Vignette. Café arabophone [0004]

‘An occurrence which illustrates the depth of Christian Lebanese patriotism was when, at a committee meeting at the AUB, two Lebanese professors refused to allow Lebanese students to be listed, in a statistical table, under the rubric ‘Arab students’, as proposed by a colleague, an ideologue of Pan-Arabism. The dispute was only resolved when a Greek professor proposed that the rubric be changed to ‘Arabic speaking’. This was accepted. After the meeting we retired to the cafeteria, where an American wit asked if we would like to have American or ‘Arabic-speaking’ coffee’ (Gordon, Lebanon: 159).