Activitats d’Emprenedoria

In contrast to the situation in the majority of neighbouring Arab states, football – and organised sports more broadly - were not introduced in Lebanon by European territorial colonial rule. They were, rather, introduced by the Syrian Protestant College (hereafter SPC), now the American University of Beirut, when Lebanon was still part of the Ottoman Empire (Loughran 1972). Founded by American missionaries in Lebanon and Syria, the SPC started its operation in Beirut in 1866. McClenahan (2007), drawing on research in SPC’s archives, describes football and basketball games attended by thousands in the college’s annual field day as early as 1903. He presents a history of the development

34 As described in a 1970s poem by Abbas Beydoun sung by Marcel Khalife, who was at one point the musical voice of the Lebanese Communist Party.

35 The historical overview provides no information about the players of various clubs as the focus of the thesis is on the political side of the development of Nejmeh and football more broadly and not on the athletic aspect.

of organised sports as one rooted in the Christian religious missions of both the SPC and the YMCA – hosted by the College since 1913. A few decades later, both the SPC and the YMCA – in Lebanon and internationally - started to divert from their religious tradition and took a more secular turn, under the pressure of the religiously diverse student body that they accommodated or, as McClenahan puts it, ‘the relative valuations and plural identities demanded by the modern industrial cosmopolitan cities from London to Beirut’

(2007: 86). The genesis I describe prompted football’s competitive development within other missionary and communitarian contexts, for example the Université Saint-Joseph (USJ), a Jesuit university established in Beirut in 1875³⁶, and schools of The Makassed Philanthropic Islamic Association (hereafter Makassed), established in 1878³⁷; both institutions imprinted the game with the communitarian and sectarian mark that defines it today.

It was two decades after the 1903 SPC game described by McClenahan that Lebanon was to be recognised within its current borders. The end of World War I brought about the formalisation of the French mandate on Syria and Lebanon in 1923. Lebanon’s borders were set by the mandate to ensure a delicate 50/50 balance between its Christian and Muslim inhabitants. However, these borders were problematic to some of the Muslim communities which nurtured Arab Nationalist sentiments. They did not see Lebanon - which until then had been part of a greater Arab East Mediterranean area under Ottoman and then French rule - as a nation state separate from its Arab surroundings. It was only after the adoption by some Muslim leaders, notably the al-Sulh family, of a position that promoted an ‘Arab, but fully independent Lebanon’ (Salibi 1965: 187) that the emergence of this new Lebanon became possible, governed by ‘a full partnership between the various Christian and Muslim sects in which no one sect alone could determine policy’ (Salibi 1965:

188). Lebanon finally gained independence from the French mandate at the end of 1943.

Football in the same period witnessed significant growth. Many new clubs were registered, which led to the establishment of the Lebanese Football Association (LFA). The LFA was founded in 1933 and was made up of 13 clubs (Sakr 1992). Several prominent figures in the LFA’s establishment had been introduced to football within the above mentioned missionary and communitarian institutions. Mr Hussein Beik Saj’an whose home was the

36 http://www.usj.edu.lb/en/files/history.html Accessed 9/11/2014.

37 http://www.makassed.org.lb/home.html Accessed 9/11/2014.

site of the LFA’s first meeting, for example, was elected the association’s first President. He represented the Riyadi Club, which was supported by the Makassed. Sheikh Pierre

Gemayel, a former student of the Saint-Joseph University, representing the ‘Cercle Jésuite’

club, was elected the LFA’s Vice President, and became its President for a second term starting in 1937.

The establishment of these new clubs was not necessarily encouraged or moderated through the missionary institutions themselves: some clubs were founded precisely because of religious sectarian, or nationalistic opposition to missionary institutional influence. The novelist, Najjar, in his ‘Beirut Novel’ comically sketches a game in the late 1930s between AUB and USJ, as the Catholic priest and trainer of USJ resorts to whatever means he can to win over AUB’s varsity, in the certainty that in a game with the Protestant school, ‘God will be with the good Catholics’ (2010: 180).

With some exceptions, the Lebanese football scene was dominated by Christian and Armenian teams, with only two of the thirteen club representatives who established the LFA in 1993 belonging to Muslim sects (Sakr 1992). This could possibly be because Christian communities in Lebanon, through enjoying stronger relations with colonial France and having been educated in the Christian missionary institutions, had come to football much earlier than their Muslim compatriots. Just as Najjar describes the

enthusiasm of the team of the Catholic USJ to beat the perceived Protestant team of AUB, sports in Muslim institutions were introduced in reaction to, but often emulating, Christian missionary ones (McClenahan 2007).

Clubs emerging from the Muslim communities did not readily position themselves as

‘Muslim clubs’, but as Arab Nationalist or anti-colonial ones. Nahda Club for example, described by sports journalist Ali Hamidi Sakr as the most popular in the early 1930s, was established in 1926, in the words of one of its founders, by a youth group as a national sports club free of any foreign hegemony (Sakr 1992). Renowned sports journalist Majdalani, echoes that spirit in a 1976 article where he recalls watching the game in 1929 when Nahda team ‘snatches the representation of Lebanese football from the French associated club Union Sportive, attracts fans from various social classes, and writes with letters made of light the first pages of the glorious history of Lebanese football’ (Majdalani 1976 – in Hamdan 1993: 152).

One member of the football community in that period, who exemplifies the entwinement of the sports and political communities is the aforementioned Sheikh Pierre Gemayal. He

was the second President of the Lebanese Football Association and at the same time, founder of the Lebanese Kataeb Party (the Lebanese Phalange Party, hereafter Kataeb), a Christian party, and at times a military group, which has been a key player in Lebanese politics through to today. In fact, inspiration for founding the party in 1936 came from sports, after the founder’s visit to the 1936 Berlin Olympics³⁸. The Kataeb had a Lebanese Nationalist agenda which, was vehemently opposed to Arab Nationalist sentiments as well as to armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon, seeing in both these political positions a threat to Lebanon as a nation state. In contrast, both the Arab Nationalist sentiments and the Palestinian cause enjoyed significant support from amongst Lebanese Muslim

communities, particularly in Beirut and the South. Disagreement over Lebanon’s position vis-a-vis its Arab identity and the Palestinian cause later became key issues of national discord which underlaid violent political conflict in the country, particularly the Lebanese Civil War which started in 1975.