Only a few of Lara Deeb and Mona Harb's informants explicitly speak of a “right to the city.” Nevertheless, a central theme of this thoroughly researched study of South Beirut is the efforts of the neighborhood's Shi‘ite youth, paraphrasing David Harvey, to make and remake their city and themselves. As in their previous work, Deeb and Harb work to deconstruct both Euro/American and Lebanese clichés about the Beirut suburb of Dahiya, which is commonly depicted as a culturally provincial, lower-class, and militarized “stronghold” of the militant Islamic group Hizbullah.

The authors are careful to offer important historical and political context, and they outline the success of the party's older generation vanguard in the building of an “Islamic milieu” within Shi‘ite areas of Lebanon that valorize the ongoing mission of the Islamic Resistance in its decades-old struggle against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. The bulk of the study then explores the rise of café culture within Dahiya as it developed in the years following the 2000 Israeli evacuation of its “security zone” in southern Lebanon. Hizbullah, and much of Lebanon, celebrated the moment as a victory for the Hizbullah-led resistance. With detailed surveys and extended interviews, Deeb and Harb document the opening of cafés, restaurants, and leisure complexes within this densely populated area that had previously lacked such commercial outlets. In doing so, and with a focus on the discourse of the middle-class Shi'ite youth of the area, Leisurely Islam provides a map of the moral geography of leisure and how these youth negotiate it. In contrast to widespread Western-liberal narratives that read leisure activity as signs of Western influence and liberalizing social practice, Deeb and Harb explain how these youth engage in public leisure behavior within a normative framework defined by multiple (social, political-sectarian, and religious) moral rubrics. While they report the vast majority of these youth embrace the ideal of seeking fun within such a normative framework (“pious leisure”), the text surveys the complex forces seeking to define, interpret, and enforce these codes. These forces include institutions such as the Lebanese Association for the Arts that develop cultural projects to advance Hizbullah's political project like Mleeta, the “Resistance Tourism” museum in Southern Lebanon. Deeb and Harb draw on their own interviews and queries (via user-friendly websites) and outline the rival ways in which the three dominant sources of religious authority in the Lebanese Shi'ite community understand which leisure behaviors are permitted and which are discouraged. More critically, Deeb and Harb explore how Shi'ite youth when faced with, for example, an invitation to a café outside Dahiya that plays pop music or serves alcohol, or when with a friend who adopts emo hijabi style, negotiate the landscape between their own piety, various moral rubrics, parental authority, and community surveillance.

Leisurely Islam provides a rich ethnography of a community narrowly defined in geographic, sectarian, and political terms. It at the same time presents a case study of features common across Lebanese politics and society, such as how authority and governance operate at multiple levels in the absence strong state sovereignty. The text gives us a thick description of the contentious sorts of pluralism and cosmopolitanisms that Lebanon maintains across and within sectarian groups.

One of Deeb and Harb's most mischievous efforts is in their analysis of café style and decor. After identifying the elements of various prevalent styles, including those of “heritage,” “nature-garden,” and “contemporary,” they highlight the tendency of café owners in Dahiya to mix and match elements of these styles. They suggest this is a pragmatic effort to cater to the range of clients who patronize each establishment. Across this range, both clients and owners are shaped by transnational experiences, defined by work and family ties, such that café styles might reflect influences from Dearborn as well as Damascus, Istanbul, or Tehran. Deeb and Harb challenge the view that such pastiche is low class or clutter, and note how urban Beiruti styles tend to appropriate idealized French and/or Italian referents. They suggest, “Ironically, in a reckoning of cosmopolitanism that takes this broader geographic view and moves beyond Europe as the cultural center of the world, municipal Beirut's cosmopolitan elite represents the more provincial perspective and Dahiya's cosmopolitan elite the avant-garde urban modern.”

One of the most important but incomplete features of the study is its exploration of relationships between Dahiya and metropolitan Beirut. The author's often highlight the commonalities between middle-class Shi'ite youth and the youth of Lebanon and beyond. Broadly, the account reflects the “Lebaneseness” of Dahiya's Shi'ite community. It explains how leisure spaces in Dahiya, such as Al-Saha Traditional Village, reflect the appropriation of the style and nostalgia for the traditional Lebanese village, commonly associated with mountain villages of the Maronite Christian heartland. This nostalgia was given new resonances in the wake of the 2006 war with Israel that devastated Southern Lebanon. Deeb and Harb also observe how public street life offered by Dahiya's leisure scene began attracting visitors from beyond Dahiya and Lebanon's Shi'ite community, while Dahiya Shi'ite youth came to negotiate leisure spaces outside Dahiya. With the onset of the uprising in Syria, however, these fragile openings were soon challenged by heightened sectarian tensions and a new wave of anti-Shi'ite hostility outside the community. At a March 2014 forum at the American University of Beirut, Mona Harb noted how, with a wave of car bombs launched by Sunni extremist groups fighting the Hizbullah-backed regime in Syria, Dahiya increased security in public spaces, which shut down flows of both leisure visitors and long-time researchers.