Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut by Deeb Lara; Harb Mona

Author:Deeb, Lara; Harb, Mona
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

CONTENDING WITH WEDDING INVITATIONS

Leisure often involves invitations to events and outings. Because weddings hold especial importance for social relationships, the stakes of successfully negotiating their invitations are high. For this reason, weddings are the type of social event that best exemplifies the difficulties that the more or less pious face within this complex moral context.

Many activities that some people deem haram take place at weddings. Of these, alcohol presents less of a problem for the pious because they are less likely to have family members who would publicly serve it, and such a thing would rarely, if ever, happen these days in south Beirut or most Shiʿi villages. Dancing and songs, however, continue to create dilemmas for those who believe they are haram. Some families hold sex-segregated weddings, others play only classical or instrumental music, and still others only dabkeh, a Lebanese folk dance thought to be more acceptable provided that men and women do not dance hand in hand. Yet with the shift toward greater public piety in Dahiya in the 1980s and 1990s, even dabkeh at weddings or mawlids came under scrutiny.22 At an all-women’s mawlid that Lara attended in 2000, the conservative singer scolded women who got up to dance dabkeh, upsetting members of the local Islamic women’s organization that had sponsored the event. In 2008, we asked a waiter in Dahiya if we could bring our own music to a private wedding party in the room that his restaurant reserved for special events. He told us that only classical music would be acceptable because it would be audible in the rest of the restaurant even with the doors closed, and “it has to be sharʿi.” He followed us out, explaining apologetically, “In this area, we can’t do it, no weddings with music and dabkeh.”

When confronted with an invitation to a potentially problematic wedding, most people attended anyway because they “had no choice.” Some reframed the situation by downplaying the importance of the moral rule that was contravened, or worked to find a solution that would allow them to simultaneously uphold their social and religious values. Only two of our interlocutors absolutely refused to attend weddings. One was a young woman who rather unusually has chosen to wear an ʿabaya, a full black cloak covering her head and body.23 She didn’t attend her own brother’s wedding. “I said to him, ‘I love you, my brother, but I cannot go,’ because it was in a restaurant where I can’t go, with music and songs. I am wearing an ʿabaya; I don’t feel that I am able to do this thing.” Others echoed the idea that a woman wearing an ʿabaya should not attend weddings, again foregrounding assumptions about the relationship between a woman’s dress and her piety along with its associated behavioral restrictions. As Hadi noted, “Sometimes you will even see a woman wearing an ʿabaya there, and then when the wedding starts she’ll leave. But if you are wearing an ʿabaya, why did you come in the

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