article · Issue No. 5, May 1951 · p. 40 p. 41

Nazira Joumblatt

Eveline Bustros

NAZIRA JOUMBLATT · Eveline Bustros

"No doubt it is too late to speak of her again." A woman who reigned for more than thirty years over the Chouf, so renowned that no Emira would have gone before her — Nazira Joumblatt, who passed away the day before yesterday in Beirut, has been carried to her residence at Moukhtara. I did not have the good fortune to know Nazira Joumblatt intimately. But the interest her personality arouses, and the esteem in which I hold her son, Emir Kamal Joumblatt — one of our most refined men of letters and a conscientious reformer — bid me carry to the departed queen of Moukhtara the homage of the Women's League.

The day is admirable. The too-gentle sun presages a possible shower. "Spring, death and resurrection," as the philosopher-poet of Le Jour would say.

Judged by eye, the distance from Beirut to Moukhtara seems a mere stroke. Yet it is forty-seven kilometers of winding road, turbaning itself around valleys and hollows overhung by unequal peaks.

The excursion, too beautiful not to be a little melancholy, deserves to be painted as much as described. The picture that follows will, I hope, give some idea of it. A typically Lebanese landscape, all stony contrasts, cut by fertile lands; certain slopes, sculpted by the pickaxe by the hands of men, form, from the depths up to the summits, narrow tiers with the symmetry of Roman theaters. On these little bands of earth, held up by stony buttresses, human sweat has already borne fruit in a nascent greenery. Here and there thorny Judas trees, of shaded lilac, with a few tender heart-shaped leaves, overhang the road. Some clouds like tulle illusion soften the deep blue of the sky and filter the sun. I feared we would be late. No horns ahead of us, and few cars follow us.

As we advance the scents vary. One no longer smells the orange blossom of Sidon. Here the wild hyacinth, the cyclamens, and the peppery leaves form a mixture recalling the carnation. Flowers and the dead. Spring and resurrection.

My companions on the excursion are too young to have known Nazira Joumblatt well. They are a Druze couple: the Fouad Naggiars, both charming. Anissa Naggiar has the good grace to be the secretary of the Women's League. Speaking of her community, she surprises me by telling me that neither the superiority, nor the tact and intelligence of Nazira Joumblatt would have sufficed for her to exercise over a Druze population of 80,000 souls the power of a chief, without the Druzes' innate respect for woman. On the subject of the Druze origin in Lebanon:

"The curious thing," she says, "is that 'Druze' or 'Durzi' was the name of a contemptible man who, a minister of the Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Allah, was sent into exile in Lebanon."

On the death of Al-Hakim, the sect, persecuted by the following Caliph, made its way to Lebanon, where it thought to find in Al-Durzi a support. The "Durzi," unfaithful to his sovereign, treated his coreligionists no better. He had allied himself with other pagan Hittite refugees to whom, instead of revealing the true God, he permitted the worship of the calf with the snow-marked brow.

He died assassinated a few years later, but the name Druze remained that of the disciples of Al-Hakim.

When the Byzantines abandoned Syria, Druzes and Hittites, already fused, were augmented by a portion of Christian Ghassanids detached from the armies of Heraclius.

Lebanon is welcoming; neither the ones nor the others were sectarian. Thus began that admirable race of Lebanese — tolerant, disciplined, and brave.

We are drawing near. Our car advances only with great difficulty, slowed by a line of buses. Even the motorcycles are stopped. We advance so slowly that one wonders whether it would not be better to walk. And the weather threatens.

It is one o'clock. The bearing away of the body is announced for two; we must get there ahead of it.

Let us resign ourselves. A climbing footpath shortens the distance. We have three kilometers of it. Hundreds of persons precede us, but we slow down to catch our breath. All the hovels, the houses, and the shops, their doors open, are abandoned

for the terraces and windows, already crowded with silhouettes, with no face but a white veil.

One hears distinctly a loudspeaker, whose voice changes a little later. Between one speech and another, or the orations, a watchword is repeated at intervals:

"No lamentations."

Once more we admire Druze discipline.

The couple accompanying me having announced to some acquaintances the President of the Lebanese Women's League and Mme Naggiar, two guides open the way for us, courteously setting aside the obstacles. The footpath is frightfully slippery and steep. From its summit one glimpses the cluster of the houses of Moukhtara, at whose center the "dwelling" of Nazira, its high double flight of stairs completely covered with women. The road has become relatively passable; only the men move about, the weaker sex perched as high as possible. It seems that the feminine part of Moukhtara has been given over today to devotion to the dead woman, whose magic wand still works on her behalf. A flowering of veils like the almond trees of two weeks ago; their white petals cover the heart of the Druze capital.

In the hushed silence, the loudspeaker transmits speeches and the injunction to restrain all lamentation.

Our guides part the wave of men, heads bare or turbaned, with long beards black or venerable. No jostling, no shots fired, but the cry "Make way for the Lebanese Women's Delegation," which, like an "open sesame" that had worked until now, has become vain. We must follow our guides through a secret vaulted passage.

From entrance to entrance and from galleries to salons, we reach the immense hall where, at the center of a thousand women, enthroned upon a final elevation, stands an open catafalque. A queen vanquished only by death: a transparent silk muslin covers three-quarters of the once so intelligent and affable face of the dead woman. One can make out upon her only white satin, on which rests a cross of the Legion of Honor.

I looked, without finding it, for the gold medal of the Lebanese Order of Merit.

My young companion, lifted up so as to be heard, pronounces in my name a few words that convey our feelings: the homage of the Lebanese women to her whose intelligence, beneficent activity, and administrative capacities have for thirty-five years raised our sex higher. Around us silent tears stream down. We too are both moved to tears.

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