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This book is dedicated to
Richard Huia Woods Rogan
Introduction
On February 14—Valentine’s Day—2005, a massive car bomb killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in central Beirut. Returning home from a session of Parliament, Hariri had followed a predictable route and was surrounded by a bustling motorcade that made him stand out in the city’s notorious traffic. The one-ton bomb left an enormous crater where the waterfront road had been and sheared the faзades off neighboring buildings. Twenty-one people died with Hariri—politicians, bodyguards, and drivers, along with i
One of the first to be killed was the journalist and author Samir Kassir, who died in his booby-trapped Alfa Romeo as he drove to work on the morning of June 2, 2005. Writing in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, Kassir was one of the leading voices of the anti-Syrian March 14 movement. Kassir saw Lebanon’s problems as a microcosm of the ills of the Arab world as a whole. Shortly before his death, Kassir had published a remarkable essay exploring what he termed the ?Arab malaise? of the twenty-first century. It reflected the disenchantment of Arab citizens with their corrupt and authoritarian governments. ?It?s not pleasant being Arab these days,? he observed. ?Feelings of persecution for some, self-hatred for others; a deep disquiet pervades the Arab world.? “Yet the Arab world hasn’t always suffered such a ‘malaise,’” he continued. He contrasted the twenty-first-century malaise with two historic periods in which the Arabs had attained, or aspired to attain, greatness. The first five centuries after the emergence of Islam, spa