This paper traces a case decided by Cassation Council--the highest civil court in Lebanon-- in 2009. The case file includes evidence and previous rulings that reach back into the late 20th century, and concerns an inheritance claim adjudicated in Christian personal status courts. Although the case is decided in 2009, it originates during the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war. The 1932 census emerges as a critical terrain of both evidence and inquiry for the jurists who sit on the council. However, it the gendered and sexual architecture of the census that most preoccupies the jurists--a register of the census that remains understudied and theorized in the academic literature on Lebanon. Following this case, I suggest that sectarianism has an affective and epistemological archival force, one that can be productively read against in both legal and more traditional archives.

Which came first, the school or the community? This paper explores the politics of community building through the lens of education in French mandate Lebanon. Historiography on education has by and large unquestioningly assumed that different ‘types’ of schooling served the needs of coherent, pre-extant communities, or what I reconceive of as “pedagogical constituencies.” During the late Ottoman period, American Protestant missionary, French Catholic, and local Muslim and Jewish communities, for example, all had schools in which knowledge specifically geared or tailored to that community was molded and imparted. However, this picture is complicated when we consider that, increasingly after 1905, new educational spaces--defined more by language of instruction and/or political leaning than religious affiliation--began to emerge, determining where students were enrolled. As such, this paper investigates, alongside newly minted “minority” communities, the formation of communities of knowledge within and among different schools. The production and circulation of particular forms of knowledge was instrumental in articulating a new kind of group identity. In so doing, this project asks: what is it about education that creates a particular community (or communities) of knowledge: is it the presence of formal educational institutions, or in the form and content of the knowledge itself? Further, where is the overlap between creating a community of knowledge versus a sectarian community? How does that overlap help us to reconsider the real or conceptual boundaries between classes and between religious communities during this period, and the implications for nation and state formation in Lebanon and elsewhere? In closing, I argue how the intersections of community, class, and education have both structured and contingently framed practices of citizenship during the mandate era.

This paper explores how the Armenian Church in Lebanon expanded its power to incorporate Armenian communities outside of the Middle East. While often considered a self-contained and marginal community, Armenians in Lebanon used sectarianism to increase their power in membership and financial revenue in Lebanon and beyond. In 1933, an Armenian priest was murdered in an Armenian Church in Washington Heights, NYC. The repercussions of the murder extended far beyond the boundary of Police District 11 to involve the authority of the Armenian Church located in Antelias, Lebanon and its major rival, the Armenian Church of Soviet Armenia. This paper will analyze the expansion of the authority of the Armenian Church in Lebanon as it engineered-- through a murder in Washington Heights-- to redraw the boundaries of its power vis-à-vis its main rival, the Armenian Church of Soviet Armenia. This extension of power and the Armenian Church in Lebanon’s foray into the Armenian-American landscape raises larger questions of the permeation of borders and reveals the continued power of a Lebanese Armenian sectarian institution into the everyday lives of Armenians far outside the Middle East. Because the accused were members and sympathizers of the Dashnak political party, all those affiliated with the party were banned from Armenian churches throughout the United States and were prevented from attending and participating in mass, weddings, baptisms, and burials. In response, in 1957, the excommunicated encouraged the Armenian Church in Lebanon to intervene, and it in turn established its own churches in America, beside existing ones. The Armenian Church of Lebanon’s unprecedented involvement created relationships that had not previously existed, and bonded thousands of Armenians in America with a sectarian institution in Lebanon, which, in turn, claimed spiritual and ideological authority over them. The extension of the Armenian sectarian institution’s power in Lebanon allowed for Armenian churches in America to become political rivals. Their ability to vie with one another for the legitimacy to represent the entirety of the Armenian community in the United States demonstrated how sectarianism could travel and be used for political and financial gain far outside of Lebanon.

Cross-sectarian civil society has been proposed by transnational policy-makers as one of the most effective sites of post-civil war reconciliation in Lebanon. More recently, the Arab Uprisings and Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon mobilized various urban middle-class groups in Beirut to further participate in cross-sectarian organizations and movements. Critical historians of Lebanon have documented how sectarianism is a nationalist creation that dates to the beginnings of colonialism and modernization. Yet, the imagination of sectarianism as “pre-modern” and “anti-national” has been central to civil society politics in Lebanon. Cross-sectarian civil society discourse defines sectarianism as the primitive atavistic tendency among Lebanon’s various religious communities that undermines sentiments for wataniyya (patriotism). Based on my broader ethnographic research conducted between 2012 and 2015 in Beirut, this paper will unpack the complex entanglements of sectarianism, nationalism, and secularism within the cross-sectarian civil society led by Lebanon’s urban elites. I will specifically focus on the leading political and civil society actors including urban elites, returning Lebanese diaspora, European volunteers and local policy-making institutions such as ministries, political parties, universities, and transnational funding agencies. I discuss how the current cross-sectarian civil society in Beirut blames everything on "sectarianism" while belittling and excluding many low-income and religious Lebanese for being "sectarian." I critically analyze the cosmopolitan urban elites' claims to ethical citizenship vis a vis the other local communities they criticize. Using an intersectional analysis, I unpack how sectarian difference is invoked alongside other forms of social difference such as social class, urbanity, religiosity and age. I specifically problematize the ways middle-class cosmopolitan Lebanese who proudly participate in cross-sectarian civil society invoke sectarianism to discredit and vilify different local actors. I will also suggest that post-colonial encounters with civil society practitioners from “Western” countries are central to the shaping of cross-sectarian civil society discourses over sectarianism in Lebanon. The cross-sectarian civil society organizations in Beirut currently host hundreds of European aid-workers and volunteers. I argue that through condescending historical comparisons between the European wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries and the current conflicts in Lebanon, they contribute to the portrayal of sectarianism as an essential archaic problem of Lebanon. By looking at the social interactions and cultural exchanges among diverse actors within cross-sectarian civil society, I will suggest that critiques of sectarianism obscure social inequality, and reinscribe racialized, gendered and class-based hierarchies.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Saida, Lebanon, this paper focuses on situations in which concerns about sectarianism or secularism lead humanitarian NGO workers to step back and explicitly reflect on their giving practices. Discursively, secularism is not the only – or even the obvious – alternative to “sectarianism.” I thus explore the, sometimes convoluted, connections between sectarianism and secularism within the field of humanitarian giving. I show that although both a donation and zakat, or the annual religious tax on one’s wealth, in their monetary forms can appear to be the same sort of contribution, in practice they are radically different. In each case, the ethics of giving changes, and there is a shift from the civil laws that govern NGOs, to the authority of religious opinion. The handling of these different forms of money can raise concerns about whether charitable workers are being properly secular and/or non-sectarian. This paper thus examines secularism, sectarianism – and non-sectarianism – as practices that are negotiated through moments of ethical rupture that have been catalyzed by deliberations surrounding money. As the research for this paper focuses on Saida city, it examines how certain practices come to be perceived as alarmingly “sectarian” within a predominately Sunni Muslim setting.