In Memoriam

How does one speak of a man who loathed making noise? Who shunned grand gestures and every form of display, even though his brilliance and nobility, much to his own chagrin, were locked in thoroughly unfair competition with his extreme modesty? The task is particularly difficult. All the more so because the man himself, never fond of the media, interviews, honors or public exposure, would have disapproved of the rather perilous exercise undertaken by the author of these lines. And yet it is precisely because Sheikh Michel el-Khoury, who passed away on July 4, 2026, just shy of one hundred, had chosen the path of silence and discretion, faithful to his leitmotif that “one must serve rather than serve oneself,” with the state and its primacy taking precedence over everything else, that speaking of him now seems absolutely necessary, at a time when Lebanon is undergoing such profound decay. All the more so because his vision of Lebanon and of its role remains more relevant than ever. May he show some indulgence toward this attempt, which is less that of a journalist than of a loyal and grateful friend, to bear humble witness to what he was and to what he will remain in memory, if only in the memories of those who had the privilege of knowing him and spending time with him. The Two “Fathers-References” Brilliance. Nobility. Silent devotion to the public good, the state and the homeland. If one had to choose a triptych with which to approach Sheikh Michel’s immensely rich and complex personality, it would be this one. Béchara el-Khoury, the first president of the sovereign Lebanese Republic, had judged correctly when he once let slip this superb, laconic remark: “My son Michel is a prince. What am I saying, a prince… an archduke!” Michel el-Khoury was indeed a grand seigneur of Lebanese politics, in the most honorable and graceful sense the expression can hold. A prince in the service of the Republic and democracy… in the irrational age of the mastiffs and wolfhounds of Lebanese politicking, obsessively in pursuit of honors… and patrons. But could it have been otherwise when the name of his father, Bechara, was inseparable from the independence of Greater Lebanon, and that of his spiritual father, his uncle Michel Chiha, from the Lebanese Constitution? Escaping the father’s name was impossible. So much so that, even past the age of ninety, and despite an exceptional career in public life and an impressive culture, he would note, with a certain weariness, that the media still continued to saddle him with his father’s first name, as though his own were still not enough… Fate was ironic. It had never ceased taunting Sheikh Michel, with no regard for his advanced age, his career or his experience. The Journey of a Rebel Yet from his earliest youth, the man had fought the very concept of political inheritance and nepotism, which naturally placed him in conflict with his own family. He certainly admired, respected and was deeply attached to the paternal figure. As an adolescent, he had watched him defy, at the risk of his life, the rifles of the Senegalese soldiers of the French Mandate when, in November 1943, rude, insulting, threatening and violent, they came to the presidential palace in Kantari to take him to the citadel of Rashaya. The episode remained engraved in young Michel’s memory to the very end, all the more so because his mother, Laure Chiha, suffered a cardiac episode that day, from whose after-effects she would die a few years later. The Mandate authorities had refused emergency assistance to the First Lady: they first had to make sure that the president was in detention… One may therefore say that Sheikh Michel lost his mother as a collateral victim of the struggle for the independence of his motherland, Greater Lebanon… That same mother who had asked him to promise never to enter politics, and to whom he had, quite precisely, promised nothing… Yet when the head of state, whose close entourage had already been touched by corruption and undermined by clientelism, decided to renew his mandate, the son rebelled and left the family home to seek refuge with his mentor, Michel Chiha, who was himself opposed to Sheikh Bechara’s anti-republican initiative. Nor was the quarrel confined to the purely familial sphere: in September 1950, Sheikh Michel spoke openly at Michel Asmar’s Lebanese Cenacle to criticize his father’s course. Bear the name, yes. But not at any price. Here is an excerpt from the lecture: “We achieved independence. And then what? What has the state of independence done? What has it accomplished in building the state, building the homeland and building the citizen? Nothing. We have gone backwards… to Ottoman habits and colonial practices. We have returned to corruption, negligence and decline… Those born with the independence of 1943 are growing older without our having made the effort, or fulfilled the duty, of bringing them together as true Lebanese… We must eliminate the remnants of the past and this deadly inertia of obsolete methods inherited from the Mandate and earlier periods; we must also remove a moral obstacle: the mentality of ‘divide and rule.’” The son of independence thus chose… independence. And it remained a constant, a coherent and assumed choice throughout his career, despite his long-standing affinity with Chehabism. As when, after the war, he decided to resign during his second term as governor of the Banque du Liban because of his firm opposition to Prime Minister Rafic Hariri’s policy of indebtedness. Hariri urged him to remain in office, despite their disagreements and in the name of their friendship. Sheikh Michel’s reply was, as usual, cutting: “It is so that we may remain friends that I am leaving…” Although he presided for a time over the Destour at the threshold of the civil war, Michel el-Khoury refused to turn it into a traditional party and tried, unsuccessfully, to modernize it. He even dared, ultimate sacrilege, to propose to Raymond Eddé, son of his father’s arch-enemy Emile Eddé, a merger with the National Bloc in order to counter the rise of the militias and the siren call of violence… only to receive an icy reply from the “Amid”: “Never will the son of Émile Eddé place his hand in that of the son of Béchara el-Khoury!” Raymond Eddé, statesman though he was, was no Charles de Gaulle… The General, for his part, had shown himself considerably more chivalrous, and more reasonable, when Fouad Chehab, then president of the Republic, entrusted Sheikh Michel with a mission to the Élysée aimed at halting the sale of French-owned land in Lebanon to the Palestinian banker Youssef Baidas. De Gaulle, who rose for no one, received the son of his old adversary standing, surveyed him from the height of his imposing frame and told him in a tone that brooked no reply: “I know whose son you are… One day, you will regret having driven the French out of Lebanon!” Be that as it may, the French president then facilitated the young emissary’s mission, which proved successful. It was in the wake of that mission that, in 1967, Michel el-Khoury was asked by Jean Kaplan of the Suez Group to take charge of Banque Libano-Française, marking the beginning of a long career in banking. The Man Behind the Scenes Michel el-Khoury gradually became the man of subtle political and diplomatic missions, carried out in the shadows, first for Chehab and then for Charles Helou, who entrusted him with the leadership of the strategic National Council for Tourism, which enabled Chehabism to pursue a genuine parallel diplomacy discreetly. It was a role that suited him perfectly, entirely in keeping with his personality as a servant of the state and a man behind the scenes, far from the glare of the spotlight… even though he also served as a minister, notably as minister of Defense before the Six-Day War. In that capacity, during meetings with his counterparts and with Arab military officials, he was able to see, from facts and projections alike, that the region’s armies faced a crushing defeat by the Israel Defense Forces in the event of confrontation. The gulf between the reality of the balance of power and Nasser’s populist rhetoric was alarming. The defeat, followed by the extraordinary wave of popular fervor surrounding the Egyptian rais, left a lasting mark on him. He immediately recognized in it one of the region’s most persistent ills: the hold a leader could exert over the collective imagination even in the face of disaster on such a scale… That discretion, combined with elegance, also ensured that he would be regularly consulted and carefully listened to by foreign chancelleries. Guided by an ethical and political framework whose sole driving force was service to the homeland, its independence, sovereignty and permanence, Michel el-Khoury was undoubtedly one of the rare political figures who asked for nothing for himself… which made him a man worthy of trust. Because he was incorruptible. An official mission to Ernest Bevin, in Attlee’s Britain, had taught him an unforgettable lesson in this regard. In the aftermath of the war, he had thought, purely as a gesture of courtesy, of offering chocolates to his British interlocutors at a time when the country was still suffering privation. But the gift was returned to him: in a country still subject to restrictions and rationing, public officials would not accept privileges unavailable to ordinary citizens. Michel el-Khoury remained deeply marked by this. What he admired was not austerity for its own sake, but the almost sacred idea that a public official must be subject to the same rules as everyone else. For a man who would spend his life denouncing clientelism and corruption, the anecdote amounted to a lesson in civic virtue. Values for Lebanon But how, then, does one tell the story of a nearly invisible man, a man who, like his great friend, lifelong companion and confidant Fouad Boutros, burned all of his archives before his death so as to leave no trace? A man who systematically refused to write his memoirs, despite repeated requests from various quarters, including the author of these lines? A man who left behind only one meditative, intimate, introspective, anguished and sublime work, Ruptures vespérales , strongly evocative of one of his masters, Emil Cioran… and signed with a pen name, Michel Delescure? Precisely through the values that guided his political action and run through his entire career. Thus, when speaking of Bechara el-Khoury and Michel Chiha, Michel el-Khoury would express a visceral rejection of the very notion of “tolerance,” contemptible in his eyes, and insist instead on the importance and meaning of “sharing,” which the two men held in common and which he had inherited from them. This foundational idea of “sharing” no doubt explains the attachment of Michel el-Khoury’s two “fathers-references” to Greater Lebanon, the National Pact and living together. For Chiha, Sheikh Michel explained, the confessional system was ultimately meant to lead toward an inclusive citizenship, not sink into tribal sectarianism. As for Bechara el-Khoury, according to Sheikh Michel, he had argued in the manuscript of the fourth volume of his memoirs, destroyed during the war in the fire that consumed the Kantari library, that his successor as president of the Republic should be Riad el-Solh, the Sunni prime minister… a sign that the system was not meant to ossify, but on the contrary to evolve, and that what mattered was a specifically Lebanese sense of belonging, not residual affiliations… Michel el-Khoury would defend this guiding conception to the end. It also explains his rejection, in Chiha’s spirit, of the State of Israel, which he regarded as the antithesis of Greater Lebanon’s pluralist model and which, in his view, played a pivotal role from its creation in 1948 in sabotaging the young Lebanese state and its development. Indeed, during a visit to the United States in the 1960s, he became embroiled in a public verbal clash with a university professor who, during a conference, openly defended Israel’s designs on neighboring countries… That man would go on to become the all-powerful future secretary of state under Nixon. His name? Henry Kissinger… It also explains his contempt for populism and for fascistic sectarian excesses within the various communities. Uncompromising when it came to independence and to a certain vision of Lebanon, and capable, when necessary, of silencing an adversary with a single well-aimed retort, Michel el-Khoury was above all a man of mediation, measure and dialogue, faithful to the teachings of his mentor Chiha. Thus, when President Elias Sarkis sought, through Sheikh Michel, then serving his first term as governor of the Central Bank, to mediate with the Palestinians in order to preserve the continuity and functioning of state institutions, Bachir Gemayel, the dominant Christian strongman in East Beirut, threatened to humiliate him publicly on the grounds that he was betraying Christian esprit de corps. In the same republican spirit, Michel el-Khoury firmly opposed all para-state and anti-state ventures, from the Syrian occupation to the militias, against whom he once physically placed himself as a human shield to protect the Banque du Liban building and its employees when gunmen attempted to storm it, and later to Iranian influence exerted through Hezbollah. On February 6, 1984, as the Amal uprising split the army and plunged the capital back into violence, he watched the country unravel and said: “The Pact has shattered.” On March 14, 2005, violence rekindled a measure of hope after the assassination of Rafic Hariri. The Syrian occupation came to an end, only to be replaced by Tehran’s yoke. Sheikh Michel, who had been active in the Kornet Chehwan Gathering under the aegis of his friend Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, another convinced “Chihist,” joined the March 14 coalition… only to find there the same endemic sickness he had fought throughout his life: struggles for power, sectarian and identity-based retrenchment, and the mediocrity of decision-makers… all of which led to the nightmare of Michel Aoun’s “consensual” election to the presidency of the Republic, in his eyes the quintessence of populism and a symbol of anti-republicanism. The spirit of Bechara el-Khoury’s independent Lebanon, Michel Chiha’s republican Lebanon and Fouad Chehab’s institutional Lebanon was being trampled underfoot in the service of the personalization of power, demagoguery, populism, and the primacy of blackmail and power politics over democracy and the institutional spirit. “Without Freedom, Lebanon Is a Fiction” At bottom, his entire conception of Lebanon rested on a difficult articulation between freedom, pluralism and independence. A critic of the Lebanese system? Nostalgic for its confessional rigidities? Far from it. That was not Sheikh Michel’s way. For him, despite its flaws, the system had preserved one irreplaceable good: freedom. Political, intellectual, religious and economic freedom, without which Lebanon, in his eyes, would lose even its raison d’être. Despite its defects and failings, the pluralism of Greater Lebanon was the guarantor of that freedom, and any project seeking to dismantle it, dilute it, his father had not had Antoun Saadeh executed for nothing, or break it apart under any pretext or name whatsoever, constituted a real threat to that fragile equilibrium standing sentinel over liberty. “Without freedom, Lebanon becomes a fiction,” he stressed. Yet that freedom could not survive without evolution. From the 1960s onward, Sheikh Michel advocated a gradual transition away from political confessionalism, the primacy of competence in public administration, civil marriage, and eventually the secularization of the state. But not through revolution. “It is possible to change the system from within the system itself,” he would say in substance. Any lasting reform required, first of all, a transformation of mentalities through education and citizenship. For Sheikh Michel, Lebanon possessed something profoundly precious: precisely this ability to enable different communities to live together, what René Maheu called a “style of civilization.” But the country had betrayed that vocation by allowing confessionalism to degenerate into clientelism, identity-based enclosure and an instrument of foreign interference. The Pact, Yes, but the Human Being Above All Deeply attached to the Pact, Sheikh Michel faulted its authors for having left it vague, allowing the Lebanese to quarrel over its interpretation while ultimately agreeing never truly to define it. Before the Taif Agreement, he therefore called for a new pact built around new common objectives for all Lebanese, along with a struggle against a form of collective defeatism and the creation of genuine opportunities for progress for all. “The Pact was a necessary foundation when it was established, but it becomes a negative foundation if one wants to make it the basis for building a nation. The positive foundation necessary for the construction of modern states is not to be found in the Pact.” For him, the problem clearly did not lie in texts alone, but in people. “We must accelerate the citizen’s apprenticeship of citizenship, so as to make him a good citizen; then it will no longer be impossible to build a good homeland,” he wrote in 1970. He added: “The fundamental need is to create a party based on a doctrine, bringing together the different components of which Lebanon is made. If such a party existed today, I would be the first to join it. I would have assumed my share of responsibility and fulfilled my duty in this field.” “The system needs great undertakings: first will, then education, then morality (…) I have found that change and reform must begin in school, in the family environment, through education.” Above all, citizenship required that every Lebanese be able to “feel well,” meaning that he or she must enjoy living conditions capable of strengthening attachment to Lebanon, he noted. “The Pact of 1943 cannot endure for long if one of the groups that accepted it is condemned to a difficult life. (…) A person becomes attached to his homeland only if he finds there the conditions that allow him to live decently.” And he stressed: “It is not enough for Lebanon to be a living example of Muslim-Christian coexistence; Christians and Muslims must also possess a permanent and certain will to remain Lebanese.” By the 1970s, however, his judgment of political leaders was already unsparing: “We sometimes demand the impossible even though we know it is impossible, and yet we continue to demand it. Why? Because some people do not really want to do anything.” A Neutrality Inseparable from Living Together Above all, Sheikh Michel defended a singular conception of Lebanese neutrality. Not isolation, but precisely its opposite: Lebanon’s ability to be present in several worlds at once, Arab without being absorbed, open to the West without being subordinated to it, speaking to everyone without becoming anyone’s satellite. A neutrality of openness and sovereignty. “But for that, Lebanon must produce and know what it is,” he would say, and above all remain itself. Years later, he added: “Lebanon is a frontier running through every Lebanese. But that frontier is also a weld.” In other words, pluralism and living together enriched the Lebanese individual with a complex personality, enabling him to feel and think with members of other communities through a model of empathy, potentially defusing what Amin Maalouf would later call “murderous identities.” That, for him, was the true Lebanese way of being. More than half a century later, this “Chihist”-inspired formulation of Lebanon’s vocation, in a world increasingly sealed into identity-based enclosures, remains strikingly relevant. The vision of positive neutrality that Michel el-Khoury formulated at a lecture at the Lebanese Cenacle in May 1961 bears a remarkable resemblance to the way this principle remains vital to Lebanon’s survival in 2026: protection from other people’s wars, far removed from any temptation toward autarky, while preserving an active Lebanese role in its environment. The Debt of Loyalty But one story perhaps best illuminates the importance Sheikh Michel attached to empathy and alterity in his conception of politics, in keeping with the integral humanism defended by Chiha. It concerns his traumatic experience in Iraq under President Chamoun, which taught him, in a far more brutal fashion, a fundamental lesson in the ethics of life. He had just lunched in Baghdad with the young King Faisal II, for whom he was supervising a construction project, when, on July 14, 1958, the revolution overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in blood. Michel el-Khoury then saw workers on the construction site erecting gallows for the royal family. One worker confided to him that one of them was intended for him, because he was “a friend of the king”… The chief engineer of the site saved his life by rushing him straight to the airport. Back in Beirut, he realized that night that his hair had turned white: he had not felt fear in the moment, but the body, for its part, had kept the account. Years later, when his providential savior in turn found himself in danger, imprisoned and sentenced to death in Iraq, Sheikh Michel mobilized his connections, notably through Fouad Chehab, to obtain his pardon and enable him to leave the country. He succeeded, at least for a time: the man was later assassinated after returning to Iraq. For Sheikh Michel el-Khoury, a debt of loyalty is never extinguished. It was a maxim he would make his own in both his personal life and his political conduct. Nearly half a century later, he continued to speak of that man with a troubling mixture of gratitude and anxiety, still wondering whether he had proved worthy of the man who had saved his life. Nobility of soul either exists or it does not. It cannot be invented. Perhaps that, in the end, was what Bechara el-Khoury had glimpsed when he called him an “archduke”… The Renaissance Man Michel el-Khoury was also a man of almost disconcerting breadth and eclecticism of culture. Names would surface casually in conversation, without his ever thinking to derive prestige from them: Chaplin, whom he met in London, Cioran, Stockhausen, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, among so many other writers, artists, thinkers and distinguished figures from the political, religious, social and cultural worlds. He could move effortlessly from a discussion of the Lebanese Constitution to contemporary music, from Chiha to Paul Valéry. During a trip I made to Sète in 2018, he asked me to pay my respects in his name at Valéry’s grave, another of his masters. Sheikh Michel, the gentleman always impeccable in his refinement, had no need for displays. He had no need to be demonstrative. No greed, no hunger for honors or recognition. Ruptures vespérales , the only intimate trace he left behind, instead reveals a man haunted by solitude, identity, time and, above all, absence. “It is fear, in the end, that makes me write, a phobia of absence,” he confesses there. Every word he traced thus became, in a sense, a weapon against erasure. There is something both strange and moving in the contradiction: Michel el-Khoury, who feared absence and struggled against nothingness, nevertheless refused to organize his own posterity. Or perhaps, quite simply, living itself, the acts of life he left behind in the memories of those close to him, was the only posterity he needed, one worth far more than the trappings of an illusory glory recorded on perishable paper… For this Renaissance man, almost universal in his curiosities, writing thus became a form of existential resistance. Lebanon’s Death in His Soul Can one live, for better and for worse, until one no longer wishes to? At ninety-five, Michel el-Khoury would say to his rare visitors: “My friends are no longer of this world. I have long outlived my time on earth. But Death does not want me…” His political disillusionment had been immense. From his youth onward, he had tirelessly denounced less the imperfection of institutions than the mediocrity of those who distorted them. “Too many people serve themselves, and too few serve.” Perhaps his entire political disillusionment was contained in that sentence. His former classmate Hassan Rifai, who had shared the same school bench with him at La Sagesse, would reach much the same diagnosis in his own way before his death in September 2025. Fouad Boutros did too. And Samir Frangié, who had already been battling cancer for some time, chose, after March 14’s capitulation to Hezbollah and the compromise that brought Michel Aoun to the presidency of the Republic in 2016, to withdraw from everything and return home to die, deeply wounded by political disillusionment and bitterness. Along with a few others, they belonged not to a generation miraculously spared populism, for their era had more than its share, but to another political tradition, one synonymous with restraint, competence, devotion to the state and the conviction that dialogue remains a foundational element of politics. But Michel el-Khoury’s disillusionment eventually reached something far deeper than politics. In September 2020, during the centenary of Greater Lebanon, one month after the Beirut port explosion, he confided to me over the telephone: “I am no longer proud to belong to this Lebanon. I no longer recognize myself in it at all. I do not want to rest in Lebanese soil. I wish to be buried in France.” Coming from the man who had written that “Lebanon is an act of faith before it is a political formula,” those words carried the violence of an intimate rupture. The tragedy of losing the motherland had struck once again. Michel el-Khoury left this world on tiptoe. He withdrew behind the doors of his home when his body could endure no more, then faded away as he had served: with complete discretion. During our last telephone conversation, he swallowed back his sobs before telling me: “Michel, wherever I go, you will always be with me, and I know that I will always be with you.” Sheikh Michel had spent his life erasing his traces. But, may he forgive me, he did not succeed, and never will, in erasing that trace.

The spirit and legacy of the Ulama Mohammed Hassan al-Amine, leading authority of Lebanese-centered, statist, and Amelite Shiism, remain more relevant than ever, five years after his passing. Five years ago, on 10 April 2021, the Shia scholar Mohammed Hassan al-Amine died in Sidon of COVID contracted at the age of seventy-five. Lebanon had long been collapsing before his eyes — and it continued inexorably to come apart after him. Perhaps paradoxically magnanimous on this occasion, the Grim Reaper granted this wise and gentle man — as it had, nearly a decade earlier, to his friend Hani Fahs — the opportunity to be spared further suffering in the face of the appalling spectacle of the continuing agony of the Land of the Cedar, and, with it, of the Shia community. No doubt finitude made him a gracious and final bow by removing him from this world before his darkest prophecies began to be fulfilled with such precision. Or perhaps this is simply that ultimate consolation which allows us to survive the disappearance of the fundamental landmarks that had gradually underpinned an entire vision of politics founded on moderation, coexistence and peace. Five years later, the ruins of the country bear exactly the contours that Mohammed Hassan al-Amine had drawn. Rereading his texts today thus produces a form of belated gratitude for that courage of clairvoyance he had been compelled to deploy within his own community, against the praetorian guard that had appointed itself its protector, and in the name of an idea of his community that those guardians were methodically working to disfigure. The Man from Najaf and Saida Born in 1946 in Chakra, deep in Jabal Amel, into a family whose religious lineage stretched back several generations — the great Mohsen al-Amine, author of the Ayan al-Shia , counted among his ancestors —, he left at fourteen his outlying corner of the world for the scholarly alleyways of Najaf, where he spent twelve years absorbing fiqh, philosophy and tradition, without ever ceasing to read in parallel what the champions of prohibition rarely read: the history of religions, the great texts of the European Renaissance, Averroes revisited from the margins, or Jamal al-Din al-Afghani as an inexhaustible source of questioning. He returned in 1972 carrying a subtle blend of fertile doubt, of the capacity to separate the divine from the human without denying one in favour of the other, and of the conviction that fiqh without a deep knowledge of history amounts, in reality, to nothing more than an infinite extension, a tragic perpetuation of the past. A religious court judge in Tyre, then in Saida, an intellectual presence in a predominantly Sunni city where he lived without retreating into communal insularity, Mohammad Hassan el-Amine convened the Multaqa al-Thulatha , Tuesday evening gatherings at his home where poets and politicians, clergy and lay intellectuals mingled, where Archbishop Salim Ghazal would come to spar with the sayyed in a friendship that nothing — neither confessional divisions nor political fractures — would ever manage to break. From Saida, Mohammed Hassan al-Amine thus built a singular intellectual figure within the Lebanese Shia landscape, one that upheld, within an increasingly lethal and totalitarian communal environment, moderation, justice, freedom and a culture of life, and refused to sacrifice any of these in the name of doctrine, ideology or hollow populist pseudo-rhetoric. The man had understood perfectly that the question Lebanon has faced for centuries lies in this very dialectic: freeing religion from the politics that constantly seeks to confiscate it. A reformist to the marrow, in the spirit of the Lebanese Amelite tradition of which he was, in the wake of Imam Mohammed Mahdi Shamseddine, one of the most eminent authorities in Lebanon. The brown tide that was ravaging his surroundings? He was perfectly immune to it. A Resister Against the Confiscated Resistance Yet the sayyed was a resister. No one could call his legitimacy on this point into question. He had sheltered Ragheb Harb in his Saida home. He had hidden Abdel Latif al-Amine through the dark years of the Israeli occupation. He had been arrested in July 1984 and expelled to Beirut by Israeli military intelligence. But he believed unshakeably in the principle of a Lebanese national resistance, which he carefully and consistently distinguished from armed communal resistance. This distinction rested on an architectural conviction, grounded in both anthropology and theology, according to which resistance has real value only when it is carried by a people and inscribed within a state project — rather than surrendered to a party-militia that always ends up, having monopolised war, monopolising peace, representation, and the life and death of those it claims to defend. He said as much without equivocation, in an interview given to Sandra Noujeim of L’Orient-Le Jour in July 2015, at the moment when Hezbollah’s militia involvement in Syria was finishing the work of revealing its true nature beneath the layers of rhetoric that had concealed it: “The resistance in Lebanon cannot fulfil the conditions of its success without Lebanese unity, without an army capable of confronting the enemy and without state institutions that serve as a reference point for the Lebanese people.” And further on, with a frankness that, coming from a respected Shia sayyed, amounted to exemplary courage: “By becoming a prop for the Syrian regime, which is in no way different from the other repressive dictatorships of the region, the resistance is being progressively denaturated.” The moumanaa, that celebrated axis of resistance which Hezbollah’s propaganda brandished as a sacred standard? “Where is it exactly? I don’t see it.” The response, perfectly calm, shattered the founding Hezbollah myth of struggle on behalf of the oppressed. The Diagnosis and Its Fulfilment Hezbollah’s participation in the Syrian war was further proof that the party had transformed the Lebanese Shia community into fuel for a project that had ceased to be Shia in the sense of the Jabal Amel tradition, becoming instead Persian in its eschatological ends and mercenary in its earthly means. The summer of 2006 had already cost an enormous price, and the verdict remained highly debatable on the “divine victories” proclaimed by the Hezb. The Syrian decade had already begun to sign the true beginning of the end… before the missiles of September 2024, then those of March 2026, came to write its most brutal and most tragic chapter. Mohammed Hassan al-Amine possessed that singular gift of formulating, without acrimony, truths that his interlocutors refused to hear, and of placing the diagnosis on the table without taking any pleasure in the wound it caused. That lucid sadness of the physician who watches the illness progress because the patient refuses treatment, and who nonetheless continues to repeat, day after day, the prescription, even knowing that those who listen are becoming ever fewer. Such was his philosophical stance, and such is what ran through his texts. The wilayat al-faqih as the foundation of political legitimacy? He had spent an entire life demonstrating that government, in the Islamic tradition properly understood, falls within the realm of human affairs and not of divine mandate, that the dawla arises within the field of mubahaat , of permitted things, and that confusing sharia with the architecture of political power is to commit precisely the betrayal Muawiyah committed in his time: stealing justice in the name of justice. Democracy as the antithesis of Islam? He had taken care to show that democracy functions as a mechanism, that the Quranic principle of shura awaits only translation into institutions, and that fourteen centuries ago Muslims missed a historic opportunity to invent democracy before the Europeans. Karbala Against Martyropathy The sayyed is no longer here to witness the suicide of the warrior sect, which destroyed the whole of Jabal Amel along with itself, ceded it to the enemy and shamelessly provoked, for the greater glory of the faqih , the displacement of its entire population. Hezbollah today emerges from the ashes of its own military implosion. And yet, amid the still-smouldering ruins of this catastrophe, martyropathic rhetoric continues to function, as though the very gravity of the disaster were incapable of breaking the diabolical circle of the ideology of death — an ideology that al-Amine had fought all his life, in the name of a superior dignity of life, convinced that Shiism, as he conceived it from his readings in Najaf to his final conferences in Saida, presents itself first as a project of human liberation, before being instrumentalised as a programme of ritual sacrifice in the service of Tehran’s imperial ambitions. Martyropathy — that structural cult of death which transforms defeat into spiritual victory and destruction into founding sacrifice — occupies the theological heart of Hezbollah’s logic, without anyone inside the system possessing the conceptual tools to escape it. This is what al-Amine had grasped in rereading Karbala as a call never to tolerate injustice, to refuse submission to the tyrant, and to distinguish testimony ( shahada ) from the compulsive pursuit of martyrdom ( istishhad ) erected into an end in itself. In his conferences of 1992 and 1993 in Teyr Debba, he turned the slogan “Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala” against the dominant reading that the militia and its eulogists had made of it. This slogan, he explained, means that the struggle for justice arises in every age and in every place, and that the true homage paid to Imam Hussein is to build the world he called for. And therefore, that repeating the scene of his immolation without end betrays precisely what he wished to transmit. But how to convince a crowd nursed from birth on the fixed and anaesthetising idea that true life passes through martyrdom? The Legacy and the Compass What makes al-Amine’s thought irreplaceable in the Lebanon of today lies in the quality of the alternative he proposed and which remains to be built. A Shiism freed from the tutelage of a military apparatus that confiscated the decision of war and peace from an entire society without ever seeking its consent, and that imposed its fate on a community by establishing an armed hegemony in the service of a foreign project. The legacy of Mohammed Hassan al-Amine, now more than ever, is that of a luminous, radiant Lebanese Shia identity, whose primary anchor is Lebanon and the heritage of Jabal Amel, read anew without the political servitude that the wilayat al-faqih has imposed upon them since 1979. A vision of the State as a common project of justice and freedom, transcending sectarian allegiances, capable of embracing Lebanese plurality within a civil architecture founded on law and democracy, far from weapons, drug trafficking and the Mephistophelian practices inherited from the Assassins. This Lebanese vision, Mohammed Hassan al-Amine — religious dignitary, philosopher, writer and poet — had built in the daily practice of a simple, austere, warm-hearted man who lived in a predominantly Sunni city, sat on interconfessional councils, welcomed with open arms, in the spirit of coexistence of Greater Lebanon, Maronite priests and lay intellectuals, who read Mohammed Arkoun with as much interest as Shahid Sadr, and who refused to allow his religious position and beliefs to dictate his relations with his fellow citizens. The closeness, the hand-to-hand grappling with otherness, the conviction that Islam constitutes the heritage of human civilisation in the broadest sense — all of this made him a kind of scholar-cleric, a moujtahed -humanist, whose deep tradition could never impede his freedom to think and to be with and for others. Shia al-ʻaql wal-damir — the Shia of reason and conscience. This is the path that Mohammed Hassan al-Amine, following in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors of Jabal Amil, offers to Lebanese Shia. It is a project for the future — for the Shia community, but equally for all Lebanese communities, currently disoriented and in the grip of the most violent identity convulsions, as is always the case in times of crisis. Like his friends Mohammed Mahdi Shamseddine, Hani Fahs, Nassir al-Assaad and Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine, and so many others, the legacy of Mohammed Hassan al-Amine is there to remind us that the compass is the State of Greater Lebanon as a definitive homeland for all its sons and daughters, sovereign, free, independent and plural. In the silence of eternity, he still waits — now more than ever — to be heard.

If I write these words today, it is not out of ethics, friendship, or politeness, but out of the immense respect I hold for a man who gave so much to Lebanon and who remained an unknown soldier. This man's name is Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine, and from 1992 to 2026 he thought and drafted the majority of the political literature that formed the cornerstone upon which we built the narrative of this country's sovereignty and independence. For Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine, sovereignty and independence were always bound to national unity, upon which they directly depended. And whenever that national unity was broken, whatever the reason, it inevitably brought with it a rupture in the country's independence and sovereignty. He would say that the majority of Lebanese — communities and parties alike — had chosen, in order to settle scores with other communities and parties, to forge a partnership with a regional or foreign power, ceding to it a portion of the country's sovereignty in exchange for auxiliary force to be used internally against the differing other. For him, independence and sovereignty were indivisible, and no benefit could be created at the expense of partnership with the other communities, whether different or not. Chamseddine was an unknown soldier because the credit for drafting, for instance, the literature of the Permanent Congress of Dialogue had been attributed to great thinkers. The credit for drafting the entire literature of Qornet Chehwan, of March 14, of the general secretariat, of the political manifestos drawn up each year, of the letters addressed abroad, to Arab decision-making centers, and so on, had all been attributed to great thinkers. All of that national and political heritage was, in truth, owed to the thinking of Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine. It was around him that we would gather at the general secretariat, cigarette in hand, with a river of coffee served by Antoinette. Around this sage, this profoundly modest man who had never, unlike so many politicians and political thinkers, sought to make a display of what he knew at another's expense. On the contrary, he taught, calmly, as a sage does. Around him, everyone — everyone — listened, seeing in him a source of kindness, courage, common sense, intelligence, and above all a deep understanding of the complexity of Lebanese society. Mohammad, you will remain for me, always, as Sami Frangieh or Nassir al-Assad were before you, a man of learning from whom I learned to stay modest, to read intensely, and to see and know Lebanon in a different way. Lebanon, as you always said, cannot be built on a balance of power, but on the power of balance. May you be heard, especially in these terrible moments we are living through, and may your words and your thought become the philosophical pillar of the Lebanon of tomorrow.

Forty days ago, Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine passed away. An exceptional mind, a Shia democrat, a thinker of the living together, and an inveterate supporter of preserving Greater Lebanon. This article is not so much a tribute as it is a precise testimony of everything this man—humble, discreet, and unknown to the general public—was and what he brought to the public debate. He is a calm, slender, taciturn man. Every day, in the early afternoon, he arrives at the March 14 general secretariat, settles in quietly and gives himself over to his reflections, his readings, his writings. A new initiative, no doubt, is taking shape, worked out with his fellow travellers Samir Frangieh and Fares Souaid. The ideas Frangieh puts to paper, in French or in Arabic, pass through Shamseddine's hands — he reflects, reciprocates, adds his comments and observations. The intellectual and political osmosis between the two men, intensely human, is total, and the result always substantial, carried by a philosophical, humanist, profound vision of conviviality. Dressed in a light grey suit and a shirt, invariably sober, with Gaulish moustache and features, he smokes cigarette after cigarette, drinks cup of coffee after cup of coffee. The air of a poet from the early nineteenth century, tinged with a left-wing intellectual from the early twentieth. Pessoa having met Trotsky in a café on Hamra Street in the 1970s. Then the regulars of the general secretariat begin to arrive, one after another. The man remains placid. The body slight. Nearly motionless. The head, on the other hand, moves like a serene and composed racing engine, almost animated by a life of its own. Substantive debates follow one another, calibrated to the cultural and intellectual level of whoever is present. The master is not only a thinker; he is a pedagogue, an educator. And one approaches him as one would a sage, a druid arrived from another time. This is not merely an impression, an energy he gives off. The man is genuinely a well of knowledge and wisdom. And, above all, he has no need to advertise it, to display his learning, to accumulate the idle chatter and pointless tirades that others rely on. He is precise, rigorous, laconic, and allows himself, from time to time, a flash of sardonic humour when irritated by some leader's discourse, attitude or political behaviour. Megalomania, populism, the absurd reign of the inspired historical leader? All of it irritates him to the point of genuine restlessness. His voice rises slightly, but no more than that. The British gentleman in him always prevails, even in revolt. Despite the paroxysmal climate of hatred — the struggle against the assassinations, the shows of force, the acts of violence perpetrated by Hezbollah — the man refuses nonetheless the easy choice, the choice of instinct and impulse. He keeps a perfectly clear head. And the notion of living-together runs in his blood. He believes in it, unshakeably: in Greater Lebanon, the land of the Cedar as a “style of civilisation” and “one of the least inhuman societies in the world” — those two expressions of René Maheu and Georges Naccache that he cites constantly, as does Frangieh. “The philosophy of the pact and the spirit of consensus are the very essence of Lebanon,” he professes to all who will listen. Mohammad Hussein Chamseddine and Sayyed Hani Fahs, two voices of Shiite moderation. This man, to whom one owes, alongside Samir Frangieh above all, a large share of the documents and initiatives of March 14 since the Qornet Chehwan Gathering, is called Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine. He is a Shia from Arabsalim, in South Lebanon. He lives in the southern suburbs and has no intention of leaving, intimidation or no. Hezbollah, no more than anyone else, does not frighten him. With good reason: Shamseddine is a resistant from the first hour. Formed in the ranks of Fatah, within which he founded, with others, the Lebanese Popular Organisation of South Lebanon, he turned the page on the war once the war was over, working ceaselessly toward a national reconciliation capable of bringing about an end to the Syrian occupation, without losing sight, naturally, of Israel’s diabolical role in fuelling sectarian conflict across the region. One of the fundamental principles of his personal code is moral and intellectual coherence. The Permanent Congress for Dialogue Under the guidance of Imam Mohammed Mahdi Shamseddine, of whom he is one of the disciples, and of Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine founds, together with Hani Fahs, Samir Frangieh, Nassir al-Assaad, Saoud al-Mawla and Fares Souaid, among many others, the Permanent Congress for Lebanese Dialogue in 1993. A concrete, clear-cut initiative, indirectly inspired by the thought of René Girard and his work Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World . Its purpose is to bring people from opposing trenches to sit together and think through the war, which is promptly done. At first, not knowing one another, the exchanges are tense. One must play mediator and “translate” as each person speaks, since the war and its physical and moral barricades have dismantled whatever common language, lexicon or conceptual approaches once existed. But the barriers gradually fall, and a shared esprit de corps, consensual and Lebanist, begins to emerge. The Congress’s founding charter, drafted that same year, raises from the outset the question that no one, since the end of the fighting, had dared to formulate directly: how does one build a unified state without first answering the fundamental question of who we are and what we want? Because the Lebanese problem is not, in the first instance, institutional. It is a matter of identity, and therefore of philosophy. Lebanese identity is a complex identity, formed of a multitude of allegiances — familial, linguistic, cultural, religious, regional — that do not overlap and do not cancel each other out in succession, but integrate into a permanent process, always ongoing, always unfinished. To reduce them to a single belonging, national or confessional, is to open the way to violence. The Lebanese state, consequently, far from being an ordinary state, is called upon to govern not only individuals but communities, cultures, regions, sensibilities — and any mechanism that claims to simplify this complexity, in one direction or another, ends by crushing it. With Anne and Samir Frangié, as well as Chawki Dagher, at the ceremony where Frangié received the Legion of Honour on October 10, 2016. It is in this spirit that the manifesto for an understanding on the foundations of the Lebanese nation, published in May 1999 in An-Nahar and co-signed by some thirty intellectuals, politicians and academics of all confessions, gives public form to the Congress’s approach. What the manifesto rehabilitates is the “Lebanese dream” that the Lebanese failed to preserve: that “style of civilisation” grounded in Islamic-Christian conviviality, the culture of consensus raised to an art of living, openness to the world without dissolution in it — an original contribution, the text affirms, to universal civilisation, one the Lebanese had not known how to measure before losing it. One of the Congress’s first concrete initiatives will be a gathering on what was then called the ihbat , the Christian post-war communal despondency, with the participation of Patriarch Sfeir and Imam Shamseddine. Hezbollah, too, is invited to the dialogue within the same dynamic, through a committee set up by Tarek Mitri in 2001, which also brings together Amal and the Jamaa Islamiya. But it collapses in 2005, with the Syrian withdrawal and the polarisation of March 14 against March 8. The logic of the Congress will snowball and, through a kind of positive contagion, break the communal straitjacket that enables Assad to divide the Lebanese and prevent them from forging a sovereignty-guaranteeing unity. The Qornet Chehwan Gathering, bringing together the main Christian forces, takes shape, followed by the Democratic Forum, grouping the left and Qornet Chehwan, then the Democratic Left, assembling the sovereignist left-wing forces dissenting from a Communist Party syrianised to excess. Walid Joumblatt also broadens his parliamentary bloc to include representatives of certain sovereignist Christian political tendencies. Everything converges toward the Bristol Gathering, quietly sponsored in the shadows by Rafic Hariri. The fate of the Syrian regime in Lebanon is sealed. The Shamseddine philosophy In the same vein, Shamseddine’s leitmotif, what he repeats incessantly to everyone, is that the problems of each community in Lebanon are not problems specific to that community stricto sensu . They are the problems of all Lebanese. And that, consequently, there is no partial, regional or communal solution to Lebanon’s problems — only national, cross-cutting solutions to the communities’ difficulties. For him, the famous post-war ihbat was not a problem that could be resolved by one community alone. It could only be addressed within a trans-communal, and therefore national, logic, one guaranteeing sovereignty and a national equilibrium grounded in living-together, justice and freedom. The Qornet Chehwan Gathering was never meant, in this sense, to become a new Christian Lebanese Front, but rather what it subsequently became: a composite dynamic, a plural opposition. Nor, in his view, is there any strictly Shia solution to the problem of Hezbollah, whose resolution is Lebanese, and passes through a community of cross-cutting efforts capable of refounding the state and its monopoly on violence. Within this framework, he will never tire of recounting, to reproach a March 14 directorate that allows itself to be walked over, consumed by its internal quarrels and power games, or by the logic of cheap pseudo-compromises, insipid and spineless, the wise Arab parable that perfectly illustrates, for him, the March 14 complex: “A man is convinced he is a grain of wheat. Terrified of being eaten by a hen, he ends up being committed. After months of therapy, the doctors manage to convince him that he is a human being and not a grain of wheat. On the day of his discharge, no sooner has he stepped through the hospital door than he spots a hen and rushes back inside, trembling with fear. His doctor asks him: — But surely, you now know perfectly well that you are not a grain of wheat! The man replies: — Of course I know! But does the hen?” “The golden rule” Why this coexistence-minded Lebanism, respectful of the communities and their specificities, but equally of justice, equity and citizenship? For Shamseddine, Lebanon’s “golden rule” is a sentence spoken in the 1950s by Hamid Frangieh, directed at Charles Malik, then Foreign Affairs minister, on the eve of his joining the Baghdad Pact: “If the Lebanese agree on something bad, it immediately becomes a source of good; and if they quarrel over something good, it becomes a factor of evil.” In other words, consensus is the foundation of the Lebanese formula, and no absolute truth can exist in Lebanon. “It is Lebanon’s golden rule, at the origin of the 1943 formula. Unfortunately, since Taëf, the political class understands nothing of this rule and does not believe in it.” It is this same conviction that brings him, in 2004, to take the floor at a congress in Saydet al-Jabal and correct, with near-surgical precision, the misreadings the Lebanese political class has been committing since the end of the war. Three errors, he says, sum up the collective blindness: believing there was a winner and a loser, believing the defeated were beaten by their adversary, and failing to see that the defeat is first and foremost a defeat of the Lebanese by themselves, through their own disunion. To which he adds a fourth, perhaps the gravest: that of drawing one’s strength from abroad, as though sovereignty could be founded on dependence. The essential thing, he rules, is not that Christian and Muslim figures find themselves side by side in the same room. The essential thing is in the substance, in the philosophy of the pact — in the necessity of dispelling the fog, of recalling that consensus is not a casuistic method among others, but the very condition of Lebanon’s existence. At the book signing for his work, Zaman Samir Frangié, on May 28, 2019. For Shamseddine, the Lebanese state cannot be an ordinary state, governed by ordinary mechanisms. A simple state is necessarily reductive, and a reductive state is, by definition, totalitarian; unable to align itself with a society as complex as Lebanese society, it ends up seeking to reshape it to its own design, to “simplify” it. The true challenge is the opposite: to adapt the state to the needs of its society, rather than the society to the demands of a state poorly fitted to it. He will therefore never cease working, from the 2000s onward, to rebuild these bonds, initiative after initiative, notably the Beirut Appeal of 2004, which draws the wrath of the Lebanese-Syrian security apparatus, alongside Samir Frangieh, Fares Souaid and Saoud al-Mawla. To him, too, is owed an essential contribution to the foundational working documents of March 14, including the one that, at the conclusion of the movement’s annual congress, defines “the culture of peace and of connection in the face of the culture of violence and exclusion,” drawing a cross-cutting fault line in the regional conflict then under way. On the strictly Shia level, given everything set out above, it should come as no surprise that the man was an inveterate partisan of the wilayat al-umma developed by Imam Shamseddine and of the plurality of the marjaa , and fundamentally hostile to the Iranian wilayat al-faqih and to Khomeinist despotism. For Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine, the state project is the only viable guarantee for all Lebanese, Shia included, light years away from the supremacist fantasies sustained by this or that foreign power. The loss of a “kindred soul” After March 14’s self-sabotage, Hezbollah’s political victory, and the accession of the pro-Iranian party’s candidate Michel Aoun to the presidency, Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine’s faithful companion Samir Frangieh — his true political and intellectual twin, a man with whom he always worked in tandem, in resonance, in total synchrony — gravely ill and worn down by the wanderings and capitulations of the sovereignist political leaders, withdrew from the scene and faded away quietly. It was a political rupture, a clean severing of something whole. Shamseddine, whose loyalty was truly unshakeable, hastened, the following year, to write his friend’s biography, Zaman Samir Frangieh ( The Time of Samir Frangieh ), every page a testimony of friendship and gratitude, yet without emphasis, without the slightest grandiloquence. Simply a civic and civil commitment to Greater Lebanon and the culture of connection, of living-together, of peace. To honour Samir’s memory, Shamseddine effaced himself entirely. But he had no need to place himself centre stage — his modesty defended him against it. And, through Samir, it was of himself, of that same Lebanese coexistence-minded breath, that he spoke. Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine slipped away as he had lived, in the most complete discretion, on the night of 1 to 2 March, at the hour when Hezbollah was initiating its war to avenge Khamenei. With the entire country engulfed in turmoil, his death passed almost unnoticed. In any case, few Lebanese, beyond the circles of Samir Frangieh’s friends and the former March 14 general secretariat, knew him or had heard of him — and that, for the rest, was always what he had wanted. Yet history will record that it is largely to him, an honest, courageous and lucid Shia democrat, that most of the coexistence-minded and unitary political literature of March 14, in opposition to all tutelages, occupations and other parapolitical monstrosities, owes its existence. His path and his legacy constitute, in themselves, a testimony that Greater Lebanon, freed of its demons, possessed of a genuine state, reconciled with itself, is truly a “style of civilisation” that deserves to live.

It was February 4, 2021, on a bleak winter morning. The body of Lokman Slim, the archetype of the committed intellectual, had just been found in his car, riddled with bullets. One more nail in the coffin of a Lebanon rotten and gnawed to the marrow by Hezbollah’s criminal hubris. Lokman’s abduction the previous day and his subsequent assassination followed a pattern long familiar. In Lebanon, for more than half a century, anyone who dares to challenge the prevailing totalitarian order becomes a potential target for elimination. Intellectuals, in particular, have always been expendable. Their disappearance rarely ignites nationalist fervor, communal solidarity, localist reflexes, or clan outrage, because they command no mobs, no militias, no crowds of blind adherents. In that sense, they are easy prey — and therefore preferred prey. By then, Lokman Slim embodied everything that unsettled the pro-Iranian party’s hired killers. From the heart of the southern suburb — which he refused to abandon — he confronted Hezbollah’s omnipotence wielding speech and pen like a sharply pointed rapier. Despite cyclical death threats, he broke the omertà surrounding the Beirut port explosion of August 4, 2020, openly pointing to Hezbollah and the Syrian regime’s responsibility in the crime, at a time when the official version broadcast everywhere claimed it was merely an accident born of mafioso negligence. He paid for that defiance with his life. It was in the midst of that tragedy that the majority of Lebanese discovered Salma Merchak, like a figure stepping out of Euripides’ Trojan Women — a modern Hecuba proclaiming in turn, yet without vengeance and with extraordinary restraint and grace, that “the death of a child has no human measure.” That day, the order and continuity of the world must have shattered for Lokman Slim’s mother, who lost a part of herself in a maternal anguish beyond comprehension. “There are sorrows that do not weep,” Victor Hugo wrote of his daughter Léopoldine. And yet, with exemplary courage, faithful to a cultural heritage of exceptional richness, Salma Merchak — with her disarming blend of English and Egyptian Arabic, and that firm, serene wisdom of noble souls unafraid to look death in the eye and who combat violence through composure — transmuted her grief into intellectual resistance. Like mother, like son. Rarely has the loss of a child — and not just any child — been borne with such modesty and dignity. In the face of the crude, brutal inhumanity of the assassins, Salma Merchak opposed a culture of life, her inner radiance transcending the abyss of the unspeakable. A Model Mother “Iconized” by the force of events into a mater dolorosa, Salma Merchak Slim undoubtedly stood as a model of ethics and knowledge for her children. In that sense, she was a mediator, a transmitter, guardian of a Levantine continuity between two shores, and witness to a Lebanon that, even from the depths of the abyss, persisted in speaking the language of culture, of connection, and of freedom. Born in Egypt to a father of Syrian origin (from Nabk in the Qalamoun region) and a Lebanese mother from Joun in the Chouf, Merchak grew up between two complementary belongings. She later studied journalism at the American University in Cairo, where among her most influential teachers was the writer, journalist, and translator Wadih Filastin. Filastin, a great scholar and self-made man who had been imprisoned under Nasser, stood in many ways as an heir to Nahdawi thought. It was likely he who inoculated the young Salma with the virus of freedom and the taste for culture. During a summer visit to Lebanon, Salma Merchak fell under the spell of Mohsen Slim, a brilliant criminal lawyer engaged within the National Bloc alongside Raymond Eddé, an opponent of Nasserism and a fierce defender of liberties and the Constitution. A courageous, irreducible and irredeemably free man, who multiplied battles against injustice, systematically disdained honors, and refused to be confined within the communal corset of his own community. From that union were born three formidable children, themselves passionate about culture and justice: Hadi, Rasha, and Lokman. Thinking in Order Not to Die While her husband fought on every front — defending Kamel Mroué against Abdul Halim Ghaleb’s grip, standing for Jamil Daaboul and Farouk Mokaddem, engaging in epic duels with Selim al-Laouzi, and resisting Chehabism in Jbeil and Beirut — Salma Merchak became what she fundamentally was: a scholar. As early as 1973, she undertook academic research on the migration of the “Shawam” to Egypt, that Levantine diaspora which, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, nourished the press, literature, ideas, and an essential part of Arab modernity. Her project as author and researcher crystallized around figures often relegated to the margins of grand narratives: Nicola Haddad and Ibrahim al-Masri, emblematic names of the bond between Egypt and the Levant, and of the capacity of “Shami” intellectuals to build enduring bridges between societies, languages, and sensibilities. She thus became a guardian of the memory of this relationship between two intimately connected worlds, driven by the acute awareness that one must not surrender to the patina of time and oblivion, but continue transmitting the Nahdawi heritage despite the Arab malaise so powerfully described by Samir Kassir. It is therefore no coincidence that Lokman would later found an outstanding research center dedicated to preserving the memory of the civil war and documenting the abuses suffered by prisoners in Syrian prisons. In that sense, the entirety of Salma Merchak’s work was resistance through thought against death. A death lurking in the shadows, insidiously seeking a way to make her pay for that sacrilege. The Enlightenment and the Night of Haret Hreik Journalistic portraits of Lokman Slim often emphasize his attachment to Enlightenment thought and to the Nahda, and his determination to resist obscurantism from the paternal home in Haret Hreik, at the very heart of Hezbollah’s darkness. Lokman was the worthy heir of his father’s bravery and his mother’s knowledge. The family home thus became a center of political resistance in the broadest sense of the term — resistance to terror and obscurantism. For Salma Merchak, the “house” was conceived as a civic space: a place of debate, reading, discussion, reflection, even when the night grows long and wolves gather ferociously around its walls. Her attachment to her library was particularly revealing in this regard — as a way of invalidating, neutralizing any victory claimed by brutality. As Makram Rabah, a companion of Lokman’s journey, has written, there was in Salma’s figure something that touched the deepest Lebanese symbolism: the house as last bastion, as last State. The country collapses, institutions decay, justice stammers, history is falsified — yet a house inhabited by conscience can become a miniature republic: library, salon, garden, tomb, place of memory, place of speech. It functions metaphorically as an “incubator” of intellectuals and friendships, of networks of thinkers, writers, visitors who pass through that house and its atmosphere. This notion of cultural and intellectual resistance to Night through Enlightenment, to barbarity through civility, recalls the spirit defended by Sélim Abou during the Syrian occupation: that political resistance remains incomplete without a cultural backbone grounded in knowledge, freedom, and human rights. Many of Lokman’s adversaries never grasped this coherence. He was consistent with himself. Not another political Tartuffe negotiating compromises for the sake of survival. He operated according to a clear scale of values — those of universal humanism and the Nahda — inherited from his parents. Thus Lokman carried the torch forward, establishing continuity in the moral and intellectual posture of his rebellious father and his discreet mother, while forging his own path through his own strength and struggles. “Thought Cannot Be Killed by Bullets…” Bitter irony: it was Lokman’s assassination that thrust Salma Merchak into public light. What the Lebanese discovered was not only sorrow, pain, or fury, but a moral stance shaped by wisdom, serenity, peace — and also by will and determination. From the outset, like Ghassan Tueini after the assassination of his son Gebran, Salma Merchak rejected the language of vengeance. She refused the Lebanese injunction to “close ranks” around blood. Instead, almost with biblical sobriety, she asked: What was the purpose? What have they gained? These questions stripped Hezbollah bare — and beyond it, all those for whom violence constitutes a mode of resolving conflict — exposing the impotence at the core of its power. It may sow chaos and annihilate opposition, yet it cannot protect itself from the contagion of knowledge and freedom. It is only a matter of time. The outcome is sealed. Alea jacta est. Civilization ultimately prevails over barbarism. “Thought cannot be killed by bullets,” she repeated. And how right she was. With Lokman’s assassination, the order of the world fractured for his mother — as it had before her for Jean and Laila Kassir, Ghassan Tuéni, Amine and Joyce Gemayel, Mahmoud and Samir Eid, and so many other parents who have seen — or not even been granted that bitter consolation, like Tueini!— the lifeless body of their son. Perhaps Salma Merchak’s strongest act of resistance was her family’s refusal to abandon Haret Hreik after Lokman’s murder. To leave would have meant surrendering the narrative. The only way to honor his memory was to continue: writing, speaking without fear, sustaining the institutions and legacies to which he had devoted his life, particularly the spirit of memory and the perseverance of UMAM. No satisfaction would be granted to the assassins. The garden became the victim’s burial place, erected as a symbol of resistance to oppression. In believing it had triumphed, Hezbollah created an immortal hero whose sanctuary is anchored in the southern suburb. Long after the pro-Iranian militia has faded from history, Lokman’s grave will continue to bloom in that garden. “One does not recover from the death of a child. One only learns to breathe differently,” wrote Françoise Dolto. Despite restrained tears, and in the suffering and humiliations inflicted by a power that denied her truth and justice known to all, Salma Merchak did far more than breathe. She breathed for two. Until her final breath. A breath of resistance, of humanism, of civility, of the culture of connection, of knowledge and of peace. She has already departed through the forest, through the mountain, unable to remain far from Lokman any longer .

How miserly time is. Lebanon and the East have known few women like Salma Merchak Slim, mother of the thinker-martyr Lokman, who passed away yesterday, longing to be reunited with him, without having seen human justice strike down his assassins. Salma Merchak survived her son by exactly five years, her tears flowing inward, within a vast heart saturated with sorrow, only rarely moistening her cheeks. She remained present, upright, unbroken, alongside her daughter Rasha al-Ameer, Monika Bergmann, and her son’s companions, steadfast in defending the values of dialogue, acceptance of the other, knowledge, culture, and the Enlightenment. This mother, scholar and intellectual, accused no one. And yet her son Lokman had named his killers even before they committed their crime. In a written statement, he had personally held the head of Hezbollah responsible for any harm that might befall him, his home, or his family, after a group from the party had demonstrated in the garden of his great-grandfather’s house in Haret Hreik. He nevertheless refused to leave that house, just as his mother Salma had done before him, faithful to the recommendation of her husband, MP Mohsen Slim, who had asked her to preserve its memory and presence. The demonstrators hung on the garden wall the sinister words: “Glory to the silencer.” To which Lokman replied: “They will not silence us.” Six months after Beirut itself had been assassinated by the port explosion, Lokman was assassinated in turn. It is likely that his crime was to have dared expose those responsible, to have brought to light, through facts and a coherent narrative, the roles of the Assad regime and its allies in Lebanon. The government, then convened under the presidency of Michel Aoun, promised a transparent investigation within five days and the identification of those responsible for this catastrophe, which had killed nearly 230 people, injured 7,000, and devastated entire districts of the capital and its surroundings. But Hezbollah paralyzed the investigation with an arrogance that has since become proverbial. Lokman, for his part, hastened to proclaim the truths as he had gathered and understood them, before walking toward martyrdom. In his book published by Dar al-Jadeed, the publishing house directed by Rasha al-Ameer after her brother’s assassination and titled in its Arabic version By Soul and by Blood… Nasserism and Its Legacies , journalist Alex Rowell reports that Salma was the first to notice the striking similarities between her son’s assassination and that of Kamel Mroué, founder of the newspaper Al-Hayat , killed in 1966. Despite the difference in age, Kamel and Lokman shared the same hostility toward totalitarian regimes. Both were targeted by systematic campaigns accusing them of treason and allegiance to the West and to Israel, in a press skilled in moral assassination. Both were Lebanese Shiites convinced of the necessity of pluralism and openness. Both were shot at close range, a preferred signature of apparatuses acting on the orders of foreign states, which thereby dispels any lingering doubt as to their involvement. Cruel irony of fate: the family of Kamel Mroué had entrusted its defense to Lokman’s father, the late Mohsen Slim, a criminal lawyer and one-term MP for Beirut’s Second District, so that he might support them and claim their rights. Two of the murderers were arrested at the time. When Mohsen Slim agreed to defend the Mroué family, he too was threatened with death. Decades before his son was targeted, a bomb exploded at the entrance of his home, intended to silence him, perhaps to eliminate him.” Alex Rowell further writes: “From the balcony of the first floor of the family ‘White House,’ Salma, widow of Mohsen and mother of Lokman, shows me the exact spot where the explosion took place more than half a century earlier. “That October afternoon in 2021, stifling with heat and humidity, her daughter Rasha was sitting with us, passing around glasses of chilled wine. ‘At the time of the explosion, our gates were wooden,’ Salma said. After the attack, her husband replaced them with the heavy iron gates we see today. She drew a long breath, then sighed: ‘How many threats we received.’ “Salma, like her late husband and son, seemed to have learned to live on the threshold of danger. “She was an extraordinary woman. When I met her, she was entering her tenth decade and remembered with undiminished precision her childhood in British and monarchical Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s. After studying at the American College for Girls in Cairo, now Ramses College, she pursued journalism at the American University in Cairo, where she was trained by Wilton Wynn, whom Reuters described on the day of his death as ‘one of the greatest American journalists of the twentieth century.’ She was also a student of Samir Souki, Newsweek ’s correspondent in Cairo, who offered her, during her final year of studies, an internship at the magazine. That internship opened to her, after her graduation in 1956, the doors to full-time employment. “That same year the Suez War erupted. The revolutionary officers newly installed in power in Egypt began restricting the foreign press and public freedoms. In 1957, censorship reached its peak; Newsweek closed its Cairo bureau, and Salma joined her new post in Beirut, alongside her director, in the Kantari district, that ‘Paris of the East,’ free and enchanting, between sea and mountain, according to optimistic accounts. “Hardly had she arrived when the events of 1958 broke out, claiming hundreds of lives over the months. In the relative stability that followed, Salma earned a master’s degree from the American University of Beirut and studied under distinguished figures, among them Professor Malcolm Kerr, assassinated on campus in 1984. After her marriage to the successful lawyer Mohsen, elected to Parliament in 1960, she entered Beirut’s social elite; and it was in those renowned circles that she met Kamel Mroué. “With a Cairene accent unchanged despite decades in Beirut, she would say of him that he was an affable and endearing man with whom it was a pleasure to converse and debate. “When she left Cairo to say ‘no’ to military dictatorship, Salma Merchak Slim believed she had saved herself. She believed that her husband’s engagement in accusing Kamel Mroué’s killers, the instigators of the 1958 events, and the perpetrators of the attack on her own home would keep the bitter cup far from her. But that was without reckoning with fate’s blow… called, in this context, Nasser.” Despite the intense burning that ravaged her heart in the wake of Lokman’s assassination, she carried to the end the message of dialogue and encounter with the other. She thus kept the flame alive before taking her leave with the dignity and courage of enlightened intellectuals. *** A service for the repose of her soul will be held on Thursday, February 26, 2026, at 11 a.m. at the National Evangelical Church of Beirut, opposite the Grand Serail. Condolences will be received on Thursday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the church hall.