As the largest sectarian group in Lebanon, the Shi’i community has largely been underrepresented and marginalized in the nation’s historical narratives. Interest in the Shi’as of Lebanon has been spurred by the community’s increasing political mobilization since the 1970s. Little work has been done on the Lebanese Shi’as prior to this period, particularly during the French Mandate. The few works that focus on this period examine the lives of the Shi’i religious elites and political zuama with little mention of the ordinary people.. My paper will examine the Ja’fari Shari’a courts, and Lebanese newspapers from within the community as a source of Shi’i social history. The sijillat records of the Ja’fari courts provide a rich source of history by presenting an intimate picture of the social concerns and requests of ordinary Shi’as who are generally silenced in the annals of history. Influenced by the theoretical approach of the subaltern studies group (Gayatri Spivak, 1988; Partha Chatterjee, 1993) and recent studies on sectarianism (Mikdasi, 2000; Pandey, 1990), this paper will attempt to examine how the legalization and nationalization of Ja’fari law under the French Mandate, shaped Shi’i sectarian lines of identity, communal belonging and familial roles within the Lebanese nation. The Ja’fari sect was officially recognized 1926 just as the first Ja’fari shari’a courts were established to administer personal status law. The establishment of personal status law, which was ultimately authorized and protected by the state, allowed each community to carve out a sectarian legal identity. The paper will take a look at various court cases retrieved from the archives of the Ja’fari court system to get a glimpse of the social concerns and judicial practices that carved out the first Shi’i communal public space within the Lebanese nation. The sijillat records give an intimate look at social issues such as divorce, Sunni/Shi’i marriages, parental roles, and age appropriate marriage within the Shi’i population. What were the demands made on this new legal authority representing the community? What were the main issues facing the Shi’i community, and how did the courts address them within this new nation that campaigned sectarian identity as a form of national inclusion? How did it help shape Shi’i sectarian identity through the normalization of family law under the auspices of the Lebanese state? A thorough examination of these cases will shed light on the intricate relationship between religious law, sectarian identity, and the Lebanese state.

A close study of the Druze diaspora communities who have settled in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, reveals ways in which very different concepts of identity have developed amongst one group. Different national, ethnic, political and religious based identities have emerged in various Druze communities depending on the communities’ local history and their relationship with the state. The Druze of the Middle East were conveniently classified differently in each state according to the interest of the ruling power. Today, they are classified as a political and religious minority in Lebanon, and a religious minority in Syria, while they are classified as a non-Arab, non-Muslim ethnic minority in Israel. The Druze in Lebanon, not only identify themselves as Arab, but they often emphasize their historic links to Lebanese history as well as being instrumental in the creation of a modern day Lebanon. In Syria, the official state policy is that the Druze are Arabs and Muslims. Eric Hobsbawm argues that recently created nations in the Middle East, must be invented. In most instances, these new nations, and the nationalism that goes along with them, have been constructed through what Hobsbawm refers to as "invented traditions." This paper will build on Hobsbawm's concept of "invented traditions," as well as add one additional, but essential, nation building tool (especially in the Middle East) which is the tradition of military service. These traditions are used by states to create a sense of shared identity, among their different minority groups.

Middle East Studies Association 2009 Annual Meeting Individual Paper Proposal My paper, entitled “House of Lebanon: Political Mobilization of the US-Based Lebanese Diaspora,” addresses how Lebanese-Americans organize in an effort to affect politics in their homeland, by emphasizing the relationship between the American Congress, the Executive, and the Lebanese diaspora in the United States. Unaccounted for, in the academic literature on both diasporas and ethnic lobbies, is the relationship between the host state and the diasporas, and the ethnic lobbies these diasporas generate. While the relationship has been examined from the side of the ethnic lobby’s ability to provide campaign contributions, votes and support, the aspect of diasporas being used by a host state as an instrument of foreign policy has not been theoretically addressed, either by scholars of diaspora nor by those researching ethnic lobbies. This central issue, of the Host state’s use of diasporas as a policy tool, is what I examine. My paper utilizes two cases: the UN Security Council Resolution 1559 of September 2004, as well as the Congressional passage of the Syria Accountability and Restoration of Lebanese Sovereignty Act, signed into law by George W. Bush on December 12, 2003, which sought Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Based on archival and field research in the US and Lebanon, I examine the dynamics between US policymakers and Lebanese-American activists, and the role of Lebanese-American organizations in promoting US foreign policy. I discuss the interaction between US policymakers and the American Lebanese Coalition (an umbrella organization of six Lebanese-American organizations), as well as the World Council for the Cedars Revolution, and the International Committee for UN Resolution 1559, two Lebanon-based NGO-s with activists with transnational connections, who actively supported the Bush administration. Utilizing the Syria Accountability and Restoration of Lebanese Sovereignty Act of 2003, I examine the interaction between the US administration and members of Congress, and Lebanese groups. I specifically focus on the Lebanese American Council for Democracy, the Council of Lebanese American Organizations, and the Lebanese Information Center. The material for this paper is based on fieldwork, including personal interviews in both the US and Lebanon with people involved in Lebanese political parties and in the above-mentioned diaspora organizations, with observers of the political and lobbying process, as well as on archival and periodical sources.

I will examine in this paper the thoughts of two Lebanese émigrés, Shukri Ghanem and Khairallah Khairallah. These men frequented the same Parisian journalistic circles, shared acquaintances in the French colonial lobby, and established together the Comité Libanais de Paris, which petitioned for reform of the special statute governing Mount Lebanon. They also both elaborated – Ghanem in his journalism and novel Da’ad, and Khairallah in an extended essay on Syria in the Revue du Monde Musulman – vicarious visions of Beirut and the surrounding areas as the catalysts driving the rapid changes coursing through Syrian society. Ghanem described Beirut in 1908 as rising briskly towards progress, out of the morass of ancestral sectarian and ethnic hatreds which had characterised the ‘Orient, where so many different races live cheek by jowl, and these diverse peoples make up a great heterogeneous, disparate flock, all stuck together in the same place, where reasons for disagreement [...] are countless’. The opening to Da’ad, set in the 1870s, presents a Beirut, which ‘at that point was not the nearly European town it has since become [...] Its inhabitants of various religions and races all lived side by side without intermingling’. However, these differences had ‘since melted away a little’, the Genoese architecture of the houses ‘more representative of their inhabitants’ ways’. Ghanem, then, drew a neat equation between the adoption by the town’s denizens of the accoutrements of European bourgeois comfort, and progress towards a more open, secular society. Khairallah, meanwhile, proclaimed confidently that the ‘Syria of old, and that of today, no longer look alike’. Throughout the land, ‘a new order has been remade, a new generation born’. These were forceful visions of a distinctly middle-class progress, driven forward by young intellectuals – journalists, lawyers and writers, whose ‘daring’ ‘literary and social theories’ had ‘stimulated that old oriental society, and sustain a powerful current pushing it forward’. These men, and women, were formidable vectors of change, transforming Beirut into the ‘intellectual capital of Syria’. However, their secular tone was systematically undercut by an emphasis upon the predominant role Christians – and particularly Maronites – played in driving the thoroughgoing transformations coursing through Bilad al-Sham. Sectarian sentiment consistently overlapped with an insistence upon the importance of intellectuals to social change. In the eyes of Ghanem and Khairallah, class, confession, and generation came together to explain the profound revolutions reshaping Beirut, Lebanon, and Bilad al-Sham.