. Sa’adeh’s writings and speeches led all Lebanese of all sects – Catholic, Orthodox Christians, Sunnis, Shi’ah and Druze – to a new detailed, scientific understanding of the sects-neutral ancient history that integrated them all in common Lebanese-Syrian-Iraqi nationhood. Sectarian Catholic intellectuals who collaborated with the French colonial occupation in Lebanon distorted the Lebanese-Syrians ancient history. They developed a Mediterraneanist ideology that stressed the necessity for Lebanon of relationship with “Latin” Europe and idealized ancient Rome’s rule over the Lebanese in order to legitimize “Latin” France’s conquest and colonial rule of the twentieth century Lebanese.
Sa’adeh in contrast projected a distinguished - detailed and scientific - view of the Syrians’ ancient history which could inspire and guide the Lebanese and the inland Syrians through the coming struggles of colonization. His communications, notably his 1938 work, The Rise of Nations, were the most sustained and analytical account of the area’s ancient history to have appeared to that date in Arabic and therefore had great impact upon the thinking of Catholic Lebanese. Sa’adeh’s account of the Lebanese-Syrians ancient history provided data that enabled the Lebanese of his day to understand the status as colonised people, to understand imperialism and to struggle for independence.
Sa’adeh’s accounts of the Lebanese-Syrians’ Ancient history were indeed like those of the pro-French Mediterraneanists in that Sa’adeh traced the ancient Phoenicians’ trading and settlements far beyond the homeland of Lebanon-Syria, not just around the Mediterranean basin, but even beyond that, down and around the coastline of West Africa. The Phoenician Syrians ancient relationship with Black West Africans in Sa’adeh’s account highlighted gentleness in international relations, respect for the sovereignty of peoples, and peaceful co-existence between nations bases of the future comity of sovereign Nations that the modern Lebanese-Syrians in general would enter after they expelled the French colonialists. We may take Sa’adeh’s account of the pacific co-existence of the ancient Phoenician Syrians with the black West Africans in ancient history. Sa’adeh highlighted economic and cultural relations between the Phoenicians in Carthaginians/Syrians and black African peoples. These were relations based on mutual interests and devoid of patterns of racial or colonial subordinations.
To quote Sa’adeh: “The one known as "silent barter" was practiced by the Canaanite Syrians (Phoenicians) who built Carthage. In their commercial ventures in West Africa, they used to . . . unload their goods and arrange them on the beach, then return to their ships and raise a column of thick smoke. When the natives saw the smoke, they came to the beach, placed gold in payment for the goods and withdrew a certain distance from the goods. Then the Carthaginians came again to the beach and examined the amount of gold. If they found it sufficient to compensate for the goods, they carried it away and set sail; otherwise, they returned to their ships and waited, whereupon the natives came back to place an additional amount of gold. The process went on until the owners of the goods were satisfied; neither one of the two parties sought to prejudice the other, for neither did the Phoenicians touch the gold before they deemed it equivalent to the value of the goods, nor did the natives touch the goods before the first party had taken the gold.
We shall see shortly, how this account subsequently reverberated in the Mediterraneanist Catholic al-Bashir three years later in 1939 sapping and transforming French thought patterns.
The second point to be stressed for our discussion of Sa’adeh and the change or shift in the Catholic Lebanese historical view in the 1930s and 1940s is Sa’adeh’s highlighting of conflicts between Lebanese-Syrians and the Latin Romans in ancient history. He documented the violence and destructiveness with which the Romans subjugated the Lebanese-Syrians in ancient history, making it difficult for anyone in Lebanon to credit the pro French Mediterraneanist myths about the relationships between Lebanese and Latin imperialists, ancient or modern. A representative was Sa’adeh’s account of Roman ill-treatment of ancient slaves: “In Rome, slavery assumed such wide proportions that it exploded into a series of revolts. The most serious revolt was that of Sicily following the Third Punic War. A Syrian with the Greek name of Jonas led the revolt. He invoked Syrian gods to incite the slaves, claiming that all of the Syrian gods had called upon him to assume royal powers. Jonas actually established a kingdom and led his army against armies and cities, causing much destruction in the land. He proclaimed himself king by the name of Antiochus after the illustrious Syrian Seleucid Emperor. His followers were called Syrians. His rule, however, was short-lived, and his liberation movement had a short duration.
Thus, Sa’adeh in his 1938 Rise of Nations depicted the ancient Romans as murderous imperialists, who sometimes conquered and exploited the ancient Syrians. Sa’adeh also indicated the legitimacy of country-violence and revolution by Syrians as the appropriate response to such Latin imperialism.
We now move to the shift in historical consciousness among Catholic Lebanese in the 1930s and 1940s. Under the influence of (a) Sa’adeh’s data about Greek and Latin imperialism in ancient history and (b) colonialist France’s increasingly oppressive actions in Lebanon, the Catholic Lebanese developed an anti-imperialist vision of history.
The writer “Lubnani Munsif”, publishing in the Jesuit-founded Beirut daily al-Bashir in 1939 depicted the ancient Greeks and Romans as often imperialistic in their relations with the ancient Lebanese-Syrians (the view of Sa’adeh in 1936). Lubnani Munsif also took up Sa’adeh’s characterization of the ancient Phoenicians as specific and non-aggressive in their dealings with nations with whom they traded. He did this, however, for various reasons, not just to exalt his land’s ancient Phoenician bygone glories. Sa’adeh had taken up the ancient Phoenicians’ “silent exchange” with black Africans as illustrations of Syrian moral nobility. Lubnani Munsif, however, gave the ancient Phoenicians specific interactions with other nations, a mordant anti-Western twist by arguing that such eastern spirituality established the moral superiority of the Lebanese over the depraved imperialistic Westerners. The general reaction against the West in the Middle East of the 1930s decidedly influenced France’s Maronite ex-friends also. Lubnani Munsif mentioned the Greeks and the Romans, along with the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Persians as - like the later Arabs - all foreign conquerors who “colonized” Lebanon, although the Romans are given credit for their building in and development of the country. It is the Phoenicians, whom Lubnani Munsif saw as having been the definitive element in the shaping of Lebanon's history and personality.
As some Egyptian neo-Pharoanic particularist nationalists had argued on behalf of ancient Egypt, Lubnani Munsif argued that the ancient Phoenicians had single-handedly originated human civilization. But he did successfully evoke a particular quality in the ancient Syrian Phoenicians that sets them apart from the methods of conquest used by the expansionist powers of what is implied to be the “materialist” West: “Who can deny that civilization first dawned on the world from these shores on which we live today? Or that no ages in any other lands can rival the services, inventions and discoveries, that the golden age of Lebanon's coast and mountain contributed to the world and which raised humanity up from its impenetrable darkness … inspiring in the peoples of the Mediterranean, the greater part of their forms of worship, their spiritual convictions, their culture, and thus their civilization?”
Lubnani Munsif in 1939 argued that the gentle, active Phoenician people, braving the elements had, through the trade network its measures established, created an international economy that had raised the standards of the peoples with which they came in contact by offering commodities in exchange for raw materials that they could not otherwise have benefitted from or disposed. The Phoenicians “through their intelligence and diligence reached the peak of glory and achievement without resorting to the word … to subjugate a brother human. It was in this fashion that the Phoenicians could inject a spirit of activity and enterprise into the peoples with whom they had dealings, inspiring them … to imitate them. Thus, the sphere of industry expanded and the desire for science and art spread.”
Thus far, Lubnani Munsif had not in 1939 passed too far beyond the collaborationist-sectarian view of ancient history which tried to legitimize France’s Colonial occupation of Lebanon and inland Syria to the Catholics by characterizing it as the Mediterranean Community. But then Lubnani Munsif swung into the attack against the Western great powers of his day, implying that their violence had placed them outside the pacific community that the ancient Phoenicians had prefigured in the Mediterranean. Lubnani Munsif’s argument about history sought to establish the moral superiority of the Phoenician Lebanese to imperialistic, violent Westerners his voice of language leaving no doubt that he definitely included contemporaneous twentieth-century European colonial powers among the “hellish”, “materialist”, violent Westerners from whom he separated the Lebanese. The ancient Phoenician Lebanese “were able, using their unostentatious and peaceful methods, to achieve what the nations who came after them could not achieve - and not even those which claim civilization today unless indeed they follow the example of the Phoenicians who spread their sciences, learning, culture, civilization, invention, manufactures through friendship and love, brotherhood and reciprocal aid with the nation with whom they mingled … Can we be loath to publicise these facts to the peoples and nations sunk deep in the sea of matter and materialist considerations? … When our land had such civilization, art, science, wealth, industry, power, the peoples who dominate the world with their wealth and the hellish instruments they have created to destroy towns and lands and exterminate man were still in a condition of natural barbarism, living in tribes, in caves and forests wearing the skins of beasts and animals.
Lubnani Munsif’s 1939 article was not a total repudiation of previous pro-French Mediterraneanist Lebanese particularists because he still underestimated the links of mountain and coastal Lebanon with the Syrian hinterland. He paid insufficient attention to the ancient Phoenicians’ and modern Lebanon’s ever-tightening affiliation to wide Syria and the general Syrian community. For all that, Lubnani Munsif voiced an apprehension of the Phoenicians in ancient history that far-reachingly ruled out any alliance of Lebanon with the West. His was a view of ancient history that focused and intensified anti-imperialism among Maronites and other Catholics in French-occupied Lebanon. Lubnani Munsif’s hostile characterization of the West and Westerns in history specifically snapped the political community between Catholic Lebanese and the French based on the latters’ nominal shared Catholicism. The sectarian French collaborationist Catholic writers in Lebanon had romanticized the Middle Age’s European Catholic Crusaders (many of whom came from France) as compassionate fellow-Catholic who delivered the Christian Lebanese from oppressive Muslims. Lubnani Munsif in 1939 punctured this by characterizing the Crusaders as violent European conquerors no different from other Western imperialists throughout history. Lubnani Munsif was radical in his rejection of the West: “even the Crusaders were imperialists is indeed an arresting sentiment to read in a newspaper for Catholics that had been founded by the Jesuits. Lebanon’s ‘Golden age’ is the period when Europeans had not yet come to the Middle East. The Phoenician approach to human and international relations, contrasts to the murderous force and conquest practiced by the modern west, which, he implied, in certain crucial aspects, has yet to break with the initial condition of ‘natural barbarism’ that characterized it at the time of Phoenicia’s glory.