Tribes With Flags
Glass, Charles
an f you had written account of a Ijourney through the Middle East, mainly concerned with the region's politics and tragedies, what would you put on the cover? A photo of one of its many gory...
...And indeed, when you think seriously about it, the horrors that drove a woman 6,000 miles to seek her living in Beirut, one of the most uncomfortable and deprived, as well as one of the most dangerous cities on earth, must indeed be unique...
...Certainly, it would not be to the taste of Glass, for whom imperialism in its various forms is still the foe...
...Then when the fundamentalist militia closed the street, "I remember meeting girls from Peru...
...the many difficult centuries, their future today is grim and their ultimate survival, at least as a significant, self-governing sect, must be in doubt...
...This time he found himself sitting at a bar with hookers from Colombia all around...
...A photo of one of its many gory episodes...
...Until 1975, his great-uncle had a butcher shop in the Lebanese town of Tripoli, where Glass used to visit him...
...ll the same, Glass had much of interest to record on his journey...
...As a rule, Glass is guarded about writing directly on the subject of Moslem fanaticism, which would not fit in well with his underlying assumption that the West is to blame for all the woes of the area...
...A reminder of its countless natural beauties or art treasures...
...22.95 Paul Johnson THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 41 view that the Middle East can only be pacified and made prosperous by bringing back the Western paramountcy that lasted from 1918 to the late 1940s—the happiest period in its entire history—would not survive long as a reporter of its current affairs...
...His grandmother was actually born in the Lebanon of a landowning family in one of the feudal Maronite (that is, Catholic, in communion with Rome) villages...
...They have two and four years...
...He has, however, personal links with the Middle East...
...Might not ordinary Colombians be happier and safer if once more ruled byimperial Spain, just as, most certainly, the inhabitants of the Lebanon and Iraq would be if still under French and British League of Nations mandates...
...On the other hand, Glass does not appear to identify with Americans either...
...In fact, as the cynical will already have guessed, Glass is a TV news reporter...
...It was a very unpleasant experience, but it does not seem to have taught him much...
...For a time, he said, "the Swedes were the favored prostitutes for the rich, and the Egyptians for the poor...
...It is very, very bad...
...that mystery was never solved...
...The word is an abusive Islamic term for unbeliever...
...Does he, then, identify with the Lebanese Maronites...
...His great-grandparents immigrated to the United States at the turn of the century...
...Glass asked...
...When he asked a Christian woman in Alexandretta about relations between Christians and Moslems, she replied: "To them, we are giaour, Christians, Jews, and everybody...
...Or even a map, perhaps...
...Readers of Jane Austen's Persuasion will recall that Anne Eliot and Captain Benwick have a discussion about how the title of Byron's famous poem should be pronounced: Glass says it should be "g'war...
...As it is, journalists are at risk...
...His book is too long and is sometimes padded with quotations from his own writings—it would have been more readable and impressive if he had simply kept a diary—but there are some excellent passages...
...Not really...
...Next, "in the lull between 1977 and 1980, British girls worked the bars in Phoenicia Street in west Beirut...
...It must be very bad if you have to come and work in Lebanon," Glass replies...
...In Alexandria and Antioch, for instance, he came across Mulish-Moslem converts to Christianity...
...Nearly all of them are in areas formerly controlled by the European colonial powers, and hastily "liberated" in response to liberal opinion...
...He is particularly good on such ancient cities as Aleppo, Damascus, and Palmyra, which are brought to life by his combination of knowledge and local contacts...
...Glass reminds us that in 1977 the London Sunday Times correspondent, David Holden, was found murdered after taking a taxi from Cairo airport...
...He is about the last person on earth I would turn to for an explanation of what is happening today in the Middle East—a complicated place embittered by countless archeological layers of savagery and barbarism, especially since the end of Western dominance—for whose understanding a cool head, an absence of prejudice, and, above all, disbelief in conspiracy theory are all essential...
...Oddly enough, I have often thought that, despite the menacing power of Shia fundamentalism, or indeed perhaps because of it, the Middle East now offers matchless opportunities to evangelical Christianity, opportunities of the kind that are being eagerly seized and exploited in Central America, Brazil, and elsewhere in once monolithic Catholic America...
...How has the human race contrived to create such hells at the end of the twentieth century...
...These attitudes seem to be deep-rooted in his personality and are probably ineradicable...
...When I first went to Lebanon in the 1950s, they were a rich, cultured, ingenious, self-confident, and wonderfully cheerful community...
...Life is very bad in my country...
...He still has plenty of cousins there, though he is a bit confused about exactly how he is related to them...
...He also recounts the experience of the London Guardian's man, David Hirst, who was seized by West Beirut gunmen and flung into a car, but managed to throw open the door and run off...
...How had he found the courage...
...On this trip, one of them produced an 1830 deed, showing a stretch of land near Tripoli that had once belonged to his great-grandfather...
...Instead, there is a portrait of himself, looking Byronic against a dark background, his handsome profile half concealed by a modest hand, on which a wedding ring glitters...
...The mood created is romantic...
...Imprisoned in his left-wing media culture, he does not seem to understand what America and Americans are about...
...A reference to its unique position as the birthplace of the three great religions of the Book...
...Our host was talking about people who had done something awful and he said they 'were just like giaour.' When he realized what he'd said, he excused himself, saying 'I didn't mean you.' " Sometimes Glass's information has really nothing to do with the Middle East's problems but is revealing nonetheless...
...One of them told him: "I have two children in Bogota...
...I just couldn't bear the thought of being dropped down that black hole...
...Charles Glass (or his publishers) rejected all of these possibilities...
...Towards the end of his book, Glass describes how he too was seized, with nowhere to run this time, and found himself right at the bottom of the black hole of Middle Eastern-Arab-Moslem fanaticism...
...The effect is to suggest: here is an author who is himself a subject of interest—in his own way, perhaps, a man of destiny...
...He eventually escaped, in circumstances that many found mysterious at the time, but are here convincingly described...
...What sensible man with an American passport would...
...But Glass's comment on the phenomenon is characteristically inept: "In the unlikely event of enough Turks becoming Christian now, the capital of the new united Europe might be Constantinople...
...In the event, anyone committed to the TRIBES WITH FLAGS: A DANGEROUS PASSAGE THROUGH THE CHAOS OF THE MIDDLE EAST Charles Glass/Atlantic Monthly Press/510 pp...
...But this is idle speculation, is it not...
...The battering they have taken since almost defies belief, and though their proverbial resilience kept them intact through Paul Johnson's books include The History of Christianity, Modern Times, A History of the Jews, and Intellectuals...
...Glass may not understand the Middle East as a whole, but he is often illuminating on points of detail...
...He writes that he has "seen generations of hookers come and go in Beirut...
...His cousins were not quite sure where it was, but one "pointed out a large, bare plot of earth, and said: 'That is yours, there.' " Glass speaks Arabic, too, albeit with an accent...
...Where an Englishman like myself, looking back over the various American interventions in the Middle East, sees a very human mixture of benevolent idealism, a passionate, often misguided belief in the virtues of democracy, great generosity, some naivete, an element of self-interest, and much clumsiness and misjudgment, Glass sees dark motives, idiotic or sinister Cold War geopolitics, the satanic hand of the CIA, the malevolent influence of Israel...
...Glass goes on to quote the woman: "We were having dinner at some Moslem friends' the other night...
Vol. 23 • October 1990 • No. 10
