Charles Corm; An Intellectual Biography of a Twentieth Century Lebanese "Young Phoenician" (original) (raw)
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The rebirth of the Lebanese identity in the philosophy of the Lebanese intellectual Samir Kassir
During the last years of the Syrian control of Lebanon, Samir Kassir was undoubtedly one of the prominent Lebanese journalists who fought against it and tried to more distinctly define the fragile and broken Lebanese nationality. Kassir was mainly active in political comment and analysis and tried to introduce new and fresh ideas in order to awaken the Lebanese people from their ongoing lack of political consciousness, coma and social degeneration. He tried to bring about a shift in political views that originated in the people, Lebanon's grass roots, rather than try to change the elite and corrupt political framework. His political and intellectual activities offered the Lebanese a new and promising national agenda that, supported by other similarly concerned intellectuals, might have given the Lebanese new hope in their turmoil. The article examines Kassir's part in building the new hybrid Lebanese identity and argues that Kassir, as a modern Lebanese intellectual, first diagnosed the core problems involved in creating this Lebanese identity and later suggested his own understanding of what such a hybrid, reconstructed identity should be.
As long as I can remember myself as a thinking individual, I have been preoccupied with the fundamental question of my own identity, that is, who am I? This question has been the essence of my reality since I am half Ashkenazi (descendants of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe) and half Sephardic (descendants of “Eastern” or “Oriental” Jews, principally from the Middle East). When I later became a researcher in the field of Middle Eastern history, this topic quickly found its way into my own lines of investigation. This understanding came to me only towards the end of my writing. Gradually, as I grew familiar with the heterogeneous society of Syria in the nineteenth century, I felt that researching the Christian Arabs constituted a special challenge in the pursuit of understanding their multifaceted identity. Delving into their cultural duality (West and East), might enable me to better understand my own duality. The Christian Arabs were caught in a multi-cultural world, as I am, although the pertinent societies and cultures differ. Yet, the fundamental question remains similar: how should they, and I, define ourselves?
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