Public historian Charles Hayek opens his provocatively titled Between History and Hallucinations with a bang. His basic plaidoyer, an admirably noble one, proposes a pragmatic Lebanese pluralism to counter narrow sectarian identities and histories, deeming the latter in turn hallucinatory, mythologized, “false,” and plain “retreats into a past that never was.” Yet this very language, exuding certitudes that no historian would dare intimate (let alone brandish uninhibited) demolishes the lofty monument of pluralism that Hayek’s premise claims to edify. To wit, the phrase a “past that never was,” beyond attributing to its author keys to an alternative “past that [assuredly] was,” begs a question that Hayek himself never answers: by what authority does one deem a claim to, say, Phoenician continuity “hallucinations,” while leaving other bickering Lebanese “mythologies” untouched? If Benedict Anderson bears any relevance claiming nations to be narrations, “imagined communities”—and here Hayek seems to lump “imagined” with “imaginary”—then the Phoenician story may be deemed no more (and no less) imaginary than a common Arab past, an unbroken Muslim filiation, or the vaunted pragmatic pluralism that Hayek deems self-evident. “Imagined communities” are not imaginary per Anderson; they are certainly no “hallucinations”; they are socially constructed yet powerfully real parameters of belonging and identity; indeed, they are the main ingredient, the very fabric, of kinship. “My identity is grounded in mythology that I know to be specious” wrote Amin Maalouf in the opening pages of Origines, “but a mythology that I nevertheless venerate as if it were the only true bearer of my only truth.” In other places Maalouf pushes the metaphor further, noting that “mythology is history that History forgot.” And so, to denigrate one group’s “imagined community” as pathological while sparing others under the guise of scholarship may be the very opposite of scholarship—indeed it may be dogmatism; a statement of power impersonating analysis.
Hayek appears particularly concerned that “fringe Christian” narratives “fracture the present and foreclose the possibility of a shared national future.” Yet one must ask why “a shared national future” ought to be the non-negotiable telos? And if the right to self-determination is sacrosanct, shouldn’t it include the right to decide with whom and on what terms one wishes to share a future? Hayek’s assumption that Lebanese Christians must continuously offer their particularism as oblation on the altar of a yearned-for “Lebanese unity” is precisely his “past that never was”; a suicide pact that never spawned an afterlife. Asking them to melt their memory into that of others “so as to be accepted” seems to echo Maurice Barrès’s 1907 caution that “in order to make us more human, we are being asked to become less of who we are.” The question is why? Why is self-abnegation deemed a virtue and self-affirmation a vice? Self-love is not rejection of others; it is an innocuous refusal to “go gentle into that good night.” Suggesting otherwise is a pietist prescription, not description illuminating Lebanese realities.
Hayek repeatedly contrasts what he calls “mythologized identities” and “historical fantasy” with their putative converse; a purported “honest history,” “scholarly rigor,” and “integrity.” Yet this overlooks the reality that all national narratives are mythologized and all kinships are imagined; that is what makes them real in Ernest Renan’s telling. Food fights are another one of Charles Hayek’s pet peeves—as if Italians ought to be vilified for claiming pizza, or Turks for hogging Tarator. One wonders why then Maronite culinary quirks or linguistic habits are suddenly “absurd,” while parallel practices elsewhere are quaint, charming, folkloric? Likewise genetic evidence is dismissed in the haste to denigrate Maronite myths of origin. Yet based on a 2017 study by Haber et al. all modern-day Lebanese derive over 90% of their ancestry from Canaanites—a substantial genetic continuity over the last 3,700 years, not “determinism” or a “veneer of scientific authority” as Hayek claims. Even when he brandishes his stronger argument—that Syriac was not the Maronites’ vernacular—Hayek seems at his weakest. For while veridical, this point is irrelevant. Arabic itself was a literary, liturgical, ceremonial language for centuries before becoming the putative “mother tongue” of millions of Arabs (even as in reality it is not; nobody speaks Arabic; but that’s another matter). Still, one would be hard-pressed accusing Arab nationalists of “hallucinations” for claiming Koranic Arabic as ancestral spoken tongue—“a history that never was.”
Glaring double standards notwithstanding, it remains that Hayek’s deepest flaw may be his epistemic certitudes. He positions himself as the guardian of “public history” whose “role is not to intoxicate or mobilize” but “to clarify,” “to resist the transformation of the past into a weapon,” and to “return history to the people in all its complexity.” Yet history, and “public history,” do slip into advocacy. This is not an indictment; it is the human condition. As Paul Valéry observed in Regards sur le monde actuel, history says exactly what we instruct her to say. Human memory is not a tidy laboratory specimen as Hayek may wish it to be. It is raw emotion, longing, nostalgia, and political will. To demand that Lebanese Christians abandon their “comforting illusions” so that a preferred future may prevail is not neutral analysis. It is coercion: “Be reasonable—do it my way” seems to be the homily.
What’s more, Hayek never levels that same moralizing gaze at Hezbollah’s actually morbid mythologization of resistance, martyrdom, and Iranian-sponsored eschatology. The perfunctory “Shia and Christian are alike” is the thinnest of Hayek’s fig leaves. It is not even-handedness as he wishes it to be; it is skilled doctrinaire argumentation that knows which side’s myth is cracking the whip.
In the end, Hayek does not defend history against myth. He defends his myth, that of a unitary Lebanon that can only survive if Christians stop being so stubbornly Phoenician, Maronite, or Syriac, and start being more “Lebanese” on his terms, deferential under a banner of righteousness that he bandies. That is not “public history.” It is “public therapy” for a nation deemed needing a cure for its particularisms. Lebanese Christians are under no obligation to accept the diagnosis, much less the cure. Self-determination includes the right to say, “we remember what we choose, we imagine what sustains us, and we decide our future without authorization from the academy’s self-appointed custodians of ‘honest history’.”
Franck Salameh is the Terse Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW.
