A Quiet Revolution, in Beirut Matthew Cassel for The New York Times Tony Daoud in Lebanon with a sign that reads "Square of Change." At the end of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, in 1990, Beirut's downtown was an apocalyptic scene of rubble and weeds, inhabited by squatters in skeletal buildings and bored soldiers moving among sewage-filled craters. The rare splash of color came from the blue advertisements for a billboard company that read: "What do our boards have in common with the C.I.A.? They're both all over the place. In the two decades since then, Beirut has become a monument to globalism, home to Louis Vuitton, Chanel and the priciest hotels, the power of capitalism concealing but never really healing the war's scars. Among the chrome-and-glass buildings downtown stands a grand statue of Riyadh al-Solh, a founder of modern Lebanon, looking like a fat and happy pasha. And beneath that statue, in a patch of bare sand he calls the Square of Change, sits a lonely man named Tony Daoud. In the glow of the Egyptian uprising, the 38-year-old Daoud and a few dozen others came to this square to spark their own version of the Arab Spring. Some of his fellow protesters had great ambitions - they would end the rule of the Lebanese people by the country's 18 religious sects, which control Lebanon like a greedy cartel. But Daoud was always more modest. "The secret of happiness is to have low expectations," he told me when I visited him in the square one day. What he wanted, he explained, was a simple thing: legislation that would allow Lebanese to marry, divorce and inherit without relying on religious law. The crowds never came. Daoud has been here every day since March 18, but almost no one shouts or waves in support; horns are only honked in the direction of the valet parking across the street. "It's not as simple as it looks on TV," he said as we sat in plastic chairs under a canvas umbrella. Two handsome men in their 20s emerged from their pup tents nearby and joined us. Cigarette butts were strewn all over the ground. A dusty placard leaned at the foot of a billboard advertising "first-class restaurants" and "luxury apartments." A young woman passing by finally showed interest, snapping a picture of the tents with her cellphone. Welcome! Daoud shouted at her. Come on inside and take a picture if you want. She nodded in what seemed like encouragement, but then went on her way. Daoud loves to chat, garrulously repeating his ideas to anyone who will listen, but today he seemed more tired than the last time I visited. I wondered if the vigil was taking its toll, but he explained that it was because he stayed up late the night before, watching "The Godfather" yet again. "You learn a lot from this film," he told me. How big people in big offices pull the strings. He lighted a Lucky Strike from a crumpled pack. "What connects the strings to the people, that's the idea," he said, and then he bemoaned that in Lebanon, "there are so many strings." During the country's civil war, nearly everyone fought everyone else - leftists and Palestinians and Lebanese nationalists and Christians and Muslims and Druze and all the combinations among them. The Green Line that divided Muslims in west Beirut from Christians in the east became a frontier. Israel invaded across the Blue Line that marks its border, then occupied a swath of the south. Syria stayed for nearly 30 years. After it pulled out in 2005, more red lines were drawn by the country's politicians - Sunni and Shiite, Druze and Christian - staking claims that would eventually prove as malleable as a Levantine compromise. Daoud's sit-in feels tangled in those borders, as if he sits at the claustrophobic center of a city demarcated by colors and banners and portraits and symbols of sectarian control. He prides himself on being a rational man, but over espresso poured in a plastic cup, he said, "You can't fight faith with logic." Then he got up and paced his small lot, limping from a motorcycle accident in 1999 that nearly killed him. He thought he might place flowers around to make the place more inviting. And he wanted to rehang a sign that welcomed passers-by, even though the printer made a mistake and the sign had arrows pointing visitors in opposite directions. He stared for a moment at a placard that read, "Change the sectarian system - toward a state of citizenship." Maybe he would plant a tree, he said, so he could measure the time it took to change Lebanon. The bells of St. George Cathedral pealed. The call to prayer would follow soon. It was his idea to call this space the Square of Change, but now he settled on a different name: the Spot of Reason. It was more consistent with what his protest had become. "This is our place now," he said. It has become ours, our own small place, where we belong. Of course, it's not enough. But what if no one was here?