Lebanon’s Youth Clubs and the 1936 Summer Olympics: Mobilizing Sports, Challenging Imperialism and Launching a National Project

Abstract

In 1936, Pierre Gemayel and Hussein Saja‘an led a delegation to the summer Olympics in Berlin. Impressed by European youth clubs, they returned to French mandate Lebanon to organize their youth, founding two youth sports clubs: the Kata’ib (Christian youth) and Najjadeh (Sunni Muslim youth). Surprisingly, French colonial officials allowed for these types of groups to grow. So long as clubs were not ‘political’ they could exist. Using the extensive Lebanon media reports on the 1936 Olympics, and the cultural productions of these clubs, this paper finds that although the French did not consider sports a threat, club leaders mobilized sports to challenge imperialism. Gemayel and Saja‘an leveraged the media platform that the Olympics afforded to criticize the French for their lack of support for sports. The Kata’ib and Najjadeh then later memorialized the Olympic trip – or what they learned in Berlin, divorced from its potential fascist roots – as part of a national project grounded in youth sport and training. Given that these two non-elite youth clubs played a major role in forging independent Lebanon, and later clashed in Lebanon’s civil wars, it is imperative to incorporate their origins story into the history of modern Lebanon and the broader Arab world.