Abstract
Lebanon covers an area roughly just the size of Wales, yet its divisions—ethnic, confessional, political—often seem as infinitely complex as a fractal. Bernard Heyberger’s fascinating Hindiyya, a real-life The Name of the Rose, offers evidence that this toxic state of affairs is nothing new to the Levant. Its subject is Hindiyya ‘Ujaymi, a Maronite Christian from Aleppo, who founded a convent dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus at Bkirki in Lebanon. Over the course of time, disturbing rumours began to fly regarding events at the monastery: accusations and counter-accusations of theft, abuse, poison, promiscuity, idolatry, witchcraft, and ultimately murder. The Church’s investigation into these events inevitably became intermeshed with and compromised by regional power-struggles.
It is these power-struggles that form the all-important backdrop to Hindiyya’s story. Typically for Lebanon, alliances and feuds criss-cross religious and ethnic boundaries in all kinds of bewildering ways. Many conflicts play a role in Hindiyya’s career: the tension between the Vatican and the Maronite church, its theoretical satellite; the tension between the Jesuits and other Catholic orders and the tension within the Society of Jesus between French and Italian factions; relations between the Ottoman administrators of Lebanon and influential local Christian and Druze chieftains; not to mention the struggle for influence in the Levant between the Ottomans, France, Russia, and Egypt. But the key conflict, according to Heyberger, is a struggle within the Maronite church between native-born Lebanese Maronites (known as ‘mountain dwellers’) and Aleppo-born newcomers. Hindiyya’s place among the latter played a major role in the incident. The Aleppine faction, led by the Maronite patriarch Yusuf Istifan, for a long time dismissed the rumours about Hindiyya’s convent as lies spread by their mountain dweller opponents.
Hindiyya exhibited ascetic and visionary tendencies from an early age. These tendencies were encouraged by her Jesuit spiritual directors, who were struggling against suspicion and hostility from many Syrian Christians, and who strongly desired the prestige of cultivating and training a potential future saint. But as Heyberger shows, the strong-willed young woman had no intention of simply acting as the Society’s biddable trophy. Rather, she intended to found her own convent in Lebanon—something that was not at all part of the Jesuits’ plan for her. But Hindiyya nevertheless prevailed in her plans, by obtaining the support of various key players among the Maronites of Lebanon, convincing them that her Order of the Sacred Heart could be a unifying force for the Maronite church.
Within the convent, a feverish, gossip-ridden and cult-like atmosphere seems to have formed, with Hindiyya’s inner circle demanding ever more extreme and sycophantic demonstrations of devotion. Hindiyya’s willpower and charisma curdled into megalomania and self-pity, which in turn became a frightening and all-consuming paranoia. She dictated the confessions of nuns, forcing them to claim to have committed various sexual offences, and ordered the stripping, beating, starvation, and poisoning of nuns who rebelled against her authority or questioned the ‘mystery of union’, the mystical marriage between Hindiyya and Christ that placed her above the Virgin Mary herself in the hierarchy of heaven.
Hindiyya finally overreached when she had the Badran sisters, two daughters of an influential local magnate, imprisoned, abused, and beaten, after accusing them of leading a Satanic cult. This resulted in the death of one, which led to the involvement of Lebanon’s Ottoman emir and the Vatican’s apostolic delegate. The convent at Bkirki was closed down, and the sisters of the Sacred Heart were dispersed to other convents. Hindiyya herself suffered years of abuse and humiliation as her triumphant enemies heaped upon her the same treatment she had given to rebel nuns in her own convent. Despite this, her spirit never seems to have broken and she was still scheming to restore the convent at Bkirki at the time of her death.