Table Of ContentSextarianism
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S E X T A R I A N I S M
Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon
Maya Mikdashi
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California S
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Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2022 by Maya Mikdashi. All rights reserved.
This book has been partially underwritten by the Stanford Authors
Fund. We are grateful to the Fund for its support of scholarship by fi rst-
time authors. For more information, please see www. sup. org/ authors/
authorsfund
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the
prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree,
archival- quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Mikdashi, Maya, author.
Title: Sextarianism : sovereignty, secularism, and the state in Lebanon /
Maya Mikdashi.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2021049998 (print) | LCCN 2021049999 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503628878 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631557 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781503631564 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social sciences)—Lebanon. | Religion and
state—Lebanon. | Secularism—Lebanon. | Sex—Political
aspects—Lebanon. | Cultural pluralism—Political aspects—Lebanon. |
Lebanon—Politics and government—1990 – | Lebanon—Ethnic relations.
Classifi cation: LCC DS87.54 .M54 2022 (print) | LCC DS87.54
(ebook) | DDC 956.9204/5—dc23/eng/20211027
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049998
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049999
Cover art: Untitled, 1973. Huguette Caland.
Reprinted with permission from Caland Family.
S Cover design: Rob Ehle
N Typeset by Newgen North America in 10/15 Sabon LT Std
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction. Sextarianism
1
1 Afterlives of a Census: Rethinking State Power
and Political Difference
24
2 A Fire in the Archive: History, Ethnography, Multiplicity
48
3 Regulating Conversion: Sovereignty, Bureaucracy,
and the Banality of Religion
83
4 Are You Going to Pride? Evangelical Secularism
and the Politics of Law
117
5 The Epidermal State: Violence and the Materiality of Power
153
Epilogue
183
Acknowledgments 193
Notes 197
Bibliography 231 S
Index 251 N
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Preface
This ethnography of Lebanon began in Iraq. In 2003 I trav-
eled from Beirut to Baghdad to fi lm a documentary, About Baghdad,
with a group of collaborators. We arrived in July and stayed for four
weeks— a precipitous time in the US occupation of Iraq. While we were
there the Iraqi state was actively being dismantled. I was in Baghdad for
two coinciding, interrelated events that have not since left me, events that
were formative to my sense of the world. The fi rst was an Iraqi Com-
munist Party (ICP) march commemorating the overthrow of the British-
appointed Iraqi monarchy in 1958. The second event was the July 2003
announcement of the Iraqi Governing Council, an occupation-a ppointed
council that was supposed to rule Iraq until elections could be organized.
It was the fi rst substantive attempt to bring a “Lebanese model”—a mod-
ulated form of political sectarianism—o f governance to Iraq. Instead of
communists, socialists, republicans, liberals, Arab nationalists, or Iraqi
nationalists, the council was composed of Shiʿis, Sunnis, and Kurds. This
was the fi rst time that Iraqi politics and governance had been structurally
defi ned this way. I was disturbed by the assumption that people in Iraq
had identities as opposed to politics or ideological affi liations. I was also
intrigued by the honesty with which political sectarianism was discussed
as a divide and rule model, echoing not only French Mandate rule in
Lebanon but legacies of indirect rule in British, French, and Ottoman
Empires. I was frightened by what I imagined to be archives of violence
that were sure to travel with the “Lebanese model” to Iraq. I thought it
obvious that the Lebanese model was doomed, or engineered, to fail in
Iraq— just as it had and would continue to do so in Lebanon.
At the time, I had never seen a protest as large, joyous, and complex S
as that of the Iraqi Communist Party in 2003. In graduate school, I had N
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preface
read and debated and written about Iraqi history and politics. But no
book could have taught me what I experienced that day. Being in Iraq
was a lesson in the political and epistemic limits of academic understand-
ing and writing—t he chasm between comprehending and understanding.
If anything, comprehension was a sensorial experience that included a
knowledge of the limits of understanding. In Iraq, I was liberated by the
knowledge that I was, on some level, never going to get it. I revisited the
frustration and anger I had felt most of my life toward people outside
the borders of shared experience: people who had not felt violence and
contingency as a structuring force, as sociality, as intimacy. Suddenly, in
Iraq, that anger felt like comradery. Like power.
Not everyone at the Iraqi Communist Party protest was a communist
or perhaps even a leftist. The ICP was not just a political party in that
moment but rather a manifestation of an unbroken political tradition of
resistance. The day provided a space for joy and exuberance for people
who had at that point lived through wars, sanctions, brutal authoritarian
rule, and occupation. I was riding in the back of a pickup truck fi lm-
ing the marchers when a young boy who stood at the front of a large
group caught my attention. He was no more than twelve years old. He
was dancing as he walked and yelled for kilometers, his body somehow
incoherent, uncontained, in movement. He was happy. I have spent some
nights imagining the different paths, or dead ends, this boy might have
walked in the intervening years.
It is diffi cult to comprehend, let alone understand or explain, the cy-
cles of hope and despair, inspiration and devastation, and creation and
destruction that people in the Middle East and North Africa1 have lived
since that day. Across the region, in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, tens of millions
have been killed or maimed, have experienced mass displacement, and/or
have lived as refugees. This is only the history that begins in 2003, with
the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Almost half of the popu-
lation of Syria, more than twelve million people, are living as displaced
people or as refugees. Genocide has been committed against Y azidis, and
famine and blockade are regularly used as weapons of war against people
S in Yemen and Syria. A brutal civil war in Sudan, followed quickly by an-
N other in South Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of women, girls, men, and
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boys have been assaulted and tortured both inside and outside of prisons
and detention centers in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. A
supposedly cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia2 has scorched Ye-
men, Syria, and Iraq. Generations of Palestinians have lived, resisted, cre-
ated, and died under Israeli military and settler occupation or as refugees
in hostile and impoverished circumstances. More than two million people
in Gaza, who are for the most part refugees, live under a fi fteen-y ear, il-
legal Israeli siege. Kurds and Sahrawis continue to fi ght for sovereignty,
and they continue to live under colonization. Since 2010 there have been
two cycles of popular uprisings across the region—b oth of which led to
further securitization and authoritarianism in most countries. A carceral
horizon stretches from Turkey to Egypt to Iran to Saudi Arabia, where in-
tellectuals, activists, revolutionaries, journalists, and academics have been
detained, arrested, exiled, and brutalized. The overwhelming “eventness”
of contemporary Middle East history, moreover, papers over and mutes
everyday forms of precarity: yawning wealth and income concentration,
an erosion of the free press, ecological devastation, broken public health
systems, disappearing social safety nets, austerity budgets and rampant
corruption, gender inequality, skyrocketing youth unemployment, and
hardening racism and xenophobia toward refugees, displaced people, and
migrant laborers. But people in the Middle East are not only destroyed
and destroying bodies. They are also effervescent.
In October 2019 popular uprisings took to the streets in Lebanon3 and
in Iraq. Both demanded a new, capable government committed to root-
ing out corruption and promoting the well-b eing of its people. Protestors
were not calling for a new economic, political, or national orders. They
were, in many ways, calling for good governance. These were not radical
demands. But in both Iraq and in Lebanon, the ruling political-e conomic
regimes could not even stand a demand for accountability, a demand for
them to be better. In both countries, though at different scales, the upris-
ings were brutally suppressed.
In the immediate sense, the protests in Lebanon were over a monthly
tax on the widely used communications application WhatsApp,4 fi nan-
cial austerity measures planned by the government, and the spectacle of S
the government being unable to put out one of the worst wildfi res in N
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Lebanese history. However, this moment had been building for at least a
decade,5 and October 17 was more akin to the cresting of a wave than
an earthquake. Hundreds of thousands, and at some points millions, of
people took to the streets, went on strike, blocked roads, and effectively
paralyzed the country. The protests were regional, expressly cross and
anti- sectarian, multigenerational, and, in certain actions, different socio-
economic classes worked together.
Two and a half years later, in 2022, people in Lebanon are living
through an economic crisis that is the worst in the country’s history,
brought on by a trifecta of public debt, unmitigated and widespread cor-
ruption, and a fi nancial Ponzi scheme that united the banking sector, gov-
ernments and politicians, and the Central Bank.6 There is no electricity,
no money in the banks, no food in fridges, no water in the faucets— no
fl oor or ceiling to the structure of circumstances that shape life daily and
hourly. People have died in desperate scrambles for fuel, medicine, for
anything that can and will and has been hoarded or smuggled for profi t.
In 2018, the UN estimated that about 30 percent of Lebanon were living
in poverty. Three years later, in 2021, the UN revised their assessment;
more than 82 percent of people in Lebanon were living in multidimen-
sional poverty, and almost 40 percent lived in extreme multidimensional
poverty As of this writing, the political class not only has weathered the
storm but stands poised to gain strength by consolidating and distribut-
ing necessary goods and services through their client networks, networks
they nourished by being parasites on the state and public sectors. What
and whom they cannot buy, they intimidate and threaten. This trend was
only accelerated by the emergency measures and further economic pun-
ishment of Covid-1 9.
Crises is perhaps not the best word to explain Lebanon in 2020–2 022.
Crisis implies a discrete before and after—a fall through cracks that be-
come craters only in extraordinary times. A quick look at contempo-
rary history teaches us that “crises” is a recursive temporality. In between
“crises” there are months, maybe years, but somehow never decades, of
status quo.7 I was eleven years old when the violence of the Lebanese
S Civil War ended. I was fi fteen when Israel launched its “Grapes of Wrath”
N campaign, twenty when Israel was forced to withdraw from Lebanon and
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