Do we like Fairuz?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful in her own words and a long record of staying out of factions, but she gives so few interviews that the record is thin.
Fairuz was born Nouhad Haddad in 1934 and was a chorus singer at Radio Lebanon in the early 1950s. Composer Halim El-Roumi gave her the stage name, which means turquoise, and introduced her to the Rahbani brothers. She first sang at the Baalbeck festival in 1957 and went on to record hundreds of songs and star in dozens of musicals and films.
Her big moral test was the civil war. She stayed in Lebanon for all of it and refused to take sides. Reporting says she did not perform in Lebanon until the fighting ended, which is part of why she became what one critic calls the only true uniting public figure there.
The stoushes are all about other people dragging her into politics. In 2008 she went ahead with a run of shows at the Damascus Opera House despite angry fans and an anti-Syrian MP, and she never answered the critics. A Now Lebanon poll found 67 per cent of respondents opposed the trip, while her former partner Mansour Rahbani called it a message of love and peace.
In late 2013 a relative who is a public figure told a Hezbollah-linked site that she loves its leader Hassan Nasrallah. The uproar was huge. She stayed silent, and her sister posted that nobody can speak for her, per AP. Politicians from Berri to Jumblatt weighed in on whether she should be kept out of it.
In 2015 a magazine called Al Shiraa ran a vicious piece about her over supposed Assad ties. Ministers condemned it as an insult to Lebanon, while the editor said he would not apologise. She took no part in it. The case shows how even a quiet woman gets used as a political football.
The harm check is short because she says so little publicly. No statement against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet turned up, and nothing about her work with anyone shady. Her Jerusalem-themed albums and civil war neutrality are her acts, and she has not campaigned for any faction in her own words. This sample was via Kanye West: it was his choice to sample her, and the article carries no word from her.