A Village in the Mountains
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 for Sir James Craig's book: Shemlan

This was the district of the Shuf, originally a Druze stronghold but infiltrated over the previous centuries by Maronites from further north. The sheikhs of the village, the lords of the manor, so to speak, were still Druzes, from the family of the Muqaddims, and most of the neighbouring villages (Aitat, Ainab, Ain Anoub, Sarahmoul) were Druze too. Suq el-Gharb was largely Greek Orthodox and there was even an unexpected Shi'ite village, Keyfoun, just over the hill. But the population of Shemlan, apart from the the sheikhs, was entirely Maronite. It may sound odd to make such a point of religion, but in the Lebanon it is the first question people ask, and the siting of a Maronite settlement in a ring of Druze villages was to have important political implications later on.

At the time [late 1940's, early 1950's], Shemlan's population was probably no more than a couple of hundred in the winter; but in the spring brother, cousins and sons came up from Beirut, arriving in lorries with their families and their bed and bedding, to escape the hot weather by commuting daily to their jobs in the city. Give or take a handful of incomers, there were only four families in the village: the Hittis, the Tabibs, the Jabbours and the Farajallahs. But they were families in the Arab sense, more like clans, numbered in scores or hundreds, dispersed not only in Beirut but, through emigration, in East Africa, Europe and the United States. Philip Hitti, the well-known professor of history at Princeton University, was a Shemlani. Marriage was largely within the four families, so that most people were related to one another in several different ways....

Shemlan shops were few and simple. A butcher, Selim Hitti, killed a sheep from time to tome and hung it from his ceiling. You asked for a couple of pounds of meat and he cut off the next piece: no question of choosing fillet or shoulder. There were two grocers, with a very limited range of goods. One of them, Eliyya Tabib, was also the barber and the post office. For fancy shopping, you went to Suq el-Gharb or, once a week, to Beirut....

Apart from its peace and beauty, Shemlan had another important advantage. The distance to Beirut was only 18 or 19 miles, but such was the nature of the roads that the journey took the best part of an hour, and longer if, like most of the students, you had to wait for a seat in a service, a shared taxi. So a trip to the big city was a treat for the weekend, not a daily distraction. In the constant struggle of conscience against the temptation of shops, cinemas, night-clubs and the cocktail highlife, the call of vocabulary and grammar tended to prevail. When the American Foreign Service set up their school in Beirut and registered their students as memebers of the Embassy, they found the opposite. By 1955, though, Shemlan had acquired one place of modest entertainment: Cliff House [Sakhra], a typical semi-alfresco restaurant at the top of the village, with glorious views over plain and sea. Its arak and mezze (no hamburgers, no steaks) were served by another Hitti, As'ad, the village headman....

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