Lara Deeb discusses part of her new book (co-authored with Mona Harb) titled Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut. New cafes in the predominantly Shi’i Muslim southern suburb of Beirut as well as a new focus on leisure in the community are promoting the flexibility of moral norms and new tensions between norms understood with a “religious” register and those understood within a “social” one. In this talk, she discusses some of the factors contributing to this complex moral landscape as well as some of the ways in which young people understand and navigate it.
