Lara Deeb

Choosing Both Faith and Fun: Youth Negotiations of Moral Norms in South Beirut

Challenging both polarized depictions of Muslim youth and scholarship that over-privileges piety as a focal point in Muslims’ lives, this article highlights the complexity of the moral worlds of Shi‘i youth in Lebanon. Through ethnography of youth choices when going out, we argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure. This interpretive flexibility may work to redefine ideas about leisure within a framework of religiosity such that some of the rules of piety itself are perceived as flexible.

Exhibiting the "Just-Lived Past": Hizbullah's Nationalist Narratives in Transnational Political Context

On 20 July 2006, eight days into an Israeli air assault on Lebanon, Israeli shells hit the Khiam detention center, the notorious site where Lebanese resistance fighters and civilians had been imprisoned and tortured during the twenty-two-year (1978–2000) Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. A news article describing the destruction of the center was subtitled, “After being remade in recent years into a monument to political atrocity, the jail at Khiam now lies destroyed by Israeli strikes,” and noted, “Fragments of walls, concrete held erect by stubborn rebar, point mute to the sky” (Quilty 2006).

Contesting urban modernity: Moral leisure in south Beirut:

The urban scholarship on Beirut often focuses either on the reconstruction of its downtown area controlled by the private real estate company Solidere, or on its poor southern suburbs (Dahiya) dominated by the Shi‵i Islamic political party, Hizbullah. Downtown is strongly associated with an urban ‘modern’ model that generates pride for Lebanese, while Dahiya is defamed as a less modern urban space, unworthy of consideration as part of Beirut’s urban modernity. This article explores the contested urban modernity of Beirut through an investigation of the new moral leisure sector that has spread across the southern suburb. It challenges the simplistic distinction and valuation of urban spaces in Beirut, and argues for a more complex understanding of urban modernity that encompasses spaces of the city where the features that produce urban modernity are multiple and contested.

Politics, Culture, Religion: How Hizbullah is Constructing an Islamic Milieu in Lebanon

What might the wreckage of a former prison in south Lebanon that was destroyed during Israeli bombardment in 2006 have in common with a series of “family-oriented” amusement parks built by a corporate investment group? How might these sites be related to an ecotourism facility high in the mountains above Saida and the 70-some cafes and restaurants that have opened in the southern suburbs of Beirut since 2000? Aside from being fieldsites in our ongoing research on Islam and leisure in Lebanon, these places are significant to the political party Hizbullah. They tell us something about the relationship of culture to politics in the Hizbullah community, and they can be considered part of a recently emergent “Islamic milieu” in Lebanon.