We often take the small pieces of paper in our life for granted. We simply accept lists and documents as a disposable—perhaps recyclable—facets of our everyday life. Media studies scholars, however, have begun taking these vernacular genres more seriously, asking what they can tell us about how information is structured and about how people understand their relationship to one another and to the state. While digital technologies have promised us a paperless future, statistics show that we now produce and consume more paper than ever. The weight of paperwork is particular profound in Lebanon, where bureaucratic processes demand that everything be on paper. Governmental institutions like the General Security Directorate (al-Amn al-‘am) are filled with mountains of paper, and employees shuffles these stacks of paper between rooms and buildings in large suitcases. In this presentation, I ask that we take the reality of documents in Lebanon seriously and begin developing a language for discussing the historical experience of documents across the Middle East. The development of documents as a legible genre in Lebanon resulted from technologies that allowed for rapid reproduction, like typewriters and Xerox machines, but also built on a tradition of paperwork that dates back to the Ottoman Empire. This presentation focuses on the case of the national identity card in Lebanon, which has been a contentious document since its inception. These ID cards were the basis for assassinations during the Civil War (1975-1990), when competing militias murdered people according to the sectarian identity indicated on the card. ID cards in Lebanon no longer reveal religious identity, but through roadblocks and check points, they are still used as a way of communicating belonging, especially in light of the two million Syrian refugees who currently live in the country. As a way of understanding how these ID cards have materialized identity, I study a series of “ID card scandals” that occurred during the Civil War. These scandals involved forging documents or acquiring legal ID cards through illegal means. Drawing on a wide-range of newspaper articles from the early years of the Civil War and a corpus of oral history interviews, I show how these scandals—which broke the bureaucratic process in place to regulate documents in the country—reveal a great deal about the stakes of the material world and about how power operated at a time of tremendous uncertainty.

In December 2011, Lebanon’s State Council ratified a decision to outlaw group prayer sessions organized by Christian practitioners, alleging that the activity threatened public order. For several years prior to the decision, a resident of Jeita (a small town north of Beirut) had held collective prayers in a lounge located on his property. The local religious authorities grew worried about these gatherings: two local parishes (one Maronite and one Greek Catholic) expressed their displeasure to the local police, who responded by prohibiting these prayers to avoid a public safety hazard. Some worshippers involved in these collective acts of prayer claimed the ban amounted to a violation of their right to religious freedom. They brought the case to Lebanon’s State Council, which supported the local police’s decision. The Council judgment stipulated that “unless it is legally recognized, a group or assembly (whatever its name) cannot practice religious acts of worship.” It also clarified that collective acts of worship can only be held in buildings or spaces that belong to one of the Lebanese sects recognized by the state. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jeita and interviews with lawyers and politicians involved in the case, this paper argues that adjudicating religious freedom cases in Lebanon sometimes helps consolidate the country’s sectarian architecture. “Religious freedom,” said the State Council in an earlier statement, “is linked to the sectarian system, which requires each Lebanese to belong to one of the official sects.” This means that in a country like Lebanon, the struggles, tensions and contestations over religious freedom and public order do not occur between the state and its citizens, but within in the “infrapolitics” of the Lebanese religious communities.The paper also shows that secularism and sectarianism are not always opposed, and that the secular norm of religious freedom can also reinforce sectarian divisions.

Syrians on all sides oppose the conception that the ongoing civil war is a sectarian one between the Sunni majority and the Alawite minority. Even though seven years of the Syrian civil war costed four times in terms of casualties than the fifteen years of Lebanese Civil War, the ghosts of sectarian killings based on religious affiliations and the sectarian “self-security” and sectarian militias as well as the Lebanese overt sectarian political system of post-war Lebanon are the reference point for defining sectarianism to most of my interviewees. Based on a year of ethnographic field work in Lebanon and Syria, which included participant observation, informal discussions, academic talks and seventy interviews with Syrians currently living in Syria and Syrian refugees in the Beqaa Valley, I argue that the Lebanese sectarian model and the Lebanese sectarian civil war occupy a large part of the Syrian sectarian imagination. I argue that the legacy of the Lebanese civil war’s sectarian violence is at the core of the meaning making of sectarianism for many Syrians. Furthermore, when sectarianism becomes Lebanese, discourses and narratives describing the war along social, economic, and human rights based arguments on all sides become salient and obscure the workings of sectarianism and sectarian violence that took and are taking place during the war. Narratives such as “ISIS and Al-Nusra are foreign to the Syrian Social fabric” take hold and become possible, based on the conception that “Syrians are not sectarian” when compared to the Lebanese experience. In this paper, I argue that the implications of such a conception of sectarianism have impacted the political and social aspirations of ordinary Syrians and in turn opens the space for ideological and discursive manipulation of the war from elites on all sides.