Obituary
Kamal Salibi: Scholar and teacher
regarded as one of the foremost historians of the Middle East
His
respect for others' views was balanced by his scorn for hypocrisy: Salibi in
2004 ( )
Almost
two decades ago, recording a BBC radio programme on Islam, I dropped by the
American University of Beirut to interview an old Christian Protestant friend,
Kamal Salibi. I asked him the same question I had already put to many Muslims:
what happens after death? They, of course, assured me of their belief in an
afterlife. Salibi, the great breaker of historical myth, did not share this
conviction. "After life is nothing," he said, eyes cast slightly
upwards, his voice almost shaking with indignation. "It is the end. We are
dust."
I
sincerely hope not. For Salibi, who died last Thursday after a stroke, was
perhaps the finest historian of the modern – and the old – Middle East, fluent
in ancient Hebrew as well as his native Arabic, his English flawless, a man
whose work must surely shine into the future as it has illuminated the past. In
one sense, his desire to deconstruct history, his almost Eliot-like precision
in dissecting the false story of the Maronites of Lebanon, his highly mischievous
– and linguistically brilliant – suggestion that the tales of the Old Testament
took place in what is now Saudi Arabia, rather than Palestine, made him a
revolutionary.
In
one sense, his wish to live in a world unstifled by the texts of dictators made
him one of the founders of the new "Arab awakening", 30 years before
his time and scarcely 40 years after George Antonius first used the phrase as
the title of his great work on the British betrayal of the Arab revolt.
History, Salibi believed, should not only draw on original sources but should
have a beginning and a middle. He was a "chronology" historian – such
creatures are now back in fashion, thank God – who was also the first Lebanese
writer to confront the country's civil war. His Crossroads to Civil War,
Lebanon 1958-1976 was published less than 12 months after the 15-year conflict
began.
Kamal
Salibi never showed his age – he was born in 1929 in the Christian hill-town of
Bhamdoun – perhaps because he so enjoyed the company of younger people, both his
students at the American University and his later companions in the Jordanian
Prince Hassan's Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies in Amman. He was a
gentle, simple man whose respect for the views of others was balanced by his
scorn for the world's hypocrisy. He often blamed the arrogance of Christians
for their own fate in the region. How he would have loathed Lebanese Maronite
Patriarch Beshara Rai's recent half-support for the Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad in Paris, an echo of the widespread Christian suspicion that only
strong dictators can protect Christian minorities from Islamist extremism.
Salibi, like his contemporary, the late historian Yusuf Ibish, admired the
Ottoman Empire and was contemptuous of the West's destruction of the Caliphate.
"You
often forget that one of the reasons you fought the First World War was to
destroy the Ottoman Empire – but the Ottomans, in their last years, they wanted
to be like the West," he told me one afternoon in his English department
tutorial room, always the teacher, always mixing emotion with the kind of detail
that obsessed him. "The Sultans and his closest advisers learned to paint.
They learned to play the piano. The Ottomans wanted to be like you. So you
destroyed them."
He
was a brave man. When thesectarian civil war began to target the Christians
still living in West Beirut, he chose to stay on in his beautifulOttoman home
in the Hamra district, scarcely a hundred metres from the 1920s villa in which
Ibish lived. When the Lebanese army broke apart and Christian units bombarded
thedistrict, Salibi fled to a neighbour as shells destroyed his home. Ibish
stayed downstairs in his own house, reading Hamlet as the upper floors burned.
But when a local paper drew attention to the meaning of Salibi's name – in
Arabic it means "crusaders" – he set off for Jordan to help establish
Hassan's foundation.
He
quickly became a confidante and adviser and was able to give me the prince's
account of the final break with King Hussein when the latter decided that his
brother Hassan should no longer be heir apparent. The prince had laid his
pistol on the king's desk and invited his brother to shoot him if he believed
he was plotting his overthrow or preparing for his demise. The king – who was
to die of cancer a few weeks later after making his son Abdullah Crown Prince –
handed Hassan an official letter renouncing his role as the next king; Hassan
heard the contents read on the news over his car radio before having the chance
to open the envelope.
Several
years later, after Hassan had unwisely mapped out the future of Jordan in the
Middle East at a conference in London, King Abdullah was understandably
enraged. Hassan sought Salibi's advice. "I told him to go and see the king
at once," Salibi recalled for me. "And I told him to tell the king
that he was very, very sorry." Good advice from a wise man who never tried
to enrage anyone. Indeed, he was the only visitor to come to my home and be
warmly greeted by the family cat – a "scaredy-puss" if ever there was
one, always fleeing from visitors – who would leap upon Salibi like a long-lost
friend.
But
Salibi made enemies aplenty when he published The Bible Came from Arabia, a
long and detailed linguistic exegesis in which he claimed to have discovered –
through long research into place names – that the lands of the Bible and of
historical Israel were not in Palestine at all, but in Arabia; in fact, in that
part of the peninsula which is now Saudi Arabia. Salibi was intensely proud of
his achievement, refusing to be cowed by the storm of often abusive criticism
which he provoked. Israel's self-appointed defenders in the West condemned
Salibi for trying to delegitimise the Israeli state – it is surprising how long
the fear of "delegitimisation" prevailed in Israel, as it still does
today – while more prosaic writers treated the author with good-humoured
contempt. A reviewer in the Jewish Chronicle referred to Professor Salibi as
"Professor Sillybilly", a wonderful crack that I forbore to repeat to
Salibi himself.
The
Saudis, true to their fears that the Israelis might decide to take Salibi
seriously and colonise the mountains of Sarawat (which Salibi believed was the
real "Jordan valley" of the Bible), sent hundreds of bulldozers to
dozens of Saudi villages which contained buildings or structures from Biblical
antiquity. All these ancient abodes were crushed to rubble, Taliban-style, in
order to safeguard the land of Muslim Arabia and the house of Saud. At the time
of the Prophet there had indeed been Jewish communities in Arabia. Salibi –
wisely or not – never abandoned his Arabian convictions. The last time I saw
him, he was offering me a new edition of his Bible, with a laudatory new
preface by an American academic, in return for a hitherto undiscovered Dumas
novel about the Battle of Trafalgar.
The
Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, caught the nature of Salibi's work accurately when
he wrote this week that Salibi sought through scientific-historical research
"to overcome inherited beliefs which had taken on a sacred
character". He was talking about the book which will still be read in a
hundred years, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered in
which he emphasised the place of Christian Maronites in the Middle East,
insisting that they did not come to Lebanon as a persecuted minority – one of
the stories which Lebanese often repeat to account for the cluster of Maronite
towns in the high mountains around Bcharre. The predicament of the Christians
of Lebanon had always fascinated him – his PhD at SOAS, under the supervision
of Bernard Lewis, was entitled "Maronite Historians and Lebanon's Medieval
History" – and was also the subject of his greatest despair.
"I
like to give my students," he told a reporter four years ago, "a
passage from an historical document and ask them: 'What does it say?' Also,
'What does it not say?'...Correct reading, it used to work wonders." It
still does. Which is why, for Salibi, the end can not be dust.
Kamal
Sulieman Salibi, historian and teacher: born Bhamdoun, Lebanon 2 May 1929; died
Beirut 1 September 2011.
Robert
Fisk
@indyvoices
Wednesday 7 September 2011
00:00
The Independent Online
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