When he speaks in Bint Jbeil, unlike in Iran, schools won't be closed and civil servants won't be threatened with dismissal unless they attend the president's speech.
After the Israelis pulled out of Bint Jubayl in the middle of the night, their SLA allies, already in a state of collapse in the centre of the strip, simply gave up.
A few miles from Bint Jbail, in the border town of Marun al Ras, visitors relaxed in a park built with Iranian money last year and gazed out at Israel.
As a honking convoy of newly captured Israeli tanks headed to Bint Jbail, in the zone's center, Israeli helicopters began buzzing overhead.
Liberal blogger Raif Badawi's imprisonment and 1,000 lashes; the arrest of women drivers Loujain al-Hathloul and Maysaa Al Amoudi; and the public beheading of Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim in Mecca have brought Saudi justice into the spotlight.
In 2008, King Abdullah, who died last January, appalled some of his subjects when he announced that the Riyadh University for Women would be renamed Princess Nora bint Abdul Rahman University, in memory of a favorite aunt.
Little wonder that admiration of Franzen's focus on "family as microcosm or micro-history" would invert to disdain should a woman choose the same subject: look, just another bint stuck in her tiny domestic world.
"Why do Muslim lives seem to matter less than the lives of others?" asked Sheikha Moza bint Nasser in a speech at Oxford University on Tuesday.
During that time, they started purchasing date palm gardens in Bahrain; a document shows that 81 years before arrival of the Al-Khalifa, one of the shaikhs of the Al Bin Ali tribe (an offshoot of the Bani Utbah) had bought a palm garden from Mariam bint Ahmed Al Sindi in Sitra island.
In Bint Jbeil, she looked in on the community centre that has provided an important base for children needing resources and recreation.
