書き抜き読書ノート 644

2010 年 7 月 4 日

Thomas L. Friedman 著「From Beirut to Jerusalem」
Anchor Books, Random House 1990 年刊を読む

1. We have not sold a window in weeks, Hijal moaned. In fact, do you really want to know how
bad it is? It is so bad that all the windows in my own apartment are shot out and I am noteven replacing the glass. It's true. It's the fourth time my windows have been broken and thistime we just put up plastic nylon instead. We're getting rockets every day. How can I put up
glass anymore?
2. How indeed? As the mushroom clouds from the Marine bombing and the Shouf fighting spreadover Beirut in early 1984, I began to wonder whether the whole city wasn't finally going tosuffer the same agonizing death as the man in the brown suit.
3. But why should anyone care about the death of the city?
4. Because Beirut was never just a city. It was an idea‑an idea that meant something not only to
the Lebanese but to the entire Arab world. While today just the word
hell on earth, for years Beirut represented

maybe dishonestlyBeirut

evokes images ofsomething quite different,

something almost gentle: the idea of coexistence and the spirit of tolerance, the idea that diverse
religious communities

Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, and Druse

could live together, and eventhrive, in one city and one country without having to abandon altogether their individualidentities.
5. The spirit of Beirut is what was known as the Levantine spirit. The wordfrom the Old French word levant, which literally meant

rising.

Levantine

derives

The Levant, where the sunrose, was the geographical name given to all those countries bordering the easternMediterranean. The Levantine political idea, which grew naturally among the communities ofthe eastern Mediterranean, was an original way of dealing with diverse tribal, village, andsectarian identities, and it inspired the Beitutis and ultimately the Lebanese to believe thatthey could build a modern Arab republic, melding together seventeen different Christian,Muslim, and Druse sects. The Levantine idea posited the notion that if men cannot break with
their tribal pasts, they can at least leam to check them at the door of the cities in which theylive. That was Beirut at its best‑aplural society in which communities, still different on thelevel of inherited religious loyalties and family ties, co‑existed within a common framework,
the words of my Oxford professor, the Lebanese historian Albert Hourani.
-1-in6. This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution, as theburgeoning Lebanese silk trade and the invention of the steamboat combined to bring men andwomen of America and Western Europe in large numbers to the Levant. These settlers fromthe West were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and merchants, Jewish traders,travelers and physicians; and they brought with them Western commerce, manners, and ideas
and, most of all, a certain genteel, open, tolerant attitude toward life and toward other cultures.
Their mores and manners were gradually imitated by elite elements of the local native
populations, who made a highly intelligent blend of these Western ideas with their own
indigenous Arabic, Greek, and Turkish cultures, which had their own traditions of tolerance.
To be a Levantine, wrote Hourani. is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belongingto either.
In Beirut, the embodiment of the Levantine idea was the city center. The Levantine spirit ofcoexistence was beth produced in, and reproduced by, the covered markets and stone‑archedalleyways, the red‑roofed houses and craft workshops, the arabesque Ottoman fountains andbookstalls of old downtown Beirut, woven around Riyad

Solh Square. In the Beirut city center

seven thousand shops once stood shoulder the shouldr, with the Maronite cobbler next to theDruse butcher and the Greek Orthodox money changer next to the Sunni coffee seller and theShiite grocer next to the Armenian jeweler. The Beirut city center was like a huge urban
Mixmaster that took the various Lebanese communities from their mountains and villages andattempted to homogenize them into one cosmopolitan nation.
7.

When I was a little boy, I discoverd Lebanese society there, the different accents and culturesand forms of drss, remarked Salim Nasr, a Lebanese sociologist. It was where the country met
the rest of the world and the different components of the country met each other.

8. With the destruction of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Levantine idea wasgradually choked to death in Smyrna, Basra, Salonika, Alexandria, and Aleppo, by Greek,Turkish, and Arab nationalists who had no patience for, or interest in, heterogeneous cultures
and the spirit of tolerance of a bygone era. But in Beirut the idea lived onelite Christian and Muslim classes.

primarily among theThese Lebanese Christians and Muslims intermarried,interacted, became business partners, and produced new ideas together, and they were the ones
who really made Beirut a cosmopolitan Manhattan of the Arab worlda refuge for thepolitically radical and a springboard for the Arab avant‑garde. Effete Arab politicians ousted bycoups d'etat came there to write their memoirs, and aspiring Arab artists and poets came there
to make it on the Arab Broadway.
9. Beirut was the ideal hothouse for this Levantine spirit to survive, because the near‑perfectbalance of power between Muslim and Christian sects made it impossible for any one group or-2-

nationalist ideology to impose itself and smother the diverse mix of cultures necessary for aLevantine society.

Moreover, there was a powerful economic base for the Levantine idea inBeirut. Because it was a city which had no real natural resources other than the cunning of its
multilingual inhabitants and their ability to make money serving as a bridge between Europe
and the Arab world, Beirutis is had to learn to come together peacefully in the city center and tocooperate with one another in order to play the profitable role of middlemen between the ArabEast and the Christian West.

That role was further enhanced by Beirut's banking secrecy,

casinos, and wild , salacious nightlife, which made it an attractive oasis for an Arab world that
had yet to discover London and Marbella. Every region of the globe one note city where therules don't apply, where sin is the norm, and where money can buy anything or anyone. Asia
had Hong Kong, Europe had Monaco, and the Middle East had Beirut.
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トマス・フリードマン氏の英語は実に読みやすい。内容は極めて深刻だが絶えず●可能性を●− 2010 年 7 月 4 日-3-

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