Beirut’s Shiny Facade Is a Mask

BEIRUT — The young cleric with the bright red beard put it like this: Memory is for Christians; the Muslims would rather forget.

“We Muslims have completely reconstructed the mosques, left no trace of war,” Mohammed Diab said. “The churches, they always leave a corner or something.”

Oblivion is proper, he said, pacing among the scarred granite pillars in the midday gloom of his 800-year-old mosque, for a man is made to forget. And today, there’s no hint -- not in the antique oil lamps, not in the refurbished domes -- that Lebanon’s years of bloodletting between its Christian and Muslim sects gutted this mosque in the heart of Beirut’s combat zone cum tourist magnet.

“And those who killed us?” Diab said with a grimace. “Now they’re in charge.”

With the dazzling, sweeping resurrection of Beirut’s war-torn city center, a killing zone has been reinvented as a grid of sun-washed seaside avenues infused with an air of vast, scrubbed perfection.

Thirteen years after the war ended, buildings that were chewed almost to dirt have risen again between the mountains and the sea. People have begun to filter back too, filling the alleys with their clamor of French and Arabic, drinking espresso and red wine and furrowing their brows into newspapers at cafes.

If ever a people were qualified to fix a surface, it’s the Lebanese, who are famous for worshiping looks. This city is a postwar mecca for plastic surgery and fashion. In Beirut, other Arabs quip with a roll of the eye, men drive around sweating in August rather than roll down the window and admit they don’t have air conditioning. They say that Beirut keeps up appearances.

Now Lebanon has built one of the Arab world’s most stunning facades. But many of the buildings remain half-empty, because few Lebanese can afford the rent. And the political woes that lurk beneath the polished yellow limestone are profound.

Years of reconstruction have driven Lebanon’s debt well above $30 billion. Syria continues to hold Lebanon in the smothering grasp of military occupation and political control. Tensions between Muslims and Christians remain intense, and many Lebanese complain that their society is still veined by the divisions that allowed the civil war to flourish.

“If we think what could come tomorrow, we’d be in anguish, because everything could explode again,” Beirut architect Pierre Khouri said. “But even during the war, the Lebanese would replace broken windows, never questioning themselves. It’s like healing a wound -- you don’t ask when you’ll be hurt again.”

For all its polish, for all the hearty international acclaim, it is with an unsteady mix of melancholy and bewildered pride that locals describe the dazzling phoenix of their downtown. Although the young and the trendy glory in their fashionable hometown, older Beirut natives seem almost disoriented, as if the shops and restaurants have been dropped there for the benefit of tourists, but not for them.

“It’s just a facade without a heart,” said Talal Salman, a Shiite Muslim and prominent newspaper editor.

The reconstruction project has opened gaps between social classes and distilled questions over urban gentrification. It has tapped into the generational divide between those who are too young to remember the war and those who are struggling to overcome their memories. But most of all, the shining new downtown has come to represent the reconstruction of a war-scarred people -- the conflicting impulses of memory and oblivion.

“It’s beautiful, but it’s not a place of reconciliation,” said Fares Souaid, a Maronite Christian and opposition lawmaker. “It’s like a museum without a soul.”

“It’s very famous,” Tony Karam, a city clerk, said with some bewilderment. “It’s touristic.” But it fills him with a certain melancholy, because it makes him think of the old Beirut, of the streets he haunted before the war.

“It used to be full, full, full,” he said. “There was a lot of warmth, and trust between people.”

Karam is back at his old desk of scratched metal, wielding his rubber stamps and logs, but City Hall is new. He and his colleagues abandoned their offices in 1978, and Karam didn’t see his Muslim co-workers until 2000, when they all trickled back to their gleaming, resurrected City Hall.

“From outside, it’s exactly the same, but inside it’s changed,” he said. “Everything fell to the floor, and started again. It’s only normal that people’s spirits would change.”

Many a city has battled over how to put itself back together from war: Berlin and Warsaw; Sarajevo and Kabul. In Beirut, after much bitter argument, ambitious planners opted to erase every scar of war from the crosshatch of streets around the infamous Green Line.

That’s “the most perfect way,” said Nabil Rashed, a spokesman for the Lebanese Company for the Resurrection of Beirut Central District, or Solidere. On a morning when winter sun was high on the Mediterranean waves, Rashed showed off models of Beirut, pointing out miniature green spaces and sea views; archeological sites and trademark iron scrolls.

When downtown is done, he said, the only memory of war will be found in the bullet holes on a lone statue in Martyrs’ Square. “It will be,” he said, “tabla rasa,” or a clean slate.

But some say Beirut has been too quick to paper over the wreckage, as if trying to overcome history by smothering it.

“We didn’t talk about it, and we didn’t learn,” said Souaid, the lawmaker. “Everybody has his own history and his own version.”

The silence about the war is one of the most conspicuous things about it -- always present, but almost never discussed. And some people say that’s just fine.

“I too parroted the line about amnesia, but I’ve come to disagree with myself,” Lebanese analyst Michael Young said. “I think amnesia is good. We’re not going to solve the problem, so we might as well forget it.

“They destroyed our past,” he said of the city planners, “but frankly, it was a pretty grimy place.”

There are other neighborhoods, back streets that are grubby and lighted by the greenish warmth of fluorescent bulbs, where Palestinian boys play soccer in scabby courtyards and bread is still pounded flat by hand.

It is in these dingier districts that the war endures, in the gray walls shot to stone lace, the countless bullet holes that beat out a visual syncopation along the streets.

But downtown the sidewalks are clean, the laughter steady and the memory short. These are the midnight stalking grounds for the young and the wealthy. They slink forth from Persian Gulf kingdoms, from Europe and from Beirut’s moneyed enclaves in leathers and elaborate coiffures and miniskirts. They look fashionably bored as they sip espresso at the outdoor cafes of the promenade, passing their mobile telephones back and forth across the table.

Abu Jamil watches them from his shop, a closet whose walls are brilliant with prayer beads and cigarette packs. Most of them weren’t born when the war began, he pointed out, watching the couples glide past in tight jeans on a recent evening. It was getting toward midnight, and dance music throbbed from the clubs. Abu Jamil drew on his water pipe and pulled out a sun-bleached photograph.

In the picture he is a proud young man, leaning jauntily against antique display cases of sequins, threads and buttons. He opened his cramped haberdashery on Souk Abu Nasr in 1970. He still holds court in the same cubbyhole, one of the few merchants who cleaved to his shop during the upheavals of war and peace.

When he was a young man, this seaside street was a run of fabric merchants, shoe vendors and secondhand clothes shops -- “and I knew every single one of them,” Abu Jamil said. Now there are discos, bars and a Dunkin’ Donuts.

“You can see around you -- there’s a class that’s living, and a class that’s destroyed,” he said.

To some ears, particularly the younger ones, the old-timers sound cantankerous, wringing their hands over what is plainly, to many young Lebanese, a triumph. They are young men and women such as 20-year-old Rana Lais, who paused near Abu Jamil’s shop. Balanced precariously on her platform shoes, she blinked around her with kohl-ringed eyes.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “I don’t remember the war, but I look at the pictures and hear the stories. We can’t erase that, but life must continue.”