Abstract
In an interview with historian Ahmad Beydoun, published in the newspaper al-Wasat in 1996, the Lebanese singer Ziad al-Rahbani tells the story of how, as a teenager, he longed intensely to be with the “real people.” He was ready to literally jump out of the window and roam the streets in order to connect with “real life” and learn from it. As the son of the iconic Lebanese singer Fairuz and her songwriter husband ’Asi al-Rahbani, Ziad grew up in a musical and artistic environment, but also in what felt to him like a secluded upper-middle-class cocoon in a wealthy suburb north of Beirut, where he attended an elite French-language school.
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Notes
Ziad Rahbani interviewed by Ahmad Beydoun, quoted in Fadi Bardawil, “Art, War and Inheritance: The Aesthetics and Politics of Ziad Rahbani” (MA thesis, Beirut: American University of Beirut, 2002), p. 48.
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© 2015 Meir Hatina and Christoph Schumann
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Haugbølle, S. (2015). Ziad al-Rahbani and the Liberal Subject. In: Hatina, M., Schumann, C. (eds) Arab Liberal Thought after 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137551412_10
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