Lebanon, as a nation-state, began in earnest following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the French Mandate of Greater Lebanon. During these periods, the potential nation had several competing nationalist narratives emerging. Intellectuals and politicians articulated ideologies such as Phoenicianism and the Merchant Republic alongside the unique role of Mount Lebanon. While the Phoenician city-state as an imagined precursor to the nation was important, in particular, for the nation’s capitalist orientation, it accounted only for the maritime regions. The Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate that covered the Mount Lebanon region had provided the fulcrum for the Lebanese nationalist project but its overt sectarian tone was not a viable project within the borders drawn up by France. Therefore, an imagining of the rural countryside emerged within the state’s discourse that formed a pastiche of rural archetypes signified as “Lebanese.” The village tropes served didactic purposes in differentiating the state from Greater Syria and the Arab region as those were the most significant concurrent nationalist projects threatening the young state. Through state patronage of the arts, the mountainous non-urban space becomes a tool to fashion a national narrative that elucidated how Lebanese political elites envisioned their nation. My paper explores the multivalent trajectories of Lebanese discourse of the rural as the nation from independence until the years before the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Using the musical theater of the Rahbani Brothers, the music of Fairuz, and musical compositions by figures such as Zaki Nassif and Said ‘Aql, I explore how the mountainous regions of Lebanon formed the crux of the national identity. In state-sponsored events such as the Baalbek Festival, artists deployed an array of tropes, symbols, and phrases that evoked the countryside as the nation. In particular, these theatrical works and songs deploy imagery of idyllic villages with grapes, olive trees, springs, and other folkloric components. The phantasmagoria of the “Lebanese village” becomes a cornerstone for circulating politics centered around community and family. Ultimately, these pieces propped up conservative notions of the self and nation even if they did not account for reality. Up until the civil war, these depictions of the village as the nation persisted without significant pushback. The recurrent use of the village in nationalist discourse was part of a wider project in imagining the Lebanese nation as a distinct entity from its environs outside strict temporal demarcations.

Elite, urban Lebanese women’s efforts to enshrine political, economic, and educational rights for women in the constitution were largely unsuccessful. Disappointed by the structure of the Lebanese Constitution, some activists worked to prove that women were foundationally important to the Lebanese nation. In order to do this, Beiruti-based activists like Najla Saab, Eveline Bustros, and Ibtihaj Qaddura constructed a narrative through their writings in the popular and women’s press that rural women were the holders of a “true” Lebanese identity. This imagined, archetypal Lebanese woman raised future generations and was connected to the land through agricultural production. Based more in fiction than fact, this image served two objectives. First, this image allowed its elite progenitors to challenge the exclusion of women from the foundational documents of the Lebanese state. Second, positioning the imagined, rural woman as the holder of Lebanese tradition, allowed urban women to claim gendered expertise locally and internationally. In 1953 the Associated Countrywomen of the World (ACWW) accepted the Village Welfare Society as its Lebanese affiliate. Through its affiliation with the ACWW, one of the largest international women’s organizations dedicated to improving the status of rural women, the Village Welfare society could position its members as experts on the status of rural women, even though none of the organization’s leaders permanently lived in a rural area. In an effort to carve out a zone of influence for themselves in the newly independent nation, members of the Village Welfare Society and other women’s organizations utilized post-war development discourse to their advantage. Crucially, the members of the Village Welfare Society did not think that they needed to be the targets of development efforts. Instead, elite, urban women involved in women’s organizations turned women who lived in Lebanon’s villages into populations in need of development and modernization. The efforts of development-oriented feminists reveals the competing impulses in the Lebanese women’s rights activist community in the early post-independence period: elite women wanted power for themselves and to help poorer, rural women, but in order to achieve the former, they needed to denigrate the latter. Using memoirs, archival materials, and newspaper articles, this paper reveals that the invented an image of rural Lebanese women as holders of tradition and as the mothers of the nation was ultimately used to otherize them in ways that benefitted the elite, urban women who constructed the image in the first place.

This paper writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic and nationalist thought. Historians of Lebanon’s post-independence period (1943-1958) have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon’s national vocation. A particular masculine subject, the ocean-going entrepreneur, epitomized this vocation. This paper reveals that engineers formed an influential counter-current that reinterpreted these nationalist principles. Against strict laissez-faire, Lebanese engineer-bureaucrats like Ibrahim Abd-El-Al and Joseph Naggear advocated statist developmentalism. They saw the post-independence era as an opportunity to raise their profession’s status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. Critical to this project was reshaping the parameters of Lebanese national subjectivity. Reinterpreting the consortium’s environmental determinist narrative, Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. Drawing on climatic, hydrological, and archaeological research, Abd-El-Al asserted a second national archetype, the rational, rugged mountain peasant, who had mastered the economic use of limited water and soil resources. By writing Lebanese fallahin into bourgeois conceptions of national identity, Abd-El-Al and Naggear called attention to urban-rural inequalities and advocated state-led agricultural development. To make these arguments, they spoke paternalistically—even condescendingly—on behalf of Lebanon’s rural margins. And, ultimately, their statist project demonstrated the limits of a bourgeois critique of laissez-faire by reproducing and maintaining that regime of accumulation’s constitutive divisions, inequalities, and injustices. Within those limits, Abd-El-Al and Naggear warned of laissez-faire’s dangerous capacity to impoverish the rural margins and pushed the government to recognize its responsibility to Lebanon’s rural majority. Moreover, they cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism, and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.