The Sunni Street

“To be Lebanese is to be political.” Sam leaned forward. His manner was grave, as if he were trying to explain Newton’s Second Law, or some other fundamental fact about the universe. “You drink politics with your coffee. You eat it with your food. You breathe it with the air. Everything is sect… sectal? Sectarian? Yeah. Sectarian.”

Anyone remember Sam?

I’d met him a couple of weeks before, walking through the packed slum-burbs of South Beirut with a bunch of Hotel Talal-ers on route to Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp, an animated, personable kid who’d learned English during a year in New Mexico.

“Shatila? That’s the lion’s den.” He volunteered to be our safari guide.

Sam spent the afternoon shepherding us about, translating Arabic pick-up lines into English, and broadsiding us with a shipload of political opinions. Two things became clear.

One. Sam was a Sunni jarhead- a mouthpiece for a million little pro-Sunni jingoisms and beliefs. Two. In a country of tight lips, Sam had a very loose tongue- and no one, it seemed, had told him to bite it in front of strangers.

A couple of weeks later, he offered to give me a rundown of Sunni politics- from the grassroots. Street-level politics, steeped in the daily life of the neighborhood, where hard-eyed men in coffee-shops and back-alleys form the backbones of Lebanon’s tribes.

I jumped at the chance.

It would occur to me much later, in the midst of one of Sam’s motor-mouthed monologues, that a casual backpacker like myself had no business knowing some of the facts that he so casually gave away.

Sam began with the basics. The Law of the Jungle: your tribe is everything. A man is dependent on wasta- or “connections”- for everything from a job, to a scholarship, to political voice. And in Lebanon, wasta is rooted in the tribe: strings of patronage to tribal godfathers and standing in the community.

Every individual life thus becomes tied to the interests of one’s tribe. Nothing is outside politics. Even the color of your clothing betrays your loyalties.

“Blue for Hariri and the Sunnis, orange for Aoun and his Maronites. Yellow for Hezbollah and the Shi’ites,” Sam ticked his fingers off one by one. “Red, green… even the rainbow is taken by the Druze. The only color I can wear that hasn’t been claimed is black.”

He paused. “Yet.”

Later, he took us on a tour of his neighborhood, Tareek Al-Jadidah.

A fiercely Sunni enclave in South Beirut loyal to the Hariri clan, it’s a dense network of ragged complexes decorated with huge murals and banners of Sunni godfathers and Islamic scholars. Many buildings sport curtains and awnings in bright Hariri blue. Flags imprinted with the logo of Hariri’s Future Movement hang from balconies and food stands. Walls of blue graffiti declare the neighborhood’s loyalties in jingoistic Arabic: “With our blood and souls, we sacrifice for you!”

“We are the base of the pyramid.” Sam explained, with his usual cheery bluster, gesturing at the noisy afternoon scene. Around us, crowds of men and women swirled and bustled about their business. Nothing is outside politics. To live in this neighborhood was in itself a political act- an oath of allegiance to the Sunnis, and to vote for their godfathers with the ballot or with the bullet.

Sam stopped by a mosque on one main street, stained glass windows ornately emblazoned with the names of Islam’s first four caliphs- Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali- the first three of whom are regarded as illegitimate by the Shi’a, whose name translates into something like: “Followers of Ali”. It was decorated with colored bunting for the upcoming haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Green, red, white.

“There’s one color missing.” Sam had one of those inside-joke smirks. “It should be there, but… we… don’t like that color.”

I didn’t answer or ask. Yellow. Hezbollah.

The Sunnis of Tareek Al-Jadidah had chosen to flaunt their old hatreds on the walls of their mosque, their schools, their streets, and their flags. All this heraldry- the banners, the graffiti, and the colors- was meant to send only one message: This is Sunni land.

Tareek Al-Jadidah is a square block, about two kilometers on each side, and framed on every side but the south by a major road or a bridge. To the west and north are neighborhoods of mixed population, a short drive from the climbing, half-reconstructed skyline of the Corniche and the downtown commercial strips. To the east is a flat, open area- sparsely populated, rolling slowly up into the outskirting highlands.

The south is where Sunni eyes turn with wary distrust. The southern border of Tareek Al-Jadidah is Shatila, that ugly Palestinian refugee camp abandoned by Fatah, the Lebanese government, and Allah- everyone, apparently, but Hezbollah and the Shi’ites. According to Sam, Shatila is a vassal state of Hezbollah, which gives them funding in exchange for a tenuous allegiance.

Fair enough. But funding for what? Health services? Education? Utilities? Or weaponry? I found myself weighing the pros and cons of having an Islamist militia, untouchable by the government in Beirut, buying the loyalties of downtrodden Palestinians- even if they were probably bought with medicines and schoolbooks.

Shatila is, in any case, the least of Tareek’s worries. Just beyond those hovels are the neighborhoods of Dahiyeh- a huge swath of Shi’ite land that one writer rather colorfully labeled “The Belt of Misery”. Dahiyeh covers a territory several times the size of Tareek Al-Jadidah, stretching across the south and up onto its eastern border. More importantly, it’s a stronghold of Hezbollah, much of which was bombed flat by Israel during the 2006 war.

“Dahiyeh used to be Sunni land.” Sam explained. “Then the Shi’ites came. They moved into apartment after apartment, first as individual families, then in huge groups. They took over the leases and drove the Sunnis out. That’s how we lost Dahiyeh. That’s how we’ll lose Tareek Al-Jadidah, and Beirut itself, if we don’t fight against it.”

Was this a war over lebensraum? Were the Shi’ites breeding out the Sunnis? I thought about the swarms of Chinese settlers in Tibetan and Uighur lands, sent by Beijing to crowd out the natives. The Sunnis were facing death by demographics, and they knew it. The Shi’ites could cry all they wanted about wanting roofs for their childrens’ heads- to Tareek Al-Jadidah, this was genocide disguised as housing rights.

We ended up at a bright blue building, multistoried, festooned with cedar flags. The sign on the front announced: Secure Plus. “This is our neighborhood watch headquarters. Don’t take any pictures.”

Sam made us wait while he conferred with one of the watchmen leaders. I peeked inside the building; it was spare, with darkly lit concrete walls, like the inside of an East Bronx boxing gym. Grim young men stalked about in groups. A small circle of youths, stubble-chinned and pleather-jacketed, formed around Sam as he argued with a tall, greasy-haired watchman. Hostile stares. I thought of my first day in high school.

Suddenly, I was spun about by an insistent tug and a harsh whisper. It was a girl from Hotel Talal- she was eastern European but spoke Arabic well. “What are you doing here?”

What?

“Are you in trouble? What are you doing here? Please, I can talk to someone for you. You shouldn’t be here.”

What the hell? I assured the girl that I wasn’t in trouble, and that I was here by invitation. She walked away skeptically. It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t a neighborhood watch any more than Hezbollah was. This wasn’t a group of middle aged-men keeping an eye on drunk teenagers. This was the headquarters of Tareek Al-Jadidah’s militia.

Sam reappeared. He looked relieved. “Okay, we can keep going with the tour. No pictures, though.”

So who were those guys?

“Secure Plus.” Sam drew out the organizational structure of his neighborhood watch, but he was very careful never to say the taboo word “militia”.

Secure Plus is a Sunni security firm, a legitimate, professional business that provides bodyguards and surveillance for Sunni communities and figures. It also doubles as a secret training ground for two smaller watch-groups, the Panthers and the Eagles. These two groups are organized gangs of non-professionals, crewed by youths in their teens and twenties. They aren’t necessarily thugs and toughs- Sam certainly wasn’t- but I wouldn’t be surprised it there were a few hardheads.

After having proved a certain degree of loyalty and competence in the Panthers or the Eagles, youths are chosen to undergo combat training with Secure Plus. Some remain; most return to the ranks of the two watch groups. This is how Tareek Al-Jadidah screens and trains its foot soldiers.

“We use electrical prods,” said Sam. “Tasers.” And guns? “No!” A vehement negative. “We don’t use guns.”

Against who?

“Thieves. And people who are unwelcome.”

Like Shi’ites and Palestinians from the south?

“Well, yeah. Who else?”

The neighborhood is divided into several watch zones amongst the Panthers and Eagles, with a highly organized chain of command. The section leaders, mostly middle-aged men, have noms du guerre that seem to have been stolen right out of a B-movie. Abu Dam- Father of Blood. Father of Suffocation. Father of Troubles. And one figure known, almost comically, as The King.

“We have day-time and night-time patrols. Some are mobile- we have men on scooters and in cars. On street corners and the entrances to important buildings, we have watchmen in plainclothes. They look like everyone else; you would have no idea who they are. If you look suspicious, they stop you and question you.”

What questions?

“Oh, you know. What your last name is. What village your father came from.” In other words, what sect you’re from. And if you’re not Sunni?

Sam didn’t answer. I assumed he didn’t hear the question, and I did not repeat it.

“We let Shi’ites and Palestinians in to visit,” he went on. “The Shi’ites won’t even do that. If you’re Sunni and you’re in a Shi’ite area, you have to pretend to be Shi’ite- use all their greetings and phrases- or they’ll heckle you out. We welcome Shi’ites and Palestinian visitors, but not to live here. We do not let the Shi’ites buy land, lease land, or rent apartments in groups. That’s how they took Dahiyeh.”

Later, Sam spread out a tourist map of Beirut on a table- complete with descriptions of the National Museum and other attractions. Dead serious, he pointed out the borders of his hood and possible avenues of attack by Shi’ites or Palestinians. “What’s in the north?”

Downtown. The Corniche. the Parliament, the tent city, the malls…

“Yes, yes.” Sam was impatient. “But who’s there? Who could protect the Sunnis?”

That was easy. It was election crunch-time. There were APCs on every street corner and troopers on every sidewalk- crewed by Sunnis, commanded by their Maronite allies. The Lebanese army.

“Yep. If the Shi’ites come from the north or the west, the army will crush them.”

Okay. What about the east, and this flat, open green space before it?

“Yep.” A grim tone, dead serious. “There’ll be snipers in those buildings.” He pointed at the long street that formed Tareek’s easternmost boundary. “We’ll have men up there watching the open ground. They can’t attack us from an open area; it’s suicide.”

And the south?

“Yeah, the south. That’s where the trouble is. That where most of our strength is concentrated.”

I listened to this little briefing intently. But part of me was incredulous. Was this a genuine tactical assessment, learned in the war-rooms of the community leaders, or was this an overzealous teenager playing general in front of a foreigner?

And snipers in buildings to the east? Sam’s loose lips had just given away a rather ugly secret: Tareek Al-Jadidah had guns in its arsenal. I didn’t call him on it.

More importantly, I was struck dumb by the tone and character of his words. Sam might as well have said of Dahiyeh: “Here be Mordor.” Here be the Forces of Evil, arrayed against the silver-armored defenders of Tareek Al-Jadidah. Here be the orcish Shi’ite hordes, playing the Persia to Tareek’s Spartans. These were the words and the beliefs of a people who knew themselves to be under siege. And their politics reflected this. The politics of Tareek Al-Jadidah were all, in one way or another, preparing for or responding to the perceived threat of Lebanon’s other tribes.

Was Sam just a jarhead? On some level, of course he knew better. He knew as well as any Lebanese that if the tribes didn’t find a way to break free of the old hatreds, Lebanon would be doomed to civil war- or cold peace- until the Day of Judgment. And he knew that the youth would have to spearhead this change. They would have to replace the beliefs of their elders- before they became them.

“I’m in a group called Future Youth,” he explained. Isn’t that the name of Hariri’s party? You know, a Sunni-only club? “No, that’s the Future Movement. It’s the actual political party. Future Youth was founded by Sunnis, yeah, but it’s for young people only, and its non-political. Shi’ites can join, and Christians too. ‘Future’ for me doesn’t mean what it does for Hariri, for the Future Movement. ‘Future’ isn’t just a name; it’s a necessity. We have to see past our differences.”

The tragedy is this kind of end-of-the-road vision-of-a-vision is drowned by the everyday reality of tribal rivalry. Dirty, day-by-day competition for jobs, for lebensraum, for political power. And with several hundred thousand frustrated, bombed-out Shi’ites clamoring on the doorstep of Tareek Al-Jadidah, well-meaning musings about olive branches and tribal unity drift away like ashes. Over the years, the moral climate of South Beirut’s single Sunni bastion have forced Sam to absorb- and live out- the skewed perspectives of his tribe.

Just like the Shi’ites of Dahiyeh, or the Palestinians of Shatila.

No, I don’t begrudge Sam his beliefs or his taser.

As he walked away for that last time, grinning cheekily and promising to Facebook me, I thought fleetingly about the movie The Departed, and its take on Good and Evil:

When you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, does it really matter?