Lebanon

Culture of the World Lebanon by Sean Sheehan and Zawiah Abdul Latif

Summary:

Until now, I have read three chapters from Culture of the World Lebanon. In this book, the authors described Lebanon's geography, history, and government. Also, they gave description about culture of people in this area. The first chapter is about geography of Lebanon. It is small country at the end of Mediterranean Sea. Therefore, it has Mediterranean climate. Also, the most famous plant in this country is cedars .This tree represents Lebanon and is featured on the national flag. In addition, the capital city is Beirut. It has 40% of population.  The second chapter is about history of Lebanon. It had a lot of eras which lived in this area. For example, in ninth century B.C, it was Phoenician era but in 64 B.C, the Roman Empire was in Lebanon. After that, it was Muslim Rule then The Ottomans. Finally, Independence was in 1926. The third chapter is about government in Lebanon. Civil war started in 1975 between Muslim and Christian. Because of the government want to end the war, all the politicians agreed about new rules which are the president of Lebanon must be Christian, the prime minister is a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the National Assembly is a Shiite Muslim.

Reaction:

I chose this book because I visited Lebanon and I have a lot of information about it. However, that did not help me a lot because it was difficult for me to read some Arabic words which were written by English. Also, some of them have wrong spelling. For example, calls mountain Al shof the author wrote Al chif.

On the other hand, in the first time when I was reading chapter Geography of Lebanon, I felt like me in Lebanon between its mountains and its rivers. However, in chapter Government, I don’t agree with the authors about a lot of information in type Border Tension. Also, in chapter History, the authors did not write how the civil war ended. In the other word, they didn’t give any information about the Altaif conference.