IT HAD BEEN NEARLY 20 years since I last visited Beirut. By then, the hostilities, which ground on mercilessly from 1975 to 1990, had turned the very name of the city into a synonym for war zone. More than a hundred thousand people died; a far greater number were ripped from their homes. Infrastructure — the telephone networks, the water system, roadways — and most of the economy had all been crippled.

By the 1990s, politics, war and hatred had run their course, at least for a while. It was the perfect moment for the emergence of Rafik Hariri, the blustery businessman who had moved to Saudi Arabia at the age of 21. Hariri entered the Saudi construction industry, advanced rapidly and was soon running his own firm, becoming the personal contractor for Prince Fahd. By the time he returned to Lebanon in 1992, to become the country’s prime minister, he was a billionaire.

Hariri set out at once to rebuild Beirut’s shattered urban center. An affable man who liked things to be big and shiny and new, he had little interest in sectarian fighting, but perhaps even less in preserving the essence of what many people had long regarded as the Middle East’s most alluring city.

Hariri, who was killed by a devastating truck bomb in 2005, loved yachts and planes and, more than anything else, enormous real estate projects, which is what the center of Beirut eventually became. To remake the city, he created a company called Solidere, which is a French acronym for the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut Central District. Squatters were removed from the city center, which was then essentially demolished. In addition, more than half a million square meters of land were reclaimed from the nearby sea.

Solidere’s stated goal was to attempt to revive the memory of the days before 1975, when Beirut was pluralistic, prosperous and throbbing with intensity. The company did retain and restore some of the bullet-riddled facades that had withstood the rampages of the various militias. But the development also wiped away centuries of history and most of Beirut’s rich architectural heritage. To get a sense of that, one only has to wander over to the Beirut Souks, which had functioned as a center of commerce at least since the time of the ancient Phoenicians. Solidere rebuilt the souks along its historical grid plan, which was supposed to assure continuity. It didn’t: The souks today are filled with shiny objects and marble floors. It is a great place to buy moisturizer, a $10,000 handbag or a Patek Philippe watch. But the new souks have far more in common with the Mall of America than with the many Levantine bazaars that have dominated the Arab marketplace for thousands of years.

“The most urgent question here is not how a collection of Pizza Huts, Safeways, McDonald’s and Body Shops gathered together as a ‘souk’ will recapture any lifestyle other than that of a shopping mall,” Saree Makdisi, who is professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, has written. Mr. Makdisi is of Lebanese descent and often writes about the development and preservation in the Arab world. “The point is not that this is a misnomer, nor that a traditional souk is necessarily more genuine and authentic than a shopping mall, but that something strange is happening to our sense of history when we can confuse a shopping mall with a souk.”

George Arbid agrees. A bearlike man with an oval face and a commanding beard, Arbid is director of the Arab Center for Architecture, and an associate professor at the American University of Beirut. Late one afternoon, he took me on a walk in the center of the city, not far from his office. Too often, he said, the word heritage has been used solely to describe Roman ruins and ancient times: “When I studied architecture” — which he did both in Beirut at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts and at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design — “the only modern architecture you could find in books was in the West. We were the ancient place. But look around. This is a modern society, and you can see that in the buildings, here and throughout the Middle East.”