Dr. Antoine Emile Khoury Harb: Lebanon, A Name Through 4000 Years

From the Daily Star, February 2004

Dr. Antoine Emile Khoury Harb, ph.D in history and archaeology, secretary general of the Fondation du Patrimoine Libanais, is an authority in the history of the Lebanese people and patrimony. In 2000 he published his doctoral thesis, a research aiming to verify that there is such an entity as Lebanon and to define it, in Arabic. Recently, thanks to the initiative of the AUB Alumni Association in the US, the book has been translated into an English edition: “Lebanon, A Name Through 4000 Years: Entity and Identity”. The Association had seen with desolation the US government questioning Lebanon’s identity and right to its territory, and saw in the book a highly important document to set things straight. Five hundred copies of the English edition were mailed to US congressmen this New Year as a proof that Lebanon is hardly the “geographic mistake” Kissinger claimed it to be.

Undaunted by the torrential rains, a handful of history lovers made it to the Convent of the Franciscaines in Badaro on February 16 to listen to Harb presenting an overview of the material of his book.

Gibran Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet”

Gibran Kahlil Gibran’s, 1883 – 1931, “The Prophet”

The coming of the ship
Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.
And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld the ship coming with the mist.

Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.

But he descended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:
How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?

Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache