From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium

Rating:
Summary: Great reading
Review: A very well written book, with beautifully weaved historical, geographical and politicals elements related to a long list of monasteries from Athos, Greece to Southestearn Turkey/Syria all the way to Egypt. Highly readable! The relatively obscure history of Byzantium is unfolded in a very interested viewpoint.
I was mostly impressed by the sharp analysis of the influences of neighboring religions/civilization on the evolution of christianity in the geographic area of Turkey/Syria/Iraq/Persia.

Rating:
Summary: Great reading
Review: A very well written book, with beautifully weaved historical, geographical and politicals elements related to a long list of monasteries from Athos, Greece to Southestearn Turkey/Syria all the way to Egypt. Highly readable! The relatively obscure history of Byzantium is unfolded in a very interested viewpoint.
I was mostly impressed by the sharp analysis of the influences of neighboring religions/civilization on the evolution of christianity in the geographic area of Turkey/Syria/Iraq/Persia.

Rating:
Summary: A phony!
Review: When I started reading "From the Holy Mountain:a Journey among the Christians of the Middle East"(paperback edition) by William Dalrymple, I was enthralled both by its style and its contents: little did I know the surprises that lay ahead in Part IV . As a Lebanese Maronite, I was looking forward to see what the author had to say about our history, past and recent. From past experience with other anglo-saxon journalists, I did not expect much sympathy . To start with, the Maronites had made tremendous blunders in the ill- fated Civil War. Personnally, I was against the Phalange, but without losing sight of the responsibilities of the other parties in the conflict. However, to say, like the author does(following Robert Fisk blindly), that the Maronites were solely responsible for the outbreak of the war is absolutely unfair.But this is not really what caused my disappointment with the author. The reason for it is that I discovered that William Dalrymple, for all his apparent regard to historical detail, is nothing but a phoney....

The shock came at page 243, when the author, heading for Bsharre, says that " just after Jebail, ..., we turned inland, driving up into a dark and narrow river valley..". Now, if the author were really heading towards Bsharre, as he claims, he would have had to continue driving along the coastal road, through Amchit, then Batroun, Chekka and its tunnel, and then he would have turned inland, up into a wide road gently sloping towards the Koura plain, and then would have gone through Amioun (the capital of Greek Orthodox Christianity in Lebanon, with many an interesting church to visit...), and from there he would have proceeded towards Bsharre, without any "narrow river valley" to be seen for miles.The distance between Jebail and the turning point inland is nearly equal to the distance between Beirut and Jebail, so one is allowed to wonder about the "near vertical cliffs rising on either side of us" that the author claims to have encountered just after Jebail! And if that were not enough, we read that "before long, we passed the snowline etc..." !! At this point, I turned back to page 236, to make sure that I had not mistaken the date I read: yes, the date is definitely 4 October ! So what the author is claiming is that, on the 4th of October, there was snow well below Bsharre.Since Bsharre is at 1450 m above sea level, what the author is telling us is utterly unbelievable: there was snow in Lebanon at , say, 1000m altitude ON THE 4TH OF OCTOBER!!! Well, I am 57 years old, and I have never seen any snow in Lebanon before the 15th of November, but never at such moderate altitudes : the snow starts falling, in late autumn, at the highest peaks, i.e at 2500m and above.Some of the heaviest snowfalls in recent times were recorded in the winter of 1991-1992, but there was hardly any snow before Christmas. So my conclusion is fairly simple: the trip to Bsharre never took place, and Dalrymple must have based it on the tale of some other traveller who actually came during winter.Another incontrovertible proof that the author has invented the whole episode can be found at page 261. Here the author says that" from Bsharre they headed south-east over the high rocky ridges of Mount Lebanon, then corkscrewed down into soft green fields of the Northern Bekaa.."Very well indeed! The road he is referring to is the Cedars- Ainata road, which culminates at about 2400 m; and whenever there is "snow lying thickly over everything" in Bsharre (p.244), it is usually closed. The contradiction is obvious: if he has really used the Ainata road, then there was definitely no snow in Bsharre, which is certainly the case in the early days of autumn.
But there is more: my personal belief is that Mr Dalrymple not only did not visit Bsharre, but he did not even look at a map of Lebanon.If the "just afer Jebail " episode is not enough, one needs only to read pages 252 and 253. At page 252, we are told that Zghorta is "20 miles further down the gorge from Bsharre". But at page 253, we read about "a century-old feud between Bsharre, Geagea's hometown, and Ehden and Zghorta, the Frangieh strongholds forty miles to the west." So which one is correct, 20 miles or 40 miles? Besides, Dalrymple seems to think that Ehden and Zghorta are so close to each other that they are at the same distance from Bsharre. In fact, Ehden is closer to Bsharre than it is to Zghorta.

After all the above, I find it a waste of time to answer all the inaccuracies and fallacies regarding the Lebanese civil war.Let me just point out the most ludicrous statement that comes from no other than Robert Fisk at page 237: "the first event of the civil war was a massacre of Palestinians by a group of Phalangists trying to win power" I fail to see how a massacre of Palestinians could win power to the Phalangists! Fisk is referring here to the incident that took place near a church in Ain al Remmaneh on the 13th of April 1975. This incident,in which a bus full of Palestinians was ambushed by Phalangists,is considered as having sparked the civil war.But tension had been rising between the Lebanese Army and the Palestinians since 1969, the year of the ill-fated Cairo Agreement.This Agreement put an end to daily clashes, near the border with Israel, between the Fedayeen and the Army. But serious clashes happened also in 1973, and the Army was restrained by pressures from the Arab countries and some of the Muslim leadership in Lebanon.Clearly, what King Hussein did in Jordan in September 1970 was not allowed in Lebanon.The Christians, mainly the Maronites, resented the state within the State that the Palestinians had established with the help of some Arab countries.Arafat has boasted once of having ruled Lebanon for ten years...This is the real reason behind the civil war, and not the fact that the Maronites wanted to reduce the Muslims "to some sort of folkloric survival tolerated to please the tourists". Despite the enormous mistakes perpetrated by the Maronite leadership,Fisk's one-sided views are totally erroneous and show a lack of historical insight.

Let me also draw the reader's attention to two passages showing how confused the author is by what he has been told by the people he has interviewed.At page 230, Père Abbé(sic) Marcel Abi- Khalil is supposed to have told him " Before the fighting, Deir-el-Qamar was half Christian and half Druze". But before which fighting, Mr Dalrymple? Certainly not before the 1975 civil war, when Deir-el-Qamar was exclusively inhabited by Christians.Père Abi-Khalil was certainly referring to the fighting that broke out between the two communities... in 1860.But the author, not very well versed in French as it appears from the "eremite" and "Prochain Orient" at page 249, must have misunderstood the old priest.
The other passage is found at page 253. Tony Frangieh,it is said there," behaved with characteristic brutality: on one occasion three hundred Muslims were massacred in one day in the Matn region in revenge for four Maronites found slain".But the Marada never operated in the Matn, the traditional stronghold of the Gemayel clan. Again, the author is confusing Tony Frangieh with Bashir Gemayel : the massacre in question is the "Black Saturday" massacre, which was related by Jumblatt at page 226. This massacre had nothing whatsoever to do with Tony Frangieh and his Marada.

Now, can anyone blame me if I stopped reading the book at page 275? Fortunately for me, I have not purchased this book: I borrowed it from a friend, and I returned it to him with a copy of this letter and many thanks...However, he insisted that I should read on till the end, which I did.But without much pleasure , and with the impression that most of what I'm reading was doubtful,at best...