In September 1975, a 12-year-old boy accompanies a Saudi prince—destined to become the King of Saudi Arabia—to Mecca, a place forbidden to non-Muslims. “After all these years, I’m still moved by what I saw there in terms of devotion and what I experienced in terms of human solidarity.”
This spiritual moment contrasts sharply with the chaos of the Lebanese civil war, which had broken out just a few months earlier. How did a boy born into a Franco-Lebanese Christian family find himself at the heart of Islam’s most sacred site?
“I didn’t fully grasp the stark contrast faced by this very young activist of the Guardians of the Cedars (a radical Christian militia), who had gone on pilgrimage to Mecca just months earlier.”
This duality—faith and violence—runs through my story, offering an intimate perspective on a Middle East where identities collide. “This complexity I lived through—of Lebanese Maronites harboring eternal hatred toward Palestinians, of Sunnis who despise their Shiite brothers, of Lebanese Muslims convinced that the Palestinian cause is also their own…”
In 1978, at age 15, I met Ayatollah Khomeini in Neauphle-le-Château, and later accompanied him on his triumphant return to Tehran in 1979. “Khomeini, to me, is the most emblematic figure of the 20th century. He revealed this to me in his own way—even though all of his actions, starting in 1979, seem to suggest otherwise.”
What remains of the revolutionary hope embodied by Khomeini, seen through the eyes of a teenager? Why was this young man, barely out of childhood, a witness to such a decisive moment? “How I wish the world—especially today’s Iran—could take interest in the other version of him that he once revealed to me.”
A reader’s testimony:
I closed the book in the middle of the night.
There is something chilling in this account that echoes the narrative thread of my own life up to 2025, and that of so many Lebanese, Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians, and others.
What is the secret behind the events that punctuate this life we either suffer through painfully or live through joyfully?
A Levantine Youth is the perfect illustration of the human comedy. Of the human tragedy. One that endures.
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