Since the Arab invasion in the seventh century, we had been living in mercantile peace with the Moslems, with only some occasional harassment by the Lebanese Maronite Christians from the mountains.

We originate from the olive-growing area at the base of Mount Lebanon - we chased the Maronite Christians into the mountains in the famous battle of Amioun, my ancestral village. Note that the Byzantines called themselves 'Romans'- Roumi (plural Roum) in the local languages. The terms balance and equilib rium were often used.īoth sides of my family came from the Greco-Syrian community, the last Byzantine outpost in northern Syria, which included what is now called Lebanon. Things appeared to be in a state of stable equilibrium, evolving out of a historical tendency for betterment and tolerance. It was taken for granted that people learned to be tolerant there I recall how we were taught in school how far more civilized and wiser we were than those in the Balkan communities, where not only did the locals refrain from bathing but also fell prey to fractious ¿ghting.

The mosaic of cultures and religions there was deemed an example of coexistence: Christians of all varieties (Maronites, Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, even Byzantine Catholic, in addition to the few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades) Moslems (Shiite and Sunni) Druzes and a few Jews. A mountainous terrain is an ideal refuge from the mainstream, except that your enemy is the other refugee competing for the same type of rugged real estate. While the cities were mercantile and mostly Hellenistic, the mountains had been settled by all manner of religious minorities who claimed to have fled both the Byzantine and Moslem orthodoxies. This millennium of peace was interrupted only by small occasional friction within Moslem and Christian communities, rarely between Christians and Moslems. The Levantine cities were mercantile in nature people dealt with one another according to a clear protocol, preserving a peace conducive to commerce, and they socialized quite a bit across communities. The place resembled major cities of the eastern Mediterranean (called the Levant) more than it did the other parts in the interior of the Near East (it was easier to move by ship than by land through the mountainous terrain).

For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs - it worked like magic.

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