Een niet-Sji'iet

Twee jaar geleden maakte een Nederlandse journaliste een kort filmpje over het uitgaansleven van Beirut tijdens de oorlog met Israel, waarin Faysal, een vriend van mij, geïnterviewd werd. Door het betere knip- en plakwerk tijdens de montage kwam zijn introductie ongeveer over als: “Ik ben Faysal. Ik ben een Sji’ietische moslim. Ik ga elke avond uit en drink alcohol.” De reacties op het filmpje (te zien op de website van het tv-station dat het had uitgezonden) waren voorspelbaar: “Nou, dat is echt geen moslim. Moslims drinken geen alcohol.”

Klopt. Faysal vindt zichzelf geen moslim. Maar geen religie hebben bestaat niet in Libanon. Bij je geboorte krijg je automatisch de religie van je vader (of die nou ergens in gelooft of niet – hij heeft ‘m weer van zijn vader gekregen), en dat bepaalt vervolgens een heel aantal zaken in je leven: huwelijk, scheiding, erfrecht, het zijn allemaal dingen die in het burgerlijk wetboek niet voorkomen, en die uitsluitend en alleen volgens de ‘wetten’ van je religie geregeld worden. (Zo kunnen Christelijke Maronieten bijvoorbeeld niet scheiden, en krijgen Sunnietische grootouders aan vaderszijde de voogdij over kleinkinderen ouder dan 7 jaar als de vader overlijdt). Je religie zegt niets over je religiositeit, en alles over welke posities je kunt bereiken in de overheid (alleen Maronieten kunnen President en Opperbevelhebber van het leger worden, alleen Sji’ieten kunnen Voorzitter van het Parlement worden, etc.). Gelovig of niet, op je ID-kaart staat een religie vermeld, en aanmeldinsformulieren op scholen en universiteiten hebben zonder uitzondering een vakje voor je godsdienst – een vakje dat je verplicht bent in te vullen.

Faysal zegt dus “Ik ben Sji’iet,” zonder dat hij zich de morele voorschriften van de Islam houdt, en iedereen in Libanon begrijpt dat dat kan. Het gelijkstellen van geloof en gelovigheid, zoals de Nederlander die commentaar leverde op het filmpje deed, gebeurt hier niet – en wordt ook niet begrepen. Atheist? Agnost? Helemaal niets? Dat komt simpelweg niet voor.

Welke feestdagen vier jij eigenlijk? Vroeg mijn collega een paar dagen geleden, vissend naar mijn religie. Dit jaar heb ik kerstmis gevierd, en ik heb gevast voor Ramadan, was mijn antwoord. Oh, ben je geen Christen dan? Vroeg ze door. Nee, ik ben geen Christen. Wat ik dan wel was, wilde ze weten. Mijn Niets. Ik ben helemaal niets, werd ontvangen met een heftig hoofdschudden.

Nee, nee. Je begrijpt het niet. Ik vraag wat je bent, wat is je familie? Walid moest hartelijk lachen toen ik de conversatie navertelde. Zelfs na drie jaar in Nederland is het voor hem nog moeilijk zich voor te stellen dat je je niet automatisch met een religie identificeert, omdat je die nou eenmaal bij je geboorte is toegeschreven. Als je in Libanon niet gelooft, dan betekent dat niet dat je ‘niets’ bent – dan betekent dat dat je niet-iets bent.

Dus in Libanon ben ik een niet-Protestant. En Faysal is een niet-Sji’iet.

Pure logic

Traffic in Lebanon is chaotic, to put it mildly. Major crossroads in Beirut are puzzles of honking cars, inching around each other, blocking everyone's way, trying to get to the other end in complete disregard of all the other traffic. Sometimes, there is a policeman trying to bring some order to the chaos, but more often than not the assigned officer gives up after half an hour of being completely ignored, yelled at and (almost) driven over. I don't blame the poor guys - getting Lebanese people in cars to follow a certain structure, the personal benefit of which is not immediately clear, is an impossible task indeed. But what do I know? Today my service-driver swirved his way around garbage-bins, passed two cars on the right and then threw his steering wheel all the way to the left to switch lanes and get across the intersection. One of the passengers pointed at the policeman who was frantically waving his stick to get people to follow his directions. 'Uh huh,' said the driver, 'if I do what he says, I will never get across!' 'Yeah,' added the other passenger with an accusing nod of the head towards the officer, 'have you noticed? There's always a traffic-jam when there is a policeman trying to arrange traffic!'

I guess it's the Lebanese version of the chicken-and-egg conundrum.

Inbox Lebanon

It is with pleasure and anticipation that I open my email-inbox at work every morning. Not because of the amount of interesting letters, but because of the advertisements. The spam messages for blue pills and other body-part enhancing potions that I find in my private mail are useless compared to the advertisements I receive at the work-address. The offers for explosion-proof cars, announcements about vacancies in Saudi Arabia, and messages urging me to join the gym to look good for summer – they are a perfect way to keep up with the situation in the country without having to read the newspaper or watch the news on TV. Unrest and economic malaise? Increase in job-offers in the Gulf. Explosions and car-bombs? Increase in gadgets to detect explosives before they set off. Violence in the streets? Increase in options to shatter-proof your windows. Agreement reached in Doha? Book your table now at your favorite restaurant – and don’t forget the option of plastic surgery before bikini-season.

So are you curious to know how Lebanon is doing these days? Just take a peek at my inbox of this morning:

And so it’s over, but it isn’t

Imagine you are colleagues. You see each other almost every day, you spend more hours together than you do with you family. You have different political opinions, but it doesn’t matter – as long as you don’t talk about it, except for a small joke every now and then – you get along very well. You even become friends, in the way that colleagues do, because over time you learn so much about each other’s lives. Then, one day, you can’t go to work. The roads are blocked, gunmen are outside your house, cars are set on fire. You hide inside with your family – your mother, your father, your brother and your son – while rockets are being fired from your building into the one across the street. Everybody is scared, trying to hide in ‘safe places’ (the rooms with no windows), angrily watching the news as the events unfold. It’s one political side against the other.

Your colleague is in another neighborhood, also forced to stay inside. You send each other an sms each day, for the basic information: Are you still alive?

The day arrives that everything calms down enough to return to work. But what are you going to say? The bullets that landed on your balcony were fired by gunmen of the party your colleague supports, the rocket that burned out your neighbor’s apartment came out of their RPGs. You know your colleague survived, but you heard her uncle died. His car was riddled with bullets by fighters from your side of politics. How can you talk about all this? You know that any mention of the events will be met with a staunch defense of their party’s role and reasons, and you know you will feel compelled to do the same if they tell their stories.

So you both remain silent. You give each other a smile and carry on where the work had been left off. The anger, the hurt, the fear that you experienced – you can’t find a way to share all of it with these people so close to you. Similarly, you do not hear about their anger, their hurt, their fear of the past few days. But what is left without these emotions? How can you sympathize when you don’t know the other person’s pain and worries? Will it still be possible to see them as friends, or even humans, if what remains for you to see and know is merely the physical expression of a political party you despise?

Or will you turn to ‘co-existence’, an innocent-sounding phrase that another blogger describes as “a Trojan horse filled with many bloodlusting soldiers ready to come out and murder the Lebanese people in their sleep”? And this is why it’s over, but it isn’t. Because as that same blogger says: “This phrase is saying: ‘We acknowledge that we have sectarian and religious differences, but we must ignore them and live together in peace.’ [But] a country is not built on mutual ignoring of differences. A country cannot be built on the fact that its denizens look at each other with scrutiny and hate. A country cannot be built until its citizens accept each other for who they are.”

[more than 200 000 martyrs / more than 3700 bombed cars / more than 1 000 000 emigrants / and still we haven’t learned / it’s enough] [clip "from all Lebanese for all Lebanese"]

Not on the news

This is where we tried to sleep tonight: between the bedroom wall and the hallway, with our heads against the toilet. There were rounds of heavy shooting in our street and the streets surrounding us, shrapnel ricocheting off fences and balconies, and big explosions that made the windows rattle. We stayed between the walls, with the windows slightly ajar and the curtains closed, as we were told to do by many civil war-veterans (our friends’ parents).

Yet Hamra is not mentioned on the news. I think no-one really expected much fighting here. ‘If anything happens, come to me!’ I would tell my friends from areas that would obviously be battlegrounds. ‘Don’t worry,’ my friends would tell me in return, ‘you live in Hamra, it’s safe.’ Well, not as safe as we thought. I knew it last night when the janitor of the building told me that the two men who came to check the roof the night before were not Lebanese Army, but from the Future Movement (pro-government Sunni). And when I saw two armed men on the abandoned building across the street.

In the middle of the night we woke up by particularly heavy rumbling. Explosions? Bombings? This sounded too heavy, too close. Then we saw lightning and rain, and we were strangely relieved. Maybe, if they get really wet, the fighters will give up for the night? ‘When I was little,’ I told my friends, ‘I used to think a storm meant that God was angry with the people. He must be really pissed off now!’ ‘Well of course he is! I mean, of course he’s very patient, – after all, it’s God – but come on, he’s dealing with the Lebanese here!’