Beirut was the capital of Arabic modernity. It was a platform for debates, for democracy, all cultures met there. It was extremely dynamic […] Everyone could create their own Beirut, which was part of the problem. Beirut gives every visitor the impression that it is his. Culturally speaking, it was the center of things. (Mahmoud Darwich, interviewed by Adam Shatz, 1st December 2001, Journal of Palestine studies, 2022)
- 1 We would like to thank Lison Burlat, assistant editor of Biens symboliques / Symbolic Goods, for he (...)
1As we were finalizing this issue of the journal, spectacular images of Beirut under Israeli bombing reappeared in the international media. “It was Beirut, all over again,” as per the famous poem by Etel Adnan (1925–2021)1. Air strikes, massive destruction, anonymous death, rushed departures: this all too familiar picture of the Lebanese capital plunged into war conjures once again an image already fixed in our minds, that of an iconic city put to death again and again, but which nevertheless continues to rise up. In the cultural domain, until Lebanon entered a spiral of economic and social collapse at the end of 2019, such hopes of rehabilitation seemed legitimate thanks to the recent installation of cultural foundations and associations with a pan-Arab outlook, the arrival of Iraqi, Saudi, and Syrian publishers from Egypt, Syria, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (Mermier 2016), and the success encountered in the global art market by artists who found refuge or were born there. Beirut still benefited from its very different historical image, which it continued to carry concurrently with that of the martyr-city throughout the Arab world: the image of a high place of Arab cultural and intellectual life, publishing the most daring voices of the region, fuelled by an overflowing and contagious vital energy.
2Prior to its representation as a figure of war, which many external observers tend to reduce it to, Beirut had established a unique place within the landscape of major Arab cities. A laboratory city of Ottoman modernity, a pioneer city in printing, press, and publishing, and an academic centre with regional influence thanks to its American and Jesuit universities, Beirut had first been, along with Cairo, one of the main centres of the Nahda—the Arab Enlightenment of the nineteenth century. However, it was in the second half of the twentieth century that this city, which was modest in size compared with Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad, fully became a regional cultural and intellectual capital. Relying on a dense network of private cultural institutions and an economy of the press and publishing with pan-Arab dimensions (Mermier 2002, 2005), liberal Beirut found itself able to challenge Cairo’s supremacy, which was hitherto undisputed in the cultural sphere.
- 2 The Palestinian Revolution (al-thawra al-filastiniyya) refers, in the words of its actors, to the n (...)
3Welcoming political exiles, dissident journalists, writers seeking recognition, and students from all over the region, Beirut intellectual worlds entered an unprecedented state of ferment from the 1950s onwards, catalyzed further by the fallout from the defeat of the Arab States in the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 (Haugbolle 2017) and the rise of the Palestinian Revolution.2 The presence in Beirut of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its various factions established the Lebanese capital as the essential meeting place for intellectual protest and ideological debate in the Arab world, while connecting it to revolutionary networks around the world (Guirguis 2021, 2023; Haugbolle & Olsen 2023). A steadily increasing number of newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and research centres spread their influence across a simmering Arab world. In an apparent paradox, Lebanon’s entry into civil war in 1975 did not slow down this movement, but rather accelerated it, owing to the resulting influx of funding by various local and regional political actors seeking to secure the solidarity of intellectuals there (Mermier 2016; Raymond 2019, 2021). It would take the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the subsequent evacuation of Palestinian fighters and cadres, and then the sinking of a country that was a victim of its internal wars, to force out many of the actors of Beirut’s intellectual worlds and sound the death knell of an era that came to be glorified in retrospect.
- 3 For more information on the seminar “Les mondes intellectuels beyrouthins. Figures, institutions, c (...)
4This period of Beirut’s intellectual history from the 1950s to the early 1980s, often presented as a golden age, is the focus of the current issue, some articles of which go beyond 1982—the year which is viewed as a turning point—to investigate trajectories and reconfigurations over the long term. The result of a seminar organized in collaboration with the Institut français du Proche-Orient (French Institute of the Near East, Ifpo), the Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris (Center for Sociological and Political Research in Paris, Cresppa-LabTop), and the American University of Beirut (AUB) between December 2021 and January 2023.3 It puts forward aspects of a sociohistorical reflection on the intellectual worlds that formed in Beirut in the second half of the twentieth century. Characterized by the predominance of private actors and the weakness of public institutions, these worlds were highly politicized, and strongly connected at the regional level. To capture their specificities and delineate their contours, this issue lies at the crossroads of several disciplines (history, sociology, anthropology, and political science) and several fields of research (history and sociology of intellectuals, sociohistory of political ideas, New Cinema History, etc.). Its six featured articles highlight the history of Beirut’s role as an intellectual capital and hotbed of Arab political thought at the intersection of transnational movements, focusing on the trajectories of Lebanese and Arab figures that marked its intellectual life as well as the institutions and media that organized the social fabric of political ideas (newspapers, journals, publishing houses, research centres, but also film clubs, cultural centres, and galleries). These various contributions offer diverse perspectives and a rich body of empirical material, often unpublished. This introduction aims to bring them into dialogue by proposing a few cross-cutting themes.
- 4 In its Arab domain as in others, intellectual history has not experienced, in English-speaking rese (...)
- 5 Exceptions to this dominant approach by individuals are certain works that have deployed the French (...)
- 6 By milieu (intellectual, in this case) we mean a structured set of social relations within a given (...)
5Let us first observe that this issue is published within a scientific context in which Arab intellectual history has been the subject of renewed interest for several years, particularly in English-speaking research. This was first manifested in an unprecedented expansion of research on the intellectual history of the Nahda (Hamzah 2012; Hanssen & Weiss 2016). More recent historical periods are also being revisited (Hanssen & Weiss 2018). The 1950s and 1960s, a period of decolonization and soaring Middle Eastern nationalist ideologies that has long interested historians of political ideas, are now being re-examined (Di-Capua 2018; Schumann 2010). Intellectual history after the Arab defeat of 1967, which was already marked by older works (Abu Rabi 2004; Charaffeddine 2000) and by more or less successful recent panoramas (Corm 2020 [2015]; Kassab 2010), is also experiencing similar renewals (Bardawil 2020; Hatina & Schumann 2015). The bulk of this production, by taking a fresh look and tapping the vein of intellectual history,4 focuses on discursive activity and the range of writing practices deployed by a rich array of authors, examining their social profiles, connections, and circulations. Critical biographies and close attention paid to their intellectual productions, placed in their principally enunciative context (Skinner 2007), reproduce the variety and complexity of individual experiences and “horizons of expectation” that inform the production of texts and ideas. But the strong individualist tropism of this literature has a drawback in that it often does not allow us to grasp how the intellectual milieus in which these actors evolve5 are formed and function.6 Although the literature has largely broken away from the cult of “big names” and willingly embraces figures considered to be minor, it remains attached to singular voices, so much so that it often lacks the underpinning of a more collective history, that of the different social spaces between which individual trajectories are built and intellectual habitus are formed (Bourdieu 2000).
6This is precisely where the first contribution of this dossier lies: it deals with giving back to the actors of this Arab intellectual history the social universes that were theirs, by sketching their social and institutional topography, but also by exploring their material conditions and mechanisms of expression. Although several articles explore the trajectories of intellectual figures, these are not necessarily the most recognized for their own intellectual contributions, but they are men (the milieu remains predominantly masculine), not of the shadows, but of intellectual intervention, who not only think and write, but also connect, support, lead, and translate. Journalist Joseph Samaha (article by Aya Khalil), activist Mounir Shafiq (Nicolas Dot-Pouillard), and publishers Suhayl Idris and Riad al-Rayyes (Franck Mermier) are among the linchpins linking institutions and networks, and political thought and practice. The female figures mentioned in several of the articles (Rosemary Sayigh and Anni Kanafani in Sune Haugbolle’s contribution, Janine Rubeiz in Flava Malusardi’s) are studied more in terms of their activist activities and their role as initiators and leaders of associations or networks, and even as cultural gatekeepers. This gendered distribution of roles (and associated recognition), which is in no way specific to Beirut’s intellectual worlds, recalls in many respects the distinction drawn by Christophe Charle (1992) between “hommes doubles” (double or dual figures) and “cultural intermediaries.”
7Through research on a variety of local and delimited subjects conducted via empirical investigations combining different spatial and temporal scales of analysis, the articles in this issue connect the threads of a web of moving interrelations which, viewed from the angle of histoire croisée (Werner & Zimmermann 2003), highlights fragments of a history of contemporary Arab political thought and anchors it to its proper sites and milieus.
8Reconstructing Beirut’s worlds of Arab intellectual history often requires researchers to gather fragmentary and dispersed documentation. Research therefore comes to resemble a treasure hunt in which the publications produced by some of the actors in this history represent only the starting point in a patient investigation which seeks to grasp what is beyond the text. In Lebanon, such a research agenda confronts the extreme weakness of public archival institutions, which is due to both the legacy of the wars that devastated the country and the historical peculiarities of a hybrid state which readily relies on private actors (Mouawad & Baumann 2017). It is the latter, whether private universities, enthusiast collectors, or heirs who are the custodians of closely guarded family archives, who hold and determine access to the bulk of the sources on which sociohistorical investigation is based. This peculiarity of the terrain in which we work largely explains why approaches to intellectual history centred on printed texts have long prevailed, and why investigation of the social universes from which they emanate has been left to lie fallow. In this respect, this issue of the journal is exploratory not only in terms of its subjects and questions, but also in terms of its sources, as evidenced by Franck Mermier’s article on publishers’ memoirs, that of Flavia Malusardi on Dar el Fan, or that of Anaïs Farine on the Arab Film Club. An additional empirical difficulty is that these investigations take place by necessity across multiple locations (and in multiple languages), since transnational circulations are constitutive of their object. Speaking of Beirut intellectual worlds does not amount, indeed, to limiting discussion to social spaces located in the Lebanese capital, and even less to focusing only on actors of Lebanese nationality operating there, but on the contrary to taking account of transnational extensions, on a regional and even global scale.
- 7 This Arabic term traditionally refers to the territories of historical Greater Syria, which covers (...)
9Considering Beirut’s intellectual worlds of the 1950s to 1990s in their transnational dimension and their regional, if not global, scope requires us, first of all, to broaden our chronology so as to situate Beirut historically as an Ottoman Arab city, the last to become a provincial capital of the Empire (Hanssen 2005; Kassir 2010 [2003]) and whose spectacular development during the nineteenth century accompanied its assertion as one of the centres of the Nahda (Fawaz 1983; Gonzales-Quijano 2007; Hanssen & Weiss 2016; Hourani 1962; Makdisi 2019). At the end of the nineteenth century, Beirut was thus integrated into a set of economic and cultural networks linking it to the other major cities of Bilād al-Shām7 and Egypt, within an Ottoman Empire whose administrative boundaries cannot be compared to modern borders. In the Ottoman Arab provinces where the city was “an essential political entity” (Thieck 1985: 117), individuals circulated as well as symbolic and tradable goods. At the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks to a growing print production, and the press in particular, political demands and projects emerged and the contours of an Arab “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) were shaped. Beirut became a link in a political dynamic which was formed around several issues: the decentralization of the Empire; increased rights for Arab communities; and the question of the Zionist project in Palestine (Khalidi 1991). The Beirut press published articles which were read and republished by the press in Damascus, Cairo, and Haifa, and vice versa (Khalidi 1981, 1997). Thus, both in terms of its regional configuration and its emerging political identity, Beirut has been constructed since the nineteenth century as an Arab metropolis.
- 8 The Nakba (literally: catastrophe) refers to the forced displacement of around 800,000 Palestinians (...)
10In the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the borders imposed by the mandatory powers and endorsed by the San Remo Conference in 1920 hardly created a physical separation between the territories of former Ottoman Syria. They were relatively porous and had little impact on socioeconomic structures. While Beirut became the capital of the State of Greater Lebanon and saw its elites clash over the legitimacy and political identity of this new country detached from its Syrian surroundings by the French mandate (Hakim 2013; Salibi 1988), it remained a junction point of regional circulations and anti-colonial protests. It was only after 1948, with the creation of the Israeli state, and then the rupture of the customs union between Syria and Lebanon in 1950, that the recent borders gradually became a clear reality that redefined collective identities and projected new shared maps (Picard 2016). Yet, far from isolating Beirut from its regional environment after Lebanon had gained independence in 1943, these changes strengthened the city as the favoured crossroads for Arab intellectual circulations and a hub of political sociability. Since the Nakba,8 the city had been home to many Palestinians, some of whom were among its most prominent intellectual figures, while others, lesser known, populated newsrooms and publishing houses. Moreover, thanks to the relative political liberalism of Lebanon, it proved increasingly attractive to intellectuals and exiles from neighbouring countries, contributing to the “cosmopolitanism of affluence” (Mejcher-Atassi 2024: 35) characteristic of Beirut’s cultural milieus.
11It is as a continuation of this imperial, colonial, and then postcolonial history, which involves a decentring from the national/state level, that this issue is positioned in order to restore the full historical depth to the “Arab city in Beirut” (Harlow 1990) evoked by the writer Elias Khoury (1948–2024). The intense flows of individuals, resources, and cultural goods brought about by transnational connections between Lebanon and the Arab world, but also Europe (and to a lesser extent the Americas), shaped intellectual spaces which were both anchored in Beirut and oriented towards the Arab world, with actors who were Lebanese as well as Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Iraqi. Thanks to the economic development Lebanon experienced starting in the 1950s (Gaspard 2004; Traboulsi 2007) and a censorship that was less restrictive compared with that practised increasingly in the surrounding countries, the Beirut publishing sector experienced a boom. The Lebanese press, which had been a press of opinion and an instrument of political mobilization since the very beginning of the twentieth century, benefited from the repercussions of the increased authoritarianism experienced in Syria and Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s. Rivalling the Egyptian press, which was deprived of access to several countries in the region and subject to increasing control, it became a true pan-Arab press published out of Lebanon (Dajani 1992). The same dynamism affected the entire publishing sector, which relied on the expertise of its printers and the boldness of its publishers to assert itself as the main space for expression in the Arab world. In this regard, Franck Mermier’s article in this issue relays the editorial history of Lebanon and the Arab world, intricately embedded in the city of Beirut, via a comparative study of the memoirs of four publishers—the Lebanese Suhayl Idris (1925–2008), the Lebanese-Palestinian Nasser Jarrous (1947–), the Syrian-Lebanese Riad al-Rayyes (1937–2020), and the Palestinian-Jordanian Fathi al-Biss (1951–). He records the continuities and overlaps between newspapers, publishing houses, and publishers’ associations; the transnational coherences they established and the rivalries which ran through them.
12Following the defeat of 1967, the intellectual competition in Beirut was catalysed by increased funding from Arab governments (Kassir 2010 [2003]) and the PLO’s presence in Lebanon. Many institutions emerged, both as initiatives of intellectual figures and from the melting pot of political organizations keen to control spaces for the production of symbolic goods. Arab and Palestinian nationalists and Marxists of different affiliations met, discussed, and organized themselves in the cafés of Ras Beirut and Hamra Street, established their cultural spaces, collaborated in various journals, often simultaneously, and echoed regional and international debates, turning Beirut into an “ideological laboratory” (Mermier 2005: 57). Aligned with the revolutionary wave of the Global Sixties, Arabist and left-wing political thinking was radicalised; an evolving reflection emanated from the various sites of intellectual production and translated “a stock of self-evidences shared by all” (Bourdieu 2000: 98) around the idea that national liberation (Palestinian and Arab) and socialist revolution were two interdependent processes.
- 9 The Institute for Palestine studies (IPS, founded as an independent research institution in 1963) a (...)
- 10 For a reflection on the role of “political friendships,” backed by a study in Shu’ûn Filastiniyya ( (...)
13Several articles in this issue contribute to drawing a vivid picture of the politico-intellectual ferment in Beirut of the 1960s and 1970s and the transnational dynamics that underpinned it. That of Nicolas Dot-Pouillard, on the trajectory of the Palestinian intellectual Mounir Shafiq (1936-) highlights considerable intermeshing between the cultural and the political fields, the attractive power of the PLO and the Fatah institutions, and the shared Arab, pro-Palestinian and Marxist ethos which many intellectual spaces in Beirut exuded beyond their distinguishing features and the competition that motivated them. Finally, it sheds light on how critical thought and revolutionary experiences from around the world—especially those from Vietnam and China in the case of Shafiq and his comrades—were discussed and reappropriated by local actors, according to what they perceived as resonating with their own political challenges and imperatives. Sune Haugbolle’s article, meanwhile, shows the phenomena of “cultural transfer” and ideological influence generated by links between the European internationalists, intellectuals of the Lebanese left, and actors of the Palestinian Revolution in Beirut, including the writer Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972). In doing so, Haugbolle shows the central role played in political thought and practice by institutions such as the PLO’s Research Center and the Institute for Palestine Studies,9 but also the bonds of friendship and camaraderie between activists from various backgrounds,10 as well as the work of translation from Arabic to a European language and vice versa, thus illuminating the “multiple intersection points” (Gobille 2017) of the history of the Global Sixties. As for the articles by Flavia Malusardi and Anaïs Farine, they situate Beirut on the map of transnational circulations through which certain symbolic goods fuelled a set of shared cultural references on a global scale. South American revolutionary songs were sung in Beirut, where the screening of Montaldo’s Sacco & Vanzetti, Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, and Costa-Gavras’s Z set the audience alight, while some films about the Palestinian Revolution made in Beirut enjoyed international success at politically engaged festivals and among European, Japanese, or South American activists (Yaqub 2018).
14Beirut’s intellectual worlds thus prove to be a subject of research which can contribute towards a social and political history that goes beyond the city of Beirut alone and embraces that of the Arab world, a history connected to the interface between the local, the regional, and the global (Subrahmanyam 1997), integrating an intellectual history of Palestine in exile, the Lebanese left and Arab publishing, as well as a history of ideological migrations and revolutionary utopias in the Mashriq. If the French-speaking intellectual milieus of Lebanon remain largely absent from this issue, this is because they are on the margins of such regional dynamics and tend to be much more Lebanese-centred in their intellectual stakes as well as in their practices—more Lebanese than Beiruti, in a way. Beyond these regional links, by situating Arab intellectual and activist networks on the map of the revolutionary circulations which made-up the Global Sixties (Gobille 2017), this issue highlights Beirut intellectual worlds of the second half of the twentieth century as a laboratory of third-world political thought.
15Another contribution this issue offers lies in its effort to decompartmentalize the sites of intellectual life and the production of political ideas, which in turn invites us to reconsider the relationship between culture and politics in an intellectual capital of the Arab world. A capital is above all a space of demographic concentration (Davie 1994), where the immediate proximity of institutions and actors promotes interactions and communication between individuals and between different fields, both those of cultural production and politics. Beirut, because of the density of its cultural milieus, lends itself particularly well to an examination of these close-knit circulations between several intellectual spaces, thanks to “the social and symbolic interaction and the almost immediate communication made possible by the immediate proximity and encounters, which would be more unlikely, difficult, or random elsewhere, between individuals from different fields and often with very diverse backgrounds” (Charle 2009: 13). This is why, while this issue seeks to explore some of the places dedicated to intellectual production, such as journals and publishing houses, it also surveys places which might at first glance seem more peripheral—a film club and a cultural centre; that nevertheless constitute spaces in which political discourse and representations form and brush up against each other, including those which are not expressly presented as political discourse or representations (Gaboriaux & Skornicki 2017), but take the form of an art exhibition or film discussion. In this respect, our research agenda is in line with the effort to broaden the historical framework adopted in the study of European cultural capitals in which, beyond institutions and places dedicated to the production of symbolic goods, examination of their spaces of circulation and consumption as well as the forms of sociability that develop there are also central to understanding the dynamics of their socialization and politicization (Romano & Van Damme 2008). Franck Mermier’s article, which brings together the plural memories of Lebanese and Arab publishers who roamed the city at different times, is full of references to these multiple locations—bookshops, cafés, editorial offices, and newspaper headquarters—where men and their ideas collided, and where shared forms of sociability and political cultures were forged. To this topography, Flavia Malusardi adds cultural centres, where art was never dissociated from politics, and Anaïs Farine adds cinemas, which became spaces that played a “unifying role” between different currents of the left which split apart more readily elsewhere. Attendance at these different places of cultural socialization plays a central role in the formation of common political dispositions, which in turn tend to make any cultural practice a tool for political struggle and social transformation.
16This intertwining of the cultural and the political is not, in itself, specific to the period covered in this issue, since very few areas of Lebanese cultural production escaped the political polarization that followed the disputed creation of the State of Greater Lebanon in 1920. Moreover, in Lebanon, as in the whole of the Arab world, cultural milieus had long been imbued with images forged during the Nahda, where it was the role of intellectual elites to develop projects for the political and cultural modernization of Arab societies (Dakhli 2009; Hourani 1962; Jacquemond 2015). If there is therefore a major characteristic of this century long history of culture in Lebanon and the Arab world, it is its close relationship with politics. What, on the other hand, is peculiar to the 1960s and 1970s is the extraordinary extension of these cultural arenas of politics transnationally, as we have already pointed out, but also socially, going beyond the traditional elitism of cultural circles and their institutions (Haugbolle 2011). Never had so many newspapers, books, and journals been written, published, sold and read; never had the universities of the country welcomed so many students or recruited so many teachers; never had the places of intellectual socialization been so frequented.
- 11 In addition to the American University of Beirut (AUB, founded in 1866) and Saint Joseph University (...)
17This evolution is underpinned by and makes manifest the important sociomorphological transformations (Bourdieu 1988) experienced by Beirut’s cultural milieus from the 1960s onwards. The expansion of the university sector, which was based in particular on the growth of the national public university (the Lebanese University11), along with the gradual rise in the level of academic qualifications bore fruit in the 1970s with the arrival in the university labour market and in the publishing sector of an increasing number of young graduates with master’s degrees and PhDs in the humanities and social sciences (Raymond 2019). The increased access of young women to higher education sped up the feminization of cultural milieus. The rise of the partisan press, concomitant with the proliferation of organizations and political groups, favoured trajectories of social and professional mobility whereby young activists from the margins invested in contemporary print culture, then at its peak, as a privileged space for engagement, but also of learning. These trends broadened the social base of recruitment into the intellectual professions, both along denominational lines (with a rebalancing in favour of Muslim communities) and in terms of social class (culture ceasing to be the preserve of the bourgeoisie and opening up largely to new entrants from the middle and working classes).
- 12 The PhD dissertation of Agnès Favier (2004), unpublished and yet now a “classic” for French-speakin (...)
- 13 Beirut’s cartography of institutions in the publishing sector (major daily newspapers, publishing h (...)
18The insertion of these new cohorts, socialized during their academic years in Beirut’s political, cultural, and trade union circles,12 along with Arab cultural actors drawn to the city by its liberal traditions, its professional opportunities, and its promise of personal and collective fulfilment, together contributed to the densification of Beirut’s intellectual worlds and, consequently, to an intensification of the interactions that nourished its dynamism and creativity. The close proximity and direct interactions between individuals have not only accelerated the spread of new ideas, but also heightened competition between cultural producers, both of which have contributed to a more innovative environment. The continued growth of the publishing market and the proliferation of intellectual and cultural journals (Raymond 2021) reflect this vitality, which had paused by the start of civil war in 1975 and the destruction of the city centre,13 but then benefited in its wake from an influx of political funding allowing for a rapid and significant recovery before the decisive turning point brought about by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its subsequent fallout.
19At the end of the summer of 1982, after seventy days of the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army, around fifteen thousand PLO fighters and cadres evacuated the Lebanese capital aboard Greek boats or via Syria. Although Yasser Arafat (1924–2004) claimed victory, no one was under any illusion: the Palestinian Revolution had turned a page and ended an important chapter, as had the last powerful political incarnations of Arabism and the left. In September, Israeli troops entered West Beirut and oversaw the massacre perpetrated by Christian militias in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In this context, many cultural institutions experienced temporary or lasting decline. Some of them shut down, others were destroyed or relocated abroad, pushing a large number of Beirut’s intellectuals, whether journalists, writers, or publishers, to leave the Lebanese capital, often for Tunis, Paris or London, and sometimes for neighbouring Arab capitals. For example, the PLO’s Research Center, a privileged site of political socialization and intellectual production mentioned in the articles by Nicolas Dot-Pouillard and Sune Haugbolle, was looted by the Israeli army in September 1982 and was forced to close its doors a few months later after a car bombing masterminded by the Israeli military leadership (Bergman 2018; Gribetz 2024). As armed violence settled permanently in the very heart of West Beirut, its networks were gradually disintegrating, some eventually disappearing, others rebuilding themselves elsewhere. Beirut ceased to be the essential crossroads for regional and international political and intellectual exchanges. The city witnessed the end of its “golden age” as the Arab capital of culture and revolution.
- 14 The Naksa (literally: setback, relapse) refers to both the Arab defeat against Israel at the end of (...)
20Besides being at the origin of significant reorientations in the individual and collective trajectories of the actors of Beirut’s intellectual worlds, the defeat of 1982 also helped to reveal regional political transformations. Indeed, the PLO’s defeat cannot be isolated from other episodes which preceded it, such as the death of Nasser in 1970, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978, followed by Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League, and Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. Nevertheless, it cannot be reduced to a simple link in a historical chain whose retrospective reconstruction reveals its meaning and coherence. From the point of view of Beirut’s intellectual worlds, the defeat of 1982 draws a “dividing line between two worlds” (Bensa & Fassin 2002) by introducing a new temporality and new paradigms. For this reason we postulate that the date of 1982 was a much more decisive moment of rupture than the Naksa of 1967.14 1982 can indeed be considered as one of those “relatively abrupt and diversionary moments” (Abbott 2001 : 247) that sparked and accelerated a sociopolitical change of direction whose consequences were rendered irreversible since they were part of a regional and global process of profound change marked by the decline of Arab nationalism, the development of Islamism, the ascending regional role taken by Saudi Arabia, the progress of the neoliberal dynamic (Hanieh 2013), and the global waning of the left (Keucheyan 2013 [2010]). Viewed in this light, the defeat of 1982 appears to be the outcome of a political sequence begun at the start of the twentieth century and dominated by the “Arab national movement” (al-ḥaraka al-waṭaniyya al-’arabiyya) which, despite its different centres of gravity and the plural forms taken over time, brought together a wide range of Arab, leftist, and/or Palestinian nationalist personalities and organizations around the shared idea of Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine.
21However, does the year 1982 mark the end of a world? While it is clearly a turning point, this temporal boundary cannot eclipse the continuities characteristic of Arab intellectual life before and after 1982. Thus, it should be pointed out at the outset that the changes brought about in 1982 did not lead to the disappearance of Beirut’s intellectual worlds, but rather reconfigured them while remodelling practices of sociability. After being dispersed, the former networks were partially reformed along new lines throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Some, for example, re-formed in Paris around al-Yawm al-sābi‘, a journal financed by the PLO (Khalil 2022); others remained in Beirut at al-Safīr newspaper, Dār al-Ādāb publishing house, or at the Centre for Studies for Arab Unity (Markaz al-dirāsāt al-waḥda al-‘arabiyya), which had shortly resumed their activities. Other networks reconstituted themselves at the end of the war, thanks to the revival by the writer Elias Khoury of al-Mulḥaq, the cultural supplement of al-Nahār newspaper, and other institutions, such as the Dār Riad El-Rayyes publishing house mentioned in Franck Mermier’s article, that were established in the country once it had achieved relative stability. In addition, Beirut’s intellectual worlds of the 1950s to 1970s, then predominantly left-wing and Arabist, were rearranged in a regional context defined by the rise of Islamic cultural institutions, the emergence of editorial and cultural hubs in Riyadh, Amman, and Damascus, in addition to that of Cairo, and the development of a press with Saudi capital established in London (Mermier 2002).
22In this changing global landscape, particular attention is thus paid in this issue to the social and geographical displacement of Beirut’s intellectuals, to the reordering of configurations and practices, and to their immediate or delayed effects on political ideas. This in turn brings to the fore patterns of thought that have either changed very little or despite being seemingly overhauled still maintain significant common denominators with previous patterns. In this regard, Aya Khalil’s article on the social trajectory of journalist Joseph Samaha (1949–2007) sheds light on the social conditions that organized a continuity of Arabism (‘urūba) during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s during the period in which Arab nationalism almost disappeared from the regional political field. Through analysis of the effects of different practices of sociability on ideas, it shows how political dispositions and ideas are used and reshaped according to shifts in the social space, new socializations, and changes to the political context, but also that, far from merely serving as instruments, “they shape trajectories and the social world” (Tissot 2005: 17). Through Joseph Samaha, the networks he connected, and the periodicals he led, we observe the remarkable persistence of the Arab national imaginary highlighting the strong resilience of this sense of transnational belonging for nearly a century and a half.
23Although it remains relatively marginal, the phenomenon of conversion—in the sense of the adoption of a new ideological mould—which has characterized the trajectories of certain intellectuals, notably from Marxism to Islamism, cannot be approached solely from the point of view of rupture (biographical or ideological). Nicolas Dot-Pouillard thus sheds light on the continuities underlying Mounir Shafiq’s “seamless conversions,” which comprise theoretical reconstructions, ideological assemblages, and redefinitions of his social identity in a changing environment, throughout which he essentially mobilizes Islam as a “a new symbolic resource” (Burgat & Rey 2022: 18) in his continued struggle to confront the colonial question in Palestine. Contrary to Samaha, Shafiq embraces a new ideological universe; yet, while their trajectories are very different, we can observe an evolutionary relationship of convergence between these two figures with regard to certain Islamic-inspired movements in the name of anti-imperialism/anti-colonialism. These reciprocities, reappropriations, and bridges between different forms of nationalism, Marxism, and Islamism in the Mashriq, on which Maxime Rodinson (1982 [1972]) has produced important work, therefore call for decompartmentalized approaches to these ideological categories (Seurat & Sfeir 2022) which, without eclipsing the antagonisms between them, help to understand the junction points between intellectuals and political currents in the Arab world, in specific configurations. Finally, despite the far-reaching sociopolitical transformations which have reshaped the societies of the Arab Mashriq and the intellectual worlds of Beirut throughout the twentieth century, it appears that, like the questions of authoritarianism and social inequalities, those of colonialism and the relationship with the West continue to shape both political mobilizations and regional intellectual life, as dramatically illustrated by the events in Palestine and Lebanon taking place at the time of writing.