For much of its contemporary history, Beirut has been characterised as the Paris of the Middle East, a cosmopolitan metropolis that misfortune has placed in the middle of a region otherwise hostile to the civilised pleasures of material excess, free-flowing alcohol and exposed female skin.
Of course, Beirut’s Parisian charm has tended to become less apparent during periods of mass sectarian slaughter. In the introduction to his seminal text Orientalism, the late Edward Said notes repercussions of civil conflict in Lebanon on the European consciousness:
The civil war may indeed have upset a regional landscape constructed over time by European scholars, poets, travellers and other self-appointed authorities, who, as Said argues, helped institutionalise Eurocentric prejudice, deny agency to the actual inhabitants of the romanticised exotic lands and thus facilitate imperial and colonial conquest.
The civil war did not, however, halt Orientalist traditions – something that was made quite clear in manuscripts like From Beirut to Jerusalem, unleashed to wide acclaim in 1989 by former New York Times Beirut bureau chief Thomas Friedman.
According to Friedman’s account, civil war-era Lebanon was populated by “buxom, Cleopatra-eyed Lebanese girls”, whose presence threw invading Israeli soldiers for a loop: “This was not the Sinai, filled with cross-eyed Bedouins and shoeless Egyptian soldiers”. That such caricatures were permitted to pass as insight exposes the delusional nature of Friedman’s subsequent complaint that “a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies”. (Belen Fernandez)
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The point of taking issue with such idealised odes to money and fashion is not to deny the affluence that exists in the city or the comparatively liberal nature of its society. However, the marketing of a Beirut brand of “joie de vivre” that is so blatantly equated with material wealth becomes morally problematic when we acknowledge the glaring economic disparity in the country, visible in the capital itself.
Consider, for example, the aesthetic differences between the refurbished downtown and the overcrowded and neglected Palestinian refugee camps and primarily Shia southern suburbs, where recent infrastructure projects have included the rampant flattening of apartment blocks by the Israeli air force in 2006.
Needless to say, less sanitary aspects of life in Lebanon – such as the enslaved status of many migrants employed in the domestic help sector – have no place in the portrait of Beirut as a paradise of wealth, where tantalising opportunities await foreign visitors and their pocket-books.
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[T]he representation of Beirut as a Middle Eastern Paris brimming with wealth and cleavage – in other words, a place the West can relate to on account of its fervent materialism – can also function on behalf of imperialism, eliminating as it does all context legitimising other aspects of Lebanon’s identity, like resistance to Israeli regional designs.
More here.