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THEY QUARRELED with Rafiq Hariri's way of rebuilding Beirut, dismissing his renewal project as an assault on the capital's ar chaeological heritage and the graceful old city of fabled memory. They wrote off his ambitious economic policy, pointing to the vast public debt that accumulated under his stewardship. Many Lebanese saw Hariri as Saudi Arabia's man, never quite taking to the swashbuckling way he climbed to the heights of power. But on February 14, when the former prime minister was struck down by a huge bomb that shattered his motorcade as it passed near Beirut's swank hotels and sea front-in the very district his construction company had remade from rubble-Lebanon had its first "martyr" in many years. Hariri had not been a vocal opponent of Syria, but the opposition now claimed him as its own. He had risen through the subtle work ings of politics and power, but "the street" now belonged to him. A Sunni Muslim, he had never bonded entirely with the Christians of East Beirut and Mount Lebanon, but he now became public property, a symbol of national unity. If Hariri's assassins sought to make an example of him for his growing defiance of Syrian power, the aftermath of the crime mocked them. A country forgotten and consigned to the captivity of its eastern neighbor shook off its fear and reticence. For the span of a generation, Lebanon was merely an appendage of Syrian power: for all practical purposes, the small republic left the

A generation after that day of October 6,1981, when Anwar al Sadat was struck down, a strange bond has been forged between Sadat and his assassin, Khalid Istanbuli. A place has been made in the coun try's narrative for both men. The history of Egypt, her very identity, is fluid enough to claim the wily ruler who swallowed his pride to deal with Israel and the United States, and also the assassin appalled by the cultural price paid in the bargain. In a sense, Sadat and Istanbuli are twins, their lives and deeds one great tale of the country's endur ing dilemmas and her resilience amid great troubles, about the kind of political men Egypt's history brought forth when her revolution ary experiment of the 1950s and 1960s ran aground. It is not hard for Egyptians to recognize much of themselves and their recent history in Istanbuli, the young lieutenant who proclaimed with pride that he had shot the pharaoh. He was in every way a son of the Free Officer Revolution of Gamal Abdel Nasser, of July 23,1952, when Egypt cast aside her kings and set out on a new, nonaligned path. Istanbuli was born in 1957, a year a^ter t^ie Suez Crisis, during what seemed to be a moment of promise in the life of Egypt. He was named after Nasser's oldest son. His father was a lawyer in a public sector company that was a product of the new, expanding govern ment. He was ten years old when calamity struck Egypt in the Six Day War, and the Nasser revolution was shown to be full of sound and