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Reconstreucting
the Nation-State: The Modernity of Secularism in Lebanon
Ussama Makdisi
Sectarianism--a
creation that dates back no further than the beginnings of the modern
era--reached a peak in Lebanon's 15-year civil war. While a discourse
of national unity has emerged in the post-war period, Lebanon is
again paralyzed by feuding among the elite and by the neglect of
ordinary citizens, nearly a third of whom are living in poverty.
On February
15, 1996, 13 squatters were killed in Beirut when the building they
were living in was brought down by demolition workers for Solidere,
Lebanon's reconstruction and development company. Solidere, a brainchild
of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, claimed it was a mistake; the
dead were carted off, destitute migrants with no place in the government's
vision of the revitalized cosmopolitan city center. Brushing off
criticism that reconstruction is proceeding too fast, the prime
minister insisted that Lebanon today is the site of "a struggle
between good and evil." The alternatives facing the nation, he insisted,
are clear: either the "will to progress" or "the will to despair."
Despite such
forward-sounding proclamations, Lebanese politics in the post-war
period mark the resurrection of the confessional state in Lebanon,
the same kind of political divisions along sectarian lines that
led to the civil war.[1] But Hariri's government claims it is determined
to forge a new era of "national unity." Perhaps its most ambitious
project of all is a new national history textbook, redirecting the
citizen towards a common national past and displacing sectarian
narratives that thrived during the recent war. The ostensible goal
is to urge the Lebanese to abandon their "premodern" loyalties of
religion that are said to have inhibited the growth of a democratic,
civil and secular society.
Central to
this effort is the dichotomy between nationalist development and
progress on the one hand, and allegedly pre-modern religious loyalties
on the other. Taifiyya or sectarianism refers to this allegedly
atavistic tendency among Lebanon's various religious communities
that undermines wataniyya or patriotism; thus the intercommunal
massacres of 1860, and of course, those that occurred between 1975
and 1990 are often cited as prominent examples of sectarianism."[2]
Thus while the nation is projected as inclusive, stable and democratic,
sectarianism is depicted as exclusionary, undemocratic and disordered.
Above all else, the post-war state claims to be part of a modernity
which ascends from an ancient lineage; the downtown excavations
in the rebuilding of Beirut proudly display Phoenician and Roman
artifacts. The layers of civilization each form part of a nationalist
narrative that inevitably concludes with modern Beirut, "an ancient
city for the future," as the reconstruction slogan has it. In the
modern reconstructed nation, sectarianism serves as a metaphor for
the unwanted past.
"Sectarianism,"
however, is a neologism born in the age of nationalism to signify
the antithesis of nation; its meaning is predicated on and constructed
against a territorially-bounded liberal nation-state. In Lebanon,
sectarianism is as modern and authentic as the nation-state. In
fact, the two cannot be dissociated. In India, scholars such as
Gyan Pandey and Partha Chatterjee have persuasively argued that
contemporary communalism is rooted not in ancient history but in
the governing politics and discourses of the British colonial regime
which were appropriated by the nationalists to legitimate specific
paths of elitist development. Sectarianism in Lebanon can be interpreted
similarly.[3]
At the same
time, however, the case of Lebanon differs from the Indian example
in that the modern state was established as liberal and (putatively)
democratic, but not secular. From the outset, the nationalist project
has been intertwined with what historian Ahmad Beydoun calls the
"innommbale," the un-utterable contradiction that has haunted Lebanon:
the paradox of a national unity in a multi-religious society wherein
religion is inscribed as the citizen's most important public attribute--stamped
prominently on his or her identification and voter registration
card.[4] A second difference from the Indian example lies in the
nature of decolonization. The Lebanese state was created as a result
of a series of compromises between the French mandatory power and
the indigenous elites, and not as the result of popular anti-colonial
mobilization. An ethos of national unity was never forged in a collective
struggle.
Religion and
the Colonial Encounter
The drive to
create a territorially unified Lebanese nation-state was in part the
result of European (primarily but not exclusively French) colonial
myth-making. Henri Lammens, whose 1921 La Syrie: precis historique
imagined Lebanon as a Phoenician refuge,[5] invoked a pre-Islamic
and pre-Arab "integrity" which, with "French aid," could fulfill "its
legitimate desire to evolve in a national framework that its historical
traditions have created."[6] Even before Lammens, European travelers,
missionaries and consuls saw Mount Lebanon as a non-Muslim enclave
from which the movement to civilize and reform the "fanatical" and
"Mohemmedan" Ottoman Empire could be launched.[7] The technological and military superiority of the
European powers, which deployed religion as a metaphor for the boundaries
between modern civilization and premodern barbarism, legitimated
European interference in the affairs of a "backward" Muslim and
Asiatic region. More importantly, colonialism transformed the social,
political and economic significance of religion into a reified order
wherein decontextualized religious identities alone defined individuals.[8]
The European powers singled out the Christian communities
of the Ottoman Empire for special protection from the Muslim population.
Missionaries were sent to proselytize among and educate the Christians,
including females. Christian traders were favored by European merchants,
and Christian workforces, in Mount Lebanon at least, were actively
recruited by French silk merchants. The irony of this European intervention
is that it coincided with Ottoman efforts to reform the Empire.
The Tanzimat movement which began in 1839 abolished legal distinctions
between the different communities of the Empire in the hopes of
fostering an Ottoman nationality (Osmanlilik) and with it a sense
of Ottoman compatriotship.
Taifa as Nation
Prior to the
nineteenth century, communities in Mount Lebanon were predicated not
so much on religious distinctions as on hierarchical politics of notability
that cut across religious lines. Villages were often religiously mixed.
Notables, known as the a'yan, dominated the self-representation
of their communities. Great families controlled different regions
of Mount Lebanon and formed an interdependent trans-sectarian elite.
They were separated from the ahali, or common people, by an
almost impermeable barrier which was reinforced by customs of clothing,
language, title, land holdings and marriage alliances. The notion
of a unified, territorially demarcated nationalism of adherents of
a particular religion that transcended kin, village or region was
absent. During the course of the nineteenth-century, demographic
changes in favor of the Christian population, increasing European
penetration and economic incorporation into European markets inspired
local elites to make appeals to the European powers along religious
lines to legitimate their position in rapidly changing circumstances.
Both the Maronite and Druze elites sought to cohere an exclusively
religious definition of community, where loyalties of kinship, region
and village were subsumed by an overarching religious solidarity.
The sect or taifa became the quasi-nation defined against
other taifas.
The deployment of religion-based politics by the
elites inadvertently opened the possibility of popular mobilization
along communal lines. Unlike the old regime where one's social rank
was determinate in local society, sectarian discourse lent itself
to a variety of often contradictory uses. The elites tried to project
a stable and ordered vision of the religious nation, while popular
elements sought to appropriate religious discourse for social liberation,
as in an 1858 peasant uprising in Mount Lebanon led by Maronite
peasants against Maronite landlords. The resulting religious mobilizations
and politics on both elite and popular levels illustrated the incompleteness
and fragility of the taifa as nation. Precisely because the
meaning of religion as an exclusive base of identity was new, its
coherence was constantly undermined by continuities of old regime
definitions of identity that stressed region or family. As a result,
despite the appearance of two sides during the 1840-60 period, one
Maronite and one Druze, there were in fact intra-communal contestations
over what a "true" Maronite or Druze was. These generated violent,
complex and protracted struggles among peasants, landlords and clergy.
Labeling the period between 1840-60 as "sectarian,"
the current Lebanese state has sought to limit discussion of this
era due to the obvious burden it places on the narrative of national
history. In the process, ironically, it has ignored the truly distinctive
feature of that era: the violent entrance of the ahali into
the politics of a socially hierarchical and extremely unrepresentative
society, and the desperate desire of the feuding elites to maintain
their power in the social order by trying to develop a viable narrative
of taifa as nation that at once excluded rival elites of
different taifas and sustained communal hierarchies.
State as Nation
The tensions between popular and elitist understandings
of the taifa as nation persisted until World War I. Then a
new and broader discourse of liberation and freedom emerged, partly
in response to educational and socio-economic changes, the rise of
an Arab print media, and Wilsonian principles of national "self-determination,"
and partly in reaction to the Turkification policies pursued by the
Young Turks.[9] In the context of the more direct massive European
intervention, the Ottoman Levant was forced into the era of nation-states.
Like the nineteenth-century discourse of taifa as nation, however,
the nationalist impetus, while originally foreign and European, took
on regional permutations and was transformed by local elites. The
nationalist "awakening" following World War I was caught up in a host
of conflicting ambitions and desires of rival elites. European insistence
on essential differences between Christianity and Islam provided one
of the key legitimating factors to their intervention in the Middle
East. The French had an obvious interest in separating Lebanon from
Syria; Henri Lammens' vision was a poignant example of French colonial
ideology that used invented cultural and historical narratives of
the Lebanese "nation" to justify the imposition of the mandate system
in the Middle East generally, and the creation of Grand Liban in 1920
specifically.[10]
The creation of Lebanon, however, could not have succeeded without
the support of the Lebanese elites, particularly the Maronites who
stressed their pro-French character. After 1920, the issue was no
longer enshrining the taifa as a nation but forging a Lebanese
nation-state composed of many taifas. The Maronites used
their historical ties to the French and their alleged numerical
superiority to present themselves as the natural leaders of an independent
Lebanon--one that had existed for centuries as a refuge for persecuted
minorities. By then the Druze had been eclipsed politically and
demographically by the Sunnis, who formed the largest Muslim community
in Grand Liban; Sunnis, for the most part, rejected the idea of
Lebanon and favored a pan-Arab nation, specifically a Greater Syria.
Despite the contradictions between Lebanese and Arab nationalist
discourses, both were self-avowedly modern in their use of the language
of liberation, freedom and natural rights. While the "people" formed
the basis of nationalist ideology, in reality the popular participation
did not fundamentally impinge upon the continuity of elite politics
and rivalries.[11]
Sectarianism as the Nation
The creation of the Lebanese republic in 1926, which gave the Maronite
elites of Lebanon the lion's share of the power, was supplemented
in 1943 by a "National Pact" which began the era of formal independence.
Presented to the people as a fait accompli, the National Pact, itself
a result of elite compromises, essentially legitimated a system of
patronage and a division of spoils among the elites of the new nation-state,
thus betraying the inability to locate a genuinely national base.
The Maronite elites were guaranteed the presidency, the Sunnis the
prime ministership and the Shi'a the speaker of parliament.[12]
The molding of nationalist politics onto an Ottoman social order
created a sectarian nationalism and the politics of nationalist
elitism.[13] The problem of how to integrate the masses into the
new nation without opening the realm of back-room politics became
the central concern of the elites. Electoral and personal status
laws were regulated by religious affiliation such that to be Lebanese
meant to be defined according to religious affiliation. There could
be no Lebanese citizen who was not at the same time a member of
a particular religious community.
Given the failure of state officials to extend their reach to
predominantly Shi'a areas in southern Lebanon and northern regions
like Akkar, the nationalist project of Lebanon remained inseparably
linked to state-affiliated elites, who dispensed jobs, paved roads
and brought electricity to their own regions. The "sectarian balance,"
based on the 1932 population census, paralyzed the government and
reinforced the system of patronage. Corruption served as the effective
social security system of the Lebanese. Benefits could not be obtained
simply on the basis of citizenship rights because jobs, housing,
telephones and education were guaranteed not by the state but through
appeals to deputies and ministers and presidents who were themselves
appointed or elected according to sectarian laws.[14] In this sense,
sectarianism, which undermines the secular national ideal and creates
subversive religious loyalties, is umbilically tied to the 1943
National Pact which institutionalized the modern, independent Lebanese
state.
As a result of the creation of an elite-dominated sectarian Lebanon,
popular mobilization occurred on two fronts, often simultaneously.
On the one hand there has been intellectual and working class dissent.
A rash of strikes and political unrest, which cut across religious
lines, culminated in the early 1970s in massive worker and student
demonstrations seeking to break the domination and vested interests
of the national elites. The issues at stake in the Ghandour strike
in 1972, for example, were basic enough: workers demanded wage increases
to keep up with inflation, reduction of shifts from ten to eight
hours and the right to unionize. The government's response was to
call in the internal security forces, which promptly crushed the
strike. The government licensing of the Protein Company in 1975,
which threatened to give it a monopoly of the fishing industry,
unleashed more violent protest by poor fishermen.
Another form of popular unrest soon came to the fore, organized
along sectarian lines and exacerbated by the presence of the PLO.
The militia politics which gripped Lebanon between 1975 and 1990
were, at least in part, another manifestation of popular mobilization
against the elite-dominated Lebanese state. This popular sectarianism
accentuated the untenable contradictions upon which the nation was
anchored. Whereas compromises between the elites were meant to divide
power among different communities, they in fact divided power among
the elites of various communities at the expense of the divided
and disenfranchised majority. Whereas the elites compromised in
the hope of containing sectarian conflicts, many of the citizens
used sectarianism to express their discontent with the product of
elitist compromises. This was the logic of the recent civil war
in Lebanon.
The militias took sectarian politics to their logical and destructive
conclusion. Wartime sectarianism was popular and sect-transcending;
transgressions were simultaneously directed against their own elites
as much as against other communities. Both the violence and the
positions taken against it loosened social boundaries. The bomb-shelters
became wartime parliaments, where the great and the small were finally
forced to rub shoulders.[15] The state's total collapse was evidenced
by the inability to provide electricity and water, not to mention
voting or security. The nation, however, survived. If nothing else,
militia rule empowered some non-elites. That the target of most
of the militias' fury resulted in the suffering of other ordinary
citizens, and that the wealthy emigrated with most of their wealth
intact, should not obscure the fact that militia politics were,
in part, popular gratification at the expense of national elitism.
Sectarianism was as much a repudiation of the social hierarchy as
it was a collapse of the Lebanese state that had been created by
the National Pact.
The war, to be sure, forced changes among various leaderships,
but this did not ultimately change the style of leadership. The
war ended with a new National Pact called the Taif agreement--another
mysterious back room deal without popular participation through
referendum and, like the 1943 Pact, imposed as another fait accompli.
In the post-war period, the new elites epitomize the politics of
the past. In many cases they are the same individuals or from the
same families. While a discourse of democracy and national unity
has re-emerged, the dynamics of a democratic society have faltered.
The Lebanese state has been resurrected, but as in the pre-war period
it is again paralyzed by elite feuds and the neglect of the ordinary
citizens, nearly a third of whom are estimated to live in poverty.[16]
Conclusion
Capitalizing on public revulsion of the war, there has been a disingenuous
call by certain government leaders to "abolish" sectarianism and to
efface all traces of the war. The government has declared a return
of "legitimacy" (shar'iyya) over all of Lebanon. It has also
re-inscribed the confessionally-based hierarchical social order while
reconstructing the nation-state.
Instead of educating citizens, the director of the government-mandated
history project recently stated that the approved history of Lebanon
"must eliminate everything that creates conflict between Lebanese"
in order to facilitate the healing process. Only later, he said,
"can we raise the truth dosage."[17] Sectarianism, however, is a
problem not of the past but of the present. Although it is constructed
as the dark deviant underside of the nationalist narrative, sectarianism
is a nationalist creation that dates back no further than the beginnings
of the modern era when European powers and local elites forged a
politics of religion amid the emerging nation-state system. Its
remedy comes not in setting up the executioner's scaffold, as the
Lebanese President said recently, but in reflecting on the meaning
of sectarianism in a country where the citizen is given little choice
between the exclusionary politics of the elites or a self-destructive
gratification born of rebellion against the resurrected confessional
social order.
Ussama
Makdisi is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University.
Endnotes
1 As witnessed
by its use to describe developments in the former Soviet Union and
former Yugoslavia, "Lebanonization" has come to refer to any process
of national disintegration and failed modernization throughout the
world. 2 See Leila Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil
Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (London:I.B. Tauris,
1994); Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline
of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: The Center for Lebanese
Studies in association with I.B. Tauris, 1993).
3 Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism
in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
4 Ahmad Beydoun, Le Liban: Itineraire dans une
guerre incivile (Paris: Karthala, 1993), p. 22.
5 See Kamal Salibi in A House of Many Mansions:
History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988),
p.134.
6 Henri Lammens, La Syrie: precis historique
(Beirut: Dar Lahad Khater, 1994 [1921]), p. 365.
7 This is part of a wider study of sectarianism
that is the subject of my unpublished doctoral thesis, "Fantasies
of the Possible: Colonialism and the Construction of Communalism
in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon."
8 Partha Chatterjee dealt with the subject of how
the colonial government in India tirelessly sought to "unambiguously"
classify the Indian population into coherent castes that defied
the complex and often "uncolonizable" voices of actually-existing
Indian people; see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments:
Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), p.220.
9 The ideologies of the Young Turks are very well
described by Sukru Hanioglu in The Young Turks in Opposition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Rashid Khalidi,
"Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria Before 1914: A Reassessment" in
Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih and Reeva S. Simon
(eds.), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (NY: Columbia University
Press, 1991).
10 An independent Lebanon, wrote Lammens, was the
only guarantee "to allow full liberty" for the Lebanese, whose Christianity
required a separate republic that could be protected from Muslim
domination. The declaration of Grand Liban signified France's sacred
duty to help Syria and Lebanon "develop" independently. Lammens,
op. cit., p. 300.
11 James L. Gelvin has written an important essay
on the populist dimension to the rise of Arab nationalism in Damascus
that moves away from elite-based analyses to stress what he calls
a "populist political sociability" that explains the emergence of
Arab nationalism as a mass-based ideology. "Social Origins of Popular
Nationalism in Syria: Evidence for a New Framework" International
Journal of Middle East Studies 26 (1994).
12 Farid el-Khazen, The Communal Pact of National
Identities: The Making and Politics of the 1943 National Pact,
Papers on Lebanon No. 12 (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1991),
p. 5. A significant amount of work has been done on the persistence
of "feudalism" in post-1943 Lebanon. Set forth in Michael Hudson,
The Precarious Republic (NY: Random House, 1968), the topic
has continued to generate interest by scholars such as Samir Khalaf,
Lebanon's Predicament (NY: Columbia University Press, 1987)
and Tabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon (NY: Monthly
Review Press, 1987). The most recent contribution to this is Michael
Gilsenan's study of power in twentieth-century northern Lebanon,
Lords of the Lebanes Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab
Society (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996).
13 Ahmed Beydoun has written an excellent book
on the subject of the creation and manipulation of historical narratives
in modern Lebanon, Le Liban, une histoire disputee: identite
et temps dans l'historographie libanese contemporaine (Beirut:
Publications de l'Universite Libanaise, 1984).
14 Gilsenen's Lords of the Lebanese Marches:
Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society op. cit., vividly
exhibits the contours of sectarianism and patronage politics by
local landlords who subvert state institutions while at the same
time run for office and are appointed ministers in the Lebanese
government. See also Petran The Struggle over Lebanon, op.
cit., pp. 35-37.
15 Hashim Sarkis has discussed the "territorialization"
of identities during the war by pointing out that the violence provided
new "spatial opportunities" to redefine identities that emerged
after and because of the onset of physical destruction. See Hasim
Sarkis, "Territorial Claims: Architecture and Post-War Attitudes
Toward the Built Environment," in Samir Khalaf and Philip S. Khoury
(eds.), Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-War Reconstruction
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), pp.100-27.
16 "Lebanese National Report for the UN Summit
on Social Development," Copenhagen, March 1995.
17 Quoted in Time International, January
15, 1996.
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