As an ignorant westerner I was a little surprised the women wore sexy dresses and had their hair done and wore make up. Though I did see several women wear head scarves the other ladies looked a way that would have had the morality police hauling them off to jail. So is Lebanon a little more liberal country in the middle east?
shareYes it is, partly because Lebanon is about 40% Christian. However the more conservative Muslims are in the North and the South, while those in Beirut tend to be more liberal. But this is just a generalization; you'll find conservatives and liberals as like any other religion. Compared to other Muslim countries Lebanon is very liberal.
shareMost Muslim-majority countries allow women to dress however they like, whether that includes hijab or not. I'm pretty sure hijab is only enforced in Saudi Arabia and Iran, which are just two countries out of several dozen.
There is this assumption among westerners that Middle East=Arab=Muslim=sharia law, which is not the case. The "Middle East" is truly multicultural — by religion and ethnicity and language. About 10% of Arabs are Christian. And Islam, like any other religion, has both sincere followers and lackadaisical followers. Hijab does not always signify someone is deeply religious; sometimes women wear it for cultural/familial reasons.
I'm happy for films like this, that unravel conventional western assumptions about a misunderstood part of the world. It's quite a beautiful, un-scary place — you should visit.
Lebanon is a country famous for it's beautiful contradictions, a country of sorts. In one street you'll find the hijab and the mini-skirt, the religious and the liberal, the sophisticated and simple, Lebanon is that sort of place! Famous for it's liberal attitude on so many issues, the country's Christian presence has taken it into a direction that truly singled it out in the region as the "Paris of the Middle East" in the 60s/70s. Then came the civil war which had a tremendous negative effect on the fabric of the Lebanese society, however 20 years after the end of the war Beirut seems to be regaining that magic element, and last time I was there I really felt the city is embracing it's multi-faceted nature. In Beirut you will find people that party into the early hours then go the beach the next day and finish their evening on mountain tops overlooking the capital, but in Beirut you will also find Christians who attend daily mass and Muslims who go to the mosque five times a day. And it is this interaction with the various socio-sectarian levels of society that continues to amaze me. I lived in Lebanon most of my life to a family who has roots that lie abroad in London (which is where I am now) but Beirut still occupies to this day a very very special place in my heart for all the reasons I mentioned above.
There are no Islamic laws in Lebanon just to clarify, Lebanon's laws have a moral aspect to them but every sect has it's own law believe it or not. Christians have their own laws when it comes to life matters and so do the Muslims, it's really strange, 17 sects all govern their own life issues. But there is a growing youth movement in the country to get secularism moving and kill this nonsense once and for all.
Anyways just thought I'd put in my 2 cents.
It's so funny-- if you're a certain age, Lebanon isn't such a mystery. If you were a child in the 1950s/60s, you grew up with "Make Room for Daddy/The Danny Thomas Show". Danny Thomas was a beloved Lebanese-American comedian, and his TV family included his Old Country relatives (remember Uncle Tonouse?).He often talked about his Lebanses heritage in interviews. And then, of course, his daughter Marlo had her hit TV show, "That Girl"!
shareWhat you saw in the movie is nothing comparing to the real life in Lebanon, watch Help and you will see that Lebanon is way more liberal than some of European countries and the USA
shareI find it Interesting, that though everything seems pretty liberal and then in the movie a girl tried to rent a hotel room and was only able to do so in some kind of cheap whore house hotel because she was not married.
shareI have no idea why the movie portrayed such fact that doesn't exist!
You can rent any hotel room for two in lebanon even if you weren't married
She couldn´t rent the room because she didn´t have a fake ID to give to the receptionist. She kept lying about her real name, maybe out of shame, or just because she didn´t want to compromise her lover.
That´s why she couldn´t rent the hotel room. Not because she was not married.
You thought that, in this movie, wearing sexy dresses could be more disrespectful to Islamic customs than having a Christian wedding?...
(I mean, wasn't the Christian wedding a clear sign that the characters were not Muslim?)
(and I seem to remember a Christian religious procession in this film too)
there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder
The wedding was Muslim not Christian. Remember the mother of the bride was wearing a scarf.
But yes, there was a Christian religious procession and two of the characters are seen saying Holy Marys (I think that's what it's called. Sorry if I'm mistaken).
There's a book very similar to this movie called "Kabul Beauty School" (about an American hairdresser who travels to Afghanistan and opens a beauty school). She pretty much says that women do wear a lot of make-up (more than Americans). Apparently -the way she tells it- is that the more make-up you wear, the more feminine you are.
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