To travel back in time to a time that is the present; Hamra, Beirut, 2017, circa. 1982. →

By Anna Sophia Habib

photo credit: @maninoush

photo credit: @maninoush

I've arrived to the neighborhood where I was born 34 years ago, where my family legacy and tragedies have sunken into the original buildings and streets that surround me.  West Beirut does not hold the allure it once did when my parents met as ecumenical activists in the seventies, when the Corniche boardwalk lining the Mediterranean sea was filled with European flare, when Bliss Street running the length of the American University of Beirut campus was busy with intellectual activity.   On my morning walk along the Corniche yesterday, I witnessed a change in demographic--an obvious leaning towards more conservatism, a mix of elegant, trendy young women in hijabs with their boyfriends or even younger women in the full chador with their children trailing behind them on bikes or a pink battery-operated toy car. 

We're staying in a hotel just up the street from the apartment building where I was born and spent the first four years of my life, sleeping to the sound of explosions. This hotel was known for its Western clientele, journalists, intellectuals, activists, NGO workers, all coming to experience the glamor of what once was described as the Paris of the Middle East, or later when the war began, to engage in relief work or cover the war for international news. But, now, at the continental breakfasts in this hotel that could definitely serve as the set of the next Wes Anderson film, the clientele has shifted--young Turkish men on a short vacation to the Beirut nightlife, big groups of extended families from the Gulf, and one lone, clean-cut French reporter (?) who lingered over his coffee, almost in meditation, so atypical in the American fast-paced, goal-oriented, what's-next-on-the-agenda lifestyle I'm taking a reprieve from.

(As I write this from our hotel room, after being on bed rest for two days from eating raw vegetables that were probably contaminated from the hazardous effects of Lebanon's severe garbage crisis, the electricity cuts off.  Thirty seconds of dark and quiet before the generator kicks in. Some things never change. )

There's a guilt I feel for writing about Lebanon this way. Everything out there about this tiny country, from novels to nonfiction, describe this place as a paradox of beauty and devastation,  chaos and hope, suffering and healing (here's a good example of this dialectic captured in an open letter by the British Ambassador to Lebanon in 2015).  It is true that within all the madness, there is a powerful draw to the culture of this place--its food, its art, its history, its people, its languages. There has always been such wisdom and resilience in the capacity to hold both the ugliness and the beauty simultaneously. But, I'm wondering today, as the plate tectonics of global politics have shifted so drastically, as the West has implicitly or explicitly (whichever way you choose to look at it) created a wave of Christian (Tea Party much?) and Islamic radicalism, if what made Lebanon so intoxicating will soon be lost. Its identity and symbolic power as a crossroads of East and West, of that melange of Eastern and Western thought, of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Druze co-habitation, seems to be slipping away. 

I am not lamenting the loss of the Western influence here or feeling uncomfortable by the increasing presence of a more religiously conservative demographic. I am worried though that the reality of the global political landscape is going to spotlight our differences and cause an irreparable divide, one that will cut way deeper than the civil war did. For a country of approximately 4.5 million, hosting more than a fourth its size in Syrian refugees will certainly affect (and the signs are already here) the national psyche. And, with a U.S. president who is hellbent on instituting a Muslim ban, the West, particularly the U.S., is gaining a reputation worse than it held during the Bush years. And, in a country that only just recently elected a president--another one of the recycled faces of Lebanese dynasty families--after having been without government for two years, the seeming current stability of Lebanon is treading on thin ice.