Lara Deeb, Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Lara Deeb (LD): I finished this book just as the current phase of Israeli genocide against Palestinians began, and I’d like to direct readers to the final question of this NEWTON, which addresses why any of this still matters. As for what made me write the book, there are many answers. Love Across Difference is deeply personal for me, a book for which it feels like I have been doing fieldwork all my life and for which I have been taking down research notes since the turn of this century. Between my own experiences and those of numerous friends, I was struck by both the variety of family responses to mixed marriage and the consistent themes among them. When I did the first formal recorded interview for the book, back in 2012, a new curiosity struck me. The interview was with a Christian-Muslim couple where the male partner’s Sunni family had put up the greater fight against the relationship. The challenge this interview posed for both common sense and scholarly ideas—specifically its upending of the notion that it is easy for Muslim men to marry Christian women because it is both religiously acceptable and legally facilitated—hooked me intellectually into the project as well. 

Another factor was the rich roundtable conversations on sectarianism that have taken place at MESA over the past decade or so. I found myself thinking that scholars have shown us, beautifully, how sectarianism is historically produced, but we still do not understand how it persists so stubbornly. I wanted to think about how something that is a made-up category carries so much power in people’s lives. Scholars have also shown us how the Lebanese state and institutions constantly reinforce sectarian categories and divisions. I wanted to understand how Lebanese might be contributing to that process through their family dynamics, their words and actions. The political sectarian system in Lebanon has been extraordinarily successful—by which I mean people have bought into it to their own detriment. One of my goals was to shake that up, to show how, in one area of interpersonal conflict, people are making sect important, over and over again. Because perhaps, if we understand how it happens, we get closer to dismantling sectarianism.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

LD: Love Across Difference tackles sectarianism in people’s social worlds and shows us how a constructed social category feels real, grows or wanes in importance, and infiltrates aspects of people’s lives in various ways. It also looks closely at how sex and sect converge as categories in people’s lives as they navigate decisions about marriage and the social consequences of those decisions. I hope that it also gives readers a tangible sense of Lebanese social worlds in all their multifaceted complexity. There is so much incredible scholarship and writing about Lebanon out there right now—with a special shoutout to anthropology, a field where recent work on Lebanon has been extraordinarily rich. I am honored to have this book sit on shelves alongside that bounty of literature. 

Readers’ perspectives shape the issues they see in any book. I think for this book, that may be more pronounced as the topic resonates broadly. I taught a version of the manuscript to an undergraduate seminar and students hooked into the text in many of the expected ways: “My family is Jewish and I’m dating a Christian,” or “My mom is Catholic and my dad is Presbyterian and I never realized before how much weird stuff my grandparents say when we visit.” But they also talked about broader resonances: parent-child interactions, their efforts to carve paths against social norms, the ways stereotypes impact their interpersonal relationships. This is obviously a book about Lebanon, but it is also a book that holds ideas relevant for mixed marriage anywhere—no matter how “mixed” is defined in that context, no matter what the categories are that determine the dissimilarity required for a relationship to be called “mixed.” I think it also says something more general about intergenerational conflict and change with regard to ideas about social difference.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

LD: On a surface level, this book departs from my first two books on Lebanon, An Enchanted Modern and Leisurely Islam (which I co-authored with Mona Harb), in that it is not focused on a specific community or geographic area of the country. And it has obvious connections to the recent volume I edited with Tsolin Nalbantian and Nadya Sbaiti, Practicing Sectarianism. I was writing this book as we worked together on that volume during the pandemic, and the chapter I included in the volume grew out of the same project. 

All that said, I think that all my work on Lebanon, including those first two books, contains the argument that “it’s not about religion” (whatever the “it” is), or perhaps more precisely, that religion is not some pure category that should ever be allowed that kind of sacred status in our social analyses or theorizing. It is always lived in ways entangled with politics and class and gender and geography. Sometimes that seems obvious, but then when people begin to talk about the Middle East or Lebanon, what seems like an obvious insight flies out the window and religion is placed back on this unwieldly, unrealistic, and dangerous pedestal. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

LD: This was a tricky book to write because I really wanted to write something that was both accessible for and interesting to a broad readership, while also hoping that colleagues will find the book’s arguments and approach useful. I often kept multiple audiences in mind: my undergraduate students in the United States; my interviewees and their families (some of whom will read this in English, but I hope to have an Arabic translation eventually published); Lebanese and others around the world who have grappled with these issues; plus people who are just trying to figure out Lebanon or the Middle East, who have a sense that “sectarianism” is a really bad descriptor for a place, but don’t quite understand how that fits with a society that seems to be always doing allegedly sectarian things.

In terms of impact, I want to challenge readers to dismantle the assumptions, especially about social categories, that we all carry around in our heads. I also hope that people who have lived the dynamics I write about, whether or not they are among my interviewees, feel seen in its pages.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LD: I’m going to leave this one to mystery. Too many things, none of which have quite taken shape just yet. 

J: Why does this matter now, during the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and accelerating Israeli settler-colonialism? Why does mixed marriage in Lebanon matter as Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed thousands and destroyed homes and lives and the environment? 

LD: I chose to pose this question to myself because it is a question I struggle with on a daily basis, and I imagine many of the people reading this NEWTON struggle with it as well. I don’t know the answer, but a comrade recently texted me this reminder: “Our work is not separate to the carnage against our people or what we do on and off campus. It is all one thing: an insistence on complexity, that our people are the world, and that we have lives and histories and knowledge that can help the world be softer and more ‘mixed.’” I also return regularly to Rafeef Ziadeh’s “We Teach Life, Sir.” I take these reminders to heart and connect them to the kinds of ethnography and writing I strive to put out into the world. Faced with apocalypse, we must also focus on life and on people’s struggles to build lives within and against the forces trying to thwart them. 

I return also to what I wrote above, about challenging the idea that religion is a pure category. Far too many people reduce Palestine and all that happens “over there” to religion, religious difference, religious conflict. I hope that this book adds to the counterweight that complicates and unravels that simplistic—and dangerous—understanding of the world. I hope that it contributes to showing how what is too easily collapsed as religion must instead be understood as politics and history. In these times of genocide, that means refusing to allow ongoing Israeli settler-colonial violence to be reframed as religious conflict. 

Similarly, as Lebanon faces the consequences of brutal Israeli bombardment—on top of the currency deflation that rocketed the poverty rate to eighty percent and the continued corruption that strangles the country—the importance of challenging the idea that religion, and sect, are natural categories grows ever more pressing. Political pressures from the United States and Israel accompany both bombs and ceasefire arrangements, pressures aimed at fomenting sectarian divides in Lebanon, pressures that are all too readily taken up and echoed by those political elites who hope to benefit from them. I hope this book adds to our understandings of how sectarianism is reinforced and how it infiltrates our lives, so that we are better able to undo its effects and smother the rot that it fuels. 

Excerpt from the book (excerpts from the Introduction)

Excerpted from Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon by Lara Deeb, published by Stanford University Press, ©2024 by Lara Deeb. All Rights Reserved.

Love Across Difference

Nina opened the door to her apartment in a beautifully renovated old building in Beirut. “Welcome, come in, it’s so nice to meet you!” she exclaimed, with an infectious smile. We greeted one another with the customary three air kisses on alternating cheeks. I followed Nina to the living room and sat on one of the white sofas while she went to the kitchen to make us Arabic coffee.

The sofas were framed by a massive, white, elegantly decorated Christmas tree and a backlit black canvas with the phrase Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim, which means “In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,” written on it in glowing calligraphy—ubiquitous fixtures in Christian and Muslim homes, respectively. Across the room, I saw two paintings, one of a Christian saint and the other depicting the names of the Rashidun Caliphs, leaders of the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad. Nina returned and sat across from me, tucking one leg underneath her. A domestic worker appeared a moment later and set a silver tray between us with the coffee, glasses of water, dried apricots, and thin sesame seed crackers.

As Nina poured the coffee and passed me a cup, I explained my project. An acquaintance had connected us, and our small talk led us to discover several other mutual friends. Nina’s parents are wealthy Roum Orthodox, one of Lebanon’s major Christian sects; my father’s side is also Roum, from a different region of the country. Nina grew up in the heterogeneous neighborhood of Ras Beirut, as did many of my relatives, and we share family and friendship connections to the area’s elite educational institutions. Once we had placed one another on Lebanon’s social map, with her permission, I turned on my digital recorder, setting it as unobtrusively as possible on the table.

“Just tell me your story,” I said. “However you want to tell it. How did you meet Ali? What happened then? From meeting him to marrying him, however you want to tell me.”

“Well,” Nina began, “we met through a common friend when we were very young, or at least I was. I was nineteen, I was at university, and he was twenty-eight. And just like that...” She started laughing. “Just like that, we fell in love, like right away, we knew! Like I remember from the moment of our first date, we went out for dinner, and I came home and told my mom, ‘I think I met the one.’ My mom said, ‘Hmm, interesting, what’s his name?’ I told her his name, and it is obviously Muslim, obviously Shi‘a, and she said, ‘Forget it, he’s not the one.’”

Lebanon may well be the most complicated place in the world to be a mixed couple. It has no civil marriage law, eighteen official sectarian (religious and ethnoreligious) groups with fifteen religious personal status laws (laws for marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance), a political system built on sectarian difference, and a history of fraught politics and periodic violence. Until relatively recently, as compared to Europe or the United States, most marriages were family approved if not orchestrated. Plus, Lebanon is tiny, a condensed country with a compressed social space. Six degrees of separation is a stretch—more often it’s only two. Compressing social space can turn it into a pressure cooker of status anxieties.

Lebanon is also the country in the Middle East with the most mixed marriages per capita. In my book, I use “mixed marriage” to refer to interreligious couples, meaning marriages between two people from Lebanon’s major religions: Islam, Christianity, and Druze, an eleventh-century offshoot of Islam. At times in Lebanon’s history, marriages between Christians from different sects (e.g., Roman Catholic, Maronite, Roum Orthodox, Syriac) or Muslims from different sects (Sunni, Shi‘a) have been considered mixed, but I will call those “intersectarian.”

[…]

When two Lebanese from different sects decide to marry, more often than not, drama ensues.

Parents have cried, pleaded, feigned heart attacks and other health scares, reasoned, argued, called on extended family or clerical pressure, used the silent treatment, threatened disownment, embarked on avid matchmaking efforts, badgered their child’s partner, restricted their child’s movement, and, rarely, threatened violence—all to express their opposition to mixed marriage. Most of these parents aren’t particularly religious. Most have friends or coworkers from other sects. So why does mixed marriage trigger intense resistance? As the following chapters show, at a fundamental level, mixed marriage disrupts parents’ expectations for their families’ social and literal futures and challenges dominant social ideas about love, patriarchy, sectarianism, discrimination, and difference.

Undaunted by her mom’s reaction, Nina dated Ali anyway. “My parents knew I was going out with him. And the whole time they were asking me, ‘What’s going on, Nina? What’s happening, Nina?’ Like, ‘You know this isn’t gonna end up anywhere, why are you going out with him?’ And the whole time I kept saying, ‘I’m just having fun, I’m just having fun, I’m just having fun.’” When she graduated from university, Nina and Ali’s relationship continued, on-again, off-again, for a decade. Even during the “offagains,” they stayed in touch. “We broke up and got back together, broke up and got back together about five hundred times because my parents weren’t agreeing to it.”

During those years, Ali tried talking to Nina’s dad, explaining that he was serious about the relationship and wanted to marry his daughter. Her dad refused him, telling him to “forget about” Nina, that they were “not made for each other.” Nina’s parents had done some digging into Ali’s background and didn’t like what they found. Aside from sect, he was too far from their expectations for a son-in-law. Although Ali attended elite schools, had a promising professional career, and came from an educated family, they held less wealth and lower social status than Nina’s elite clan.

Nina’s mother regularly brought up the relationship. “Who is this family? What social circle do they come from? How can we not know anything about the family you want to marry into?” At the same time, she understood her daughter wanting to marry for love. “I married for love,” she would say, “and I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to stand in my way, and I’m not trying to stand in your way. All I’m trying to say is, try to find someone else. If you go out with a bunch of people, and you come to me and say, ‘You know what mom, I still love him,’ then that’s it, do what you want, but just try first.”

So, Nina tried. “I had a lot of fun,” she told me. “And I laughed a lot. But I never took anyone seriously.” Nina even allowed her parents to set her up on dates with eligible Christian bachelors from families they knew, accompanied by her mother or another relative. She went back to her mom and said, “You can see that I’m trying, but seriously, you’ve seen these guys, would you go out with them? Would you say, ‘Yes, they interest me?’” Her mother conceded the point, agreeing that none would have interested her either. “There you go,” Nina retorted. “It’s not like I’m not trying to meet someone else.”

[…]

While Nina spent years discussing Ali with her parents, dealing with their disapproval, Ali’s parents stayed out of it. This was expected. Some Lebanese men must fight their families to marry the women they love, but their battles are less frequent and intense and are typically short-lived. Mixed marriages must contend with patriarchy because they involve women trying to make marital choices against the grain of their families and society. My interviewees wanted to marry, to take part in that heterosexual and patriarchal system, but they wanted to do so on their own terms.

The generational conflict between children fighting for love and parents doing what is best for their children out of love is a symptom of an incomplete shift from arranged or family-mediated marriage to companionate or love marriage. The first questions most parents ask—“Who are they? Do we know them?”—are a holdover signaling their discomfort with the unfettered choice some young people assume comes with companionate marriage. Marriage grafts families together, not individuals, and those families are supposed to be similar. Even as many people described their marital choices as based on romantic love, like Nina, they told me about the pull of broader kinship connections in their lives.

In Lebanon, mixed marriages also run headfirst into patriarchal and sectarian family status laws that add legal discrimination to the sexism Lebanese women face. Take fifteen personal status laws and multiply by two—because the laws are different for males and females—and you end up with thirty legal categories. Differences in rules for marriage, divorce, and child custody mean that the details of the sexism Christian, Druze, and Muslim Lebanese women experience vary, but no group has it uniformly worse than the others. The combination of this legal system and social norms shapes decisions about how to marry for women of all sects in the country.

The forces of patriarchy weigh more heavily on women, but men are far from immune. I heard nearly as many stories about parental pressures on sons of all sects as on daughters. Sons carry parents’ expectations for their family’s future; patriarchy is a hierarchy of generation as well as sex. Factors like class, education, and even personality can alter dynamics in ways that disrupt gendered religious or legal limitations. Just because religious and state authorities regulate families in specific ways, social practices and ideas don’t necessarily follow.