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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 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.