Civil wars are particularly good for political graffiti. To come into one's own in Beirut, during Lebanon's long civil war, was to live in the clutter of the graffiti. In this collection, A.H. presents here the graffiti of his Christian compatriots, but he could have had a big exhibit working with Muslim graffiti: the pictures of the "martyrs" who had fallen in the long war, the black banners of rival militias, the proclamations of political loyalty or political-religious damnations.

There came a time when a "hip", seemingly modern and secular country, was claimed by religious feuds. The Lebanese had always thought of Beirut, a city by the Mediterranean, as a worldly place that had assimilated the ways of the West, and had outgrown religious cocoons. But it wasn't so. A long war with really no exact starting point and no specific end rid them of their illusions. So the cross and the crescent didn't embrace in Lebanon, as the civics textbooks taught. Lebanon was a divided land, and a war with no clear frontlines re-made its life. No one was fated to prevail in that war. The protagonists began with a fight over beachfront hotels and once proud places. Soon they would be fighting over hulks of gutted buildings. Men being what they are, the shells of buildings had to be called "strategic." The graffiti would serve as a claim of ownership, and something of the artist's signature: I was here, I scribble therefore I am. Few in Lebanon, A.H. recalls, really noticed the graffiti of crosses and martyrs and political parties. It was the country's subliminal art form, this was the way the fighters and the spectators expressed themselves. The Lebanese had long told false stories about their country, the messages on the walls and the street corners were to serve as a kind of unsentimental truth. This was never a straightforward Muslim-Christian fight. There were wars within, as each community sub-divided, and the warlords went at it with abandon. The Shia fought among themselves, and so did the Maronites. It was a war of all against all. The pretexts of the war were so soon forgotten.

A.H. began his project in a haphazard way. These crosses, from Beirut and Mount Lebanon, capture one facet of this terrible time in Lebanon's history. Faith became a weapon, and these crosses are an expression of a people besieged and at war. Religion here doubles as communal identity, a way of drawing lines in a painfully small and cramped country: seventeen or eighteen communities in a paltry four thousand square miles. He had been raised to an idea of Lebanon's inclusiveness; what he presents here is the antithesis of all that. When A. H. started this project, he had no scheme for it. (Perhaps like the civil war itself, it became an obsession, a chronicle, with no set purpose in sight.) We have no civil wars in New York, and Lebanon is worlds away. But the crosses are a reminder of order's frailty.