‘Where faith and fun intersect’

Leisurely Islam: Negotiating geography and morality in Shi’ite South Beirut

Deeb, Lara and Mona Harb

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013

Pp. 286

Many people, Lebanese or otherwise, have a rather uniform image of Dahiya (south Beirut), as being poor, socially conservative, drab and even scary. In contrast, what Lara Deeb and Mona Harb discovered in researching the area’s new café culture was an amazing diversity. “New forms of moral leisure in Dahiya highlight the area as a casually lived urban space as opposed to its all-too-common sensationalised image as a ‘Hizbullah stronghold’.” (p. 27) 

This is not to imply that Hizbullah is at odds with the new trend. In fact, the party has diversified its cultural activities, and entrepreneurs closely linked to it are involved in some of the new leisure sites.

Deeb and Harb are keen observers, interpreting what might seem to be random details from the decor of cafés, restaurants and amusement parks, to the clientele’s attire and choice of time, place, companions and seating arrangements, into a coherent whole. 

Adding to their onsite observations, they analyse relevant passages of Lebanon’s recent history, providing background for the heart of their research: extensive interviews with café staff and their clientele, well as politicians, entrepreneurs and jurisprudents. Approaching the subject from these three angles, they paint a fascinating picture of a community, a neighbourhood, a vibrant youth culture, two generations of Dahiya residents and their relationship with the city and its other communities. 

Their focus is to examine how new public leisure spaces relate to ideas about morality, geography and status. In their view, Dahiya’s new cafés “allow pious youths to spatially appropriate the city, and move away from family, religious, and political authorities, opening up interesting venues for change”. (p. 207)

Just as perceptions of Dahiya reflect the particularly Lebanese intertwining of sect, politics, geography and class, so the growth of the entertainment sector there is a result of similar factors. The 2000 liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation was a seminal event for the Shiite community in particular, fuelling “both people’s desires and market possibilities for leisure”. (p. 61)

Especially the youth of an expanding middle class felt it was now okay to go out and have fun. At the same time, with the hope of peace, expatriate Lebanese Shiites returned ready to invest, and some chose to open cafés. Subsequent political polarisation across Lebanon, however, soon created new political/sectarian boundaries, and made many in Dahiya tend to stay close to home. The emerging local leisure sites made people feel safe and comfortable that their moral values would be respected, particularly the prohibition of alcohol. 

Though the authors focus on the local causes of the emergence of Dahiya’s entertainment sector, they also note that it parallels “the growth of a broader transnational Muslim consumer market where faith and fun intersect”. (p. 62)

Still, comparison of Dahiya’s new café culture with a similar phenomenon in Egypt, Iran and Turkey, reveals much about leisure in south Beirut to be very specifically Lebanese. 

While the prohibition on alcohol was a red line for the great majority, the authors found that their interlocutors among the younger generation were quite flexible on many other issues, especially when compared to the previous generation (those over thirty) who had built the Shiite movement in Lebanon and endured decades of war and instability. Deeb and Harb attribute the flexibility of youth to the “complex moral landscape” in which they live, and “the existence of multiple religious authorities, a fraught sectarian political context, class mobility, and a generation that takes religion for granted but wants to have fun”. (p. 10)

They are frequently confronted by social and moral dilemmas, such as what to do upon meeting Christian friends from work or university who suggest a café where alcohol is served. The dilemma can also be closer to home: Do you attend the wedding of a relative if you know alcohol is going to be served, or there will be dancing or singing you consider inappropriate? In explaining the flexibility of youth and their acceptance of others’ difference, the authors highlight the great popularity of the late Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadallah, who emphasised individual choice and responsibility more than the other jurisprudents to whom Shiites in Lebanon refer for guidance. 

While many from Dahiya go often to other parts of Beirut for study, work or fun, some now maintain that “one can have everything without leaving south Beirut”, an idea that “is relatively new and highlights Dahiya’s transformation from a marginalised suburb to a vibrant urban area with its own leisure sector”. (p 180)

The authors even suggest that “the most interesting urban changes in the capital today are not located in its classic centres of downtown or Ras Beirut but rather in its new centres, established through political violence, wars, and displacements, and once stigmatised as peripheries.” (p. 207)