Contesting urban modernity: Moral leisure in south Beirut

Introduction

The urban scholarship on Beirut often focuses either on the reconstruction of its downtown controlled by the private real-estate company Solidere, or on its poor southern suburbs, known as Dahiya, an area dominated by the Shi‵i Islamic political party, Hizbullah. This binary reading of the city echoes the depiction of Beirut’s downtown by local and international media as an ordered and clean urban space that is nicely furnished and landscaped, lined with beautifully restored heritage buildings and slickly designed new ones. Beirut’s suburbs are pictured instead as chaotic, illegal, filthy and scary sections of the city that people should avoid. ¹ Here, downtown is associated strongly with an urban ‘modern’ model that generates pride for Lebanese, and leads rulers around the Arab world and beyond to request urban design ‘like Solidere’s’. ² This perception of urban modernity has been adopted by the Lebanese national government, which chose it to be featured on promotional tourism videos where hip and happy young men and women walk along the arcade at Maarad Street in downtown Beirut, shopping in its high-end boutiques, dining in posh restaurants and dancing in nightclubs, as they enjoy life in this decidedly modern city. Of course, Dahiya’s urban environment does not qualify to be included in this footage.

In this article, we explore Beirut’s contested urban modernity by investigating the new moral leisure sector that has spread across the southern suburb. The data for this article are based on collaborative fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2009, semi-structured interviews with café owners and managers, and a detailed photographic survey of the interiors of cafés. ³ For the past decade, more than 100 cafés and restaurants have opened on Dahiya’s main streets and high-end neighbourhoods, attracting a predominantly mixed-gender young, fashionable, middle-class and more-or-less pious clientele. This new addition to the city’s leisure scene follows the significant urban changes that have marked Dahiya over the past three decades. Indeed, the southern section of Beirut has been efficiently and professionally managed by Hizbullah’s holistic network of institutions and, since 1998, by elected municipal councils that have improved the quality of urban and social services (Harb, 2010). Its neighbourhoods are home to a vibrant community actively involved in charity work, promoting a ‘pious modern’ way of life (Deeb, 2006). Dahiya also has a rich economic life activated by dynamic private enterprises catering to the needs of a large community of consumers.

Despite its diverse and lively urban attributes, Dahiya is still defamed as a less modern urban space, unworthy of representing Beirut’s urban modernity. Because of the dearth of regulated urban planning in south Beirut, Dahiya’s urban spaces have been produced in negotiated ways that allow greater opportunities for people to inhabit and appropriate neighbourhoods, according to their informal needs. This negotiated process of spatial production makes urban spaces in Dahiya acquire a plurality of urban forms marked by politics and religiosity: forms that do not fit the idea of a secular urban modern epitomised by Solidere. Similar urban processes have produced comparable places within and outside Beirut’s agglomeration. Here, our focus on Dahiya is not intended to overstate its uniqueness, but rather to explore how, in a sociopolitical context that somehow escapes the rigid regulatory order of the city centre, other urban modernities are being explored and experienced. ⁴ While similar pluralities exist elsewhere in Lebanon, Dahiya has been consistently singled out by Beirut’s elite as a special violation of their vision of urban modernity. Thus, we selected the case study of Dahiya in order to challenge this simplistic distinction and valuation of urban spaces in Beirut, and to argue 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. In so doing, we recognise modernity as a concept rooted in a plurality of experience, interpretation and understanding and within fields of power (see Deeb, 2006; Donham, 2002; Mitchell 2000, among others).

Modernity here is not an exclusive project of the West, neither is Islamism cultural resistance to western modernity or merely selectively modern (see for example, Abu-Lughod, 1998; Ghannam, 2002). It is crucial to keep in mind the important differentiation between ‘modern’ and ‘global’. Many of the spaces described below draw selectively on the English language and on a variety of transnationally circulating forms and images that are rooted in Europe or the USA. However, the selective appropriation of these discourses and images does not translate into a notion of ‘selective modernity’. To assume so misses the point that what is ‘modern’ in the first place encompasses a set of values that are produced locally; even when those values include global ideas, they are not subsidiaries of them. For this reason, we seek to understand people’s ideas and desires in relation to their answers to the question of how to be modern, and how the places they inhabit materialise those ideas and desires – in this case, the sites of leisure that they patronise. We do so without assuming a universality of ideas and desires, or that modernity has a singular trajectory. Thus, our contribution to understanding urban modernity builds on this special issue’s aim of exposing ‘the conflicts, paradoxes and politics’ underlying the concept, across time and place, through researching the ordinary and the everyday in cities (Lindner et al., Introduction).

The first section of this article describes this new leisure sector, its emergence and consolidation and the qualities that lead us to qualify it as ‘moral’. Then the sector’s aesthetic features are presented and illustrated, which we categorise for heuristic reasons into four styles: heritage, nature-garden, formal dining and contemporary. These work together to form an eclectic style that is quite cosmopolitan. Following this, eclecticism is discussed in relation to issues of urban modernity in Beirut and the variables of class, sect and taste, arguing that the moral leisure sector in Dahiya participates equally in the making of Beirut’s urban modernity.

Moral leisure

Since the May 2000 liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation, a new emphasis on leisure within the Lebanese Shi‵i community has translated into the multiplication of recreational sites and restaurants in south Beirut (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Leisure sites in south Beirut.

Liberation was an event that fuelled both people’s desires and market possibilities for leisure. The new landscape of moral leisure sites and practices was initiated by two large-scale entertainment projects: Fantasy World and Al-Saha, built in 1998 and 2000, respectively. Following the assassination of prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, internal political tensions and violence in the country escalated and re-entrenched sectarian communities in Beirut, as people felt safer in their own neighbourhoods. Simultaneously, the significant expansion of an urban Shi‵i middle class in Lebanon in the 1990s, and the post-2000 influx of return émigré capital into the community, brought new investors and consumers to the landscape. A generation of more or less pious youth, who take piety as normative while looking to consume multiple moral and geographic options in their leisure practices, provided potent kindling. ⁵ Together, these factors led to the formation of a new market, sparking the rapid development of leisure places in Dahiya in a relatively short period of time.

Two elements further enhanced these conditions: the infitah (opening-up) of Hizbullah over time, and global influences related to a transnational Muslim consumer market where faith and fun intersect. ⁶ While Beirut has long been a tourist destination for Arabs from the Gulf States, Europeans and increasing numbers of North American and Asian visitors, south Beirut’s leisure spaces aim to attract a new clientele. In addition to their local and resident Lebanese customers, Dahiya’s cafés and restaurants cater to pious Shi‵i Lebanese expatriates and tourists from Iran, as well as Gulf Arabs who shun municipal Beirut’s sinful possibilities and prefer to relax in ‘moral’ environments. ⁷ Café owners as well as Hizbullah officials confirmed this deliberate effort to construct a market for moral leisure. Some owners coordinate with travel agents to put their cafés on tour itineraries for lunch or dinner, and several Hizbullah officials have described plans to produce a map for what they called ‘religious tourism’ or ‘resistance tourism’ (Harb and Deeb, 2011).

The new cafés in Dahiya are often described as ‘shar‵i’ (‘religiously legitimate’), ⁸ ‘muhafiz’ (‘conservative’) or simply ‘munasib’ (‘appropriate’) by both their clientele and owners. What makes a café legitimate, conservative or appropriate? There is little consensus on this question, beyond the absence of alcohol and non-halal meat. Most pious people agree that such cafés should not play loud music conducive to dancing, and should not tolerate overt physical contact between members of the opposite sex; however, which music and how much physical contact are unacceptable is up for debate. A key element is the behaviour of customers; but again, where the lines are drawn varies widely, including among the pious. More broadly, there is little agreement on what kind of behaviour is appropriate, how people should dress and where the lines of absolute violation occur (some of these moral boundaries are gendered, although not as strictly as they seem to be in contexts such as Cairo; see Peterson, 2011).

Complicating definitions of legitimacy further, a pious person may feel strongly that a legitimate café must not serve alcohol, but think that it is perfectly permissible for them to go to a café that does serve alcohol, provided that they do not drink. For many people, figuring out whether a café is legitimate, conservative or appropriate has to do with judgements about the type or quality of the people who frequent it (naw‵al-nas), encompassing a range of ideas about class, sect, piety and politics. Other potential customers assume that such cafés are only located in Hizbullah-friendly areas of the city: an assumption they find comforting, as it alleviates their fears of navigating hostile territory and fulfils their desire to frequent establishments that abide by their politics (these fears and desires lead some people to avoid businesses in certain neighbourhoods of Beirut viewed as ‘anti-resistance’ and those associated with the USA, such as Starbucks). Finally, some people assess the appropriateness of a café based on its reputation, which is linked directly to their knowledge about who owns the place and their reputation. Thus, multiple characteristics combine to make a café appropriate or legitimate, including the location and class of the establishment, the cost of its menu items, a potential patron’s class, taste, religiosity, mood that day, politics and ideas about morality and factors such as time of year, who one is socialising with that evening, access to transportation, security and ideas about the quality of particular cafés and their offerings.

Most cafés in Dahiya are owned by male private entrepreneurs who quickly understood that moral leisure is a sound business venture, and established themselves as the main producers of ‘Islamic fun’. ⁹ Hizbullah’s role in the leisure sector is less powerful, despite party efforts to dominate cultural production and control behaviour in and outside cafés. ¹⁰ Besides managing their private investments, café owners act as self-proclaimed paternalistic authorities attempting to enforce particular moral tenets on their customers’ behaviour. These attempts often reflect wishful thinking, as youths are quite savvy at contesting authorities that interfere with their lifestyle choices: for example, young couples often find secluded spaces in cafés where they can sit closely and interact intimately. Additionally, and more critical for the discussion here, café owners are directly engaged in conceiving and designing the interiors of these new leisure sites, and in the production of aesthetic features that combine to form what we gloss as an ‘eclectic’ style.

The aesthetic styles of moral leisure

South Beirut’s cafés and restaurants display an extraordinary range and variety of aesthetic styles and themes. For heuristic purposes, we distinguish below four dominant styles – heritage, nature-garden, formal dining and contemporary – keeping in mind that these are themes that often work together to produce different sorts of effects and environments. These styles materialise various people’s ideas and desires about tradition, urban modernity and globalisation.

Heritage style

Heritage style interiors encompass themes of village life, earlier lifestyles and values that are often understood by people as ‘traditional’ in a positive sense (as opposed to the sorts of ‘traditions’ that need to be left behind for the sake of progress). It packages idealised versions of tradition and heritage into a nostalgic and romanticised longing for olden times, and specifically for the simpler life of the village. This utopian vision is expressed architecturally through stone or faux finished stone-like walls, wood and wrought iron, and decor in earth and muted tones. The national specificity of this village is often claimed through the juxtaposition of three arches next to one another: a feature typical of old Beirut houses and 19th-century Mount Lebanon mansions. Old or antique objects hang on the walls or sit on shelves and evoke village practices such as serving Arabic coffee in a copper pot. Furniture arrangements suggest non-urban lifestyles, although not necessarily that of a Lebanese village. Low couches upholstered in an ubiquitous red and black striped fabric are arranged around tables, accompanied by carpets on the floors and walls, and occasionally a tent-like drape hanging from a ceiling fixture. These sitting areas are redolent of ideas about being ‘Eastern’ or ‘Arab’, and resemble the sorts of couches one sees in Bedouin tourist tents in Jordan and elsewhere. ¹¹ Owners and café patrons alike refer to them as diwaniyyat.

In Dahiya, the earliest example of this decorative style is found in the Al-Saha Traditional Village (Figure 2). Al-Saha’s architecture attempts to recreate the idealised space of the village through a plethora of elements that appeal to visitors’ collective memory, and their associated representations of Arabic and Islamic heritage: in 2005 the project was awarded an architectural prize by the Arab Cities Association for its ‘daring design and its contribution to traditional architecture’. In an interview conducted with Al-Saha’s architect, Hajj Jamal Makki, in 2005, he explained that he wanted to make the customer feel as though they are in a village within the city. Hajj Jamal was inspired by the Lebanese writer Anis Freiha’s well-known novel, Isma‵ya Rida (Listen Rida), which praises genuine village values over a corrupt urban lifestyle. Makki borrowed extensively from Freiha’s book to design Al-Saha’s spaces, in addition to bringing in his own interpretations of heritage, and had accumulated hundreds of antique objects from years of travel to Malaysia, Syria and Turkey: he said that Al-Saha was the ideal space to exhibit this collection.

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Figure 2.

Al-Saha Traditional Village.

Al-Saha has become a landmark and leisure destination for people from across Lebanon as well as foreign tourists and businesspeople. It also has been a key inspiration for south Beirut’s burgeoning café scene, such as Bab al-Hara (Figure 3). ¹²

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Figure 3.

Bab al-Hara Café, entrance level.

Explanations for the appeal of escaping to an earlier time in these leisure sites often suggest that a village aesthetic functions as a foil for customer’s constructions of their own identities as urban and modern. ¹³ Another common explanation – one that is more consistent with the narratives of the café owners interviewed for this study – is the idea that heritage elements are appealing because they evoke nostalgia for a time and/or place that was, or is, better than one’s present circumstances. Here, the values placed on the urban–rural divide are reversed, and place and time are conflated in an idealisation of village life as serene and relaxed, as opposed to the city’s chaos. In the village, one can lead a good moral life in keeping with ‘family values’, whereas the city corrupts with its vice and anomie. Here, moral urban leisure seems to be seeking to resolve the tensions between immorality and the city, and operating as a conduit to a more moral urban modernity. The yearning for village life also carries meanings specific to this part of Beirut. Nostalgia and the prevalence of heritage style elements in Dahiya’s cafés may be related to the violent loss of access to village life experienced by many Shi‵i residents of this area during the long years of Israeli occupation of the south and Beqaa Valley. Moreover, a noteworthy reconfiguration of time–space is manifested through these borrowings, where the village becomes an ideal type to be imitated and materialised. ¹⁴

By drawing on generic village objects and design details such as red tiles and the triple arch, Dahiya’s cafés subvert the notion that ‘the Lebanese village’ is a Christian mountain village. By appropriating the notion of the village in contested ways, they can be seen as disputing what makes the Lebanese nation, and claiming that the ‘Lebanese village’ should incorporate the resistant village of south Lebanon. Such aesthetic claims on heritage contribute to ideas about what constitutes Beirut’s urban modernity; in addition, they are associated with the nature-garden theme found in cafés.

Nature-garden style

Nasamat is one of the few cafés in Dahiya that was built as a stand-alone structure on an empty lot, and therefore can provide ample outdoor space for patrons. In these gardens, the café owner becomes a landscape designer, choosing trees, flowers and shrubs, adding pergolas, wooden bridges and ponds, and often adding water through wells, canals and waterwheels. Workers are hired to shape natural rock and stone, to create plaster replicas of common garden elements and to build walls and paths that weave through the greenery. Furnishings are usually made of bamboo or wicker and wood, although glass tables and metal or plastic chairs make occasional appearances (Figure 4). Many cafés in Dahiya include the nature-garden style through symbolic and figurative elements, such as arrangements of artificial flowers and plants, the occasional live plant and paintings, or photographs of snow-capped and forested mountains.

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Figure 4.

Nasamat Café.

Sometimes the nature-garden style represents the relationship of Dahiya dwellers to their homes, whether evoking the village or a rooftop or balcony garden in the area – especially when nature is present in the controlled form of a garden. Here, nostalgia for the village manifests as longing for fruit from one’s own tree, or vegetables from one’s garden. (This trend is found in several homes in Dahiya and Beirut where people grow herbs and vegetables on their balconies or roofs: this is especially the case of the generation of people who experienced the city in the 1950s, a time when urban agriculture was common practice, given that several people lived in buildings or homes with gardens.) The village also represents a space of calm tranquility because it is associated with the outdoors and spending time in green spaces. ¹⁵ The emphasis on nature can be quite distinct from heritage style. Some cafés overtly associate natural spaces with Switzerland, envisioning the Alps as the ideal clean space of nature, in contrast with the pollution in Lebanon. For example, framed photos of snow-capped mountains and of edelweiss hang on Swiss Time’s walls, the café’s name suggesting Switzerland as the perfect escape from Dahiya.

Nature may represent a longing for paradise, both mundane and divine. For some pious Shi‵i Muslims, reconstructing this relationship to nature takes on connotations of the divine. There is a relationship between a particular sort of environmentalism and contemporary forms of religious ideology in Dahiya. Hizbullah scouts are taught to maintain trails and respect the natural landscape; the party’s resistance museum at Mleeta also highlights the relationships of their fighters to the environment (Harb and Deeb, 2011).

Sometimes the relaxed ambiance of the garden is combined with a large interior dining room with a more decorous ambience, often referred to by waiters and owners as the ‘restaurant’. We gloss the principal style of these rooms, as well as a few smaller cafés, as ‘formal dining style’.

Formal dining style

Swiss Time is a large, stand-alone café with an exterior garden. Its interior is divided into two sections. The more intimate enclave has walls half-panelled in dark wood, and few windows draped in brown curtains that admit dim natural light. Low wicker sofas and tables in beige and brown with bright red cushions encourage lounging. The hall is grander in style and design: about 15 large round and square dark wood tables, with heavy marble tops and high-backed carved wooden chairs, fill the space. The overall impression in the hall is sober and formal (Figure 5). The waiter confirmed this as he explained to us: ‘This is the restaurant area. It is more formal (rasmi). You can hold special events (‵azayem) here. We serve nice food. A lot of people hold their events here.’

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Figure 5.

Swiss Time Café.

Several cafés include these formal dining halls. While some maintained a simpler style, others included patterned fabrics for furniture and curtains, marble fountains, stone walls, wooden details and gypsum-textured ceilings, as well as fancy chandeliers. Curtains concealed natural light and indirect lighting created a dim and restrained atmosphere. Objects that one would find in a home – vases of artificial flowers, gold-framed paintings, ceramics and antiques – were placed around the halls, evoking an expensive living or dining room.

In middle and upper-class Lebanese households who can afford both, the living room, as opposed to the sitting room or den, is a formal space, designed for entertaining and honouring guests while displaying one’s social status and wealth. It is used only on special occasions, and otherwise sealed off from the rest of the house. Often, the woman of the house is in charge of the decor. Sofas and wooden chairs in antique styles are upholstered in cream, gold, beige, red and green fabrics with gold details. Matching curtains are heavy and multi-layered. Copper or crystal chandeliers hang from ceilings designed with floral or geometric gypsum motifs. Substantial gilded frames surround paintings and perhaps Qur‵anic verses. Vases, antique objects and crystal bowls sit on side tables. Paralleling the purpose of these living rooms, formal dining style restaurants are places where people invite others out to dinner or host receptions (for example, one owner noted that holding such events in the new restaurants was ‘a new social trend’ in Dahiya). The decor and ambience simultaneously convey comfort, formality and grandeur, providing an alternative space to the home in which one could honour guests suitably. By materialising social status and economic mobility, these interiors also display people’s ideas about urban modernity. This is especially the case for older generations of middle-class pious people; pious youth prefer more contemporary interiors to materialise their belonging to a modern urban lifestyle.

Contemporary style

Coda Café, the only 24-hour café we know of in the area, typifies contemporary style. A wood coffee bar with dark brown leather stools dominates the entrance. Behind it are displayed bottles of coffee syrups and Italian soda flavourings, looking deceptively like alcohol (Figure 6). The café’s furnishings include leather sofas and dark wood tables and chairs, in a colour scheme of browns, tans and soft red. The exception is a small, raised seating section in the back with orange-beaded fringe curtains, which one of the owners calls ‘the VIP room’. A huge painting on one wall picks up the reds and browns of the decor: it is reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock and may well be a copy of one, as the owner found it at a place that specialises in replicating work by famous artists.

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Figure 6.

Coda Café.

Contemporary café spaces feature furniture in leather, glass, steel and sometimes plastic. The strong lines and angles are accompanied by bright primary colors and, occasionally, zebra and leopard skin-patterned prints. The walls are striped or covered in photographs that resemble stylised advertising copy, often incorporating English words. They frequently have a coffee bar, softer couches that are conducive to lounging, and English-only menus. Typically these places provide free wi-fi access along, with the standard argileh (hookah pipe or sheesha) and coffee and food items.

Despite the stylistic difference, people use contemporary spaces in ways similar to heritage style or nature-garden style ones. People of all ages are to be found in all these cafés, although there are proportionately more youth in the contemporary styled ones. The coffee and food items on offer are also similar, and contemporary style spaces are just as full of argileh smoke as other café spaces. This can be explained partly by the resurgence of argileh’s popularity among youth across the Middle East beginning in the 1990s, a resurgence that paralleled its newfound hip status in the USA and France. ¹⁶

These contemporary style interiors explicitly refer to the cafés’ inclusion in a transnationally connected world that includes corporate chains, Facebook page listings and internet lists of restaurants in local areas, including Dahiya. The links to urban modernity are obvious, but more interestingly, it is through this very inclusion that south Beirut’s contemporary cafés are carving out a new stylistic niche. They are quite different from the French-style cafés that predominated in Hamra prior to the civil war, which tend to be smaller, maintain a stronger interaction with the street and serve upscale coffee, wine and food. French-style cafes are also perceived to be intellectual spaces where regulars may have impromptu discussions, with walls functioning as a rotating art gallery or visual display of the place’s history. Dahiya’s contemporary style more closely resembles the global corporate coffee shop typified by Starbucks or Gloria Jean’s. ¹⁷ Global corporate coffee shops usually provide several distinct seating areas with larger couches, and tend to be more detached from city life outside. They often serve brewed American coffee drinks and Italian coffees in dozens of flavours and varieties, as well as pre-made food for a clientele of youth, students and foreigners. Their interior spaces are generic and do not convey a particular historical narrative. Yet Dahiya’s cafés are not nearly as impersonal as this model.

Contemporary-style cafés in Dahiya represent neither the French-style café model nor the global corporate coffee shop model. Many of them incorporate contemporary style as one element among many, catering intentionally for a variety of customers. As a whole, south Beirut’s new cafés seem to be creating a new genre of coffee shop that mixes an idea of global culture with a very specific locality. In this way, they are actively participating in the construction of Beirut’s urban modernity.

The urban modernity of eclecticism

Leisure sites in Dahiya often mix and match multiple aspects of the styles discussed previously, imbuing them with a consistent sense of eclecticism. ¹⁸ Eclecticism is not new to Lebanon’s aesthetic scene, but the intense ways in which Dahiya’s cafés demonstrate it in their interior spaces may be novel. Ideas about Lebanese national folklore are nothing if not eclectic, bringing together assumptions about myriad civilisations and eras. ¹⁹ There are several cafés in other parts of the city and country that mix and match ideas and objects from various eras and places in their decor; however, none do so with the frequency and multiplicity of places in south Beirut, where an aesthetic of eclecticism is pronounced.

There are number of explanations for the greater prominence of eclecticism in café interiors and offerings in south Beirut than elsewhere in the city. Café culture in Dahiya is newer and combines an array of ideas encountered in (or imagined about) the city, the village and/or transnational contexts. South Beirut’s cafés draw from and add to earlier forms of heritage style found across Lebanon, spaces for formal dining inspired by home interiors, landscaped outdoor spaces evoking the tranquility of nature and new forms of urban modernity related to global corporate coffee chains. ²⁰ By the time that these cafés emerged, it was commonplace for middle-class consumption to include objects, styles, ideas and foods from around the world. Their pastiche, we argue, is a mark of contemporary globalisation and urban modernity. In addition, consumer desires did not find expression in a leisure sector in Dahiya until recently, allowing entrepreneurs simultaneously to work from a blank slate and respond to a plethora of diverse demands. Thus eclecticism of style might be intentional, a design meant to be inclusive, as owners deliberately cater to what they perceive to be the needs and desires of different age groups and tastes of customers in the same establishment. When café owners choose to mix heritage and garden-nature styles, they are hedging their bets. This is both a business decision and commentary on the diverse uses and customers for whom these spaces are designed. ²¹

Eclecticism should be understood as reflecting the diversity of urban and social experiences of a particular setting. In the case of Dahiya, this includes the broad range of transnational networks that Shi‵i Lebanese have forged over the past decades: networks that include both the USA and Iran in ways that belie simplistic understandings of the community regarding an interconnected world, as well as other Arab countries, Europe, Australia and West Africa. Eclecticism suggests an aesthetic shaped by the multiple experiences and transnational and historical references of residents, including class mobility, return emigration, loss of home villages, spatial practice and identification with ideas about being Lebanese, Arab and Muslim or Christian, as well as living in cities as citizens of an increasingly globalised world.

These aesthetic characteristics of the moral leisure scene significantly relate to people’s changing ideas about urban modernity, especially as pious, middle-class Muslims materialise their claims for participation in both local and global culture through café interiors. The sombre spaces of formal dining-style interiors convey propriety and status, combining local values of hospitality with the European cosmopolitanism associated with the formal dining room. Heritage style and nature-garden spaces counter assumptions about the moral corruption of the city, and encourage customers to identify with village and nation, and with village-as-nation – and thus with good moral values. Contemporary interiors highlight a more recent form of global citizenship, one that is linked to virtual communication networks and transnational corporate consumption. In these ways, urban modernity should be understood as a concept ‘‘that appreciates that people in many different places invent new ways of urban life and are enchanted by the production and circulation of novelty, innovation and new fashions; a concept that explores the wide diversity of ways in which, in Marshall Berman’s phrase, people make themselves ‘at home’ (1983: 345) in a ‘changing and perhaps modernising world’” (Robinson, 2006: 66).

However, and despite the multiple features that embed moral leisure within urban modernity, non-residents often denigrate cafés in this part of the city as having a ‘Dahiya quality’, connoting a negative valuation and ‘less’ urban modernity. The label also may be used pejoratively to qualify certain cafés elsewhere in the city (including Hamra) as ‘too Dahiya’ or ‘for Dahiya people’. Even some wealthier south Beirut dwellers, especially those who strive to disassociate themselves from the area and its people, talk about a ‘Dahiya’ quality that they think ‘devalues’ their neighbourhoods. In all these cases, the term ‘Dahiya’ is used to differentiate places as having lesser value and quality. Class mobility and participation in Beirut’s urban modernity is limited by ideas about sect, politics and religiosity, in a hierarchy in which Shi‵i Muslims rank below Sunni Muslims and Christians, the Hizbullah-led 8 March political coalition ranks below the Hariri-led 14 March one, and visible Muslim religiosity ranks below Christian religiosity, invisible religiosity and non-religiosity. Exclaiming ‘This place is so Dahiya!’ marks a person as belonging elsewhere, as being a tourist in south Beirut, and raises the status of the speaker in this social hierarchy.

One of the features that provoked labelling a café ‘Dahiya’ was the aesthetics of its decor, this consistent sense of eclecticism – whether in the diversity of patrons, the organisation of seating arrangements and services provided, the menu offerings or the decor itself – which reflects the diversity of transnational and local experience of Dahiya’s residents in an increasingly globalised world. Despite the fact that one can find eclectic spaces in other parts of the country, this eclecticism is viewed as less sophisticated by Beirut’s elite in part because it is associated with Dahiya, but also because it is often compared to standards of urban modernity cultivated in Lebanon over the past century that privilege a Eurocentric aesthetic model. ²² Yet the move away from a Eurocentric – and more specifically, Parisian – ideal for urban modernity also signals the rise of both US and global corporate aesthetic models, exemplified in coffee chains such as Starbucks as well as notions of ‘ethnic chic’. Dahiya’s leisure sector emerged at a time when mixing and matching in a postmodernist pastiche had become the mark of a particular form of global urban modernity, and the area’s eclectic style can be read in that vein. Despite the restrictions of corporate capitalism, a transnational American stylistic model is far more flexible than a bourgeois French one; it is more amenable to interpretation because it has less history, and therefore fewer longstanding conventions. Ironically, in a reckoning of cosmopolitanism that takes this broader geographic view and moves beyond Europe as the cultural centre of the world, municipal Beirut’s cosmopolitan elite represents the more provincial perspective and Dahiya’s cosmopolitan elite the avant-garde urban modern.

For Beirut’s elite, Dahiya cafés’ Arabic and Islamic features, referents and menu offerings are a key indicator of their departure from a secular Eurocentric ideal. While displays of heritage artefacts, Qur‵ans and paintings of religious scenes or mosques could be viewed within a transnational corporate model as examples of ‘ethnic chic’, this is not the perspective of the Eurocentric elite Lebanese who degrade these qualities. Their assumption, that Arabic elements reflect religiosity and lower-class status, is reinforced by the tendency of Dahiya’s waiting staff to speak Arabic rather than French or English with customers, and by the numerous spelling mistakes in the English-language menus that are available (however, it is worth noting that these characteristics are not unique to Dahiya, and that there are cafés in other parts of the city – including Gemmayzeh, an area assumed to be more ‘Eurocentric’ – that share them). Ideas about appropriate café activities also influence presumptions about the relationship between ‘Arab’ or ‘Islamic’ and class. If a café does not serve alcohol, it is assumed to be Hizbullah-related and religiously conservative by outsiders, with all the anti-urban modern connotations that those descriptors carry.

The label ‘so Dahiya’ conveys the idea that both the service and the material surroundings in south Beirut cafés are of lesser quality or cheaper. ²³ Beirut’s elite rapidly perceives the range of service and material elements that demonstrate this lesser quality, including poorly designed menus, cleaning supplies or water hoses visible in café corners, tiny and poorly designed toilets that are often missing details such as soap dispensers and low-quality building materials. Of course there are cafés and restaurants across Lebanon with these characteristics, but they share an association with a lower class of clientele and a lower urban modernity status. The fact that these features provoke the specific descriptor ‘Dahiya’ reinforces a strong association between the area’s lesser urban modernity and a particular class position. Via the political-sectarian logic of space in the country, this association extends beyond place to include people and behaviour: not only places, but also people and acts, can be labelled ‘Dahiya’ to indicate their lower-class position and their lesser urban modernity. This association persists, despite the fact that customers in Dahiya’s cafés share many characteristics of middle-class status with customers in cafés that are viewed as more urban and modern or simply ‘better’ in other neighbourhoods: characteristics including levels of wealth, education and consumption. Thus café styles, ideas about morality and ideas about geographies work closely together to produce distinctions of class disguised as distinctions of taste (Deeb and Harb, 2013).

Conclusion

Our analysis of the new moral leisure sector in Dahiya demonstrates how urban modernity in Beirut is a product of multiple dynamics of urban change and development that combine a plurality of local and global, social and spatial references. It also underscores the politics involved in qualifying certain spaces and people as included or excluded from the urban modernity project. Indeed, urban modernity is a contested arena, and there is a politics of urban modernity that must be accounted for when researching cities and people. Ideas about what qualifies as ‘legitimate’ or ‘good’ urban modernity are hegemonic, exclusive and discriminatory – as demonstrated by the Beirut case. Beyond these politics, our study of moral leisure reveals that cities and urban modernity today are being shaped not only in the conceived spaces of the dominant powers, but also in the so-called peripheries or suburbs and elsewhere. The most interesting experiences of urban modernity today are no longer located in the city’s older downtowns, but in the city’s new urban centres: areas that have been stigmatised as peripheries. These are experiences of urban modernity shaped through contestation, conflict, inequalities and displacement.

In Beirut, Dahiya is one of these new centres, where sites of moral leisure allow pious youth to spatially appropriate places, streets and neighbourhoods and facilitate their movement away from family, religious and political authorities. These sites and processes establish south Beirut as a crucial part of Beirut’s urban modernity, while opening up opportunities for continued social change. By creating urban spaces and places that make the city more inclusive of people’s different ideas about appropriate leisure, the cafés and restaurants in Dahiya are enriching people’s spatial practices of Beirut, providing them with new possibilities for navigating and experiencing the city. They are facilitating porosities between urban neighbourhoods and interaction between groups, especially mixed-gender youth, where ideas about morality, geography, society and politics are being debated and contested. Additionally, through their eclectic aesthetic style, moral leisure sites are expanding understandings of urban modernity, which are no longer limited to Solidere’s purified urban design model and western secular ideals, but instead are enriched with new, diverse and sometimes contradictory references and meanings. In addition, these contestations of the dominant urban modernity project are found in internal dissensions to prevailing moral leisure practices, expressed by the pious youth we observed in many south Beirut cafés. Through daring dress codes, pop song ringtones or boldly intimate mixed-gender interaction, youths are negotiating the boundaries of what it means to have fun and remain pious (Deeb and Harb, 2013).

In our efforts to conceptualise urban modernity, we need to remember Jennifer Robinson’s postcolonial urban theory in which she underscores that ‘all [neighbourhoods in] cities can be understood as both assembling and inventing diverse ways of being modern’ (2006: 91). Thus we need to pay special attention to incorporating the multiple practices and places in the city’s spatial production processes, and to avoid focusing exclusively on those practices and places that are the most mediatised or most visible. There, in the city’s less visible places and among its ordinary people living their everyday lives, lies the laboratory of urban modernity. There, people’s ideas and desires about living a better life, in a better place, are being negotiated and materialised.