New histories of Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt are not needed, argued British historian, Philip Mansel, during recent visits to Cairo and Beirut. Instead, the region should be treated as a single continent - the Levant. This is what he does in his most important and innovative book thus far. By combining histories of Alexandria, Beirut and Izmir, he conjures up the vanished world of the eastern Mediterranean in the heyday of the Ottoman empire. He then shows how, after the fall of the empire in 1923, those port cosmopolitan port cities continued to flourish despite the scourge of nationalism, and civil war. Their success, writes Mansel, owed everything to a readiness to put ‘deals before ideals'. Two thousand years ago, Cicero observed that port cities port cities manifest ‘a certain corruption and degeneration of morals ... a mixture of strange languages and customs ...an allurement to pleasure.' Though he condemned this, Mansel does not. Unlike capital cities, he notes approvingly, port cities are not burdened by what Thackeray called the ‘fatigue of sublimity'. His story begins with Izmir in1517 when the Ottoman sultan, Selim I, gained control of the eastern Mediterrranean by conquering Syria and Egypt. Once known as Smyrna and one of Asia's most important Romanised Greek cities, it was no more than a minor Ottoman Turkish port when Armenian, Greek and Jewish merchants decided to exploit its location on the doorstep of Anatolia. Thus began its transformation into a thriving centre of Levantine trade, education and culture. By 1813, Greeks from the Ottoman empire owned 600 ships and had their own flag. They even regulated their own taxes. The foreign consuls were the top power brokers. Considered the equals of ambassadors, they lived as grands seigneurs attended by liveried footmen and janissaries holding six-foot ivory-knobbed staves But there were also catastrophes. Mansel spares us no details in bringing to life the horror of plagues, fires and massacres perpetrated during the struggle for Greek independence in 1821-22. The greatest suffering occurred on the island of Chios where Ottoman troops murdered as many as 25,000 Greek residents. Lord Strangford's chaplain saw ‘skulls, arms and half-consumed bodies amid paper, books and broken furniture.' Smyrna, still part of the Ottoman empire, suffered less and attracted a deluge of Greeks eager to escape the chaos in newly independent Greece. Nationalism caused yet more turmoil in May 1919 when Smyrna was occupied by the Greek leader, Venizelos. At first, things went well. Under Greek governance, life became increasingly liberal. Smyrna acquired 34 newspapers in five languages, 500 cafes, 13 cinemas and many ‘ragtime bars'. A British officer wrote to his wife: ‘Heavens, what a place this is!...as for the girls - oh Lord!' But everything changed when the Turks struck back and went on a rampage of rape and murder. In June 1921, King Constantine was forced to travel from Athens to rally his troops. They were fighting, he told them, for ‘the Hellenic idea which produced in this very place that incomparable civilization which will never cease to merit the admiration of the whole world.' The harder the Greeks fought, the more they galvanised their enemies. When Turkish troops regained Smyrna in September 1922, a mob attacked the Greek Orthodox activist, Archbishop Chrysostomos, cut off his nose and gouged out his eyes. Arsonists then set the Greek and Armenian quarters on fire. Fanned by the wind, the flames leapt so high you could see them from Mount Athos. Caught in the inferno, thousands of men, women and children rushed to the waterfront and threw themselves into the sea. Many drowned; others were clubbed to death and dumped in the water by Turkish soldiers.With his eagle eye for detail, Mansel notes that local youths jumped into the sea and stole the rings on the fingers of the floating corpses. They swam, he writes, with scarves round their noses ‘so they would not faint from the smell.' Yet the Turkish commander, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), had no regrets. Within less than a year, a vigorous Turkish republic would rise from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire with himself as its founding father and national hero. *** Alexandria owed even more than Smyrna to a man of genius. Born in what is now northern Greece, Muhammad Ali Pasha arrived in Egypt in 1801 as an Ottoman officer charged with returning the region to Ottoman rule after the expulsion of Napoleon's forces. Uninterested in Egypt's pharaohs and Mamluk sultans, he idolised Europe's living monarchs. It was his determination to establish a dynasty of his own that motivated his campaigns in Egypt, Arabia, Greece and Syria. Though he succeeded in Egypt, the cost proved unsustainable. Facing bankruptcy after the creation of the Suez canal in 1869, his successors were forced to borrow. Ultimate power was snatched by politicians and bankers in London and Paris - a fact grimly revealed when Alexandria was bombarded by the British navy in 1882. Mansel's account of that shameful episode is vivid but also harsh in its condemnation of the British prime minister, William Gladstone. His personal holding in Egyptian bonds was probably not the chief factor that led him to authorise the assault. Peer pressure in Whitehall was intense. The British naval commander, Admiral Seymour, was determined to attack Alexandria, even as there were misunderstandings, not mentioned by Mansel, arising from the meddling of the British political activist and poet, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, during negotiations with the champion of Egyptian rights, Ahmed Urabi. According to the nineteenth-century ‘father of Egyptian education', Ali Pasha Mubarak, Urabi was mainly to blame for the looting and burning of Alexandria. In his eyes, Alexandria had become a contemptible hotbed of influences alien to Muslim values and Egyptian traditions. Unrest returned when Britain withheld Egyptian independence after the First World War. The arrest and deportation of the great nationalist leader, Saad Zaghloul, united pashas and peasants, Muslims and Christians, men and women, adults and schoolchildren. Independence came in 1922 but was only nominal. Nonetheless, Alexandria passed through a golden period , flourishing as a port, commercial centre and cultural meeting place between East and West under the patronage of the Khedive Abbas Hilmi and his successors - Sultan Husayn, King Fuad and King Farouk. Mansel's admiration of this period shines through every page. Alexandrians, he writes, were tolerant in matters of sexual relations and religious differences. They sent their children to schools that turned them into fluent speakers of French and English.Leading families such as the Zoghebs, Debanes, Menasces and Benakis travelled the world and built themselves palatial villas in which Pharaonic and Ptolemaic antiquities were combined with Chinese porcelain, Iznik plates and textiles, paintings by Vlaminck and the latest books by Proust and Paul Morand. Argine Salvago was famous for her ‘parties and lovers of both sexes who were seduced by her purple-blue eyes.' King Farouk, who succeeded his father in 1936, was as captivated as were painters, poets and writers like E.M. Forster, Cavafy and Lawrence Durrell. Yet Mansel admits Alexandria's shortcomings. Yes, the city had become ‘the Queen of the Levant''. But it was also a place where, in the words of the English writer Robin Fedden, ‘the parquet floors quaked over an abyss of poverty.' Workers' protests and strikes brought little improvement. The squalor of the Turkish quarter had to be seen to be believed; and seen it was by the rich Alexandrians who haunted its brothels, many supplied with children. Yet the elite could also be bourgeois. Fearing scandal, Emmanuel Benaki, ‘king of the bourse', forbade his daughter, the novelist Penelope Delta, to divorce. The Greek vice-consul whom she loved, declared: ‘I have never suffered so much as here; Christ did not suffer more in Jerusalem.' Durrell deplored an obsession with money. Cavafy, confided to a friend: ‘I am used to Alexandria now and odds are I'd stay here even if I were rich... But oh how a person like me, someone so different, needs a big city! London, for example.' Attitudes to the British, unlike the French, were mainly negative. During the Second World War, anglophobia was suppressed. But Britain's victory celebrations provoked violent protests and demands for the closure of its army bases. Withdrawal to the Canal Zone made no difference. Quoting Naguib Mahfouz, Mansel relates how, in January 1952, everything the Egyptians had beeen nursing inside them exploded ‘like a hurricane of demons'. In Cairo, four hundred buildings were set on fire. Once glamorous King Farouk - now in Mansel's opinion ‘an obese buffoon' - was also targeted. On 26 July 1952, lacking support from his subjects and the American and British governments, he obeyed an army ultimatum demanding his abdication and sailed into exile. Soon Egypt emerged as a single-party republic led by the leading two conspirators - Mohammed Naguib and then Gamal Abdul-Nasser. Intolerance was the hallmark of the new order. The chief victims were communists and Muslim Brothers. After an attempt to assassinate Nasser in October 1954, up to 20,000 Brothers were said to be held in concentration camps. Torture became routine.Yet Egypt's 54,000 Jews were rather well treated and few wished to leave. Desperately needing immigrants into their newborn state, Zionists tried - as in Iraq - to frighten them into leaving by paying agents to plant firebombs in public buildings. In the event, many Jews stayed on even after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company in 1956. Most of those who left avoided Israel. Regarding the Suez crisis, Mansel mentions that the main aim of the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was to destroy President Nasser's regime. According to some accounts Eden wanted to bomb not only Alexandria but also Cairo.It was thanks to obstruction by the allied chiefs of staff that both cities were largely spared. Mansel barely mentions the fate of Port Said which was attacked instead. The suffering and brave resistance of the people of Port Said during the savage assaults of France, Britain and Israel have still to be properly acknowledged. Instead, Nasser took all the credit and became the hero of Arabs throughout the Middle East when the invaders withdrew under pressure from America, Russia and the United Nations. Nasser's revolution struck most forcefully in July1961 when private property and industries were sequestrated or nationalised on a large scale. Though enacted in the name of socialism, Alexandrians saw the deed as punishment for the long years in which they treated fellow Egyptians as inferior. So many now left - up to 100,000 by 1966 - that the journalist, David Holden, compared the local telephone directory to ‘a Levantine requiem'. Their departure - described by Mansel as ‘Nasser's greatest gift to the West' - created a vacuum for the Islamist movement. Under his successors, Presidents Sadat and Mubarak, Alexandria became further mired in corruption and incompetence. Its grandiose stock exchange, writes Mansel, ‘survived British and Axis bombardment but not Egyptian independence'.Taken over by the National Democratic Party, it was burnt down during bread riots on 18 January 1977. As the Queen of the Levant shriveled into the Queen of the Delta, hundreds of Alexandria's gardens became car parks or construction sites. Villas designed by renowned architects were replaced by office buildings and high-rise apartment blocks. A notable exception was the magnificent new glass and aluminium Bibliotheca Alexandrina completed in 2001. *** Mansel's most exciting chapters focus on Beirut. In 1830, it was little more than a jumble of narrow streets squeezed between overhanging mansions and massive crusader walls, but its views of mountain and sea reminded the poet Lamartine of paradise. After Muhammad Ali occupied it in May 1832 during his conquest of Syria, its port and markets revived under the governorship of his son, Ibrahim Pasha. This and other similar successes convinced Lord Palmerston in London that Egypt was becoming a grave threat to Britain's access to India and to Ottoman Turkey as a barrier against Russian southward expansion. By November 1840, diplomacy and naval action had forced Muhammad Ali to accept a deal. In exchange for withdrawing all his forces to Egypt, his family would be recognised as Egypt's ruling dynasty within the Ottoman orbit. While governor of Beirut, Ibrahim's coarseness and heavy drinking had turned everyone against him, so his departure was widely celebrated. Without him, Beirut continued to grow. By 1914 its population had reached130,000 from a mere 46,000 in 1860. Yet this was far from a complete success story since there were also serious internal conflicts. Here and in other parts of Mansel's work readers may feel that he blames religion too much for the disorders plaguing the region, even as he tends to downplay its benefits. It was, after all, religion that legitimised and regulated the Ottoman Empire as also its Byzantine and Holy Roman counterparts for centuries. In many cities, mosques, churches and synagogues stood peacefully side by side. Christian hospitals were and still are open to all. Muslim and Christian children study together in church-run schools. Muslims and Christians pursued Arab independence jointly. Most struggles labeled ‘religious' were in fact efforts to promote human rights and protect material assets. Take, for example, the infamous massacres of Christian Maronite peasants by their Druze landlords and employers in and around Beirut in1860. Were they really caused by religion? Probably not. According to most accounts it was ruthless exploitation that antagonised the Maronite peasants and fear of their anger that caused the Druze to hit back. A chronicler at the time states that ‘the Druze made up in ferocity for what they lacked in numbers, cutting up Christians like firewood' Order was restored thanks to the arrival of French and British warships and the diplomatic skills of a former Ottoman grand vizier, Fouad Pasha. ‘On 18 July 1861,' writes Mansel, ‘a new internationally guaranteed regime... was proclaimed at a grand Ottoman ceremony outside Beirut. Henceforth the governor-general of Mount Lebanon would be an Ottoman Christian ‘chosen after consultation with the European powers by the Ottoman government'. A new decree was issued when Beirut became the unofficial capital of Mount Lebanon. The administrative council must comprise four Maronites, three Druze, two Orthodox, one Greek Catholic, one Shia and one Sunni, Thus sectarian power-sharing was institutionalized at the cost of entrenching communal divisions - a principle still operating in Lebanon today. Mansel supplies a brief but brilliant account of Beirut's transformation into a modern city - of its acquisition, with Ottoman support, of newspapers and publishing houses , public gardens, hospitals and grand hotels. Franciscans and Jesuits built first-class schools. Wealthy families like the Sursocks and Bustros visited the new race course and entertained so lavishly that even the German Kaiser was impressed during his state visit in 1898. Yet not all were satisfied. Some complained of further territorial losses to Western armies, others of growing immorality and westernisation. Devout Arabs, sensing the collapse of the entire Ottoman and Islamic order, dreamed of establishing an Arab caliphate, while Arab nationalists discussed notions of autonomy or independence. In 1916, eight years after the Young Turks forced Sultan Abdul-Hamid to restore the constitution, Syria's Ottoman governor, Jemal Pasha, cracked down on the nationalists and had their leaders hanged for conspiring against the empire. Speaking from the gallows set up amid the trees and fountains of Beirut's Place de la Liberte, Abdel-Ghani Al-Uraysi declared: ‘The glory of the Arabs will come... Our skulls will form the foundation of Lebanese independence.' As the First World War and the Arab revolt gathered pace, Beirut was gripped by famine. A Turkish journalist, Rifki Atay, wrote that the groans of ‘living skeletons seemed to come from the depths of the soul'. Yet at this very same time he attended a party where ‘drink and pleasure flowed like water'. As in Beirut today, writes Mansel, ‘anguish and merriment coexisted'. After the war, joy took firm control as adoring crowds drew the Hashimite Emir Feisal in a carriage through the streets of Beirut - an apt gesture for a prince who had risked his life and achieved Arab victory campaigning alongside General Allenby and T.E.Lawrence. In March 1920, after his followers declared him King of Syria (then including Lebanon and Palestine), the French deployed their army and brutally forced him into exile. Beirut under the French aspired, like Alexandria, to be an advanced ‘fountainhead of philosophy and culture'. In the late 1920s, a female member of the prominent Salam family dared to appear unveiled at the new American University in Beirut and deliver a lecture supporting women's rights. Protesters soon forced her into hiding, but her sister, adds Mansel in one of his many amusing asides, won the right to ride to school on her bicycle. When Nazi Germany occupied Syria in May 1940, some Beirutis rejoiced; one popular song offered ‘praise to Allah and to Lord Hitler!' Others welcomed Allied intervention the following year when British forces intervened against Germany alongside Free French forces led by General De Gaulle. Though facing a common enemy, De Gaulle and Churchill's personal representative, General Spears, were soon locked in a personal battle. Mansel is at his best in revealing how their relationship deteriorated to the point where Spears, albeit an ardent Francophile, warned De Gaulle that Syria and Lebanon would not be held down ‘to be raped by Free France'. Beirut and Damascus burst with happiness when, thanks largely to Spears enormous efforts, France finally surrendered power on 22 November 1943. Most Syrians were grateful to Spears but not British officials in the Foreign Office who blamed him for the grave setback in Anglo-French relations and ordered his dismissal. As for de Gaulle, he could only growl that Britain had ‘insulted France and betrayed the West.' Nor was the struggle fully over. Three more years of strained negotiations were required before the first Prime Minister of Lebanon, Riad Solh, announced that the last French soldier had left Beirut. In his memoirs he wrote, ‘My hand shook as I held the text of my speech and my voice trembled with emotion. I could hardly pronounce words which I had been rehearsing all my life'. The most alluring Syrian amid these excitements was the Druze princess, Amal-al-Atrash. Best known as Asmahan, Mansel describes her as ‘a pure Levantine ...Egyptian film star, Arab singer, British agent and grande horizontale.' In his memoirs, Spears admits how totally he was smitten.‘She was and always will be one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.Her eyes were immense, green as the colour of the sea you cross on the way to paradise.... She bowled over British officers with the speed and accuracy of a machine gun.' General Jack Evetts, became so besotted that he was recalled to London. After the war and throughout the 1950s businessmen and bankers, artists, writers, intellectuals, pimps and tourists flocked to Beirut hunting for pleasure and profit. Yet, behind its glittering facade, the city remained susceptible to what Mansel calls ‘the geography of fear'. The arrival of the champion of Shia rights, Musa al Sadr, in the 1960s attracted thousands of his followers to Beirut's southern suburbs. Palestinian refugees and fidayeen, led by Yasir Arafat, then poured in from Jordan along with a mixed bag of gangsters and gunmen. Soon there were deadly clashes with the local population.. The root of the problem was, of course, Zionism and the planting of a largely European community in soil that had been Palestinian for two thousand years. At first, the Palestinians enjoyed great sympathy. But attitudes changed in 1967 when they used Lebanese positions to attack the new-born state of Israel, making Beirut a target for Israeli counter-attacks. Tensions also arose from suspicion that many Palestinians regarded Lebanon as a potential subsititute for their stolen homeland. Meanwhile Beirut's Maronite catholics were accused of seeking to convert Lebanon into a Christian state. It was these fears that culminated in the civil war that plagued Beirut until 1990. Mansel's account of that struggle is brilliant but horrifying. Using shocking details he electrifies his account of the venomous relationships that developed between the warring factions - Israelis versus Arabs, Syrians and Palestinians versus Lebanese, Sunnis versus Shi'is, Muslims versus Christians - and the yet more complex involvement of the Alawis, the Hezbollah, the Amal and the Phalange. The most conspicuous symbol of Beirut's polarisation was the ‘green line' separating the Muslim western half from the mainly Christian east. Long neglected except at a few crossing points, ‘weeds and grasses grew thicker, flocks of sheep replaced cars and buses on the Place des Martyrs; cows appeared on the Rue Clemenceau. A horse escaped from the racing stables and was photographed wandering through a deserted airport waiting lounge.' Remarkable, too, is Mansel's account of the Israeli air strikes. In Beirut, he writes, guests at dinner parties would gather on balconies to watch the flares and rockets as they lit the night sky. ‘Hosts laid out extra binoculars and telescopes.' In the daytime, sunbathers on the beach would say ‘that was close', readjust their sun glasses and continue sunning themselves. Some women found ‘love under fire' exciting. Homosexuals enjoyed militia men returning ‘hot from battle'. Ensconced in her palace, Beirut's grande dame, Yvonne Sursock, was one of the many who refused to flee. ‘When your country is on its knees,' she said, ‘you cannot abandon it....I could not leave the servants.' Despite further Israeli bombardment by land, sea and air, Beirut's reconstruction was achieved by the Saudi-sponsored billionaire politician, Rafic Hariri. Then came the tragic day in February 2005 when, together with eighteen guards, he was killed by a car bomb while driving past the Phoenicia Hotel in a convoy of armoured Mercedes. Beirut, writes Mansel, ‘seemed to glow with grief.' His funeral became Beirut's ‘supreme moment' when ‘Lebanon said no to dictatorship and murder'. Though he had been a Sunni Muslim, many candles by his grave bore images of the Maronite saint, Charbel. Mansel struggles to end his tour de force on a positive note. Thanks to ‘brains, pleasure and freedom', he writes, Beirut remains ‘resilient and creative, hosting book fairs, producing new films and novels and championing gay rights and other challenges to the last taboos.' Despite chronic instability, he insists there is room for hope. As for his central theme, capital cities have evidently captured the diversity and creativity of yesterday's port cities. Izmir's waterfront has yielded to Istanbul's Taksim Square; Alexandria's corniche, once cosmopolitan and secular, is challenged by fundamentalist Islam, while Cairo's Tahrir Square has become Egypt's leading political forum. Beirut prevails not because it is a port, but because, like Cairo and Istanbul, it is a national capital. It is these three capitals that hold the secrets of the Levant's future. The writer is a researcher based in London and Cairo. He has contributed articles on politics, arts and history to the Independent, Financial Times, Guardian, Middle East Economic Digest, The Spectator, and Al-Hayat. His works include Al-Sabah - a History of the Ruling Family of Kuwait (Ithaca Press) and Records of Iraq (Archive Editions, 2004).
