

Beyond Psychology

It would be reductive to believe that Lebanon’s difficulties are largely interpretive — that the country suffers from a crisis of confidence and that a healthier national narrative might unlock hidden possibilities.

There is some truth in this, but there is also a danger. The language of perception can unintentionally obscure the language of power. Many Lebanese do not expect disappointment because they suffer from a cultural tendency toward negativity. They expect disappointment because they have experienced repeated disappointments. They have watched institutions fail, savings disappear, promises collapse, and political systems reproduce the very conditions that generated crisis in the first place.

The question is not only why citizens have become cynical. The question is what has repeatedly taught them to be cynical. This distinction matters because narratives do not emerge in a vacuum, they are produced by experience.

The Memory of Catastrophe

“Lebanon, the country of resilience.”

The description is accurate, but incomplete.

Resilience is usually celebrated as a virtue. Yet resilience can also become a burden. A society praised endlessly for surviving can gradually become accustomed to conditions that should never have required survival in the first place.

Behind many Lebanese assumptions lies not merely pessimism but memory.

Civil war. Occupations. Assassinations. Economic collapse. Displacement. Political paralysis. Explosions. Regional conflict.

These are not abstract historical episodes. They form part of the emotional architecture through which many citizens interpret the present. When stability repeatedly proves temporary, skepticism becomes understandable. What outsiders sometimes describe as negativity may in fact be accumulated experience.

The darkness inside the mind did not emerge independently from the darkness outside. The two have been shaping each other for decades.

Who Benefits From Despair?

National stories are never politically neutral. A society convinced that nothing can change may eventually stop demanding change. A population that expects institutions to fail may invest less energy in reforming them. Citizens who assume corruption is permanent may come to treat corruption as natural. In this environment, the corrupt thrive.

The Question That Remains

So as Lucy asked: Is it dark outside or in your mind?

For Lebanon, the answer is both.

The darkness outside is real. No serious observer can deny the country’s political dysfunction, economic hardship, social fragmentation, or exposure to regional conflict.

But the darkness inside deserves attention as well — not because it is imaginary, but because perceptions eventually become forces in their own right.

Expectations shape choices; Choices shape institutions; Institutions shape futures.

The deepest challenge facing Lebanon may therefore be neither psychological nor political alone. It may lie in the relationship between the two.

Can a society remember its wounds without becoming defined by them? Can it confront failure without turning failure into identity? Can it remain realistic without becoming fatalistic? Can it imagine alternatives without retreating into fantasy?

These questions matter because nations do not live only in the world they inherit. They also live in the stories they construct about what is possible.

In 1964, the Austrian-American critic Bernard Rudofsky unsettled the architectural establishment with his exhibition Architecture Without Architects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His thesis was simple yet radical: some of the most intelligent buildings in the world were not designed by architects at all. They were shaped instead by communities — by inherited knowledge, climate necessity, ritual practice, and material constraint. Rudofsky’s provocation was not anti-architecture; it was anti-amnesia. He asked the profession to look at what it had ignored.

For readers in Lebanon and across the Arab world, the idea is hardly foreign. The region’s landscapes are filled with built forms that predate the institutionalization of architecture as a profession. Long before starchitects and global masterplans, there were courtyard houses in Beirut and Tripoli, mudbrick cities rising from desert valleys, and reed structures woven along marshlands. These were not anonymous accidents. They were accumulated intelligence.

Today, in a Middle East grappling with climate stress, displacement, and rapid urbanization, revisiting architecture without architects is not nostalgia — it is urgency.

Shibam and the Vertical Desert

In Yemen’s Hadramaut valley rises the extraordinary city of Shibam, often described as the “Manhattan of the Desert.” Its earthen towers — some reaching eleven stories — were built as early as the 16th century using sun-dried mudbrick. There was no single architect, no signature vision. The city evolved through collective practice, shaped by defensive needs, scarce agricultural land, and the logic of vertical expansion.

UNESCO recognizes Shibam as a masterpiece of human settlement based on environmental adaptation. Its compact urbanism reduces sun exposure; its thick earthen walls regulate heat; its verticality preserves farmland. In contemporary sustainability discourse, these strategies are praised as innovative. In truth, they are ancestral.

Shibam exposes a fallacy embedded in modern development across the region: that density and technological sophistication are recent imports. The desert skyscraper was already there — sculpted from earth, built by communal memory.

Wind, Courtyards, and the Intelligence of Air

Across the Gulf and the Levant, traditional houses reveal an equally refined environmental logic. The barjeel — the wind tower common in Gulf architecture — captures upper breezes and directs them downward into living spaces, functioning as a passive cooling system centuries before mechanical air conditioning. In Lebanon’s historic courtyard houses, inward-facing plans create shaded microclimates, filtering light and organizing domestic life around a protected center.

These spatial strategies were not stylistic gestures. They were climatic negotiations. Thick masonry walls delayed heat transfer; narrow streets created urban shade; mashrabiyas filtered light and preserved privacy. Social custom and environmental performance were inseparable.

The tragedy of much late-20th-century development in the Arab world was not modernization itself, but separation from its source. Reinforced concrete replaced earth; sealed glass façades replaced cross-ventilation. Imported typologies, often indifferent to climate, proliferated in cities from Beirut to Riyadh. Scholars have argued that this shift severed architecture from both ecological logic and cultural continuity.

To speak of architecture without architects in this context is to question whether professionalization distanced design from lived intelligence.

The Marshes of Iraq: Architecture as Ritual

In southern Iraq, the reed structures known as mudhifs rise from the Mesopotamian marshes in graceful parabolic arches. Built entirely from bundled reeds, without nails or industrial materials, these communal halls are reconstructed periodically as part of living tradition. Their form is both structural and ceremonial — hosting gatherings, mediations, and rituals.

Anthropologists trace this building culture back thousands of years, linking it to ancient Mesopotamian practices. The mudhif is architecture without blueprints, sustained through apprenticeship and memory. It resists permanence; it accepts cyclical renewal. In an era obsessed with monumentality, it proposes ephemerality as resilience.

Lebanon and the Question of Continuity

Lebanon occupies a unique threshold between Mediterranean and Arab architectural cultures. Its vernacular stone houses, red-tiled roofs, and triple-arched façades evolved through Ottoman, Levantine, and European influences — yet remained grounded in climate and craft. Post-war reconstruction, particularly in central Beirut, introduced a different paradigm: corporate planning, speculative development, and image-driven urbanism.

The question facing Lebanon today is not whether to reject contemporary architecture, but whether to reconcile it with inherited intelligence. The renewed interest in earth construction, adaptive reuse of heritage houses, and climate-responsive design suggests a quiet return to vernacular principles — albeit reframed through professional practice.

Rudofsky argued that vernacular builders achieved “a harmony between man and his environment” that modern architecture often failed to sustain. In the Arab world, where environmental extremes are intensifying, that harmony is no longer romantic; it is critical.

Lebanon’s national symbols are well established. The cedar occupies a central place in the country’s cultural imagination, while its mountains have long been celebrated in literature, politics, and tourism. Far less familiar is a species that inhabits those mountains at elevations where few people spend much time: Montivipera bornmuelleri, the Lebanon mountain viper.

Endemic to the high mountains of Lebanon and parts of the Anti-Lebanon range, M. bornmuelleri is one of the Levant’s most distinctive reptiles. It is also among the region’s least known. Restricted to rocky habitats at high elevations, the species has adapted to environmental conditions markedly different from those experienced across most of the eastern Mediterranean. Its distribution, ecology, and evolutionary history make it a valuable indicator of the health of Lebanon’s alpine ecosystems.

A High Mountain Snake

First described in 1898, the species belongs to a genus of mountain vipers distributed across parts of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. Adults are relatively small by viper standards, typically measuring less than 75 centimetres in length. Their colouration — various shades of grey, brown, and black — provides effective camouflage among limestone outcrops and alpine vegetation. Although highly venomous, the Lebanon mountain viper is not considered aggressive and is seldom encountered outside the remote alpine environments it inhabits. Encounters with humans are uncommon, largely because the species occupies remote terrain and is generally inactive during periods of intense daytime heat.

What distinguishes Montivipera bornmuelleri is not its rarity alone but the environment it inhabits. Most records come from elevations between approximately 1,700 and 2,400 metres, where winters are severe and snow cover can persist for months. These high-altitude habitats support a concentration of endemic plants and animals that have evolved under ecological conditions found nowhere else in Lebanon.

An Indicator of Alpine Ecosystem Health

As with many mountain specialists, the species faces pressures that extend beyond direct human persecution. Habitat disturbance, expanding recreational activity, infrastructure development, and climate change all pose potential risks. Because the viper occupies a relatively narrow ecological niche, even modest environmental changes may have disproportionate consequences. Warming temperatures are of particular concern. Species adapted to cool, high-altitude conditions often have limited opportunities to shift their range upward when climatic conditions change.

The conservation significance of M. bornmuelleri extends beyond the species itself. Its presence reflects the ecological integrity of Lebanon’s alpine zone, an environment that remains comparatively understudied despite its biological importance. Protecting these habitats contributes not only to the survival of the viper but also to the preservation of a broader assemblage of endemic flora and fauna.

Beyond Fear: Scientific Value

Scientific interest in the species has increased in recent decades, particularly in relation to its venom. Research has identified biologically active compounds with potential pharmaceutical applications, including anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties. While such findings remain primarily within the realm of laboratory investigation, they underscore a broader point: biodiversity often acquires practical value only after it has already become threatened.

The species also challenges common perceptions of snakes in the region. Public attitudes towards reptiles are often shaped by fear or misunderstanding, leaving little room for appreciation of their ecological role. Yet predators such as M. bornmuelleri form an important part of mountain ecosystems, helping maintain natural balances within fragile habitats.

Conservation in a Changing Climate

In Lebanon, discussions of environmental conservation tend to focus on forests, coastlines, and urban development. The country’s high-mountain ecosystems receive less attention despite their ecological distinctiveness. The Lebanon mountain viper offers a useful reminder that some of the country’s most significant biological assets exist far from population centres and outside the landscapes that typically dominate public debate.

Climate change has added urgency to this conversation. Alpine species are often among the first to experience the effects of rising temperatures, and their restricted ranges leave them particularly vulnerable. For Montivipera bornmuelleri, the future of Lebanon’s mountain habitats may prove inseparable from its own.

A Place in Lebanon’s Natural Heritage

Whether Montivipera bornmuelleri ultimately becomes a conservation success story will depend on how Lebanon manages its alpine environments in the coming decades. What is already clear, however, is that the species occupies a unique place within the country’s natural heritage. Not because it is charismatic or widely recognised, but because it represents an evolutionary lineage found in few places on earth and adapted to one of Lebanon’s most demanding landscapes.

At a time when questions of environmental stewardship are becoming increasingly urgent, the Lebanon mountain viper serves as a reminder that national heritage is not limited to monuments, archaeological sites, or iconic trees. It also includes the lesser-known species whose continued survival reflects the health and resilience of the landscapes they inhabit.

It’s 1963, and you’re walking along the Champs-Élysées with Lebanese pounds in your pocket. Your friend wants to see the Eiffel Tower later, but first you need to exchange money. You look up at the board outside the currency shop: the dollar, the pound sterling, the franc — and there, among the world’s major currencies, the cedar tree of Lebanon. For a country as small as Lebanon, it feels improbable. But by the early 1960s, Beirut had become the financial center of the Arab world, and much of that rise was tied to one institution: Intra Bank.

Founded by Youssef Beidas in 1951, Intra connected Gulf capital, regional commerce, and international finance through Lebanon, helping turn Beirut into a banking hub with influence far beyond its size. It controlled prestigious real estate on New York’s Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center, along Champs-Élysées in Paris, as well as in London, Geneva, and other major global financial hubs — offering exclusive services unavailable anywhere else. When the bank collapsed in 1966, it was more than a financial failure. For many, it exposed deeper tensions inside the Lebanese system — tensions over power, identity, and who the state was ultimately willing to protect.

The Rise of Intra Bank

At its peak, Intra Bank was among the most influential financial institutions in the region. Its influence extended far beyond deposits and lending into the commanding heights of the Lebanese economy. It held controlling or decisive stakes in sectors that shaped both economic life and cultural projection abroad: Middle East Airlines, which connected Lebanon to global markets; Casino du Liban, a centerpiece of tourism and elite social life; and Studio Baalbek, which helped define Lebanon’s cultural golden age. Its reach extended into the Port of Beirut, real estate, and international ventures across multiple continents.

Through this network, Intra integrated finance, infrastructure, culture, and capital flows into a system centered on Beirut. Intra became deeply embedded in the Lebanese economy, with influence across multiple sectors. Yet not all observers saw this dominance as a strength. Even at its height, some observers pointed to structural vulnerabilities — particularly its rapid expansion, cross-sector exposure, and reliance on confidence-sensitive deposits — raising questions about how it would perform under stress.

However in Lebanon’s political economy, that level of concentration rarely goes uncontested.

An Outsider

Lebanon’s post-independence order was shaped by a Francophone elite whose authority rested on political office, inherited networks, and control of key institutions. Cultural alignment with France functioned as a marker of legitimacy within this structure. Beidas stood outside it.

Born into a Palestinian Christian family in 1912, his ties to Lebanon were nonetheless deep: his mother was Lebanese, his wife was Lebanese, and his life and work were rooted in Beirut. Yet at the decisive moment, his position within Lebanon’s political and financial order remained ambiguous, particularly in moments when institutional backing became critical.

His early life unfolded in a multilingual environment linking Eastern Mediterranean trade and finance. He entered banking through Arab Bank, rising quickly through technical skill and operational discipline. The decisive shift in his trajectory came after the 1948 upheaval, which disrupted the region’s economic geography and displaced much of its commercial class.

He was also distinctly Anglophone in orientation. His financial practices and partnerships aligned more closely with Anglo-American capitalism than with the Francophone traditions of Lebanon’s established elite, reinforcing his exclusion.

As Intra expanded, it came to represent an alternative center of power — one operating outside sectarian, familial, and cultural control. By the early 1960s, his growing influence generated increasing discomfort among segments of the political and financial establishment.

The Unraveling

The collapse of Intra Bank in October 1966 is often framed as a financial crisis, but its progression has led some contemporaries and later observers to question whether factors beyond pure market dynamics were at play.

In the days leading up to the collapse, rumors targeting Intra’s solvency spread rapidly through Beirut’s financial networks, reaching major depositors and triggering a sharp loss of confidence. Withdrawals escalated, draining tens of millions of dollars and placing the bank under severe liquidity pressure.

Some contemporaries argue that Intra could have been stabilized through emergency liquidity support. Others disputed this, pointing to rapid expansion and reliance on short-term deposits as signs of deeper structural vulnerability. From this perspective, intervention carried risks of amplifying instability across Lebanon’s banking system.

Beidas sought emergency support from the central bank. The liquidity required was within the state’s capacity, particularly given the strength of Intra’s underlying assets. The request for emergency support was ultimately denied. Whether that decision reflected political considerations, institutional caution, or uncertainty about the bank’s underlying exposure remains debated — but it proved consequential, as liquidity pressures quickly escalated into collapse.

The decision accelerated the bank’s transition from liquidity stress to collapse. Other banks facing similar stress were assisted and survived; Intra did not. Contemporary accounts point to political hostility and elite opposition as important factors. The reported dismissal of Beidas on the grounds that he was not Lebanese reflects how identity and power shaped an economic decision with national consequences.

External Pressure and the Withdrawal of Capital

As internal pressure mounted, external forces intensified the crisis. Intra depended heavily on Gulf deposits, and during the critical days of October 1966, large volumes were withdrawn.

The timing and scale of these withdrawals significantly intensified the crisis, removing critical liquidity at a moment of declining confidence. They unfolded amid strained relations between Beidas and Gulf political figures, and during a broader regional shift as oil-producing states began redirecting financial strategy.

The withdrawal of Gulf capital did more than bring down a bank. It weakened Beirut’s position as the center of Arab finance and accelerated a redistribution of financial power across the region.

Collapse and Redistribution

When Intra fell, its system was dismantled and redistributed. Its holdings — from aviation to culture to infrastructure — were absorbed by the Lebanese state and other actors.

What had been a relatively concentrated structure was broken up into multiple components, redistributing control across state and private actors. For some policymakers, this fragmentation was not entirely negative but a necessary correction to a system seen as overly concentrated in a single institution. The state reasserted control, but without the integrative vision that had defined Beidas’ model.

A Foundational Fracture

The fall of Youssef Beidas marked one of the first major fractures in the modern Lebanese state.

It highlighted tensions between economic decision-making, elite interests, and identity politics, revealed institutions unwilling to defend systemic stability, and shattered the confidence on which Lebanon’s financial model depended.

Beirut’s role as a regional financial center rested on trust — in its banks, its institutions, and its neutrality. The collapse of Intra broke that trust.

From 1966 to the Present

While 1966 did not determine Lebanon’s future on its own, it exposed structural tensions that would reappear in later periods. The entanglement of finance and politics, the selective use of state power, and the prioritization of elite interests over systemic stability became recurring features of Lebanon’s economic life.

Over time, these dynamics eroded institutional credibility and resilience. The financial collapse of modern Lebanon follows a trajectory that can be traced, in part, to this earlier rupture.

The Point of No Return

The case of Youssef Beidas can be interpreted not just as the marginalization of an outsider, but as a reaction to a figure who had become highly central without being fully integrated into existing structures of power.

Despite his Lebanese family members, his roots in Beirut, and his role in building the country’s economic power, he did not receive the level of institutional backing that might have been expected at a critical moment. That denial was not symbolic; it was operational. It shaped decisions that dismantled the system he built.

The fall of Intra Bank wasn’t only the collapse of a financial institution. It was a decision about who is allowed to hold power in Lebanon — and under what conditions. In choosing to let Intra fall, the Lebanese system preserved its internal hierarchy over its own economic future.

That choice did not end in 1966. It helped shape much of what followed.

There are poems that survive not only because they are profound, but because they remain relevant. If— belongs to this category. Like national slogans repeated long after belief has faded, the poem reappears whenever societies need to aestheticize endurance.

Lebanon has long had an affinity for this language: composure under pressure, dignity amid disorder, self-control mistaken for stability.

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs…”

In Beirut, losing one’s head is rarely dramatic; it is procedural: a frozen bank account, a pharmacy missing half its shelves, a power outage at the wrong hour, a currency fluctuation during an ordinary dinner. One inconvenience folds into another until deterioration itself becomes ambient noise.

Now war has returned to the country’s vocabulary with exhausting familiarity. Families displaced from the south move through Beirut carrying plastic bags, mattresses, medication, children half-asleep in strange apartments. Entire neighborhoods absorb new populations overnight with the weary efficiency of repetition. The shock is real, but so is the familiarity. Lebanon has lived through versions of this before: hurried departures, overcrowded apartments, schools converted into shelters, families reorganizing themselves around uncertainty.

The Lebanese middle classes once possessed a remarkable talent for converting instability into routine. This was not “resilience” in the therapeutic vocabulary preferred by NGOs and foreign correspondents; it was adaptation through fragmentation. Every household developed parallel systems: generators replacing infrastructure, dollars replacing salaries, relatives abroad replacing institutions. The state became supplementary to society rather than the reverse.

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…”

Lebanon specializes in doubt. Not dramatic ideological doubt, but the smaller, more corrosive variety: doubt in banks, courts, electricity, currencies, governments, investigations, futures. Citizens compensate accordingly. They accumulate backup plans with near-professional discipline: two currencies, three telephones, one sibling abroad.

War deepens these doubts unevenly. In recent months, displacement has fallen disproportionately upon Lebanon’s Shi’a communities in the south and southern suburbs, many of whom already carried memories of earlier wars, occupations, and reconstructions. Entire families now inhabit schools, unfinished apartments, relatives’ homes, temporary rooms offered by strangers. The country speaks constantly of unity during crisis, but suffering in Lebanon is rarely distributed symmetrically.

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…”

Perhaps no society practices this more instinctively than Lebanon. Political victories rarely last long enough to become history; disasters arrive too frequently to retain their exceptional character. Celebration and catastrophe exist almost beside one another, weddings continue during crises, restaurants reopen after explosions.

Foreign observers inevitably describe this as resilience, usually with photographs of crowded bars standing a few streets from visible ruin. The admiration is often sincere, but incomplete. Lebanon is not only resilient; it is habituated to continuation.

This habit was not born with economic collapse. The civil war conditioned generations to normalize interruption: roads closing suddenly, neighborhoods divided overnight, ordinary life reorganized around violence. Later conflicts merely altered the scale and geography. The present war with Israel has reopened older structures of fear and displacement that never fully disappeared.

Lebanon’s relationship with refuge further complicates the story it tells about itself. Palestinians arrived first as temporary guests and became permanent participants in the country’s unresolved political landscape. Syrians followed decades later into a nation already strained by its own instability. Now internal displacement repeats the same logic: schools becoming shelters, relatives becoming institutions, hospitality becoming infrastructure.

“If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…”

Waiting in Lebanon ceased being transitional long ago; it became environmental. People wait for salaries to recover value, for governments to form, for embassies to respond, for roads to be repaired, for electricity to return, for their children at the airport. Families from the south wait to learn whether homes still exist, parents refresh news feeds with the mechanical discipline of ritual. Even memory functions through delay — events linger unfinished, suspended between trauma and bureaucracy.

The Beirut port explosion revealed this with particular clarity: The scale of destruction should have produced rupture. Instead, the city absorbed it into its existing logic of continuation. Rubble disappeared faster than accountability. Restaurants reopened beside shattered apartments. Mourning became administrative.

But something else emerged alongside exhaustion: mutual recognition. Volunteers sweeping streets before the state arrived, strangers opening homes to the displaced, doctors working through broken hospitals, a city improvising solidarity because improvisation is often the only available institution.

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone…”

Entire generations have learned to organize emotional life around contingency: private generators replace electricity grids, remittances replace economic policy, humor replaces political language. Stability becomes something rented temporarily rather than possessed.

The ability to continue is not always a virtue. Societies can adapt so successfully to violence that adaptation itself begins to conceal the scale of what has been lost.

But Lebanon also possesses another habit rarely acknowledged abroad: the refusal to become culturally provincial despite repeated collapse. Beirut still produces conversations unavailable elsewhere in the region — Arabic, French, English, cynicism, diasporic longing, exhausted cosmopolitanism compressed into a single evening. The country remains intellectually engaged even when politically stagnant.

“If you can dream — and not make dreams your master…”

This line feels particularly Lebanese. Dreams here are treated cautiously. Entire generations were raised on promises of recovery, reform, renaissance, rebirth. Most learned instead to distrust grand narratives while continuing to build ordinary lives anyway.

Perhaps this is the country’s most durable quality: not optimism, but attachment. People continue investing emotionally in Lebanon even after leaving it physically. The diaspora speaks of Beirut less like a homeland than an unfinished argument or an unrealized dream. Distance rarely weakens the connection; it often sharpens it.

Kipling’s poem assumes that discipline eventually produces coherence: endure long enough, master yourself sufficiently, and stability follows. Lebanon offers no such promise. Crisis here does not culminate in transformation; it accumulates. And yet the country continues.

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…”

Lebanon has spent decades doing precisely that: stretching limited time, limited resources, limited certainty into forms of life that remain unexpectedly vivid. Not ideal, not stable, certainly not just — but alive.

Kipling ends If— with inheritance: “you’ll be a Man, my son.” The line now reads less as wisdom than as a relic of another century’s certainty — the belief that character guarantees arrival.

Lebanon guarantees no arrival. It does not ask “if.”

It simply carries on, and leaves interpretation to catch up later.

For Ramy.

Sheikh Abdallah Al‑Alayli was a Lebanese intellectual, linguist, writer, and thinker whose work had substantial impact on modern Arab cultural thought, linguistic studies, and debates about identity and reform. Born in Beirut in 1914 and active throughout much of the 20th century, Al‑Alayli combined deep classical training with a bold engagement with contemporary issues, making him one of the most influential and controversial figures in Arab intellectual history.

Early Life and Education

Abdallah Al‑Alayli was born on 20 November 1914 in Beirut, during the final years of Ottoman rule and a time of immense social upheaval in Lebanon. His early schooling was in traditional Qur’anic schools and local primary institutions before he traveled to Cairo to study at Al‑Azhar University, one of the foremost centers of Islamic scholarship in the Arab world. There he studied under eminent teachers and immersed himself in Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and literature.

After completing his studies in the mid‑1930s, Al‑Alayli returned to Beirut, where he began a lifelong career as a teacher, preacher, and public intellectual. He engaged widely in cultural, linguistic, and religious debates, and also took part in nationalist movements seeking cultural and social reform.

Scholarly Work and Major Publications

Al‑Alayli’s literary and intellectual output was both broad and ambitious. He believed that language, culture, and thought are inseparable from the progress of society. Much of his work focused on modernizing and critiquing traditional approaches to language and religion, and on arguing that Arab societies needed to adapt intellectually to the challenges of the modern world.

One of his earliest significant works was Introduction to the Study of Arabic Language, where he set out principles for a systematic and modern study of Arabic that bridged classical tradition and contemporary linguistic thought. His commitment to the Arabic language also led him to create The Great Dictionary, a major lexicographical work intended to expand vocabulary in a way that reflected social change and intellectual development.

In Refining the Linguistic Approach, Al‑Alayli elaborated his methodology for teaching and understanding language, advocating clarity, analytical depth, and openness to new linguistic insights. Beyond language, he tackled broader questions of culture and religion in works such as Where Is the Mistake? Correcting Understandings and the Theory of Renewal and Where Is the Mistake in Islam?, which prompted widespread debate because of their reformist stance toward traditional interpretation. He also wrote on human identity and social roles in Where Is the Human?, reflecting his holistic approach to human sciences.

His writings spanned not only academic treatises but also literary essays and poetry. Al‑Alayli published works in various genres, including lyrical and philosophical poetry collections that reflected his engagement with personal and societal themes.

Ideas and Intellectual Contributions

Al‑Alayli saw language as a living, evolving phenomenon that should reflect the needs and realities of contemporary societies. He argued that without linguistic and cultural renewal, societies remained intellectually stagnant. His approach to language combined deep respect for its historical foundations with insistence on reform and adaptation. This placed him at the center of debates over how Arabic should be studied and taught in the 20th century.

In religious and philosophical realms, Al‑Alayli called for reinterpretations grounded in context and reason. He believed that rigid adherence to tradition without openness to modern insights hindered intellectual and social development. These views, especially in Where Is the Mistake?, sparked controversy among conservative scholars at the time, leading to bans of his work in certain places.

Scholars have also highlighted his broader philosophical orientation, which included renewal in jurisprudence and contemporary readings of foundational texts, positioning him as a figure who merged classical scholarship with modern critical thought.

Recognition and Legacy

Throughout his lifetime, Al‑Alayli received both public honors and criticism. He was recognized for his service to Arabic language and culture and awarded national distinctions for his writing and scholarship. His bold critiques sometimes put him at odds with religious establishments and political authorities, yet they also ensured that his ideas remained central to discussions about reform and intellectual renewal in the Arab world.

Sheikh Abdallah Al‑Alayli died on 4 December 1996 in Beirut after a long career that left a deep imprint on Arab linguistic thought, cultural critique, and intellectual reform movements. Today he is remembered as a pioneering reformist thinker, whose work challenged readers to rethink how language, culture, and religion can evolve together in a rapidly changing world.

The papacy is often imagined as an institution rooted almost exclusively in Italy and Western Europe. Yet in the early centuries of Christianity, the leadership of the Church in Rome was far more diverse. Several popes came from the eastern Mediterranean, which in antiquity encompassed much of what is today Lebanon, Syria, and southern Turkey.

This should not be surprising. Jesus himself was from the Levant, and in the following centuries, it became one of the great heartlands of early Christianity. Cities such as Antioch, Tyre, and Emesa were vibrant centers of theology, trade, and culture, producing bishops, scholars, and saints whose influence extended across the Roman world.

Between the second and eighth centuries, six popes are generally recognized as having Levantine or Syrian origins. Their pontificates remind us that the early Roman Church was deeply interconnected with the eastern Mediterranean — and that figures from the Levant once stood at the very center of Christian leadership.

Anicetus: An Early Bishop of Rome from Emesa

One of the earliest Levantine figures to lead the Roman Church was Pope Anicetus, who served in the mid-second century. Tradition places his birth in Emesa, modern day Homs, an important Syrian city that was both a religious and cultural center of the Roman East.

Anicetus governed the Church during a formative period when Christianity was still developing its structures and traditions. His papacy is remembered for a famous encounter with Polycarp of Smyrna, who visited Rome to discuss differing practices regarding the date of Easter. Though they maintained separate traditions, the two bishops remained in communion — a sign of the diversity that characterized the early Church.

John V: An Antiochene Pope

More than five centuries later, the papacy again passed to a man from the Levant. John V, born in Antioch, became pope in 685.

Antioch was among the most important cities of early Christianity and one of the intellectual centers of the eastern Roman Empire. Before his election, John had participated in the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681) as a papal representative, where the Church addressed major Christological debates of the time.

Although his pontificate lasted only about a year, his election reflects the continuing ties between Rome and the eastern Christian world.

Sergius I: A Syrian Family in the Mediterranean World

Sergius I provides a vivid example of the mobility that characterized the Byzantine Mediterranean. He was born in Palermo to a Syrian family originally from Antioch.

During his long pontificate (687–701), Sergius confronted the Byzantine emperor Justinian II, who attempted to impose disciplinary rulings from the Council in Trullo on the Western Church. Sergius refused to sign the council’s decrees, demonstrating the growing independence of the papacy from imperial authority.

He also left a lasting mark on the Roman liturgy, including the introduction of the Agnus Dei chant during the Mass.

Sisinnius: A Brief but Energetic Pontificate

Sisinnius, a pope of Syrian origin, ruled for only a few weeks in 708, making his reign one of the shortest in papal history.

Despite his advanced age and illness, he immediately turned his attention to the defense of Rome, initiating efforts to repair the city’s deteriorating walls. Some later traditions associate his family with Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city on the Lebanese coast.

Constantine of Tyre

Sisinnius was succeeded by Constantine, who is traditionally said to have been born in Tyre.

Constantine’s papacy (708–715) was notable for a rare diplomatic journey: at the request of Emperor Justinian II, he traveled to Constantinople in 710. This visit was one of the very few occasions in which a pope personally visited the Byzantine capital during the early Middle Ages.

His diplomatic mission helped ease tensions between Rome and the empire during a politically volatile period.

Gregory III: The Last Levantine Pope of the Early Middle Ages

The final Levantine pope of this period was Gregory III, born in Syria and elected in 731.

Gregory’s papacy coincided with the iconoclast controversy, when the Byzantine emperors attempted to prohibit the veneration of religious images. Gregory firmly defended the traditional use of icons and convened a synod in Rome that condemned iconoclasm.

Historically, Gregory III occupies a unique place: he was the last pope from the eastern Mediterranean.

The Levant’s Place in Papal History

The existence of Levantine popes reminds us that early Christianity was profoundly Levantine in character. The intellectual and spiritual life of the Church flowed continuously between Rome and the great cities of the East.

For the Levant, this history forms part of a broader cultural heritage. Cities such as Tyre and Antioch were not peripheral to early Christianity; they were among its most dynamic centers.

In the rugged mountain landscapes of Lebanon, a small and easily overlooked beetle tells a much larger story about biodiversity and scientific discovery. Libanoclytus tommasoi, a species described as recently as 2010, is not just another addition to the insect world — it represents an entirely new genus within the longhorn beetle family, Cerambycidae.

Its discovery reflects how even in regions with long histories of natural study, new species continue to emerge, often hidden in plain sight.

A Species That Redefined Its Own Category

When entomologists Gianfranco Sama, Pierpaolo Rapuzzi, and Antoine Kairouz first described Libanoclytus tommasoi, they realized they weren’t just classifying a new species — they were identifying something structurally distinct enough to require a new genus altogether. That is no small feat in taxonomy, where new genera are proposed only when differences run deeper than superficial variation.

At first glance, the beetle fits comfortably within the tribe Clytini, a group known for species that often mimic wasps in coloration and form. Yet closer inspection reveals subtle but decisive differences in its anatomy: the shape of its thorax, the structure of its head, and fine details in its body segmentation set it apart from its relatives.

Measuring just over a centimeter in length, L. tommasoi is modest in size, but its scientific importance far outweighs its physical presence.

Life Among the Trees

Like many longhorn beetles, Libanoclytus tommasoi is intimately tied to trees — not living ones in their prime, but those in decline. Its larvae develop within dead or decaying branches, making it part of a specialized ecological group known as saproxylic insects, organisms that depend on decomposing wood.

Field observations have linked the species to trees such as Ficus carica, Morus, and Cercis siliquastrum. These trees, common across Mediterranean landscapes, provide both nourishment and shelter during the beetle’s larval stage, which can last up to two years.

Adults typically emerge in late spring, around May and June, coinciding with warmer temperatures and increased biological activity in forest ecosystems. Their brief adult lives contrast sharply with their long developmental period, a pattern typical of the Cerambycidae family.

A Regional Native with a Narrow Range

So far, Libanoclytus tommasoi has been documented primarily in Lebanon and parts of neighboring Syria. Within Lebanon, it has been found in mountainous regions, including areas like the Qadisha Valley, a landscape known for both its ecological richness and cultural history.

This relatively limited distribution suggests that the species may be endemic to the Levant or at least highly specialized to its environment. Such narrow ranges often make species more vulnerable to habitat changes, though detailed conservation assessments for L. tommasoi are still lacking.

Why It Matters

At a glance, a small wood-boring beetle might not seem especially noteworthy. But species like Libanoclytus tommasoi play an essential role in maintaining forest health. By breaking down dead wood, they contribute to nutrient cycling, helping sustain the ecosystems they inhabit.

Beyond ecology, the species also underscores a broader scientific truth: biodiversity is still far from fully catalogued. Even in regions close to human settlement and long studied by naturalists, entirely new branches of the tree of life continue to be discovered.

In that sense, Libanoclytus tommasoi is more than an insect. It is a reminder that nature still holds secrets, and that careful observation — sometimes of the smallest creatures — can reshape our understanding of the natural world.

References

Sama, G., Rapuzzi, P., & Kairouz, A. (2010). Catalogue commenté des Cerambycidae du Liban.
Hoskovec, M. (2023). Species account of Libanoclytus tommasoi.
Márkus, A., & Németh, T. (2016). Notes on Cerambycidae host plants and ecology.

Youssef Aftimus, born on 25 November 1866 in Deir el Qamar, within the Chouf region of what was then the Ottoman Empire, emerged as a major civil engineer and architect whose style melded Moorish Revival aesthetics with urban planning in early 20th-century Beirut.

Early Life and Education

Aftimus was raised in a Greek Catholic family in the historic town of Deir el Qamar. His education began at the Collège des Frères Maristes around 1875. By 1879, he had progressed to the Syrian Protestant College, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree. Prior to his journey abroad, he taught Arabic at the same institution for two years and even co-authored an Arabic grammar textbook – a testament to his early literary and academic inclinations.

In 1885, Aftimus traveled to New York City to study civil engineering at Union College, graduating in 1891. His initial professional tenure was with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, working on the Hudson Canal project and Pennsylvania rail lines. Subsequent stints followed with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company and General Electric.

Rise as an Architect of Global Stature

Aftimus’s entrance onto the global architectural stage came in 1893, when he was chosen to design several pavilions – Persian Palace, Turkish Village, and Cairo Street – for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Particularly, the Cairo Street pavilion was a notable crowd-puller. This marked a significant foray into Moorish Revival architecture, framing his stylistic perspective and anchoring his later contributions in Beirut and the broader Levant.

His work extended beyond Chicago, including involvement with the Egyptian pavilion at the Antwerp International Exposition in 1894, followed by a research visit to Berlin in 1895 focused on construction engineering. He returned to Beirut in late 1896.

Architectural and Urban Legacy in Beirut

In 1898, Aftimus was appointed municipal engineer of Beirut. One of his early notable contributions was the design of the Hamidiyyeh Fountain in 1900, dedicated to Sultan Abdulhamid II. Originally located at Riad el-Solh/as‑Sour square, the fountain was later relocated to Sanayeh Park, where it still stands.

Aftimus founded a consulting office in 1911 alongside Emile Kacho, another engineer. The next decade saw some of his most enduring projects. In 1923, Aftimus won the design competition for Beirut’s City Hall (municipal building), situated at the prominent intersection of Weygand and Foch streets — a structure that endures as a civic landmark today.

His public service extended beyond architecture: he held the position of Minister of Public Works in the 1926–1927 government under Prime Minister Auguste Basha Adib.

Among his broader portfolio, Aftimus contributed to:

• The Old Damour bridge (1920), later damaged in 1941.

• Water infrastructure in Nabatiyeh (1924).

• Nicolas Barakat Building (1924), and buildings for the Hôtel-Dieu de France hospital (1925).

• His own Aftimus House in Kantari (1927).

• Conference halls and residences like the Issa Building (also hosting the U.S. consulate) and the Le Grand Théâtre de Beirut (1929).

• The Mugar Building at Haïgazian University and works at Beirut University College (1932–33).

An ambitious, but unrealized, project in 1935 was his design for a Greek Catholic cathedral, which never came to fruition.

Aftimus’s influence extended beyond his built works. He co-authored a published treatise on Arab architecture, titled العرب في فن البناء, and was inducted into the Arab Academy based in Damascus. He also served as president for the Syrian Protestant College alumni association, showcasing his continued engagement with academic and institutional communities. Notably, he was a force in the fight against tuberculosis, founding and leading a non-profit charity to combat the disease.

Cultural and Architectural Impact

Aftimus emerged during an era marked by an Ottoman architectural revivalist movement, which sought to define a distinct Ottoman architectural identity. This movement was sparked by the 1873 publication of Usul‑i Mimari‑i Osmani (“Principles of Ottoman Architecture”) under commission by Ibrahim Edhem Pasha. It blended disparate styles like Ottoman Baroque, Beaux-Arts, Neoclassicism, and Islamic motifs.

Aftimus’s exposure to Western exhibitions, particularly at Chicago, along with his experience in Beirut, positioned him uniquely to import an Ottoman revivalist style from Istanbul and the Columbian Exposition into Beirut by the late 19th century. His designs dominated public building styles in Beirut during the final decades of Ottoman rule.

The Barakat Building

The Barakat Building, also known as the “Yellow House,” and now, “Beit Beirut,” was one of Aftimus’s iconic designs. Severely damaged during the Lebanese Civil War and located in Achrafieh’s Sodeco area, it was slated for demolition in 1997. However, concerted efforts led by Lebanese activists along with media campaigns and public rallies, preserved the building.

An artistic intervention by Atelier de Recherche ALBA in 2000, exploring the building and neighborhood narratives, amplified the conservation campaign. In 2003, demolition plans were halted, and Beirut Municipality acquired the property to create a city memory museum chronicling the city’s 7,000-year history. With support from the government of France, restoration efforts progressed and culminated in the inauguration of Beit Beirut in 2017.

A Lasting Legacy

Youssef Aftimus passed away on 10 September 1952, but his architectural and urban legacy endures. As a masterful synthesizer of Moorish and revivalist aesthetics with pragmatic urban design, he shaped the face of modern Beirut. His influence stretched from civic edifices like Beirut City Hall to cultural memory sites such as Beit Beirut.

With roles encompassing engineering, politics, education, and philanthropy, Aftimus stands as a defining elder figure in Lebanese architectural history.

George Hatem, known in China as Ma Haide, lived a life that seems almost improbable. Born in the United States to Lebanese immigrants, he would go on to become a key figure in China’s Communist revolution, a trusted physician to its leadership, and one of the first foreigners granted citizenship in the People’s Republic of China.

Though his name is not widely recognized in the West, his impact on public health in China helped transform the lives of millions.

From Mount Lebanon to Medicine

Hatem’s story begins long before his birth, in the mountain village of Hammana in Lebanon. His father, Nahoum Salameh Hatem, left the region in the early 20th century in search of opportunity in the United States. During a return visit home, he married Thamame Milane, and together they settled in America.

George Hatem was born in 1910 in Buffalo, New York, and later grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, where his family ran a small business. Despite his American upbringing, Lebanon remained a strong presence in his life.

In 1929, he returned to Beirut to study medicine at the American University of Beirut. He then continued his training in Switzerland, graduating from the University of Geneva in 1933. There, exposure to international classmates — particularly from East Asia — sparked a curiosity that would define his future.

A Doctor in Revolutionary China

Soon after graduating, Hatem moved to Shanghai, where he opened a medical practice. It was there that he encountered influential figures in China’s political circles, including Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen. Through her, he was introduced to the Communist Party.

Hatem eventually made his way to Yan’an, the Communist Party’s remote base. There, he served as a physician within the leadership circle, treating high level officials — including Mao Zedong — while also tending to soldiers and civilians.

He joined the Chinese Communist Party and took on a new name: Ma Haide, meaning “the one who came from overseas.” It was more than a name change — it marked a complete transformation of identity.

In June 1944, Harrison Forman, Gunther Stein and other foreign journalists came to Yan’an to conduct interviews. They also talked with Hatem.

“One of the things I like most about this place is that there is absolutely no professional jealousy here. This is due in large measure to the fact that there is no financial incentive, no rivalry for special honors or favors. All of us work together like members of a big family, and satisfactions and disappointments are mutually shared.”

Hatem also mentioned the change of his mind in Yan’an.

“They taught me a very great deal I probably couldn’t have learned any other way. And I had some pretty swell people to learn from, you must admit.”

Medicine on the Front Lines

During years of war and upheaval, Hatem worked under extreme conditions, providing care to thousands of wounded fighters and villagers. His role was not confined to clinics; he was part of a broader revolutionary effort, where survival often depended on improvisation and resilience.

He worked closely with leaders like Zhou Enlai and contributed to the medical infrastructure that supported the Communist movement, culminating in the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Fighting Disease, Building a Nation

After the revolution, Hatem shifted his focus from battlefield medicine to public health — where his impact would be even greater.

As a senior official in China’s Ministry of Public Health, he became a driving force behind national campaigns to combat infectious diseases. His most notable work was in the fight against leprosy, a disease that had long been widespread and stigmatized.

Hatem spared no effort in spreading the message. He often said, “leprosy is preventable, curable, and not terrible,” and that it could be controlled within three days after medication and then eliminated, making it no longer contagious.

Through coordinated treatment programs, rural outreach, and medical training, Hatem helped bring the disease under control. By the late 20th century, leprosy in China had been reduced to extremely low levels.

He also contributed to broader efforts in sanitation, rural healthcare, and disease prevention, helping lay the groundwork for China’s modern public health system. In 1986, his achievements were recognized internationally when he received the Lasker Medical Award.

A Life Between Worlds

In the 1950s, Hatem became one of the first foreigners to receive Chinese citizenship — an extraordinary honor in a newly established state. By then, China was not just where he worked; it was home.

He married a Chinese woman, Zhou Su-fei, and the couple had two children. Fluent in Mandarin and deeply integrated into Chinese society, Hatem spent the rest of his life there.

Yet he never lost sight of his roots. In 1974, he returned to Lebanon, where he was welcomed with pride — especially in Hammana, the village his father had left decades earlier.

Recognition and Remembrance

Hatem’s contributions earned him recognition in both China and Lebanon. In 1985, he was awarded Lebanon’s National Order of the Cedar at the rank of commander.

Three years later, in 1988, he passed away in Beijing at the age of 78. He was given a state funeral and buried in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, a resting place reserved for China’s most distinguished figures.

A Legacy That Crosses Borders

George Hatem’s life cannot be confined to a single nation or identity. He was at once Lebanese, American, and Chinese; a man who crossed borders not just geographically, but culturally and politically.

In choosing purpose over origin and service over recognition, he built a life that defied easy definition. Today, his legacy endures in the health of millions and in the rare example of a man who belonged fully to more than one world, yet defined by none.

In a region where church bells and the call to prayer share the same sky, theological questions are rarely distant or abstract. Few issues highlight the differences between Christianity and Islam as clearly as the question of Jesus’ crucifixion. For Christians, it is central to faith; for Muslims, the dominant interpretation has long held that it did not occur.

Yet a closer reading of the Qur’anic text — particularly in its full form — alongside historical context, suggests a more nuanced possibility.

Mainstream Christians Belief

Within Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is foundational. The New Testament presents it as both historical fact and theological necessity: Jesus is arrested, tried, and executed under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate (Mark 15:24; Luke 23:33). His death is understood as an atoning sacrifice, followed by resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3–4).

Mainstream Muslim Belief

In contrast, mainstream Islamic belief holds that Jesus (ʿĪsā) was not crucified. This view is primarily based on Qur’an 4:157, which states in full:

“And their saying, ‘Indeed, we killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the Messenger of God,’ and they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but it was made to appear so to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him for certain.”

Classical Islamic scholarship overwhelmingly interpreted this verse as a denial of both killing and crucifixion. Over time, a strong consensus (ijmāʿ) formed, often accompanied by the substitution theory — the idea that another person was made to resemble Jesus and crucified in his place.

It is important to acknowledge the weight of this tradition. At the same time, the substitution narrative itself does not appear explicitly in the Qur’an, but emerges in later commentary.

Reading the Full Verse More Closely

When read in full, the verse does more than simply deny an event — it engages a claim:

“Indeed, we killed the Messiah…”

The response unfolds in several layers:

• A denial: “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him”

• A qualification: “but it was made to appear so to them”

• An observation: “those who differ over it are in doubt”

• A critique: “they have no knowledge… only assumption”

• A final emphasis: “they did not kill him for certain”

Taken together, the structure of the verse shifts attention from the event alone to human perception, disagreement, and certainty.

This raises an important interpretive possibility: that the verse is not only describing what did or did not happen, but also challenging the confidence of those claiming to understand what happened.

Historical Context: A Widespread Belief

By the time of the Qur’anic revelation, belief in Jesus’ crucifixion had already been widespread for centuries. Early Christian communities across the Roman world consistently affirmed it, making it central to their identity and theology.

From an Islamic perspective, this does not establish theological truth. However, it provides context for the statement:

“it was made to appear so to them.”

The verse may be engaging a belief that had already become deeply rooted in collective understanding.

Corroborating Historical Sources

This belief was not limited to Christian texts. Non-Christian writers from the first and second centuries — including the Roman historian Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus — also refer to Jesus’ execution under Pontius Pilate.

While such sources are not authoritative in Islamic theology, they show that the perception of crucifixion extended across communities. This reinforces the Qur’anic emphasis on how events “appeared” and were understood by people.

A Linguistic Note: Where Certainty Is Placed

The final phrase of the verse adds a notable emphasis:

“and they did not kill him for certain.”

The qualifier “for certain” (yaqīnan) is attached specifically to the claim of killing. This does not negate the earlier denial of crucifixion, but it does highlight where the strongest emphasis lies.

Within the flow of the verse, certainty is directly challenged. People are described as being “in doubt,” having “no knowledge,” and following “assumption.” The final reaffirmation — that they did not kill him “for certain” — underscores the idea that their claim to decisive success is being rejected.

This does not prove that a crucifixion occurred. However, it supports a reading in which the verse is primarily concerned with denying certainty about Jesus’ defeat, rather than offering a purely mechanical description of events.

Understanding Crucifixion: Purpose and Outcome

In the Roman world, crucifixion was designed not only to kill, but to humiliate and eliminate influence. It was meant to end movements.

Yet in Jesus’ case, the outcome appears markedly different. His message endured, spread, and transformed societies. Today, he remains one of the most influential figures in history, revered in Christianity and honored in Islam.

If the intent was to eliminate him, it did not succeed.

Addressing the Central Objection

A central challenge remains: if the verse says “they did not crucify him,” how can one affirm that a crucifixion took place?

One possible approach is to read the denial in light of the entire passage. The verse begins with a claim of victory and ends by dismantling certainty around that claim. In between, it emphasizes appearance, doubt, and assumption.

In this framework, the statement “they did not crucify him” may be understood not only as a denial of the act in isolation, but as part of a broader rejection of the claim that Jesus was successfully defeated.

Such a reading does not dismiss the traditional interpretation, but suggests the verse may operate on multiple levels — historical, rhetorical, and theological.

Questioning the Substitution Theory

The substitution theory raises further questions. Why would another individual bear this fate? And why is this detail absent from the Qur’an itself?

Given Islam’s emphasis on clarity in revelation, this absence may suggest that later interpretations attempted to resolve ambiguity rather than reflect explicit textual claims.

A Shared Point: The Ascension of Jesus

Despite their differences, both Christianity and Islam affirm that Jesus was raised to Heaven. The Qur’an states:

“Rather, God raised him up to Himself” (4:158)

This shared belief offers an important point of convergence.

Toward a Reconciliatory Interpretation

If the full verse is read with attention to its emphasis on perception, doubt, and certainty, a reconciliatory interpretation becomes possible:

• A crucifixion event may have occurred

• It appeared to observers that Jesus had been defeated

• In reality, his enemies did not achieve their ultimate aim

In this view, the Qur’anic denial speaks not only to what happened, but to what it meant.

Jesus Lives On

While theological differences remain, both Muslims and Christians affirm that Jesus was sent by God and that his message endures.

Rather than focusing solely on the mechanics of the crucifixion, a broader perspective reveals a shared conviction: that his mission could not be destroyed, and that his influence continues to live on in the hearts of believers across traditions.