I wasn’t surprised by the looks of astonishment whenever someone asked what major my daughter chose for university. She decided to study Eastern (Arabic) music, focusing on the oud, which she has loved since childhood.
For many, studying music is a waste of time and effort; most people prefer “serious” fields like medicine or engineering, especially if the student’s grades are high enough to get into those faculties.
But the astonishment I encountered had other reasons. We live in a southern village shaped by an ideological political order, so the disapproval was of a different kind. In our conservative, Shia-dominated area, speaking about music is like describing some strange creature from another planet.
If we look back—so my grandmother swears—dabke circles and evenings of zajal and ‘ataba were once held openly, with young men and women of the village joining in. Hands clasped hands, voices rose in long songs that told stories, described feelings, and carried playful notes of challenge.
Even at funerals, the deceased was carried on shoulders to the accompaniment of the ḥorbah—chanted, melodic verses of zajal about the pain of loss and the awe of death. Anyone leading the ḥorbah had to have a beautiful, moving voice, and the villagers repeated the lines with reverence, sorrow, and deep feeling.
My mother used to tell me about the place the radio had in the home, how people waited for Thursday night to hear Umm Kulthum’s concert, wondering whether she would sing something new or revive an old classic.
And despite how modest schools were back then, music was a compulsory subject. My mother would wait for that period with bated breath, her chance to sing before her teacher and hear praise for her beautiful voice and confident performance.
I still remember, as a teenager in the 1990s, how we gathered with friends to spend evenings dancing to the latest hits. Our village was lucky to have two young men with lovely voices who made it onto Lebanese TV singing competitions and held concerts for the villagers.
The big event was when a new Hani Shaker song came out: he was the heartthrob back then, especially for the youth of Nabatieh. Cars blasted his music by day; at night, emotions and feelings groaned along. It was as if the singer had sworn an oath to dampen everyone’s spirits with his heartbreakingly sad lyrics.
Music was part of our daily lives, with a strong presence at every occasion, joyous or mournful.
How did we end up, in our region, in a state of estrangement from music and singing? How did these restrictions arise, policing what may and may not be heard? How did songs by Fairuz, Sabah, and Wadih Al-Safi become near-taboo?
It is the dominance religious parties exerted in the South, imposing rigid standards of judgment: everything is either white or black, halal or haram. Music and songs were the first victims of that dominance.
For most Shia religious authorities, music is forbidden because it is “idle entertainment” that stirs emotions and passions and distracts people from reflection and religious rituals. As political Islam spread its control in the area, piety proliferated across most of the South.
People’s primary concern in our villages became performing religious duties and holding Husayni mourning gatherings for every occasion, as if Ashura had stretched across the entire year.
If melody is permitted at all, it is only for Qur’an recitation or for religious anthems deemed lawful.
Instead of cars blaring romantic songs, they now play anashid and lamentations.
I remember when eggs and firecrackers were hurled at the last musical concert held in our village in the 1990s, and how that marked the end of mixed, dance-filled musical gatherings. After that, women-only mawlids became the wedding norm; phrases like “legitimate music” entered our vocabulary; kitchen utensils that make noise were brought in as substitutes for musical instruments and were deemed halal “music”; most importantly, girls were instructed to keep to “permissible” modest swaying during dance at those mawlids.
In our areas, music festivals don’t exist—they’re viewed as frivolity and a distraction from the central cause: the Arab–Israeli conflict, reduced to us in South Lebanon and Palestine. All forms of art were to be harnessed to serve that cause.
So we replaced love songs with revolutionary chants, held evenings of zajal praising the Islamic Resistance and its feats, and when we organized art exhibits, their themes had to be land, resistance, and martyrs’ blood. This doesn’t mean we deny the sacrifices or the importance of those ideas—but is it reasonable to erase social, human, and emotional themes that shape people’s lives?
Meanwhile, many parts of Lebanon enjoy world-class annual arts festivals—Byblos, Baalbek, Batroun—while the South has been deprived of such events that reflect cultural openness and also stimulate the economy. Artistic activity here has been limited to a few rare concerts by the singer Julia Boutros in Tyre, owing to her large repertoire of patriotic, revolutionary songs. I still remember the massive crowd when I attended one of her free concerts in the Tebnine area after the liberation, held to celebrate the occasion.
I have often wondered: why does authority in our region fear music and song?
I don’t believe melody is the problem: after all, the so-called “permissible anthems” they approve of often have beautiful melodies. I think what they truly fear are the words.
Religious parties seek to harness music and art for their own ends: to define narrow boundaries that reinforce their ideology, creating the illusion that nothing matters more than their political cause. That’s why they insist on songs that glorify the party, recall victories over the enemy, and praise sacrifices made along the way.
Love songs—those that speak of passion, longing, regret, and pain—or any expression of tender human emotion, threaten that rigid structure. They soften hearts and distract minds from the central doctrine of vigilance and perpetual victimhood—as if we are living in a permanent state of emotional and ideological emergency. Love songs create shared worlds, because they speak of feelings experienced by all humans, regardless of belief, ethnicity, or political allegiance.
Wadih El Safi and Nasri Shamseddine sang countless songs about village traditions, nature, mountains, and rivers, celebrating the beauty of Lebanon as a whole. Today, however, the only lyrics allowed are those that isolate the South from the rest of the country, as though we inhabit a different planet, cut off from every other region.
Art holds extraordinary power to influence and shape collective consciousness; power that can foster obedience and conformity. The dominant parties in the South understood this well. They used art to serve their political agenda, guiding society’s way of thinking and narrowing its emotional and intellectual horizons within the confines of religious ideology.
But on the other hand, art—when free—has the power to expand minds, to critique, confront, and challenge authority gently yet profoundly. That is precisely what religious parties fear.
For three decades, the South has been under the grip of a religious-political authority that has imposed strict artistic limitations and set rigid criteria for what is “permissible” and what is not. A whole generation has grown up never hearing Fairuz, Sabah, or Wadih El Safi, even though they were among the greatest artists to sing of Lebanon’s beauty and love.
These constraints must be broken. And breaking them requires a plan, one led and implemented by the Ministry of Education. Music classes must once again become a core part of school curricula. Lessons in dabke should also be introduced, teaching students this traditional dance as part of cultural education.
As a music teacher myself, I make sure that every morning when my students arrive, they hear Zaki Nassif. They now ask for him by name if I change the song—it’s become part of their routine.
Since musical awareness begins in childhood, reviving the Teacher Training College for Music Education should be a priority, along with supporting the Higher Institute of Music and opening new branches across southern Lebanon to spread musical culture.
This effort should also fall under the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture, which can collaborate with the Ministry of Interior to allocate additional budgets to municipalities wishing to host music festivals, even if they must be adapted to local sensibilities. Municipalities should be encouraged to establish music schools and art institutes of all kinds. What matters is that we start somewhere: that the South reclaims its artistic and emotional heritage: its music, its ‘ataba, its dabke, and all forms of expression that connect people and open them to one another.
Musical heritage is a fundamental pillar of national identity—and in Lebanon, we need that unifying force more than ever. We need to focus on what binds us, not what divides us.
If the state truly wishes to “return to the South,” or for the South to “return to the state,” there is no better bridge than art. Through music, theater, cinema, literature, and poetry, law and policy can be translated into lived human experience—into feeling. Art can heal divides and highlight shared humanity.
If ministries like education, culture, and interior succeed in bringing art back into schools and public life in the South, it will mean that the state has begun to restore the very meaning of the social contract between itself and its southern citizens.
It pains me deeply when my mother’s seventy-year-old friend tells me how she misses listening to Umm Kulthum and Farid al-Atrash, but refrains from doing so out of religious prohibition, following her cleric’s fatwa. None of my efforts to convince her that such art elevates the human soul—not debases it—have succeeded.
The wave of religiosity that swept through the South led to excessive restrictions on art. The lack of courage to distinguish between what nurtures the soul and what corrupts it has led to blanket prohibitions. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that God is beautiful—and loves beauty… and music.
