When I heard the news on a weekend morning, I immediately called my father. His voice broke, as he tried in vain to suppress a sob before hanging up. My dad is usually not generous with tears, but when he heard that Ziad Rahbani, the great Lebanese composer and playwright, passed away at 69, following a long illness, I knew what it meant to him. After all, I was overcome by the same emotion.
I was raised by old-school Algerian Marxists in France, so Ziad’s words and music became almost an educational guide for us. Though we are neither Lebanese nor Palestinian, Ziad had long been a pillar in our lives, as he was to millions across the Arab world and its diaspora. His lyrics filled our days, bringing life to meals, coffee breaks, car rides and family gatherings alike.
His 1985 anthem “Shou Hal Ayyam” (“What Are These Days”), a satirical piece denouncing income inequality, has been our go-to on the way to protests, with its punchy lyrics — “Where are this one’s millions from if we have never seen him sweat?” — that sound like ready-made slogans. “All the money stashed away,” the lyrics continue, “was taken from the people’s pockets and must return to the people’s pockets.”
The lyrics of the 1985 song “Ana Moush Kafer” (“I Am Not an Infidel”) gave us comfort when religious violence dominated headlines back home: “I am not an infidel, but hunger is. … I am not an infidel, but poverty and humiliation are.” My dad tried in vain to explain to me the messiness of love while blasting the 1991 hit “Kifak Inta” (“How Are You”), the iconic ballad sung by Ziad’s mother, Fairuz, that sounds like a woman meeting a now-married ex-lover but actually recalls an encounter between mother and son, or 1985’s “Bala Wala Chi” (“Without Anything”), an ode to the refusal of superficiality in love and probably the only love song that perfectly brings together the phrases “love me” and “think a little” in the same line.
I grew up with Ziad as a lifeline to an Arab world that I had little access to and that only seemed to exist in his songs: rebellious, self-aware, absurd and still musically transcendent. He made sure the region wasn’t just a postcard in my diaspora imagination, but a complicated, painful yet humorous reality. His critique of his own country, Lebanon, and by extension the Arab world as a whole, through the lens of class struggle and his unwavering support for Palestine made him a working-class icon: an enfant terrible who spoke truth to power.
Of course, he was not unanimously approved of. It was not rare to hear a relative raise an eyebrow when a new interview with Ziad was released, accompanied by the question, “What has he said this time?” His positions during the Syrian Revolution, when he expressed sympathies for the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and his unwavering support of Hezbollah left more than a few fans puzzled, but it was always clear that Ziad spoke his mind. He did not speak to please his audience.
Despite all his contradictions, or maybe because of them, he achieved what seemed impossible: forging a sense of belonging among Arabs across generations, especially at a time when the promise of pan-Arabism faded and the Arab left stumbled. I was born in the mid-1990s, a time when that political legacy was but an echo. Yet I found peers of all ages who would use Ziad to mark the rhythms of their everyday life. Friends in Egypt singing “Aycheh Wahda Balak” (“Living Alone Without You”) to mock someone after a breakup: “How can you keep talking about your love? The whole town laughs at you.” A Palestinian friend of mine quoted the famous line, “Soraya, your son is intelligent, but he is a donkey” from Ziad’s 1978 play “Bennesbeh Labokra Chou?” (“What About Tomorrow?”) to describe the poor conduct of a love interest of mine. Through Ziad’s music, I felt part of something larger, yet intimate. I am not sure whether we were hopeful or born disillusioned, but we shared a bond — a blend of humor, wit, cynicism and a profound pride in our cultural heritage that reached its apogee in Ziad’s hands.
This impulse to use music as a medium for forging collective identity was, arguably, the life project of Ziad’s father, Assi Rahbani. Ziad was not always the rebel we now remember; he began as the virtuoso son of a family that had already left a mark on Arab music. Born in 1956, he is the son of Fairuz, the greatest living legend of Arab music, and Assi, who, with his brother Mansour (Ziad’s uncle), pioneered a new musical language. Together, they crafted a distinctive form of musical theater, a fusion of classical Arabic music, local Lebanese folklore and Western orchestration. Their work evoked a dreamlike vision of Lebanon, a bucolic homeland, rich with lyrical references to classical heritage.
The young Ziad seemed to follow this path. At 16, he stepped into his father’s shoes after Assi suffered a brain hemorrhage. The result, 1972’s “Saalouni el-Nas” (“People Asked Me”), which addresses the family’s sorrow after the incident, is now a classic of Fairuz’s repertoire. A year later, he wrote his first play, “Sahriye” (“A Late Night”).
Ziad could have chosen to extend the Rahbani legacy, but instead he quickly broke free. He came of age in a Lebanon that had little to do with the idealized homeland of his father’s songs: A brutal civil war tore the country apart from 1975 onward, the state collapsed and the middle classes plunged into poverty. He chose to depict reality with a biting satire that spared no one, including his own comrades on the left. With his acerbic tongue, he seemed more like the descendant of the Egyptian composer Sheikh Imam and poet Ahmed Fouad Negm than a member of the Rahbani house.
In 1980’s “Film Ameriki Tawil” (“A Long American Movie”), arguably his most iconic play, Ziad presented characters who, in Beckett-like fashion, wait hopelessly in a psychiatric hospital. Through their diverse phobias, the play brilliantly captures the absurdities of Lebanese society at the time. One character believes every member of the other faith is out to get him; another blames everything on one conspiracy theory or another. Their fears still resonate today. His protagonists have lost hope, but their bitterness comes across as clairvoyance to the audience.
While he set a new, incisive political tone, Ziad was no less radical in his musical experimentation. He is credited with introducing the previously scorned jazz to Arabic music, alongside funk and bossa nova. The result is a symbiosis more than a fusion, a seamless integration in which Western influences serve to enhance an Arab musical sensibility. His 1984 album “Houdou Nisbi” (“Relative Calm”) remains a landmark of the genre.
His musical innovation profoundly shaped his mother’s career. The 1979 album “Wahdon” (“By Themselves”), with the famous song “Al-Bostah” (“The Bus”) — a love letter to the beautiful eyes of Aliya — or the 1991 album “Kifak Inta,” named after its iconic title track, showed Fairuz in a new light. A personal favorite of mine is the 2002 album “Wala Keef” (“Or How”), the most jazz-infused of all their collaborations. It features poignant songs like “Sobhi al-Jiz,” composed in honor of an eponymous young sweeper who was killed during the Lebanese Civil War (“My comrade Sobhi al-Jiz, he left me on this Earth and went away. He put down his broom and left”) and “Tinzakar Ma Tinaad” (“Recalled, Not Repeated”), a confused but heartfelt call to move on in love — almost the opposite of “Kifak Inta.”
The tumultuous professional collaboration between mother and son echoes an equally tumultuous personal relationship. If Ziad produced masterpieces, he also dragged his mother into controversies. In 2013, he had a memorable outburst and sparked outrage when he declared on national television that his mother admired Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. Yet Ziad also played a key role in moving Fairuz from the saintly spokesperson of an idyllic Lebanon to a more human, complex and hence universal figure that could sing equally about heartbreak, regrets and hope.
Scenes from his funeral matched the image I had of the man. Even as his death left me in despair, the scenes filled me with hope. Despite being a controversial figure, Ziad could draw the whole of Beirut to the streets. It still felt like the end of an era, a final goodbye to the last of the great political Arab artists. To hold on to that moment, I asked a friend to get me a copy of Al-Akhbar, the newspaper in which he wrote a regular column. The only copy they found was on sale for $5, more than five times the usual price. “You know what?” she joked. “That sounds like something straight out of one of his plays.”
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