Estrangement: A Path toward Death

“Living as a gharīb is one thing, dying as one is another,” Gharīb’s son, Said, told me once when I asked him about the saying: “The stranger is the stranger of the grave.” As I gathered stories of death and displacement throughout Lebanon in 2018–2019, the saying had come up on multiple occasions in my conversations with Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese friends. Often, it was the first reaction I would receive after explaining my research on burials of displaced communities in Lebanon. The phrase comes from an ancient ode that is still sung by Arabic speakers throughout the Levant, the Gulf, and North Africa. It is attributed to Imam Zayn Al-Abidin (659–713 AD), the fourth Shiʿa Imam and a descendent of Prophet Mohammad. The ode starts with these words: “The stranger is not the stranger to Yemen or Sham (Syria), though the stranger is the stranger of the grave and coffin. The stranger certainly has more right to his estrangement than the ones who reside in [their] homelands and dwellings.… I am traveling far away, and my provisions are not sufficient, my strength has weakened, and death is calling unto me.”Footnote ²

The verses that follow describe the hardships of living in ghurba, the state of estrangement, and how these hardships will lead to the stranger’s death. His every step away from where he belongs counts as a step toward his death. The further he moves from his ties to the world, the poorer and more estranged he becomes. He continues despite the anguish caused by his faqir, poverty, and lack of provisions. The act of letting go of, or having to let go of, what binds one to the fabric of the world brings about his faqir, poverty, while at the same time it becomes the source his righteousness, as one who dares to stare into the eyes of solitude and has come to know his estrangement. The ode juxtaposes estrangement and poverty, speaking to the ways in which death bleeds into life. Here, death is not a rupture in living, but a process of alienation and impoverishment, experienced through loss of belonging. One’s gradual death is marked by the lack of belonging(s), both materially and socially.

The eventual death of Gharīb, the Palestinian PLO fighter from Gaza, transcended his singular lived experience to resonate with that of many more in the refugee camp of Nahr al-Barid, where displaced Palestinians have lived in exile for generations. His story, however, is not merely a metaphor nor is it limited to Palestinians in Lebanon. Being a gharīb, or feeling like one, is a way of living and dying that is marked by not fully belonging. It is what connects the story of this PLO fighter to my Syrian, Palestinian, and Lebanese interlocutors who have been internally and externally displaced, as well as economically and socially marginalized, in post-2011 Lebanon.

This paper considers estrangement as a way to understanding processes of marginalization and regional mobility in their variegated yet overlapping forms. I explore the theoretical and analytic possibilities of the concept of gharīb as a regional construct, which allows for a more nuanced understanding of displaced and marginalized communities’ ways of being, living, and dying in what we know as the modern Middle East. Throughout this paper I employ the concept of gharīb as an analytic tool that allows us to delve deeper into the complexities of belonging, futurity, and rights without falling into the traps of methodological nationalism. I argue that legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, and internal versus external displacement, have been further blurred against the backdrop of ongoing and interlocking forms of structural violence, inequality, and increasing marginalization of the poor and the displaced.

In so doing, this paper makes an analytic shift away from the category of the refugee, the dominant framework in the study of displacement. The refugee has long been under construction, not only within rights-based and policy-oriented platforms but also as an analytical framework in the literature on displacement. Within anthropological and refugee studies, the refugee has become a contested figure whose integrity and relationality to the world has been deconstructed, questioned, and reframed so as to capture its distinctiveness. This distinctiveness is a recurrent theme in the literature of displacement, legitimized by the spatial, legal, and social particularities of the condition of refugeehood. Much of the ethnographic study of displacement, worldwide, is bound to the spaces of refugee camps (Agier Reference Agier2002; Davies and Isakjee Reference Davies and Isakjee2015; Gabiam Reference Gabiam2016; Khalili Reference Khalili2005; Peteet Reference Peteet2005; Sayigh Reference Sayigh1994), despite the fact that only 22 percent of refugees worldwide live in camps, whether formal or self-settled.Footnote ³

The focus on camps has, in turn, rendered refugeehood into the embodiment of Agamben’s state of exception (Agamben Reference Agamben1998; Reference Agamben and Attell2004; Ek Reference Ek2006).Footnote ⁴ Following Arendt’s contention that the refugee is “a new kind of human being” (Reference Arendt and Robinson1994[1943]), the exceptionality associated with conditions of displacement, particularly external displacement, has framed a displaced person’s life as a distinct form of life (Fassin, Wilhelm-Solomon, and Aurelia Segatti Reference Fassin, Wilhelm-Solomon and Segatti2017), or more so, as an utterly different ontological being (Perdigon Reference Perdigon2018). Despite their analytical appeal in studying displacement through the lens of legal frameworks or in the spaces of camps, these renditions fall short in exploring the sociopolitical, economic, and spatial entanglements of the lives of the majority of displaced persons, outside of camps, with the rest of the society they live in.

Within the Middle East, long a hotspot of so-called humanitarian and refugee crises, refugeehood has inevitably been a dominant scholarly framework for studying regional displacement. This has partly been due to the gravity of the Palestinian experience, marked by the shortcomings of UN-run camps and the Palestinians’ protracted refugee crisis. In this context, many displacement scholars have engaged with the concept of the refugee, while calling for the scholarship to move beyond the confines of this rights-based framework in understanding the multifaceted forms that lives of displacement can take (Allan Reference Allan2014; Reference Allan2018; Balkan Reference Balkan2015; Carpi Reference Carpi2023; Chatty Reference Chatty2010; El Dardiry Reference El Dardiry2017; Feldman Reference Feldman2012; Reference Feldman2017; Frangieh Reference Frangieh2014; Reference Frangieh2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh Reference Fiddian-Qasmiyeh2016; Reference Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh2020; Janmyr Reference Janmyr2016; Khalili Reference Khalili2005. Recent studies have furthered the discussion by “deexceptionalizing” displacement in a world led by dispossession and alienation (Cabot and Ramsay Reference Cabot and Ramsay2021), whereas others have (re)introduced regionally contextualized languages and discourses, better reflecting experiences of displacement (El Dardiry Reference El Dardiry2017; Zaman Reference Zaman, Jureidini and Hassan2020).

By recentering displacement in the Middle East around the concept of gharīb, this paper helps move the discussion forward in three main ways. First, it reveals the shortcomings of the international platforms’ rights-based language, and bears witness to how displaced persons perceive, formulate, and act upon their conditions and navigate their displacement differentially.Footnote ⁵ Second, it propels us to rethink the analytic lines that are often drawn between marginalized communities—such as refugees, the internally displaced, the poor, or the stateless—and to instead explore the similarities of their structural positioning, their overlapping lived experiences, as well as their shared struggles against inequality and oppression. The temporal modes of belonging, or lack thereof, experienced by my interlocutors in this paper bring together refugees, the internally displaced, and impoverished citizens in ways that are indeed ontologically and analytically inseparable. And third, by tracing the gharīb’s traveling footsteps historically and geographically, it allows for a regional fluidity that surpasses not only the modern demarcations of nation-states but also the regional contours of what we know as the Middle East.

I build on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork—which involved semi-structured and life history interviews with Syrians, Palestinians, and Lebanese in Beirut, north, and east of Lebanon—as well as archival and media analysis, to thread together the lives of impoverished and displaced communities of contemporary Lebanon. I combine ethnographic data with a genealogical analysis to bring together the nomads of Eastern Europe with the outcast of Turkic, Kurdish, Persianate worlds, and the Indian subcontinent, all the way back to the medieval Islamic era and the rise of Islam. In seeking the overlapping identities and spaces of the ghurabāʾ in post-2011 Lebanon, this project took me to the poverty-stricken regions of the north and east, as well as the outskirts of cities like Beirut, Tripoli, and Zahle, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians reside in either makeshift camps or short-term rentals.Footnote ⁶ I traveled to Lebanese villages and local cemeteries, and UNRWA-run Palestinian camps, including Nahr al-Barid, where I met Gharīb. I visited Al-Ghuraba Cemetery in the northern city of Tripoli, where hundreds of Lebanese and non-Lebanese ghurabāʾ lie next to one another in the ground. The cemetery is not only a resting place for those ghurabāʾ who die in Lebanon but also a refuge for living ghurabāʾ. By 2019, when I was conducting research in northern Lebanon, Al-Ghuraba Cemetery was home to more than a thousand poor Lebanese and displaced Syrians—all of whom were referred to as ghurabāʾ, strangers—who had set up informal dwellings in the graveyard for years and even generations (Farhang Reference Farhang2022). In many ways, this cemetery epitomizes gharībness in a space that abides by the rules of exception, in its very Agambenian sense, while not being bound by the category of the refugee.

In this paper I embrace the messiness of categories of belonging—analytically and methodologically—which in turn precludes clearcut and extractive analytical frameworks.Footnote ⁷ It allows the non-conforming, capacious, and fluid forms of the gharīb to lead us to the rich history of mobility and displacement, before and beyond the set contours of nations and regions. Here, the gharīb, as a traveling concept, moves in between variegated categories of belonging: citizen, (im)migrant, internally displaced, externally displaced, refugee, marginalized, impoverished, and more. Embracing this messiness is at the very least an adventure into the widening cracks between legal and analytic categories and at most an interrogation of the Eurocentric and colonial categorizations of peoples and regions.

The fluidity of the gharīb, however, does not suggest that the concept floats in an ideal-typical vacuum. The analysis that follows attends to the gharīb’s ties, or lack thereof, to the dynamics of social and moral repertoires that govern relations between those who assume belonging and those who lack it. While multifaceted and singular in its complexity, the status of gharīb can be discerned only in relation to the social systems that define it as such. One such social system is manifested within the framework of hospitality, guesthood, and reciprocity, specifically that of Arab hospitality, karam al-ʿarab (Shryock Reference Shryock2004), dating back to pre-Islamic ideals of care, sovereignty, and sanctuary (Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal1997). Here the gharīb, and more generally the stranger, molds into and out of temporally bound metaphors such as ḍayf (guest), nāziḥ (displaced), and darwīsh or faqīr (the poor), as outlined throughout this paper. The label at times embodies the hostile outsider, while at other times it represents the eschatological subject that characterizes upstanding pious individuals within a given society.

Juxtaposing the gharīb with the qarīb—the latter term means relative, kin, or close person, and is contrasted to the gharīb with a close assonance—I will further reflect on kinship systems and their changing patterns within exacerbating flows of migration. I also situate ghurabāʾ, plural of gharīb, within Islamic history and in relation to early Islam’s Muhajirūn, to Ibn Khaldun’s ‘asabiyya in medieval Islam, and all the way up to the shifting meanings of belonging among ʿashāʾir, nomadic communities, in Syria in the years leading to the Syrian uprisings. Doing so allows exploration of the gharīb concept on its own terms, while grappling with the structures that define its relationship with the broader societal and moral worlds surrounding it. These structures also outline the social lexicons that those rendered as ghurabāʾ use to perceive, and at times oppose and resist, conditions of estrangement. The paper’s last vignette discusses such conditions in relation to zulum, oppression, in order to unpack the modes of structural inequality and systemic violence that are at play in marginalization, impoverishment, and alienation of a growing number of people within crumbling, fragmented systems of governance in Lebanon and elsewhere. To start down this path, we must first ask: what is a gharīb?

The Faces of the Gharīb

The concept of gharīb has accrued a wide range of denotations and connotations over time, including a stranger, outcast, or exile (Wehr Reference Wehr1976: 668), as well as a poor or lowly person (Steingass Reference Steingass2000[1892]: 886), and even someone who is foreign or extraordinary (Platts Reference Platts2000[1884]: 770). The ways ghurabāʾ, strangers, have been received and the ways they have seen themselves throughout history testify to the many faces of gharīb, features and facets which have survived from before the establishment of nation-states. As a matter of this regional rather than national definition, one can be born within the geographical borders of modern nation-states and still identify, live, and die as a gharīb. A gharīb, therefore, does not abide by the international contours of these states, but rather by a complex set of social and affective relations to the world through which meaning-making becomes possible. To understand what the concept of gharīb stands for requires an interrogation of many taken-for-granted assumptions regarding national borders, citizenship, and displacement, as well as a revised understanding of the above issues as they intersect with class, gender, legal status, and local categories of un/belonging. The gharīb comes to a chorus of meanings, aspirations, and patterns of both individual and collective identifications through these competing lineages.

Within the literature, dynamics that set the boundaries of self and other have largely been outlined in the regional, religious, and historically contextualized modes of hospitality, guesthood, and reciprocity. Hospitality has indeed been framed as “the problem of how to deal with strangers” (Pitt-Rivers Reference Pitt-Rivers2012: 502). Or as Da Col frames it, a system of strategies “for keeping the stranger in abeyance or incorporating the outside into the inside” (2019: 20). To incorporate or to draw a renewed line between the outside and the inside manifests itself in the way the host—whether it be a state or the head of a household—exercises sovereignty in relation to those outsiders, as Shryock outlines in his classic account of the Belga Bedouin hospitality (2004; 2012).

Whereas strangers appear frequently in the literature on hospitality, their status is often up for debate. Pitt-Rivers, for instance, argues that strangers have no place within the social system since they lack direct jural relationships with anyone in the community and therefore possesses no status. This, in turn, leads to a contradiction of “the status of being statusless” (2012: 503). As a matter of this “status of being statusless,” the stranger has occupied various positions within the hospitality discourse, spanning from enemy,Footnote ⁸ to hostile outsider, to shifter, to stranger-guest, and guest (Da Col Reference Da Col2019; Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld and Gilmore1987; Fortes Reference Fortes, Fortes and Patterson1975). A guest’s status, Pitt-Rivers argues, stands “midway between that of hostile stranger and that of community member” (Reference Pitt-Rivers2012: 503).

The stranger, in this context, carries a potential, bound by the very temporalities that grant them the leverage to come out and mold themselves into holding a more established and familiar status, such as that of a guest. It is precisely through this temporality, this mode of abeyance, that Kant argues for the “rights of strangers” as a condition of “universal hospitality.” In Perpetual Peace, he writes: “Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. […] It is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have” (Reference Kant and Beck1957[1795]: 357). Universal hospitality, therefore, grants the “right of temporary sojourn” to strangers, while distinguishing it from a right to become a “fellow inhabitants for a certain length of time” (ibid.), allowing for a subjective evaluation of the length strangers are to be welcomed by the sovereign host.

It is not a coincidence that the rhetoric of hospitality has been provoked over and again by host states and host communities in response to contemporary waves of mass migration and displacement, particularly in the Middle Eastern and European contexts. In the Greek context, hospitality, filoksenia, is provoked as a national and traditional Greek virtue, through which the state rhetorically compensates for the poor living conditions of millions of asylum seekers there (Rozakou Reference Rozakou2012). In Turkey, Turkish hospitality, Türk misafirperverliği, has welcomed more than three million Syrians who have fled their war-torn homes since 2011, while assigning them the officially distinct status of misafir, guest, “until the conditions for their return were secured” (Dağtaş Reference Dağtaş2017; also see Alkan Reference Alkan2021; Al-Khalili Reference Al‐Khalili2023; Carpi and Şenoğuz Reference Carpi and Şenoğuz2019; and Zaman Reference Zaman, Jureidini and Hassan2020).

Discourses and practices of hospitality are not limited to host states and communities. Providing, reciprocating, and hosting are common ways in which displaced and migrant communities practice mutual care and redefine their positioning within the new societies they have entered (Ramadan Reference Ramadan2008; Vandevoordt Reference Vandevoordt2017). There is a distinction, however, between these intra- and inter-communal modes of hospitality which predate nation-states and so-called refugee crises (see Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal1997; Shryock Reference Shryock2004; Reference Shryock2008; Reference Shryock2012) and those provoked by host states (Alkan Reference Alkan2021; Dağtaş Reference Dağtaş2017). Caught between the top-down and bottom-up approaches and swaying between the language of rights and that of generosity (Rosello Reference Rosello2001), hospitality has allowed for vernacularized versions of displacement policy that act as a double-edged sword. It does so by rendering displaced subjects into welcomed strangers—guests—who participate in an unfulfilled host-guest loop of reciprocity so long as they remain temporary and transitory. At the same time, hospitality works by obscuring the actual dynamics in play, where the displaced persons often make up an exploitable labor force and are deprived of protections associated with legal statuses such as “refugee” (Rosello Reference Rosello2001; Zaman Reference Zaman, Jureidini and Hassan2020).Footnote ⁹

In post-2011 Lebanon, where the rhetoric of hospitality still serves as a “humanitarian toolkit” (Carpi and Şenoğuz Reference Carpi and Şenoğuz2019), it has arguably been less emblematic of the state’s discourse toward the many Syrians who fled there as the 2011 civil war erupted. At the communal level, the long-term ideals of Arab hospitality as well as the historical connectivity between the two neighboring countries have created ties of trust—and modes of distrust—between Syrians and Lebanese that transcend the humanitarian limits. That said, since 2011, and with the large number of Syrian newcomers whose return is not necessarily on the horizon,Footnote ¹⁰ the semantics of hospitality have shifted (Ferreri Reference Ferreri2023; Thorleifsson Reference Thorleifsson2016). To many of my interlocutors, words such as ḍayf, guest, occasionally used in media accounts or by Lebanese locals, felt imposed, or rather unwelcoming, since they carried the connotation of temporariness in the neighboring country that felt too close to and yet too far away from home. “Guest is not about hospitality, it’s about a person who leaves in the end,” one of my Syrian interlocutors responded to my inquiry about his frustration with Syrians being called ḍuyūf, guests, in Lebanon. It gave a false image of Syrians as being served, provided for, or taken care of, which is far from the reality of intense labor, exploitation, and impoverishment that shapes their experiences of displacement in Lebanon. In this context, politics of the gharīb appears to be more appropriately framed as inhospitality rather than hospitality.

Whereas the framework of hospitality provides a gateway into exploring the relationalities that inform my interlocutors’ experiences of displacement, poverty, and exile, it falls short in that it understands the gharīb, not as a temporary and empty container that other social metaphors, such as guest, can be molded into, but as a category in itself. My interlocutors’ experiences suggest more the persistence of gharībness, or estrangement, and the stigmatizations and openings that are brought about through this persistence. This mode of estrangement appears to be closer to the way Simmel defines his sociological form of the stranger. In his short essay “The Stranger,” Simmel introduces the stranger as a figure that represents the union of closeness and remoteness. The stranger, here, is understood not as “a wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man who comes today and stays tomorrow” (Reference Simmel and Levine1971[1908]: 143). As Simmel goes on to say, “His position within it [i.e., a social group] is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it” (ibid.).

Simmel’s figure of the stranger can be positive, and even welcome, as an objective observer whose sense of clarity comes from his lack of belonging and biases. But there exists a different, negative form of strangeness that Simmel recognizes as a form of “non-relation” built around “a stranger to the country, the city, the race, and so on, [where] what is stressed is nothing individual, but alien origin, a quality which he has, or could have, in common with many other strangers. For this reason, strangers are not really perceived as individuals, but as strangers of a certain type. Their remoteness is no less general than their nearness” (ibid.: 148). This union of remoteness and nearness, which Simmel’s essay showcases in the marginalization of Frankfurt Jews in Middle Age Europe, is similar to the forms of estrangement I identify in relation to the displaced Syrians, Palestinians, and Lebanese living in the margins of Lebanese society. Being regionally from the Levant and speakers of intimate vernaculars of Levantine Arabic, while at the same time displaced or lacking meaningful and necessary social bonds with the rest of the society, they are at once “close” and “remote.” Furthermore, in the gharīb, Simmel’s two facets of the stranger overlap, which both allows and disrupts the cultivation of new forms of being for them. It is in this light that I bring together the story of the Palestinian Gharīb together with Palestinian refugees, illegal Syrians, or internally displaced and poor Lebanese. By relating different versions of the gharīb experience, these narratives allow us to explore the intersection of poverty and displacement and to contextualize displacement regionally, beyond the borders of nation-states.

Within the Middle East, one can trace the gharīb back far beyond and before the formation of nation-states, and linguistically, back through Arabic, Persian-Kurdish, Turkic, and Urdu literature for centuries. Throughout its long history, the gharīb concept has been embraced in different regions to serve social, economic, and political boundary-making. It has then traveled and been repurposed. Its geographical contours, its socio-ethical connotations, and the prevalence of its applicability have shifted across the centuries.

The word gharīb comes from the gharaba root in Arabic and indicates “to go away, depart, absent, withdraw, leave, to be a stranger; to be strange, odd, queer, obscure, abstruse, difficult to comprehend … to expel from the homeland, banish, exile, expatriate … to say or do a strange and amazing thing; to exceed the proper bounds, overdo, exaggerate … to go to a foreign country, emigrate; to be (far) away from one’s homeland; to become an occidental, become Westernized, be Europeanized; to find strange, odd, queer, unusual; to deem absurd, preposterous, grotesque” (Wehr Reference Wehr1976: 668). The gharīb then traveled into Persian languages to denote “uncommon, strange, outlandish, foreign; extraordinary; rare; a foreigner, stranger,” as well as “poor, needy, humble, gentle” (Steingass Reference Steingass2000[1892]: 886). Through Persian, it passed to Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, and many other Indian languages to mean “foreign, alien, rare, wonderful, unusual,” and “poor, destitute,… lowly; a poor man; a meek or humble person” (Platts Reference Platts2000: 770). In everyday Arabic and Persian, the word gharīb mostly carries the first denotation—being strange, stranger, abnormal, and unusual—but can certainly connote weak social relationships and a lack of social roots in specific contexts. In Turkish, garip can mean miserable, desolate, and poor, as well as alienated, estranged, and weird (Zirh Reference Zirh2012).

In Persian, a derivative of ghurbat, the same as ghurba or estrangement in Arabic, is ghurbatī, which literally means being away from home or exiled, but it has a plainly pejorative connotation. It is used as a derogatory term to refer to people with low socioeconomic status who arrive in metropolitan areas from faraway villages or towns or from non-sedentary, that is, nomadic, backgrounds. Ghurbatī is also the name of a nomadic ethnolinguistic minority of a few thousand people in Iran and Afghanistan who speak a dialect of Domari language, also known as “Middle Eastern Romani.” This endangered Indic language is spoken by nomadic communities all across the Middle East and North Africa, including Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, the Indian subcontinent, Syria, and Lebanon (Richardson Reference Richardson2020). In Turkish, and other Turkic languages, gurbet (being away from home) and gurbetçi (one who left for gurbet) are commonly used as a way of “portraying the socio-spatial dimensions of migration,” whether it be rural to urban migration, or labor migration to Western Europe and various waves of exile, particularly since the 1960s (Zirh Reference Zirh2012: 139–40). Gurbeti, the Muslim Roma community of former Yugoslavia, is from the same ethnolinguistic origin. The word traveled with the nomadic community to mean “gypsy” and “wanderer,” and to cast the people as “foul” and “untrustworthy,” in Serbia and Kosovo (Cvorovic Reference Cvorovic2006). The largest diasporic community of ghurbatīs is now in Austria, where most of them are employed in menial and low-skilled construction work (Pelekani Reference Pelekani2018).

The etymology of ghurba, estrangement, and its variegated denotations and connotations—that is, in ghurabāʾ, ghorbati, and gurbeti—eloquently conveys the regional and cultural connectivity throughout not only the modern Middle East but also east to the Indian subcontinent and as far west as Central Europe. In his study of the term gharīb in the medieval Mediterranean, Pifer looks at the gharīb as a loanword that traveled far beyond its Arabic roots, linguistically and geographically. He argues that the gharīb can be viewed as an all-encompassing term which brought together “a broad range of theological concepts, social categories, affective states, and topics of literary production among medieval Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike” (Reference Pifer, Babayan and Pifer2018: 15). What brings these different peoples together under the umbrella term of gharībness is the juxtaposition of their mobility and their lack of belonging to the spatio-temporality of their surroundings—socially, culturally, linguistically, and economically. The poverty of every one of the above-mentioned forms of capital reinforces a vicious circle of estrangement and subjugates people to it.

According to Taneja (Reference Taneja2018), in everyday Hindi-Urdu gharīb specifically means “poor.” In his study of gharīb nawazi, the culture of hospitality to the stranger, in the ruins of a medieval palace and a saint shrine in Delhi, Taneja reflects on the potentiality of the word gharīb in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, asking:

The juxtaposition of the adjectives “outcast,” “mad,” and “polluted” with” rare” and “extraordinary” in all the above-mentioned languages indeed gives the gharīb the possibility of remaking itself spatially and temporarily. From the conception of gharīb to the many faces of the gharīb, the route is filled with “wonderful” and “unusual” turns, as Platts puts it, where in one spatio-temporal setting they stand for moral decay and in another as opening up a different world to the society they enter.Footnote ¹¹

While by no means limited to Islamic history and hadīth,Footnote ¹² the gharīb has a palpable presence in Islamic traditions. Al-ghurabāʾ is an eschatological denomination that characterizes upstanding pious Muslims in the larger society, either Islamic or otherwise.Footnote ¹³ A well-known prophetic hadīth states: “Badaʾ al-Islāmu gharīban wa sayaʿūdu gharīban kamā badaʾ fa ṭūba lil ghurabāʾ,” meaning: “Islam began as something strange and it will return to being strange as it began, so glad tidings to the strangers” (Mundhirī and Ibn Al-Hajjaj Reference Mundhirī and ibn al-Ḥajjāj al-Qushayrī2000: 270). This is a reading of gharībness that unites all Muslims through their strangeness, and more so, holds it up as a virtue. In other iterations of the hadīth, the people ask, “Who are they [al-ghurabā], O Messenger of Allah?” and the prophet answers, “Those who are pious and righteous when the people have become evil” (Ājurrī and Badr Reference Ājurrī and ibn ʻAbd Allāh Badr1983: 18). A ṣaḥīḥ Al-Bukhāri narration, “Live in this world as though you are a stranger or a traveler,” also suggests that a life of estrangement is the correct conduct in this world (al-Bukhari Reference Al-Bukhari and Khan1996).Footnote ¹⁴ In the centuries since, the perception of ghurabāʾ and their relation to the social and political order of societies, Islamic or otherwise, has taken radically different directions.

In The Muqaddimah (Reference Khaldun1958[1377]), Ibn Khaldun elaborates on the dynamic relations that ghurabāʾ form with the rest of the society and with the political leadership. In his social theory, dynasties, or civilizations, rise and fall in a cyclical manner marked by their ‘aṣabiyya, a fluid term coined by the author to capture the essence of community cohesion or group feeling. Strangers’ positioning within the hierarchy of a dynasty, in Ibn Khaldun’s view, marks the strength of the dynasty and the amount of its ‘aṣabiyya: you would know that “the destruction of the dynasty is imminent” when the strangers are employed as followers (ibid.: 244). What makes the outsiders and strangers the least reliable for community formation and the least favored allies for the ruling power has to do with their lack of familiarity and the temporality of their social cohesions with the ruling dynasty. Embedding this view within his cyclical narrative of civilizations, Ibn Khaldun describes how strangers have to occupy the bottom of social strata for political leadership. This is when a community’s ‘aṣabiyya is at its strongest. As the political leadership gets more powerful, it loses its necessary connection to the followers who have the tightest social closeness with it, and the necessary hierarchy of followers starts crumbling. This is where the ruling power starts accepting strangers as its followers and putting them in the place of its old and original ones.

The threat that the ghurabāʾ pose to social cohesion, as outlined by Ibn Khaldun, has long positioned them in the margins of the society and at the bottom of social hierarchies. These modes of exclusion persisted through the formation of modern nation-states, translating themselves into the more elaborate structures at play in perpetuating marginalization in the region’s modern and contemporary societies. Gharībness as, first, a fleeting way of dwelling in the world, and second, a byproduct of the uneven distribution of capital—economic, social, or otherwise—highlights the othering processes that push not only the displaced and the stateless, but also the poor, into the realm of gharībness. In this sense, one can be a gharīb in the home country and, by the same token, a migrant in a different country can cultivate a sense of belonging by creating socioeconomic bonds that connect them to their surroundings in meaningful ways. The relationship between low socioeconomic status and lack of a sense of belonging is where all the different characters in this paper meet.

Becoming Ghurabāʾ in Lebanon

In his political history of Lebanon, Lebanese-Palestinian intellectual Samir Kassir says the word gharīb means “foreigner” while carrying “the pejorative connotation of an intruder, and only in connection with an Arab foreigner; a European or an American is called ajnabi (plural ajanib)” (Reference Kassir and DeBeviose2010: 474). He explains how the word underwent a shift in meaning in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, with “the intensification of xenophobic feeling in the press in early 1968 and [when the word gharīb] came to be used against Palestinians as well as Syrian workers” (ibid.: 475). Kassir’s remarks on the use of gharīb still resonated with many of my Syrian and Palestinian interlocutors five decades after the shift he described. As Arab foreigners of Lebanon, they have long been viewed as strangers, where their gharībness has been an amalgamation of political and socioeconomic marginalization. In the same vein, the word gharīb has long been used to refer to the Lebanese poor who migrated or were displaced from more remote rural areas to the country’s larger cities. To be identified as gharīb when one is a visitor or a newcomer to a different region or city need not carry a pejorative connotation, but remaining a gharīb while not new to a place certainly does. The way out of gharībness passes through the cultivation of social and economic ties to one’s surroundings, which is often denied to ghurabāʾ, whether they are of Lebanese or non-Lebanese Arab descent. The right to belong, in this sense, is less about citizenry and more an intersectional mode of social and economic poverty, marked by racial/ethnic and linguistic differences, that brings the displaced and the poverty-stricken together in the margins of Lebanese society.

The spaces and identities of impoverished and displaced communities have been increasingly mapped together in the context of 2011 Lebanon. Following the forcible removal of Palestinians from their occupied country and exile in Lebanon with the 1948 Nakba, the outbreak of the 2011 civil war in Syria led to a mass migration of Syrians to the country, making them Lebanon’s largest displaced community. Again, many Syrians were not newcomers; the country had long benefitted from large numbers of Syrian seasonal workers who kept the country’s agricultural and low-wage labor economy up and running for several decades (Chalcraft Reference Chalcraft2008). As the war took its toll and displaced many more Syrians, Lebanon imposed a non-encampment policy on Syrians who fled from their hometowns to the neighboring country.Footnote ¹⁵ This dispersed Syrians within Lebanon’s already saturated landscape of displacement. Today, in this small Mediterranean country that has long been a refuge for the region’s displaced peoples, almost half of the population are either non-citizens or not of Lebanese descent.Footnote ¹⁶ In this intimate and overlapping geography, the daily struggles of the many displaced communities and the poor and marginalized Lebanese coalesce in meaningful ways. The ongoing and interlocking forms of structural violence, inequality, and increasing marginalization of both the poor and the displaced communities have further blurred the legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, and internally versus externally displaced, particularly in the margins of the state, where the repercussions of the country’s ongoing economic and political crises are first and foremost felt.

Throughout my fieldwork in Lebanon, I came across many experiences of ghurabāʾ, strangers, that capture the multifaceted quality of regional displacement in the Middle East. Hiba, a Syrian farmworker who had lived in east Lebanon since being displaced from Hama in 2012, described gharībness to me as a state in which “the stranger (al-gharīb) is treated differently from the relative (al-qarīb).”Footnote ¹⁷ She delineated her experience of gradual strangeness through her mother’s passing and her siblings’ resettlements in Europe, one at a time. For her, Lebanon could have become home—despite the illegality and economic hardship that inevitably came with it—only if death and resettlement did not divide her family. To her, gharībness was strictly a matter of kin relations irrespective of homeland and one could fall into its void simply by leaving one’s family or being left behind. “We didn’t have anything in Syria either, but we had each other,” as she put it. For Hiba, nothing, even economic prosperity, could compensate for feeble kin relations and that was where she drew the boundaries of estrangement.

In contrast to Hiba’s experience, gharībness and its lack of kinship ties allowed for Yassin’s self-exploration as a young non-binary Syrian man from Al-Hasaka in the north-easternmost region of Syria. He escaped mandatory military service in Syria and moved to Beirut, where he knew nobody. Living in humble shared housings in Beirut and working at a local bar near Hamra Street, a lively nightlife scene in Beirut, Yassin refashioned himself into someone he viewed as a more truthful version of himself, beyond the confines of familiarity and communal identity. In the year and a half of our friendship I witnessed his gradual embrace of a new way of being and living, through which his experience of displacement and lack of kin relations was constantly reformulated. His remaking of himself in Beirut likely came with many unsettling conditions, due to his lower-class background, his “accented Arabic” (from the perspective of the Lebanese), and more, which ultimately left him feeling an outcast and at times fundamentally alone. In such circumstances, he could only imagine a future for himself outside of the region, where “the Lebanese, the Syrians, all of us, are strangers … all of us, Arabs.” Ending up in Beirut, after the inevitable cutting of ties with his life in Syria, his situation appeared to be halfway between liberating and belonging, and yet neither. Being an accented non-binary Arab man in an Arab country and working in a luxurious bar for a low wage—and yet again being SyrianFootnote ¹⁸—limited Yassin in such a way that his future aspirations embraced gharībness as the only possibility of living without being torn apart.

The forms of exclusion Yassin experienced as a non-binary man were brought up in different shades and forms in my conversations with other self-identified ghurabāʾ of Lebanon. Noor, a young Syrian-Palestinian rapper whom I met in 2019 in Badawi, the UNRWA camp near Tripoli in northern Lebanon, viewed gharībness as directly correlated with racism. “Wherever there is racism, there are ghurabāʾ,” he argued. He was born in the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, near Damascus, until he was displaced midway through the ongoing war. His experience of gharībness was tied to his forced move from Yarmouk,Footnote ¹⁹ which felt like home to him, to Baddawi, where he believed all Palestinians were ghurabāʾ. When I asked him what constituted the stark difference, he responded: “Have you heard any Palestinian in Lebanon call themself a Lebanese-Palestinian?” and, after a short pause, “No. Because the system (niẓām) is racist (ʿunsuri) in Lebanon.”Footnote ²⁰

Similarly, Fatma, a Syrian primary school teacher from Damascus now living in Tripoli, viewed racism as at the core of Syrians’ experiences of gharībness in Lebanon. She was particularly taken aback by the treatment of the Syrian dead in Lebanon, seeing it as the ultimate level of estrangement. “Racism has even reached to the two meters where we bury our dead,”Footnote ²¹ she said. In both Fatma’s and Noor’s articulations, the connection between racism and gharībness was not geographically set, but fluid and changing. Further, it was understood as a systemic imposition rather than a case-by-case and arbitrary form of exclusion. In separate conversations, they both recounted stories heard from friends, and friends of friends, in the UAE or Europe, where Arabs were treated poorly, viewed as inferior, or excluded in various ways. The Lebanese version of it, however, represented the most intimate experience of Simmel’s simultaneous closeness and remoteness, where deep linguistic and cultural ties were in drastic contrast with the structures of alienation. In Lebanon, it was as if the violence of estrangement, and its constant presence, were not expected—and therefore more deplorable.

The racism entrenched in the Lebanese system can be traced back to what Kassir identified as the rise of Arab ghurabāʾ, a pejorative category fabricated in the 1960s within regional politics and shifting economic relations. The juxtaposition of Palestinians and Syrians in the last few decades in definitions of Arab intruders is not a coincidence. The timeline of structural forms of estrangement in Lebanon relates directly to the rapidly changing political map of the region. As the Palestinian resistance movement has been increasingly disempowered and stigmatized by regional powers since the Arab-Israeli War, displaced Palestinians have been pushed out to the further margins, socio-politically and economically. The presence of Syrians, on the other hand, categorically labeled as seasonal migrant workers and predefined under the shadow of the long-term military occupation of the Syrian regime in Lebanon, triggered long-term political rivalries and reinforced class hierarchies. The production of ghurabāʾ and the remaking of their categories, in this sense, denotes a constant back and forth between different scales of belonging—from the most intimate, the personal, and kin-based, to the larger national and regional configurations of power.

The Syrian Conflict: A View from the Side of Ghurabāʾ

Abdallah, a displaced Free Syrian Army fighter from the outskirts of Homs, viewed himself as a lifelong gharīb, even though he was only displaced from his hometown in 2012. He was smuggled into northern Lebanon by his family after being rescued from a deadly battle between the free Syrian Army and Bashar al-Assad’s military forces in Homs. Abdallah understood his positioning within any given society as that of an outsider and identified the forms of exclusion he had lived through and survived as the source of his non-conformist spirit. In Lebanon, he was a freelance humanitarian worker involved with various local and international NGOs in the north and east. He was not recruited by any of the organizations he worked with in Lebanon, due to his lack of residency papers. Despite his constant financial struggles, he did not mind the demanding work and travel.

When I first met him in the fall of 2018, he was thirty years old, with a limp and a partially disabled arm, reminders of his last battle as a revolutionary in Syria. His articulation of gharībness was intimately entangled with what he viewed to be the underlying reasons for the start of the Syrian revolution. He argued that the sectarianization of Syrian society by the Assad dynasty—with Hafez al-Assad’s rule starting in 1971—was the main reason for the estrangement of Syrians from their country and the ultimate uprisings of 2011. “Before the Baathist rule,Footnote ²² there was only the nation of Syria and no sectarianism,” he observed. Abdallah’s argument about the sectarian factionalism of the Baathist regime has been a focus of scholarship on Syrian politics, particularly since the eruption of civil unrest there (Dukhan Reference Dukhan2022; Holliday Reference Holliday2011; Menshawy Reference Menshawy2022; Phillips Reference Phillips2015; Pierret Reference Pierret2014), with large-scale revolts in the predominantly Sunni regions since 2011. Among the Sunnis hardest hit by the exclusionary politics of the Assads’ regime were the ʿashāʾir or nomadic communities.Footnote ²³

ʿAshāʾir, the plural form of ʿashīra, means clans or nations and is often used to refer to nomads or communities who are viewed as not yet fully “urbanized.” Although many of these communities have lived sedentary lives for generations, their dress and traditions, vernaculars of spoken Arabic, and their communal ways of living on the outskirts of towns and cities are viewed as distinct from normative modern urban life. Abdallah was born to one of these formerly nomadic communities, believed to be a Qahtanite tribe,Footnote ²⁴ which originated from the ancient south Arabia region. In urban settings in Syria, nomadic and rural communities are often viewed as ghurabāʾ. Just like ghorbati in Persian-speaking regions and gurbeti in Turkish and Eastern European context, being born to ʿashīra automatically associates these mobile subjects with strangeness and its multifaceted forms. Being an ibn ʿashīra, born to a clan, as Abdallah was, was the basis for his political marginalization as well as the revolutionary and anti-establishment spirit that carried him through war, injury, and further displacement in Lebanon. In Syria, people born to ʿashīra are often perceived as true Arabs,Footnote ²⁵ descending from the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula,Footnote ²⁶ the region unified by the Prophet Mohammad under Islamic rule in the years following his migration to Medina in 622. By the same token, they had been the perpetual outsiders in the rapidly urbanizing setting of Syrian society under the self-identified secular modern rule of the Assads.Footnote ²⁷

The estrangement of ʿashāʾir and the sectarian production of ghurabāʾ during the Syrian Baathist rule can be further uncoiled in light of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of social ‘aṣabiyya and the rise and fall of dynasties. Scholars of the modern Middle East have explored Khaldunian frameworks for understanding religious and sectarian politics and the rapidly changing configurations of power in the regions (Khuri Reference Khuri1990; Lacoste Reference Lacoste1984). Goldsmith (Reference Goldsmith2011) looks specifically at the consolidation of power under Hafiz al-Assad and its decline during Bashar’s rule in the years leading up to the 2011 uprisings. He uses the term “sectarian ‘aṣabiyya” to analyze the formation and shifts in the security regime’s apparatusFootnote ²⁸ and its changing relations to Syrian society.

Sectarian ‘aṣabiyya “can function similarly to Ibn Khaldun’s social or tribal ‘asabiyya in terms of the rise and decline of dynasties” (ibid.: 39). Much of the political history of and scholarship on post-2011 Syria has focused on the sectarian aspects of the conflict (among others, see Balanche Reference Balanche2018; Berti and Paris Reference Berti and Paris2014; and Phillips Reference Phillips2015). These studies, however, have not looked at the way the declining ‘aṣabiyya of the Baath regime and the ongoing conflict in Syria in the years following 2011 have been closely tied to the rise of multiple groups who in fact self-identify as ghurabāʾ. As a byproduct of the Syrian state’s exclusionary politics, different groups of ghurabāʾ self-organized and formed their oppositional movements. These forces, nevertheless, were not limited to the ‘ashā’ir, or the poor and marginalized from within Syria. With the outbreak of war, the long-lived jihadi groups of the region joined the fight under the banner of ghurabāʾ, claiming their righteousness through a contested interpretation of al- ghurabāʾ in Islam.

In Syria, and since the start of the conflict, the category of ghurabāʾ and its Islamic interpretations have been contested. Many active warring parties carried the denomination of al-ghurabāʾ, among them fundamentalist jihadi movements.Footnote ²⁹ The most prominent ghurabāʾ jihadi groups during the Syrian civil war are Firqat al-Ghurabāʾ Brigade and Ghurabāʾ al-Shām. The former consists of Arab and non-Arab Muslim youth who traveled mostly from Western European countries to be settled in tents at the edges of Idlib. They fight against the Syrian regime and its Iranian and Russian allies, as well as the locally organized forces of Idlib youth who aspired to independence from the Syrian regime. The members of this jihadi group unite under the banner of “strangers” as a way of both acknowledging their foreignness to the region and to claim their Islamic righteousness. Since their settlements, there have been many conflicts between them and the locals who view the group as threatening outsiders who only attract more military attacks by the Syrian Army.Footnote ³⁰ The latter, Ghurabāʾ al-Shām, has a longer history, dating back to the Iraq war (2003–2011). First founded in Aleppo, the militia smuggled its fighters to war zones in the Middle East, mostly from the former Eastern Bloc, Turkey, and Arab Sunni majority countries.

These militias’ claim to gharībness and the righteousness derived from it created uncomfortable and contested points in my conversations with displaced Syrians in Lebanon. My interlocutors claimed gharībness not only due to their external displacement but also as people who took it upon themselves to fight against oppression and further marginalization. While many, including Abdallah, maintained that the jihadists could not legitimately call themselves ghurabāʾ, their objections gestured toward different readings of estrangement and its appeal. To Abdallah, that “real revolutionary Syrians” were appalled by these jihadists was basis enough to reject their claim to the righteous gharībness of Islam. As an ibn ʿashīra who felt estranged by the Baathist regime and joined the anti-establishment movement, Abdallah was committed to a journey that brought the many faces of gharīb together.

To Umm Ali,Footnote ³¹ a middle-aged Syrian woman born to a religious shaykh in Al-Raqqa, it all boiled down to distinguishing truth from falsehood (tamyīz al-ḥaqq min al-bāṭil). The jihadists were not righteous, and therefore not true ghurabāʾ, because they were not fighting for the good cause, as is the Islamic command. In a similar vein, Yassin, my friend from Al-Hassaka, believed that ghurabāʾ are always in opposition, and fighting oppression rather than seeking a position of power. For him, the jihadists’ claim to rule already pushed them beyond the sacred boundaries of gharībness.

Not all my interlocutors agreed upon or highlighted the virtuousness of the positioning of ghurabāʾ, but they each sewed oppression into the fabric of gharībness as emblematic of the way ghurabāʾ are positioned in larger societal settings. Oppression, in its very structural form, acts as the intersection between a gharīb’s solitary path and those of others who experience exclusion, marginalization, and estrangement in their multiple forms throughout life and death. That estrangement transcends individual, communal, and national forms of belonging allows us to see shared modes of resistance, as well as contestations and disagreements that ghurabāʾ bring to their surroundings. Let me now return to Lebanon to further explore the entanglement of oppression and gharībness and the ways it reorganizes social boundaries of self versus other, and us versus them.

Ghurabāʾ and the Silencing Oppression

“Of course we are ghurabāʾ (strangers) here,” Amer responds when I ask whether he thinks of himself as a stranger in Lebanon. When I met him in the summer of 2019 in a makeshift camp near the city of Zahle in the Beqaa Valley, he had been living in eastern Lebanon for five consecutive years. Following the capture of his hometown, Dayr al-Zur, by the ISIL in the spring of 2014, he left Syria with his wife and four children, leaving behind their aging parents. For Amer, Lebanon was not only a postwar destination. Before the start of the Syrian conflict, he had crossed the border multiple times as a migrant seasonal farmworker, spending four to six months per year in agricultural fields of north and east of Lebanon and returning to his family in Syria during the cold months. The camp he was settled in with his family was in fact one that he had frequently stayed in while a seasonal worker in the Beqaa Valley. Knowing his way around eastern Lebanon and being part of the seasonal labor network, in a way, facilitated their finding a tent in an informal settlement, and day-labor jobs, though they were poorly paid and precarious. Now he, his wife, and their twelve-year-old son worked intermittently long shifts in the nearby farms for 6,000 Lebanese lira (about US$3) per day, which still left them under the poverty line.

In 2019, and with the exacerbating criminalization of paperless Syrians, having three day-labor wages coming into the household was rare for Syrian families settled in the Beqaa Valley and north Lebanon. “Alhamdulillah” (“Praise be to God”) he whispered a few times in between his sentences while acknowledging how much more arduous conditions of displacement could be for Syrians without the long history and local knowledge that he had acquired in Lebanon prior to being displaced. These subtle differences in Syrians’ living conditions, however, did not change the fact that they all were ghurabāʾ in Lebanon.

“There is oppression (ẓulum) everywhere, but if you could respond back, it means that you have rights, you’re not a gharīb,” he exclaimed, adding, “Here we just remain silent [in the face of oppression].”

“But doesn’t it help to speak the language, know the culture and the region?” I asked. “Aren’t Syrians more like ghurabāʾ in Europe?”

“It’s not the language. Even Lebanese can’t say anything [to oppression]. It’s the system (nizām) here. You need connections (maʿārif) or a lot of money (maṣāri), or you can’t say anything.”

Amer’s pointed response challenged many presumptions about what it means to be, or feel, like a stranger. He started by redirecting my question from whether he views himself as a gharīb in Lebanon and instead responded in plural “we are ghurabāʾ here.” Throughout the conversation, the “we” Amer viewed himself to be part of shifted fluidly from Syrians to include “even Lebanese” who were deprived of the unevenly distributed privileges that he succinctly defined as indicating connections and wealth. Thinking aloud, he divulged conditions of ghurabāʾ beyond geographic, linguistic, and historic familiarities, or a lack thereof, and instead highlighted their positioning as marginalized subjects who faced oppression. To him, merely speaking a language or knowing one’s way around did not make one any less a gharīb; rather, what separates those who belong to the structure of any given society from those excluded from it is whether they can speak up against oppression or must remain silent. Amer’s juxtaposition is remarkable, particularly coming from someone who was displaced from his home country precisely because of a collective uprising led by people who decided to at last speak up against oppression. The aftereffects of speaking up—which in Syria turned out to be intensified state violence, mass killing, torture, and the displacement of millions—appeared to Amer as the price Syrians paid for asking for their rights; that is, for saying no to being estranged. Lebanon, in contrast, represented a system (niẓām) that automatically silenced the voices of people deprived of connections and money, which for Amer loosely defined the condition of estrangement.

On my visit to the makeshift camp a week later,Footnote ³² Amer recounted his father’s last days in February of 2019, in a way that extended his contrasting of the two states. He fell ill while on a visit in Lebanon from Dayr al-Zur, where the majority of the population is now elderly, and widowed women, with no desire or means to leave. As his health deteriorated, he had decided to visit his family for what they all feared would be the last time. A few days after his arrival he was hospitalized. Amer first took him to a Lebanese hospital, “thinking,” he said, “that it’s like in Syria where at least hospital care was free (bi balash) [free of charge or affordable].” But they were stopped at the hospital gate and told they had to pay a one-night hospitalization fee up front and show their residency permits. Having neither the money nor the permits, they ended up in Al-Nasra, the Palestinian Red Crescent hospital in Bar Elias, a twenty-minute drive from Amer’s camp. Established in 1968 for displaced Palestinians, the hospital is now much less frequented by Palestinians than by Syrians and lower-class Lebanese with no access to medical insurance and unable to pay the high rates of Lebanon’s increasingly privatized health care system.

Amer expressed bewilderment at the scene of the small Palestinian hospital’s waiting room crowded with “the poor from the area (fuqarā min al-manṭaqa),” who, like him, could not afford a Lebanese hospital. His father was hospitalized in Al-Nasra for only four days, at which point he was turned away since the hospital could not spare a bed for a terminally ill patient. Amer was not aggrieved so much by the hospital’s decision as by the structures that conditioned growing numbers of people to a scarcity of resources. “The government (al-dawla) must recognize that we are darawīsh (impoverished),”Footnote ³³ he contended, “but all troubles come to us unfailingly.”Footnote ³⁴ Amer’s father was eventually set on the road back to Syria and died from a pulmonary infection the day after arriving in Dayr al-Zur. “We say alhamdulillah, for he passed away in Syria. He was buried in our family grave plot.” Amer said.

For Amer, the waiting room of Al-Nasra, a humanitarian-run Palestinian hospital packed with poor Lebanese and displaced Syrians, encapsulated the ghurabā experience that he had explained to me a week earlier. The system (niẓām), or rather its failures, which rendered increasing numbers of Lebanon’s inhabitants into silent strangers, was manifested in Amer’s medical journey with his father. In his understanding, ghurabāʾ were a direct product of the uneven distribution of capital, whether economic, social, or otherwise, which leaves people estranged from the care that very system is intended to provide; that is, public goods. The public healthcare systems in the two countries displayed the contrast he drew between Syria and Lebanon in our first conversation. That poorer Lebanese who were pushed to the margins of a malfunctioning system of governance shifted Amer’s we from Syrians, or categorically speaking the displaced, to darawīsh, the poor, whether it be from Lebanon or elsewhere in the region.

In the last decade, concurrent with Lebanon’s deteriorating economy and the Syrian civil war, the extent to which living standards have deteriorated has further intertwined the lives of impoverished Lebanese and displaced communities, and for many of them living and dying as ghurabāʾ has become the only affordable option. As such, gharībness and its Levantine particularities are unraveling the complexities of the lives and deaths of the marginalized beyond legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, internal versus external, and voluntary versus displaced migration. The long history of regional connectivity and the fluid bordering practices that have existed since well before the Levant’s modern nation-states formed, have cultivated and multiplied forms of gharībness not easily mapped onto the territorial and legal frameworks of the international governance of populations.

Binary legal categorizations are especially useless in Lebanon, a country with many regionally displaced peoples which also rejects the ratification of major refugee laws within its territories (Janmyr Reference Janmyr2017).Footnote ³⁵ Despite the ostensible differences in their legal statuses, all communities—Palestinians, Syrians, and the ever-more-impoverished Lebanese—have been conditioned to occupying a status of not fully belonging.