Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon

The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation

Christopher Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135980153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Based on an award-winning thesis, this volume is a pioneering study of musical theatre and popular culture and its relation to the production of identity in Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century.

In the aftermath of the departure of the French from Lebanon and the civil violence of 1958, the Rahbani brothers (Asi and Mansour) staged a series of folkloric musical theatrical extravaganzas at the annual Ba'labakk festival which highlighted the talents of Asi's wife, the Lebanese diva Fairouz, arguably the most famous living Arab singer. The inclusion of these folkloric vignettes into the festival's otherwise European dominated cultural agenda created a powerful nation-building combination of what Partha Chatterjee calls the 'appropriation of the popular' and the 'classicization of tradition.'

The Rahbani project coincides with the confluence of increasing internal and external migration in Lebanon, as well as with the rapid development of mass media technology, of which the Ba'labakk festival can be seen as an extension. Employing theories of nationalism, modernity, globalism and locality, this book shows that these factors combined to give the project a potent identity-forming power.

Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon is the first study of Fairouz and the Rahbani family in English and will appeal to students and researchers in the field of Middle East studies, Popular culture and musical theatre.

1
BAALBECK AND THE RAHBANIS

Folklore, ancient history, and nationalism

At a certain point in their careers Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers had become virtually synonymous with Baalbeck’s ancient ruins and annual festival. This fact is reflected in some of Fairouz’s nicknames, such as “the star of Baalbeck” (najmat Baalbeck) and “the seventh pillar” (al-‘am

d al-s

bi‘) (W

zin 1996:20). In this chapter I begin tracing the formation of the tautological relationship between Baalbeck the site, Baalbeck the Festival, Lebanon, and Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers. Different combinations of these elements are often linked in a variety of sources. In the program to the 1998 Baalbeck Festival, the Lebanese literary critic Kh

lida Sa‘

d writes on the occasion of the return of Fairouz to Baalbeck after an absence of almost a quarter of a century:

Fairouz is a unique phenomenon who…became the symbol of Baalbeck. It is one of those rare times when an artist is transformed into a symbol for the nation…. In the darkest days she did not give up her belief that art is the most lasting face of Lebanon, nor did she lose faith in the ability of art to save the world. Thus she became a symbol of Lebanon and a sign of a desired utopian Lebanon. With this inspiration and symbolic voice she returns to the ruins of Baalbeck. We greet her return like the renewal of the promise and we hope for the resurrection of the utopian dream from its ashes.

(Sa‘

d, Kh. 1998a:125)

One concern of this chapter and Chapter 2 is to address what it means to say that this place, this Festival, and this family came to equal Lebanon.

It is at the very moment that the Rahbanis and the Baalbeck Festival are being linked, in fact, that the site itself reaches a period of peak potency as a symbol for the nation. Which nation it symbolized was a contested issue, a fact that the story of the Rahbanis’ difficult entrance into the Festival will demonstrate. I will show that the eventual metaphoric and metonymic relationship between the Rahbanis, the ruins, the Festival, and Lebanon itself was not the given that it can appear to be from the vantage-point of today

Baalbeck: whose site is it anyway?

Before Baalbeck could become a productive site in Lebanon’s post-independence nation-building process, the connection between the ruins and present-day Lebanon had to be established. This process was paradoxically facilitated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European identity searching in the region (Makdisi, U. 1998:138). Partha Chatterjee’s study of nationalism in nineteenth-century India reminds us that this phenomenon was in no way peculiar to Lebanon. If the English could lay cultural claim to ancient Greece, nineteenth-century Indian nationalists argued, could not India do the same for its Vedic age, a civilization the greatness of which had already been established by European Orientalists? This is an example of what Chatterjee terms the “classicization of tradition” (Chatterjee 1993:73).¹

The process of the classicization of traditions has been documented, with some variation, for other European colonies. Before taking up the case of Lebanon, I will refer to a few other examples. Chatterjee’s work traces how nineteenth-century European historiography of India marveled at its classical and glorious past and bemoaned its present state of decay and decline. This decline was blamed on centuries of despotic Islamic rule, a conclusion that, among other things, served as a convenient justification for colonialism (Chatterjee 1993:102). In parts of the world with Islamic majorities, the wholesale disparaging of Islam was more problematic. The requisite period of decline, in other words, had to be formulated differently. The process, however, was often virtually identical. Timothy Mitchell, in his treatment of the transplanted Levantine Christian J

rj

Zayd

n’s prolific historiographic writing on Islamic History, documents this phenomenon in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. Through his scholarly works, historical novels, school textbooks, and his highly influential magazine al-Hil

l, Zayd

n, as read by Mitchell, helps propagate the idea of a truncated Islamic golden age being followed by centuries of decline culminating in “our present backwardness” (Mitchell 1988:169). As in India, such historiography is arguably influenced by Orientalist “groundwork.” Mitchell argues, for example, that Zayd

n was influenced by works such as Gustave Le Bon’s La civilisation des Arabes (Mitchell 1988:170). This mode of writing about Egyptian and Islamic history—with some variation as to when the decline actually began—remains prevalent today (Piterberg 1997). Mitchell’s examination of Zayd

n’s works also gives us insight into another aspect of the classicization of tradition process: namely, how the colonial discourse of great classical cultural flow followed by centuries of ebb was eventually co-opted by local national elites (Mitchell 1988:169–71). Thus the same historical construct that paved the way for colonization could, ironically, do the same for independence: “You were once great and need our help to become so again,” becomes tweaked to read, “We were once great without you and can become so again.”

Egypt has an additional period that is a candidate for a former-greatness/current-decline narrative: the Pharaonic age. Some of the most influential intellectuals of early twentieth-century Egypt such as Muh

mmad Husayn Haykal, Sal

ma M

s

, and Tawf

q al-Hak

m fell under the spell of the achievements of European Egyptology The nascent Pharaonic movement was catalyzed in particular by the near confluence of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 and the 1922 discovery of the fantastically intact tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.² For the remainder of that decade, traces of this strain of Egyptian nationalism can be found in all types of writing and artistic expression (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986). Haykal, the author of Zaynab (woman’s name, 1913), arguably one of the first Arab novels,³ would eventually outline the importance of Egypt’s Pharaonic past in his literary manifesto The Literary Revolution (Thawrat al-adab, 1933) in which he states that Pharaonic History, the Nile, and its valleys

are capable of being the source of inspiration for a national literature that would depict Egypt’s past and present powerfully and truthfully and impress the spirit of her children as well as foreigners…. Thus they would know the authentic Egypt, not the Egypt that propaganda has defaced out of political, and other motivations.

(qtd. in Selim 2004:82–3)

As an example of a literary text making the link between the Pharaohs and the contemporary Egyptian peasant, Samah Selim offers the case of the French archeologist in al-Hak

m’s novel The Return of the Spirit (‘Awdat al-r

h, 1937) who compares the happily toiling Egyptian peasant to his uncomplaining and industrious Pharaonic ancestor: “We are simply unable to comprehend those feelings that united this people into a single unit, capable of carrying huge blocks of stone on their shoulders for twenty years and smili...