When the song stops echoing

L'Orient-Le Jour

08-05-2025

In the hills of Mount Lebanon, my grandmother used to sing a lullaby in a now-vanishing form of Lebanese Arabic, echoing the pre-modern cadence of village storytellers. The words, warm and untranslatable, drifted through the cedar trees like the scent of baking bread. But as I write this from my apartment in Beirut, windows open to the hum of traffic and a skyline of cranes, I wonder if that lullaby will be sung to anyone after me.
This is the quiet war of cultural preservation in the Middle East. It isn't always fought with arms — more often, it's fought with memory. And in a world racing toward the future, memory is heartbreakingly easy to lose.
Modernization has swept the region like a tide: glass towers replacing stone houses, Western curricula replacing oral traditions, TikTok videos replacing folktales. For some, this is progress. For others, it's a slow kind of erasure. The tension between development and identity defines our generation. We are the bridge between what once was and what might never be again.
Take the youth of southern Iraq, for example. They've taken to Instagram to showcase traditional reed house construction. Once dismissed as backward, these homes are now reframed as brilliant examples of sustainable architecture. They're using the very tools of globalization to preserve what it once threatened to erase.
In Lebanon, the fight is quieter, but no less urgent. It's not just buildings or dialects at risk, but the soul of entire neighborhoods. In Beirut, Mar Mikhael used to smell like manousheh dough. Now, century-old Armenian bakeries stand beside neon-lit bars. The dough still rises, but the context is slipping. Some call it coexistence. Others, like community organizer Silva Chahinian, see it differently. 'When rent triples and the baker closes, we don't just lose bread,' she said. 'We lose memory.'
Lebanon has long known wars, and each has left a mark deeper than the rubble. The 15-year Civil War didn't just topple buildings; it cracked open the fabric of daily life. Families were torn apart, neighbors became strangers, and many grew up with memories they were too afraid or too exhausted to speak of. Villages emptied. Dialects slipped away, unspoken and forgotten. Church bells went silent. Songs once passed from one generation to the next faded into the noise of gunfire and sirens.
And now, decades later, with tensions rising again in the South, these old wounds feel fresh. Villages near the border have emptied once more. Schools sit in silence. Weddings are postponed with no new dates. What used to be a rhythm of life: early morning songs from the fields and evening stories told over tea have been placed on hold. But even now, people find ways to hold on. A friend from the southern Lebanese coastal city of Sour, heavily bombarded in the latest war with Israel, told me his grandmother still gathers the children each evening to tell them stories she heard as a girl, her voice steady despite the distant hum of drones. 'If the walls fall,' she told them, 'let the stories stand.'
In Saida, volunteers preserve folk songs sung by the newly displaced people by recording them on phones, uploading them online and sharing them like treasured keepsakes. In every word and every note, there's a quiet act of defiance: a way of saying, 'We're still here.'
Students at the American University of Beirut began an initiative, recording their grandparents' stories in Arabic, Kurdish, and Armenian.
Culture in Lebanon has always been more than tradition; its resilience stitched into sound, scent, and memory. It's the unshaken belief that even in the worst of times, something beautiful is still worth saving.
In Jordan, Bedouin musicians are digitizing their maqams, preserving not just notes, but the silences between them. In Palestine, embroidery circles have become cultural sanctuaries, where each thread is a story, and every pattern an act of quiet resistance.
In Tunisia, a small initiative called " Toufoula" (childhood) brings people together in a deeply personal way. Every month, villagers gather under olive trees or in open courtyards, where elders teach traditional weaving techniques to local children. It's not a lecture but a shared moment. The kids aren't just learning how to weave; they're laughing, asking questions, spilling threads and soaking in stories. It's loud and messy and beautiful. What they're taking in isn't just a skill; it's a way of life, passed down one thread at a time.
These efforts may seem small, even invisible. But, they are tectonic. They remind us that culture is not something to be sealed in a glass case. It breathes. It adapts. But, it must not be uprooted.
I keep coming back to my grandmother's lullaby. I looked everywhere for it online, but nothing came up. No digital archive, no YouTube cover. Just her voice, now gone. So, I recorded myself singing it, shaky but honest. I sent it to my cousin in France. I scribbled the lyrics phonetically on the back of a receipt. I called my uncle to confirm the melody. It's not a perfect recording. But maybe that's not the point. Maybe what matters is that the song still lives, even if it trembles.
Preserving culture doesn't mean standing still. It means moving forward without forgetting where you started. It means carrying your grandmother's voice in your pocket while learning to live in a world she never imagined.
In a world that urges us to upgrade, update, and upload, may we also remember to listen. Not just to what's trending, but to what is quietly disappearing.
Before the song stops echoing.