Orderly fashion not the style in Beirut

The Lebanese have a very different way of doing business, writes Michael Karam.

I received an email the other day from an American colleague who was coming to Beirut and would be staying at the “The Diana Tower Building, on Mansour Jurdak, near Najib Ardati, Beirut”. I know Beirut. Beirut is a small city. I lived in Beirut for 22 years but the address gave me no clue as to where the delicately-named Diana Tower was.

You see, we Lebanese don’t “do” 85 per cent of street names. Ask a Lebanese taxi driver for Mansour Jurdak or Najib Ardati and he will give you a blank look. You need to know your landmarks: squares, malls, political party offices, embassies, hospitals, restaurants, petrol stations, bridges and statues. Brands have become landmarks. There is the Fiat Bridge as well as the Chevrolet and Cola junctions.

Google maps came to the rescue. I knew where it was immediately, but a Beiruti would say, “it’s behind the Hobeish police station” or “where the old German embassy used to be”. It gets weirder. It turns out that Mrs Karam and I lived on Mansour Jurdak from 1996 to 1997.

I mentioned this to a Lebanese businessman over lunch last week. “We are just different from the rest of the world habibi,” he said, unfurling a napkin, buttering his bread and greeting a fellow diner in one seamless motion. “I mean where else would you find the restaurants full when the country is in critical condition and there is a mini-revolution on the streets not 100 metres from where we are?”

He told me he had been reading Sudhir Hazareesingh's How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People. "We are not, on the whole, a nation of thinkers," he said. "Agonising contemplation over small coffees and filterless cigarettes is not our thing. We are traders; we are loud, we like to have fun, to spend, to enjoy the goods the world sends to our shores and we like to go out and eat."

He had a point. The restaurants in central Beirut are doing brisk trade even though Lebanon is experiencing its most existentially precarious moment since the end of the civil war in 1990. The government is in disarray; the political class is under attack both literally and metaphorically from shaggy haired civil society activists and the economy is in the middle of a prolonged myocardial infarction.

“Is this our Paris, May ’68 moment?” my friend asked, no doubt keen to give relevance to his current reading matter. “OK they are not attacking capitalism but we are attacking corruption and the old order. They will not win. You will see. Just like in France in June of 1968, elections were held and the hated Gaullists came back stronger.”

I admitted that my knowledge of French politics was practically non-existent but clearly Lebanon’s racketeering political class had been finally rumbled. Something had been broken and surely he, a member of the private sector, whose biggest concern was the ability to do business, could see that successive governments had assumed the private sector would look after itself.

"I read what you wrote last week," he said tucking into his duck with alarming gusto. "You were right. [The business leaders] were parroting a very cynical government line to deflect blame on to the protesters, but I still believe it will take a huge force to change things, and if I am being honest I believe we actually thrive in instability."

He went on to tell me that he was 16 when the civil war ended. He knew nothing of peace until his late teens and even after that, life was punctuated by bursts of instability and violence. He grew up watching his parents fight to save the family business during the civil war, then came 2006 and the month-long conflict between Israel and Hizbollah.

“That was my war. At that point I knew what it is to be Lebanese. We cannot exist in peace.” He voice rose. “It bores us. We work better in uncertainty because it is our default setting and that is why I have told myself that no matter what happens, if the political systems change or remain or even if ISIL causes us trouble, we will still endure.”

I couldn’t tell if he was angry or just needed to get it off his chest. We sat there in silence. “So do you know your business address?” I asked. “I have no idea”, he said before bursting out laughing. “Like I said, we do things differently.”

Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.

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