Новая книга Шарифа Маджалани раскрывает многогранную идентичность Бейрута

‘Beirut Habibi,’ a portrait of a city that refuses to stand still BEIRUT – Beirut has never been a city that submits easily to definition. Its history can be read in its buildings, streets and shoreline, but history alone cannot account for the peculiar force of the Lebanese capital. Beirut is at once ancient and restless, Mediterranean and unmistakably Levantine, elegant and unruly, wounded and relentlessly creative. Its identity lies less in any single inheritance than in the extraordinary way its many layers coexist. That elusive character is at the heart of “Beirut Habibi,” a new volume from Assouline's Classics Collection, written by Lebanese novelist and academic Charif Majdalani. Across 304 pages and more than 150 images, the book offers a portrait of Beirut through its architecture, landscapes, neighbourhoods, people and creative life, presenting a city shaped by successive civilisations but never entirely defined by any of them. Majdalani's Beirut is a city of accumulated histories. Perched on a peninsula reaching into the Mediterranean, it has been a Phoenician port, a Roman colony, an Ottoman centre and part of the French mandate. Each era has left its imprint, whether in architecture, urban design, language, cuisine or social life. European influences can be felt in its cafés, boulevards and grand residences, yet the city remains deeply Arab and Levantine in its rhythms, sensibility and cultural imagination. The book's visual journey moves naturally between the monumental and the intimate. The Sursock family's palace evokes the refinement and aristocratic elegance of an earlier Beirut, while the city's souks recall its enduring role as a commercial crossroads. At the water's edge, the imposing Raouché rock formations rise from the Mediterranean, an instantly recognisable emblem of the capital and one of the landscapes that have become inseparable from its identity. But “Beirut Habibi” is most compelling when it moves beyond the postcard. Lemon trees perfume narrow streets; old buildings coexist with contemporary cafés; historic quarters continue to absorb restaurants, galleries, boutiques and new creative ventures. In neighbourhoods such as Gemmayze, Beirut's past and present appear not as opposing forces but as parts of the same urban fabric. Creativity is central to this portrait. Fashion, in particular, becomes one of the ways in which Beirut's distinctive sense of elegance travels beyond the city itself. Elie Saab's couture ateliers represent a tradition of craftsmanship and glamour that has found an audience on international runways and red carpets. Yet the book's broader celebration of creativity extends to the artists, writers, designers and intellectuals who have long been attracted to Beirut precisely because of its capacity to bring different worlds into conversation. That capacity has survived profound upheaval. The Lebanese civil war, which ended in 1990, transformed the city and left scars that remain part of Beirut's physical and emotional landscape. Yet Majdalani resists the temptation to reduce the capital to a catalogue of destruction and nostalgia. The Beirut of “Beirut Habibi” is not a museum of its own losses. It is a city that has repeatedly rebuilt, reinvented and reimagined itself. This is perhaps the book's most important contribution. Beirut's appeal does not rest simply on what has survived from the past, but on what the city continues to create from it. Its cultural energy has long emerged from encounters between East and West, between the Mediterranean and the Arab world, between inherited traditions and contemporary experimentation. Artists and intellectuals have found in Beirut an unusually fertile environment for those encounters. The result is a cultural landscape that is difficult to categorise precisely because it is constantly changing. Majdalani is particularly well placed to explore that complexity. Born in Beirut in 1960, he studied at the Université de Provence before completing a doctorate in 1993. He is a professor at Saint-Joseph University of Beirut, where he served as dean of the French Literature Department from 1999 to 2008. Between 2005 and 2025, he published ten novels and two essays in French. His literary career has itself crossed several worlds. His debut novel, “Histoire de la grande maison” (2005), was shortlisted for the Renaudot, Femina, Médicis and Wepler prizes, while “Caravansérail” (2007) won the Tropiques Prize and the French Academy's François Mauriac Prize. His 2025 novel, “Le Nom des Rois,” was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize. He is also a member of the editorial board of L'Orient littéraire, a columnist for the French daily La Croix, and president of the International Writers' House in Beirut. That literary sensibility is evident in the way “Beirut Habibi” approaches its subject. Rather than offering a conventional chronological history, it constructs an impressionistic portrait in which places, images and cultural references accumulate to form a sense of the city. The result is a book that can be read as both travel companion and cultural meditation. Its linen hardcover and lavish photography give it the physical presence expected of an Assouline volume, but its appeal goes beyond design. The images invite the reader to look at Beirut not merely as a collection of landmarks, but as a living environment in which grand history and ordinary life continually intersect. There is, inevitably, nostalgia in these pages. Beirut has lost buildings, neighbourhoods, institutions and entire chapters of its social history. But the book's nostalgia is tempered by movement. Its subject is not a Beirut that once existed and has disappeared; it is a Beirut that carries its past forward while continuing to invent itself. That distinction matters. Cities with histories as dense as Beirut's can easily become trapped between romanticised memory and narratives of crisis. “Beirut Habibi” offers another possibility: to see the city through continuity and renewal. Its contradictions are not flaws to be resolved but the very qualities that make Beirut recognisable. The Beirut captured here is sophisticated without being polished into uniformity, cosmopolitan without losing its local character, and deeply conscious of its past without allowing history to dictate its future. In the end, “Beirut Habibi” is less an attempt to explain Beirut than an invitation to experience its many selves. It celebrates the palace and the souk, the coastline and the narrow street, the old neighbourhood and the new gallery, the inherited tradition and the next creative idea. Beirut remains elusive because it has never stopped changing. Majdalani's book understands that the city's greatest inheritance may not be any particular monument or historical chapter, but its enduring ability to turn layers of history, beauty, loss and imagination into something new.