When the Beirut port was hit by a devastating explosion on the afternoon of 4 August 2020, Ziad Rahbani, a musician whose name is bound with the city, had already started a slow process of self-confinement that was attributed mostly to the decline of his health – although some speculated it was depression.
Despite his isolation, Ziad as he is called by his listeners everywhere, remained perfectly present. Lines from the plays that he wrote and produced, including the visionary Nuzul Al-Surrour (Happiness Lodge, 1974), Film Amereki Tawil (A Feature-length American film, 1980) and Shi Fashel (A Failed Thing, 1983) – all of which depict the contradictions and absurdities of people who choose to fight among themselves for no good reason, holding onto sectarian affiliations.
In press interviews he gave in the early 2000s, over a decade after the Taif Agreement that brought the Lebanese Civil War to an end, Ziad insisted that what Lebanon was going through was an extended ceasefire that had never turned into a real peace because sectarianism is only superficially over.
When he died on 26 July 2025, Ziad was mourned across sects. Behind the grief, there was a realisation that his profound concern over sectarianism remained as legitimate as it was during the years of the civil war. The quotes from his plays that had been recalled following the Port blast five years earlier resurfaced as crowds gathered outside the Khoury Hospital in the neighbourhood of Al-Hamra, where he died, leading the way to the funeral mass at the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Church in the stupendous presence of his mother, the iconic Lebanese singer Fayrouz who was also confined to deep silence.
The story of Ziad and that of his city is told in four volumes published between 1990 and 2025: Beirut Fragments by Jean Said Makdisi (1990); Zaman Ziad: Adaish Kan fi Nas (Ziad’s Time: How Many People Were There, 2016) by Talal Shetwi; Beyrouth 2020, Journal d’un effondrement (Diary of a Collapse, 2020) by Charif Majdalani; and Kifak Inta: Ziad Al-Rahbani (And How Are You: Ziad Al-Rahbani) by Ibrahim Abdel-Fattah (2025). Makdisi’s book is a memoir of a Palestinian-born woman in Beirut centring on 1970. What it offers is an explanation for the madnesses of the civil war that Ziad was so determined to unveil in his plays and for that matter in the TV satirical shows that he presented with the intention of “making people see things for what they are”, as Abdel-Fattah notes in his book.
In her book, Makdisi details her routine as a woman in her mid thirties when the war broke out, describing her determination to maintain a semblance of normalcy as life grows increasingly absurd. It is a book about endurance and survival in the face of the madness Ziyad described, written in the same spirit.
“Someone should record this madness... Someone should write all this down,” Makdisi writes early on in her book. “The pictures in the papers were always the same: babies and old men... houses reduced to unrecognisable rubble; an old woman, wiping away her tears, picking her way through the ruins of her home, holding up a picture, perhaps, a saucepan, a bent and twisted vase – items that had once been part of her life and had now lost all meaning.”
Makdisi was 35 when the war started, Ziad was not yet 20, but they both decided not to abandon their city, embracing what they saw as their destiny, “the days” Ziyad described as “such a failure”. Here as elsewhere in his work Beirut is more than a Mediterranean city. It is a living soul, a creature that, as Makdisi says of the long-suffering people to whom her book is dedicated, has in spite of everything kept its spirit alive.
The legendary couple Fairouz and Assi Rahbani had their first baby, Ziad, on 1 January 1956, a year that saw a literal rehearsal of the civil war when Sunnis clashed with Maronites over their support for Gamal Abdel Nasser following the October 1956 Tripartite Aggression. Camille Chamoun, the Lebanese president, refused to break diplomatic relations with the UK and France against the wishes of Rashid Karami, the prime minister who favoured pan-Arab alignment.
Ultimately, a confrontation took place and the US had to intervene in July 1958 with Operation Blue Bat to re-stabilise the situation. While Chamoun, Karami, and Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt were caught up in the political squabble, baby Ziad was turning into “a very different child”, as Abdel-Fattah notes in his book, less interested in play than sound.
“He was born not just as the son of Fairouz and Assi but also as the son of Lebanese political confusion,” Abdel-Fattah writes. It was only to be expected that he should grow up to comply with neither the classical music he was being taught nor his political context, that of the Phalange Party and the Maronite position. Instead he embraced the Shia resistance, becoming an admirer of the late Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel just a year ahead of Ziad’s own demise, which followed personal as well as political disappointments.
Like Makdisi in her book, Ziad was a biographer of civil-war Beirut, but thanks to his medium he is also its bard. As both Abdel-Fattah and Shetwi say, he couldn’t help playing that role. He could’ve made money and grown even more successful had he simply used his musical genius in the service of “the Fayrouz-Assi scheme”. He was not content with their achievement, and faithful to his own vision – which occasionally resulted in rows with his mother – he tackled all that he disliked head-on.
“I don’t care too much about having a project,” Ziad said. “What matters to me is to have a position.” Both Adaish Kan fi Nas and Kifak Inta – both named after Fayrouz songs he composed, in 1973 and 1991, respectively – demonstrate the extent to which he was committed to his Marxist and anti-sectarian principles, to his musical vision and to the ideal of true love. As Shetwi recounts, Fayrouz would often buy him expensive clothes despite his refusal to lead a bourgeois life. He embodied the tension Beirut itself experienced as some sought to make it a (fake) European city and others insisted on tethering it to (ideological) Arabness. In “Bala Wala Shi” (For Nothing At All), a song he composed and performed alongside Carmen Lebbos.
“Ziad was really quiet about falling in love; he did not write love songs like those written by most lyricist but rather as a man who simply feared falling in love,” Abdel-Fattah wrote. According to Shetwi, it was this sensibility that made so many people who had never met Ziad in their lives feel they knew him well: rich and poor, Christians and Muslims, men and women, whether in Beirut or elsewhere in the Arab world. Between the end of the civil war and the port explosion, Ziad public presence began to fade. He worked little and spoke even less.
It is not clear, Abdel-Fattah wrote, why he chose to embark on this act of progressive disappearance some 15 years before he passed away. Most probably, he argued, Beirut in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s was not the city Ziad knew and felt connected with. The city was changing around him; it was no longer his city as he knew it – even though he never exactly fell out of love with it, Abdel-Fattah writes.
Was “Ziad’s time” – the time of Beirut – coming to an end? In his novel Beyrouth 2020, the French-language writer Majdalani gives one possible answer. “It felt odd to read Beyrouth 2020, and to relive what we all went through with the [pandemic and] the lockdown before the city was hit by the explosion of the port in August,” one reader posted on social media.
Clearly, what Majdalani did with this novel, zeroing in on the few weeks leading to the port explosion, was to reflect on the unending changes that the city and its people were forced through. In essence, it is a profound critique of the sectarian quota system created by Taif. This regime was necessary to spare the Lebanese a war that had killed no less than 120,000 people. However, as the book shows, this regime created a sense of hollowness and de facto stagnation that stripped the city of its soul.
This, Majdalani says, made things look like they were happening when they weren’t. Beirut seemed to be there but it wasn’t – at least not the Beirut that was once there. And just as Ziad said the war came to an end with a truce but not with peace, Majdalani argues that, while the hostilities stopped, the inter-sectarian dynamics never did. On the contrary, the city has been taken hostage by drug trafficking and money laundering as an expression of precisely those dynamics. The explosion hit a tired, dysfunctional city begging for trash collection just as it was begging for a political elite free from corruption.
Majdalani had started writing his book prior to the explosion that killed over 200 people and left a significant portion of the city destroyed. For Majdalani, this was in many way an inevitable manifestation of the decay of the city, the crescendo of ongoing cracks and fragmentation that had been eating it up since the early 1990s, after Ziad created his landmark song for Fayrouz “Kifak Enta”, then started to withdraw. Majdalani’s Beirut as exhausted and frail as the musician. And, just as Makdisi had exercised endurance by keeping a journal, Majdalani got through the post-Civil War horror by writing a novel.
On one page of his journal, a little over two weeks before the explosion, Majdalani writes, “In thirty years, the entire country became the private hunting ground of the caste of oligarchs in power, which established a relationship with the citizenry similar to a mafia’s, offering protection, guarantees and small opportunities to all those who asked for them, and preventing any form of access to government officials except petitioning.”Majdalani too is a great chronicler of catastrophe unfolding. Ziad too performed the same role, but as Abdel-Fattah so poetically puts it, he did so “through the music and down to the ashes his own body and soul”.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 August, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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