Until the twentieth century, the Arabs in the region saw the area between the Lebanese mountains and the sea as simply a province of the region of Syria. The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.
The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the birth rate among Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni Muslims was growing faster than that of the Christians, while the Muslim population had been swollen by Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in neighbouring Israel/Palestine. There has only been one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.
There have long been bouts of fighting between the various confessional groups in the area, and what some historians call the first Lebanese civil war broke out in 1958 between the Maronite Christians and the Muslims, who by this time probably slightly outnumbered the Christians. They are now in a clear majority but there are still no official figures, and academic studies citing numbers are fiercely contested.
Some parts of the capital, Beirut, are exclusively Shia Muslim, as is most of the south of the country. This is where the Shia Hezbollah group (backed by Shia-dominated Iran) is dominant. Another Shia stronghold is the Beqaa Valley, which Hezbollah has used as a staging post for its forays into Syria to support government forces there. Other towns are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. For example Tripoli, in the north, is thought to be 80 per cent Sunni, but it also has a sizeable Alawite minority, and given the Sunni–Alawite tensions next door in Syria this has led to sporadic bouts of fighting.
Lebanon appears to be a unified state only from the perspective of seeing it on a map. It takes just a few minutes after arriving at Beirut Airport to discover it is far from that. The drive from the airport to the centre takes you past the exclusively Shia southern suburbs, which are partially policed by the Hezbollah militia, probably the most efficient fighting force in the country. The Lebanese army exists on paper, but in the event of another civil war such as that of 1975–90, it would fall apart, as soldiers in most units would simply go back to their home towns and join the local militias.
