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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

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

Introduction

Cyrus Schayegh

in Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950

This chapter sets a scene: a number of young Iranians are preparing their doctoral theses at the local university's Faculty of Medicine. Among them is Amir Faradj Khan, who has been living in France ... More

This chapter sets a scene: a number of young Iranians are preparing their doctoral theses at the local university's Faculty of Medicine. Among them is Amir Faradj Khan, who has been living in France since 1900. He has not arrived direct from Iran, but via Beirut, where he had studied at the French Medical College. He decides to stay in France for another two years, working at the Val-de-Grace Medical College following his graduation. He then embarks on a life that combines medical practice and teaching with secular political activity and high administrative service, simultaneous vocations that he pursues into old age. Amir's journey was not remarkable. Besides merchants and workers in search of trade opportunities and jobs, many left Iran in a quest for modern higher education and scientific knowledge.Less

The Nahḍa, the Press, and the Construction and Dissemination of a Radical Worldview

ilham Khuri-Makdisi

in The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914

The nahda was established between the years 1860 and 1914, and, constructed in its three main centers of Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria, reform would figure as its most dominant theme. It was a ... More

The nahda was established between the years 1860 and 1914, and, constructed in its three main centers of Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria, reform would figure as its most dominant theme. It was a geographic and linguistic module—a provincial, mostly Syro-Egyptian Arab manifestation—of a larger reformist project implemented by local rulers, administrators, and bureaucrats throughout the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century; it is also a conscious intellectual articulation of the need for reform and its manifestations by thinkers belonging to a variety of networks, groups, institutions, and intellectual traditions. The nahda was not explained monolithically and was not the monopoly of a single regional, religious, ethnic, or social category. The impetus of reform was shared by people forming a plethora of networks whose members intersected, collaborated, and shared various visions and implementations of reform.Less

Lebanon

Rebecca Hillauer

in Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmakers

Several enthusiastic and engaged young people who wanted to reclaim the image of Beirut travelled across the country, armed with a camera, to search for stories that seemed to resemble their town. ... More

Several enthusiastic and engaged young people who wanted to reclaim the image of Beirut travelled across the country, armed with a camera, to search for stories that seemed to resemble their town. They succeeded in gathering information and presented it in a film. That is the time when different filmmakers emerged in Lebanon, such as Maroun Bagdadi, Jean Chamoun, Randa Chahal, and others who led Lebanese cinema on to new adventures with freedom and audacity, despite of the war. The war that overwhelmed the country inspired Lebanese filmmakers to create different kind of films regarding the situation in Lebanon, such as Danielle Arbid, who started working on a video documentary project on Lebanese fighters. Other filmmakers are Leyla Assaf, who has made hundreds of documentary and feature films; and Randa Chabal-Sabbag who criticizes political and social power structure in her films.Less