Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, 2011.
"Sanctioned Pleasures: Youth Negotiations of Leisure and Morality in al-Dahiya"
In "ARAB YOUTH: Social Mobilisation in Times of Risk," 2011, edited by Samir Khalaf and Roseanne Saad Khalaf.
This chapter draws the politics of morality depicted in the practices and discourses of young pious Shi'te in the Southern suburbs of Beirut who construes spaces of leisure and piety. A growing desire of combing religious moral code of conduct with fun becomes a commercial pattern of islamicizing spaces of leisure in a global consumerist society highly influenced with transnational spatial patterns.
In so doing, a young generation is generated named "more-or-less" generation that breaks the rigidity of Islamic teachings of the older "vanguard generation" through flexible interpretations in attempt to push the boundaries of moral legitimacy. In such process, they negotiate "multiple moral authorities" such as Sayed Mohamed Husayn Fadlallah that would open up a space for "individual responsibility" to judge and expand morality based on time and specific-related situations.
"Recent work on Iranian youth has tended towards the "youth as transgressive" model, casting young people as actively resisting the Islamic regime through their practices of fun, sexuality, and "breaking the rules" (Khosravi 2008, Mahdavi 2009, Varzi 2006)." (303) - "a state of imposed normality makes transgression a norm," (Varzi 2006: 124). (306) In Lebanon, pious youth tend to negotiate boundaries inducing fun and faith. Deeb and Harb argue that "youth practices and discourses of morality are flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure." (304)
And in that sense; "In the process of navigating and rewriting the boundaries of moral comportment in relation to leisure, pious Shi'a youth are contributing to the (re)production and (re)construction of an Islamic milieu in the city that also extends to other regions of the country." (304)
Deeb and Harb argue that "the emergence of this generation of pious youth provides the missing explanatory link for understanding why new practices and ideas of leisure are currently proliferating in the southern suburb of Beirut." (306)
"The power of generational shifts in producing social change
has been widely discussed and theorized from a number f perspectives. Perhaps one of the best known is the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, which popularized a notion of youth as actively constructing subcultures, particularly through commodity forms (Hebdige 1979, Hall and Jeferson 1993, others). -
Several anthropologists have recently noted that the consequences of the subsequent focus on "youth culture" as a universally applicable concept has been a fetishization of both youth as a category and of resistance, divorcing both youth and their actions from their political-economic, historical, and relational contexts (Cole 2007, Christiansen et al 2006).
Recent works that have emerged from this critique (Borneman 1992, Cole and Durham 2007, Christiansen et al 2006, Vigh 2006) often re-center Karl Mannheim's classic essay, "The Problem of Generations," and his discussion of a generation as:
1) a group of people sharing "a common location in the social and historic process" (1952: 291) and participating "in the common destiny of the the historical and social unit" (303). "Generation here is produced and defined through shared experiences and understandings of particular historical and cultural events, and through specific responses to those experiences and events (Borneman 1992, Christiansen et al 2006).
2) youth as a category and actors has to be understood in conversation with both older generations and state structures, according to Cole and Durham (2007).
3) youth as an actor and category must be understood in their negotiations of shifting moral norms and sources of moral authority (Deeb and Harb, 2011: 307).
4) youth as an actor and category must be understood in their political struggle and comradeship experiences in resilient grassroots movements during uprisings and moments of political tensions and social upheaval. (EL-Husseiny) - "rofaka' almidan"
FIRST GENERATION: The Lebanese Shi'ite Vanguard Generation
The "Islamic vanguard" generation are those whose efforts in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s led to the Lebanese Shi'a Islamic movement and its institutionalization in Lebanon. That generation often had to fight against their own parents' notion of morality - "cast by the rebelling Islamic vanguard generation as "traditional""- in order to be able to enact their new understandings of both religious and political commitment." (307)
SECOND GENERATION: A Generation of "More-or-less" Pious Youth
Shi'a youth have been raised normalizing these traditional moral traits. Yet, Shi'a youth in the southern suburb of Beirut have begun to question moral boundaries related to ideas and practices of leisure, by engaging with "multiple sources of moral authority", including their own interpretations. "While religious faith is certainly important to many young people in al-Dahiya today, and many do embrace a pious lifestyle, their definitions of that lifestyle differ from those of the vanguard generation. Specifically, it is the details of practice that are consistently debated and redefined." (308)
"More-or-less pious youth" is a generation characterized by a diversity of youth opinion and interpretation, especially on matters of leisure, facilitated by the existence of multiple sources of moral authority in the Shi'a community on Lebanon today. While they conform to certain moral standards, they are well versed in the interpretations of multiple religious scholars and authorities, and tend to "view moral standards with a greater flexibility" than did the vanguard generation. (308)
MULTIPLE MORAL AUTHORITIES
In the Shi'te community, there is a high order of marja'iyya, or hierarchical religious knowledge. While there is the Hizbollah more conservative source of reference, there has been a very popular religious scholar named Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. SInce the 1990s, Fadlallah has been a marja' al-taqlid, "source of emulation."Fadlallah popularity in guidance has been due in part to his clarity of language and pragmatism in his books and sermons. He is also popular because he believes in the need for Islam to "adapt" to the contemporary world and thinks that "interpretation" should work to facilitate young people's lifestyles whenever possible within the limitations of Islam. This is especially important in the pluralist context of Lebanon, where Fadlallah is appreciated as a Lebanese maja' in particular. As a result, he tends to be viewed as more progressive than others on a wide variety of issues.
Fadlallah consistently encourages his followers to use their "judgement and interpret situations and sometimes religious texts for themselves," a practice and call that some view as existing in constant tension with the practice of following a marji' to begin with. Fadlallah is concerned with guidance of clear haram, Islamic prohibitions, things like proscriptions on alcohol and adultery. But he leaves a wide range of flexible possibilities for "individual responsibility and interpretation" on other things related to mustawa of akhlaq or qiyam, morals or values. According to Fadlallah's son, "this level rests on the choice of the individual himself, meaning that he chooses to participate or not participate, depending on his mood, depending on his environment, on his culture, depending on his perspective on his role in life." (309, 310) There are people who, maybe don't like to go to certain places and people who don't like to go there at all, and other people no... and as long as a person doesn't do anything forbidden/muharram in these places, then there is no problem with him going there.
"This emphasis on individual responsibility is crucial to the emergence of today's pious youth as a generation that is gently pushing the boundaries of moral behavior." (310) They try to push the boundaries set by formal authorities of Hizbollah and Fadlallah. These youth are educated, literate, expectant, and media-savvy, and as a result, feel entitled and able to engage in debates about moral norms. That's why Deeb and Harb call them "more-or-less pious generation". "Their commitment to religion is by no means uniform. They take Fadlallah's teachings about individual moral responsibility to heart and believe "religiosity is something to be developed by the individual." That notion is then extended into their discussions and debates about leisure sites and practices.
LEISURE SITES: CAFES AND RESTAURANTS AS "APPROPRIATE" SPACES OF MORALITY AND PLAY, FAITH AND FUN
Since 2000, the youth have been infatuated with at least seventy-five new cafes and restaurants in the area, bustling with smartly dressed customers smoking argileh, drinking cocktail juices, eating saj manaqish, chatting and gazing, enjoying the privacy of a space hidden behind a column, or being part of the spectacle. Cafes operate also as catwalks; young women, whether muhajjaba of not, go to cafes made up and very well dressed, exhibiting their bodies. Young men show-off brand names and other external signs of distinctions - sometimes in relation to faith or politics. For example, they may wear large singe-stoned rings that contain a protective "hijab" (a slip of paper with a Qur'anic verse written on it) or they may set their mobile phones on ring tones to a speech by Sayyid Nasrallah or a party anthem - both signs associated with Hizbollah, and find appreciation by girls looking for pious youth with fun desire.
Restaurants and cafes are competent in southern suburb of Beirut are competent to the "quality standards" of Beirut with "waitstaff dressed stylishly in a ll black serve Illy brand Italian coffee along with French and Arabic pastries and hookahs. One place, the cafe is colorfully designed, with chairs and tables fitting into each other to form red, black, and white cubes, and shiny reflective floors and walls that produce a sleek, polished effect. Many young youth expressed their appreciation for the high-end services and aesthetic provided by this cafe and others like it. They find it both a "moral space" and "a quality standard aesthetic space" competent to contemporary Muslim lifestyle comportment of fun and faith.
These new leisure places themselves contribute to the reshaping of conventional boundaries and lifestyles by "introducing new social practices and providing spaces where the varied tastes and desires of their young clientele can unravel (Harb and Deeb 2009).
"Fadlallah emphasizes that beyond the clear rules on what is halal and haram - into which fall things like alcohol, halal meat, and physical intimacy between unmarried people - everything else falls into the realm of personal interpretation and has more to do with societal values than religious laws." (311)
More critically, Hizbullah has been both directly and indirectly involved in defining the relationship between play and morality. Party-run municipalities provide support to specific establishments and discourage others - by facilitating legal permits for the former and exerting pressure on the latter to redefine their business to fit within the party's ideas about moral standards. One cafe owner holds Italian soda syrups lined up on a wall behind coffee bar reported a visit by guys who :looked like Hizbullah" who seemed to be inspecting the contents of those bottles. Apparently he passed the test, as his business has been doing quite well since then. This speaks to the "indirect censorship" - led by committees resembling "neighborhood watch" groups - that takes place via unofficial boycotts of local cafes that do not fit the party's ideas about moral standards.
APPROPRIATE LICIT MUSIC (shawq vs ghara'iz)
Music conducive to dancing is understood by most youth to be forbidden by Fadlallah, Hizbullah, and many in the vanguard generation. In the last decade; official opinions in music shifted so that today Hizbullah utilizes a wide variety of musical instruments in its compositions, including electric guitar and drums, and Fadlallah emphasizes that the content of lyrics is what is important, and suggests that listeners be alert to the difference between shawq (longing or desire), which is acceptable, and ghara'iz (sexual instincts), which are unacceptable, in love songs. Yet in the absence of official regulation of music in Lebanon, "acceptability" is interpreted widely by youth, as well as by the managers and owners of the establishments that they frequent.
What constitutes inappropriate music changes depending on the time of year and on the clientele of an establishment at any given moment. One cafe owner turns the MTV channel on if the clientele appears to be likely attentive to it, but she would change the channel if other customers look more "religious" came in. Others might publicly shun pop music but listen to it secretively on their MP3 players. Similar differences emerge in relation to whether one would enter an establishment that serves alcohol or not. Time of year is also relevant, and during Ramadan or Ashura, for instance, people who might frequent restaurants with alcohol on the menu during other months cease to do so temporarily." Some youth wouldn't accept entering a restaurant serving alcohol, others do as long as there is no bar space specified for that but only served on demand, etc. "As long as the absolute red-lines are not crossed, there remains space for negotiation, movement, moods, and even day-to-day changes in activities and comportment without accusations of hypocrisy of immorality." (314)
SPACES OF MIXED GENDER PROXIMITY
Behavior is "self-policed" in al-Dahiya and "enforced through social convention" rather than a "morality police" such as those found in Iran or Saudi Arabia. In cafes and restaurants, "appropriate" behavior appears to be regulated through a "combination of self-disciplining and enforcement by waitstaff," with significant room for "flexibility of interpretation and practice." Cafe owners declared that "parents feel sage about their children coming here; because they know we make sure the ambiance stays controlled (madbuta); even if a girl is with a guy, parents know tha they are in a place where morals rule (ft akhlak) and nobody here will allow anything immoral (ghayr akhlaqi) to happen, because this girl is like our daughter." (314)
"Yet, during our visits to Dahiya we saw a good deal of mixed sex interaction that this cafe owner, and the parents to whom he refers, would no doubt find immoral. Most cafes have organized the layout of their tables to provide several intimate spaces for their customers, with dedicated floors for tables of two, private rooms, and various corners where young couples can spend time with one another relatively out of sight. We witnessed numerous couples sitting in very close proximity to one another and sometimes making out in the not-quite-private nooks and crannies of these cafes. It is also not uncommon for young couples to arrive and depart from cafes separately, highlighting their use of the space as a place to meet away from the eyes of their families and society." (314, 315)
TOLERANT ATTITUDE TO DIFFERENCE & OPENNESS
Michel Aoun ally with Hassan Nasrallah providing a mixed sectarian interaction between "non-Islamic" comportment and "morally fun" behavior. "This diversity and flexibility facilitates a certain amount if leniency on the part of many young people with regard to their own choices as well as those of their friends." (316) "Importantly, young people often cautioned against judging others' piety, and frequently warned one another against judging others and emphasized the importance of being tolerant and open to others' perspectives and lifestyles.
"Belief in the mutability of faith and religious commitment should not be mistaken for moral relativism, as such belief works in relation to the interpretations of religious scholars, one's personal trajectory, shifting community norms, and Hizbullah-related censorship." (316) This all creates the "conditions of possibility" within which people striving to live pious lives are able to enact various expectations and desires for a moral life. What is clear is that this is a generation that is bringing ots own interpretations, tastes, and desires to the Islamic milieu.
"Sanctioned Pleasures: Youth Negotiations of Leisure and Morality in al-Dahiya"
In "ARAB YOUTH: Social Mobilisation in Times of Risk," 2011, edited by Samir Khalaf and Roseanne Saad Khalaf.
This chapter draws the politics of morality depicted in the practices and discourses of young pious Shi'te in the Southern suburbs of Beirut who construes spaces of leisure and piety. A growing desire of combing religious moral code of conduct with fun becomes a commercial pattern of islamicizing spaces of leisure in a global consumerist society highly influenced with transnational spatial patterns.
In so doing, a young generation is generated named "more-or-less" generation that breaks the rigidity of Islamic teachings of the older "vanguard generation" through flexible interpretations in attempt to push the boundaries of moral legitimacy. In such process, they negotiate "multiple moral authorities" such as Sayed Mohamed Husayn Fadlallah that would open up a space for "individual responsibility" to judge and expand morality based on time and specific-related situations.
"Recent work on Iranian youth has tended towards the "youth as transgressive" model, casting young people as actively resisting the Islamic regime through their practices of fun, sexuality, and "breaking the rules" (Khosravi 2008, Mahdavi 2009, Varzi 2006)." (303) - "a state of imposed normality makes transgression a norm," (Varzi 2006: 124). (306) In Lebanon, pious youth tend to negotiate boundaries inducing fun and faith. Deeb and Harb argue that "youth practices and discourses of morality are flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure." (304)
And in that sense; "In the process of navigating and rewriting the boundaries of moral comportment in relation to leisure, pious Shi'a youth are contributing to the (re)production and (re)construction of an Islamic milieu in the city that also extends to other regions of the country." (304)
Deeb and Harb argue that "the emergence of this generation of pious youth provides the missing explanatory link for understanding why new practices and ideas of leisure are currently proliferating in the southern suburb of Beirut." (306)
"The power of generational shifts in producing social change
has been widely discussed and theorized from a number f perspectives. Perhaps one of the best known is the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, which popularized a notion of youth as actively constructing subcultures, particularly through commodity forms (Hebdige 1979, Hall and Jeferson 1993, others). -
Several anthropologists have recently noted that the consequences of the subsequent focus on "youth culture" as a universally applicable concept has been a fetishization of both youth as a category and of resistance, divorcing both youth and their actions from their political-economic, historical, and relational contexts (Cole 2007, Christiansen et al 2006).
Recent works that have emerged from this critique (Borneman 1992, Cole and Durham 2007, Christiansen et al 2006, Vigh 2006) often re-center Karl Mannheim's classic essay, "The Problem of Generations," and his discussion of a generation as:
1) a group of people sharing "a common location in the social and historic process" (1952: 291) and participating "in the common destiny of the the historical and social unit" (303). "Generation here is produced and defined through shared experiences and understandings of particular historical and cultural events, and through specific responses to those experiences and events (Borneman 1992, Christiansen et al 2006).
2) youth as a category and actors has to be understood in conversation with both older generations and state structures, according to Cole and Durham (2007).
3) youth as an actor and category must be understood in their negotiations of shifting moral norms and sources of moral authority (Deeb and Harb, 2011: 307).
4) youth as an actor and category must be understood in their political struggle and comradeship experiences in resilient grassroots movements during uprisings and moments of political tensions and social upheaval. (EL-Husseiny) - "rofaka' almidan"
FIRST GENERATION: The Lebanese Shi'ite Vanguard Generation
The "Islamic vanguard" generation are those whose efforts in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s led to the Lebanese Shi'a Islamic movement and its institutionalization in Lebanon. That generation often had to fight against their own parents' notion of morality - "cast by the rebelling Islamic vanguard generation as "traditional""- in order to be able to enact their new understandings of both religious and political commitment." (307)
SECOND GENERATION: A Generation of "More-or-less" Pious Youth
Shi'a youth have been raised normalizing these traditional moral traits. Yet, Shi'a youth in the southern suburb of Beirut have begun to question moral boundaries related to ideas and practices of leisure, by engaging with "multiple sources of moral authority", including their own interpretations. "While religious faith is certainly important to many young people in al-Dahiya today, and many do embrace a pious lifestyle, their definitions of that lifestyle differ from those of the vanguard generation. Specifically, it is the details of practice that are consistently debated and redefined." (308)
"More-or-less pious youth" is a generation characterized by a diversity of youth opinion and interpretation, especially on matters of leisure, facilitated by the existence of multiple sources of moral authority in the Shi'a community on Lebanon today. While they conform to certain moral standards, they are well versed in the interpretations of multiple religious scholars and authorities, and tend to "view moral standards with a greater flexibility" than did the vanguard generation. (308)
MULTIPLE MORAL AUTHORITIES
In the Shi'te community, there is a high order of marja'iyya, or hierarchical religious knowledge. While there is the Hizbollah more conservative source of reference, there has been a very popular religious scholar named Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. SInce the 1990s, Fadlallah has been a marja' al-taqlid, "source of emulation."Fadlallah popularity in guidance has been due in part to his clarity of language and pragmatism in his books and sermons. He is also popular because he believes in the need for Islam to "adapt" to the contemporary world and thinks that "interpretation" should work to facilitate young people's lifestyles whenever possible within the limitations of Islam. This is especially important in the pluralist context of Lebanon, where Fadlallah is appreciated as a Lebanese maja' in particular. As a result, he tends to be viewed as more progressive than others on a wide variety of issues.
Fadlallah consistently encourages his followers to use their "judgement and interpret situations and sometimes religious texts for themselves," a practice and call that some view as existing in constant tension with the practice of following a marji' to begin with. Fadlallah is concerned with guidance of clear haram, Islamic prohibitions, things like proscriptions on alcohol and adultery. But he leaves a wide range of flexible possibilities for "individual responsibility and interpretation" on other things related to mustawa of akhlaq or qiyam, morals or values. According to Fadlallah's son, "this level rests on the choice of the individual himself, meaning that he chooses to participate or not participate, depending on his mood, depending on his environment, on his culture, depending on his perspective on his role in life." (309, 310) There are people who, maybe don't like to go to certain places and people who don't like to go there at all, and other people no... and as long as a person doesn't do anything forbidden/muharram in these places, then there is no problem with him going there.
"This emphasis on individual responsibility is crucial to the emergence of today's pious youth as a generation that is gently pushing the boundaries of moral behavior." (310) They try to push the boundaries set by formal authorities of Hizbollah and Fadlallah. These youth are educated, literate, expectant, and media-savvy, and as a result, feel entitled and able to engage in debates about moral norms. That's why Deeb and Harb call them "more-or-less pious generation". "Their commitment to religion is by no means uniform. They take Fadlallah's teachings about individual moral responsibility to heart and believe "religiosity is something to be developed by the individual." That notion is then extended into their discussions and debates about leisure sites and practices.
LEISURE SITES: CAFES AND RESTAURANTS AS "APPROPRIATE" SPACES OF MORALITY AND PLAY, FAITH AND FUN
Since 2000, the youth have been infatuated with at least seventy-five new cafes and restaurants in the area, bustling with smartly dressed customers smoking argileh, drinking cocktail juices, eating saj manaqish, chatting and gazing, enjoying the privacy of a space hidden behind a column, or being part of the spectacle. Cafes operate also as catwalks; young women, whether muhajjaba of not, go to cafes made up and very well dressed, exhibiting their bodies. Young men show-off brand names and other external signs of distinctions - sometimes in relation to faith or politics. For example, they may wear large singe-stoned rings that contain a protective "hijab" (a slip of paper with a Qur'anic verse written on it) or they may set their mobile phones on ring tones to a speech by Sayyid Nasrallah or a party anthem - both signs associated with Hizbollah, and find appreciation by girls looking for pious youth with fun desire.
Restaurants and cafes are competent in southern suburb of Beirut are competent to the "quality standards" of Beirut with "waitstaff dressed stylishly in a ll black serve Illy brand Italian coffee along with French and Arabic pastries and hookahs. One place, the cafe is colorfully designed, with chairs and tables fitting into each other to form red, black, and white cubes, and shiny reflective floors and walls that produce a sleek, polished effect. Many young youth expressed their appreciation for the high-end services and aesthetic provided by this cafe and others like it. They find it both a "moral space" and "a quality standard aesthetic space" competent to contemporary Muslim lifestyle comportment of fun and faith.
These new leisure places themselves contribute to the reshaping of conventional boundaries and lifestyles by "introducing new social practices and providing spaces where the varied tastes and desires of their young clientele can unravel (Harb and Deeb 2009).
"Fadlallah emphasizes that beyond the clear rules on what is halal and haram - into which fall things like alcohol, halal meat, and physical intimacy between unmarried people - everything else falls into the realm of personal interpretation and has more to do with societal values than religious laws." (311)
More critically, Hizbullah has been both directly and indirectly involved in defining the relationship between play and morality. Party-run municipalities provide support to specific establishments and discourage others - by facilitating legal permits for the former and exerting pressure on the latter to redefine their business to fit within the party's ideas about moral standards. One cafe owner holds Italian soda syrups lined up on a wall behind coffee bar reported a visit by guys who :looked like Hizbullah" who seemed to be inspecting the contents of those bottles. Apparently he passed the test, as his business has been doing quite well since then. This speaks to the "indirect censorship" - led by committees resembling "neighborhood watch" groups - that takes place via unofficial boycotts of local cafes that do not fit the party's ideas about moral standards.
APPROPRIATE LICIT MUSIC (shawq vs ghara'iz)
Music conducive to dancing is understood by most youth to be forbidden by Fadlallah, Hizbullah, and many in the vanguard generation. In the last decade; official opinions in music shifted so that today Hizbullah utilizes a wide variety of musical instruments in its compositions, including electric guitar and drums, and Fadlallah emphasizes that the content of lyrics is what is important, and suggests that listeners be alert to the difference between shawq (longing or desire), which is acceptable, and ghara'iz (sexual instincts), which are unacceptable, in love songs. Yet in the absence of official regulation of music in Lebanon, "acceptability" is interpreted widely by youth, as well as by the managers and owners of the establishments that they frequent.
What constitutes inappropriate music changes depending on the time of year and on the clientele of an establishment at any given moment. One cafe owner turns the MTV channel on if the clientele appears to be likely attentive to it, but she would change the channel if other customers look more "religious" came in. Others might publicly shun pop music but listen to it secretively on their MP3 players. Similar differences emerge in relation to whether one would enter an establishment that serves alcohol or not. Time of year is also relevant, and during Ramadan or Ashura, for instance, people who might frequent restaurants with alcohol on the menu during other months cease to do so temporarily." Some youth wouldn't accept entering a restaurant serving alcohol, others do as long as there is no bar space specified for that but only served on demand, etc. "As long as the absolute red-lines are not crossed, there remains space for negotiation, movement, moods, and even day-to-day changes in activities and comportment without accusations of hypocrisy of immorality." (314)
SPACES OF MIXED GENDER PROXIMITY
Behavior is "self-policed" in al-Dahiya and "enforced through social convention" rather than a "morality police" such as those found in Iran or Saudi Arabia. In cafes and restaurants, "appropriate" behavior appears to be regulated through a "combination of self-disciplining and enforcement by waitstaff," with significant room for "flexibility of interpretation and practice." Cafe owners declared that "parents feel sage about their children coming here; because they know we make sure the ambiance stays controlled (madbuta); even if a girl is with a guy, parents know tha they are in a place where morals rule (ft akhlak) and nobody here will allow anything immoral (ghayr akhlaqi) to happen, because this girl is like our daughter." (314)
"Yet, during our visits to Dahiya we saw a good deal of mixed sex interaction that this cafe owner, and the parents to whom he refers, would no doubt find immoral. Most cafes have organized the layout of their tables to provide several intimate spaces for their customers, with dedicated floors for tables of two, private rooms, and various corners where young couples can spend time with one another relatively out of sight. We witnessed numerous couples sitting in very close proximity to one another and sometimes making out in the not-quite-private nooks and crannies of these cafes. It is also not uncommon for young couples to arrive and depart from cafes separately, highlighting their use of the space as a place to meet away from the eyes of their families and society." (314, 315)
TOLERANT ATTITUDE TO DIFFERENCE & OPENNESS
Michel Aoun ally with Hassan Nasrallah providing a mixed sectarian interaction between "non-Islamic" comportment and "morally fun" behavior. "This diversity and flexibility facilitates a certain amount if leniency on the part of many young people with regard to their own choices as well as those of their friends." (316) "Importantly, young people often cautioned against judging others' piety, and frequently warned one another against judging others and emphasized the importance of being tolerant and open to others' perspectives and lifestyles.
"Belief in the mutability of faith and religious commitment should not be mistaken for moral relativism, as such belief works in relation to the interpretations of religious scholars, one's personal trajectory, shifting community norms, and Hizbullah-related censorship." (316) This all creates the "conditions of possibility" within which people striving to live pious lives are able to enact various expectations and desires for a moral life. What is clear is that this is a generation that is bringing ots own interpretations, tastes, and desires to the Islamic milieu.
