To drive away from Beirut’s Mediterranean coastline is to climb, up into the rugged, unrelenting ridges of Mount Lebanon. The limestone mountain range that traverses huge lengths of Lebanon lent the country not just its name but beauty, diversity – and a combustible political culture that risks being inflamed again as Israeli forces invade.
For centuries before modern Lebanon was established, its mountains were a natural barrier to invading armies. For the region’s religious minorities – especially Christians and Druze – they became a sanctuary. Ensconced in remote mountain villages, the kaleidoscope of communities that would eventually form the Lebanese nation developed distinct identities, histories and anxieties over their own survival. Lebanon, wrote one of it great historians, Kamal Salibi, was “a house of many mansions”.
