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Exploring Leisure, Morality, and Geography in South Beirut

Lara Deeb and Mona Harb

in Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the popularity of the Bab al-Hara café in south Beirut, an area often maligned in the U.S. press as “the Hizbullah stronghold” and known ... More

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the popularity of the Bab al-Hara café in south Beirut, an area often maligned in the U.S. press as “the Hizbullah stronghold” and known in Lebanon as Dahiya. The café exemplifies many of the shifting features of leisure in south Beirut, and highlights many of the new ideas and practices of morality as well as geography that have emerged in this Shi'i-majority area of the city over the past decade. The chapter suggests that these cafés provide new spaces for leisure that are promoting flexibility in moral norms. The circumstances that both new spaces and desires for leisure provoke highlight tensions between religious and social notions about what is moral. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Producing Islamic Fun: Hizbullah, Fadlallah, and the Entrepreneurs

Lara Deeb and Mona Harb

in Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut

This chapter discusses the three types of major players—political, religious, and economic—involved in producing and controlling leisure sites in south Beirut. All three types of players are ... More

This chapter discusses the three types of major players—political, religious, and economic—involved in producing and controlling leisure sites in south Beirut. All three types of players are conceiving leisure spaces, and to varying extents, feel responsible for ensuring that their customers abide by particular moral norms. On the political front, the Hizbullah plays a wide variety of roles in creating leisure for the Islamic milieu, ranging from directly producing sites to co-opting existing sites to, most commonly, facilitating and supporting private entrepreneurs who abide by what are perceived to be appropriate moral standards. On the religious front, the importance of following a marja' (religious scholar), and indeed even knowledge of the term and institution, has increased considerably since the 1980s. On the economic front, leisure in south Beirut is predominantly a private sector phenomenon. Almost all the cafés and restaurants are owned and managed by private and independent entrepreneurs, often in partnership ventures.Less

Mapping Leisure and Café Styles

Lara Deeb and Mona Harb

in Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut

Prior to 2000, Dahiya had a few pizza places scattered along some of its commercial streets that functioned like the local man'oushe and fast-food stands. With the introduction of the Internet in ... More

Prior to 2000, Dahiya had a few pizza places scattered along some of its commercial streets that functioned like the local man'oushe and fast-food stands. With the introduction of the Internet in Lebanon, businesses providing access appeared across Beirut, including in Dahiya. Initially, Internet access was incorporated into the “amusement centers” where young men played pool and computer games. Eventually, some of these gaming centers became small cybercafés, providing Wi-Fi along with wired desktop computers, food, and drinks. Over time, they attracted an increasingly mixed clientele of youths. This chapter provides a geographic analysis of these new leisure sites, mapping them onto Dahiya's streets and neighborhoods, and comparing their architectural design and aesthetic features.Less

Comforting Territory, New Urban Experiences, and the Moral City

Lara Deeb and Mona Harb

in Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut

This chapter considers the ways in which pious Shi'i Muslims navigate and inhabit moral leisure places in different parts of the city. It argues that new moral leisure geographies are changing pious ... More

This chapter considers the ways in which pious Shi'i Muslims navigate and inhabit moral leisure places in different parts of the city. It argues that new moral leisure geographies are changing pious people's spatial experiences both within Dahiya and between Dahiya and Beirut. It begins with those who feel more comfortable remaining within their neighborhoods, and how this preference confines and territorially limits their spatial and leisure experiences. It then examines the urban experiences of those who prefer to venture outside the familiar to inhabit other city spaces that share their moral norms. Next, it shows how moral leisure facilitates new urban experiences in Dahiya and Beirut by promoting street life as well as public interactions. It concludes with reflections about how the city is being reshaped by the spatial practices of youths living moral leisure.Less

Good Taste, Leisure’s Moral Spaces, and Sociopolitical Change in Lebanon

Lara Deeb and Mona Harb

in Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut

The preceding chapters showed how ideas about morality, space, and place come together to create specific forms of leisure for more or less pious Shi'i Muslim residents of south Beirut. Choices about ... More

The preceding chapters showed how ideas about morality, space, and place come together to create specific forms of leisure for more or less pious Shi'i Muslim residents of south Beirut. Choices about leisure activities and places are informed by different moral rubrics, as people negotiate social norms, religious tenets, and political loyalties. Pastimes and their settings are assessed according to ideas about where they are located and how their patrons behave—ideas built on assumptions about the relationship between morality and geography in the city. Yet how and where a person hangs out is also an expression of personal taste. This chapter brings taste into the picture and discusses how Dahiya's new leisure sites and practices are valued along with how judgments about class, morality, geography, and politics work together to produce ideas about taste and social hierarchy. It concludes by thinking through the question of whether changing leisure practices and spaces can lead to broader social, political, and urban change.Less

Lebanon and Late Modernism

Robyn Creswell

in City of Beginnings

This chapter emphasizes the importance of Beirut in conditioning the historical and intellectual emergence of the modernist poetry movement, not only because of the city's suddenly central and yet ... More

This chapter emphasizes the importance of Beirut in conditioning the historical and intellectual emergence of the modernist poetry movement, not only because of the city's suddenly central and yet anomalous place in the intellectual life of the Arab world, but also for its nodal position in the global history of modernism during the early Cold War. It focuses on the antagonistic nature of intellectual exchanges during the period, particularly as seen in literary magazines and journals of opinion. If, as Robert Scholes and others have argued for the European case, “modernism begins in the magazines,” then the same is profoundly true of the Arabic movement. Intellectual life in Beirut was not so much a playground as a battleground, and this war of position extended beyond the borders of Lebanon. The debates between local intellectuals—nationalist, Marxist, and liberal—reflect the global agon between the main ideological camps of the early Cold War.Less

Global Islam and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: An Architecture of Assimilation

Kishwar Rizvi

in The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia plays an important role in the dissemination of political and religious ideology throughout the Muslim world. The Kingdom, a proponent of the Salafi Sunni doctrine, is ... More

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia plays an important role in the dissemination of political and religious ideology throughout the Muslim world. The Kingdom, a proponent of the Salafi Sunni doctrine, is legitimized by its guardianship of the holiest sites in Islam, the Kaʿba in Mecca and the holy mosque of the Prophet, Muhammad, in Medina. The government is an active patron of mosque building in Saudi Arabia and has contributed financially to the construction of mosques and Islamic schools around the world. One of the most interesting examples is the Faisal Mosque (Vedat Dalokay,1986), which King Faisal gifted to the Pakistani nation. The Muhammad al-Amin Mosque (2008) by Azmi Fakhouri in downtown Beirut may also be viewed as a diplomatic gift by the Kingdom; nonetheless, it is clearly responsive to the political and architectural history of Lebanon. On the domestic front, architects such as Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil designed mosques in Jeddah and Medina to make clear references to Mamluk architecture, but the Grand Mosque in the capital, Riyadh, eschews historicism in favor of a nativist aesthetic deriving from local Najdi architecture.Less

The ‘Fakhani Republic’

Yezid Sayigh

in Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993

The signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty posed a strategic dilemma for the PLO, which had made a sustained effort since 1973 to gain a direct role in the US-sponsored peace process and place ... More

The signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty posed a strategic dilemma for the PLO, which had made a sustained effort since 1973 to gain a direct role in the US-sponsored peace process and place Palestinian statehood on the negotiating agenda. The mainstream leadership did not relinquish its core objectives, nor did it abandon its basic assumptions about the means to attain them, but it was obliged to retrench politically. The major consequence was to reinforce the statist transformation of the PLO. The PLO had become more than a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, it was a state-inexile, with an autonomy born out of the combination it enjoyed of territorial control in Lebanon, non-extractive financial resources (Arab aid), and international recognition. This was the age of the ‘Fakhani Republic’, as the PLO headquarters area in the west Beirut neighbourhood of Fakhani was sometimes dubbed by its critics.Less

Assaulting the State-in-Exile from Within

Yezid Sayigh

in Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993

In the immediate wake of its departure from Beirut, the mainstream PLO leadership was less concerned to reassess past performance than to obtain what it saw as the political dues it had earned by ... More

In the immediate wake of its departure from Beirut, the mainstream PLO leadership was less concerned to reassess past performance than to obtain what it saw as the political dues it had earned by dint of sheer survival. The publication of the Reagan plan five days earlier indicated that the US administration had come to the conclusion that lasting stability in the region required resolution of the Palestinian problem, and the PLO and Arab states hoped to seize the opportunity. The cautious PLO response to the Reagan plan equally reflected recognition of the greatly reduced state of its bargaining power. Furthermore, an independent Palestinian state was to be established with Jerusalem as its capital. Arafat explained that this formulation made peace contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian state, but the implicit exchange was PLO willingness to recognize Israel and negotiate on the basis of UNSCR.Less

Coda

Elizabeth M. Holt

in Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel

Historians of the Arabic novel typically tell a tale of the rise of the novel and the nation. Overlooked in the process has been the centrality of finance to the early Arabic novel. Reading ... More

Historians of the Arabic novel typically tell a tale of the rise of the novel and the nation. Overlooked in the process has been the centrality of finance to the early Arabic novel. Reading serialized fiction allows for the novel form to be seen as open to its historical moment and agentive in generating the fictions that subtend it. The nation and the anticolonial movement from the first World War are in Arabic critiques of an earlier Arabic dream of a cosmopolitan Eden of empire. Tethered to maritime risk, the novel of finance would be replaced with a return to the village and its land, much of it now mortgaged.Less

Cockroach and A Good Land

Syrine Hout

in Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora

This final chapter contrasts Rawi Hage's Cockroach (2008) and Nada Awar Jarrar's A Good Land (2009). The unnamed Lebanese protagonist in Montreal is neither exilic in the sense of wishing to return ... More

This final chapter contrasts Rawi Hage's Cockroach (2008) and Nada Awar Jarrar's A Good Land (2009). The unnamed Lebanese protagonist in Montreal is neither exilic in the sense of wishing to return home nor a travelling immigrant with a homing desire. Unlike the other first-person narratives, the story of this man's war-wasted childhood and adolescence is based on a personal trauma and delivered against his will to a therapist appointed by the Canadian immigration authorities. Lebanon, never mentioned and to which no return is possible, is a haunting memory triggered in flashbacks in a cold place in which there is no possibility for self-renewal. A Good Land, by contrast, is a realist narrative of nostos, the repatriation of a young woman who had been forced to leave for Australia during the war as a teenager but is now determined to re-establish what she had lost. Its characters, belonging to multiple generations yet having all spent years abroad for personal or war-related reasons, retell different periods of Lebanese history before they all meet in post-war Beirut. Lebanon feels only like home for former immigrants-turned-repatriates if life therein is sustained by love and friendship among kindred souls.Less

Introduction

Tsolin Nalbantian

in Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own

The Introduction contextualizes the Armenian population in Lebanon. It distinguishes between Armenians who lived in Lebanon prior to the division of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of the Armenian ... More

The Introduction contextualizes the Armenian population in Lebanon. It distinguishes between Armenians who lived in Lebanon prior to the division of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, and after the establishment of French and British mandatory rule in the Levant. In addition, it outlines the ecclesiastic, class, linguistic, and political gamut of the Armenian population in Lebanon. It analyzes how Armenians organized themselves according to the villages and centers in the Ottoman Empire that they hailed from and reformed their political ideologies, affiliations, and ecclesiastic connections resulting in the establishment of mini-enclaves within Armenian-populated neighborhoods in Lebanon. The introduction also positions the book within four fields: histories of Armenians, Lebanon, the Cold War in the Middle East, and the Diaspora Studies. The innovation of linking these fields together through the themes of identification, belonging, and articulating citizenship produces fresh readings of the time period. This intervention draws attention to experiences that established scholarship does not adequately tackle, increasing the possible ways and methods to study and approach the region, its inhabitants, and historical time frame.Less

The Homeland Debate, Redux: The Political–Cultural Impact of the 1946–1949 Repatriation to Soviet Armenia

Tsolin Nalbantian

in Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon their Own

Chapter 2 deals with the 1946-1949 Soviet repatriation drive to collect all worldwide Armenians and “return” them to the ASSR and, specifically, the Lebanese Armenian political-cultural ... More

Chapter 2 deals with the 1946-1949 Soviet repatriation drive to collect all worldwide Armenians and “return” them to the ASSR and, specifically, the Lebanese Armenian political-cultural understandings of it. I explore how that initiative formed a chapter of Lebanese (and other Middle Eastern) Armenians’ renegotiation of national belonging in early post-colonial times. And although about a third of all Armenian repatriates travelled via Beirut, I also look at those who remained in Lebanon and in other countries in the Middle East. The emerging Cold War was more than a backdrop to this story. Heating up, the Cold War – and the very divergent readings of, and responses to, the repatriation initiative among Lebanese Armenians – reinforced tensions between Armenian rightists and leftists. Armenians’ response to repatriation did not simply reflect their extant political-cultural positions. Rather, repatriation sharpened those positions. Responses to repatriation echoed issues on the changing Lebanese/Syrian/Armenian identity complex at the dawn of the post-colonial nation-state. The responses to repatriation included a retelling and a reconstitution of the history of the tragedy of the genocide. They also automatically triggered questions about the location and nature of the Armenian homeland, adding fuel to the division between Dashnaks and Armenian leftists.Less

Making Armenians Lebanese: The 1957 Election and the Ensuing 1958 Conflict

Tsolin Nalbantian

in Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon their Own

Chapter 4 investigates Armenians’ stance in the 1957 elections and in the ‘general’ Lebanese and the intra-Armenian mini-civil war of 1958. Armenian parties participated in, and contributed to, ... More

Chapter 4 investigates Armenians’ stance in the 1957 elections and in the ‘general’ Lebanese and the intra-Armenian mini-civil war of 1958. Armenian parties participated in, and contributed to, political tensions in Lebanon. Simultaneously, they used their position in the Lebanese political system to jostle for power within their own community – a development that turned violent and ended only in December 1958, almost two months after the Lebanese mini-civil war had ended. This tension and violent confrontation between Armenian parties and their armed men had a crucial spatial effect: it unprecedentedly territorialized certain neighborhoods of Beirut. Whereas parts of Lebanon were organized by sects and classes, by relative contrast, it was according to political party affiliation that in 1957/1958 many Armenians of Mar Mikael, Sin el Fil, Bourj Hamoud, and Corniche el-Nahr were re-sorted and relocated, often by force. Lebanese Armenians aligned along the right-left fault lines that divided Lebanese politics and society— more than other confessions, indeed. Vice versa, the Lebanese state was Armenianized, as it were, in that it started to pay more attention to Armenian matters than before, intervening directly and by military force in Armenian neighborhoods in order to finally end the internecine Armenian confrontation.Less

The Humanitarian Imagination and the Year of the Locust: International Relief in the Wartime Eastern Mediterranean, 1914–1918

Keith David Watenpaugh

in Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism

This chapter explores the formation of the idea of the “humanitarian imagination” and how it can motivate action (or not) through the case study of the World War One–era flooding of Baghdad and ... More

This chapter explores the formation of the idea of the “humanitarian imagination” and how it can motivate action (or not) through the case study of the World War One–era flooding of Baghdad and famines and shortages in Beirut and Jerusalem. It also introduces the concept of “unstrangering.”Less

The Gentle Crusade

in The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon

This chapter contrasts European perceptions of Mount Lebanon as a mountainous refuge indomitably holding out against an Islamic despotism with local understandings of Mount Lebanon's rural world. It ... More

This chapter contrasts European perceptions of Mount Lebanon as a mountainous refuge indomitably holding out against an Islamic despotism with local understandings of Mount Lebanon's rural world. It explains that for the very reasons that the French traveler Nerval identified—the biblical landscape and the stunning beauty of the mountain chain overlooking Beirut, which appeared to be an inviolate sanctuary—Europeans viewed Mount Lebanon as an ideal site for the reformation of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter emphasizes that the cumulative presence on the land of so many Western writers, travelers, missionaries, painters, and poets heralded the dawn of a gentle crusade in Mount Lebanon. It explains that it was gentle in the sense that it was not a military expedition: it sought no territorial gain, it was actively courted by native elites, and it advanced itself primarily through the pen and paintbrush rather than the sword and musket.Less