Secular Coexistence in Lebanon - by Raja Abillama

About the Book

A study of the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Lebanon through an investigation of Lebanese law.

Book Synopsis

A study of the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Lebanon through an investigation of Lebanese law. The book considers coexistence as an organizing or structuring principle of the modern Lebanese state, and of its legal order. It analyses the kind of legal arrangement that coexistence dictates, and the legal processes that sustain coexistence. It reaches beyond the law to describe or provide an account of coexistence as constitutive of a secular sensibility or form of life, a sensibility or form of life that finds its articulations in specific ways of thinking, doing, and feeling. It describes some of the concepts, practices, and attitudes of coexistence, through which Muslims and Christians in Lebanon are secured a place and secured in place, enabled and constrained to make legible their 'religious' difference and distinctiveness through marriage and its consequences (the family), and to keep in check, restrain, or contain their 'religious' passions. It proposes that the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Lebanon is Lebanese secularism.

Review Quotes

In this valuable book Raja Abillama has provided an anthropological account of secularism in Lebanon by focusing on the detailed way Muslim-Christian co-existence works there. Central to this analysis is his stress on the importance of particular legal, political and emotional aspects of social life. This is a thought-provoking study that enlarges and complicates our understanding of 'the secular' that is too often taken as an abstract generality. It deserves to be read not only by specialists of the Middle East but also by anyone seriously interested in theorising secularism.--Talal Asad, City University of New York

Skilfully argued and richly illustrated with fascinating material from recent Lebanese legal history, Secular Coexistence is an essential contribution to the anthropology and political history of the Middle East. Through a careful study of Lebanese law and the types of coexistence between Christians and Muslims that it attempts to guarantee, Abillama expertly and sophisticatedly dissects the mechanisms of secular power it employs. In doing so, he masterfully reveals the ways that the law, through its careful management of religion, creates forms of communal life that are hard to transcend, as well as offers the seeds for thinking the relationship between law, religion, and the secular otherwise, moving beyond a politics of religious difference alone.--Noah Salomon, University of Virginia