Lebanon has been “trending” for all the right reasons since it was announced that Amal Alamuddin, a London-based barrister was engaged to George Clooney, an American actor. Not bad for a girl from the sleepy town of Baaklin in the Chouf Mountains.
Then again, we do punch above our weight when it comes to exporting highly educated, multilingual, and in Ms Alamuddin’s case, supremely groomed and impeccably flossed, human capital out into the world.
And in case anyone thinks this is a one off, achievement runs deep in the Alamuddin gene pool. Much has been made of her immediate family – dad is a respected academic while mum is a journalist – but her grandfather’s first cousin, Najib Alamuddin, trumps the lot.
Sheikh Najib, or the Flying Sheikh, as he was dubbed, was a man ahead of his time. In the pre-civil war period, which everyone agrees was something of a golden age, he embodied all of Lebanon’s achingly huge potential, first as chairman of Middle East Airlines and then as a government minister.
From 1952 to 1978, Mr Alamuddin took MEA, a newly formed carrier, and shaped it into a company that captured the panache and elegance of the new nation. MEA became the envy of the Arab world and, in many ways, today’s state-of-the-art GCC carriers owe their high standards to the benchmark it set.
Not only did he create a model corporate entity, Alamuddin was also notable for rolling up his sleeves and chipping away at the immovable monolith that is Lebanese confessionalism. He wanted MEA run like a western company and that meant snuffing out the sectarian culture of favours and sinecures and imposing efficiency and advancement by performance and merit.
He also smashed many of the practices that even today would incur the indignation of reactionaries. One of his most celebrated achievements was to ban the customary offering of coffee in the workplace whenever someone popped by, a practice that while socially ingrained and in the best tradition of Arab hospitality, hampered productivity. And it showed a remarkable determination to change what many would have deemed the unchangeable.
In the early days, he also fought to have as many Lebanese captains as possible, a vision that could have been stillborn in the wake of an accident in Dahran in 1964 when an MEA plane crashed as it came in to land, killing the 42 passengers and seven crew.
The captain on that flight was Lebanese, and MEA directors were scared that Lebanese pilots were simply not yet up to the job. Surely foreign pilots would be more reassuring. Alamuddin knew that if the company was to evolve, it had to nurture its own talent. He did not cave.
But there was another issue. This was at a time when MEA flight deck crew earned more than a government minister and many ambitious parents sent sons to unscrupulous flight schools in the United States, spending a fortune on what were ultimately useless licenses. Alamuddin actively discouraged the practice and ensured that all pilots accepted by the airline were trained in Perth in Scotland.
As MEA’s chairman, Alamuddin was a board member of Lebanon’s Intrabank, at the time the biggest financial institution in the Middle East and owner of a significant chunk of the airline. When Intrabank collapsed spectacularly in 1966, it wasn’t just a story for the business pages. The bank’s downfall was seen by many as the moment politics and finance collided.
Intra’s brilliant chairman, Yusuf Beidas, was seen by many in the Lebanese establishment as an upstart Palestinian who needed to be taught a lesson. Alamuddin recognised that the move to neutralise arguably the most powerful man in the country would backfire. Writing in his autobiography, he called it, “the beginning of the disintegration of Lebanon [by] a system so corrupt in style and morals that had plagued [the country] since independence and finally plunged the nation into civil war.”
Lebanon could do with a few more people with his integrity. In the meantime, we will have to hope our sons and daughters marry well.
Michael Karam is a Beirut-based freelance writer
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