A Levantine Youth

The book first strikes the reader with the power of its narrative. Santi possesses an undeniable gift for evocation: Beirut before 1975, the scents of the Mediterranean, Jesuit liturgies, the fervor of an Oum Kalthoum recital, Saudi humidity, the solemnity of Mecca, the fury of the Christian militias. The text is carnal, vibrant, often magnificent. The reader is swept up by the voice of a child hurled into tragedy, whose sensitivity seems sharpened by every shock.

But this stylistic success is also the heart of the problem. A Levantine Youth is not merely a testimony: it is a staging of the self, an intimate mythology. The author does not simply recount; he constructs himself as an exceptional character, placed at the center of the great fractures of the century. At twelve, he accompanies a Saudi prince to Mecca. As a teenager, he is enlisted in an extremist Lebanese militia. Later, he meets Khomeini, then crosses Israeli lines. Life becomes a novel, and the novel becomes a justification.

This aesthetic of exception feeds a persistent moral ambiguity. Santi asserts that “one can witness a crime without necessarily approving of it.”
So be it. But the book constantly transforms proximity to horror into an initiatory privilege. War, militia life, religious radicalism become formative, almost necessary stages of an “extraordinary” destiny. The author even writes that the destruction of Lebanon was the condition of his “sublime destiny.”

This staggering sentence reveals a dangerous temptation: subordinating collective catastrophe to individual fulfillment.

The relationship to violence is thus continually aestheticized. The Christian militias, with which the author was close, are described in their brutality, but also in their energy, their fraternity, their tragic intoxication. The executioners sometimes appear as novelistic figures, almost heroic. Evil is acknowledged, but magnified by style. Confession becomes epic. This shift raises a major ethical question: can horror be turned into lyrical material without attenuating its gravity?

The same unease runs through the pages devoted to Khomeini. Santi recounts the fascination exerted by the ayatollah, his “unbearable charisma,” and confesses that he almost “abandoned everything for him.”
To be sure, he later acknowledges that Khomeini’s name has become “synonymous with inhumanity and cruelty.”
But the book persists in seeking an “other version” of the dictator, as if state terror could be relativized by a benevolent personal experience. Once again, the intimate threatens to dissolve the political.

On the ideological level, the book is permeated by a seductive syncretic discourse: the monotheistic religions are said to be sisters, their conflicts arising more from their similarities than from their differences, in a Girardian reading.
This humanist vision is generous. But it also tends to flatten historical responsibility. Everything becomes “complexity,” “entanglement,” “common destiny.” Yet war is not merely an abstract evil: it is made of decisions, chains of command, precise ideologies. By diluting causes into a metaphysics of tragedy, the narrative risks depoliticizing violence.

The book’s great strength—its avowed subjectivity—thus becomes its weakness. Santi claims the right to confusion, ambivalence, contradiction. The problem is not that he was lost, fascinated, manipulated. The problem is that the text sometimes seems to turn these wanderings into proofs of election. The tossed-about child becomes a tragic hero, almost chosen by History. Fault is acknowledged, but transfigured: “I would never have known happiness […] without the evil I did.”

This logic is dangerous, because it naturalizes violence as a necessary stage of success.

Yet A Levantine Youth remains an important book. Not because it provides an objective key to the Middle East, but because it exposes from within the vertigo of belonging, the seduction of the sacred, the intoxication of murderous identities. It shows how an adolescent can be swept up by narratives of grandeur, by charismatic father figures, by absolute causes. In this sense, it is a valuable document on the psychology of radicalization.

It must, however, be read at a distance. This text is not a history manual, nor a political treatise: it is a mythologized autobiography. Its beauty is real, but deceptive. It embellishes what it claims to denounce. It turns war into operatic scenery. The reader must therefore resist the enchantment of style in order to maintain critical lucidity.

A Levantine Youth is a great, ambiguous book. It illuminates the Levant as much as it reveals one man’s illusions about his own trajectory. It fascinates, unsettles, disturbs. But it also compels us to ask an essential question: how far can one sublimate evil without betraying it?

Finally, the preface by Gilles Kepel is not insignificant: it functions as an intellectual guarantee, almost an anticipated amnesty, for a narrative that constantly flirts with fascination for violence and for charismatic power.