Beirut of the Margins - II

Even the icons which have historically defined Ashura have been reinvented to serve the needs of the present. For pious Shiite women, this pertains to the role of Sayyida Zainab (AS) from a mourner to an inspirer of revolt, which has much resonance when one looks at Shi’ite women’s role in public activism as well as ‘gender jihad’ and the resistance against Israel and the local pro-US Lebanese oligarchy. It is difficult to visualize how previously popular secular parties like the Lebanese Communist Party could have had such spectacular success at a comparative level to Shiite mobilization, having had no political or cultural icon to own, with a history of martyrdom and sacrifice to appropriate. The Sunnis, by contrast, perhaps have less of a revolutionary tradition to draw upon in the same way as Hussein (AS) and Zaynab(AS), with the possible exception of Abu Dharr (RA).

This, then, is the “living authenticated Ashura” that Lara Deeb speaks of (p. 154), which has prevented the Shiites as they exist in Lebanon from living an ossified existence, frozen in tradition. Instead, they may be seen harnessing the glorious revolutionary past for contemporary, modern needs of public activism and piety. Deeb also does well to remind her readers that ‘martyrdom operations’, firstly, were carried out only against the Israeli occupiers and secondly that these operations are not the exclusive preserve of the Shiites. In fact, in Lebanon, suicide bombings were pioneered by communist and secular groups rather than Hezbollah, as the meticulous work by Robert Pape – which Deeb doesn’t cite – has convincingly shown.

Two ways in which pious Shiite women come to terms with the public activism and piety exemplified by Sayyida Zainab (AS) are community commitment and gender jihad. Community commitment simply means that many well-to-do women – mostly middle-class – volunteer to help the destitute and poor in al-Dahiyya by providing them with their basic needs through jama’iyyas, either associated with Hezbollah or functioning independently. These voluntary organizations have sprouted up since the state abdicated its role in providing basic necessities to its citizens, wracked by war and opening up to neoliberal dictates of the IMF and World Bank and its own internal weaknesses. They are effectively replicating the role of the state in catering to the needs of the poor, war widows and orphans. Hajjeh Zahra’s powerful testimony (p. 187-191) makes clear the transformation which young, secular women (and men) like herself made from being affiliated with secular-nationalist, leftist parties to religious parties like Hezbollah, in a trend mirrored in the rest of the Muslim world from Egypt to Pakistan.

It is also important to understand that one of the key reasons why religious organizations like Hezbollah are able to tap into the poor is not just because of the impulses of humanitarianism, piety and politics discussed by Deeb but because of the social services provided free-of-cost to the poor – even to those who exaggerate their poverty – something which both the state and the traditional left are unable to do at the moment. One could argue that, based on Deeb’s discussion of the relationship between volunteers and their dependents, over time such relationships create dependency (p. 183) and prevent any form of agency to the poor themselves, much like NGOs are doing in developing countries today, replacing grassroots politics for donor handouts in a politically neutral space. Yet this is counteracted by the fact that one of the major motivations of the volunteers for working among the poor is that in supporting the latter, especially the martyrs’ families, they became part of the political resistance against Israeli aggression (p. 199-201)



However, what also cannot be denied is the fact that this kind of politics offers no remedy for combating the neoliberal depredations visited upon the Lebanese poor, short of temporary relief. Another downside is that religion and its visible accoutrements are often a determining basis for deciding membership of such volunteer organizations, e.g. the hijab (p. 206) Thus, it can be said to reinforce the appeal of religion in Lebanese society.

Gender jihad denotes the efforts that pious Shiite women are taking to reclaim their work spaces from men and in the process challenging patriarchy and male stereotypes about the former’s “ability to cooperate, be organized and to think rationally” (p. 213) More radically, it implies the ability to reinterpret religious texts which traditionally have been the preserve of male clerics. Doing so, they distinguish themselves from the so-called elite ‘subhiyya’ women.

Gender jihad denotes the efforts that pious Shiite women are taking to reclaim their work spaces from men and in the process challenging patriarchy

However this notion of enchanted modern is now being questioned by younger Shiite women who see limits to its applicability to either their private or public lives, given the often sharp divergences between the two. This ties in with the debate over the real role of religion in one’s life: should it be reduced to mere ritual or does it imply a notion of spirituality and relevance? Deeb directs our attention to another interesting question at the end of the book, namely “whether the public piety imperative has diminished since the liberation of south Lebanon in May 2000” (p. 231), then goes on to recount that on her last visit to al-Dahiyya in 2001, she was allowed to enter an Islamic school without requiring to wear an abaya and hijab. However Deeb need not be confused over this: as long as young people in the Arab-Muslim world see no real alternative to the ravages inflicted by neoliberalism, religion will continue to provide an outlet for resistance and Nasrallah, Muqtada al-Sadr and Hamas continue to be anointed as rock-stars, irrespective of the fact that religious forces once were the preferred instruments of the West to get rid of the appeals of secular-nationalism and communism in the Muslim world and it is the mixing of religion and politics by the state that has frequently led to societies becoming sectarian bloodbaths from Egypt and Algeria, and from Indonesia to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Whatever the case may be, women in the Muslim world continue to defy stereotypes, not only in their own societies but also those constructed about them by their counterparts in the West – in the name of ‘women’s liberation – whether it is a ten year old Yemeni child-bride forcing a court to annul her inhuman marriage to a man twice her age or the courageous stance of the female Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya who demands accountability from the corrupt warlords empowered by the Afghan government under US tutelage.

In the wake of just the latest tragedy to strike this resilient city, I suspect this classic study of Beirut of the margins is likely to be read and re-read, away from the gloating ‘experts’ in Paris, Washington, Riyadh and Tehran.