Ziad Rahbani Inherited Lebanon's Songbook and Set It on Fire, Nightly

The Inheritance Problem

No musician in the Arab world ever inherited more, or trusted his inheritance less. Ziad Rahbani was born in 1956 to Fairuz and Assi Rahbani, which is to say: inside the machine that manufactured modern Lebanon's self-image. The Rahbani brothers' musical theatre gave the country an Eden of mountain villages, brave peasants and moonlit fidelity. Their son looked out the window at Beirut, found none of it, and spent fifty years saying so in public, brilliantly, to the country's face.

He started inside the family firm as a teenager, then broke out with plays that remain Lebanon's sharpest self-portraits: Nazl el-Sourour (1974), Bennesbeh Labokra Chou? (1978), Film Ameriki Tawil (1980). Staged in a country sliding into civil war, they replaced the village square with the bar, the checkpoint and the asylum, and their dialogue entered Lebanese speech permanently. The plays circulated for decades on bootleg cassettes, becoming, as The Washington Post's obituary put it, the counter-archive of a state that preferred the original myth.

Oriental Jazz

Musically, Ziad called his blend "Oriental jazz": Arabic song run through jazz harmony, funk, bossa and whatever else the night suggested, decades before such fusion became a regional default. Albums like Abu Ali and Houdou Nisbi made Beirut's cynicism danceable. And in the great irony of his career, the family idyll he punctured kept commissioning him: from the late 1970s he composed and arranged for his mother, giving Fairuz her modern second act, including the album Kifak Inta, whose title song scandalised purists precisely because it made the national saint sound like a woman in a Beirut apartment, smoking, asking an old lover how he is.

That double role, the myth's heir and its saboteur, is the whole man. He did not destroy the songbook. He annotated it, in the margins, in a hand the whole country learned to read.

Politics Without Apology

Ziad's communism was not an aesthetic. He broadcast it, wrote columns in it, structured plays around it, and paid its social costs in a country whose civil war he analysed more honestly than its historians. His targets were consistent: sectarianism, the warlord class that became the political class, and the self-deceptions of every Lebanese faction including his own. When Lebanon's uprisings and collapses arrived, 1975, 1990, 2019, 2020, his decades-old lines resurfaced each time as if freshly written, which is either prophecy or, more accurately, a country refusing to change its script.

July 2025

Ziad Rahbani died in Beirut on July 26, 2025, at 69. The state that his work spent a lifetime needling awarded him the Order of the Cedar after his death; crowds filled Hamra as his body left the hospital; and Fairuz, in her nineties and long withdrawn from public life, appeared to bury her son. The image, the century's voice standing over the century's conscience, closed an era as clearly as any armistice.

What he leaves is a method, and it is portable: treat your golden age as material, not scripture. Every Arab artist now sampling, satirising or restaging their parents' canon, from Beirut to Cairo to the diaspora, works in a lane Ziad paved, chain-smoking, certain the traffic behind him would come.

Key Facts

• Ziad Rahbani was born in 1956 to Fairuz and Assi Rahbani, and began working in the family's musical theatre as a teenager.

• His landmark plays include Nazl el-Sourour (1974), Bennesbeh Labokra Chou? (1978) and Film Ameriki Tawil (1980).

• He coined and practised "Oriental jazz," fusing Arabic song with jazz, funk and Brazilian styles.

• From the late 1970s he composed and arranged much of Fairuz's later repertoire, including Kifak Inta.

• He died in Beirut on July 26, 2025, aged 69, and was posthumously awarded Lebanon's Order of the Cedar; Fairuz made a rare public appearance at his funeral.