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Lebanon
On Our Way to Palestine: An Eyewitness Account of Nakba Day at the Lebanese Border
![[Protesters marching towards Palestine. Image from Nour Samaha.]](/content_images/3/sm_noursamaha1.JPG "[Protesters marching towards Palestine. Image from Nour Samaha.]")
Sunday 15th May, 2011. 7.30am, Nada calls. "The buses are already full and they told us if we want to hitch a ride we'd have to stand the whole way down, is there space with you?" The buses are full? Big smile on my face. "Of course!" Quick change of plan, and I wait for Rana before we set off to pick up Nada and Lara and join Ahmad in Khalde. After a stop for coffee, we began our journey down, with Ahmad leading our two-car convoy. It was very unlikely we would get lost though, because every kilometre or so we'd pass half a dozen buses decked out with Palestinian flags, clearly heading in the same direction as us. And if somehow we missed ...
Keep Reading »What is Sharia?
![[Sharia For Dummies. Image From Unknown Archive]](/content_images/3/sm_sharia_dummies.jpg "[Sharia For Dummies. Image From Unknown Archive]")
This question has animated scholarly, religious, and political debates for centuries. These debates have been lively, at times contentious, and have been held (under different circumstances and leading to different results) in different parts of the Muslim majority world as well as in parts of the world with few, if any, Muslims. More recently, it seems that the question “What is sharia?” has become a pressing concern in Western countries with growing Muslim minorities who continue to be unevenly incorporated into the imagined image of the “French”, “Swedish”, “German”, or “American” citizen. Central to this uneven incorporation (and at times, explicit discrimination) is ...
Keep Reading »Urge (to Keep) Going
Urge for Going. By Mona Mansour. Directed by Hal Brooks. Through April 17, Public LAB, The Public Theater, New York, NY. Urge for Going, Mona Mansour’s new work in development, is a coming-of-age story built from the outside in. Her 90-minute play follows Jamila, a seventeen-year-old Palestinian preparing to take the Baccalaureate on the eve of her graduation from a UN school in Beirut, Lebanon. Surrounded by her two uncles, her parents, and her brain-damaged brother, Jul, in a Beirut refugee camp, her quest to take the test fights a family’s worth of dysfunction and several generations’ worth of dislocation, frustration, and regret. Mansour’s piece offers a ...
Keep Reading »Narrating the Past, Confronting the Present
The Kingdom of Women: Ein El Hilweh. Directed by Dahna Abourahme. Lebanon, 2010 Could I do today what I was able to do then, questions Nadia, one of the women in Dahna Abourahme’s latest documentary film The Kingdom of Women: Ein El Hilweh. Based on stories of the women of Ein El Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon, between 1982-4 during the Israeli invasion and the imprisonment of the majority of the male population (those between the ages of 14-60), the film is also a reflection on the act of narration itself. The weaving of the women’s voices with tangible objects — letters from their husbands written from inside Israeli prisons, rich embroidery ...
Keep Reading »It's Official: In 2006, The Lebanese Government Was Hoping Israel Would Disarm Hezbollah For them
![[Lebanon, August 2006. Moments after an Israeli air strike destroyed buildings in Dahieh: Image by Paolo Pellegrin]](/content_images/3/sm_PellegrinNYC60974Lebanon2006-700.jpg "[Lebanon, August 2006. Moments after an Israeli air strike destroyed buildings in Dahieh: Image by Paolo Pellegrin]")
So now we know. In 2006, as Israel was bombing Lebanese highways, power supplies, the airport, and oil reservoirs, the Lebanese Prime Minister was hoping that Israel would finish “the job” quickly and successfully. Now we know. As over a quarter of the population was displaced from their homes under the threat of missiles, tank fire and artillery, the then commander of the army and now president of Lebanon, was letting the Israeli government know that the Lebanese army would stand down. As 10,000 homes were destroyed and over 1,300 Lebanese citizens (1/3 of them children) were killed, the Lebanese government's main concern was that that this very real and very brutal ...
Keep Reading »Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon?
![[Lebanese Army: Image from Now Lebanon]](/content_images/3/sm_m08107111056-arminside.jpg "[Lebanese Army: Image from Now Lebanon]")
We are living in extraordinary times. 2011 Egypt, in hindsight, will be seen as just as, if not more, “historic” as the 1952 coup. This precedent and others illustrate that this revolution is not the instantiation of the political awakening of a “stagnant” part of the world, and nor was it brought to you (only) by Facebook or twitter. For now, the 2011 people’s uprisings in Egypt and in Tunisia resist categorization, and cannot be contained or explained by adjectives that Middle East “experts” have used to shape the dominant discourse on the Arab world such as "Islamist," "communist", "liberal", "pro-American", ...
Keep Reading »Boutros Harb For President
![[Boutros Harb: Image From Unknown Archive]](/content_images/3/sm_images-1.jpg "[Boutros Harb: Image From Unknown Archive]")
In my capacity as a founding editor of Jadaliyya, I hereby endorse Boutros Harb, current Lebanese Minister of Labor, for the office of President of the republic. If Lebanon were a country where presidential candidates actually stood for elections and citizens actually voted to choose who would occupy the office of the President[1], I would certainly vote for him. I would even campaign for him. Throughout a long career of public service to his country, Mr. Harb has demonstrated an uncanny understanding of and dedication to the whole of Lebanon, and not only to the community that his detractors say his only concern is; the Christians of Lebanon. While his detractors see ...
Keep Reading »A Legal Guide to Being a Lebanese Woman, Part 2
![[wedding rings. Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_gods_design_for_marriage_umjr.jpg "[wedding rings. Image from unknown archive]")
In Part 1 of A Legal Guide to Being a Lebanese Woman, I represented graphically a number of the laws that constitute Lebanese male and female citizens differently. I meant to show how the Lebanese legal system as a whole is built to produce categories of citizenship that are differentiated according to sex. In this post I build on this argument and question why religious personal status is often posited as the “problem” for women in countries where the secular state is just as, if not more, discriminatory. I illustrate this point with a comparison of how the Lebanese state differentiates between married and unmarried female citizens within particular laws. Despite ...
Keep Reading »On Representational Paralysis, Or, Why I Don't Want to Write About Temporary Marriage
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Picture3.png "[Image from unknown archive]")
For the past few years, I have been working with a colleague on a collaborative project about leisure in the southern suburb of Beirut. Along the way, there was a moment when we thought that new ideas about temporary marriage among Shi‘i Muslim youth would be a significant part of it. We eventually abandoned that possibility, for reasons that included changes in our primary interests and the difficulties of interviewing young people about what remains for the most part a socially stigmatized practice in Lebanon. But the most powerful reason impacting our decision to write less about temporary marriage has to do with our hesitance to contribute to an ...
Keep Reading »Thanksgiving In Beirut
![[Mass Grave at the Massacre of Wounded Knee: Image from Wikipedia, Indian Costume: Costumes Galore]](/content_images/3/sm_Picture8.png "[Mass Grave at the Massacre of Wounded Knee: Image from Wikipedia, Indian Costume: Costumes Galore]")
On November 24, people from across the United States will gather with family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving. They will travel (on the busiest travel day of the year), they will eat turkey and pumpkin pie, and they will shop at the orgiastic sales that are a fixture of what is perhaps the most widely celebrated holiday in the USA. Like all ideologically inflected nationalist myths, holidays such as Thanksgiving or Columbus Day both commemorate and mask the histories of violence that build and sustain nations. Such masking enables us to know that people lived on and were removed from the land but also allows us to disregard the fact that the descendants of those ...
Keep Reading »Maroun al-Ras: Day of Death at the Lebanese-Israeli Border
[The following report and photographs were sent to Jadaliyya by Natalia Sancha in regards to events that transpired on Sunday May 15.] It all started as a commemoration. Buses, food, chanting, and derbakehs. We arrived to Maroun Ras after four hours of driving from Beirut. Some youth go off the path and start running downhill towards the border … they are not aware that there are mines on the way. Chanting while stones are thrown at the Israeli soldiers hiding between the electric fence and ...
Keep Reading »The Ongoing War; Lebanese Leaders Against the Lebanese
It has been 21 years since the end of the Lebanese civil war. 21 years since the last spasms of violence reverberated through the country’s cities, towns and villages. More than two decades ago, a country torn apart, in ruins and in rubble, suddenly found itself at “peace.” Almost immediately, the reconstruction began. In these years, landmarks such as Nasser, Modca, Horshoe, and the Carlton were torn down and replaced with uniforms of the new global order; cheap clothing made in china, chain restaurants ...
Keep Reading »Why Secularism is Not the Answer; Gays in the Lebanese Khutba
In the past 48 hours, a debate has erupted on the facebook page of the movement to “overthrow the political sectarian regime in Lebanon.” This debate was not about how to accomplish this lofty goal, or how to better strategize for more effective and powerful street demonstrations, or even what the actual demands of the movement are, should be, and how these demands can be enacted. Rather, the debate is about homosexuals and homosexuality in Lebanon. What does homosexuality have to do with secularism? A ...
Keep Reading »What is Political Sectarianism?
*Note: This analysis refers to political sectarianism in Lebanon, it cannot be “applied” to the workings of sectarianism in other contexts, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Bahrain or Bosnia Herzigovina. There is an ongoing spasm of activism in Lebanon directed towards changing the sectarian structure and ethos of the state. For the past five weeks, growing numbers of people have taken to the streets stating their refusal of both the March 14 and March 8 coalitions and demanding the end of ...
Keep Reading »The Student Movement in 1968
A couple of weeks ago on Jadaliyya, Jessica Winegar reported on some of the stories she heard from the older men and women she met in Tahrir Square in Cairo. A number of them spoke of being leftist student activists in the 1970s but in the years since had to watch, as Winegar writes, “their youthful dreams of creating a just society crumble before their eyes.” While analysts have listed historical antecedents to the current events, such as the 1919 Revolution in Egypt and the first Palestinian ...
Keep Reading »The Other Coup?
Lebanon has not had a government since January 12th , when ministers allied to the March 8 opposition movement withdrew from Cabinet, precipitating the collapse of the Sa`ad al Hariri led majority government. For months prior to the collapse of the Hariri-led government, the cabinet had been at a stalemate and had not been performing its constitutionally defined duties towards Lebanese citizens. The reason for that stalemate was the inability of the majority and the opposition to come to an agreement ...
Keep Reading »Lebanese Ideology and Boutros Harb: Separate, But [ Kind of] Equal
For over a week now, the debate on a draft law proposed by Lebanese Minister of Labor and former presidential candidate Boutros Harb has been heating up. If passed by the Lebanese state, this law would make it illegal for a period of 15 years for Christians to sell land, apartments, houses or commercial property to Muslims, and vice versa. The draft law has won the support of the Maronite Patriarch, Samir Geagea, Amin Gemeyal, and Future party MP Ahmad Fatfat. Harb has stated that the law is meant to ...
Keep Reading »A Legal Guide to Being a Lebanese Woman (Part 1)
For the past four years I have been researching the histories and the applications of the Lebanese legal system. An understanding of this legal system, which is the architecture of the Lebanese state, has been vital to my dissertation. I have spent thousands of hours poring over legal texts and legal histories, putting together the puzzle of how, when, and why laws are promulgated, amended, and put into practice in Lebanon. I have met with countless lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, clerks, and ...
Keep Reading »Things To Do On Lebanese Independance Day + Arabic Translation
Drive from Saifi Village to Hayy al Sullum or Naba`a, marvel at the miracles of capitalism and Lebanon’s constitutionally protected free market economy. Watch a few pilots from the Lebanese Air Force put on a show in the sky, feel safer knowing that if the IDF is also watching, they are sure to be too afraid to continue violating Lebanese airspace on an almost daily basis. Take a walk in casual clothes through what used to be a bustling souk but is now luxurious downtown Beirut. Count how many ...
Keep Reading »What's in a City? (Part 2)
(see Part 1) Last summer, a friend (under some coercion… not from me) gave me a valuable gift – a 1954 Guide to World Travel issued by Pan Am airlines. In the section on Lebanon, it listed the average temperature in August as 83º Fahrenheit (~28º C). August, by far the hottest and most humid month, only 83 degrees? I mean, if you needed any further proof that the world is heating up, consider that the average temperature in Beirut this past summer was well about twenty degrees hotter. For a while ...
Keep Reading »Infomous
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