When Middle East Airlines danced

Salim Bou Harb was an electrical engineer at Middle East Airlines. Nidale Hamouche danced with the Rahbani Brothers’ folkloric troupe; she was still a teenager when her sister brought her into the airline to train a group of employees who had begun dancing together after work. He was in charge of the music recordings that accompanied the performances. She devised the choreography and led the dancing.

They married in 1971. That same year, the troupe came to an end. The photographs went with them.

Rowina Bou Harb, Salim and Nidale’s daughter, is an archivist at the Sursock Museum in Beirut. She grew up with those boxes. Her father died in April 2025; a few months later, she sat down with her mother and began going through the photographs. She puts it plainly: at first, it was a form of therapy. Only later did she realise what she had in front of her: a little-known story that deserved to be told.

The Butterflies and Bumblebees of Middle East Airlines’ poster exhibition at Sursock museum.

“A spontaneous combustion”

Cedar Wings, MEA’s in-flight magazine, devoted its May 1966 issue to the airline’s twentieth anniversary. On page eight, a column entitled “Our Own Folkloric Troupe” set out to explain where these dancers had come from.

“There is no general agreement as to how it all started,” it reads. “Like many sensible things, the idea occurred to several people almost simultaneously. The Chairman said it would be a good idea for MEA to have its own folkloric troupe and practically overnight the troupe was formed. […] This almost spontaneous combustion produced more than 90 enthusiastic members at first. They were whittled down to the best 20, but the survivors are really very good.”

The less mythologised version begins in 1963, at an internal club known as the Cedar Jet Club, where employees organised their own evenings and danced with their spouses instead of going out. Then someone came up with the idea of taking the dancing beyond the club: whenever a new route opened to another country, a delegation of employees would travel there in advance, bringing costumes, music and food with them.

In 1966, improvisation became policy: the public relations department took over the programme under the direction of Nazih El-Abed. Nidale trained the roughly twenty dancers who had been selected, alongside Naim Naamani, an experienced member of the troupe.

Ambassadors with costumes and cooking pots

For the airline’s twentieth anniversary, the troupe made three trips: Damascus, Iraq and Karachi. Then Vienna. Then Frankfurt, for Arab Tourism Week. Then West Africa: Accra, Abidjan and Cameroon, home to some of the continent’s largest Lebanese communities.

All of this was part of a deliberate strategy. In a study devoted to the airline’s history, academic Philippe W. Zgheib and his co-author Abdo B. Bardawil, a former MEA vice-president of human resources, list the objectives the company had set itself by the turn of the 1970s beyond purely commercial concerns. Among them was to “provide a bridge between Lebanese emigrants and their homeland.” The troupe appears explicitly on that list. “They were taking Lebanese culture around the world,” Rowina sums up. “Even before foreigners got on a plane to come here.”

The high point came in 1967, in a small town in the Charente region of France. The Confolens International Folklore Festival invited an Arab troupe for the first time. This was not a delegation sent by a Ministry of Culture: it was the staff of an airline. They carried the torch, led the parade and planted a cedar tree.

It is worth remembering who these people were. Mechanics, counter staff, secretaries — people who did not dance for a living and who travelled on their days off. One letter on display shows Nidale asking to take unpaid leave to tour with the Rahbani Brothers, promising to return with new choreography. Her mother told her how exhausting those tours were, Rowina says: the fatigue was immense, but they forgot about it because they were happy.

The troupe fades away

The troupe faded away without ever officially coming to an end. The administrative files tell the story: one member got married and moved abroad, another left the airline. “It just gradually fell apart,” Rowina says. “That’s the word.”

At MEA, Nidale worked in the Public Relations Department’s Publishing and Information unit, where her role was specifically to receive and manage any document, photograph or material relating to the troupe. When she left the company, the papers went with her: around 500 items in all.

The couple settled in Chiyah, in Beirut’s southern suburbs. In 1975, the civil war broke out just a few streets from their new home. Part of the archive was lost amid the fighting and looting; they returned to retrieve what remained and took it to Ajaltoun, in Mount Lebanon.

 The troupe performing at the Corso Fleuri de Genève in September 1969. The MEA recreated the architectural element of Beiteddine’s mashrabiyya windows, which was mounted on a car decorated with flowers and phoenixes.

The plane takes off anyway

What the airline did over the next fifteen years explains why, in Lebanon, MEA is not a company like any other.

On 28 December 1968, an Israeli commando unit destroyed thirteen Lebanese aircraft at Beirut airport, eight of them belonging to MEA — two-thirds of its fleet. Flights resumed eleven hours later, using aircraft borrowed from Morocco and Jordan.

Then came the war, and the airline decided not to stop. The airport was closed for around 850 days between 1975 and 1990, including 196 days in 1989 alone. Whenever it reopened, MEA flew. In the 1980s, it was the only airline serving Beirut; for a time, passengers checked in in the city before being taken by boat to Larnaca, where the airline’s aircraft were stationed. Over the entire period, MEA carried around eleven million people, at a time when every other airline had withdrawn. Its overseas stations carried messages and medicines to people under siege in Lebanon, and advanced money to Lebanese stranded abroad. Bardawil and Zgheib put it plainly in their chapter: MEA was not simply running a commercial business; it was carrying out a humanitarian and national mission.

The price was heavy: twelve aircraft lost, forty-four employees killed, six missing — abducted on their way to work and never seen again. As many as 1,300 “sleepers” took refuge at company headquarters because they could no longer return home; the training centre became a dormitory, each employee wore a metal tag around their neck engraved with their blood type, and when food ran short, women from the neighbourhood were hired to bake markouk bread. One day, management laid out the figures before the staff: two million dollars a month in wages, twenty million in reserves — ten months left to survive. The ground staff union replied that its members wanted their full salaries, but would lend a quarter of them back to the company. In 1978, then the best year in its history, the airline repaid the money.

One final point is worth noting, in a country being torn apart along sectarian lines: MEA’s workforce was a cross-section of Lebanese society.

The foreign press eventually gave it nicknames. In 1979, a San Francisco newspaper called it “the airline that refuses to die.” In 1996, Airways magazine wrote: “the airline that would not surrender.”

“I know it will always be there”

That determination has never disappeared. Philippe Zgheib, who is also a private pilot, says that throughout the fourteen years of war in Syria, MEA — unable to fly over the south — crossed Syrian airspace, above military aircraft, without interrupting operations for a single day. In 2024, as again in the spring of this year, its planes continued taking off from an airport within range of fire. Lebanon has had only very limited military aviation; control of its skies depends on arrangements negotiated elsewhere.

Zgheib describes MEA as “the phoenix that rises from its ashes every time, just like Lebanon,” and its business model as an umbilical link between the country and a diaspora several times larger than its domestic population. Yet MEA is expensive — very expensive. Lebanese travellers do not necessarily fly with it: they also use other major airlines, including Turkish Airlines, Qatar Airways and Air France. “What matters,” he says, “is that, in the Lebanese mind, Middle East is always there. Maybe I don’t travel for three or four years. But I know that the day I need to leave — for a business trip, a hospital visit, a funeral — I can be home within a few days.” A mental guarantee, he says, “almost socio-spiritual,” which the company has managed to turn into a market.

Rowina puts it her own way, smiling: “For us, the pilots represent the government more than the Lebanese government itself.”

Nidale Hamouche.

“…To dad”

The Butterflies and Bumblebees of Middle East Airlines was held at the Sursock Museum from 11 June to 29 August, co-curated by Rowina and Nidale — daughter and mother — to mark the airline’s eightieth anniversary. The final line of the exhibition text is a dedication: “…To Dad.”

When a Lebanese television channel covered the exhibition, the report opened with a question: did you know that MEA once had a folkloric troupe? Almost no one did. Since then, the story has begun passing from hand to hand. Naim Naamani’s daughter came to the opening with the portion of the archive she had inherited from her father. Elie Souaid, a young captain building his own collection, was given Salim’s uniform, which he had been missing; that same day, he offered Rowina a photograph of the troupe that her mother had just said she had never owned.

And the colour slides, never before printed and digitised for the occasion, were projected onto a screen in the exhibition room. Nidale had not seen them in fifty years.

Meanwhile, in Confolens, the cedar planted in 1967 has grown enormous. It has been growing for decades, reminding the few residents of this French town of Middle East Airlines’ dancing troupe.