Sometimes, when people asked me if I’d ever go back to Lebanon, I answered with a tongue-in-cheek remark like, “Who wants to take a holiday in Hades?” In reality, though, it was a glib answer to throw people off the scent.

Although I had left Lebanon some 17 years ago, it had not left me. Lebanon was an unfinished work lying somewhere in the attic of my imagination, waiting to be dusted down and completed. Somehow the time never seemed right.

I had planned three different surreptitious returns, but either some political crisis or the fact that the media had heard about it and wanted to accompany me with cameras and sound recorders made me jettison my plans. After having my return scuppered for the third time, I convinced myself that I should give up, that there are some mountains that do not want to be climbed and some remote places that do not want to be explored. To hell with it: I had other plans.

However, no matter where I went or how long I stayed, inevitably a news item or a remark by an innocent passer-by would remind me of Lebanon.

To those who have never been there, it must appear accursed. It is like an ancient smoking volcano, cyclically erupting with ever more violence, war and religious recrimination. Yet ever since I had read the poetry of Kahlil Gibran when I was 17, I had been drawn to the mythic dimension of the place. You see, Lebanon is a seductress. It sucks you into itself then spews you out, either more bewildered or more at peace. In my case I am not sure which.

Each time I thought about returning, I found myself getting high on the incense of my own dreams and anxieties. This is how I described my thoughts about the place in my book about my previous time there: “I feel like a cross between Rip Van Winkle and Humpty Dumpty. I have woken up after a long sleep and find all the pieces of myself before me. There are more than I began with. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put Humpty together again.”

Maybe that, too, was part of the lure of Lebanon: to put all the pieces together again. In any case, I believe that no one can understand the journey they have been on until they return to their point of departure. Only then can they truly understand where they have been or what they have become. I saw my return as a journey of reclamation. And another part of me felt that Lebanon owed me something and it was payback time.

A tourist guide to the Middle East that I had been perusing in a bookshop had a detailed “don’t leave home without” list, with recommendations that included “a sense of perspective, patience and an open mind”. I smiled at the irony of it. The history of the Middle East, and Lebanon in particular, is precisely about the lack of these qualities.

Given my own previous experience, I wondered just how much perspective, patience and open-mindedness I could bring to the country. I snapped the book shut and, several months later, I was on an Air France flight descending into Beirut.

As I sat looking over my itinerary, the passenger beside me, seeing the details, asked politely in a French accent: “Your first time in Lebanon?” For a second or two I stared at the back of the seat in front of me: “No, I was here many years ago.”

“So you know a little of the country?” The man was being friendly but curious. What could I say without appearing rude? “I was only here for a short period, teaching at the American University. I didn’t really get to see much,” I explained. It was the truth but not the whole truth.

Through the window, Lebanon was rising up to meet me. I didn’t know what I was feeling except that my stomach was empty – yet I had eaten an excellent lunch only an hour ago.

Outside the porthole I watched the Legoland sprawl of ochre-coloured apartment blocks that climb up the hillsides in complete disorder. I remembered that in Lebanon there was no such thing as planning laws. Indeed, in the Beirut that I had last visited, there was no such thing as law, full stop. Everybody made and upheld their own and murdered any transgressors without question.

My mind flashed back to the Beirut of 17 years ago. The din of the place then was deafening, with cars careering around like souped-up dodgems. Street vendors had turned the shopping areas into an open-air market. The stallholders screamed out their wares; people spoke with wild gesticulations, almost shouting to be heard.

Guns of all sizes were everywhere. You could buy a Kalashnikov for $25 but the magazine to go with it cost more. Every man had a pistol tucked into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back, with an ammunition clip bulging in his pocket.

The seatbelt light flashed above my head and the captain’s voice intoned the familiar phrase, “Enjoy your stay.” I smiled to myself, remembering my last visit.

The Beirut I had lived in two decades ago was a city on the edge. Anxiety, stress and suspicion had reduced it to a macabre fantasy land that was psychotic and almost para-normal. People took refuge in tribal and religious loyalties, not out of conviction but because you had to belong somewhere. Not belonging, not believing, not carrying a gun in a city that was imploding by the hour meant that you could fall through the cracks and disappear suddenly and for no reason.

At night the city was a morgue. A no-go land where only the huge population of stray cats and lonely fools walked the streets. There were no street lights. Strangers never took taxis in case they never reached their destination.

Memories were coming back to me as fast as the ground was flying up to meet me. I remembered the intense watchfulness. Even if you entered into a friendly conversation with someone you knew, it was never an open exchange. It was a veneer behind which the person was scrutinising you and withholding his thoughts.

Someone told me once that you didn’t measure the city in square miles but rather the number of dead in any cubic foot. The cubic-foot measure puzzled me at first; but as I looked out on the clutter of apartment blocks, I remembered what it meant. When you have finished killing on the first floor, you move up to the next. One cube after another.

When you absorbed the devastation, street after street, mile after mile, the city looked nothing like a city then. It was like a skull with a great, gaping mouthful of hollow, rotten teeth. That’s what I had left 17 years ago – but what was I coming back to?

I knew that, over the years, the city had renewed itself, rising phoenix-like out of the ashes of civil war. But in the past year the Israeli military machine had reduced the southern suburbs and several villages to mounds of rubble.

Whatever anxieties I had, walking into the arrivals lounge soon dispelled them. Everyone was dressed in gaily coloured clothes. Some had balloons on the end of strings; others had bunches of flowers; many of the young men had both bunches of flowers and boxes of chocolates. Kids jumped up and down excitedly and people waved scarves and arms at new arrivals. The scene looked to me as though someone had opened a giant box of Liquorice Allsorts and sprinkled them with great abandon at the arrivals gate.

Obviously none of this was for me, even if I relished it. It was certainly a far remove from the dimly lit airport I last saw, full of silent men staring at everyone. Each one of them had carried a firearm of some description – but now there wasn’t a gun in sight.

The Lebanese have a saying that “the guest is a gift from God”. I thought about that as I caught a taxi into the city. Although there were no flowers or chocolates or balloons or embraces for me, I was already beginning to feel very much at home. The hunger pangs had miraculously disappeared.

For the next few days I walked around the streets of the Hamra area, with my feet hardly touching the ground. The street vendors and their stalls had gone. Incredibly, the bedlam of the traffic, with horns permanently depressed, had reduced in volume by several decibels. Nor were people screaming their conversations at one another. Instead, they retreated to trendy cafe bars, where they played chess or backgammon and conversed with an air of good-natured languor or passionate engagement.

I loved these places. There was a buzz and ease about them which made me feel like a regular as I listened to conversations moving effortlessly from Arabic to English or French. I looked at the young people around me and thought of my students at the university where I had taught. I wondered where they had gone and if any of them had not survived the Israeli air raids.

The university has survived, as has most of Beirut – apart from the southern suburbs, which have a postcatastrophe appearance about them. Dahiya, the worst-hit area, had been exclusively Hezbollah territory – a no-go area for outsiders.

When I drove into part of it with a Lebanese driver, I could feel waves of repulsion coming out of the rubble of half-demolished apartments. Some people were still living in makeshift accommodation. Their eyes followed our car with suspicion. “Let’s leave,” I said, unable to bear the unspoken accusation that I felt was being thrown at us.

The word “holocaust” entered my head as I looked back at the devastation. History is supposed to tell us what not to repeat – but it seems that for the Israeli military machine, the needle has got stuck.

After that, walking through the gates of the American University was like walking into paradise. I recognised immediately every brick and bush of its tranquil campus and was almost sick with longing. I imagined that I could hear the cheery voices of my long-gone students greeting me. “Good morning, Mr Brian,” or “Bye, Mr Brian. See you tomorrow.”

I had loved this place, loved my job here and loved my students. I felt I belonged here. As I stood watching some young people saunter easily through the grounds, I felt pangs of anger and regret about what had happened so long ago, which had stolen from me all the pleasurable years I might have spent here.

I sat on a bench near the library and recalled the faces of my happy, chirpy students. There was a running track on campus where I used to go jogging every Saturday morning. Sometimes a few of my students would be there, sitting on the bleachers. They would jeer at me good-naturedly: “Too slow, old man” and “Maybe we can get you a wheelchair from the infirmary”. I remembered their panic and concern when I feigned a sudden heart attack.

Without thinking, I quietly removed the visitor’s badge I had been given at the porter’s lodge. I didn’t want to be a visitor here.

It was three weeks before term-time, but the grounds were already buzzing with students. I stopped a few and asked if the running track was still there. They looked at me puzzled for a moment. “You have been here before?” one of them asked. I explained that I had taught here 20 years ago.

“That was during the war. What was that like?” They were genuinely curious.

“I survived,” I said, trying to avoid going into any detail, and then quickly asked them about their own plans for the future.

Eventually the conversation got back to what the Lebanese call “the Wada”, which means the current situation. The Wada has a habit of coming up in every conversation no matter whom it’s with or how it starts.

“No, there will never be another civil war,” they assured me, but these young people, like everyone else I spoke to, were acutely aware that anything that happens in the wider Middle East has a habit of coming home to roost in Lebanon. Everyone was anxious about the future. Not because of a kind of cultural pessimism, nor because of the cyclical violence that seems to be rooted in local politics. They all insisted that something much bigger was on the horizon.

One afternoon I visited my old Turkish villa, where the daughter of the man I had originally rented it from was now living. If going to the university had made me wistful, being at home in my villa stirred up the same emotion in double measure. I sat on the veranda, where I used to read and drink fine Lebanese wine or Turkish coffee each evening. Surrounded by a classical Islamic garden, I was in my own idyllic little world. But it was mine no longer and I was sadder to leave it than I cared to admit.

Even the memory of my kidnapping, which had happened just outside its gate, had not dispelled the enchantment.

Elsewhere in the city, high-rise construction was powering ahead. Nabil, my driver, explained how the new apartments were valued: “First floor, one million dollars; second floor, two million; third floor, three; and so like this to the top.”

“How many floors on that one?” I asked, pointing to a towering shell. “Twenty-eight,” he said. “Twenty-eight million dollars for a penthouse apartment?” I said, whistling incredulously. “No, 30,” Nabil corrected me. “Penthouse is extra.”

I thought of the huge number of construction projects across the city and gave my friend a disbelieving look. “All oil money,” he said. “The Saudis and Kuwaitis buy buildings like they are cups of coffee and the politicians all fill their pockets with the profits.”

Nabil then drove me round the downtown area, where a colossal reconstruction programme was under way. The shops at street level all had designer names and designer price-tags. I thought to myself, “Well, if you can afford $30m for an apartment, what’s $500 for a shirt?”

During the war, this was frontline territory: a blasted wasteland where all the fine buildings had either collapsed into rubble or were waiting for one last mortar to finish them off. People fled through it at their peril, tripping over corpses as they tried to evade the sniper fire coming from every direction.

That evening, after my trip downtown, I sat in my room – at the same hotel where I had stayed all those years ago when I first arrived. Outside, the streets were bustling with revellers. Yes, Beirut had changed from how I remembered it.

I spent days and nights walking through half-remembered streets and places that had once been no-go areas for the sane and sensible. I couldn’t say I was happy and excited to be back – it was far more than that. I was falling in love.

Beirut is like a dark stranger beckoning to you from the shadows; its lure is irresistible. And, after all these years, I was once more caught in its thrall. The moment I acknowledged these feelings, however, alarm bells started sounding. As everyone knows, you need to beware of the shadows.

There are still many empty buildings pockmarked by mortar shells and scarred by bullet holes. Iron reinforcing rods spill out from them like shredded nerve ends. The darkness behind the glassless windows conceals more than emptiness – because, in this place, every building tells a story.

It was in derelict buildings like these that I had been held for long periods, cocooned in the darkness while the city was blowing itself and its inhabitants to pieces.

Today, Beirut is like a living organism, constantly uncovering an exhausting palimpsest of histories. Sometimes it feels like each part of it lives in a time capsule of its own – just as I consider my own captivity as something separated from the rest of my life.

You can get a palpable sense of the metaphysical when you walk down a street where you know human life has been extinguished. You can almost hear the dead whispering their stories. However new the city is becoming, you can still feel the past haunting it.

There were times when I found it spooky, imagining all those faces of the dead staring out from the windows as I passed. It was as though the city was a great ventriloquist, throwing voices at me in the dark. What if I had not come home from this place – what tale would my pale shade be whispering now to some sensitive passer-by?

Blindfold, manacled and beaten: Keenan’s 1,574 days at the mercy of terrorists

Brian Keenan was seized outside his Beirut home four days before the American bombing of Libya, in April 1986. He had been teaching English at the American University in the city for only four months when he was bundled into a car by Kalashnikov-wielding members of Islamic Jihad.

For the first three months of his 1,574-day incarceration he was kept in solitary confinement; later he was joined by other hostages including John McCarthy, the British television reporter.

Keenan, a holder of British and Irish passports, had apparently been kidnapped because Islamic Jihad wanted to hit back at Britain for its support of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

McCarthy and Keenan, who shared a cell, were blindfolded, kept chained to radiators and frequently beaten with rifle butts. Given only minimal food and deprived of sunlight, Keenan became gravely ill and went inexplicably deaf for six weeks.

The two men were allowed out of their manacles for a few minutes each morning to exercise their wasting muscles and were given a 90-minute reprieve from their blindfolds in the evening.

Keenan was finally released in August 1990. He announced to the waiting press that he wanted “to make love to all the women in the world”. McCarthy was released a year later.

After withdrawing from the world to “lick and heal the wounds gradually and unmolested”, Keenan married Audrey Doyle, a physiotherapist, in 1993.

© Brian Keenan 2008

Brian Keenan made a film of his return. Back to Beirut will be shown on BBC2 on March 31 at 7pm

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