[LCM Articles] A Nation With A Long Memory, but a Truncated History

[Maurice Hage-Obeid]

January 10, 2007
Beirut Memo
A Nation With a Long Memory, but a Truncated History
By HASSAN M. FATTAH

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 9 — History classes across the globe serve two
purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They
also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the
vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon
kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here — history seems
simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon’s heyday. With
sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the
failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to
repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from
their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have
their own agendas.

“America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce
sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity,” said Nemer
Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and
Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum.
“From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a
citizen. And what’s worse is that the people who are encouraging this are
the intellectuals themselves.”

Students are frustrated by the omissions, knowing they are getting a
distorted view of the past. “We keep asking them when we’re going to learn
the real history,” said Fatima Taha, a ninth grader at Hara International
College, a secondary school in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “The history
just suddenly stops.”

Private schools, which educate about half the country’s one million or so
students, teach history based on books of their choosing, but approved by
the Ministry of Education; public schools teach about two hours per week
of history, based on textbooks virtually unchanged since they were written
in the 1960s and 1970s.

In one textbook, the students get to know the Ottomans as occupiers; in
another, they read about them as administrators. In some, they study the
French as colonialists; in others, they study them as a examples to
emulate.

In some Christian schools, history starts with the ancient Phoenicians,
whom many Christians believe are their original ancestors, and the dawn of
Christianity. In many Muslim schools, the Phoenicians are glossed over and
emphasis is placed on Arab history and the arrival of Islam.

Whether Lebanon was occupied by the Ottomans, subjugated by the Ottomans
or was simply a principality of the Ottoman Empire depends on the sect and
region, much like whether the French, who oversaw the country until the
1950s, are depicted as colonialists, administrators or models of emulation.

“If they would just give us a national history, this country’s entire
outlook would change,” said Jawad al Haj, Hara’s principal. Mr. Haj, who
says two of his students were killed while fighting Israel last summer,
has banned his students from attending protests in Beirut, fearing they
could be indoctrinated by various political parties.

He has also prohibited any talk of politics inside his school, and is
especially strict on any hint of sectarianism. About half of his 1,500
students are Shiites and the rest are mainly Sunnis, along with a few
Christians.

“The kids need realities, a history they can believe in,” he said.
“Otherwise, they will never learn the meaning of citizenship.”

Under the 1989 Taif accords that ended the civil war, Lebanon was supposed
to unify its history and civics curriculums with the hope of building a
national consensus and a more solid national identity.

Nearly two decades later, however, the history and civics curriculums are
the only subjects that have not been revamped, still seen as the third
rail of Lebanese politics. Beginning in 1997, a committee put together by
the Ministry of Education spent three tumultuous and argumentative years
trying to arrive at a common history curriculum.

In 2000, it released guidelines for a new curriculum that sought to
depoliticize the history, several committee members said, focusing on the
effects of scientific and economic development on the country, with
lessons in sociology and economics in addition to teaching techniques of
historical analysis.

The curriculum was to delve deeply into the civil war, its causes and the
sectarian differences, and explain how those differences were finally
resolved — without any group coming out ahead, several committee members
said.

“You have to emphasize the costs of the war, to show it is a losing
cause,” said Antoine Messarra, director of the Lebanese Foundation for
Permanent Civil Peace and a member of the committee. The published
curriculum simply sat on officials’ desks, however.

In 2001, another committee, this one headed by Mr. Frayha, the former
research group director, managed to publish one textbook, a third-grade
history, and was preparing to publish several others.

But the text avoids any discussion of the civil war, switching to
international history after the 1960s. Even so, one chapter, lumping the
“Arab arrival” with all the other occupations and conquests of Lebanon,
touched a nerve. Abdel Rahim Murad, then minister of education, banned the
book.

“There were mistakes in the pictures, the content and the material,” Mr.
Murad said in an interview last week. But most of all, he said, the book
detracted from Lebanon’s Arab identity, a central tenet of the Taif
accords. “In Frayha’s book, Lebanon has no identity,” he said. “It was
lost or blurred.”

Critics of Mr. Murad say he banned the books to please his Syrian backers,
who were against cultivation of a nationalist Lebanese identity. Syria,
which controlled Lebanon until 2005 and micromanaged much of its politics
since the end of the civil war, also sought to control the country’s
historical narrative, critics say.

The issue became so controversial that Mr. Frayha was fired from his
position and subsequently summoned to Syria for questioning, he said.
Rather than submit to that, Mr. Frayha said he left Lebanon to teach
elsewhere.

“Typically the victor writes the history,” said Milhem Chaoul, a professor
of sociology at the University of Lebanon. “The problem with the civil war
was that nobody won, and you still can’t write its history because we are
still not at peace.”

Nada Bakri contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/world/middleeast/10textbooks.html?ei=5094&en=d9fc5a80bcd98350&hp=&ex=1168491600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all


Maurice Hage-Obeid
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
428 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02139
(857)-222-1663