1. Book Review: Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon
- Author:
- Zara Lal
- Publication Date:
- 03-2023
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy
- Institution:
- The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
- Abstract:
- In Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon, Maya Mikdashi interrogates and redefines the core of the intersecting categories through which “lies … became bureaucracy” (15). The text opens with such a lie, told by a woman named Samera who was married in the Ottoman Empire, but, while living separately from her husband, claimed to be unmarried on the 1932 census conducted under the French mandate to escape her marriage. While this lie allowed her to escape her husband, it also led to a multitude of competing sets of documents, which implicated her son’s ability to receive his inheritance – even his existence was a legally contested question. This phenomenon represents what Mikdashi terms “sextarianism,” “how sex, sexuality, and sect structure legal bureaucratic systems” and shape the performance of citizenship and statecraft (2). Mikdashi’s conceptualization and theorization of the relationship between sex, sect, and the conditioning of state power is in dialogue with Joan Scott, Saba Mahmood, Carole Pateman, Audra Simpson, Hussein Ali Agrama, Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, Suad Joseph and Talal Asad’s contributions on secularity, sexual difference and the structures of state power. In Sextarianism, Mikdashi skillfully brings to light the relationship between state secularism and “evangelical secularism” in the stories of the Sameras appear throughout the chapters of Sextarianism, and particularly how they come into play in the construction of the private sphere through personal status law, and the ways personal status laws reproduce capital and wealth. As Mikdashi argues, all personal status laws, in states where political power is organized through sectarian governmental categories, are essentially “laws of sexual difference” (25), which produce and manage heterosexuality, and intertwine it with sectarian forms of control. In effect, the sextarian approach reveals how the concept of “sect” is structurally reproduced in the constitution of state power.
- Topic:
- Sovereignty, History, State, Sexuality, and Secularism
- Political Geography:
- Middle East and Lebanon