Buarij: Portrait of a Lebanese Muslim village
The village world
Water is a source of life.. Where springs break from the Lebanese mountains there is human habitation. Water is a source of power, feeding and nourishing the soil. Sprites and spirits inhabit sources of water since living water issuing from the hidden regions of the earth is both mysterious and semi-sacrosanct; mysterious because of its subterranean origins, semi-sacrosanct because of its primal relationship to the sustaining of all life.
On the eastern slopes of the Lebanon Mountains, which run parallel to the Mediterranean Sea and form a distinguishing mark of the country, from the steep slopes of Mt. Knisseh at an altitude of four thousand feet, breaks a spring of water, neba asal, or "spring of honey" so called because of the sweetness and freshness of its flow. Lesser springs lie near it. Close to the waters is an Arab Muslim village, its nearer fields and stand of poplars fed by diverted streams. Here high on the eastern mountain slope, facing the interior of the country, a peasant people have their home and gain a living from the soil.
The spring waters flow downward to the plain, a thousand feet below, or to that elevated tableland, the Beqaa, which divides the Lebanon mountains from the more easterly and parallel Anti - Lebanon range. It is this stretch of territory of downward mountain slope, of width of plain, and face of further mountain range that village houses overlook. The village itself is the highest settlement on the mountain side. It forms the apex of a watered triangle which becomes more populated as the foothills and region...
Contents
Preface / iii
I. The village world / 3
II. The world of time and space / 11
III. The world of nature / 20
IV. The world of people / 27
V. The world of children / 35
VI. The world of men / 44
VII. The world of women / 51
VIII. The world of kin / 60
IX. The world of work / 7I
X. The world of god / 79
XI. The village world and the outer world / 88
Map
Frontispiece. Buarij in its setting / 2
PREFACE
The year 1937-38 I spent in the Lebanese village of Buarij. At that time Lebanon was a mandate territory under the control of France. Through Salah Hibri, a student of the American University of Beirut, I was introduced to the village. His family from Beirut owned land in Buarij and also two houses where they had spent the summers for some years. Since the Arab world is a world of personal relations, this personal introduction facilitated my stay. To him and his family I wish to express my indebtedness and thanks.
Though the villagers were accustomed to the few Beirut Muslim summer people who stayed in Buarij, no foreigner had before resided in the community. But since foreigners summer in villages on the opposite western slopes of the Lebanon range overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the notion of a resident foreigner was not entirely without precedent.
At first I told the villagers that I was merely summering in the village, preferring it to others because of its superior spring water, high location, and commanding view. As I prolonged my stay I frankly said it was because of my interest in their village, their village life, and village ways. First, I came to know village families near at hand, spending most of my time with the women.
Through these families I came to know their relatives and neighbors, spending much time in homes, going into the fields with groups, or accompanying them to neighboring towns, to the water mill on the plain below, or to distant villages from which wives had come into Buarij. In the winter of the year many days were spent with herdsmen families who had gone to the coast land, they sharing their food with me in front of their herdsmen's caves and huts.
Information was collected largely by an informal rather than a formal method — by listening to village talk and participating in village affairs. By this means, I was accepted more readily, since the villagers tended to associate direct questions, especially involving statistics or any numerical data, with the unpopular tax collector or other official intruders from outside the village world. All village persons I came to call by kinship terms. The girls were "sisters" the boys "brothers," the grown men "paternal uncles," and the elders "grandfather" and "grandmother." In turn I was treated almost as kin. Living within the community, I adhered to those dictates governing the deportment of an unmarried Muslim woman. From the villagers, increasing loyalty was received. Towards them, I had equal loyalty.
In 1945 during World War II, I managed to return for a day to the village. Meanwhile, the British had evicted the Vichy French from the country. On the main Beirut-Damascus highway were pillboxes and entrenchments. But the village itself had remained untouched. The villagers, however, were full of war talk. From their high location they had witnessed air battles above the plain and the passing of troops, both British and Vichy French, on the main routes of communication. But they themselves had not fared badly. There had been construction work on the roads, and the British had taken over large areas of the plain below for the growing of foods for their troops in the Middle East theater. This had given village men increasing work.
The village men at this time were more adequately clothed than in 1937, largely in British army goods. They said they came by these through means best known to themselves. Because the villagers had been cut off from the towns and from itinerant peddlers, there was a marked revival in certain village crafts, particularly in the spinning and knitting of village wool. But Buarij in its physical appearance remained much the same. It was in political consciousness that the village had changed most. Lebanon's freedom as an independent nation had been proclaimed. The young men talked much of the future of the country and of the larger Arab setting. The former watchman of the village, a forceful figure, was now a gardener at the American Legation in Beirut. The best place for work was in the cities, he said. But he would return to the village for the summer months. The women as before remained concerned largely with events near at hand. They regretted that they and others from the neighboring villages had not attended the spring festival, badly disrupted by the war years.
From a pair of army trousers hanging on the wall of a house, the legs knotted to form a sack, walnuts were given me. Two eggs were fried in sheep's fat. Later, I turned down the village road towards the highway. Since then I have not seen the peasants of Buarij, who were my friends and whom I came to hold in loyal affection.
To the American Association of University Women I wish to express my thanks for the grant of the Margaret E. Maltby Fellowship which made my stay in the village possible. To the American University of Beirut I owe a debt of gratitude for its friendly and helpful interest and for the use of its library and other facilities. To the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and to its Director, Professor H. A. R. Gibb, I wish to express my thanks for interest and valuable help in the preparation of the manuscript. To Mr. D. W. Lockard, Asso ciate Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and to Dr. Jane Philips of the Graduate School of Public Health of the University of Pittsburgh, I owe a special debt of gratitude for their friendly understanding, advice, and constant encouragement in the preparation of the manuscript. I wish to express my ap¬preciation and thanks to Mrs. Martha Smith for her editorial assistance and to Mrs. Kenneth Pease and Miss Brenda Sens for the typing of the manuscript.
A. H. F.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January, 1960
Anne H. Fuller
Buarij
Portrait of a lebanese muslim village
Harvard Middle Eastern monograph series
Segond printing Vi
By
Anne h. Fuller
Distributed for the
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
of Harvard University by
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1963
© 1961, by the president and fellows
of Harvard College
Library of Congress catalog card number 61-14633
Printed in the United States of America
