Sites of Memory in Lebanon: The Hariri Mosque in Martyrs Square

Abstract

This chapter explores the spatial dynamics of memory in Lebanon by focusing on the Muhammad al-Amin “Hariri” mosque in Beirut’s Martyrs Square. By examining the circulation of everyday memories around the Square and mosque, Hamdan advocates an approach to the politics of memory grounded in the everyday production of space in Lebanon. He argues that although Beirutis do not evoke a common counter-memory, their many memories are otherwise united in a critique of elite politics in the country and their perceived reliance on sectarian categories of identity. This produces a fragile kind of unity and, somewhat paradoxically, hope, in the nation-building project of Lebanon. This chapter further contributes to methodological discussions of the site of memory as both lieux and milieux.

Introduction

During the summer of 2012, workers at the state-owned Electricité du Liban (EDL) went on a strike lasting months. The daily three-hour electricity cuts to which Beirutis were accustomed during daylight stretched into the darker hours of evening, with power at times failing to return until the following morning. A state-owned company, EDL split over whether to permanently hire a number of Shi’i contract workers, which would have violated state requirements for sectarian parity (El Amin 2012, p. 5). Persistent institutional breakdown and sectarian divisions outwardly suggest that Lebanon has become what many call a “failed state” (Kosmatopoulos 2011). At the same time, this, and countless similar experiences, bring Lebanese together around a set of shared expectations and frustrations, to the point that their cynicism has generated a common joke. When lights begin to flicker, or as conversation turns to politics, someone will inevitably throw up their hands in mock outrage, exclaiming “wayn al-dawla?!?”—that is, “where’s the state?”—in mock surprise over the enduring absence of state institutions and indeed, in recollection of an era when these were once felt in daily life.

Like this joke, memory in Lebanon opens the door to complex discussions of disunity, unity, and fragile state institutions. The tiny republic embodies the sort of contradictory forces afflicting many post-colonial states today, offering insights into the political dynamics of coping with the past in such contexts. Indeed, the very practice of circulating this joke evokes a unified Lebanese public at the same time as it highlights its absence as a challenge to a truly “collective” national memory. More specifically, the episodic crystallization of sectarian identities and patron-client networks colors the mechanisms through which elites and non-elites struggle over the nature and content of political community in Lebanon . Any consideration of memory in Lebanon must be placed within this ambivalent and ill-defined political context.

This chapter examines the social life of memory in Lebanon with respect to the politicized spaces of the capital, Beirut . These spaces are a crucial medium of memory and a locus for political critique, focusing specifically on the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque and tomb complex in Beirut’s Martyrs Square . By taking into account the symbolic politics of the mosque-tomb and popular critiques of the site, this chapter proposes an approach to the study of memory grounded in the everyday production of space in Lebanon. Drawing on interviews collected over three months during the summer of 2012, this paper teases out the everyday, “messy stuff of contention” that emerges in contexts beset by internal divisions and faltering state institutions, like Lebanon (Wedeen 2008, p. 69). Such an approach attempts to examine the simultaneously conflicting and collective cultures of memory without assuming the centrality of the nation-state to their production, as does much of the literature on public memory in Lebanon (Volk 2010; Vloeberghs 2010; Haugbolle 2010).

The Social and Spatial Life of Memory

Until its 1975 civil war , Lebanon appeared to Western analysts as a hopeful model for reconciling “ancient” sectarian divisions with “modern” political institutions (Binder 1966). Indeed, Lebanon’s widespread embrace of what James Ferguson calls the “myth of modernity ” earned it a regional reputation as a bastion of Arab modernity (Ferguson 1999, p. 13; Hartman and Olsaretti 2003; Kassir 2010; Khalaf 2013). But analysts and, to an extent, the Lebanese , changed their tune when Lebanon’s institutionalized confessionalism , which allocated government offices in accordance with sectarian identities, broke down in 1975. Suddenly, it was “hopelessly intertwined religion and politics” that triggered state collapse and civil war in Lebanon (Fawaz 1994, p. xiv; Mikdashi 2014; Joseph 1997; Salamey 2009). Although the brutal war that followed officially came to a close in 1991, the destruction and trauma it generated linger in the country’s landscape and evolving cultures of memory.

Exploring trauma through the lens of collective, cultural, or social memory certainly poses conceptual and methodological questions. Memory, some say, is a risky analytical metaphor, one whose fast-and-loose importation of psychological terminology (emotions, trauma, and consciousness) presupposes the solidarity of groups that are actually quite contested—chief among them the nation-state (Olick and Robbins 1998; Kansteiner 2004). Early scholarship in the study of memory certainly reads too much coherence into the phenomenon of “collective memory ” (Halbwachs 1992; Withers 1996) . Beyond this, there remains the methodological challenge of distinguishing individual memories from those that are somehow “collective” (Olick 1999; Kansteiner 2002). Others counter that the aim is, in fact, to deconstruct the nation-state by puncturing its representations of personhood; the best way to do so is to uncover the many cultures of memory that coexist at any one time via the social mechanisms through which they are performed, circulated, and challenged (Connerton 1989). Although societies as such do not remember, particular cultures of memory reach near-hegemonic status through performances, practices, and narratives enacted by state institutions, as well as by social forces. Seeking meaning in the past is thus very much a contingent outcome of political struggle.

Importantly, competing cultures of memory do not necessarily center on the project—or scale—of a nation-state . Famously unstable, Lebanon’s political struggles are mediated by localized clientalist networks, transnational capitalists, and sectarian entrepreneurs of varying political orientation and geographical horizons (Gaspard 2004; Traboulsi 2012; Hanf 2015) . Post-colonial states like Lebanon are arguably subject to unique challenges owing to the legacies of colonial institutions and, consequently, their fragile positions in the global capitalist division of labor and American hegemonic order (Agnew 2005; Gregory 2006). Added to this, conflicting cultures of memory are embedded and circulate within specific spatial contexts. Studying Lebanon’s tangled cultures of memory thus requires sensitivity to the politics behind the mechanisms of commemoration , on the one hand, and the production of space, on the other.

For geographers, this means studying memory through mechanisms of commemoration (and contestation) grounded in the spaces of everyday life. Cultural geographers in particular approach the arrangement and signification of spaces—rural and urban alike—through the concept of “landscape.” As Don Mitchell notes, “One of the purposes of landscape is to make a scene appear unworked, to make it appear fully natural. So landscape is both work and an erasure of work.” (1996, p. 6) Political struggles play out in such layered, meaning-rich landscapes. The growth of segregated sectarian suburbs at Beirut ’s edges (Bou Akar 2012; Harb al-Kak 2000), Hezbollah’s “resistance landscapes” in the rural South (Deeb and Harb 2013), and the pseudo-militarization of Beirut’s residential neighborhoods (Fregonese 2012; Fawaz et al. 2012; Seidman 2012) are thus not post-war reconstructions; they are ongoing, grounded mechanisms of socialization whose unstable hegemony shapes the contours of future political struggles in Lebanon . Indeed, the politics of categorization—what Bourdieu calls “visions of social division”—frequently plays out through subtle struggles over the meaning and form of such landscapes (Cresswell 1996; Valentine 2007; Mikdashi 2013; Nightingale 2011; Bourdieu 1991).

One particular example of this phenomenon is what Robert Kaiser calls the practice of “homeland-making .” This refers to the “spatialization of historical myth and the mythologization of space in terms of history ” to naturalize exclusive claims to territory or important symbolic locations (Kaiser 2002, p. 235). Building on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mèmoire , Kenneth Foote argues that such landscapes , as larger wholes, are particularly powerful mechanisms for bundling narratives , heroes, and, indeed, places into a coherent and lasting whole—a nation:

Human modifications of the environment are often related to the way societies wish to sustain and efface memories … the very durability of the landscape and of the memorials placed in the landscape makes these modifications effective for symbolizing and sustaining collective values over long periods of time. (Foote 2003, p. 33)

But these “are not simply arbitrary assignations of historical referents in space,” and are instead “consciously situated to connect or compete with existing nodes of collective remembering ” (Johnson 1995; Till 2003). Their political significance is strengthened via the seamless connections among narratives, practices, and the materiality of the spaces themselves. Such lieux de mèmoire —monuments and memorials, but also entire landscapes —require considerable material resources, and state institutions sometimes cannot afford or execute such projects. As a result, the hegemonic mythology of the nation-state is unevenly realized across space , with some places embodying the nation more than others.

Considering cultures of memory through place and landscape is important because they act as contested loci for circulations of memory and the social practices that are the key to its reproduction. Elites use such sites to uphold ongoing visions of social division and inequality by anchoring them in historical narratives that buttress their ideological credentials (Till 2005; Forest et al. 2004; Koch 2015). They are also sites for performances with the potential to contest these credentials. With time, they are freighted with new meanings and associations that are part of everyday life. As the recent Gezi Park protests in Turkey demonstrated, individuals challenge the state’s hegemonic reading of history by associating their contestations with the national significance of such places (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Hammond and Angell 2013). But it would be wrong to draw a clear line—as Nora does—between hegemonic spaces of the nation-state (lieux de mèmoire) and counter-hegemonic popular spaces (milieux) (Nora 1989). This is because, as we will see, lieux de mèmoire do not necessarily buttress state power, even if they draw on the nation-state for legitimacy. Moreover, contrasting these overmuch with milieux de mèmoire can reify a nostalgic view of pre-modern or popular memory as pre-political and unself-conscious. Neither is intrinsically more “real” than the other, a tension that is captured in the indeterminate meaning of sites of memory.

Lebanon poses an opportunity to bring these tensions to the forefront by escaping the wealthier, more stable states of the global north that dominate the literature on collective memory (Harvey 1979; Johnson 2007). Focusing on a “weak state” like Lebanon, we might learn more about how people negotiate the politics of memory and social division through public space . Indeed, Lebanon’s nation-building tradition is haunted by sectarian violence, colonial interventions, regional irredentism, and controversial attempts at constructing a set of shared national myths, narratives , and, indeed, symbolic places (Hartman and Olsaretti 2003). Like post-war Berlin, the landscape of Beirut is an urban palimpsest that “implies voids, illegibilities, and erasures, but it also offers a richness of traces and memories, restorations and new connections that will mark the city as lived space ” (Huyssen 2003, p. 84).

Beirut is hardly a grand imperial capital with monumental sites of memory like Paris, Berlin, or Washington, D.C. The city is rather a byword for urban disorder, failing infrastructure, and sectarian ghettoization (Fawaz et al. 2012; Seidman 2012; see also Larkin 2010 and Calame and Charlesworth 2011). In many respects, Beirut closely resembles Italy’s “impossible capital” of Rome, whose disjointed, multi-layered landscape frustrated the attempts of the new Italian upper class to impose a singular vision of Italy, as argued by Agnew (1994). Indeed, in her ethnography of Beirut , Aseel Sawalha describes the post-war urban landscape as an eclectic arrangement of “prohibited spaces … transformed into sites of nostalgia and remembrance” (2010, p. 12). Until the beginning of the 1990s, its most notable feature was the infamous “Green Line ,” a great swath of weeds, shrubs, and garbage running along the old Damascus road that split the national capital into two hostile camps. The Green Line terminated at Martyrs Square with the famous Mazzacurati statues (discussed below) that remain standing today. The square’s central, open, and heterogeneous character situated it at the heart of the city’s physical and cultural landscape , but with war, this became one of the most dangerous locations in the city. At present, it has become an object of symbolic and material contestation amid initiatives to reconstruct Beirut ’s historic core (Makdisi 1997; Khalaf 2006) . Plans to install a national monument commemorating the dead of all sides of the civil war were, at the last moment, altered to banish this symbolic gesture of reconciliation from the formerly shared national space to the Ministry of Defense in Yarzeh , a distant mountain suburb to the northeast (Young 2010; Haugbolle 2010) . Instead, the more familiar Mazzacurati martyrs statues remained.

Former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri then constructed the monumental new Muhammad al-Amin Mosque in the southwest corner of Martyrs Square . This spatialized a new mythology in the landscape of the capital, a new layer of memory that sanctified Rafiq Hariri himself (Foote 2003; Kaiser 2002). On a site located at the city center, once representing the coming together of Muslim and Christian as Lebanese and the primacy of the state, the construction of the “Hariri Mosque” (as it is known) has in some ways re-crystallized sectarian categories of division in Lebanon , while producing common ground for the critique of the country’s elite politics. In what follows, I contextualize Martyrs Square within the elite politics of its production before considering the contested significance of this place for Lebanon’s varied cultures of memory.

Martyrs, Mosques, and Monuments

Standing beneath the massive stone arcades of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque , Rafiq Hariri’s son the former Prime Minister Saad Hariri looks out onto Martyrs Square . It is Lebanese Martyrs Day 2012, and he is reading a speech before a large audience:

A few years ago, Martyr Prime Minister Rafik Hariri stood in this same square to announce in front of a huge crowd of Lebanese the commemoration of Martyrs Day. He did not know that he would become one of Lebanon’s greatest martyrs, that his grave would be in this square, and that the Lebanese who gathered around his martyrdom would make this place a symbol of freedom and independence …

… there is a thin line connecting both events. In the first event, great figures from Lebanon offered their lives for the sake of Lebanon’s independence, from al-Burj Square in May 1916 to Saint George Square in February 2005. (Now Lebanon 2012) ¹

Seven years earlier, former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated as his motorcade passed the St. George Hotel in downtown Beirut . Saad Hariri’s speech, and the site from which it was delivered, speak to the ways in which, materially and through narrative and spectacles, actors construct landscapes that naturalize distinct political visions. Saad Hariri connects his father’s death in a straightforward manner to the sacrifice of the Lebanese founding fathers. The symbolism is potent because one could actually draw such a “thin line” from the statues at the heart of Martyrs Square to the Hariri Mosque, which his father brought into existence. Moreover, Rafiq Hariri’s burial at this particular site, rather than in Sidon (his place of birth), adds to the layers of interconnected meanings that mythologize or “sanctify” Saad Hariri’s father as a Lebanese martyr (Foote 2003) and as the ultimate re-creator of post-war Lebanon .

Central to the geography of memory in Beirut, Martyrs Square is haunted (to use Karen Till’s expression) by associations with colonialism , state collapse, civil war , and reconstruction . For a roughly one-hundred-year period spanning the tail end of the nineteenth century until 1975, the square was a key site for shaping political subjectivities and developing new forms of urban lifestyle. Many scholars have chronicled this space’s evolution from a maydān—a relatively fluid social space used for arriving caravans, military drills, and, to a lesser extent, commercial activity—into a much more carefully structured and regulated sāḥa (square, plaza), one whose gated gardens and commemorative centerpieces were designed to reflect the hegemonic visions of the city’s rulers in Istanbul, Paris, and eventually Beirut itself (Khalaf 2006; Young 2010; Volk 2010; Hanssen 2005; Davie 1996; Verdeil 2011). Despite various name changes during the Ottoman period (until 1919), the French Mandate (1919–1943), and the post-independence era (1943–1975), the square consistently operated as an Arab laboratory for international consumption patterns and flows of regional expatriates and as an everyday space for commerce, consumption, socializing, and bureaucratic activity at the center of the evolving city (Khalaf 2006; Kassir 2010). Ringed by important institutions like the Beirut Municipality and the Petit Serail, by international hotels and landmark cinemas , the square’s symbolic centerpiece was a set of statues , erected in 1960. ² Although attempts to produce an icon capable of uniting Lebanon’s body politic at first proved difficult, by the “golden years” of the sixties a set of statues by Italian sculptor Marino Mazzacurati had become fixations not only in the square itself, but also in the popular media representing “Lebanon ,” like postcards, stamps, and photographs. This landscape in the heart of Beirut came to symbolize Lebanon’s upward trajectory and haloed its confessionalist institutions, casting the Lebanese state not only as the “Switzerland of the Middle East,” but also as a “democracy in an unusual and, one might think, unpromising environment” (Harrison 1967, pp. 71–72) (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1

Looking south from Martyrs Square toward the statues, Muhammad al-Amin Mosque in the background. Photo by the author

With the 1975 civil war , this meeting ground for Lebanese of different regional, religious, and class backgrounds became the front line of a capital city divided into a predominantly Christian East Beirut and a Muslim West Beirut . Straddling these polarized spaces , the ambiguity of Martyrs Square became its most dangerous attribute, with the result that it was avoided, neglected, and effectively destroyed by war’s end. By the 80s, the division of downtown Beirut seemed to mirror the “cantonization” of the entire Lebanese state, as sectarian militias fought violently to dispossess one another of villages, neighborhoods, and whole regions of the country (Calame and Charlesworth 2011; Traboulsi 2012, pp. 220–39). The 1990 Taif Agreement eventually ended open hostilities, and reconstruction of the Lebanese capital began. In one of the most important post-Taif developments, the businessman and Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri , recently returned from Saudi Arabia, assembled a number of agencies to oversee the comprehensive reconstruction of the Beirut Central District (BCD), including Martyrs Square . Hariri’s projects were quickly met with accusations of nepotism, conflict of interest, dispossession, collective amnesia , and even “Disneyfication” (Makdisi 1997; Nagel 2002; Stewart 1996; Fregonese 2012; Wilson-Goldie 2010). This was because the various reconstruction agencies, foremost among them Solidère , were in name private but in fact headed by the Prime Minister himself. One observer blithely noted, “Rafiq Hariri, the investor … has been a primary beneficiary of the economic program engineered by Rafiq Hariri , the prime minister” (Denoeux and Springborg 1998, p. 163). But alongside the commercial redevelopment of the BCD , Hariri was key to constructing the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque that now towers over the southwest corner of Martyrs Square .

Unlike most projects afoot in the BCD, the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque was not a reconstruction project in the sense of a returning to or a reflecting of a prior state of social relations, since no such structure predated the war. ³ In fact, its construction was the means for producing a new set of relationships, associations, and power dynamics atop the rubble of Martyrs Square . Among these new relations has been the mounting commodification of nostalgia for the city’s built environment. The gradual blurring of boundaries between past /nostalgia and future/amnesia is likewise reflected in Solidère’s long-running branding of Beirut as “an ancient city for the future.” In addition, Ward Vloeberghs argues that the mosque became a symbolic statement of dominance by the Hariri family over Lebanon’s Sunni community, winning over the Mufti of the Republic to the Hariri family’s side and thus discouraging Saudi influence peddling in the country. ⁴ The massive size and relative position of the structure at the city’s heart became an unavoidable icon of Sunni Islam at the heart of a city that identifies as diverse and “cosmopolitan” (Denoeux and Springborg 1998).

More generally, the family’s decision to bury Rafiq Hariri at the mosque has entangled it in Lebanon’s agonistic cultures of memory . Contestation of Hariri’s memory transcends typical Lebanese political factions, with many seeing his legacy not as “bringing back Beirut ” but as consolidating a more deeply divided Lebanon in the spaces of the capital itself. This is backed up by research on the deepening class inequality resulting from his construction projects, but can be expanded to include the deepened entanglement of individuals in webs of patron-client relations (centered on the Hariri family), his reliance on foreign capital (from Europe and the Persian Gulf) to shape the city’s growth and character, and his pro-American orientation that many believe has benefited Israel (Denoeux and Springborg 1998; Fawaz et al. 2012). The monumental mosque-tomb, and Rafiq Hariri’s legacy more broadly, have come under intense fire. As his political opponent Michel Aoun has argued, Hariri’s narrow political bloc has “killed [Rafiq] Hariri a thousand times and he is no longer Lebanon’s martyr , but only a family’s lost one to the extent that they find his name [useful]” (Now Lebanon 2011).

On the purely symbolic level, the mosque situates Lebanon within a transnational Sunni Muslim world. Its neo-Ottoman architecture, the great size of its dome (one of the largest in the Islamic world), and its symbol-rich location at Martyrs Square place Beirut in the company of historically significant Sunni metropolises like Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul, while seeming at the same time to suggest a forward-leaning, pro-Western Sunni Islam similar to that of contemporary Turkey under Recep Tayyib Erdoğan. The mosque could be compared profitably to carefully crafted sites like Mleeta and Khiam, for example, where a quite different sectarian actor, Hezbollah, attempts to “organize its understandings of history , memory , and culture and shape them into landscape projects, and establish those understandings as a dominant thaqāfa within the Islamic milieu in Lebanon” (Harb and Deeb 2011, p. 29). Far from the institutions of state power, sectarian and clientalist elites thus propagate conflicting cultures of memory through the medium of the Lebanese landscape (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2

Looking west toward the Muhammad al-Amin “Hariri” Mosque, St. George’s Maronite Cathedral (and campanile ) behind. Photo by the author

The enduring bitterness of these memories complicates the commemoration of Rafiq Hariri as a national martyr (Makdisi 1997; Khalaf 2013) . Indeed, the story told above masks a more complex knot of associations and relations in which Rafiq Hariri is entangled: as a pro-Western, pro-Saudi politician; as a recently returned expatriate Lebanese billionaire; and as a prominent sectarian figure in Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim community. Ward Vloeberghs argues, “Although the [Hariri] mosque may seem to be a religious edifice, a great deal of political, juridical, and sociological dynamics are associated with its construction.” (Vloeberghs 2012b, p. 137) Indeed, the mosque is thus not a cosmetic reflection of pre-existing social relations, but attempts to refashion Lebanon’s nationalizing myth in Hariri’s image. This imposing commemoration of Hariri’s divisive legacy is thus caught up in the distinctly rocky history of state building in the Lebanese capital. But more pronounced criticism arises when we take into account other cultures of memory rooted in everyday use of the space. It is to this topic that I now turn.

Sectarianizing Social and Urban Space

Though it remains at the city center, Martyrs Square has nevertheless entered the peripheries of social life in Beirut . Long a symbol of Lebanese independence and integration, the Mazzacurati statues at the center of Martyrs Square were in a sore state at the close of the civil war . Graffiti coated sections, bullets had gouged deep holes, and explosions had corroded the metal in some places; one of the limbs had even been stolen, some think as a prank (Volk 2010, p. 157). At the time of my 2012 fieldwork, little had changed: no plaques clarified who or what the statues represent; bullet holes still marred the smooth surface of the metal, though the statues are cleaner, if neglected-looking; and the square on which they sit seemed a small grassy island at the center of a dusty, sun-blasted parking lot. The only visitors are the occasional Lebanese expatriates who bring their children (born abroad) to pose for photos (as I once did years ago), who eventually flee the heat and emptiness of this awkward, disconnected site.

The contrast between the Martyrs Statues and the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque could not be more dramatic. At the southwest corner of the square, its blue dome and amber minarets visually dominate the statues, drawing the eye (and feet) from the public space at its center and toward the posh, extensively developed neighborhoods of Foch-Allenby , Étoile, and the Souqs. The mosque complements the visual motifs of these neighborhoods—honey-colored stone, clean lines, nostalgic architecture—but the former was realized by Hariri himself, while the latter is a product of the Solidère firm that Hariri founded. Nearby, the St. George Maronite Cathedral sits in the mosque’s shadow. Quite recently, the church began construction of a campanile (bell tower), which rises until level with the minarets of the mosque, an odd, painted-concrete addition to an otherwise stately, historic building of beige limestone. The “temporary” ḍarīḥ (tomb complex) for Rafiq Hariri remained in place after ten years, but was nearly empty. As a guard I spoke with noted, “Almost no one ever comes here … very, very few.” ⁵ In this section, I draw on semi-structured interview data to tease out the social life around the mosque and its position within Beirut ’s myriad cultures of memory.

“Only Their Own Interests”: Unregulated Urban Development

Not long after the war, Donna Stewart warned, “The failure to thoroughly address the needs of the poor is perhaps the most risky aspect of Beirut ’s reconstruction ” (Stewart 1996, p. 502). Today, it is common to meet characters like Abu Ali (who self-identified as Shi’i) , an elderly seller of kaʿk, who spends his day walking the neighborhoods of Ashrafiye, Gemmayze, and Sodeco selling sesame bread from his rickety wooden cart. He has stopped to rest in the shade of a gnarled fig tree, and we chat. “A while ago,” says Abu Ali, “before ‘the events,’ Martyrs Square was called ‘the city.’ Everyone went there. There were cinemas , restaurants, cafés … now, Solidère bought it all, and it’s all foreign [-owned] now. No one can afford it.” ⁶ Likewise, Maurice, a small business-owner, compliments the Hariri Mosque but compared Martyrs Square to distant North America, where cities have become “so expensive that only millionaires can afford to spend a night out.” ⁷

Class conflict is an important dimension through which the Lebanese understand the changing urban landscape of Beirut , as scholarship by Aseel Sawalha (2010), Heba Bou Akar (2002), and Sara Fregonese (2012) has demonstrated (see also Nagel 2002). This conflict is particularly visible in Martyrs Square owing to its former status as a public space par excellence, such that it was once synonymous with “the city.” But these encounters with the square are likewise caught up in how the Lebanese produce memories of sectarian coexistence —or conflict . Jumana runs a small gift shop in Gemmayzeh (East Beirut ), a historic neighborhood of tiled storefronts, nineteenth-century houses, and a popular, well-heeled nightlife scene. Her shop is within view of the Martyrs statues and the minarets of the Hariri Mosque. Asked how the reconstruction efforts have affected her life in this slowly gentrifying neighborhood and how she sees the mosque, she replies:

It’s magnificent [bijannin]! The people who say that [it’s a problem] are only interested in money. They want to do what, take it down? And put up what? No, they don’t think of religion, only of if there’s something in it for them … here, we don’t have [categories like] Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Druze. “To those of any religion, God will help them” [kull wāḥid ʿala dīnu allāh biʿaynū]. I love hearing the call to prayer [ādhān] from the Mosque. ⁸

I mention the campanile being built by the St. George’s cathedral . “Yes, they’re building it for bells—very nice, right? There are some who are annoyed by the bells… but why, when we enjoy the ādhān so much?” She then reflects at length on how unimportant sectarian divisions were before the civil war and the collapse of the state, which she contrasts with the present state of affairs, in which everyday acts of piety are interpreted in political ways. “There are some people,” she says, “whose [practice of] religion is just strange … bizarre logic… some only want to look out for their own interests.”

Jumana was keen to differentiate between the Lebanese state’s complete unwillingness to regulate post-war construction—which she saw as ruining Beirut , Martyrs Square included—and the Hariri Mosque. To her, the mosque represents the more authentic, pious spirit of Lebanon , which fills a void left by the state. At the same time, her narrative reflects an awareness of inter-sectarian tensions that the mosque produces through mundane observations on the soundscapes of religious structures. While “we” (in her case, Maronite Christians) enjoy the ādhān, “some” (and here she implies Muslims in general) are hypocritically offended by the bells of the nearby cathedral . Although the two monumental houses of worship evoke an image of religious harmony, cited by many as a distinctly Lebanese landscape and reinforced by their adjacency to Martyrs Square , this heavily curated landscape masks their more complex state in the present. Embedded in these sites are many overlapping cultures of memory that interweave criticism of elites with narratives of class conflict and sectarian harmony.

“Don’t Let Them Tell You Otherwise”: Sectarian Tensions

Visiting the cathedral , I am given a walking tour by Pierre, a volunteer groundskeeper. A banker working by day in the BCD , Pierre spends his weekends keeping an eye on the church, checking for necessary repairs, and showing around the occasional visitor. He is passionate, gripping my forearm for emphasis as he tells me that

This church had been here forever, before there had ever been a mosque on the spot. Before “the events,” Christians and Muslims used to come here to spend time together and pray. When they put up the Hariri Mosque, people got upset. Why? Not because it’s a mosque—we have no problem with that. Even Muslims—and all practicing Muslims should—get angry, because yes, sure, they put up a place to pray [for Muslims], but they were going against history and tradition. And it blocked the view from the church! Look, I don’t have any problems with Muslims. None of us do. ⁹

Prior to the construction of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque , Pierre asserts, Muslims and Christians had prayed together in the St. George’s Cathedral , with the site thus embodying an ethos of religious unity-in-diversity. Though difficult to verify, this statement sets the stage for what follows. He leads me to a section of wall, where he pulls my hand out of my pocket and places it onto what appears to be beige marble, veined with white. “Knock on it,” he says, knowingly. I rap it with my knuckle, and a loud hollow noise rings out. He explains:

While the church was struggling financially, Hariri gave some $12 million to build a new mosque and renovate the old ones (of which there are five). He started building on the site and said he wanted to build a minaret ; so the municipality said okay, but there’s a church next door, so be considerate. Then they went and built four minarets, and made the dome bigger—enlarged the whole thing. Just a question I’ll pose: why would the city need a new mosque if there are already five Sunni mosques downtown? What is it needed for? This is the same as what Hariri did in Sidon . But you mustn’t think we’re building this [the tower] because of all this … as Christians we’re supposed to live peacefully with others. Everyone knows it. ¹⁰

Pierre’s story highlights the role of material resources in mediating the mythologization of space . He blames the Beirut municipality for its unwillingness to confront the powerful Hariri family through regulation, or at least fund the church’s efforts to rebuild. To this end, he contrasts the St. George Cathedral , which was forced to install faux-marble plaster walls due to lack of funds, with the Hariri Mosque, which he views as excessive and out of place. But while Pierre sets the mosque in opposition to sectarian harmony, he does not deny such projects a place in Lebanon. Rather, he argues that there is a folk geography of sectarian memory, local distributions of such sites that are appropriate to a given context. For Hariri to build the Bahaa’ al-Din Hariri Mosque in Sidon was thus innocuous. But constructing on such a scale in Martyrs Square , in “cosmopolitan” Beirut , and beside a church no less, disrupted what Pierre saw as the proper symbolic arrangement of the city’s landscape . With the added element of his burial on site, the mosque posed what Vloeberghs calls “an urban, spatial expression of ongoing political contest” (Vloeberghs 2012a, p. 89).

Rima identifies as Sunni Muslim (like Hariri), but not practicing, and her curiosity is aroused by my questions about the city’s transformations in the post-war era. “Of course people don’t like [the mosque], they say it’s too big, et cetera … but there had always been a mosque there. People mention the church’s view, so now you see this thing … [She makes a raised, expansive gesture with her arms and smirks] that they are building.” “You mean the bell tower?” I ask. “Yes,” she responds, “and it’s definitely a reaction to the Hariri mosque. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.” ¹¹ Contrary to Rima’s account, there had not been a mosque beside the church, though there had been plans to construct one (Vloeberghs 2010, pp. 275–345). Despite this, Rima is cynical enough to interpret the mosque through sectarian categories, and is more amused by the competition among Lebanon’s elites for skyline than interested in defending Hariri’s legacy. Mahmud, another self-identified Sunni, runs a furun (bakery) near Martyrs Square . He is surly but agrees with Rima in spirit: “I think he put it there for the tourists, to show them that Islam can be developed (mutaṭawwar), and that’s why he built it like something out of Istanbul. But very few people go there.” ¹² Whatever their background, my interlocutors saw in the mosque the perpetuation of divisive elite narratives masked in the commemoration of a particular figure. Yet all contrasted this with layered memories of Martyrs Square as a space once open to all.

The “Real” Monument

This contrast became most clear when I spoke with Claudette, a Greek Orthodox expatriate who recently returned for the summer. Discussing Martyrs Square , she stated:

People just don’t notice. They don’t notice. Now when I see a monument, or whatever, I think two things: is its message good, and does it represent me? Take for example the Hariri Mosque. I understand that people want to memorialize things important to them—that’s normal. If my neighbor and I don’t get along, but his son dies and he wants to make a wreath or something to remember his death, that’s okay. But it [the monument] has to represent the people. The Hariri Mosque is not Lebanon—its architecture is more Istanbul than here, it’s too big, it’s just not us. In a small country like Lebanon , these monuments should be mixed, especially in the centre-ville where there are so many churches and mosques intermingling. But that’s just for him … Now everyone knows Beirut only by that mosque! It really makes me angry! ¹³

It would be a mistake to interpret Claudette’s comments as criticizing Hariri because of his sectarian identity as a Sunni Muslim. This sort of surface-level view of sectarian division clouds the degree to which actors are conscious of, and indeed react to, the social order in which they are embedded. Rather, Claudette’s comments criticize the deepening entanglement of sectarianism , memory , and public space in Lebanon:

… it’s written in the Qur’an that you can get into heaven if you build a mosque, so of course everyone wants to build a mosque … and so Sunnis are of course really happy when they see it, but everyone else? But there are Christians who are also like this, who are like, “I built a church!” But it’s not useful, and maybe nobody goes.

To Claudette’s eyes, the mosque lacks a true “use” for Beirut ’s spiritual communities and instead disrupts the dynamics of a much more inclusive space . Beirut’s landscape of memory seemingly reflects the divisive priorities of elites more than it does the need to truly come to terms with a troubled past : “[T]he thing is … is that [the Martyrs Statues] … is the real monument, which actually represents the whole country. They even left the bullets in it to show everyone ‘look guys, we’re still here, after all this shit.’” ¹⁴

Claudette’s comments express the fatigue—but also the hope—Lebanese have in confronting the power of entrenched political dynasties. The “we” evoked by Claudette is an embattled one, a bullet-scarred body politic that many still seek, despite the periodic breakdown of state institutions and the influence of figures like Rafiq Hariri and his son Saad. In this regard, the Hariri Mosque is thus “much more than a space of remembrance devoted to a particular person,” as Vloeberghs argues (2012a, p. 92). It lies at the center of a conflict not so much among sects as over the very terrain of political community in Lebanon : as citizens of the nation-state or as a fragile and divided body politic. Indeed, geographers like Karen Till have argued that sites of memory like Martyrs Square and the Hariri Mosque “are more than monumental stages or sites of important national events. They also constitute [new] historical meanings, social relations, and power relations,” whether by embedding the nation-state in important spaces of urban life or by dramatizing its shortcomings (Till 2003, p. 291). At the same time, commemorative projects like the Hariri Mosque are uneven and incomplete in their effects; they never fully map their “vision of social division” onto social space. “Although elites have had more control over the establishment of places of memory in public settings,” continues Till, “they cannot control how they are perceived, understood, and interpreted by individuals and various social groups” (p. 297). Though Hariri—so-called “Mr. Lebanon”—reshaped Martyrs Square to re-fashion the Lebanese nation-state in his image, others do not passively accept this.

Conclusion

Contrary to Saad Hariri’s assertion, there is no straightforward “line” linking this body to Hariri’s symbolic or material legacy. Nor is there a “real” monument from a pre-political past that can truly bring together the Lebanese body politic. Sites of memory , whether they are state-sponsored or popularly instigated, are always objects of political projects that are not free of criticism. As Lara Deeb and Mona Harb have noted in their recent book, the central districts of Beirut have their own politics of exclusion, even if these are grounded in memories of Lebanese “cosmopolitanism.” These memories came to a head in 2006 when hundreds of protestors associated with the then-opposition March 8 coalition (consisting largely of Hezbollah and Michel Aoun’s Future Movement) staged a long-term sit-in in Martyrs Square, where many accused them of being “rural invaders” with no right to the city (Deeb and Harb 2013; Young 2010).

Crucially, conflict over memory in Beirut —and in Lebanon more generally—need not entail dramatic acts of contention or spectacular performances of state commemoration . Rather, memory is also embedded in a politics of space derived from prosaic, everyday concerns. These concerns point to conflicts as well as emerging forms of solidarity, what Lisa Wedeen calls the “messy stuff of contestation”: those subtle practices and discourses arising at the margins of institutions that nevertheless shape politics in the Lebanese Republic. Through the repetition and circulation of memories of a more tolerant, inclusive Lebanon, Lebanese of many stripes express a shared set of “anxieties, moral entitlements, and desires” (Wedeen 2008, p. 69) that challenge attempts to mythologize Rafiq Hariri in the spaces of the capital.

Beirutis continue to imagine a Lebanese nation from within and through the landscape of a capital populated by hostile sectarian organizations and haunted by the fragile Lebanese state. Sectarian violence has not yet re-engulfed the country, despite years of dire warnings to the contrary and in the face of war in nearby Syria. Lebanon , in other words, endures—and not thanks to the commemorative practices of elites and state institutions. Highlighting the collective and conflicting cultures of memory as forms of political practice in Lebanon allows us to “take into account participation and the formation of ‘public spheres’ as activities of expression in their own right,” which can enact political communities even when sectarian elites and state institutions fail to do so (Wedeen 2008, pp. 110–111). Through acts of criticism and counter-hegemonic memory, the Lebanese show their unwillingness to give up on a shared political community. To be sure, we should not overstate the potential of such practices to transform political futures in Lebanon in the immediate term. But at the very least, they push us to see beyond the nation-state as the primary author of memory and to heed the many overlapping, contradictory cultures of memory that emerge in its cracks.

Notes

• 1. Al-Burj Square was the name of Martyrs Square in 1916, while St. George’s Square is the location where Rafiq Hariri’s motorcade was bombed, killing him and several bodyguards.

• 2. An earlier statue–of two women mourning their martyred sons—preceded the current Martyrs Statues, but was eventually removed due to controversy (Volk 2010, pp. 39–77).

• 3. Though some have alleged that there was a mosque on this site, Vloeberghs clarifies that this was in fact a zāwiya (Sufi lodge) and that, while plans to build a more formal mosque structure were in place prior to 1975, these came to nothing. See Vloeberghs (2010), pp. 275–345.

• 4. A particularly significant goal of this project was to win the support of the then-Mufti of the Lebanese Republic, Sheikh Rashid Qabbani, head of Dar al-Fatwa (the primary institutional organ of the Sunni Muslim community in Lebanon). For details, see Vloeberghs (2010, 2012a).

• 5. Interview with guard at Rafiq Hariri tomb complex, June 26, 2012. Beirut, Lebanon.

• 6. Interview with Abu Ali, street vendor, June 24, 2012. Beirut.

• 7. Interview with Maurice, owner of a small confections shop, July 2, 2012. Beirut.

• 8. Interview with Jumana, small business owner, Gemmayzeh, July 23, 2012. Beirut.

• 9. Interview with Pierre, volunteer groundskeeper for the St. George’s Cathedral, July 12, 2012. Beirut.

• 10. Ibid.

• 11. Interview with Rima, manager of a bookstore in the Beirut Central District, July 23, 2012. Beirut.

• 12. Interview with Mahmud, bakery owner, June 24, 2012. Beirut.

• 13. Interview with Claudette, expatriate Lebanese from the city, June 24, 2012. Beirut.

• 14. Ibid.