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A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of
Rafiq Hariri's New Beirut
Richard Becherer
a
a
American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon; Iowa State University ,
Ames, Iowa, USA
Published online: 22 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Richard Becherer (2005) A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Rafiq Hariri's New
Beirut, The Journal of Architecture, 10:1, 1-42, DOI: 10.1080/13602360500063089
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360500063089
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A matter of life and debt: the untold
costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon;
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA
The images accompanying the rst reconstruction project to appear after Lebanons sixteen-
year long Civil War are seductive indeed. The unabashedly modern urban life depicted
within the projects promotional images is peaceful, orderly, afuent, leisurely.
While these labour-free images of Beirut quietly sidestep the issue of money, the fact of
the matter is that this rst reconstruction project did nothing less than to obsess over it.
Money lay at the heart of this project. For without it, how would the war-ravaged
economy replace 1200 damaged or demolished buildings, sanitise a 60-hectare toxic waste
site, and replenish 150 hectares of city, in what would be the worlds largest urban
renewal? The much-vaunted answer has a familiar ring to it: privatisation. And Raq
Hariri, Lebanons billionaire homeboy made good was just the man to do it. The rst step
entailed Hariris agitation as Lebanons new Prime Minister virtually to give the city
centre to a new development corporation optimistically named Solide` re. The states event-
ual payback would issue from prot on sales of its properties and income generated by the
site. The government would also underwrite a public offering of shares in this company, a
subscription that would capitalise the company to the tune of more than one thousand
million dollars, making it the largest corporation by far in Lebanon (and one of the largest
in the Middle East). And in order to attract other investors, Hariri would leverage his nan-
cial reputation by himself investing in the project, as would virtually all of Hariris family and
key business associates. The Lebanese government together with its Prime Minister would
be invested in the publicly traded company, thus ensuring government oversight.
Today, Lebanons once-vaunted privatisation programme is regarded contemptuously by
most economists who have downgraded Lebanese treasury and corporate bonds to junk
levels. For the truth of the matter is that Solide` re, still Lebanons largest company, has not
truly privatised, and does not truly growout of the free market. Instead, it epitomises a com-
plicated public/private arrangement, less partnership than Faustian pact. The private sector
holds the public sector hostage as its private fortunes are equated with the governments.
Meanwhile the public sector does what it can to protect its investment and to damage-
control the activities of its business model and the worlds perceptions of the Lebanese
marketplace. Neither public nor private, Solide` re epitomises a hybrid economic world
whose viability is fundamentally dependent on huge infusions of state capital, public reven-
ues that might otherwise serve other unsung sectors of the economy. Tacit state guarantees
also encourage proigate scal irresponsibility, fraud, croneyism, monopolism, and excess
1
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
#2005 The Journal of Architecture 13602365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360500063089
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expenditure that further draw down the states meagre resources, explode its national
budget decit, and atrophy the civil state.
For the state to call Solide` re a day would be to admit the failure of its economic centre-
piece as well as the defeat of the very modernist social programme that propelled the
project in the rst place. Whats more, to leave Solide` re incompletea ruinwould be to
acknowledge the futility of Lebanons dreams for social and economic reform, a reality
which sadly this part of Solide` res story serves but to illustrate.
A. Picturing Beirut
Beirut. August 2000. After a vote of no condence
in the government of Prime Minister Salim El-Hoss,
the city prepares for the third Parliamentary election
in four years. Political campaigns in Lebanon, it has
been said, are second only to those of the United
States in terms of their cost and extravagance.
Evidence of this: the city is festooned with political
posters, their images oating through the air like
so much ticker tape. Candidates impress their por-
traits onto particular sectors of the city, quarters
that each knows to be partisan, to be a location of
support, of clientele. For instance, Walid Jumblatt,
a Druze MP and long-termMinister of the Displaced,
surfaces among the households of his people in Ain
El-Mreisseh. Nabih Berri, de facto head of the Shiite
political party Amal and current Parliamentary
Speaker, pops up six storeys high on an apartment
block in Beiruts Shiite Southern suburbs. Salim El-
Hoss, the current Prime Minister, commands four
oors of Beiruts storied Hotel St. Georges, still in
ruins after the Civil War (Fig. 1).
Hosss setting is signicant for it confronts the
great expanse of terrain controlled by his political
arch-rival, Raq Hariri. And Hariris turf is a
seeming desert located upon what had been
Beiruts city centre, a new urban development
known by the acronym Solide` re (Fig. 2). Solide` re,
the economic and spatial entity, is almost single-
handedly controlled by Hariri. Indeed, the Hotel
St. Georges is noteworthy in this place as the only
parcel of land attached to the city centre not
owned by Hariri or his proxies. And Hosss image
on this outlier building makes this political point
about property ownership for a knowing Beirut
electorate.
To Hosss parry comes Hariris thrust: a similar kind
of gigantic poster just a stones throw away, in one
of the citys most beloved locales, the Mina or sher-
mans port (Fig. 3). What makes Hariris seaside entry
to the battle of political adversaries remarkable is not
so much that his image is positioned in a special spot
(much as Hosss). Rather the singularity of his image
stems from the fact that the poster actually captures
photographically the setting in which it is so promi-
nently displayed. As it does so, social reality and
political imagination, life and art, telescope one
into the other.
And what might candidate Hariri hope to gain
from the obvious spatial and experiential blurring
he so deftly orchestrates here? How might this
particular political image function for him (Fig. 4)?
Most obviously, the picture operates by collapsing
the real space of the port into the ctive space of
2
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
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the photograph. Specically, the photograph takes
as its pictorial context the port itself, complete
with shermen, boats, nets, and its line of seaside
dwellings. And centered among these is a local land-
mark, the prominent nineteenth century yellow
house, upon which Hariris face actually settles. Inci-
dentally, signicantly edited out of the photograph is
the forty-storey luxury apartment building bordering
the Mina, a structure that most Beirutis see as del-
ing the port, improbably nanced by a bank owned
by none other than the candidate himself. With this
potential political embarrassment eliminated, the
image colludes with its setting, making the place
seemingly picture-perfect, and the photograph,
picturesque. Hariris implicit authorship of the
poster is signalled by a three-quarter portrait, his
face turning in a panoramic survey. If so, then photo-
genic setting and its principal internal viewer, Hariri,
enter into a visual pact, viewing this place across a
certain mighty subjectivity, and making this place
real. More importantly, the port and its community
are attered into believing that it is being actively
observed, and, therefore, that it is of political
value. By insinuating itself into the Minas affection,
the visual rhetoric of Hariris image rings out over
and above the general political din raised by Salim
El-Hoss and others embroiled in Campaign 2000.
The image of Hariri viewing the port captures a
complex subject/object relationship moving back
and forth between the pictures centre and edge.
Is the focus here on the place or is it the person?
Which one has the power to see? And who sees
what? Does the gaze of Hariri, arguably Lebanons
most powerful man, valorise the place, or does the
place behold the candidate, investing him with its
own power? With its reexivity, the picture provides
a succinct and telling illustration of the places incipi-
ent clientelism, and the long-standing relationship
between the patron (or zaim) and his supporters.
1
By situating himself within this place beloved by
all, Hariri instructs the quarter, the city, the nation:
Invest me with your collective electoral power, and
I will in turn represent your concerns. You guarantee
my interests, and I will in turn protect yours. Quid
pro quo. The image foregrounds the political advan-
tages to be gained as each party in the political pact
safeguards the interests of the other. At the same
time, the clientelism inhabiting the image also
3
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 1. Salim El-Hoss:
political poster
suspended from the
Hotel St. Georges.
(Source: The Daily Star,
August 2000.)
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4
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 2. Solide` re,
aerial view. (Source:
Solide` re Annual Report,
1998.)
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5
The Journal
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Figure 3. Political
poster of Raq Hariri in
the Mina. (Source:
author.)
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presumes that any political advantage furthered by
either client or patron comes with something at
stake. With every asset, be it political, social, or
economic, comes a liability, with every promise a
debt. If the port does give its allegiance to the can-
didate (and the very existence of this image in the
port suggests that the Mina is prepared to give it),
then the candidate must be prepared to do some-
thing for this place. That is, Hariri must do more
than exploit the ports picturesque potential for
enhancing the value of his own property.
Current political propaganda notwithstanding,
Hariri had in point of fact been privately confecting
his own images of the city for years.
2
And part of
this imaginative project develops from the fantastic
function that the city had long played in nourishing
the young mans mental life and forming his political
identity. Beirut becametheOther for Haririthat is, all
that was different fromthe hometownwhere he grew
up, the provincial port city of Saida in South Lebanon.
As Paris is for my children, so was Beirut for me, the
candidate recently admitted in an interview with a
colleague of mine at the American University of
Beirut.
3
Beirut was all that was glamorous, foreign,
Western.
4
It was Orientalism in reverse.
5
Hariri spent the beginning of the War abroad in
Saudi Arabia, where he amassed his fortune
working for the Saudi Royal Family, becoming one
of the worlds wealthiest people.
6
Returning to
the city in the late 1970s, he found it devastated,
a shadowof what it had been, a far cry fromthe fan-
tastic place he had dreamed of as a child or known
as a student at the Arab University. Almost at once,
he set to the monumental task of rebuilding the
capital city, a mission that took shape in many
designs over the next fteen years. There can be
little doubt, as I will show later, that these projects
capture to some degree the imaginary shape of
Hariris remembered city. They also privately con-
soled him. Affecting though these designs may be,
however, it warrants emphasising that one
persons site of promise may well be but anothers
location of pain, one mans imaginary, anothers
symbolic.
7
To understand the sometimes conicting
6
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 4. Detail of
3. (Source: Fadi Nassar.)
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agendas set into motion by various of Hariris city
reconstruction projects, some critical background is
in order.
B. Beirut: a Western Orient
I begin with a few words as to the genesis of the
Hariri-sponsored Beirut Central District, or BCD,
reconstruction. As is commonly known, Lebanon
was shaken by a Civil War that began in 1975
and continued, in varying degrees of intensity, until
1990 (Fig. 5). The conict claimed 150,000 lives by
conservative estimates.
8
Damage to the country
was widespread and profound, but nowhere more
debilitating than in Beirut, and no place more devas-
tating than in the citys commercial centre. From this
stricken heart of Beirut issued that most notorious of
battle lines of the Lebanese Civil Warthe infamous
Green Line sited on what formerly had been the
Damascus Road. This spatial demarcation (which
took its new name from vegetation encroaching
upon the unused roadbed) has established itself
for many as the spatial and psychic boundary separ-
ating East from West, Christian from Muslim sec-
tions of the city. The causes of the War are
complex, and its political consequences have irrever-
sibly altered the city of Beirut and its people. I will
address these issues indirectly during the course of
this paper as I focus upon the processes and
designs of Beiruts city centre reconstruction, and
the manifold modalities of social representation
deployed in the projects major iterations. I am
especially concerned with imagesimages that
give shape to critical locations of Lebanese culture,
images that simultaneously project and obscure
national identity/ies, images that serve to attract
and distract a desirable marketplace at once,
images that construct and deconstruct one-Self.
Zygmunt Bauman has stated that the political
nature of modernity, and its enlightened will to
order, is distilled into the colonial impulse. Modernity
is for the East, the tunnel at the end of the light.
9
That light is the light of enlightenment, and it orig-
inates in the West. It strikes the Orient like a spot-
light, operatically staging the places prominent
performances upon a luminous centre stage. Alter-
natively, other supernumerary features are lost in
the shadows cast by this brilliantly Occidentalised
East. The light we observe today at the end of
Lebanons tunnel vision has been shaped by centuries
of colonial occupation, most recently Ottoman, from
the nineteenth century to the end of World War I,
and French, from 1920 to 1941, the so-called
Mandate period. In November 1941, the country
broke ranks with its Vichy French administration,
declaring the moral bankruptcy of its colonial occu-
piers, and claiming its independence and sovereignty.
Ottoman and French rule oversaw the early mod-
ernisation of the city of Beirut, eventually turning it
into the Middle Easts major nancial and commercial
centre. Memories of Ottoman dominance persist in
the BCDs largest historic structure, the Serail, today
recongured (by Raq Hariri himself) as political seat
and residence of the Prime Minister (Fig. 6). And the
French presence lingers, most prominently perhaps,
in one of the city centres most notable urban set-
pieces, the Parisian-style Place de lEtoile, garnished
with a healthy dollop of Tony Garnier. Public modern-
ism is paralleled in a private project like the Hotel
St. Georges, mentioned above, designed by Antoine
Tabet, a Lebanese student of Auguste Perret.
7
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A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 5. War Damage
in the Beirut Central
District: Souk Sursock.
(Source: Ristelhueber,
Beirut, 1984.)
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The Journal
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Figure 6. Serail.
Present-day appearance
after reconstruction:
in the foreground,
monument to Riad
El-Solh in Riad El Solh
Square. (Source:
personal.)
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Despite the persistence of outspokenly modern
forms like these, the postcolonial was accompanied
by a quiet attack on Western modernity itself.
10
For
instance, projects like Willy Sednaouis Piccadilly
Building, while showing an afnity to Le Corbusiers
abstract and aloof Pavillon Suisse, also remakes the
paradigmaticallyHighModernbyperverselyabsorbing
it into the city, appropriating and contaminating
Corbus vacant ground oor with nothing less than
an Arab souk (Fig. 7). The Postcolonial Modern in
Beirut seems implicitly to travesty essentialising
Western modernism while illuminating ways in which
its prescriptions might be both dethroned and radica-
lised, that is to say, postmodernised avant la lettre.
11
When it came to sketching rst thoughts on the
new shape of Beiruts BCD following the Civil War,
I initially saw the French connection persisting here
as though nothing particularly unusual had inter-
vened. It was business as usual, or so it appeared.
In equally familiar fashion, the light at the beginning
of the tunnel emanated fromLa Ville Lumie` re.
12
The
French-trained Maronite architect Henri Edde , a
partner and lead designer in the Middle Easts
largest architectural rm Dar El-Handassah (a Hariri
property whose global investments include the
Chicago architectural rm Perkins and Will) trod, it
seemed, a time-worn path (Fig. 8).
13
Others too
have seen it in this way, particularly as his project
was roundly criticised for taking its inspiration from
older colonial models (like Beiruts classic Place
de lEtoile), and for uncritically resorting to such
trademark French planning devices as boulevards,
rond-points, and scenic vistas. Forms like these
seemed to many useless and obsolete spatial effects
and unnecessary urban spectacle. Furthermore, it
was argued that such planning devices were
simply inappropriate formally, standing in stark con-
trast to the casual intricacy of the Centres centuries-
old street network and densely-packed historic
building fabric. The foreignness of the projects inter-
ventions immediately met with the criticisms of
Edde s contemporariesarchitectural regionalists
like Assem Salaam, Jad Tabet and Nabil Beyhoum:
the URI group. They also, however, emboldened a
new post-War generation of architects (like the
informal group calling itself Plan B)mostly
trained in the United Statesto produce their own
decidedly contextual brand of site-specic urban
response. Criticism arriving from both quarters led
to many public meetings, then to televised Parlia-
mentary debate. The immediate consequences: a
second, and equally unsuccessful Edde scheme,
and then a new project by another hand.
Before proceeding to these, I would rst like to
turn to a number of images from the rst Edde
design to discuss in more elaborate terms why this
project seems so foreignwhy it seems particularly
e trange. For me, its strangeness has to do largely
with the degree to which Edde s buildings
despite their purity of shape, modern construction,
curtain walls, and their omnipresent allusion to
transparencyseem so typologically opaque. In
short, why do they seem so tight-lipped, so uninfor-
mative? My commentary also has to do less with the
way that Edde s architecture exists in fact as the way
that it is staged and therefore constructed to be
viewed. There is little doubt, I think, that a very
considerable amount of wishful thinking and
fateful doubling goes on in this project. As noted
above, the great boulevard that opens to the port
10
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
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11
The Journal
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Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 7. Willy
Sednaoui: Piccadilly
Building, 19657.
(Source: author.)
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(a high-speed thoroughfare obliterating the historic
Burj, the historic space where independence was
declared) seems equal parts Pariss scenic Champs-
Elyse es and Los Angeless efcient (and progress-
ive) Harbor Freeway (Fig. 9). The twin-towered
World Trade Centre advanced by another of Edde s
images mimics its ill-fated big brother in the Big
Apple. Such explicit formal quotations serve here
to recharacterise Beirut in prominently Western,
that is to say, High Modern terms (Fig. 10). And
out of this Occidental resemblance evolve at once
a visual legitimation of a re-emergent Lebanese
state and economy, and a reassurance if not an
enticement of an external, Western marketplace.
Here, the Western gaze now sees a familiar if
reduced version . . . of itself. Surely this is a safely
domesticated place where global capital can feel
safe, secure, comfortable, and where it can deal
with people whose values are its own.
C. The City that doesnt work
It is worth noting I think, that Edde s images
operate allusively, connotatively as much as they
do instrumentally. They also promise a second
story of sorts, a narrative set into the storyboards
that this new, modern city produces, and vignetted
against the natural settings that have come to sym-
bolise, to the Christian Lebanese at least, Le Grand
Liban.
14
For instance, the drawing of Edde s World
Trade Centre presents his twin towers as sleekly
anti-gravitational, oating diaphanously above a
crystalline sea as effortlessly, as naturally, as the
wind-lled sails propelling the ketch in the images
foreground. In a second drawing, less effusive but
no less self-assured, ofce buildings march regularly
along a picturesque canal framing (and spatialising)
12
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 8. Henri Edde :
plan of the First
Reconstruction Project
for the BCD, Beirut,
1991. (Source: Gavin.)
Figure 9. Henri Edde` :
Martyrs Square, rst
project, 1991. (Source:
Edde .)
Figure 10. Henri Edde :
World Trade Centre,
rst project, 1991.
(Source: Edde .)
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a new island carved from the collective debris of a
sixteen-year long Civil War with spit and polish
(Fig. 11). Unlike this procession, promenaders dally
along the canals quais as they survey motor
launches passing lazily beneath them. In a fourth
image, a massive circular fountain is maternally
fondled within the nurturing embrace of two
curving surfaces of glass (Fig. 12). These paired
structures opportunistically collaborate to enclose a
space and frame a vista onto the sea, seizing the
prospect of an unlimited horizon. A fth and nal
view seems to gaze upon the yacht basin beside
the Hotel St. Georges, pausing rst at the luxurious
13
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 11. Henri Edde :
Canal, rst project,
1991. (Source: Edde .)
Figure 12. Henri Edde :
Roundabout at the First
Basin, rst project,
1991. (Source: Edde .)
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mid-rises on the island, and then off to Mt Sanine in
the far distance (Fig. 13). For those of us who
know, the view is captured from a specic vantage-
point: the celebrated, pre-War terrasse atop Edward
Durrell Stones Hotel Phoenicia.
This nal image does concern itself with the archi-
tecture of Edde s reconstruction project, to be sure.
But it equally attends, it seems to me, to rather
specic private activity in its foreground. Twin non-
Starbucks cups of coffeeand, yes, Starbucks has
reached Beirutrest on that cafe table, while an
attractive couple, lovers maybe, chat quietly and
insinuate the viewer into the image. Like the
outside viewer, the two inside break from their
intimate te te a` te te, looking towards the dramatic
vista that Edde imagines here, this new view
having the power to give pause to their irtations,
at least momentarily. In this single vignette, Edde cap-
tures the new Beirut less as progressive, modern mar-
ketplace than as surprisingly romantic diversion, a
delicious, enticing and surprisingly familiar world
ripe, ready, and waiting for consumption. As this
happens, consumption as based in need is tacitly
transformed into consumption based in desire. The
implicit sexual drive the image employs to power its
message carries, it seems to me, another meaning,
to wit, that for all the would-be modernity of this
new place, the life of this city remains essentially
14
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 13. Henri Edde :
The Phoenicia Terrace,
rst project, 1991.
(Source: Edde .)
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body-driven, propelled by urges equal parts boy and
girl, eminently human, basic, and natural. All
images operate as if to say that this much here in
Beirut is, quite simply, unarguable. Beirut, whether
old or new, could simply perform no other way.
The combination of naturalness and diversion is
reinforced in later renditions of the Solide` re
project, even when those proposals are consciously
designed to critique the progressivism embedded
in the project itself. Most importantly, Angus
Gavins replacement Dar El-Handassah scheme
(also underwritten by Hariri via Solide` re) outspokenly
bolsters the historical framework of the project,
while consciously seeking to quell the outrage of a
local Beirut population who bridled at the thought
and appearance of Edde s seeming modernity
(Fig. 14). Gavins outspokenly contextual scheme,
which makes direct use of such postmodernist the-
ories as Colin Rowes notion of urban Collage,
grounds his project, he claims, within the residual
and uncanny historical specicities to be found
on-site, recalling Beiruts now-buried shoreline
and Ottoman seawall, antiquities, heritage
architecture, and so on.
15
He even furthers his
design essentially to fabricate historical form
(sometimes even stylistically simulating it
16
) by
introducing gridding into his plan, an organis-
ational form which harks back, so he argues, to
both Greek and Roman sources. Whats more, he
frames the entire scheme between not one but
two distinct yacht basins, a design motif directly
suggesting that most resilient signier of the
Levantine city-state (and this, presumably, is his
wishful thinking for Beirut), the double-harboured
Phoenician city (Fig. 15).
17
Despite the bounty of historical allusion, Gavins
project works contrary to Rowes call for controlled
ambiguity and an iridescent urban semantics as set
out in Collage City. (Indeed, Gavins project is, in
the nal sense, more about ambiguous control.)
For that book, as the entirety of Rowes late urbanis-
tic project, geared itself to unmasking and humiliat-
ing any progressivist order.
18
In so doing, Rowe had
sought to loosen the strictures modernism placed
upon contemporary practice, allowing his kind of
design to advocate a more subversive understanding
of history (as opposed to historicity) and to expand
its palette of meaningful architectural and urban
form.
19
Gavins scheme operates quite differently.
Solide` res revision of Rowe seeks to restructure and
rigidify the ambiguous post-War state of Beirut,
implementing essentially academic formal devices
15
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 14. Angus
Gavin: Project for the
BCD/Solide` re, 1992.
(Source: Gavin.)
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that here appear nothing short of invasive. All pos-
turing aside, in the nal analysis, history takes
Gavins denitive scheme for Solide` re to the same
place modernity does for Edde : to an ideal location
which is the naturaland necessarydestination
of an urban teleology. One mans history would be
but another mans progress.
Whats more, both projects seek to outline an
architecture that is less productive in the capitalist
sense of the word than attractive. Edde speaks
hardly at all about the functional use of his urban
ensemble and the buildings themselves assist little
in the clarication. Gavins project reduces to little
more than mixed use with functions to be deter-
mined on demand by the marketplace. What
guides the urban conception here is fundamentally
aesthetic, not practical zoning. And this means
that appearance is as powerful a driver of this
urban conception as it was in Edde s proposal, if
not more. Recent developments in Gavins project
further underscore this fact: the urban vision now
touts itself no longer as the capital centre of the
Middle East (and its a good thing because it would
be hard pressed to reclaim this title from Abu
Dhabi, Jeddah, or Dubai) but as a tourist destina-
tion.
20
With its plethora of archaeological remains
being unearthed (and therefore degraded), Beirut
now seeks to market itself as an attraction for the
so-called heritage tourist. Furthermore, there is
even talk now of loosening the BCDs vaunted aes-
thetic zoning, the projects legislative centrepiece,
in certain key locations of the plan earmarked
specically for designs to be produced by so-called
master-architects.
21
These buildings, so the head designer explained,
might be just the constructive incentivethe archi-
tainmentneeded to promote highly protable
architectural tourism.
22
The new list of attractions
goes on. The most recent redesign to enhance the
schemes visual appeal occurs on the projects land-
ll portion. This area, the one-time nancial district
in both Edde and Gavin schemes, has just been
recongured (by SOM no less) to accommodate a
Formula 1 racing course a` la Monte Carlo, thereby
targeting a wealthy class of mostly male sports
tourist. And with this single grand gesture, the
one-time Switzerland of the Levant is transformed
into monster-car track, a fancy playground for big
boys with big toys.
Historical fabulation in Gavins executed scheme
(and even more in Edde s unexecuted projects)
went hand-in-hand with historical erasure (Fig. 16).
16
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 15. Aerial
photograph of the city
of Saida, showing its
twin Phoenician
harbours. (Source:
Lebanon
Opportunities.)
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Of the more than eighteen hundred buildings
damaged but largely extant within the site connes,
fully two-thirds were demolished for replacement by
Solide` re. Where the remains of these buildings have
gone is a simple question to answerthey have
joined the other debris left by the Civil War in the
Normandie dump, now euphemistically known as
the Solide` re land ll (Fig. 17). Of course there were
those buildings, like the suite of commercial banks
along the Rue Riad El-Solh, that escaped damage vir-
tually intact, thanks to smart bombs then too, or
were they smart bombers? Monumental, religious
buildings, no matter how degraded, were also off-
limits to the developers. Historically signicant
structures and urban ensembles were also pro-
tected, like the Place de lEtoile. And then there
were buildings belonging to politically inuential
owners, like the Murr Tower, the property of the
countrys former Minister of the Interior who lever-
aged his political status to avoid expropriation.
23
Buildings too were destroyed for political reasons.
Whereas colonial buildings of one eraof the
French Mandatewere largely protected and cher-
ished, Ottoman structures of the previous century,
the old souks for instance, were almost wholly eradi-
cated. And, as George Corm the former Minister of
Finance recounts, there was the Jewish quarter in
Wadi Abu-Jamil, rased, apart from the synagogue
(protected as a religious structure), as misplaced pol-
itical protest, or vengeance, against the 1996 Israeli
invasion (Fig. 18).
24
Here, Corm indicates a case of
what might be termed rhetorical demolition, that
is, history erased because the reality of its continued
effect is just too painful or infuriating to bear.
17
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 16. Angus
Gavin: Retained
Buildings, Project for
the BCD/Solide` re, 1992.
(Source: Gavin.)
Figure 17. Normandie
Dump/Solide` re Land Fill,
c.1985. (Source: Gavin.)
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At moments like this, urban renewal goes hand in
hand with denial and, in turn, leads to repression,
which is, in Pierre Bourdieus reading, the ip-side of
seduction, historical or otherwise.
25
Of course, the fea-
tures that both reconstruction projects, Edde s and
Gavins, seek to eradicate most effectively are traces
of the War itselfand the vast emptiness recorded
by time-lapse photographs, taken through the
American University of Beirut for the Aga Khan
Archnet website, registers this historical reality only
too clearly (Fig. 19).
26
The land ll, that shard pile of
the recent past, has today been cleansed and puried
by a waste management company from Houston,
Texas
27
, the dirt of the War puried of any chemical
or psychological toxicity. What we nd today of the
old city that Solide` res developers have deposited
there is scarcely more than gravel.
28
The great irony is that there is little renewal in the
BCD per se; for of the twelve hundred buildings
destroyed, only six new ones have been constructed
to date.
29
The Normandie dump/land ll today
looks equal parts transplanted, sixty-hectare
fragment of the Arabian peninsula and terrain
vague.
30
What we now see in this place rests in
sharp contrast to any idealising image a` la Edde . To
contemporary eyes the BCD site presents itself as a
stark and surprisingly modernist tabula rasa, a vast
space that operates as the best defence against
hidden demons (Fig. 20). Not a single building
should be kept as it is to remind us of the civil war.
There is no need to preserve this painful memory,
so Raq Hariri recently pronounced.
31
His message
here is clear. To guard against recurrent trauma,
erase. In the absence of collective memory, collective
denial will do.
The origin of the projects frank promotionalism
rests in the person of one man, Raq Hariri. The
basics of Hariris background have been outlined
above; however, the Prime Ministers central role
as the reconstruction and planning force in con-
temporary Lebanon demands amplication. As I
mentioned earlier, Hariris rst impulses for the city
and the BCD specically were essentially philanthro-
pic, using his construction company to help repair
18
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 18. Wadi
Abu-Jamil, with
Synagogue.
(Source: author.)
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19
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 19. Wadi
Abu-Jamil, before and
after. (Source: Archnet
web site.)
Figure 20. Place des
Martyrs, Summer 2001.
(Source: author.)
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degraded infrastructure. In the mid-1980s, however,
his energies and ambitions turned from mere main-
tenance to city and nation building, and this involved
engineering not just economic opportunities for the
nation but political ones for himself as well. At this
point he commissioned a rst reconstruction project
from French architects, largely situated on the Nor-
mandie dump here recongured
as a peninsular recreational development equal parts
Riviera Port Grimaud and Montreal Habitat (Fig. 21).
32
Following the Taif Accords, the Hariri-designed
peace pact that more or less ended the Lebanese
conict, the countrys Conseil du De veloppement
et Reconstruction (or CDR) solicited a reconstruction
project for the city centre from Dar El-Handassah,
the architectural rm in which Hariri was heavily
invested. In fact, it was at his personal expense,
another act of philanthropy, that the Edde project
was developed. The government would soon priva-
tise this initiative, and the citys public land would be
rebuilt privately, or so it was thought, by the devel-
opment corporation named Solide` re, a publicly
traded company. And Solide` res major investor
would be none other than the eventual Prime
Minister thanks to his private agreements with
family as well as political and business allies, many
fromSaudi Arabia, who would act as silent partners.
33
D. Quidding the Quo
Today there is little doubt that the BCD project has
served Hariris political ambitions, and that this
project like so much of his charitable work was
personally benecial, even as his economic support
of public works was touted as philanthropic. In a
Lebanese context particularly, philanthropy does
not come free of obligation. Giving denitely
comes with strings attached, and acts of benevo-
lence are normally undertaken with the expectation
of return in kind. Call it patronage, clientelism, or
what the Lebanese domasoubiyesuch modern
displays of generosity, particularly in the Middle
East, are seldom undertaken without an implied
sense of personal debt and eventual payback.
34
As
recent events point up, the quid pro quo has cer-
tainly been a hidden driver of Hariris institutiona-
lised philanthropy as another of his Campaign
2000 posters illustrates (Fig. 22). This one displays
the candidates genial portrait against a montage
of his charitable activities: historical preservation,
university scholarships (some fteen thousand over
the course of almost 20 years), port modernisation,
educational technology upgrades, and, of course,
the new BCD for which he takes the credit. All are
regarded as endowments conferred by Hariri on a
Lebanese population, beneting from but also
indebted to his benecence. So the image serves
implicitly to remind the electorate of their long-
standing debt to the candidate, and of the inescap-
able fact that with this election, the debt now
becomes due. Its payback time, the image
remonstrates.
Philanthropy of many stripes does seem to have
this single fact in common. Although American
philanthropy (as epitomised by the likes of the
Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations) has com-
monly been presented as having no strings
attached,
35
the social theorist Max Weber has
been so bold as to suggest that even this supposedly
disinterested philanthropy had an implicitly ideologi-
cal aim.
36
For Weber, such giving was geared to
20
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
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21
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 21. Project for
the BCD
Reconstruction, c.1985.
(Source: Edde .)
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educating the disadvantaged, thereby inculcating
among the receivers values consonant with
the interests of the benefactor. Even benefaction,
particularly benefaction, extracted a potentially
adventitious spiritual debt in place of a material
one, particularly in those unlucky Middle Eastern
places where the prize of oil was not at stake.
There is a major difference between the
philanthropy deployed by the Hariri Foundation
and that of his modern American forebears,
however.
The matter of debt, real or symbolic, is somewhat
different in the Islamic world because charitable
giving is regarded a moral duty, tithing a fact of
life for the devout Muslim. Whats more, the
matter of debt that is an unspoken reality in much
Western philanthropy is further problematised in
Islam, for both the Koran and the Shariah expressly
22
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 22. Political
poster depicting Raq
Hariri and his
philanthropies. (Source:
The Daily Star.)
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outlaw the practice of usury, or the lending of
money for interest.
37
This is not to say, however,
that interest payments do not occur in Islam, for
the simple fact is that it is not necessarily money in
kind that is to be repaid.
38
Having said that, philan-
thropy in Arab countries is not necessarily regarded
as a gift outright, for there is an implicit social con-
tract that comes attached to the Foundations
giving, as illustrated, it seems, by the Hariri political
poster. For it renders not just a culture in continu-
ing receivership but in spiritual debt as well (as
suggested by the visual exchange between mon-
taged images) that is expected eventually to be
repaid. And power and political support welling up
from the indebted was and continues to be certainly
one of the main ways of doing so.
The charitable giving of the Hariri Foundation, and
the inestimable role it played for candidate Hariri
during the elections, suggests that the candidate
used his Foundations giving opportunistically,
thereby keeping an indebted constituency at his
beck and call. In point of fact, it might further be
said that this kind of pragmatic, politicised giving is
actually demanded within the multi-religious, con-
fessional construction of contemporary Lebanon,
where literally every life decision is rendered simul-
taneously political and religious thanks to the
nations Constitution. Elections in Lebanon are
won not so much by garnering the support of
ones own confessional group as by attracting or
securing a coalition of other special interest groups
and confessions. Philanthropy particularly becomes
an agent of securing old constituencies, and
constructing ever-larger political bases. Hariris
Foundation continues to build interconfessional
support across a horizon of moral, and scal,
indebtedness. Of course this phenomenon is pre-
cisely the subtext of Hariris political poster posi-
tioned at a strategic point in the interconfessional
Mina.
39
The consequences of this second image,
described at length above, sustain and derive from
coupled acts of seeing at once. First, there is the
gaze of Hariri who views outward, seeing less this
particular place, rather something more, indenable
and untenablethe city, the nation, the world
perhaps. However, the potentially unlimited scope
of this image is reinforced in yet a third posterin
fact, a oating installationbobbing in the water
across the Corniche from the Mina, framed against
a sublime horizon and lapped by the Sea (Fig. 23).
Its subject matter is nature surely, but also natures
temporal dimension that the candidate holds in his
visual, and political, sway. This mans object
relations, it seems, are endless.
And, then, there is the specic seeing of the people
of Ain El-Mreisseh who rst attach themselves to
23
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1
Figure 23. Political
poster depicting Raq
Hariri, oating in the
Sea near the Mina.
(Source: The Daily Star.)
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these images made prominent by their settingsand
to the eyes that do not see harboured withinso as
to imagine, to construct themselves as captured
within the candidates viewing. In the words of song-
writer Jerome Kern, this is the sort of viewthat seems
to want to be seen.
40
The places lengthy lack of pol-
itical representation is to be resolved, so it appears, by
attracting Hariris attention to it, and, consequently,
his serving the Minas interests and fullling its needs.
Jacques Lacan has argued that the lack felt by the
infant in the preconscious state is fullled by his
attachment to the image contained in the mirror.
The image, rst captured within the reective
surface and then introjected, provides a provisional
and temporary shape for the childs inchoate phys-
ical experience and self-identity.
41
Imaginary activity
of this order, though similar, is not precisely the case
on the Mina. Instead, the psychopolitics underlying
cultural identity, as implied by the relationship of
poster and setting, suggests a scopic alternative to
the mirror stage.
42
Again, Lacan usefully speaks
to this slightly different construction of the gaze in
a later discussion prompted by the question, What
Is an Image? where he posits the impossibility of
the image to perform as simple object-lesson per
se.
43
Rather it performs simultaneously as an
object and a screen which a seeing subject comes
to occupy in part as representable identity, as well
as mask concealing and protecting whatever is unre-
presentablethe lack of presence. Hariris campaign
posters, it seems to me, operate within this particu-
lar binary psychic register.
The population of Ain El-Mreisseh constructs itself
as the tting object to Hariris attentionand as it
does so the Mina insinuates itself into performing
as object of his subjectivity. This object lesson oper-
ates advantageously for Hariri as he is likened to
the quarter as the quarter is to him.
44
What engin-
eers their need to become his object, however,
derives from equal parts need arising from their
lack (in this case a specic lackthe Sunni lack of
political representation in this place), and desire for
renewed self-construction, accomplished via their
recourse to mimicry and attraction.
45
The Minas
inhabitants construct themselves not so much out
of who they believe themselves to be so much as
what it is that they believe that their champion
desires and demands of them. The residents of Ain
El-Mreisseh are thus prepared to dispense with
what is perceptible of their own shadowy social
identity, or lack thereof, while constructing them-
selves as his partisans, as one of his own.
46
Whats more, by constructing their responses to
meet the demands of the market for their services,
Hariri, it might be said that the local population
behaves very much like the Western marketing
expertthe Kawaja
47
whom the billionaire nor-
mally employs in his business and his politics to
target the consumer. The difference here is that
these marketers instead target a political market-
place tautologically constructed as none other than
themselves. In short, they are the consumers (self-)
targeted to consume images of their own confec-
tion. This constituency shapes itself to be the one
he would have them be. As they do so, this group
inhabits an image projected upon them by
another, so as willingly to elicit the continued
interest of the politicians gaze (as well as to disguise
the reality of their social condition and the inescap-
able fact of their decades-long unrepresentability).
24
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
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One might say, following the Lacanian line, that the
poster the quarter chooses physically to inhabit com-
prises a split between potent expressive image and
covert, protective screen, ingenuous portrait and
disingenuous disguise. Jean-Paul Sartre would
likely decry autoassimilation like this as opportunis-
tic, and a collective act of bad faith. I would prefer
simply to call it a contract, an arrangement, a
negotiation.
48
Ain El-Mreisseh characterises, it seems to me, a
pragmatic construction of wishful thinking for all
parties involved, paid for at a certain personal and
political costand bringing with it a certain debt
for all contractual participants. Among the people
of Ain El-Mreisseh, there exists the cherished
belief, fostered over the centuries, that the machina-
tions of masoubiye will entail benets far outweigh-
ing the existential lossesand that their solicitation
of symbolic capital
49
, and the debt they assume in
doing this, will eventually be repaid in spades . . .
and in shovels . . . and in sh.
E. Historys eye
At this time, when Lebanon seeks so desperately to
carve out a sense of national identity, perhaps the
greatest of all Lebanons debts may well be called
the countrys debt to history. Here, the construction
of political Self-identity is fabricated out of a deep-
seated relationship to history as an articially con-
structed and gaze-endowed Other. The cultures
sometime submission to, and sometime refusal of,
the historical gaze is illustrated in Solide` re by two
specic instances. The rst illustrates the construc-
tion of ethnic identity out of the connection that a
political minority (though perhaps a confessional
majority) fabricates across a specic work of historic
architecture in the affair of the Mazar Ibn-Irak
(Fig. 24). The second entails the denial of one
order of the historical gaze even as the Prime
Minister constructs his own.
The rst case study revolves around a small
Mameluke structure exposed to the public eye
during the destruction of the Ottoman souks, a
building that was rst known as the Mazar Ibn-Irak
and then the Zawiya Ibn-Irak al-Dimashki. The
small domed structure, previously invisible within
the accretion of post-Mameluke construction in
the souks, resembles the multitude of madrasas, or
schools devoted to the study of Islamic law, in the
old Mameluke capital Tripoli north of Beirut. Madra-
sas like these were in fact philanthropic foundations,
commonly attached to the tomb structures of their
donors. And so it was with the similar Beirut
example.
The mazar was slated for destruction in 1992,
along with most of the damaged souks, to be
replaced eventually by Solide` re. Nabil Beyhoum
recounts a strange series of events set into motion
as demolition commenced. First, the bulldozer
chain pulling at the intractable building broke,
then, the machines driver suddenly experienced
paralysis in one hand, and, nally, miraculously, a
mysterious gure appeared at the structures
doorway entreating the workers, Do not kill me a
second time!
50
Because of these uncanny occur-
rences (to say the least), the building was immediately
proclaimed a sacred and miraculous site, and as this
occurred Ibn Iraq became more than an historical
name but a holy man from Iraq, the Shiite hallowed
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26
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 24. Mazar Ibn-
Zawiya Irak al-Dimashki:
the structure dates from
the early sixteenth
century. (Source:
author.)
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land, and the mazar his domicile. For the areas Shiite
population, the dwelling immediately became a site
of religious pilgrimage, and to lay their claim to it,
they appropriated it, attaching to it loudspeakers con-
tinuously shouting Koranic verses, and mounting a
huge photograph of the Ayatollah Khomeini on its
street side. For the rst time, the locales Shiite popu-
lation, so they argued, had a religious site in the BCD
equal to the Sunni, Maronites, Greek Orthodox,
Roman and Armenian Catholics, Protestants and
Jews.
Beiruts Sunni population bridled at the idea that
this site, long attached to their confession, might
be redesignated, sanctied, and appropriated. This
was nothing less than religious squatting. So they
promptly embarked upon their own historical
researches into the building. They genealogically
determined that Ibn Iraq was in fact a celebrated
attorney and devout Sunni Muslim and that he
came from Syria not Iraq; they signied this
descent by afxing the sufx al-Dimashki (from
Damascus) to his name. The undeniable saintedness
of the siteso foreign in feel to secularised Sunni
Islamwas explained away by arguing that Ibn
Iraq was a su, and that this mazar, or residence,
was in fact a zawiya, or place of religious instruction,
wherein mystic suc rites were practised and popu-
larised by its perhaps overzealous Sunni inhabi-
tant.
51
Archaeological excavation also revealed
that there was a tomb attached to the structure,
not Ibn Iraqs, however.
52
Case closed. The zawiya
was then encased in barbed wire, discouraging
further Shiite pilgrimage. And then a sign bearing
Ibn Iraqs correct genealogy was afxed to the
buildings most visible side, the place where
Khomeini had been, dispelling historical or political
ambiguity once and for all.
In practical reality, though, the Sunnis rectication
of the historical record is beside the point in this case.
What is most interesting to me is the degree to which
the local Shiite community felt the need both to
attach itself to a work of architecture so as to evi-
dence itself spatially, and to legitimate that connec-
tion by constructing an authenticating history. This
validating saga would have had the collateral effect
of naturalising the local Shiite population, and of
imbuing it with some kind of God-given right trans-
ferable to its domicile, that is, the nearby BCD prop-
erties (buildings like the recently demolished Hilton
Hotel) in which the Shiites were in fact squatting. It
would also have reinforced their claims to nancial
compensation for any expropriation from this place,
especially as Solide` re had begun its more than half
a thousand million dollar payout to relocate the inter-
lopers.
53
The Sunnis, however, would have none
of what they regarded as religious and political
posturing, nor would they allowa social legitimisation
via religion that would cost them capital, real or
symbolic.
Whatever their rationale, Sunni counter-argu-
ments do not invalidate Shiite historical or spatial
claims within the now vacant BCD by attachment
to a heretofore undesignated and nownewly signi-
cant religious monument. For the fact remains that
this buildings signicance originates in the very
demands that the Shiites made of it, stemming
from their insistent need to render this place, some-
place, meaningful here. Furthermore, Shiite con-
struction of a legitimating history stems from what
the Shiites would argue was a social need to be
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rendered visible. Such visibility is accomplished by
giving what they believed to be their history an his-
torical face, with eyes capable of viewing them and
of constructing them as the objects of its gaze.
Lastly, the hostility with which the Shiite (mis)read-
ing of history was met among the Sunni elect
suggests less the degree to which this second
group felt a responsibility to maintain historical accu-
racy (for certainly Sunnis are fully capable of rewrit-
ing history in their own best interest as we shall see)
as the degree to which such social and legiti-
mating spatialisation might threaten Sunni domi-
nance here.
My second case study centres on an urban space
at the head of Beiruts bank district, the Place Riad
El-Solh (see Figure 6). This square, once attached
to the city gate Bab Yaqoub, was renamed in the
1950s in honour of the Sunni leader who
co-engineered Lebanese independence in 1943.
Like most places in the BCD, it was extensively
damaged during the War, and what remained
after the War was slated for demolition in the
BCD reconstruction. The present-day, recongured
Square presents itself in stark contrast to its
pre-War appearance, lacking spatial enclosure,
amenity, or attendant urban functions. Today it is
little more than a landscape ornament, a pink a-
mingo, lending a little cachet to the leading edge
of a parking area.
The historical raison de tre of the post-Mandate
space was commemorative; here thankful Beirutis
erected a portrait of one co-founder of the
modern Lebanese state, reconguring the space
from utilitarian to ceremonial. Rene Naba, in his
recent biography of the current Prime Minister,
explains that the space was to be deled and the
remains of the sculpture to be removed under
Hariri, exiled with no hope of return. This was not,
so Naba argues, the rst time the Prime Minister
took aim at the Sunni political hero. Rather, this
erasure was but the last in a line of similar efface-
ments of Solhs memory that Hariri had effected in
Beirut and elsewhere in the country over the
course of a decade.
54
Perhaps the most notable
instance of such eradication occurred in his home-
town of Saida, where the Prime Minister hoped to
remove his predecessors name from the Ring Road
encircling the city, substituting his own. As the two
sagas played out, Hariris plans in both instances
were thwarted. The sculpture was returned to the
Square as one of the last civic acts of Hariris long-
time political opponent, the then-Prime Minister
Salim El-Hoss
55
, and it was restored as an act of
respect by Solhs own grandson, Prince Alwaleed
Bin Talal, a Saudi-Lebanese businessman like Hariri,
only much richer.
56
What was it, though, that caused the Prime
Minister to take such umbrage and aim at this
space and its sculpture specically? I look at one
of my recent photographs of this place from its
focal pointand feel an uncanny sense of de ja`
vu. That meeting of gazing gure and landmark
as a compositional strategythat interconnection
of face, place, and monumentIve seen them
before and in none other than Hariris own political
poster at the Mina. And as I argued that that
images visual dynamics operated there, so do I
think they work herewith the gaze of state-
making Solh phenomenalising the Serail in the
background, the house that Hariri rebuilt for the
28
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
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Prime Minister, that is, to say, for himself. And as
Hariri charged the community of Ain El-Mreisseh
to follow his lead, so, it seems, does the memory
of Solh instruct his Sunni issue, that is, whoever it
is that inhabits that house on the hill, to follow in
his footsteps.
Solhs lessons, however, would be difcult for this
particular successor Prime Minister to follow,
especially after having violated the spirit of the
Prime Ministers National Pact, the unofcial accord
between confessions and a proclamation of interre-
ligious cooperation.
57
Whats more, Hariri at present
seems less state-builder than potential state-
destroyer, holding the country hostage to a debt
burden produced by his capital spending pro-
gramme that exceeds 40-fold the debt the country
was forced to bear even at the Wars worst. In
point of fact, Hariris policy of decit spending has
effectively led to the withering of the civil state
and its services as Lebanese debt nancing
demands ever-larger portions of the GDP, now
reaching almost 70%, so Georges Corm has
reported.
58
And, as if this werent enough, Corm
argues that Raq Hariri, hugely successful business-
man, stands to benet richly from his countrys
nancial woes and civil collapse, proting from his
own banks
59
funding of the nations debt by pur-
chasing the lions share of the Lebanese government
junk bonds (at an interest rate that has at times
topped 30%, incidentally).
60
The gaze of history as
embodied in that statue at the Place Raid El-Solh
would demand that Hariri respond to the ethical
calling of his illustrious forebear; but this challenge
of history must be politely, but rmly, declined. In
the face of such moral authority, all, it seems, that
Hariri can do is to look away, or, better still, to
remove the eye of history entirely.
F. Re-colonialism in Hariris Beirut
Solide` re, the most visible in Lebanons array of new
public works, promotes itself on the basis of moder-
nised images borrowed heavily from the experience
of modernity in the West. The intention, I argue, is
frankly ideological, designed to reassure a Western
marketplace of the countrys returning civil order,
economic stability, and Westernised social identity.
This is a good place, so its images imply, for you to
do business. Part of the role these images have to
play is to construct a productive narrative for the
city of capital re-emergent, the Switzerland of the
Levant. This rhetorical agenda, however, is accom-
plished at the expense of another narrativethe
War itself, which, dreadful as it was, constitutes
the single shared experience to cut across all of
Lebanons social divisions. Ironically it is the single
narrative today with which all Lebanese can readily
identify.
A columnist for The New York Times, John Kifner,
recently wrote an article headlined The Beirut I
Knew Wasnt So Different.
61
His description of the
city following a long absence concluded that the
city seems to be returning to the same place it was
before the War. For someone who has lived in
Beirut recently, much of what I understand to have
existed in Beirut then does seem very much
present todayrestaurants, bars, boutiques,
discos, gaming, prostitution, drugs. Every diversion
that made this place the luxury destination of the
gogo jetset during the 1960s and 1970s appears
again to be in ample supply if somewhat less
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immediately visible (Fig. 25). Beirut is again a (if not
the) playground of the Middle East, although inter-
lopers in the Gulf States have assumed something
of a cultural lead. Certainly Solide` res new-found
images of limpid seas, sparkling skyscrapers and
boundless leisure have a major hand in promoting
the idea of the city resurgent, and of turning back
the clock.
But along with the surplus come the real values of
Beirut social life, among them, glaring disparities of
wealth, dramatic and recalcitrant class stratication,
the increase of interconfessional disputes that are
also intractably class-bound, the erosion of the Leba-
nese middle class, and the disturbing rise of poverty.
A recent painting by noted Lebanese artist
Mohammed El Rawaz points directly at these pro-
blems in a decidedly cynical milleniallistic mixed
media assemblage Third World Utopia, where a
sleek and bouncy, Gehry-esque house on a hill
hovers above a collection of what seem to be
beach-side shanties (Fig. 26).
62
The image has
denite staying power. Although putatively
contemporary, this urban landscape harks back to
pre-War settings of architectural high style irremedi-
ably contaminated (so those of a certain social class
would argue) by the plethora of squatter dwellings
that proliferated in Beiruts so-called Misery Belt.
Sadly, this kind of pre-War architectural view persists
today in the largely Shiite informal sectors of South
Beirut like Ouzai, Jnah, and Saint-Simon (Fig. 27).
Plus c a change. Rawazs image seems to make hay
with its subject matter, and ironically to unsettle the
spatial, temporal, and ideological distinctions that
his painting, and its title, initially describe. The ten-
sions transmitted between image and caption give
us cause to wonder, Is this place Utopian, Is this
place Third World? And with the unsettling, we
are caused to ponder just how utopian, just how
modern, just how Third World is it? And if it is not
precisely modern, nor utopian, nor progressivist,
nor Eastern, then this image may just as well
30
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 25. Bliss Street,
Hamra, Summer 2001.
(Source: author.)
Figure 26. Mohammed
El Rawaz, Third World
Utopia, mixed media
assemblage, 2000.
(Source: Mohammed El
Rawaz.)
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be . . . us, that is, we Western observers. Rawazs
picture, which putatively seeks to abstract the
social realities of life in Beirut, cannot help but con-
struct its Westernised viewers into its pictorial quad-
rature, mirroring us in its shiny facets of metal.
Which leads me to pose the following question. If
it can said, to paraphrase social theorist Ghassan
Hajj, that modernity is best characterised by what
kind of future the First World shows the Third,
then might it not also be argued that postmodernity
is best characterised by the kind of future the Third
World shows the First, that is to say, our Western
world?
63
And what of modernity and the colonial impulse?
Surely Solide` re gives every impression that this place
can be interpreted as having been colonised by
global, that is to say, First World capital. Indeed, it
is precisely this colonisation that causes us to liken
its emerging forms to New York, Paris, London,
and the like. But where Beirut differs from the
traditional images of Empire conveyed by modern-
ism resides in the facts that its forms are gene-
rated not so much to manage global capital as to
attract it, and that they are primarily designed and
executed by Beirutis for consumption by Beirutis.
More and more is the target for Solide` re less
an international, than a distinctly national market.
Formalistically, Solide` re might be likened to the
Bund in Shanghai, built by international investment
banks like Lloyds or Barings to manage and direct
English capital for purposes of exploiting an unmo-
dernised China. However, such is not the case
here. Rather, these Western-style high rises are
the evidence of a Lebanese economy colonising
none other than itself, a form of exploitation that
operates by splitting Lebanese national identity,
authoritative and submissive, dominant and sub-
altern at once.
The places desire to draw a foreign market stems
from its historic role as international service centre,
as hub of global banking activity. To attract, it oper-
ates as a mirror of the Western capitalisation it
desires, becoming the Other quietly seducing the
gaze of the West while outspokenly validating it.
However, to build in this way, it also acquiesces to
Western demands for order, efciency, and transpar-
encythere are to be no secrets here. Its forms
invariably perform in conformance with the terms
demanded by Western funding entities like the
World Bank, always indebted to the West, ever pre-
pared to submit to the terms of the deal and to repay
the debt, though not necessarily in kind, when the
loan is said to fall due.
64
I contend that Solide` re presents an image of a per-
sistent colonialism; the great irony here is that the
colonisers today are none other than the colonised
themselves. This situation suggests that colonisation
and its economic construction are more than a
31
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Figure 27. View of
Ouzai in the Southern
Suburbs of Beirut,
Summer 2001. (Source:
author.)
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matter of nance but also, so Max Weber would
argue, a matter of social psychology.
65
The compul-
sively regenerative nature of capital is accomplished
by continually recreating the very circumstances
necessary to engender itself, and these include pro-
ducing a self-sustaining manner of thinking, an
ideology of capital.
66
So it is, I would argue, with
the colonised. I wonder if the colonial self-construc-
tion survives into Beiruts post-colonial moment pre-
cisely because this place can simply imagine itself no
other way. It remains compulsively colonial because
it can no longer, if it ever did, imagine itself as other
than a culture consuming as it is consumed, and
deeply indebted as the consequence of its voracious
appetite, of its need to consume.
One of the oldest originary myths of the world is
set in the Levant. Hesiods Theogony recounts the
tale of heavenly and earthly beginnings, not to
mention those of time itself.
67
Not surprisingly,
time here is described in outspokenly naturalistic
termsas the genealogy of the greatest of the
Titans, the god Cronos. Cronos, so we are told,
upon hearing a prophecy that he is to be over-
come by one of his children, devours each of his
offspring as they are born. Chronoss wife Rhea,
determined to thwart his plans and recover her
children, substitutes a rock for the last child,
thereby allowing one son, Zeus, to escape his
fathers appetite, and, in time, to return and
conquer him. He does so by freeing his brothers
as his Father Time sleeps, thus fullling the pro-
phecy, thereby allowing time and life itself to
resume their interconnected courses. Reluctantly
acknowledging the craft of his children, Cronos
bequeaths to each of them a portion of the
32
A matter of life and
debt: the untold costs of
Raq Hariris New Beirut
Richard Becherer
Figure 28. Palestinian
children playing by the
sea near Tripoli;
photograph taken
c.1978. (Source: Reed,
Beirut: City of Regrets,
c.1988.)
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universe, that is to say, a different Levantine city
over which to rule, Byblos, Saida, Sour, among
them. Poseidons was to be Berytus.
Hariris is to be Beirut.
What goes around comes around. There are
curious parallels indeed to be found between the
political history of Raq Hariri and the Cronos
myth. Like Cronos, the Prime Ministers appetite
for monuments suggests at once his vanity and his
vulnerability to time, both aspects met by his
desire that his Lebanese Grands Projets both glorify
his name for today and retain his memory for
tomorrow. Moreover, as with Cronos, the hunger
for immortality felt by this new nations father can
be guaranteed only by consuming his childrens
sweat and life-blood as a nations indebtedness
transfers to its posterity. A difference emerges,
however, with the absence of a saviour as agent of
salvation. This time around, there is no Zeus. In the
mythic rewrite that Hariri and his political family
live, a new generation of offspring is expected to
escape their paternal connes in the darkness and
without a guide. Because of daunting obstacles
like these, we fear that the ending in the originary
tales retelling may be less happy than it was the
rst time around. And that Hariris children may
never know the joyful warmth of the sun on their
faces, or the exhilarating discovery of their bodies
outlined upon the sand (Fig. 28).
Postscript
I am assuming that the events in Beirut surrounding
Raq Hariris assassination on 14th February, 2005,
well after the nalisation of this article, will prompt
a number of readers to visit this text in hopes
of better understanding its socio-political context.
Hariris murder by parties unknown can only be con-
strued as an abomination and regarded with the
deepest regret and sadness. For the Lebanese, it
has had the effect of rekindling the dread of return-
ing sectarian violence while summoning up a
repressed experience of the Civil War. In the face
of these issues, it should be recalled that noone
was more assiduously committed to putting sectar-
ianism to rest than Hariri. It was, after all, he who
engineered the Taif Accords. It is also worth noting
that his postwar business practices, although criti-
cised here for their empire building, were remark-
able in their egalitarianism and confessional
blindness; as Prime Minister his advisers numbered
Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Maronites, among many
others. Whether in the business or the political
arena, Hariris manner in this most contentious of
places was even-handedly to engage the best
people, independent of religious or ethnic aflia-
tions. Indeed, he demonstrated that it was in the
best interest of all involved parties to do so. In the
wake of Hariris assassination, the international
press reported on a returning atmosphere of cultural
and political crisis in Lebanon. I can only hope that
this is not the case. Indeed, it is my belief that
there would be no greater affront to Hariris values
of religious toleration or his practice of democratic
statecraft than for the country that he loved and
defended to retreat into a wartime condition of
internecine suspicion, intolerance, and fear.
Acknowledgement
This paper could not have been completed without
the caring guidance of many friends in Beirut,
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including Abdul-Halim Jabr, Howayda Al-Harithy,
Esther Charlesworth, Nada Moumtaz, and,
especially, Marwan Ghandour. I am also indebted
to Helen Seeden, Assem Salaam, Georges Corm,
and Angus Gavin for sharing their experiences in
Solide` re with me. At Iowa State University, Howard
Shapiro, Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education,
helped to fund this work, and Architecture col-
league Lynn Paxson and graduate student Linli
Chen assisted me in preparing its images for publi-
cation. As ever, I thank my wife Charlene Castellano
for her tireless reading and indispensable criticism of
my work.
Notes and references
1. For a brief discussion of the construction of patronage
in Lebanon, particularly the bargaining occurring
among Christian, Sunni, and Druze zuama, see
Arnold Hottinger, Zuama in Historical Perspective,
included in Leonard Binder, ed., Politics in Lebanon
(New York, London, Sidney, Wiley and Sons, 1966),
pp. 85105. Samir Khalaf argues how these relation-
ships transform from religious to political and commer-
cial relations in Primordial Ties and Politics, Chapter 5
in Lebanons Predicament (New York, Columbia,
1987). For a working bibliography of clientelism in
Lebanon, see S. N. Eisenstadt and Rene Lemarchand,
eds, Political Clientelism, Patronage and Development
(Beverly Hills, London, SAGE Publications, 1981),
p. 311.
2. It is commonly believed that Hariri commissioned the
international advertising rm Saatchi and Saatchi to
design his political campaign. There is some truth to
the claim. Hariri is a major investor in French marketing
conglomerate Publicis Groupe, which controls Saatchi
and Saatchi. The advertising rmalso works extensively
with Hariris media interests in Beirut, including news-
papers and Future TV.
3. Interview 7 with Raq Hariri conducted by Esther
Charlesworth, 15 May 2000.
4. Beiruts construction as a Western city is a recurring
theme in Christian national discourse in Lebanon,
intent upon garnering a distinctly European ideological
formation that valorises a particular strain of non-Arab
cultural production. This mode of identication with
the West is powerfully problematised in works of con-
temporary ction like Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose: a
Novel, trans. Georgina Kleege (Sausalito, CA, USA,
Post-Apollo Press, 1978), esp. pp. 467. See also
Thomas Foster, Circles of Oppression, Cities of Repres-
sion: Etel Adnans Sitt Marie Rose, PMLA 110:1 (Jan
1995), 5974.
5. Any discussion of Orientalisation must account for one
of the elds seminal texts, Edward Saids Orientalism:
Western Representations of the Orient (Harmonds-
worth, MX, UK, Penguin, 1978). This book is central
to the entire eld of postcolonial theory. See Robert
J. C. Young, Postcolonialism (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001),
p. 383.
6. Forbes magazine regularly numbers Hariri among the
worlds wealthiest people (108 in 2004, 83 in 2003,
87 in 2002). His estimated net worth is said to range
from $2.5 billion in 1996 to $4.3 billion in 2004.
Note that at a time when the face value of his property
ventures in Beirut is collapsing, Hariris personal fortune
grows by almost 75%. Forbes magazine website:
www.forbes.com/lists.
7. The concepts Imaginary, Symbolic, Real describe the
three Lacanian dimensions inhabiting the process of
Identication as outlined in the Translators Note prefa-
cing Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sher-
idan (New York, Norton, 1977), pp. ixx. The dyadic
relationship between Imaginary and Symbolic is further
described by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic
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Language, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York, Columbia
University Press, 1984), pp. 956.
8. This number does not include the 17,000 still recorded
as missing.
9. Here Bauman quotes Klaus Offe, see Postmodernity
and Its Discontents (New York, New York University
Press, 1997), p. 22.
10. One telling discussion of post-Mandate architectural
form occurs in Jad Tabet, From Colonial Style to
Regional Modernism: Modern Architecture in
Lebanon and the Problem of Cultural Identity,
included in Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construc-
tion and Reconstruction of Modernity, Peter Rowe
and Hashim Sarkis, eds (Munich, Prestel, 1996),
pp. 83115.
11. Similarly, Edward Said has spoken of three phases of
colonialismmost important of these, a third period
wherein the East, now educated in the institutions of
the West, is empowered to direct its appropriated criti-
cal tools at the incipiently imperialistic bases of
Western institutions, and their driving master narra-
tives. The net result is a De-Colonial, Post-Modern
critical project that compels the West to consider this
critique as gestated within a condition of radical alter-
ity, and to internalise it. See, for instance, Saids Yeats
and Decolonialisation, included in Moustafa Bayoumi
and Andrew Rubin, eds, The Edward Said Reader
(New York, Vintage, 2000), esp. pp. 297302, as well
as his Intellectuals, Expatriates and Marginals,
pp. 377381. See also Said, Representations of the
Intellectual (New York, Vintage, 1996), pp. 2545.
12. Tabet, op. cit., pp. 846. On the Frenchness of
Lebanese architecture during the Mandate period,
see Assem Salam, The Role of the Government in
Shaping the Beirut Environment, included in Project-
ing Beirut, Rowe and Sarkis, eds, op. cit., esp. pp.
1245. More specically, on the Levantine experience
of French architect Michel Ecochard, designer of
Beiruts rst urban plan in 1943, see Marlene Ghor-
ayeb, The Work and Inuence of Michel Ecorchard
in Lebanon, also in Projecting Beirut, pp. 106121.
Ecochards work was closely tied to the archaeological
researches of the French Institute in Damascus.
13. Edde discusses his involvement with the reconstruction
project in his autobiography, Le Liban dou` Je Viens
(Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 1996), especially Annnexes:
La Reconstruction du Centre-Ville, pp. 225249.
For alternative discussions of the two Edde projects,
see Ossama Kabbani, The Reconstruction of Beirut
(Oxford, Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992), esp. pp.
3147, and Hashim Sarkis, Territorial Claims: Archi-
tecture and Post-War Attitudes toward the Built
Environment included in Recovering Beirut, eds
Samir Khalaf and Philip Khoury, introd. Richard
Sennett (Leiden, New York, Cologne, Brill, 1993), pp.
101127. For a later critique of the Beirut reconstruc-
tion see Sarce Makdisi, Laying Claim to Beirut:
Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age
of Solide` re, Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997),
pp. 661705.
14. Perhaps nowhere is this myth of place more attached
to emergent Lebanese national consciousness than in
Charles Corms La Montagne Inspire e, second edition
(Paris, Editions de la Revue Phe nicienne, 1964). This
collection of French-language poems, dating from
192034, is thoroughly Symbolist in feeling.
15. Angus Gavin, Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and
Development of the Central District (London,
Academy Editions, 1996), especially chapter 6 Gran-
deur and Context. Gavins debt to Rowes theories
has been suggested in the course of conversations
with the project architect. Rowes Collage City is also
listed in Gavins bibliography for the book.
16. The competition programme for the Souks, to be built
by Solide` re, demonstrates this projects initial contex-
tualising preferences. Its programmes brief included
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various style sheets of historical detailing which com-
petitors were encouraged to consider in the course
of creating their proposals designs. See The Recon-
struction of the Souks of Beirut: An International
Ideas Competition (Beirut, Solide` re, 1994), especially
Souks of Beirut Condition and Program Kit. To his
credit, the Souks winning designer Rafael Moneo did
not submit to the projects limited formal predilections.
17. Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West:
Politics, Colonies, and Trade, trans. Mary Turton
(Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press,
1987), pp. 1515.
18. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge,
MA, MIT Press, 1978), especially Chapter 1: Utopia,
Decline and Fall.
19. It comes as little surprise that one of the main archi-
tects sub-contracted to develop Gavins Solide` re
master plan was none other than Rowes collaborator
on Collage City, Fred Koetter. Koetter/Kims project
for the hotel district, Beirut Central District: The
Development Plan for Sectors B and CThe Hotel
District and the Serail Corridor, dates from July
1997. The rm also here afliated itself with Perkins
and Will, the US subsidiary of Dar El-Handassah.
20. Dubai has become the Middle Easts foremost market-
place, its growth spurred by its tax-free status. The city
has supplemented its shopping allure with unparalleled
opportunities for entertainment. Beirut is seeking to
prot from Dubais formula for success by foreground-
ing its leisure culture as well as by envisioning specic
tax-free zones near border points, including the
Lebanon/Syria border and the Beirut international
airport. Beirut also imitates the tax-free zones one
month a year during Fabulous February when state
tax levies are temporarily suspended.
21. The latest instance of high-style architecture is the
recently announced Landmark Building in Riad
El-Solh Square to be designed by Jean Nouvel. This
project, like its predecessor scheme by Rem Koolhaas,
was commissioned by the Hariri-nanced urban design
rm Millennium. See Tarek El-Zein, Building the Tallest
Building in Lebanon, The Daily Star (8 April 2004),
Section I, page 1. This building will be funded
largely with Kuwaiti money.
22. I borrowthis apt termfromthe recent essay by Norman
Klein, Architainment: LIndustrialisation du De sir,
trans. Thierry Marignac, included in Au de la` de la
Spectacle (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2001), pp. 7784.
23. Unfortunately for Murr, he was unable to leverage a
higher price from Solide` re, leaving the Minister
holding this truly unsalvageable, white elephant of a
commercial building.
24. Interview with former Minister of Finance Georges
Corm in Paris at Le Do me, 15 February 2001. Corm
notes that Jad Tabet conrms his claim concerning
the wanton destruction of the BCDs Jewish quarter.
By contrast, Angus Gavin, Solide` res chief architect,
argues that the buildings were demolished because
of their extreme physical degradation. Physical con-
dition, however, cannot explain the wholesale destruc-
tion of this entire quarter.
25. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 3667.
26. On the subject of the Archnet site (www.archnet.org),
refer to my article, The East/West Web Site, Architec-
ture 90:7 (July 2001), pp. 534. Hariris team
responded to the web sites visual diatribe with a
new book, compiled by Ayman Trawi, using a similar
Before and After format favourably to spin the BCD
reconstruction, Beiruts Memory (Beirut, Banque de la
Me diterrane e, c.2002).
27. The 1998 Solide` re annual report discloses the company
to be the Radion Corporation, from Houston, Texas.
28. Beiruts Solide` re project epitomises the modernist
discourse of urban hygiene while attaching itself
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ideologically to acts of historical cleansing like that
described by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and
Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press,
1991), esp. Chap. III, The Self-Construction of
Ambivalence.
29. These include the United Nations ESCWA building by
Pierre El-Khoury, the power substation by Abdul-
Halim Jabr in association with Bawader architects,
the new Parliament Annex at Place de lEtoile and
the Forum building in Rue Maraad, both by Building
Design Consultants (Nabil Azar, principal), the
Banque Audi beneath the Serail, by Kevin Dash, and
the nearly complete LOrient-le-Jour/An-Nahar
building, also by Pierre El-Khoury, in the Burj Square
(Place des Martyrs). To this list should be added
the proposed Landmark Building, designed by Jean
Nouvel, to be erected in Riad El Solh Square, men-
tioned above.
30. This is no idle comparison for an essential formal and
political actor in the Solide` re redevelopment is Saudi
Arabia. Raq Hariri was a developer for the House of
Saud and instrumental in constructing those grands
ensembles with which the Royal Family has confected
the national identity of the Saudi state. See Edde , op.
cit., pp. 1424. His work for them even includes the
very conference centre in Taif where the Lebanese
peace accords were signed in 1989. Most important
are a redesign of the city of Mecca and the urban
ensembles built upon previously empty, desert land
not unlike the vacated tabula rasa created by Soli-
de` rethat the Royal Family has built in Riyadh and
Jeddah, hugely modernised simulations of rural, and
village peninsular culture (Naba, p. 32, citing Guilain
Denoeux and Robert Springbord, Hariris Lebanon,
Middle East Policy VI:2 [October 1998]). For a parallel
discussion of the ways that contemporary Saudi
culture both un-writes and re-writes its culture, see
Elaine Sciolino, Where the Prophet Trod, He Begs,
Tread Lightly, New York Times International
(15 February 2002), late edition: A4 and Howayda
Al-Harithy, Manufacturing Architectural Identity: The
Works of Rasem Badran in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tra-
ditional Dwellings and Settlement Review XII:1
(Autumn 2000), p. 49.
31. The once and future Prime Minister announced
this injunction at the ceremony at Martyrs Square
commemorating the 25th anniversary of the outbreak
of the Civil War. The Daily Star (14 April 2000),
p. 1.
32. This project is included in the synoptic table of BCD
schemes included in Henri Edde s two volumes prefa-
cing his project for the reconstruction of Beirut. The
mid-1980s plan transformed the dump into a peninsu-
lar playground covered with a megastructure of
seaside apartments and hotels.
33. The legislation governing the creation of the develop-
ment corporation limits share ownership by any indi-
vidual to 10%. Hariri, who is a Saudi citizen, is
allowed to own no more than 5000 square metres of
property by Lebanese law. Despite this restriction,
Hariri publicly declares his investment in Solide` re at
7%. He is in fact far more invested than this, using
family members and close business associates as
proxies. Hariri also conceals Solide` re investment in
ctive holding companies and, of course, in his invest-
ment banks. (Naba, op. cit., p. 37.)
34. Patronage studies became an essential component in
the study of Middle Eastern social and political patterns
as illustrated by one of the standard works on Leba-
nese governance, Leonard Binder, ed., Politics in
Lebanon (New York, London, Sidney, John Wiley,
1966). They also shape the work of Ernest Gellner
and John Waterbury in their edited volume Patrons
and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London,
Duckworth, 1977), Samir Khalaf in Lebanons Pre-
dicament (New York, Columbia University Press,
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1987), and Marie Picon in Lebanon a Shattered
Country: Myths and Realities of the Wars in Lebanon,
trans. Franklin Philip (New York, London, Holmes and
Meier, 1996), esp. Chap. 5, pp. 4962.
35. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller
(New York, Random House, 1998), pp. 19, 315.
36. Max Weber posits that stewardship, and the sense of
moral obligation to the poor that drives it, is one
means by which the wealthy believed themselves
assured of their salvation. The Protestant ethic then
was not free of its decided self-interest. Weber, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons and Foreword R. H. Tawney (London,
Unwin, 1930), pp. 267, 162, 170. Zygmunt
Bauman, however, would argue that even the most
seemingly altruistic American giving was accompanied
by a simultaneously educational and moral lesson; US
philanthropy, no matter how altruistic, normally came
with ideological strings attached. See Bauman, Work,
Consumerism, and the New Poor (Buckingham,
Philadelphia, Open University, 1998), p. 10.
37. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the
Last 2,000 Years (New York, Touchstone, 1997), pp.
1723, 232.
38. Lewis argues that the entire Islamic banking system
sidesteps the issue of monetary interest as it is dis-
placed onto various kinds of nancial and social
equity, and that it has evolved from this principle.
39. The social geography of the Mina, the centrepiece of
Ain-el-Mreisseh, is evenly divided between Druze and
Sunni populations.
40. This expression is taken from Jerome Kerns and Oscar
Hammerstein IIs popular song, The Folks Who Live on
the Hill, composed for the Broadway show High,
Wide, and Handsome, 1937.
41. Jacques Lacan, TheMirror Stageas Formativeof theFunc-
tion of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,
included in Ecrits (New York, Norton, 1977), pp. 17.
42. This term is appropriated from Milton Greenblatts
book Psychopolitics (New York, Grune and Stratton,
1978).
43. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis, trans. Allen Sheridan (New York,
Norton, 1981), pp. 105116.
44. Ain El-Mreisseh, though mixed religiously (confession-
ally) as noted above, normally throws its support
behind members of the Jumblatt family, the quarters
traditional representatives in Parliament. The Jum-
blatts, wealthy and powerful Druze leaders in
Lebanon, do not always voice the interests of the
Sunni population in the quarter, and the Minas
support of Hariri would seem to underscore this point.
45. This analysis is particularly indebted to Homi Bhabhas
discussion Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of
Colonial Discourse, Chapter 4 of The Location
of Culture (New York, London, Routledge, 1994),
pp. 8592.
46. The concept of lack (manque) is fundamental to the
Lacanian process of identity construction. Jacques
Lacans famous Mirror Stage essay, explains how the
infants misidentication (me connaissance) with the
maternal object constitutes a traumatic instant
embedded into basic libidinal drives, The Mirror
Stage, pp. 67. The lack of the object, if left unsatis-
ed, can lead to an innite rebus of desire cathecting
onto a cascading series of inadequate objects, all
proxies for the absent originary object, which poten-
tially leave the subject in a state of psychic fragmenta-
tion. A spiral of innite misidentications later leads to
Lacans famous series of Gordian knot diagrams,
which continually circle around a hole, void, or lack:
Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject and the Dia-
lectic of Desire, Ecrits, pp. 315318. Julia Kristeva
expands Lacans theory into the domain of language,
noting that lack constitutes an immanent under-
tow repetitively drawing the subject toward the
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(inadequate) signier, an afnity that motivates com-
pensatory, poetic discourse. She underscores the
binary relationship of the subject/object discourse,
noting how lack undoes the hopeful synthesis that
emanates from Hegelian dialectics with an unstable
binarism. (Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic
Language, introd. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Margaret
Waller [New York, Columbia University Press, 1984],
pp. 956.) Lacan returns these ideas to the domain
of the visual in his essay, What Is an Image? cited
above, where the image serves as both a desirable
object and ploy averting the attention of the viewer
from an irretrievable past, or lack. Presence and
lack correlate with feelings of power and impotence,
psychic conditions that translate easily from the indi-
vidual to the social body, as the Lacan-informed politi-
cal theories of Louis Althusser illustrate. See Althusser,
Essays in Ideology (London, New York, Verso, 1984).
47. The term kawajah is an Egyptian slang transformation
of the Arabic kojah, meaning expert. The Egyptian
term carries with it a cynical connotation referring to
the kind of Western expertise Third World countries
tend to employ to legitimate their commonly suspect
political agendas.
48. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book From Beirut to
Lebanon, Thomas Friedman argues that life in the
Middle East is a matter of continual bargaining, and
that any good negotiator here must know as much.
Whats more, the thing really to fear here is an
absence of negotiation. His argument would be, I
think, that trade-off, or masoubiye, is somehow bred
in the bone. Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to
Jerusalem (New York, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1989),
pp. 5018.
49. The term symbolic capital is taken from Pierre
Bourdieu, Distinction, op. cit., p. 291.
50. See Nabil Beyhoums, Ne me tuez pas une seconde
fois . . ., included in Michael Davie, Beyrouth:
Regards Croise s (Tours, URBAMA, 1997), pp.
3513.
51. For a discussion of the distinction between the Sunni-
opposed Shia and the Sunni-neutral Sus, see
Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the
Last 2000 Years, op. cit., pp. 238243.
52. The holy man, it is said, died on the Hajj and was buried
on the Arabian peninsula in the Bab al Maalla ceme-
tery in Mecca. See Helga Seeden et al., Urban Archae-
ology 94: Beirut. (Beirut, Directorate of Antiquities of
Lebanon, 1995), pp. 1213.
53. Nabil Beyhoum, op. cit., depicts the Shiites at the
Zawiya as nancially grasping, as he describes the
way that they cut up the green cloth found draped
over the tomb monument, to be sold as relics for prot.
54. Naba, op. cit., pp. 889.
55. Hoss, in reconstructing the monument, associates
himself with Solh, becoming Prime Minister and
leader of Lebanon following the collapse of the gov-
ernment under Michel Aoun.
56. According to Forbes magazine, Bin Talals estimated
net worth is estimated at $21.5 thousand million
dollars. See www.forbes.com/lists.
57. This is the claim about Solh made by Kamal Salibi in his
Histoire du Liban: Du XVIIe` me Sie` cle a` Nos Jours
(Beirut, Nawfal, 1992), pp. 288290.
58. Interview with former Minister of Finance Georges
Corm in Paris at Le Do me, 15 February 2001.
More recent numbers put the debt at something like
170% of GDP with 80% of state revenues now
going to debt servicing. Public Sector Debt Almost
Unsustainable, Lebanon Opportunities (June 2002),
p. 68.
59. His banks include the Banque de la Me diterrane e,
Banque Saoudi-Libanaise, and Banque Libanaise
dOutre-Mer (or BLOM).
60. Both Moodys and Standard and Poors have lowered
the rating on Lebanese long-term government bonds
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to a B, that is, a junk rating, on a par with Bulgarias
and Argentinas. The high rate of interest is a measure
of the risk level that the government must assume in
order to attract buyers to its bond issues nationally
and internationally. Incidentally, the bulk of Lebanons
debt is nanced internally, bond issues having been
oated in world markets only relatively recently.
Capital Intelligence Downgrades Rating, Lebanon
Opportunities (June 2002), p. 67.
61. John Kifner, The Beirut I Knew Wasnt So Different,
The New York Times (9 July 2000), section IV16 .
62. Exhibition catalogue. Mohammed El Rawaz (Beirut,
Galerie Janine Rubetz, 2000), p. 11.
63. Ghassan Hajj, Lecture, 13 February 2001, American
University of Beirut.
64. Hariri now seeks forgiveness of the nations more than
twenty thousand million dollar national debt in order
to avert the nations complete nancial collapse.
Rumours run rife that he is prepared to naturalise
Palestinians exiled in Lebanon provided the national
debts be forgiven by the IMF and World Bank. As
intriguing as this scenario may sound, such economic
high drama is scally impossible given the fact that
these organisations can forgive only bilateral loans,
which constitute only a fraction of the national debt.
Interview with Georges Corm, 15 May 2001.
65. Weber, op. cit., p. 31.
66. This contentions Marxian tone rests in the proposition
that the main function of ideology is to guarantee the
reproduction of existing class relationships. The power
elite relies on ideology as a coercive way of maintaining
the capitalist relations of exploitation, and protecting
its locations of capital and political power. Louis
Althusser, Ideology and the State, included in Essays
on Ideology (London, New York, Verso, 1984), pp.
289.
67. Hesiods Theogony, trans. and introd. Norman
O. Brown (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1953),
pp. 6667. See also Hesiod, The Theogony, trans. and
notes M. L. West (Oxford, Clarendon, 1966), p. 19.
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