Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics

Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut

Lara Deeb, Mona Harb

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400848560
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How the rise of leisure is changing contemporary Lebanon South Beirut has recently become a vibrant leisure destination with a plethora of cafés and restaurants that cater to the young, fashionable, and pious. What effects have these establishments had on the moral norms, spatial practices, and urban experiences of this Lebanese community? From the diverse voices of young Shi'i Muslims searching for places to hang out, to the Hezbollah officials who want this media-savvy generation to be more politically involved, to the religious leaders worried that Lebanese youth are losing their moral compasses, Leisurely Islam provides a sophisticated and original look at leisure in the Lebanese capital.What makes a café morally appropriate? How do people negotiate morality in relation to different places? And under what circumstances might a pious Muslim go to a café that serves alcohol? Lara Deeb and Mona Harb highlight tensions and complexities exacerbated by the presence of multiple religious authorities, a fraught sectarian political context, class mobility, and a generation that takes religion for granted but wants to have fun. The authors elucidate the political, economic, religious, and social changes that have taken place since 2000, and examine leisure's influence on Lebanese sociopolitical and urban situations.Asserting that morality and geography cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another, Leisurely Islam offers a colorful new understanding of the most powerful community in Lebanon today.

1

NEW LEISURE IN SOUTH BEIRUT

In December 1999, seven months before the liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation, an amusement park opened in Dahiya. It was located along its western edge, close to the Golf Club of Lebanon and several ritzy residential areas. Its Ferris wheel was shining new and could be spotted easily while driving on the highway that linked the airport to downtown Beirut. Mona was tempted to check it out with her 2.5-year-old son who had never been to an amusement park in Lebanon. Luna Park in the seaside Manara neighborhood of municipal Beirut was not clean enough for her taste, and its rides were old and rickety, and seemed unsafe. She called a friend who lived in the eastern neighborhood of Achrafieh, and they met with their kids at Fantasy World. Both of them were happily surprised with the park’s accessibility from the highway, free parking, cleanliness, affordable prices, and wide variety of rides and attractions. They spent the afternoon comfortably on shaded benches watching their kids play. The amusement park was an island of entertainment, flanked by a highway to the west, a low-income settlement to the east, and high-end residential buildings to the north and south. Mona returned repeatedly with her son to Fantasy World, alone or with friends. In time, the rides lost their shine and the bright paint faded—but the place was always full of children of all ages, supervised by parents or domestic workers. A large restaurant with an open terrace, lush with trees and fountains, catered to families’ needs, encouraging adults to spend time and money while their kids played nearby (see figure 1.1). A few months later, in early 2000, just blocks south of Fantasy World and also close to the highway, al-Saha restaurant opened its doors. The restaurant was housed in an immense yellow limestone structure that stood out from the surrounding built environment to such a degree that some passersby took to calling it “that castle thing.” Al-Saha’s owner was quickly overwhelmed by the demand it generated and could not keep up with the customer flow; we tell the story of the restaurant’s expansion in the next chapter. The concomitant establishment of al-Saha and Fantasy World was a clear sign of new desires for leisure and entertainment in Dahiya.

FIGURE 1.1 Fantasy World amusement park

These two major sites opened in an area of the city where businesses dedicated to leisure were scarce. They represent massive financial investments in leisure that foreshadowed and inspired the plethora of cafés that less than a decade later had filled south Beirut’s streets. Before Fantasy World opened, people in Dahiya spent their free time at Beirut’s Corniche, or eagerly awaited weekend trips to their villages in South Lebanon and the Bekaa. Lower-class men might hang out and smoke argileh on street corners, and teenage guys might play computer games in dim, smoky Internet shops. The wealthy visited downtown Beirut and cafés in upscale neighborhoods like Raouche, Manara, or Verdun. There were a few gyms in the area that met the sports and exercise needs of its residents, and several of them offered indoor pools used by women during the day and men in the evening. The need to enjoy oneself did not suddenly appear for people living in south Beirut, nor were desires for leisure and fun invisible in the pious Shiʿi community before Fantasy World. There has, however, been a significant and palpable change in both how and where people have fun. Fantasy World and al-Saha are no longer exceptions; they are two among the many options that residents of Dahiya have when they decide how to spend their free time.

So why is this? Why has leisure been an arena of major social and spatial changes in south Beirut during the first decade of the twenty-first century? Where did both intensified desires for leisure and the conditions for the development of a leisure sector in Dahiya come from? The answers to these questions require a historical journey through this part of the city and the political, economic, urban, generational, and moral transformations that have impacted and been instigated by its residents, especially since 2000.¹ As we will see, the end of the Israeli occupation in 2000 marked a pivotal moment in the relationship of many Lebanese Shiʿi Muslims to leisure. National and international politics in the following years eventually led to new separations between political communities, thereby altering relationships and spatial practices, including those related to fun. A recent history of economic and social mobility for Shiʿi Lebanese came to fruition in the form of a consolidated consumerist class. A generation of youths who had been raised within an environment of religious revival and Hizbullah politics came of age. These factors have united to produce a vibrant leisure sector in Dahiya as well as a community of pious Shiʿi Muslims who seek specific sorts of fun.

These multifaceted transformations have also resulted in what we call the Islamic milieu in Lebanon. Islamic milieu is our gloss for the Arabic phrases al-hala al-islamiyya or al-saha al-islamiyya.² These phrases have no fixed, a priori meaning. The synonyms that our interlocutors frequently use for hala and saha include biʾa and jaww, meaning “environment” and “ambiance,” respectively. We choose to translate this loose concept that incorporates “state-environment-ambiance-arena” as the word milieu for several reasons. Whether referred to as the hala, saha, biʾa, or jaww, this concept simultaneously connotes the physical and symbolic spaces within which pious Shiʿi Muslims live out a particular “state of being,” the public sphere where its norms and values are debated as well as shaped, and the “state of being” itself with its continually shifting moral norms.³ Pious Shiʿi Muslims—those who consider themselves a part of the hala/saha/biʾa/jaww—are thus always participating in redefining the milieu. The milieu is continually reconstructed and reproduced by various actors, as opposed to being either an existential state or merely a context in which people live. The term milieu highlights this entanglement of physical spaces where ideas and norms are inscribed and negotiated, with the social environment constructed through those ideas and norms.

This chapter explains the history of the Islamic milieu, and describes its changing relationship to Dahiya and a new generation of pious Shiʿi Muslims. Through this history, we will come to understand how political contingency, urbanization, economic mobility, and generational shifts have combined to produce an environment ripe for the development of leisure. We also consider 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.⁴ The most visible of these changes—and our starting point for this historical journey—is of course Hizbullah’s popularity along with its incorporation into the social and spatial fabric of Dahiya and Lebanon.

HIZBULLAH IN DAHIYA AND LEBANON

FROM INCEPTION TO LIBERATION

Hizbullah is the most prominent face today of the multistranded Shiʿi mobilization that began in the late 1960s, and included a number of major actors with varying political perspectives, methods, and ideologies.⁵ One of the earliest and most important of these individuals was the charismatic cleric Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, who came to South Lebanon from Iran in 1959, and established the Supreme Islamic Shiʿi Council in 1969 and Harakat al-Mahrumin (the Movement of the Deprived) in 1974, both of which were focused on winning rights for Shiʿi Muslims within the existing structures of the Lebanese state. With the onset of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, a militia branch of the Movement of the Deprived was founded, called Amal, an acronym for afwaj al-muqawama al-lubnaniyya (the Lebanese Resistance Brigades), which also means “hope” in Arabic.⁶ Amal later developed into one of the Shiʿi Muslim political parties in Lebanon.⁷ Al-Sadr disappeared while on a trip to Libya in 1978, thus attaining powerful status as a symbol of Shiʿi righteousness and unity for both Amal and Hizbullah.

Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, who moved to Lebanon in 1952 after training at the religious schools of Najaf in Iraq, was another key figure in the Shiʿi Islamic mobilization of the late 1960s. Until 1976, Fadlallah lived and preached in Nabʿa, a poor neighborhood in the eastern suburbs of Beirut. During a particularly violent series of events in the early years of the civil war, Nabʿa was occupied by the Maronite Christian Phalange militia, and many of its Shiʿi Muslim residents, including Fadlallah, fled to the southern suburb. There Fadlallah continued teaching and expanding his grassroots religious educational and development work, emerging in the early 1980s as one of the pivotal figures in the community. He is credited by many of our interlocutors as their inspiration, and by the mid-1990s had established himself as an important marjaʿ al-taqlid (henceforth marjaʿ or jurisprudent), or “source of emulation,” in Lebanon—a status he continues to hold postmortem. This means that he was one of the jurisprudents to whom other Shiʿi Muslims could look for guidance in religious matters, as discussed further in chapter 3.

The context for these Islamically oriented mobilizations of the Lebanese Shiʿi community included the political and economic marginalization as well as disenfranchisement of Shiʿi Muslims in the Lebanese state since its inception, the perception that the Lebanese Left had failed to protect the Shiʿi community, the inspiration provided by the success of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the violence and instability of the Lebanese civil war (1975–90). Perhaps most crucial to the formation of Hizbullah in particular were two Israeli invasions of Lebanon, first in 1978 and then in 1982, when nearly a half-million people, mainly Shiʿi Muslims, were displaced from South Lebanon to Beirut and its suburbs. During the 1982 invasion, Israeli troops placed west Beirut under siege, and stood by as Christian militias massacred Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.⁸ In 1985, the Israeli army withdrew partially, but continued to occupy the southern 10 percent of Lebanon using a proxy militia called the Southern Lebanese Army until May 2000.

Hizbullah was born in 1982 as a movement of armed resistance to the Israeli invasion and occupation, though the group did not formally declare its existence until February 1985.⁹ Its Islamic Resistance (henceforth, the Resistance) eventually came to dominate the military resistance to Israel in the South, overshadowing Amal as well as leftist and other militia groups that were also fighting against the Israeli occupation. Tensions with Amal escalated to warfare in 1988, and ended with a Syria- and Iran-brokered agreement in 1989 that essentially conceded control of the southern suburb to Hizbullah. From its early days, Hizbullah was not merely a militia but instead a broader movement that built on the Islamic mobilization to develop social welfare networks and institutions in Shiʿi-majority areas of the country.

With the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, most militias either relinquished their weapons or hid them in basements and village storage sheds, and then transformed or retransformed themselves into political parties. With the blessing of most Lebanese, Hizbullah maintained its weapons in order to continue to fight the ongoing Israeli occupation in the South. The group also began transforming into a political party and participated in the first postwar elections in 1992, winning eight seats, the largest single bloc in the 128-member Parliament. Since that first election, Hizbullah has developed into a legitimate political party that works within the state, and participates in the same sorts of interparty wheeling and dealing that generally characterizes Lebanese politics.¹⁰ It has continued to carry a major bloc in Parliament and numerous elected municipal positions throughout the country. In addition, its institutions have grown such that today Hizbullah manages one of the largest, most efficient social welfare networks in the country, and is allied with private entrepreneurs who share its moral and political stances. The party also administers a vast media network, including television, radio, and print media. And since the late 1990s, it has begun to focus on cultural activities, leisure, and tourism.

Hizbullah’s popularity within Lebanon has shifted with political contingencies and events. Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure—such as the 1996 Grapes of Wrath attack on Qana during which over one hundred civilians who had taken refuge in a UN bunker were killed—generally contributed to greater national support for the Resistance. The withdrawal of Israeli troops and Israel’s proxy militia, the Southern Lebanese Army, from Lebanese territory on May 25, 2000, was understood by most Lebanese of all sects and parties as a victory for the Islamic Resistance, and fueled a high point in Hizbullah’s popularity at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Liberation, as the Israeli withdrawal is referred to in Lebanon, also marks a key moment in the development of the leisure sector in Dahiya. For many Shiʿi Muslims—especially those who supported Hizbullah, had family members fighting with the Resistance, or were from villages in the occupied South—the experience of war did not end in 1990. Reports on Hizbullah-affiliated radio and television stations shared detailed information about skirmishes in the occupied South, Resistance operations, and Israeli or Southern Lebanese Army attacks. Many people in Dahiya tuned in to these reports, and did not experience the 1990s as a time of calm in the way that their Lebanese compatriots did. For those who bore the brunt of the occupation and resistance to it, war ended in 2000. That was the moment when, in the words of many of our interlocutors, “we could breathe again.” One woman continued, “People wanted to go out again, especially youths. People wanted to be out and about. It’s natural, because we could breathe.” As she suggested, one of the effects of this newfound sense of freedom and relief was renewed desires for leisure, entertainment, and fun.¹¹ Fun was no longer felt to be frivolous, as it often seemed when reports of martyrs lost were a constant part of the media and social landscape. Opportunities for leisure were emerging, as expatriate Shiʿi Muslims started to return to Lebanon, riding on this moment of hope, and investing in the building and rebuilding of their community. The wave of expectation and anticipation that followed Liberation was short lived, however, and soon gave way to a new and newly ugly phase in Lebanese politics.

OLD WARS AND NEW SECTARIANISMS

Liberation was followed in the Lebanese political arena by calls for Hizbullah to disarm, having ostensibly fulfilled the goal of freeing Lebanon from occupation. Hizbullah’s consistent refusals were based on the premise that conflict with Israel continued, due to the continued occupation of a fifteen-square-mile border region called the Shebaa Farms, persisting low-grade and occasional cross-border skirmishes, and the detention of many Lebanese in Israeli prisons.¹² The release of many of these detainees in January 2004 further fueled the demands to disarm Hizbullah.

In 2005, after the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, these tensions came to the foreground and, for the first time in Lebanese history, began to take the form of Sunni-Shiʿi sectarian conflict. Hariri’s Sunni Muslim party, the Future Movement, now led by his son Saad, took the lead in accusing Syria of involvement in the assassination while calling for an end to Syria’s political, economic, and military presence in the country (a presence made possible at the invitation of Christian militia leaders in 1976). Hizbullah came to its ally’s defense and organized a large demonstration to “thank Syria” for its service to Lebanon. That demonstration was held on March 8, 2005, and to this day the Hizbullah-led political alliance is known as the “March 8” movement. A few days later, on March 14, an even larger demonstration demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon was held, hence the appellation “March...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Note on Language
• Introduction: Exploring Leisure, Morality, and Geography in South Beirut
• 1 New Leisure in South Beirut
• 2 Producing Islamic Fun: Hizbullah, Fadlallah, and the Entrepreneurs
• 3 Mapping Leisure and Café Styles
• 4 Flexible Morality, Respectful Choices, Smaller Transgressions
• 5 Comforting Territory, New Urban Experiences, and the Moral City
• 6 Good Taste, Leisure’s Moral Spaces, and Sociopolitical Change in Lebanon
• Appendix: Quoted Figures and Characters
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index