Islamic family laws are often highlighted for expressing and perpetuating inequality between women and men, and for their more or less explicit endorsement of violence against women. In a broader understanding of violence, the confessional or sectarian boundaries in Lebanese society are in themselves violent constructions that in a range of sectarian-based personal status codes perpetuate inequalities between women and men across and along sectarian lines (Joseph 2000). Among Lebanon’s feminist and women’s organizations a secular legislation, superseding confessional boundaries, has been approached as a promise of more gender equality (Mikdashi 2014). In contrast, a variety of organizations, centers, and individual researchers have within the recent decade questioned these long-reigning approaches to Islamic family laws and their inherent gender inequality by in their approach to reform remain within an Islamic framework. On the background of new opportunities offered by globalization, MUSAWAH is an organization which is spearheading this task in networks transgressing a range of countries within and beyond the Arab region. The norms and strategies found within these networks have hardly diffused into a Lebanese national context; only individuals have embraced or endorsed them (Steger 2015). Therefore, in a framing analysis I outline how Lebanese women activists whose activism is based on a religious platform contest or accommodate the Lebanese personal status code, and how their approaches differ from both secular and MUSAWAH strategies. Islamic feminist transnational networks and their strategies of re-interpreting the Qur’anic messages in directions that emphasize gender equality may seem a far cry from Hizbollah women supporters whose rejection of feminism as Western and individualistic align with the movement’s religiously conservative agenda. However, Islamic women’s organizations, such as the Hizbollah-affiliated Al-Hayaat Al-Nisaayia, offer training in women’s rights according to Islam and according to Lebanese legislation (Ottaway & Abdellatif 2007). In interviews Hizbollah women activists do not point at Islam but at cultural and social norms mistakenly assumed to be Islamic, as the framework required for understanding current gender inequality in Lebanon bringing their framing close to the one offered by MUSAWAH.

Lebanon is distinct from most Arab countries because it has 18 different religious sects that have different personal status codes and is the only Arab country that allows for civil marriages contracted outside the country to be registered in Lebanon. My presentation will focus on the topic of civil marriage in light of the confessional system in Lebanon. It will briefly highlight the several attempts to put forth a unified civil personal status law in Lebanon and the draft laws presented related to instating an optional civil marriage that didn't see the light. The presentation will shed light on the activism of NGOs and civil society organizations on the ground, and the stark opposition they often receive from the government and the religious establishment. The presentation will highlight the case of Nidal Darwich and Kholoud Sukkarieh, the first Lebanese couple who managed to contract a civil marriage on Lebanese soil. Thanks to the ground-breaking legal loophole lawyer Talal Husseini found, coupled with the willingness of Joseph Bechara, the notary public who accepted to endorse the marriage contract, Nidal and Kholoud were able to get married in a civil manner in Lebanon. The presentation will highlight how they managed to do it, the legal hurdles they endured, and the backlash and repercussions they faced in a confessional country like Lebanon where they were forced to leave the country to build a better future for their son. The presentation will also highlight the stance of the religious authorities both Muslim and Christian and their indirect influence in making the government revoke a previous decision taken in 2013 by the Consultations Committee at the Ministry of Interior to legitimize civil marriages contracted on Lebanese soil and allow for their registration. After registering several marriages, a change in ministers brought forth a change in law that has repercussions on a dozen of couples who are still struggling to have their marriages registered. This current refusal of the ministry to recognize such marriages constitutes a violations of human rights and the presentation will attempt to discuss some possible practical recommendations to solve this problem.

In this paper, I focus on how male violence is negotiated and subverted within the domestic space, and how these spaces become gendered within diverse relations of power, where masculinity and femininity are socially-constructed and linked social, religious and political factor. I will focus on the father figure that possesses commanding ascendency and control within the inner sphere. As head of the household he demands differential treatment by the family and represents vigorous action, and misogynic authority. He is resolute, severe, self-centered, emotionally impotent, tyrannical, unyielding and abusive to the women in the family. To affirm his misogynic authority, he resorts to physical as well as psychological violence predominantly against women but also against younger men in the family. Despite the fixed notions of gender differentiation within the home space such relations are rooted in everyday practices and are counteracted by strategies of individual resistance contingent upon intersecting issues of history, class, location, sexuality, age and other circumstantial factors. I will focus on two novels: Randa Khalidy’s An Unheroic Journey (2017) and Hassan Daoud’s Borrowed Time (1990). Al-Khalidy’s novel centers on her struggle with her domineering husband who despite her high educational and class status managed to acquire agency and freedom only after his death. She concentrates on aspects of her life that have been trivialized and expunged and resuscitates a self that is swamped in oblivion. Now, she feels free to do what she likes without a husband who has controlled her life, decisions, and mind; she no longer relies on his approval for her feelings of self-worth, and no longer conforms to societal demands and assumptions regarding her actions and thoughts. Daoud’s novel focuses on the re-territorialization of the narrator, now an old man, within the bounds of the domestic space which downgrades him and denies him the power and control he enjoyed all his life. The space in which he moves shrinks and he ends up, like his late wife, scuffling between the kitchen, the mastaba, and the bedroom. His withdrawal from the masculine world of action, his idleness and unproductivity underline his effeminization and loss of effectiveness and control. His present frustrations makes him all the more ruthless and despotic in his brutal treatment of his his ailing first wife and his second wife and her unmarried sister.