Lebanese culture: eighteen communities and the practices they share

How eighteen communities divide daily life

Lebanon recognises 18 religious communities: four Muslim, twelve Christian, the Druze and the Jewish community. Each recognised community runs its own courts for personal status, so marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance follow the religious law of the community a citizen belongs to. There is no civil marriage inside the country, though marriages contracted abroad are recognised, and Freedom House reports that couples marrying across communities often travel to do so.

The size of each community is a political question, because seats and offices are divided by community, and no official census has been taken since 1932. Estimates therefore vary with who made them. Britannica describes Shia and Sunni Muslims as the two largest groups, each more than a quarter of the population, and Maronites as more than a fifth. A study by the research firm Statistics Lebanon, cited in Wikipedia's article on Lebanon, gives about 27% Sunni, 27% Shia, 21% Maronite, 8% Greek Orthodox, 5% Druze and 5% Melkite. The CIA World Factbook's estimate for 2020, cited in the same article, puts Muslims at 67.8% and Christians at 32.4%, excluding refugees.

The communities also have a geography. The same article places Sunni residents mainly in west Beirut, the southern coast and the north; Shia residents in south Beirut, the Bekaa and the south; Maronites in east Beirut and around Mount Lebanon; Greek Orthodox in Koura, Akkar, Metn and the Achrafieh quarter of Beirut; and the Druze in the mountains east and south of the capital. Britannica records that the civil war sharpened this, moving thousands of Christians north of Beirut along the coast and thousands of Muslims south and east of it.

Family and kinship sit at the centre of social life, in Britannica's description, in public as well as private affairs.

Which languages people speak and write

Article 11 of the constitution makes Arabic the official national language and leaves the cases in which French is used to be set by law. Britannica records that about 20% of the population spoke French in daily life in 2004. The spoken Lebanese dialect mixes Arabic with French, English is also spoken, and smaller communities speak Armenian or Kurdish.

Syriac survives as a liturgical language: Britannica records that it is still used in some Maronite churches. Arabic calligraphy is part of the same inheritance: Lebanon is one of the states named in UNESCO's listing of the skill in 2021.

Where the Armenian community came from

The Armenian community is the clearest case of a community that arrived within living memory and built its own institutions. Refugees from the Armenian genocide came mainly between 1918 and 1920 and founded Bourj Hammoud, east of Beirut, on what was then marshland. Others settled in Karantina, the port quarter of the capital whose name means quarantine. Armenian presence before the genocide had been small. A second group, leaving Alexandretta when Turkey annexed it in 1939, founded the town of Anjar in the Bekaa. Minority Rights Group International, cited in Wikipedia's article on the community, counts about 156,000 Armenians, around 4% of the population.

Most belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church, with Catholic and Protestant minorities. The community was larger before the civil war, when insecurity and economic dislocation sent many of its members abroad. The community keeps Armenian-language media and parties, held to a reputation for neutrality in the civil war, and is represented by six seats in parliament. Armenian Orthodox Christians keep Christmas on 6 January.

What the shared table holds

Britannica describes a cuisine of herbs, vegetables, fruit, olives and olive oil, laban (yoghurt), rice and khubz, the flatbread, eaten as a spread of small shared dishes. Kibbeh, minced meat and bulgur shaped into a stuffed oval, is often called the national dish, along with tabbouleh, a salad of herbs, tomato, onion, bulgur, lemon juice and olive oil. Most food is grilled or baked, or cooked lightly in olive oil; butter and cream appear in few dishes besides desserts.

Mezze is the form the table takes when guests come. Wikipedia's article on the cuisine describes three or four dishes for a family and 20 to 60 in a restaurant: tabbouleh and fattoush, hummus and baba ghanoush, kibbeh and falafel, stuffed vine leaves, pickles and nuts. Drinks are rarely served without food. The national spirit, arak, is made from fermented grape juice and flavoured with anise, and turns milky white when water and ice are added. Regions have their own specialities: kibbeh in the south, meat pastries such as sfiha in the Bekaa, sweets in Tripoli and Sidon. Households still prepare mouneh in late summer and early autumn, the stored year's supply of bulgur, oil, labneh, pickles, jams and preserved meat.

Al-man'ouché, inscribed by UNESCO in 2023, is the breakfast flatbread. UNESCO's description is precise: the dough is dimpled with the fingertips, topped with thyme, sumac, toasted sesame, salt and olive oil, baked, and often finished with labneh, tomato, cucumber, olives and mint. Women make it at home, and men, women or whole families run the small bakeries that sell it. The listing ties its smell to the sobhhiyé, the morning gathering.

Wine is older than any of this. Wikipedia's article on Lebanese wine records that the wines of Byblos were exported to Egypt in the Old Kingdom and that a seventh-century BC wine press was found at Tell el-Burak near Sidon.

How poetry and song are performed

Zajal is folk poetry, declaimed or sung, inscribed by UNESCO in 2014. Men and women perform it alone or in troupes, at family celebrations and in daily life, on love, death, politics and the day's events. Its best-known form is the poetic joust: poets and musicians sit at a table of mezze and arak and trade verses as challenges over a tambourine and a derbouka drum, while singers and audience repeat the lines. UNESCO's listing records that the verses often speak of tolerance and of dialogue between communities, and that the jousts can work as a release for tension.

The folk revival that Britannica describes centred on song, zajal and dabkah, the line dance it calls the national dance. In the 19th century Lebanese writers and linguists were at the front of the Arabic literary revival, the nahda. Khalil Gibran, born in Bsharri in 1883, published The Prophet in 1923. Britannica names Georges Shehade, Michel Chiha and Hanan al-Shaykh among writers widely translated since. The singer Fairouz, whose career spans several decades, is in Britannica's words a treasured cultural icon.

Wikipedia's culture article names Sabah, Wadih El Safi, Majida El Roumi and Najwa Karam among the singers who carried the traditional repertoire to a wider Arab audience, and Marcel Khalife among those who set classical Arab music to modern arrangements and political lyrics. Radio carries traditional, classical Arabic and Armenian music side by side.

Dress follows the same line between folk revival and daily life. The same article describes clothing as historically Ottoman and now part of folk culture: in the countryside women sometimes wear brightly coloured skirts and men the baggy sherwal trousers, while almost everyone wears modern clothes day to day. The names the article lists in the Lebanese fashion industry include Elie Saab and Zuhair Murad.

Ancient sites serve as stages. The Baalbek International Festival is held among the Roman temples, and Wikipedia's culture article lists festivals at Byblos, Beiteddine, Broumana, Batroun and Tyre as well.

Who runs the schools and universities

Education began as a matter for the communities and for foreign missions, and much of it remains so. Britannica records that most students attend private schools, which are generally better regarded than public ones, and that the public share fell from more than two-fifths of pupils in the early 1970s to about a third by the end of the civil war. Six years of primary school lead to up to six years of secondary or technical study ending in an official baccalaureate.

The universities show the same layering. The American University of Beirut grew from the Syrian Protestant College founded by American missionaries in 1866; Université Saint-Joseph was opened by the Jesuits in 1875 and is subsidised by the French government; the state's Lebanese University dates from 1951 and Beirut Arab University, affiliated to the University of Alexandria, from 1960.

How the press and sport are organised

The press has long been plural and partisan. Britannica names Al-Nahar and Al-Safir among the Arabic dailies, L'Orient-Le Jour in French and The Daily Star in English, and contrasts a relatively free print press with broadcasting that the government regulates more closely. Freedom House's report on 2024 adds that nearly all outlets depend on the patronage of parties, wealthy individuals or foreign powers, and that the Samir Kassir Foundation recorded more than 800 violations against journalists between 2016 and 2022. Books, films and plays are censored, especially where they touch politics, religion, sex or Israel.

Britannica describes football as one of the sports with the widest following, with basketball also popular. Lebanon sent officials to the Berlin Olympics of 1936, formed its Olympic committee in 1947 and has competed at Summer and Winter Games since; it hosted the Pan-Arab Games in 1997 and football's Asian Cup in 2000. Snow on the Lebanon Mountains supports ski resorts, and Britannica notes that weightlifting has had a following since the mid-20th century.

When the communities celebrate

The calendar is shared out like the state. Britannica lists Christmas and Easter for Christians, with dates that differ between Catholic and Orthodox churches, and Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, the Prophet's birthday and, for Shia Muslims, Ashura. Most churches keep Christmas on 25 December and the Armenian Orthodox on 6 January.

Two national days carry the modern history. Independence Day on 22 November marks the release of the government arrested by the French in 1943, and Liberation Day on 25 May marks the Israeli withdrawal from the south in 2000. The Lebanon: history article covers both events. Workers' Day and Martyrs' Day are national holidays too.

What the buildings keep of the past

UNESCO's World Heritage List holds seven Lebanese properties, all cultural, and its list of intangible heritage three elements:

Britannica dates Anjar to the early 8th century and names al-Walid as its founder. The houses are more recent. Wikipedia's article on Lebanese culture traces an Italianate style in Beirut and Sidon to the engineers Fakhr al-Din II brought back from Tuscany in 1618, and the village of Deir el Qamar near Beiteddine, the residence of the governors of Lebanon from the 16th to the 18th century, is built of stone houses with red-tiled roofs.

The institutions that keep this record were interrupted by war. The National Museum in Beirut holds Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine collections, and the National Library, closed in 1979 because of the civil war, reopened in 2018.