The Leftist, the Liberal, and the Space In Between: Ziad Rahbani and Everyday Ideology

Intellectual history has long dominated the study of ideologies in the Middle East. Since Albert Hourani's famous Arab Thought in the Liberal Age (1962), a number of scholars have linked ideological formation to intellectual life in the nahda period, stressing the role of famous writers and thinkers. According to this narrative, the reforms of the late Ottoman Empire produced social change in Egypt and the Levant, which led to the emergence of ideology in the Middle East.1 A class of well-heeled, educated professionals-doctors, lawyers, journalists, and editors-as well as a middle-class urban intelligentsia known as the effendiya, adopted and reshaped socialist, anarchist, nationalist, and liberal ideas and gave them an outlet in newspapers, journals, and artistic production. Islamic reformists gave rise to Islamist movements. Socialists and communists adopted and reshaped Marxist ideas under the influence of anticolonial sentiments, while Arab anarchists actively spread their ideas through propaganda work. In the decade following World War I, the various ideological trends became the basis for political parties and currents. These institutions-journals, newspapers, and parties-are the usual foci for studies of ideological formations both in the nahda period and in the rest of the twentieth century.2Most research has focused on the lives and work of intellectuals. One of the results of this focus on great thinkers, I argue in this article, has been that scholarship on ideology in the region tends to ignore how political ideas gained currency among the wider Arab populations. By framing ideologies as subjectivities and traditions, I want us to think of political ideas as fluid fields of identification that shape the political thought of a much broader segment of the population than professional intellectuals. I urge us to interrogate the spaces in between ideological traditions, in particular the zones of overlap and convergence between the left and liberalism. In this article I focus on the space in between liberal and leftist subjectivities by analyzing the Lebanese singer Ziad Rahbani, his work, and his significance in a Lebanese cultural and political context. His songs intervene in a field of ideas, but not in ways that can simply be likened to political theories or political programs. As John Thompson poetically puts it, 'Ideas' do not drift through the social world like clouds in a summer sky, occasionally divulging their contents with a clap of thunder and a flash of light.3 Rather, ideas circulate in the social world as utterances, as cultural expressions, as embodied understandings of the social world-habitus-based on human experience. Therefore, to study ideology is to study expression in the social world. It is to study the ways in which political ideas are negotiated over time in an ongoing reflection of history. Ideological processes are long intergenerational conversations, or cumulative discursive traditions in the sense used by Alasdair MacIntyre. Tradition, MacIntyre argues, isa historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual's search for his or her is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual's life is a part.4In political culture, discursive traditions and sensibilities afford a comprehensive, ongoing reflection on the individual's own good in relation to the common of society. For example, in communist parties and the milieus that surround them, a common frame of the ideal, egalitarian society exists, but with significant variations. These variations, which if serious enough can become subsidiary ideological traditions, reflect how people read history as it unfolds, and how particular interpretations of that history become paradigmatic. …