Profs & Pints Nashville: The Lessons of Lebanon

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “The Lessons of Lebanon,” on the history and struggles of a Middle Eastern country decades in the crosshairs of world conflict, with Dylan Baun, associate professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, scholar of Lebanon, and author of Beirut Radical: A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]

For the Lebanese people, history is not a memory of a distant past but the source of continued conflict and threats to life and livelihood. Central to Lebanon’s story are questions of identity. Is it a bridge to the West? A heart of the Arab world? Or a reluctant frontline in Arab opposition to Israel, its neighbor?

Join Dr. Dylan Baun, who has spent more than 15 years studying Lebanon and engaging in on-the-ground research on life there, for a talk that will give you a much richer and more nuanced understanding of that nation and the forces that have shaped life there over recent decades.

We’ll start with Lebanon’s 1943 attainment of independence from French colonial rule. You’ll learn how the political, economic, and social leaders of Lebanon's two largest communities, Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians, came together to resist the French. Their cross-confessional unity was formalized in a 1943 agreement between them calling for Lebanon to be a separate country with an Arab identity. The growth of the pan-Arab movement during the Cold War raised questions, however, about how separate Lebanon would be, giving rise to the tensions that led to Lebanon’s first civil war, which Dr. Baun chronicled in his book Winning Lebanon: Youth Politics, Populism, and the Production of Sectarian Violence, 1920–1958.

From there we’ll look at how 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which did not involve Lebanon, nonetheless had a major impact on Lebanese society. Many Lebanese responded to pan-Arabism’s failure in that conflict by seeking alternate ideologies supporting the liberation of Palestine. Divisions emerged pitting a Lebanese president and army that advocated staying out of regional affairs against groups, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and Progressive Socialist Party, that championed the Palestinian cause. These dynamics were at the center of the Lebanese Civil War that began in 1975, the focus of Professor Baun’s book Beirut Radical.

Dr. Baun will discuss how Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon led to the founding of the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, which grew in influence in the 1980s and 1990s by appealing to marginalized communities. Hezbollah’s alliance with Iran and use of terror as a tactic helped propel its rise in Lebanese politics but also provoked U.S. and Israeli blowback, which has brought Lebanon the destruction and chaos that may lead to Hezbollah’s downfall. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A 2019 protest in Beirut. Photo by Shahen Araboghlian.