T. 📚☕️

Many of you have heard about Lebanon’s golden era of the 1950s and 1960s, before the country descended into civil war.

You have also probably heard critiques of that period, namely that it was mostly a mirage in which a narrow clique of mostly Christian urban elites prospered while the rest of the country wallowed in poverty.

But what if that was not entirely true? What if this Lebanese prosperity was more widely shared than often assumed, and was, in fact, not solely a Christian story?

Here is a Druze perspective on pre-war Lebanon and a commemoration of some of the great - and, like much about pre-war Lebanon, often forgotten - Lebanese Druze individuals who made outsized contributions to Lebanon’s Belle Époque. (🧵)

Il est la version française d’Hugo Chávez. Rien de plus, rien de moins…

I am delighted to announce that the Lebanese Druze community and FIFA have officially signed the historic Mountain Shield Accords, a NATO-style mutual defence treaty heralding a new era of international security cooperation.

Under the terms of the agreement, President Infantino is now protected by an elite battalion of battle-hardened mountain warriors, whose sole mission is to safeguard his reign and repel any and all coup attempts.

In his closing remarks, Sheikh Sami Abilmona, the spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Druze community, delivered a stirring address worthy of Churchill himself, reaffirming the community’s unwavering commitment to the cause:

“For our dear friend President Infantino, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the pitches, we shall fight on the training grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this great institution, FIFA, were subjugated or starved, then our mountain strongholds beyond the seas, armed and guarded by our valiant warriors, would carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the Five Bounds, with all their power and might, step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the world.”

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I thought I would take a moment to mourn Dr. Anis Obeid, who passed away about a week ago.

Born in Aley, Lebanon, Dr. Obeid graduated from the American University of Beirut with a medical degree in 1957 before emigrating to the United States to pursue his residency. He went on to enjoy a distinguished, decades-long career as a cardiologist and professor of medicine in upstate New York. He was also deeply involved in the American Druze diaspora, witnessing firsthand its remarkable growth in size and influence over the second half of the 20th century.

Notably, medicine was only one of his many intellectual pursuits. In 2006, he published The Druze and Their Faith in Tawhid, a rather dense but intellectually ambitious examination of the faith into which he was born.

It reflects the perspective of a Druze layman profoundly curious about his own religious tradition, but also that of a man of science who, after decades in the West, was unafraid to question inherited interpretations and advocate for the reinterpretation, and at times reform, of certain beliefs and practices.