soc.culture.lebanon

Long-form reference · 3,757 words · about a 16-minute read

The group and its era

soc.culture.lebanon was one of the national groups of the soc.culture.* hierarchy, carried on the Big Eight feed and given its character entirely by whoever chose to post. The charter line promised nothing more specific than the country and its people, and nothing more was needed: the subject supplied its own agenda.

Its active life fell wholly in the aftermath of the war of 1975 to 1990. The Taif Agreement, signed at Taif on 22 October 1989 and ratified on 5 November, set the terms of what followed: parity between Christian and Muslim representation in an enlarged Chamber of Deputies, executive power shifted from the presidency towards the council of ministers, and a Syrian redeployment to the Beqaa within two years for which no date of full withdrawal was fixed. The reconstruction years were built on that settlement.

Further detail of that settlement is worth setting down, because it framed the whole of the period the group covered. The text was negotiated by the surviving members of the Chamber of Deputies elected in 1972, the last parliament returned before the fighting began; the deputies ratified it on 5 November 1989 at the Qoleiat air base in the north and elected a president the same day, and the constitutional amendments giving it effect were signed in September 1990. The government formed under the agreement afterwards set 30 April 1991 as the final date for the surrender of all territory and heavy artillery and the disbandment of militias. The agreement itself reduced the ratio of Christians to Muslims in the Chamber of Deputies from six to five to one to one; the enlarged Chamber has 128 members, shared equally between them.

Lebanon also came online early by regional standards. The American University of Beirut set up the country’s first internet node from 1991, and the campus network known as AUBnet became active in 1993; commercial dial-up followed in 1995 under four licensed providers, and by 1998 there were some forty thousand subscribers. Posting from inside the country was therefore possible in a way it was not everywhere in the region.

Events kept arriving. Israel completed its withdrawal from southern Lebanon on 24 May 2000; the Security Council adopted Resolution 1559 on 2 September 2004; Rafic Hariri was killed on 14 February 2005, and the Syrian military presence maintained since 1976 was withdrawn by 30 April that year. news2mail carried the group to e-mail from 2000 to 2004, squarely inside that sequence.

Connectivity and who could post

The country’s place in the domain name system can be dated exactly. IANA’s root zone database records the delegation of .lb on 25 August 1993, with five second-level domains — com.lb, edu.lb, gov.lb, net.lb and org.lb — and a requirement that a registrant hold a Lebanese address. For the whole of the group’s active life the registry issued names directly and without charge, with no registrar layer; a registrar model and an annual fee came only on 1 February 2021. The delegation date falls between the first university node and the first commercial licences: the country had an address in the root two years before an ordinary household could buy an account.

What that meant in practice is visible in the ITU series carried in the World Bank’s indicator for individuals using the internet as a percentage of population. Lebanon is recorded at 0.14 per cent in 1996, 1.24 in 1997, 2.72 in 1998 and 5.38 in 1999, then 7.95 in 2000, 6.78 in 2001, 7 in 2002, 8 in 2003, 9 in 2004 and 10.14 in 2005. The years news2mail carried the group therefore sit on a plateau of roughly seven to nine users in every hundred residents. The same series for 2000 gives 0.18 per cent for Syria, 0.64 for Egypt and 2.62 for Jordan; that is the measurable sense in which Lebanon was online early for its region.

It was also online narrowly. Digital subscriber lines arrived late — the country was among the last in the region to offer them, from 2006, with ADSL launched in April 2007 — so a poster inside Lebanon during the group’s active years was working over a metered dial-up line, and the whole country’s international bandwidth was still under one gigabit per second in 2007. A metered line prices every minute spent reading a long thread; an institutional or flat-rate account, of the kind common on the academic and corporate networks abroad, does not.

The composition of the group follows from that arithmetic. The earliest posters from inside the country were on academic accounts — the American University of Beirut node and the Lebanese Academic and Research Network that grew out of it — and the general public followed years later. A group whose subject was a country of some four million residents drew most of its volume from outside it, which is the ordinary pattern for soc.culture groups from countries with late or expensive access. It is also why a mail gateway of the news2mail kind mattered in such places: electronic mail crossed institutional links and firewalls that a full NNTP news feed did not, and moved far less data.

A dated record

What follows is a list of dated events and nothing more. Every item but the last precedes the years in which news2mail carried the group, and all of them remained live subjects within it. No responsibility is assigned here to any party for any event listed, and the ordering implies no causation.

• 13 April 1975 — the conventional start date of the war.
• 17–18 October 1976 — Arab League summit at Riyadh; 25–26 October 1976 — summit at Cairo. The two established the Arab Deterrent Force, more than 35,000 strong, of which 30,000 were provided by Syria and the remainder by other Arab League states.
• 15 November 1976 — units of that force deployed in Beirut.
• 14–21 March 1978 — an Israeli operation in southern Lebanon, lasting a week.
• 19 March 1978 — United Nations Security Council Resolutions 425 and 426 established UNIFIL; its first troops deployed in the area on 23 March 1978.
• by late May 1979 — the non-Syrian contingents had left the Arab Deterrent Force, and the Syrian component stood alone.
• 6 June 1982 — Israeli forces entered southern Lebanon; a multinational force later oversaw the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from Beirut, and the Arab Deterrent Force mandate ended that year.
• February to April 1985 — a phased Israeli withdrawal to a strip along the southern border.
• 22 October 1989 — the Taif Agreement signed; 5 November 1989 — ratified by the Chamber of Deputies at Qoleiat.
• September 1990 — the constitutional amendments implementing it signed into force.
• 13 October 1990 — the conventional end date of the war.
• 30 April 1991 — the date set by the government for the surrender of all territory and heavy artillery and the disbandment of militias.
• 16 June 2000 — the Security Council was informed that, as of that date, Israeli forces had withdrawn from Lebanon.

Two cautions attach to a list of this kind. The opening and closing dates are conventions rather than legal facts: no instrument began the fighting and none formally ended it, and accounts differ on how the fifteen years should be divided into phases. And the names given to individual events vary by source and by language, so the same episode is searchable under several forms.

What was discussed

Reconstruction was the standing domestic subject, and the rebuilding of central Beirut its sharpest instance. Solidere, the shareholding company established in May 1994 to redevelop the city centre, held powers of compulsory purchase and compensated property owners in shares rather than cash — an arrangement documented as contested at the time, along with the scale of demolition, the treatment of surviving fabric, and what a restored downtown was for.

Confessional politics and the memory of the war ran underneath everything. The only national census ever published in Lebanon was taken in 1932, so the demographic ratios on which its power-sharing rests are estimates, and arguing about them is itself a political act; a general amnesty enacted in 1991 covered most political crimes committed during the fighting. A group like this put people whose families had been on opposing sides in one room with no referee, and what the archives preserve is the shape of the disagreement rather than any resolution of it. Emigration and return made a quieter constant: paperwork, nationality, schooling, and whether to go back.

The cultural register was enormous and largely unembarrassed. The provenance and correct preparation of dishes were treated as questions of national standing; the repertoire of Fairuz and the Rahbani brothers — from her first Baalbeck festival appearance in 1957, through the operettas, to the Martyrs’ Square concert of September 1994 staged to mark the rebirth of the ruined downtown — was common ground where little else was; poetry, classical and colloquial, was quoted from memory and corrected from memory. The posting itself carried the point: Modern Standard Arabic is the official language, French entered under the Mandate and remains widely taught, English gained ground through the 1990s, and code-switching among them is ordinary in Lebanese speech.

Writing Arabic on a seven-bit network

Usenet inherited its character set from electronic mail. RFC 822, dated 13 August 1982, defines a message body as a sequence of lines containing ASCII characters and defines its CHAR token as any ASCII character in the range 0 to 127; RFC 1036 of December 1987, the standard for the interchange of Usenet messages, requires every article to be a valid RFC 822 message. The transport therefore assumed 128 code points, among which there is no Arabic letter and no accented French one. MIME, published as RFC 1341 in June 1992 and revised as RFC 2045 in November 1996, supplied the machinery to declare a character set and to encode eight-bit content so that it survived a seven-bit path; uptake across news servers and newsreaders was uneven for years afterwards.

The eight-bit sets that MIME could label were themselves plural and mutually incompatible. ISO/IEC 8859-6, titled Latin/Arabic alphabet, appeared in a first edition in 1987 and was revised in 1999; it derives from the Arab standard ASMO 708, adopted by ECMA as ECMA-114 in 1986, and it encodes only nominal letters, leaving the contextual shaping of those letters to the display software and omitting the additional characters needed for Persian, Urdu and other Arabic-script languages. Windows-1256 was a different arrangement of the same alphabet, not compatible with it, and carried in addition a set of Latin letters taken from Windows-1252 for writing French, though not their capitals. The MacArabic encoding was a third, compatible with neither. A post that arrived mislabelled, or unlabelled, produced a screen of the wrong letters rather than of nothing.

Unicode settled the standard long before it settled the practice. The Arabic block at U+0600 to U+06FF was present in Unicode 1.0.0 in 1991 with 169 characters assigned, and reached all 256 of its code points only with Unicode 14.0 in 2021; the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block at U+FE70 to U+FEFF also dates from 1.0.0 and exists solely for compatibility with the older encodings rather than for composing new text. The script thus had a universal encoding for the entire life of the group. What it lacked was uniform support for it in the newsreaders, gateways, mail clients and archive front-ends through which the group was written and read.

The habit that grew in the gap was transliteration. Arabic written in Latin letters, with digits standing in for the consonants Latin has no sign for, is known as Arabizi, and also as Franco-Arabic or Arabish; the digits were chosen for resemblance, most obviously 3 for the letter ayn, whose shape it mirrors, with 2 for hamza, 5 for kha, 6 for the emphatic ta, 7 for ha and 9 for sad, and several of them doing double duty for qaf. French posed a smaller version of the same problem: ISO 8859-1 covers the language but omits the ligatures Œ and œ and the capital Ÿ, which ISO/IEC 8859-15 supplied in 1999, and on any path that stripped the eighth bit the accents vanished altogether, so accented vowels were simply written bare.

The consequence for a reader of the archive today is practical. A full-text search for a word in Arabic script will not match the same word written in Latin transcription, and the transcription was never standardised, so a single name may appear under half a dozen spellings. Place names and personal names commonly have an Arabic form, a French form inherited from the Mandate-era administration and an English form, and this group used all three, often in the same thread. Anyone searching the archive has to try each in turn, and the digit spellings as well.

Print, record and festival

The trilingual habit the group displayed rests on an unusually long and well documented history of printing. A press was installed in 1584 at the monastery of Saint Anthony at Qozhaya, in the Qadisha valley, by the Maronite patriarch Sergius Rizzi, and is described as the first printing press in the Middle East; its earliest known product is a bilingual Psalter of 1610, a folio of 260 pages carrying the text in Syriac in one column and in Arabic written in Syriac letters — the practice called Garshuni — in the other.

The nineteenth-century revival gave Beirut a set of institutions that can be dated. Butrus al-Bustani, born in January 1819 and died on 1 May 1883, founded the National School in the city in 1863 to teach in Arabic outside the confessional schools, began the periodical Al-Jinan in 1870, compiled the dictionary Muhit al-Muhit, whose first edition is dated 1867 to 1870, and published the encyclopaedia Da’irat al-Ma’arif in eleven volumes from 1876; earlier he had worked with Eli Smith and Cornelius Van Dyck of the American mission in Beirut on their Arabic translation of the Bible.

The daily press was older than the war and outlasted it. An-Nahar was founded on 4 August 1933 by Gebran Tueni as a four-page hand-set paper with a print run of 500 copies, and was circulating around 45,000 in the early 2000s. On the French side, L’Orient was founded in Beirut in 1924 by Gabriel Khabbaz and Georges Naccache, and Le Jour in 1934 by Michel Chiha; the two merged on 15 June 1971 to become L’Orient-Le Jour. An Arabic daily and a French daily of that vintage shared the same newsstand.

Recorded music has an equally datable institutional line. Baidaphon was founded in Berlin in 1906 by members of the Baida family of Beirut, registered its trademark and gazelle logo in 1912, and through the 1920s and 1930s ran branch offices in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo; its catalogue took in Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Asmahan, and also Greek Orthodox liturgical music and songs recorded in Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish and Hebrew. The company remained active into the 1940s and faded after the Second World War.

The festival calendar supplied a recurring and comparatively cheerful subject. The Baalbeck International Festival was organised from 1955 in the Roman temple complex in the Beqaa, and its programme is a matter of record: Margot Fonteyn danced there in 1961 and again with Rudolf Nureyev in 1964, Ella Fitzgerald appeared in 1971 and Miles Davis in 1973. It stopped for the war years and reopened in 1997, inside the group’s active life, and Sting played there in 2001. The Beiteddine festival was launched in the middle of the 1980s, while the fighting was still going on, at the two-hundred-year-old palace in the Chouf.

Sport gave the group one fixed date of its own era. Lebanon hosted the AFC Asian Cup from 12 to 29 October 2000, a twelve-team tournament played at the Sports City Stadium in Beirut, the municipal stadium in Sidon and the international Olympic stadium in Tripoli, with the final in Beirut on 29 October, won by Japan against Saudi Arabia by a single goal. That fell inside the years news2mail carried the group to e-mail.

The documented chapter of the food arguments is late. In October 2008 the Association of Lebanese Industrialists petitioned the Lebanese Ministry of Economy and Trade to seek protected status from the European Commission for hummus as a Lebanese product, and record-sized public servings of the dish then passed back and forth between Lebanon and Israel: Israel in 2008, Lebanon in 2009, Israel in January 2010 and Lebanon again in May 2010, with a dish of roughly 10,450 kilograms prepared by 300 cooks at al-Fanar near Beirut. All of that postdates the group’s gateway years; the argument underlying it is older than any of the records.

Context

The country the group described had on the order of four million residents. The Lebanese diaspora is several times that, on estimates ranging from four million to fourteen, and it is old: substantial emigration began after the Mount Lebanon conflict of 1860 and ran through the late Ottoman decades, long before the twentieth century’s wars added to it. Brazil and Argentina hold the largest communities by most reckonings, with others long established in West Africa, the Gulf, Australia and North America.

Those communities had diverged. A family four generations into Brazil and one two years into Sydney or Abidjan shared an origin but not a language, a citizenship or a set of assumptions; the Gulf communities were built largely on work contracts, the older American and Brazilian ones on settlement. A newsgroup with an obvious name was a shared address for all of them, and for those still at home, when no other cheap public one existed. That is the ordinary function of a soc.culture group, performed here for an unusually dispersed population.

The neighbouring subjects had their own venues — soc.culture.arabic, soc.culture.syria, soc.culture.palestine and soc.culture.jordan — and crossposting across such a cluster was routine on Usenet generally. What survives in the archives is a contemporaneous record, written while the outcomes were unknown, of how a dispersed nation talked to itself about a country being rebuilt.

Where the readership was

Figures for the diaspora vary by an order of magnitude. For Brazil, the Brazilian and Lebanese governments have both put the number of people of Lebanese descent at about seven million, Brazil’s foreign ministry at seven to ten million and the Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce at around twelve million; against those, a 2008 survey by IBGE, the national statistics institute, covering seven states only, found that 0.9 per cent of white Brazilian respondents reported a family background in West Asia, and figures resting on IBGE research put the total at about two million. The immigration counts are narrower and older: roughly 130,000 Lebanese entered through the port of Santos between 1884 and 1933, settling above all in São Paulo and Santos and then in Pará, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia, and a further 32,000 or so arrived during the war of 1975 to 1990. Lebanese Brazilians are counted differently depending on whether descent, birth or citizenship is being measured, which is why no single figure can honestly be quoted.

West Africa is the community least often given numbers. Lebanese migration to the region begins as early as the 1890s, though in Ivory Coast no community formed until the 1920s; by the late 1980s the reported range was 60,000 to 120,000 Lebanese and Syrians there, with some observers giving a figure as high as 300,000. Present estimates for that country run from 80,000 to 100,000 at the low end to 300,000 at the high. Elsewhere in the region the counts are smaller and better bounded: on the order of 50,000 in Senegal, 30,000 in Nigeria and 3,000 in Sierra Leone.

Beyond that, the commonly cited figures are 440,279 for the United States and 190,275 for Canada, both from census returns; about 340,000 in Australia and 300,000 in France; between 1.2 and 3 million in Argentina; and in the Gulf 120,000 in Saudi Arabia, 80,000 in the United Arab Emirates, 41,775 in Kuwait and 25,000 in Qatar, communities built largely on renewable work contracts rather than on settlement. About 1.2 million Lebanese citizens are recorded as resident abroad, a far smaller number than any descent-based estimate, and some 990,000 people are estimated to have left the country during the war years. Several of those destinations have their own pages in this directory — soc.culture.brazil, soc.culture.argentina, soc.culture.australian and soc.culture.african.

A readership spread that way has no evening. Beirut keeps UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 under summer time; Abidjan keeps UTC+0 the year round, São Paulo UTC−3, Detroit UTC−5 or −4, and Sydney UTC+10 or +11. The span from the Australian communities to the Brazilian ones is about thirteen hours, which is to say that when one end of the readership is at work the other is asleep, in both directions, permanently. Usenet handled that better than any synchronous medium of the period could: a message simply waited, and an exchange that took a day to complete one turn could still run for weeks. It also meant there was no hour at which the group was live.