American University of Beirut

American University of Beirut at Beirut, Lebanon; English language; chartered by New York State in 1866 as Syrian Protestant College, rechartered 1920 as the American Univ. of Beirut. It has faculties of arts and sciences, health sciences, engineering and architecture, agricultural and food sciences, and medicine. There is an archaeological museum. The university remained operational during most of the protracted civil strife in Beirut. In 1990 it started a joint program of research and development with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the reconstruction of Lebanon.

Beirut By 1914 this was one of the wealthiest cities of the Middle East, under what was effectively a French protectorate. It contained two missionary universities and was the intellectual centre of rising Arab nationalism. Occupied by the Allies in 1918, it was established by the French as the capital of the new state of Greater Lebanon. Under French Mandate 1920–46, it grew rapidly as a centre for Arab banking and economic activity. However, as a centre for all the religious communities of Lebanon, it became a microcosm of the tensions erupting throughout the country. In the Civil War (1979–89), most of the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ was destroyed, while Christian-and Muslim-dominated areas were divided by a no-go area, the ‘green line’.

Jumblat, Walid (b. 1949). Lebanese politician The son of Kamal Jumblat, he studied at the American University of Beirut and in France, enjoying life as a playboy. He was catapulted into political action by the assassination of his father in 1977, whereupon he became leader of the Druze community. He pursued his father's policies of hostility to Lebanon's communal Constitution (with its inbuilt Maronite parliamentary majority) with even greater extremism. As leader of the Progressive Socialist Party founded by his father, he was reluctant to accept Syrian control of Lebanon established during the 1980s. He frustrated all efforts by A. Jumayyil to end the civil war, and used the partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon to increase the territorial control of his militia forces and encircle Jumayyil and his forces in East Beirut. He became an uncomfortable and unpredictable supporter of the 1989 Taif Accord. He became more vociferous in his opposition to Syria following the death of President Assad in 2000.