When Leila Milki first heard Fairuz’s Bahebak Ya Lebnan, she experienced it as the song of Lebanese unity and resilience. Milki, a Lebanese-American singer-songwriter and pianist based in Los Angeles, has partly built her career on covering the catalogue of Fairuz, the 91-year-old Lebanese singer who has become a rare generation-uniting public figure in the small Mediterranean country. “I knew that, in terms of my parents’ generation and even my grandparents’ generation, the song was sort of this really cathartic, hopeful message of unity,” says Milki.
The old adage is that Lebanon and its people remain resilient in the face of tragedy, able to rebuild and be born again into a stronger, more stable nation. That was the message Fairuz conveyed with Bahebak Ya Lebnan, a song released 50 years ago that has since become the country’s de facto national anthem. “I love you Lebanon, my homeland, I love you / Your north, your south, your plains / I absolutely adore,” Fairuz sings in Arabic in the opening lines. When she released the song in 1976, it came against the backdrop of the early stages of a 15-year civil war, which resulted in the deaths of roughly 150,000 people, the mass exodus of nearly 1 million people and foreign occupation by Syria and Israel.
In the decades since its release, Bahebak Ya Lebnan has repeatedly resurged to inspire hope and national pride: during the multiple conflicts with Israel, the Covid-19 pandemic, internal sectarian strife, the financial collapse in the country since 2019 and the 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut that decimated parts of the capital.
The song has become synonymous with tragedy – meaning that many Lebanese now turn to Bahebak Ya Lebnan with mixed feelings, especially as the current US-Israeli war against Iran and the forced displacement of more than a million people in Lebanon by Israel mean that Fairuz’s anthem is once again serving as the soundtrack to the country’s despair and hope. “It’s evolved into more of a lament,” says Milki. “It feels like this moment of deep grief that truly captures the essence of what it feels like to be so exhausted, and to time and time again have to surrender to the rebirth narrative, knowing full well that nobody wants to be experiencing this.”
For many younger Lebanese, the song offers a fantasy: “I said, our land is being reborn,” Fairuz sings. “The Lebanon of dignity / A people that perseveres / How could I help loving you? Even in your madness I love you.” The many TikTok posts and Instagram reels soundtracked by Bahebak Ya Lebnan are nostalgic for a “golden age” of the country in the 50s and 60s – at a time when Fairuz broke out as a Lebanese and broader Arab icon after her riveting performance in 1957 at the revered Baalbeck international festival – that most users of the platform never experienced.
But for other young Lebanese people, that fantasy now feels hollow. “I love the Lebanon I grew up in but it isn’t always the Lebanon that Fairuz talks about in this song,” says Sleiman Damien, a Lebanese music producer based in Dubai.
Lara Atallah, a Brooklyn-based artist and writer whose parents live in Lebanon, thinks the diaspora turns to Fairuz as a way to stay tethered to the “postcard” version of Lebanon. She, however, cannot bring herself to listen to the song. “I wish I could listen to it without feeling rattled,” she says. “I do not actively listen to it or much of Fairuz’s music as it’s come to connote war, devastation and endless mourning, all caught in the net of her heartbreakingly beautiful voice.”
Dr Nour El Rayes is an ethnomusicologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who grew up in Lebanon and is researching the ethnography of alternative music in the country. “For people who were born in Lebanon in the 30s or 40s or 50s, and who lived through the ‘golden age’, Bahebak Ya Lebnan does capture something about the feeling of that moment,” El Rayes says. “Fairuz was theirs. She came up when they came up. This was the popular music of the moment.”
A younger generation, she continues, may not view these kinds of songs in the same manner as their parents or grandparents. “I also think the kids are angry,” El Rayes adds. “They inherited this world that’s on fire. Many of them just don’t believe there’s a future to be optimistic about.” (These listeners may gravitate towards alternative musicians who are more explicitly political in their music, such as the popular rappers Bu Nasser Touffar and Nuj.)
The nostalgia of an imagined Lebanon masks the current day-to-day of the country, where people in the south continue to face forced evacuations and have to shelter from airstrikes in the latest Israeli campaign against the armed group Hezbollah.
Even before this war, the Lebanese government remained inept at rooting out corruption and providing basic necessities, such as electricity and unfettered access to bank accounts, to its people. The connection between Fairuz’s idealised Lebanon and the country’s reality grows weaker with each passing generation. Even in 1999, in an interview with the New York Times, Fairuz recognised how much the Lebanese people, particularly those in the diaspora, grasp at an idealised version of the country through her music, even though she said that version “bears no resemblance” to real life.
“I think for those who still resonate with the song, it’s because Lebanese people are in love with the concept of nostalgia,” says Dina Ikbal Yunis, a researcher living in Beirut. “We’re in love with this idea of what they think a progressive or a better Lebanon looks like.”
Though Bahebak Ya Lebnan continues to have staying power – it continues to be covered by Arab artists across the region, including Emirati singer Hussain Al Jassmi, Lebanese crooner Fadel Chaker, and pop divas Assala and Sherine – the question remains whether the song continues to feed into an antiquated stereotype of the “resilience” of Lebanon. “It’s almost a cliche that Lebanese people are resilient and optimistic by default, but we are also exhausted,” says music producer Damien. “The truth is more complex.”
