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Beyond sectarianism: Intermarriage and social difference in Lebanon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2020

Lara Deeb
Lara Deeb*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Scripps College, 1030 Columbia Ave, ClaremontCA91711
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: ldeeb@ScrippsCollege.edu
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Abstract

Based on interviews with Lebanese in over 150 mixed-religion marriages and their extended family members, I argue that sect may conceal or stand in for other forms of difference, including ideas about status and hierarchy related to class and regional origin in Lebanon. Because it is the most readily available discourse for understanding social difference, parents often use sectarian rhetoric to describe their concerns about a variety of problems they see in their children's chosen partners. By listening between the lines of parental objections, I suggest that expressions of bias against people of other sects may mask concerns with other forms of social difference, in effect reducing a complex and shifting social field of multiple axes of difference into sect. Rather than assume sectarianism's a priori importance, this approach allows me to bring other discourses of difference and analytic lenses to the foreground.

Keywords

intermarriagekinshipLebanonsectarianismsecularism
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 215 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 All names are pseudonyms. In potentially identifiable cases, I altered details or used a composite character.

2 Threats of physical violence figured in very few of my interviews, were more common than actual incidents of violence, and were temporally distributed from the 1960s to the 2010s.

3 See Drieskens, Barbara, “Changing Perceptions of Marriage in Beirut,” in Les métamorphoses du mariage au Moyen-Orient, ed. Dreiskens, Barbara (Beirut: Presses de l'Ifpo, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an overview of marriage forms and ideals in Beirut; Anne Françoise Weber, “Briser et suivre les normes: les couples islamochrétiens au Liban,” in Dreiskens, Métamorphoses, on religious endogamy and interreligious marriage; and Allouche, Sabiha, “Queering (Inter-Sectarian) Heterosexual Love in Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 4 (2019): 547–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the normativity of sectarian endogamy. Many of my interviewees described parents who readily accepted intermarriage as “open-minded” (munfatiḥ).

4 There are no good statistics on interreligious marriage in Lebanon. It appears to be more common than elsewhere in the region, and may be increasing, although it is not a recent phenomenon. One way university structures have been a factor is by the (continued) fragmentation of the public Lebanese University into multiple campuses during the civil war, reducing opportunities for non-elite Lebanese to meet potential marriage partners.

5 Drieskens, “Changing Perceptions,” 7. See also Weber, “Briser et suivre.”

6 There are, of course, people who oppose intermarriage on religious grounds. But among the cases I examined, representing multiple generations, classes, and sects, piety was not a primary motivator for opposition.

7 Interviewees included people from most sectarian groups and class backgrounds, every region in Lebanon, and multiple generations (marriage dates ranged from 1957 to 2018). I have also followed the experiences of multiple couples since 1999. Additionally, I interviewed several interreligious queer couples. In these instances, although sexuality was the primary concern, several mothers made “jokes” highlighting consciousness of the interreligious relationship. One Maronite mother responded, upon meeting her son's partner, “Look, gay, fine. But Muslim, too much!”

8 Harik, Iliya, Politics and Change in a Traditional Society, Lebanon 1711–1845 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Suad Joseph, “The Politicization of Religious Sects in Borj Hammoud, Lebanon” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1975); Beydoun, Ahmad, al-Jumhuriyya al-Mutaqati‘a: Masa’ir al-Sigha al-Lubnaniyya ba‘d Itifaq al-Ta’if (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1999)Google Scholar; Farah, Caesar E., The Politics of Interventionism in Ottoman Lebanon: 1830–1861 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000)Google Scholar; Makdisi, Ussama, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Traboulsi, Fawwaz, A History of Modern Lebanon (New York: Pluto Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Weiss, Max, The Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi‘ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kern, Karen, Imperial Citizen: Marriage and Citizenship in the Ottoman Frontier Provinces of Iraq (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

9 Joseph, “Politicization of Religious Sects.”

10 Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism.

11 Joseph, Suad, ed. Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Kingston, Paul, Reproducing Sectarianism: Advocacy Networks and the Politics of Civil Society in Postwar Lebanon (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Clark, Janine and Salloukh, Bassel, “Elite Strategies, Civil Society, and Sectarian Identities in Postwar Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 4 (2013): 731–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deeb, Lara and Harb, Mona, Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in South Beirut (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cammett, Melani, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salloukh, Bassel et al. , The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nucho, Joanne, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monroe, Kristin, The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Hashemi, Nader and Postel, Danny, eds., Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. See also Haddad, Fanar, “‘Sectarianism’ and Its Discontents in the Study of the Middle East,” Middle East Journal 71 (2017): 363–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 The largest are Sunni Islam, Shi‘i Islam, and Maronite Christianity. There are also significant populations of Greek Orthodox Christians, Melkite Greek Catholics, and Druze (counted as Muslim by the state but not always by other Muslim communities). The state also recognizes two additional Muslim groups (‘Alawites and Isma‘ilis), nine Christian ones (Roman Catholicism, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholicism, Assyrian or Nestorian, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholicism, Chaldeans, Protestants, and Evangelicals), and Judaism.

14 The French, with local elites, established this system during their post–WWI Mandate to give Maronite Christians political dominance and reduce the potential for unified resistance to French colonialism. They based the quotas for this system on a questionable 1932 census that has not been updated. Those quotas were revised when the civil war ended in 1990, but power sharing was merely rearranged within the existing system.

15 A few interlocutors reported that there are clerics (of all sects) willing to bypass or forge certain religious regulations or documents (for example, related to baptism or conversion) to marry a couple. Weber describes this, for baptism certificates, in “Briser et suivre.”

16 Mikdashi, Maya, “Sex and Sectarianism: The Legal Architecture of Lebanese Citizenship,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 2 (2014): 279–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Ibid., 282.

18 I edited this quotation for gender neutrality to protect identities. Raising children with mixed identities in Lebanon was a major concern for all of my interlocutors who were parents.

19 Quite a few couples held a symbolic religious ceremony in addition to their civil one, usually to appease family.

20 Hage, Ghassan, Is Racism An Environmental Threat? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 91.

22 Ibid., 98.

23 Ibid., 98.

24 When women approach thirty, parental opposition often begins to evaporate, betraying the relative strength of pronatalism and social pressures around unmarried daughters over the preference for endogamy. Drieskens suggests that women's inability to find the right spouses may be driving the increase in average age of marriage for Lebanese women, from 24.1 in 1970 to, depending on the source, 28.8 or 30.1 in the 21st century (“Changing Perceptions”). Also, although most unmarried Lebanese live with their parents, the financial ability to live independently shapes responses to spousal selection.

25 Drieskens, “Changing Perceptions”; Weber, “Briser et suivre.” Nationality also factors into desirability. Intermarriage with a non-Lebanese partner introduces new desires and discriminations, including, depending on the nationality in question, xenophobia, white or European supremacy, class, political histories, and racist hierarchies of civilization.

26 Compare to Weber, “Briser et suivre.” Although Weber suggests that in Lebanon, “la norme de l'endogamie religieuse est plutôt d'ordre social que religieux,” she persists in describing these social concerns in relation to maintaining sectarian boundaries: “Il importe plutôt de ne pas donner ses droits, ses enfants ou ses possessions à l'autre groupe rival. Et de ne pas démonter les frontières entre ces groupes si bien définis et séparés par le système politique et juridique libanais.” This tautological argument continues to hold reified sectarian boundaries as the explanation for opposition to intermarriage.

27 On kinship's centrality to Lebanese economic and social relationships, see Joseph, Suad, “Descent of the Nation: Kinship and Citizenship in Lebanon,” Citizenship Studies, no. 3 (1999): 295–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Mikdashi, “Sex and Sectarianism.” This piece pushes beyond the intersectional approach taken in earlier work, such as Joseph, Gender and Citizenship.

29 Hoodfar, Homa, Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Lila, ed. Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Suad Joseph, “Gendering Citizenship in the Middle East,” in Joseph, Gender and Citizenship, 3–32; Bristol-Rhys, Jane, “Weddings, Marriage and Money in the United Arab Emirates,” Anthropology of the Middle East 2 (2007): 20–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasso, Frances S., Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

30 Weber, “Briser et suivre.”

31 Joseph, “Descent of the Nation.”

32 For an intervention showing the complex relationship among patriarchy, power, and couples’ negotiations of intimacy, see Allouche, Sabiha, “Love, Lebanese Style: Toward an Either/And Analytic Framework of Kinship,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 15, no. 2 (2019): 157–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism.

34 Deeb and Harb, Leisurely Islam.

35 See Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a call to broad ethical scholarly praxis that requires assessing how we think about problems and seeing different analytic terms. Sectarianism may seem far from Haraway's work on multispecies being together, but in her model for new ways of living difference together across species I see lessons for new ways of practicing difference among humans.

36 I only interviewed parents with the permission of their child (my original interlocutor). Some parents were deceased or ill. I did not interview parents who fully supported the marriage or who were still not speaking with their child.

37 Drieskens, “Changing Perceptions.”

38 The case of Walid, in Abillama, Raja, “Contesting Secularism: Civil Marriage and Those Who Do Not Belong to a Religious Community in Lebanon,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review (2018): 148–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, supports this gendered minority status explanation. He imagined that legalizing civil marriage “would make it possible to avoid the injunction of communal endogamy” for male Druze and “contribute to the community's numerical growth” (154).

39 Other patterns, developed in my larger project, relate to spatial integration and segregation, especially following the civil war, and how social-spatial realignments have shaped understandings of difference among Lebanese and bolstered the insistence that difference is sectarian as opposed to something else.

40 Sometimes the marker of cultural difference highlighted in a particular argument seemed mundane and vaguely class-related (e.g., draining fried potatoes on paper towels versus newspapers was an issue of contention for several mothers).

41 “Cultured” here included ideas about dress, language, phrases, habits, food, and taste that again came down to notions of similarity.

42 An exception made the news in 2017: https://www.annahar.com/article/637991 (accessed 25 September 2018). See also Lara Deeb, “‘Til Sect Do You Part?’ On Sectarianism and Intermarriage in Lebanon,” Jadaliyya (14 September 2017), https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34552 (accessed 25 September 2018).

43 Mikdashi, “Sex and Sectarianism”; Mahmood, Saba, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Abillama, in “Contesting Secularism,” argues that both civil and religious marriage legal regimes are secular, but misses a key dimension of power in its gender-blind analysis.

44 Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another explanation for why secular Christians comprise the unmarked category in Muslim-majority Lebanon is related to how some Lebanese seek to approach global whiteness by deploying transnational anti-Muslim discourses.

45 These dynamics are neither unique to my interlocutors nor entirely new: There are middle- and upper-class Beirutis whose families do not include mixed marriages who share these views of what constitutes secular practice, and long histories of “secular” social and political configurations in Lebanon, especially related to leftist political parties, that prefigure contemporary anti-sectarian or post-sectarian activism and sensibilities.

46 Younger interviewees more frequently spoke in these terms; older individuals tended to pair “secular” as an adjective with a state category (e.g., “I am a secular Sunni”). This generational difference in understandings of the relationship between secular and sectarian informed conversations about intermarriage. Some also linked identification with a “secular” Lebanese community to space: mixed couples who could afford to often chose to live in neighborhoods they described as “secular” or “mixed.” These are not necessarily spaces where multiple religions are visible. Instead, non-religious Christian symbolism remains the unmarked aesthetic: Christmas trees, but no Nativities. Muslims are incorporated into these spaces if they are not visibly different.

47 See Allouche, “Queering [Inter-Sectarian] Heterosexual Love.”

48 Similarly, Allouche, ibid., argues that inter-sectarian love “exhumes a particular agency … which attempts, albeit fails, to reverse the status quo” (552) and that its anti-normative potential queers it, where “queerness...is evoked as political hope” (559).