Grounds for change

As a new cafe culture emerges in a conservative Beirut neighbourhood, the academics Lara Deeb and Mona Harb explore the relationship between morality and geography through the coffee cup and the nargila, writes Shirine Saad

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Shirine Saad

The Dahiya area of Beirut is often described in the western press as a “Hizbollah stronghold” and by the Lebanese as the “suburbs”, near the city’s downtown areas yet conveniently tucked away from traditional elites. Lately it has been a site of recurring and uncontrollable violence: kidnappings and explosions.

But the authors of a newly published book Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shiite South Beirut, have chosen to focus on an entirely different aspect of that neighbourhood: its emerging cafe society and the relationship between leisure, religious and social morals, and the changing urban landscape.

Lara Deeb, an associate professor of anthropology at Scripps College and the author of An Enchanted Modern, and Mona Harb, an associate professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut and the author of Le Hizbollah à Beyrouth, met while conducting research in Dahiya for their doctoral theses.

They immediately clicked and began discussing a phenomenon they had noticed in the area: the new generation seemed to enjoy spending time in cafes, which had largely begun to spring up in the post-Rafik Hariri assassination era. They counted more than 75 new cafes that had opened after 2000, with most opening after 2005. The authors spent hours lingering in these cafes, observing the behaviour of their clientele and owners, speaking with Hizbollah leaders and religious authorities to explore the relationship between morality and geography framed through the lens of leisure.

“We suggest that these cafes provide new spaces for leisure that are promoting flexibility in social norms,” write the authors. “The circumstances that both new spaces and desires for leisure provoke … highlight tensions between religious and social notions about what is moral. A complex moral landscape emerges, facilitated by 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.”

While Hamra cafes such as Modca were key to revolutionary and Arab nationalist movements in the 1960s, these new cafes are independent from any political movements shaking the region, insist the writers, who also note that Lebanon is not part of the Arab Spring. Rather, they illustrate the need for a new social and economic class to indulge their desire for consumption and even flaunt its wealth.

“After [former prime minister] Hariri’s assassination [there was] new polarisation in Lebanon and a period where people weren’t leaving Dahyia as much,” explains Deeb, “and with class mobility and the emergent middle class they had to leave the area to access the lifestyle they wanted, but they couldn’t because of the political situation. So entrepreneurs decided to build cafes here. All of these things came together to trigger our research.”

These cafes are not the ones romanticised by authors and intellectuals of the cafe society of Vienna or Paris, but intriguing new hybrids inspired by international chains and adapted to local values and tastes. They do not serve alcohol or play loud music, and they welcome consumers of all ages, clothing styles and genders, and sometimes adopt a lenient attitude towards flirtation and even physical contact among unmarried couples.

“What we are seeing here is that young people knew about these dominant ideas about music and how to behave, and then they really decided for themselves how to act,” explains Deeb. “It’s an individualism in moral choice that takes these ideas much further than any religious leaders, including Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. The idea that you have an individualised choice has a lot of potential if you have an entire generation of young people who believe they can choose their moral path. You can imagine the dominant discourse fluctuating and social change happening. Dominant moral ideas shift through people in the community.”

After the liberation of south Lebanon by Hizbollah in 2000, the Shia communities of the country, including Dahiya, felt relieved, argue the writers. During that brief moment of hope, those in the community began to long for fun, away from the gloom of television and radio reports. But after the assassination of Hariri in 2005, tensions were reignited, taking the newly intensified form of Sunni-Shia sectarianism. This “fear of the other” led to the need for leisure opportunities in people’s own neighbourhoods, contributing to the rise of cafe culture in Dahiya.

The rise of a large, stable middle-class in the area, thanks to specific development efforts by Hizbollah, also lured investors and entrepreneurs seeking to cater for a new clientele’s needs. And for the new generation of inhabitants, being pious did not exclude spending money, enjoying leisurely activities and questioning the various ethical and moral values of contemporary Islam.

Deeb wanted to show that these youths had universal needs, breaking the militant and conservative taboos associated with Hizbollah – who, the authors claim, have much less control over the area than people might expect.

“Our audience is people who are working with these stereotypes,” explains Deeb. “I’m thinking of my American students who associate pious Muslims with militancy. I wanted to highlight that these are young people just like they are. They have morals just like my students do. Everyone in the world is working with an idea about morality; it is the details that differ. It’s also important in the Lebanese context to show that Dahiya is not all men holding guns.”

Rather, Dahiya is a diverse and complex neighbourhood where some cafes play music by Arab pop acts such as Haifa Wehbé, Buddha Bar-style beats, British and American rock and even serve as venues for live bands, provoking debates about the morality of playing and listening to music (particularly genres that “excite the sexual instincts”). And while consuming alcohol is a major taboo in the community, it is the subject of different interpretations, as is argileh smoking for women and interactions between unmarried couples.

These myriad ways in which Dahiya’s inhabitants navigate and rethink the urban, social, economic, religious and political landscape are key to understanding the mechanisms of social change, argue the authors. “There are very strong stereotypes in Lebanon about Dahiya and about Shia Muslims and these are stereotypes that link class and certain ideas about taste as if Dahiya was not as civilised as the rest of Beirut,” explains Deeb. “We really have to embrace the idea that everyone has the capacity to be a cultural producer. Good taste is a cultural concept and we have to open up the question of how one defines what good taste is.

“Given that Dahiya’s cafe sector developed more recently than other Beirut neighbourhoods, Dahiya is perhaps at the forefront of new trends in Lebanon rather than backwards.”

Sadly, the authors’ research ended in 2010, as the Syrian conflict ignited and the atmosphere and make-up of the city began to radically change again. “My guess is that the geographic aspects of people’s explorations have changed more than those related to morality,” says Deeb. “I would speculate that the continued political polarisation of Lebanon has had the effect of reducing people’s geographic explorations of the city, and that the recent car bombs in Dahiya, one of which was very close to two of the cafes we highlighted in the book, have heightened fears of violence in the area, and affected where people hang out.”

Shirine Saad is a New York-based editor and writer.