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This chapter examines the suicide missions (SMs) related to the Arab-Israeli conflict that took place from 1981 to December 2003. SMs are a relatively recent phenomenon in the Middle East, with only sporadic cases before 1981. In the two decades under examination, the great majority of the SMs related to the Arab-Israeli conflict took place in three geographic areas: Israel, the Occupied Territories (Gaza Strip and the West Bank), and Lebanon (primarily in the south). This concentration is largely due to the outcome of the 1967 war, the so-called Six Day War. Israel managed to sign effective peace agreements with its neighbours in the south (Egypt) and in the east (Jordan), but not in the north (Syria). Hence, a shift in the conflict towards the Occupied Territories and Lebanon, the latter squeezed between the Israeli army in the south and Syrian influence in the north.

This chapter introduces the ancient Egyptian queen Tausret, who ruled Egypt for a number of years from shortly after 1200 bce (scholarly estimates vary and range from 1209 to 1185 bce as the beginning of her reign). Far from being a transient pretender to the throne, she appears to have been universally accepted as ruler, and there is no question that her rule embraced all of Egypt. Artifacts bearing her name have also been found at sites distant from Egypt; expeditions seem to have been dispatched to the turquoise mines of Sinai during the queen's reign; and her name has been found on items discovered as far away as Lebanon to the north and Nubia in the south. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter discusses ways of dealing with the repercussions of sibling death on children, describing the case of a three-year-old boy who was grieving after his brother was killed in a battle in Lebanon. It explains that it is normal to expect long-term repercussions of sibling death, and suggests talking to children with all honesty and answering all their questions about sibling death.

Includes all relevant information on national elections held in Lebanon since its independence in 1941. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Lebanon's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

Concerns the issue of what is to be done with paramilitaries and their weapons in post‐settlement scenarios. It argues that Lebanon has lessons in this matter that are relevant for Northern Ireland. Schulze argues that the key to progress is a process that is inclusive of all groups, including the representatives of paramilitary organizations.

Oren Yiftachel argues that consociational patterns of authority among elites, the restricted state authority, and the internal boundaries for rival communal groups open up a possibility of maintaining state borders intact with high levels of democratic stability. The author focuses on three bi‐ethnic states: Lebanon from 1943 to 1985, Cyprus from 1960 to 1974, and Belgium from 1963 to 1993. Theoretically, the author brings together discussion of public policy towards ethnic groups —particularly accommodation and consociation—and the role of ethnic geographies that highlight special factors of state integrity and cohesion.

This chapter examines the European powers' military intervention in Ottoman Lebanon and Syria during the period 1860–1861. It first considers the local and international context prior to the intervention, focusing on Mount Lebanon, an autonomous administrative Ottoman entity distinct from the province of Syria, before discussing how Europeans saw themselves compared to how they portrayed Mount Lebanon's populations. It then analyzes the conditions that brought about the massacre of the Ottoman Christians in 1860, along with the European governments' reaction and the motives of their intervention. It also looks at the Paris Conference that was set up to clarify the nature and modalities of the humanitarian intervention. Finally, it explores the questions addressed by the European Commission, including the case of the thousands of refugees amassed in Beirut, and the consequences of the intervention.

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.

This chapter explains the history of the Islamic milieu, and describes its changing relationship to Dahiya and a new generation of pious Shi'i Muslims. This history will provide an understanding of how political contingency, urbanization, economic mobility, and generational shifts have combined to produce an environment ripe for the development of leisure. It also considers transnational influences on leisure, and a general sense of the infitah, or “opening up,” of Hizbullah and Dahiya as conditions for these new leisure desires and sites. The most visible of these changes is of course Hizbullah's popularity along with its incorporation into the social and spatial fabric of Dahiya and Lebanon.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter investigates the French mandate in Lebanon from 1918 to 1946. The modern history of Lebanon began in 1920, when the French, the prospective mandatory, created a state which they called Le Grand Lebanon (Greater Lebanon). Since this state had no historic unity its later development depended on whether this amalgam of Ottoman districts and religious sects could hold together and generate a sense of common nationhood. Because this was necessarily largely a political process, this chapter examines political structures and developments by focusing on the establishment of the French mandate and its background and the operation of the mandate to 1945.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed both the golden age of American Calvinism and its decline. Increasing fragmentation among Calvinistic voices as well as the rise of competition from non‐Calvinistic Protestants and Roman Catholics contributed to a vital but also chaotic theological period. A number of key Calvinist leaders published important works during this era, and public debates over theology were influenced by a number of decisive events not only within the denominations but also in public life. By the 1850s, leading voices like Horace Bushnell and Catherine Beecher were beginning to challenge the once settled principles of American Calvinist theology.

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.