The Effect of National Direction on the Work of the "League of Five"

It is self-evident that there is no reforming revolution, no cry of right against wrong, no new order springing up against a crumbling old one, but has its source in the heritage of a people and the love of a land... and out of this heritage and this love the League of Five was formed — here in Lebanon. The time had come for the Lebanese song, straying along the paths of the mountain, to be taken in hand by an elegant, giving imagination and launched to the world as a great living melody, one that plants a banner for Lebanon and opens before it a horizon whose touch had been reserved to its pioneers among the men of the West...

And it is self-evident that pens should rise up to challenge, to obstruct the procession, to spread among the people the notion that the artistic edifices whose courses the League has begun to lay are foreign to us. But this will not diminish the beauty of the truth: these polished melodies, these hewn stones, look out at you through tune and word to point you to their glowing quarries in the mountains of Lebanon.

And since my one means of reaching the readers just now is the word, let me review with them some sung passages from the works of the men of the League.

Homeland of the free, fear not the foe:
on the day of peril we are ransom for the right.

A nation that never bends from its glory,
love has bound it together, and made good its aim.

The verse is by Mustafa Mahmoud and the music by Zaki Nassif, one of the men of the League. The choice of this poem, to wed it to the melody, opens before us the composer's inner self — the self of his vengeance — seeking to take on flesh, and finding before it nothing but the word to clothe itself in, thundering with it in the roar of voices surging toward freedom.

At this moment there flashes into my mind a passage from "On the Rocks of Lebanon" by the Rahbani Brothers, that sung play whose events unfold at Nahr al-Kalb. It is the stand of every Lebanese girl in the face of every conqueror who has wounded the values of this homeland.

The Conqueror: I have possessed you, fair one.
The Girl: You have possessed an empty land.
The Conqueror: And what remains to you all?
The Girl: Our high summits remain.
The Conqueror:
I shall climb those summits, and every one of them will bow to me.
The Girl:
Those are summits impregnable to tyrant armies;
those are the summits of faith in the depths of lofty souls;
those are the summits of pride and honor and right.
The tyrant may succeed in humbling perishable bodies,
but we, the spirits, do not kneel before the tyrant.

This believing, stubborn spirit — is it not the very one that rebuilt Tyre and Sidon and Beirut? It is the spirit of Lebanese resistance across the ages. And when I mention Lebanon I mention Syria, and the face of her poet Adonis looks out at me. He is not alone: near him appears Tawfiq al-Basha, one of the Five. Tawfiq was not content with what he had sung of Lebanon, and went on to give the poetry of Adonis wings of melody, that it might fly to the eye that has not read and the ear that has not heard.

My country is the country of the far-off call,
beyond whatever has been said or written or pictured.
Processions for the right — I have marched,
marched while she bore the burden of mankind,
planting Baalbek wherever she wills,
raising Palmyra wherever she wills,
beckoning the sun not to set,
and the barren waste to bloom.

This holy earth... who has loved it as these Five have loved it? Who has carried its dust on eyelash and heart and scattered it as sweet melodies upon the ears of the world? Read with me then — God keep you — these lines from the sketch "Our Generous Land": a brother is bent on selling the land, and his sister disowns him.

He: What are you saying?
She: Lower your head and go.
You are hatred! My brother is serenity and love.
At his step, freshness and bounty are sown,
and clouds pour rain wherever he stretches out his palms;
he crowns the branches with plenty, and walks —
through his lashes, along the summits of color, a path.
You? Who are you! Upon your brow collapses
a sweet ambition, and fertility withers.

To write about hunger is one thing, and to hunger is another; to imagine the harvests while you sit at your desk is a pleasant excursion whose bounds are soft fancy — but to live that life is a joy whose truth no picturing or imagining can equal. And the Rahbani Brothers lived that life: they suffered and rejoiced as harvesters and grape-pickers, and they sowed the path from the vineyard to the winepress with thousands