Choosing Both Faith and Fun: Youth Negotiations of Moral Norms in South Beirut

Abstract

Challenging both polarized depictions of Muslim youth and scholarship that over-privileges piety as a focal point in Muslims’ lives, this article highlights the complexity of the moral worlds of Shi‘i youth in Lebanon. Through ethnography of youth choices when going out, we argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure. This interpretive flexibility may work to redefine ideas about leisure within a framework of religiosity such that some of the rules of piety itself are perceived as flexible.