The mantra of Lebanese administrative politics these days is the need to implement reforms to bureaucratic norms and practices going back to the era of Ottoman occupation: Fiscal stamps, illegible ink stamps, handwritten and often illegible documents loaded with mistakes in spellings and dates, bribes, etc.
The need for these reforms stems from a broken system that degrades the individual citizen by forcing him or her to resort to for-fee-brokers (with established money-driven corrupt channels with bureaucrats protected by a political leader or party), or to any other form of bribe-driven services. Reforms are not only needed, they are required by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as conditions to lend money to a pauper and beggar state.
The system pervades the life of Lebanese citizens. Two years ago, I needed to renew my driver's license. I had two options: Doing it myself or hire a broker whose name was provided to me by a friend. To do it myself, I have to obtain a half dozen paper documents from a number of sources (medical certification, residence statement form the selectman (moukhtar) of the town where I reside, passport photographs, etc.), each of which charges a fee and requires driving relatively long distances on bad roads where maniacal drivers abound and at an exorbitant price of gasoline. I also have to check that all these sources use the same spellings and the correct dates, as the compulsory cursive nature of Arabic handwriting is particularly liable to errors. I also have to go to administrative buildings where chaos reigns supreme, where employees' offices are unmarked, where dust and cigarette butts line the floor and the walls, where elevators run the risk of breaking down because there's no electricity, and where the stench of urine and tobacco hits you in the face the moment you walk in. Not to mention the crowds that haunt these places all the time. You'd think you're in a leper colony!
The other option is to hire a broker who, through his connections, will illegally obtain all the necessary - and forged - documents from doctors who don't check me, from towns where I don't reside, etc. and two days later will present me with a brand new driver's license. All of this for a fee that is triple the normal cost of the doing-it yourself option.
For a while, I had a birth certificate with one date of birth (28 January), an extract of the Civil Registry with another date of birth (25 January), and a driver's license with still another date of birth (15 January). Here's the story why.
First, the Registrar of the Civil Status of my district (first name: Rajeh; last name withheld) issued me on the same day a birth certificate with the correct birth date of January 28 and an extract of my Civil Status Registry entry with the erroneous birth date of January 25 because, as he later justified, errors occurred when they recopied by hand the registers after the 1975-1990 war during which some records were burned. In Arabic, the numbers 28 and 25 can, if written fast by hand and without diligence, be made to look very similar, whether written in full words or in numerals, so errors occur right and left. But as the corrupt jackass that he is, the Registrar refused to recognize, let alone correct, his own mistake. Ottoman-minded bureaucrats like this asshole still haunt the Lebanese administration where they act like members of secret associations that cultivate their own unintelligible jargon and traditions, including, like doctors on their prescriptions, the mysteriously persistent bad handwriting: By issuing barely legible handwritten documents, they cultivate mystery and artificially glorify their job which, truth be told, should be as simple as a schoolchild carefully doing his/her homework, and instill dread in those they ought to be serving. I am not sure how much of a "mistake" this is; it may well be a deliberate introduction of errors to screw with people's lives and then extort them for money to "repair" the error.
Second, when I used the extract of the Civil Status to obtain a Drivers' License, the 25 became 15. Again, a collateral damage of the archaic script of the technically dead language that Arabic really is.
Imagine the headaches and the tremendous hardship this state of affairs causes on people who, for example, are in the process of registering in university, emigrating, getting married, seeking inheritance, or who emigrate with one date of birth on their passports but then return with a different date of birth in their records.
To add insult to injury, when confronted with the discrepancy in the date of birth appearing on two documents simultaneously issued by his own Registry, the Registrar was very upset and refused to correct what is obviously an administrative error. Instead, he poured salt on the wound and required a Court Order to compel him to correct his own error. I suspect he might budge for a fat bribe, but I refuse to reward his corruption. I hired an attorney who has prepared the file but apparently can't file it with the courts because the courts, according to him, haven't functioned in years and are in fact on strike. Yet, every evening on the news, we hear about courts issuing judgments in a variety of cases. The corruption in Lebanon is very pervasive; even people, like my own fucking attorney, who ought to be on your side are probably ripping you off. So life goes on for me, with three different dates of birth circulating across my records in the Lebanese administration.
I do not even tell you about the five different ways my name is spelled, as Lebanon elevates Arabic as its official language, but still has French and English haphazardly strewn across its official papers. Half of Lebanese last names begin with the letter A because Arab nationalism requires the use of the archaic definite article "Al" stuck like shit on a monkey as a prefix to most last names. It would be as if in English, half of all last names are written by prefixing them with the article "the". For example, US presidents' names would be sometimes written as "Joe The-Biden", or "Donald The-Trump", but not always, just arbitrarily, on a whim, alternating these spellings with "Joe Biden" or "Donald Trump".
Worse yet, when I was admitted to American University of Beirut, the university, whose pre-WW I history under Ottoman rule is pregnant with a visceral hatred of an independent Lebanon, insisted on forcing a "high Arabic" spelling on students' names which was entirely different from the official spelling. Let's say, for the sake of illustration, that your last name is شعيب . The Lebanese State would have spelled it in your personal documents as "Shayb" or "Chaib", but the arrogant hypocrite neanderthals of American University of Beirut, trying to be more Arab than the Arabs, imposed on you the spelling of "Shuayyibb", as the name would have sounded circa 800 AD in the now dead language of classical Arabic. I hear that they have dropped this insulting practice in recent years.
In Lebanon, the country its nationalists claim to be the "homeland of freedom, culture and enlightenment" while it continues to rot under millennia of abject ignorance, religiosity and feudalism, you don't even own your own name.
Even Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who wants to resurrect the Ottoman Empire, would be upset if these practices were current in his modern-day Turkiye. But in Lebanon, the barbarians are entrenched inside the gates and the defenders of the city are outside the city walls. Go figure.
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