A Farewell to Hamra
Beirut 2001: The Year in Pixels
by R. Joseph Hoffmann
I am walking up the stairs of Fisk Hall to get to my office. The steps are always stuffed with students using them as bleacher seats. There is no clear passage between tightly packed bodies in springtime embraces, elbow-to-elbow cell-phone addicts, and recovering exam-takers, plonked down in exasperation until their next class begins. The old building itself is a typically noble collegiate monstrosity of the late nineteenth century, looking out on a green oval and attended by two equally venerable structures, all named after the American missionaries who founded the Syrian Protestant College—now the American University of Beirut (AUB)—in 1866.
Daniel Bliss is the name to conjure: an energetic Presbyterian attached to the Syrian Mission to the Holy Land, whose job it was to spread the gospel to the infidel—and any indigenous Christian Maronites and Orthodox who might, in the bargain, see the error of their theological ways.
It worked. Though Bliss couldn’t raise the necessary money by subscription in America, with a Civil War economy digging at everyone’s pockets, he resourcefully took his pleadings to England, where by April 1866 he had managed to collect £4,000, and sailed off to Beirut to begin his marvelous odyssey.
Bliss’s memorial edifice stands a hundred yards away from Fisk’s, free of the traffic problem I am facing because it opens welcomingly level to the ground. As I hit the landing to the front doors, I sidestep twelve or so card-playing students and dodge another four playing hacky sack at the entrance.
Things are tense this morning, more than usual. Tensions in Nablus and Jenin have spilled over onto campus, where it seems every fifth student is a stateless Palestinian, has a Palestinian parent, or feels a kind of warm anti-American satisfaction in supporting the Palestinian cause. That explains the hisses, the clucks, the sniggers, instead of the cheerier Marhaba’s and B’jour, Sirs I was getting last month.
The Coming of Bliss
Bliss’s idea was the child of its era, the Evangelical internationalism that preceded America’s political involvement in the rest of the world by several generations. Similar histories were being sketched in the South Pacific, in Hawaii, and, sidestepping the more practiced British, in parts of Africa. For every Livingstone, there was a Bliss; just as later there would be a retinue of Andover Newton bachelors of divinity to bring the refreshment of Scripture to thirsty souls—many of them as well trained in basic medical science (Baldwin on Maui, Peabody in Syria) as in theology.
Bliss carved out a Christian motto at the front gate as buildings began to rise on his superb site overlooking the vast, and then unpolluted, view of the Mediterranean: “That they may have life and have it more abundantly.” But even in 1866 one had to be careful. The verse was New Testament, but the sentiment was (and still is) taken to refer to the value of a “liberal education” at the hands of Western instructors. Beirut by the mid-nineteenth century had already seen its share of invading non-indigenous Christians: The Crusaders left rubble in the form of churches and “castles” from Tripoli to Tyre; the Cistercians came to mind the holy sites and to ensure that the Maronites remained essentially of one mind with Rome; and by the time Bliss arrived, the Jesuits had planted vineyards in the Bekka Valley and were producing potable if not exportable wines for the local population. The gospel seemed secure, as the old Quaker hymn intoned, beside the Syrian Sea.
As the teetotaling Protestants took up their life behind the gates of their college in the Muslim quarter of the city, their goal was to represent the American form of Christianity to the victims of ancient misunderstandings and aberrations. They would teach medicine, the useful arts, literature, and divinity, while the Catholics brought only dogma, the sacraments, and, perforce, grapevines. Bliss is reported to have said of his college that “any man, white, black, or yellow, Christian, Jew, or Mohammedan or heathen may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution . . . and go out believing in one God or in many gods or in no god. But it will be impossible for anyone to continue with us long without knowing what we believe to be the truth and our reasons for that belief.” The key presumably was “impossible to continue with us,” since there was little doubt among the men of the college what Bliss believed.
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