"The Birth of Independence"

In my hands now is the book The Birth of Independence — the study prepared by Sheikh Munir Taqi al-Din, Director General of the Ministry of Defense, as a thesis for the master's degree in the sciences from the American University. The book chronicles a period of no more than thirteen days — perhaps the most important period in our contemporary history: the stages of the crisis that preceded the proclamation of independence.

It pleases me to call this study "the anthem of independence," and that takes nothing from its scholarly value; for the author, despite his attempt to make an objective study, as he affirmed in the book's introduction, did not strip himself of his true personality as one of those who threw themselves into that battle, nor did he strip himself of his feeling as a Lebanese citizen for whom independence meant more than a historical event or a subject for scholarly study. And so the book came out a piece of song, representing a period of Lebanese history in which the moral forces — in the fullest sense of the word — were mobilized to seize the first opening that permitted the independence of a people to whom everything in the loftiness of its mountain answers with sovereignty.

What gives the book its scholarly value is the sincerity that fills it, and the writer's care to present his point of view with precision, making of himself a truthful spokesman for the spirit of the Lebanese majority in the battle that led to independence.

And when a historian, fifty or a hundred years hence, undertakes to study this period of our history, he will find in The Birth of Independence one of the finest primary sources for the study of one face of that stage; it will remain for him only to set this splendid scene in its proper place in the history of world diplomacy, in the light of documents that are difficult of access now, and to uncover the true motives of those who tried to put spokes in the wheels — and they were, in that, largely sincere, though it is impossible now to justify the part they played in a battle that proved afterward to have been decisive in our history.