In his poem entitled “Bayrūt,” written in the local Lebanese dialect, ‘Issām al-cAbdalla maintains that there is “no city called Beirut/Beirut is a bunch of villages” (Buzayc 2010: 207). Keeping in mind the spatial proximity between Beirut and its surrounding countryside, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of people living in Beirut have migrated from rural areas as well as the peripheries, the novels challenge any view of rural and urban binarism. This chapter focuses on three novels, al-Ḥumānī's Ḥayy al-lijā (1969),cAwwād's Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt (1972) and Kraydiyyā's Khān Zāda (2010). The novels challenge the dualistic approach of country–city that favors two sanitized and antagonistic communities with rigid boundaries.

Ḥayy al-lijā subverts the rural–urban divide by focusing on a family from rural South Lebanon that settles in al-lijā neighborhood of al-Muṣaytabā district in Beirut, where kinship ties and cohesive group identities are preserved. Nevertheless, the novel shows that the boundaries between rural and urban are porous, allowing the members to interact, coexist and cross-pollinate.

Far from an idyllic rural environment, the village in Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt is seen as a static, depraved, backward and primitive place whose inhabitants, particularly women, move away from it without nostalgia or regret. Simultaneously, if the city is initially viewed as a site of freedom, revolution, well-being, and sexual license—especially for women, it is also a site of anomie, violence and exploitation, strongly aligned with rural ferocity and abuse. The gendering of space becomes especially evident in this urban geography of menace, where women's dread of male violence is exhibited in the form of anxiety about space.

Khān Zāda, on the other hand, reveals that a traditional semi-rural consciousness is unavoidable in Beirut, especially after the 1975 Civil War (1975–90).