Customer Reviews

Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions (Princeton Series on the Middle East)

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I checked this book out of my university library because I wanted a complete history of Lebanon that covered the entire civil war and the following period, and this was the only one it had. Harris brings an obvious knowledge of the country, and peppers his account of the civil war with personal anecdotes from his time at the American University of Beirut during the war, which greatly add to the book. Unfortunately, Harris didn't do nearly as good a job as he could have-for one thing, his prose style is not particularly engaging (I had to work to finish this book). Also, he assumes his readers already have a basic knowledge of Lebanon and the civil war (or have access to other books besides his about them). Probably as a result, this book has lots of gaps in it-to give the most glaring example, Harris says practically nothing about why Hezbollah was founded or who its founders were-in his telling, the group almost magically appears sometime around 1984. Other events of the civil war-particularly having to do with the Christian side-Harris relates in much greater detail. Harris also seems biased towards General Michel Aoun-he describes him more sympathetically then other civil war leaders, and cites, numerous times, his post-war interviews with Aoun.
In short, this book is OK as a reference, and the author obviously knows his subject-and, just as obviously, could have used a good editor.

Harris, an occasional resident of Lebanon since 1983 and now a university instructor in New Zealand, has produced the first reliable and readable history of Lebanon to appear in years. The first section introduces the country's geography, sects, and politics; the second provides a routine but useful overview of Lebanon's political history from 1920 to 1989; and the final one breaks new ground in English by making sense of the country's recent past, dealing at length with the Michel Aoun's to throw off the Syrian occupation, then the consequences of Aoun's defeat.

Harris is that rare foreign specialist of Lebanon who makes no excuses for the Syrian occupation there. He notes that since Syrian troops gained nearly full control of Lebanon in October 1990, the regime of Hafiz al-Asad has treated Lebanon as "a conquered state" and calls this era the "years of stagnation and humiliation" for ordinary Lebanese. Harris rightly interprets Syrian actions in Lebanon-economic and cultural no less than political and military-as intended to stabilize Syrian primacy. He reports how the Lebanese have responded to life in the world's only remaining satellite state by trying, against overwhelming odds, to maintain a civil society. His description brings to mind Poland in the 1950s, suggesting that while the Syrian yoke will be heavy and long, it will not permanently prevail.

Middle East Quarterly, March 1997