Introduction for Love Across Difference

Introduction

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.¹ 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.² 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 this book, I use “mixed marriage” to refer to inter-religious couples, meaning marriages between two people from Lebanon’s major religions: Islam, Christianity, and Druze, an eleventh-century offshoot of Islam.³ 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.”

To say that Lebanon has the “most” mixed marriages is relative, as they likely represent between 2 percent and 5 percent of all marriages among Lebanese.⁴ In the US, according to a 2001 survey, 22 percent of marriages were interfaith.⁵ Still, having the most makes sense given Lebanon’s relative religious diversity within the region.⁶

As a point of comparison, when I asked family and friends in Jordan if they knew of mixed couples—other than Jordanian Muslim men married to European or North American Christian women, which is more common—few could list more than one or two. Some people recalled elopements that ended in disownment or violence. One person told me interreligious couples have to emigrate. A few people came up with a handful of couples, mostly elites. And indeed, in Jordan, Muslim-Christian relationships are “the classic examples of star-crossed lovers” and rarely end in marriage.⁷ Egypt is similar, and the rare nonelite Muslim-Christian romance leading to marriage can foment sensationalist speculation about bride abduction and forced conversion.⁸

In contrast, when I asked Lebanese strangers about mixed marriage, they usually mentioned a recent media story about it (George Clooney’s marriage to Lebanese-British lawyer Amal Alamuddin, whose family is Druze, was a popular one), talked about civil marriage instead, or told me it was once rare but growing more common. Older men sometime recited a saying that roughly translates to “A person who marries outside their religious group will die with their predicament” (Li byekhod men gher melto, b mout b ‘elto)—meaning that they are stuck with the consequences, and those consequences will be dire. People assume mixed marriage will be difficult, not necessarily for the couple, but for their families, and they’re right. 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 “off-agains,” 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.”

When I asked her why she had spent years complying with her parents’ wishes rather than eloping with Ali, Nina explained that she didn’t want to marry without her parents’ approval because she had a great deal of compassion for the hardships they had faced raising children during Lebanon’s 1975–1990 civil war. “Our parents’ generation really had a hard time raising us, they really had a shitty life in this country, you know? They didn’t have anything other than war and stress. And now I think about it, like I’m stressed, what the hell am I stressed about? My parents lived through the war. I don’t know how they made money. I don’t know how they worked every day. I don’t know how they got up every day. I don’t know how they did this. I don’t know if they were on medication. They would take us to school, then bombs would drop so they would run back to pick us up from school.”

Nina’s deep appreciation for her parents’ sacrifices ruled out eloping, even though that was the path some of her friends had chosen. “It was a red line for me. I knew I wanted to marry him, but not in a way that hurt my parents, or upset them, or defied them.”

<

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.⁹

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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹

Some of my interviewees named patriarchy and sexism as the source of their struggles, railing against these forms of discrimination. Others searched for legal loopholes, seeking ways to ensure their rights within a system stacked against them. Yet others acquiesced to social norms, whether by upholding patriarchy themselves or feeling stuck, with no other options.

While Nina was empathetic to her parents’ position and spent years trying to make them happy, she also brooked no compromises when it came to marrying for love. She insisted her ideas about love came from her parents’ romantic story; people still referred to them as “lovebirds.” So, a few months after meeting Nina, I went to meet her mother, Salwa. Salwa told me she and her husband had fallen in love as young teenagers. They exchanged secret glances and letters for a year until he dared call the house and she heard his voice for the first time, then braved years of clandestine meetings until she was old enough to date. They finally married, a decade after their first glance, with their parents’ blessing.

This experience weighed on Salwa. “If a groom had showed up and asked for Nina’s hand, I don’t know what we would have said,” she told me, thinking back to those years of conflict with her daughter. “People were asking to introduce Nina to their relatives. And we thought, if we pressure her and she marries someone we choose, someone Christian who we consider good socially, and then she comes to us one day and says, ‘I’m not happy,’ we will never ever forgive ourselves.”

On the one hand, Salwa struggled to accept Ali because he didn’t fit into her dreams for Nina’s future, from the decorated church steps for the wedding photos to the extended family Christmas gatherings. On the other hand, she said, “I couldn’t stop her because I know what it means to marry for love. I couldn’t imagine my daughter marrying someone who doesn’t make her heart beat faster every time he puts his key in the door.”

Eventually, on one of her breaks from Ali, Nina met a guy she could imagine falling for. She called her mom to share the news. Again, the first thing Salwa asked was, “What’s his name?” Nina told her his first name, which assured Salwa that he was Christian. Then Salwa asked for his last name.

After a brief pause, Salwa responded, “Wait a minute, where is he from?”

“He is European.”

The phone went silent. “Go back to Ali,” Salwa finally said.

As Nina told me this part of the story, she collapsed into another round of laughter. “In the echelon of bad to worse,” she laughed, shaking her head at the absurdity of the situation, “it turned out marrying a foreigner and never moving back to Lebanon was the worst thing that could happen.” That new relationship ran its course quickly.

Then one day, she was talking to Ali on the phone. “He called me. Or maybe I called him,” she told me. “I forget. But I had just left that other guy. And I started crying on the phone, like, ‘Fuck my life, like this one guy I meet after a million years who seems right and it doesn’t work out.’ So, Ali says to me, ‘I don’t understand, like I’m living god knows how far away from you, and I’m still in love with you, and you’re crying over some guy who came from who knows where!’” He booked a flight, stayed with Nina for a while, and then relocated to be closer to her. Soon after, Nina made her decision. “That’s it, it’s Ali. Ali is the one.”

She called her parents and told them the news. “You know what,” she said, “I dated a lot, and I tried, and it’s still Ali. And you are going to get to know him, because I have decided this is it, he’s the one.’” I asked her how they replied. “They were like, ‘Okay, that’s it,’” she answered, “but, like, after ten years! It took ten years.”

Most of the parents in this book who opposed mixed marriage wanted the best for their children. They wanted them to be happy, and even to marry for love, but they also wanted them to fall in love with an appropriate person. Being a loving parent means working toward your child’s well-being, and many believe that well-being hinges on a harmonious marriage and that harmony grows from similarity. And most Lebanese—like most people around the world—marry people who they see as similar to them. “We have a lot in common” competes with “Opposites attract”—and the former saying is more likely to be heard about a successful marriage than the latter. The catch here is that most of my interviewees saw their spouses as similar to them. With a few exceptions, most don’t see their marriage as “mixed.”

In 1941, sociologist Robert Merton defined intermarriage as the “marriage of persons deriving from those different in-groups and out-groups other than the family which are culturally conceived as relevant to the choice of a spouse.”¹² A mixed marriage is a marriage between people who society believes differ from one another. Most Lebanese today believe that religion—down to the specific sect—is the most important feature defining those in-groups and out-groups. But where parents, society, and the Lebanese state see difference, most mixed couples do not. As one person told me, “Other people see religious difference, but all we see are the things we have in common. We grew up in the same neighborhood. We were born at the same hospital. We’ve both lived outside the country for periods of time. We feel the connections, the similarities. We never felt like strangers, or like we were worlds apart from one another.”

My interviewees aren’t naive. They understand perfectly well that society and their families view them as a mixed couple because they are interreligious or intersectarian. Some love one another because of or despite that difference. But their commonalities far outweigh labels of sect or religion. As we will see, one of the fundamental issues at the root of these family conflicts is a disagreement about what similarity and difference entail in the first place.

Social pressure inflames disagreements about who is marriageable. Lebanon is a small world where families and social circles intertwine and where economic networks may rely on those relational ties. Most parents are terrified of the social consequences of their child’s mixed marriage, for that child but also for themselves. Threats of shunning are powerful. Children are supposed to act in ways that maintain a family’s networks and social worlds. Love is reciprocal; it carries expectations. The family members or friends pressuring parents, urging them to keep their child in line, to solve the problem of an errant relationship before the wrong person has been admitted into the family tree and social world, are also seeing difference where the couple sees similarity. At these moments, sect often seems like the only thing that matters, the most important characteristic of a potential spouse.

My interviews tell a different story. When I ranked the factors underlying parents’ concerns about mixed marriage, religious difference came in sixth. At the top of the list was “What will people say?”—social pressure, in other words, whether from relatives, neighbors, colleagues, or friends. Fifty percent of parents who had opposed a mixed marriage worried about social consequences. The two factors following closely behind amplified this social pressure. One was a difference of social status between families, whether defined by socioeconomic class or some other metric like education, time spent outside Lebanon, local area of origin, or sect. The other factor was a lack of exposure to people from the sect of the potential spouse, accompanied by fear of the unknown plus a reliance on negative stereotypes about that group (e.g., “They are less cultured”; “You will be forced to dress a certain way,” etc.). The next factors each came up in only 10–15 percent of parent objections: “The family is unknown to us,” often because of geographic difference; “The political situation will make life difficult for you if you marry someone from X community”; “You will not be able to raise children properly together”; “We are too different from them to make this work.”

People used the language of sect to describe most of these concerns or objections, but they weren’t about religious differences. No one was talking about which prophets a person believes in, or how they cross themselves or hold their arms during prayer. In Lebanon, sectarianism is the dominant script for social difference, the most readily available, tip-of-the-tongue language for talking about it. But it’s an empty script that can be molded to any meaning. Everyone assumes sect is the type of difference that matters most, but when people talk about sect as the problem, they are often referring to socioeconomic class, or village versus urban differences, or political disagreements, or some other issue. In that Lebanese saying—“A person who marries outside their religious group will die with their predicament”—the word for “religious group” is sometimes used more broadly to refer to other social groups, like family, region, or class. The fact that people recited the saying to me when I brought up mixed marriage demonstrates the prominence of sect as a category in Lebanon. Other kinds of social difference hover under the surface because sectarian language has already carved an easier path along which words can flow. And deep in the core, it’s usually about status—defined by different criteria but subsumed into the category of sect.

Relying on the language of sect simplifies people’s lives because it doesn’t see them through an intersectional lens, a lens that understands their experiences through the overlap of different identities. Being Sunni Muslim, female, wealthy, and urban is a radically different experience than being Sunni Muslim, male, poor, and rural. The combinations are myriad. Intersectionality isn’t simply additive.¹³ It isn’t enough to list the characteristics, like race, gender, and class, that shape a person’s life, identity, and experiences. The characteristics themselves aren’t separable; they define one another. Anthropologist Maya Mikdashi coined the term “sextarianism” to capture how sect and sex cannot be understood separately. She analyzes how, at every level—from state institutions like personal status law to practices like marriage or activism—sect and sex together shape Lebanese experience.¹⁴ As you read the stories in this book, keep this idea in mind.

Relying on the language of sect hides other kinds of difference from sight. The drama around mixed marriage uncovers those submerged differences, uncovers the taken for granted or deliberately ignored aspects of discrimination and stereotyping and shows us sect doesn’t have to be at the center. Seeing these other kinds of difference dislodges sect from prime position, making it one category of difference among many. As parents came to terms with their children’s choice of spouse, they too had to put sect back in its place, undoing their own assumptions and learning about the similarities that had drawn their son or daughter to that person. Nina’s parents were no exception.

Now that Ali was a reality, it was time for Nina’s parents to get to know him. Salwa had a long chat with him about the standard of living they expected him to maintain for their daughter. She left that conversation reassured and went to her husband and said, “Don’t tell Nina I said this, but I liked him, and if I like him, how can I blame her for falling in love with him? He’s a sweet, nice guy, very handsome; it’s easy to like him.”

Getting to know Ali helped allay one of her father’s concerns, which was that Ali would someday grow religiously conservative. “He is like us,” Salwa told me. “He has a drink after a long day at work; this makes us comfortable. We don’t drink a lot, only socially, but if he stopped drinking, that might bother me. And if I am honest, if his mother were veiled, that would have bothered me, because we don’t have such a thing in our family.” They did, however, have other mixed marriages in the family, which eased Salwa’s social worries. “If my daughter had been the first one in the family, ouf! It would have been too much. But because more mixed marriages were happening, I felt like, okay, maybe some people won’t say anything or hold this against me.”

It also helped that Ali had built a career that brought him into the Ras Beirut social circles of Nina’s family. Salwa and her husband had done their research: “Of course, we immediately started investigating, not only about him, but also about mixed marriages, the law, children, legacy, all those things, but yes, also about him. We asked around. And it turned out that one of my husband’s friends knew Ali well, and said he was one of his best students and also a gentleman. And Nina’s uncle asked also and came back and told us, ‘There is nothing against him, no one says anything bad about him. This person, as a man, as a guy, there’s nothing against him.’ This all helped.”

Key among the findings of their investigation was that Ali could indeed provide financially to allow Nina to maintain an upper-class lifestyle. Salwa was explicit about this point: “If Nina loved someone from a different religion who was poor, of course I wouldn’t accept it. Even if he was a Christian, I wouldn’t accept it. There are certain standards. It isn’t the money. He has to be educated and ambitious and able to give her a good life. And we need to be able to sit with his parents and be able to get along with them. It’s okay if they have a little less than us, and it’s even better if they have more than us, but it has to be similar.” As Salwa continued describing class similarity while insisting that it wasn’t about money, it became clear that she associated a certain level of material comfort with how people act at home: “He has to care for her, to treat her the way her father treats me.” As she got to know Ali, Salwa grew convinced that he was indeed like her husband in this way.

The moment her parents accepted the match, Nina’s extended family embraced Ali. Salwa and her husband threw the couple a huge engagement party. A few distant relatives expressed disapproval to Salwa: “One of my relatives told me that if it were her daughter, she would have committed suicide! Can you believe it? But she is a distant relative, and we didn’t pay her any attention.”

Ali’s family had remained silent until this point, but his parents were unhappy the couple chose a civil marriage in Cyprus instead of a katab kitab, a Muslim marriage contract, which could take place in Lebanon without Nina’s conversion. They blamed Nina, fearing she would pull their son away from his family and environment. Their discomfort erupted in arguments about the wedding details, like what the invitation cards should say. Nina’s father encouraged her to ignore them. He told her that he had gotten to know Ali, that he was a good man who loved her, and that’s why he had blessed the match.

By the time they married, Nina was thirty. “Ali always jokes about it,” she laughed. “One of his friends said to him, ‘You know what, they aren’t going to hand her over to you just yet, she’s still young, she will still get a lot of suitors, but once she hits her late twenties, if she isn’t married yet, her parents will give her to you.’ Ali jokes that it’s true, that’s what happened.”

Ali’s friend’s prediction speaks to double standards that hold only women to ideals of virginity and fertility. With time, not only did Nina grow in confidence, but her age put her at greater social risk for both premarital sex and fertility loss, which may have helped change her parents’ minds. Ali was also willing to wait—for Nina to be ready to face her parents and for her parents to see him through more realistic eyes. As Nina put it, “We survived so much, it shows how strong our relationship was, and he waited for me.”

Looking back, Salwa is happy that her daughter is happy and confident that Nina’s marriage is strong. But once in a while, small things irk her. When she attends a baptism celebration, there’s a twinge of envy toward the grandmother. Her relationship with Ali’s mother is pleasant but not chummy. “I’m not completely open-minded,” she admitted. “Of course, I would have preferred a Christian man, I can’t lie about that. But don’t ask me why, I know it’s silly, and when I think about it, I find it shallow. Saying, ‘Ouf, there will be no church, no church decorations,’ such silly things. But it was a preference. It was an expectation.” Those moments pass, Salwa rarely voices such thoughts, and all is well.

While Nina’s parents conceded that love won the day, love alone wasn’t enough to have changed their minds. In the end, as they got to know Ali, they could say to themselves and their social worlds, “Although he is Shi‘a, he is just like us.” But why did they assume he was so different in the first place? Such assumptions aren’t unusual in Lebanese society. Whether Christian, Muslim, or Druze, Lebanese parents often react in sectarian ways when their child wants to marry someone of a different group.

Sectarianism is one of the most overused and misunderstood words in US public discourse about Lebanon and about the Middle East more generally. Sect is not a natural category—it’s one of the many ways human beings categorize one another. Sect begins as a box into which people sort themselves or others according to ideas about religion, but over time, that box accumulates layers of meaning that have no relationship to religious belief or practice. Think about why there have been so few Catholic presidents of the United States, for example. Do American voters disagree with the way Catholics treat Communion versus Protestants? Some likely do, but for the most part, the problem is whatever else people associate with being Catholic versus Protestant. We could call that sectarianism. In Northern Ireland, the line between the two is staunchly political; the differences are about territory and sovereign loyalties. We do call that sectarianism. In the US, it is more common to use “denomination” to label groups like Roman Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Southern Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Methodists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses—to emphasize their Christian unity instead of their sectarian differences. To an outsider, the term “sect” makes just as much sense.

The word “sectarianism” has become a semantic mess—an umbrella term that includes the structural, political, institutional, economic, and legal aspects of sect-based discriminations along with the social and interpersonal.¹⁵ In Lebanon, the term carries at least three meanings. It is used to describe interpersonal and institutional discrimination against people of other sects. It also refers to the system whereby the government labels each Lebanese citizen at birth with their father’s sect—one of eighteen official religious and ethnoreligious categories counted by the state.¹⁶ That label determines the personal status law that applies to that citizen. To do anything related to personal status—marriage, divorce, child custody, or inheritance—a person must follow the laws of their category.¹⁷ Individuals’ official state-designated sect may have nothing to do with what they believe or practice religiously, how they identify, their political views, or even how society views them. Finally, sectarianism or, more accurately, “political sectarianism” refers to Lebanon’s political system since its independence in 1943, with those eighteen sectarian groups, none a majority, dividing power in the country. Lebanon is also a parliamentary democracy. Combining political sectarianism with parliamentary democracy means that every elected and appointed public position—from prime minister (always Sunni Muslim) and president (always Maronite Christian) to professors at the public university—is distributed according to sect in a system based on a nearly hundred-year-old census and ratified in the 1943 National Pact among political elites.¹⁸ (If this seems confusing, imagine how confusing the electoral college in the US is to people who understand democracy as a direct one-person, one-vote system.)

Sectarianism has come to exist through historical processes, processes that both lead to and are fueled by bias and discrimination. Antagonism between sects or religious groups is neither natural nor necessary. Relationships between groups take historically specific forms. Like other communal identities, sectarian categories—and even the idea of sect itself as a category—have been created by human beings over time. None of this is primordial or the inevitable outcome of age-old divisions.¹⁹ Lebanese sectarianism in all its forms developed over the course of history. Historian Ussama Makdisi has shown how, in the nineteenth century, interactions between Ottoman Empire reforms, European interventions, and local religious authorities led to sectarian politics and violence to such an extent that sect became the key defining aspect of modern political identity in Lebanon.²⁰ The French mandate government that held power between the end of World War I and Lebanon’s independence in 1943, along with local elites, solidified this nascent sectarianism, began the process of codifying it into personal status law, and created the political-sectarian government that persists today.

Once society is divided by sect and those categories carry political, economic, and social importance, their borders are maintained, not only by the state and institutions,²¹ but also by people going about their everyday lives.²² As a form of discrimination, sectarianism is constantly reinforced by people’s actions and words. Writing about racism, anthropologist Ghassan Hage explains how racists imagine their world and try to protect or secure some aspect of their lives by “turning difference into polarity.”²³ Once difference has been polarized, the racist works to manage their space or home, however defined, by excluding, eliminating, or controlling the other. If we apply this process to sectarianism, we see how when a parent freaks out because their child wants to marry someone of a different sect, that parent is creating social polarization—us versus them—by packing meaning into the category of sect. By paying attention to how this happens, we can see how opposition to mixed marriage perpetuates sectarianism. When they fixate on sect as the problem with their child’s choice of spouse, parents bolster the idea in society that sect matters more than anything else. When other people in those parents’ social worlds scold them about their child’s marriage or when gossip about their family reaches their ears, sectarianism gains fuel. When people are shunned, or threatened with shunning, for the apparent crime of not stopping a mixed marriage, sectarianism burns stronger.

The couples in this book show us how people push back at these ideas about difference, push back at the idea that everyone has to belong to a sect that defines who they are and who they love. Where their families or communities see only sectarian difference, they often see similarity. In the end, what constitutes a “mixed” marriage in the first place is in flux. Lebanese law thinks certain combinations are “mixed,” parents have varying opinions on the matter, and couples’ opinions vary even more. Some of my interviewees shook off their society’s ideas about sect and difference in their youth, some faced internal struggles before they could marry someone from a different background, and some were raised by parents who taught them the secular ideal that religion didn’t matter and then blindsided them when it came to marriage. Their perspectives are the foil for how sectarianism persists in society, revealing why they stand out as unusual, why some people are grafted onto a family tree without a fuss and others risk being pruned. While they understand that their love and persistence won’t end sectarianism or sect-based discrimination in society, many of them hope it will contribute to change. The final chapter of this book takes up that hope as a question about the future. And in the best of anthropological tradition, their struggles and hopes can teach us about our own social worlds and about how human beings react when people force a change in their ideas of who is in their family by creating new kin through marriage.

How does one study social worlds? Anthropologists primarily use two methods in their research: interviews and participant observation. The latter is exactly what it sounds like: participating in a social world while trying to understand it not only through your observations but also your own embodied experiences of sharing—to a certain extent—in that world. It sometimes feels like I’ve been doing participant observation for this book for most of my life. I was born in Beirut to a Roum Orthodox Lebanese father and a Protestant Armenian Lebanese mother. My family fled the civil war when I was young, emigrating to a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We visited Lebanon throughout my childhood, and as a graduate student in my twenties, I began spending summers, and then two consecutive years, living in Beirut on my own. Since then, and since meeting and marrying my spouse, whose worldview mirrors my own and whose family is Sunni Palestinian, I have continued to spend significant time in Lebanon. Several friends have pursued mixed relationships, and I’ve heard about their experiences, just as they have heard about mine. This book grew out of my efforts to make sense of the sectarian social worlds that infused my life uncomfortably. It was too easy to simply accuse people of being sectarian or racist or bigoted. I wanted to understand more about what was going on.

First, I had to figure out who I was going to interview. Rather than starting from geography—Lebanon—I started from a sense of identity—being Lebanese. Multiple waves of displacement precipitated by the civil war, Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982 and the Israeli occupation of the South until 2000, and economic migration—including the recent wave triggered by the currency collapse—mean that while approximately four and a half million Lebanese live in Lebanon, estimates of the diaspora population range from eight to fourteen million. My interviewees all understand themselves to be Lebanese, no matter where they were born or now live. Many also see themselves as part of a community of strangers connected by the fact that they married someone of a different sectarian group in a context where sect matters. The kinds of social relations they negotiated, the social dynamics that mattered to their families, and the struggles they faced in relation to their marriage choices connects them to each other. Their quintessentially Lebanese stories resonate outward, carrying perspectives and ideas that can teach us about the United States and beyond. Too often, images broadcast in film and media valorize an individualized romantic love that underestimates the degree to which family and society hold sway over many Americans’ choices as well, shaping the outcomes of falling in love.

I decided to focus primarily on Lebanese married to other Lebanese because I wanted to isolate sect-based discrimination in order to examine its roots and boundaries. I am keenly aware that many residents of Lebanon are not Lebanese. Whether fleeing violence or seeking work, around half a million Palestinian refugees, over a million Syrian refugees and laborers, many Iraqis and Kurds, and over a million migrant workers from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere live in Lebanon. Adding the dimension of racial and national categories would require another project. Including marriages to white Europeans, North Americans, or Australians would bring anti-Arab racism, its internalization, and Lebanese desires to view themselves as white into the mix. Including marriages to nonwhite non-Lebanese would add an analysis of the racism rampant in Lebanese communities, including anti-Black racism and intersectional racism against migrant domestic workers. While I understand that the families my interviewees created are defined as Lebanese families by excluding racialized others, in order to hold focus on sect, I didn’t include interracial or inter-national marriages. In a nod to the historical porosity of borders between Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, as well as contemporary population movements, a few couples where Lebanese are married to Palestinians or Syrians make an appearance.

Over a decade after first dreaming up this project, I began formal interviews, shifting from casually interjecting “What do you think of X?” into social occasions to recorded conversations where I asked people in mixed marriages to tell me their stories. The first one was in 2012. I started with friends and acquaintances, and it snowballed from there. Fearing my sample was too linked to Beirut and the university and NGO spheres where my friends clustered, I began asking random acquaintances in other fields and parts of the country if they could help me find interviewees. I placed an ad on Facebook and received a flurry of replies from total strangers. People were eager to share their mixed marriage stories. At the end of each interview, I always asked whom else they could put me in touch with. In the end, I completed interviews with people across a relatively broad swathe of Lebanese society. It took time. I followed many threads and lost some to communication gaps. I interviewed as many people as possible in person, stacking interviews on long days, and spoke to others, especially younger people, via FaceTime or Skype. We spoke in a mix of Arabic and English, depending on their inclinations. Some people interjected French, though I asked them to stick with one of the two languages in which I am fluent. Some interviews were one long conversation, others developed over time and multiple encounters. Most took place between 2016 and 2018, with a few lingering into 2019.

Overall, I recorded interviews with 192 Lebanese. This doesn’t include the handful of comparative interviews I conducted with interreligious Arab couples where neither party was Lebanese. Nor does it include the hundreds of informal conversations I have had with everyone from manicurists to close family members since the late 1990s about the subject. My recorded interviews included 158 people in heterosexual interreligious marriages (representing 129 such marriages), 9 in Sunni-Shi‘a marriages, and 5 in interreligious queer relationships. Sometimes I interviewed only one partner, sometimes I interviewed each spouse separately, and sometimes I interviewed the couple together. I left it up to them to decide. Of these interviewees, 74 percent were female, and 26 percent were male. All had married sometime between 1962 and 2018; the oldest was born in 1939, the youngest in 1992. Two people had divorced at the time of the interview and six were widowed, and the mixed marriage was a second marriage for two. Among them were nine families with multiple generations of mixed marriages, three sets of sibling pairs, and four other sets of relations (like cousins who were both in mixed marriages).

I also interviewed mothers of people in mixed marriages, from all the major Lebanese sects, plus a handful of other family members. Research assistants helped me gather additional data. Nadim el-Kak interviewed nine unmarried young women, then reinterviewed eight of them three years later. Mariana Nakfour interviewed religious clerics, Christian, Muslim, and Druze, and followed up on other research matters for me, like calling the morgue at the American University Hospital (now the American University of Beirut Medical Center) to ask about cremation rules and checking with lawyers to clarify personal status procedures. Statistics are difficult to come by in Lebanon, and most of the numbers I provide in this book are thanks to Mohammad Zamzam and his creative data gathering and number-crunching abilities.

I collected basic information about more than two hundred additional mixed marriages through stories people told about other people. There was a Maronite woman in the North who married a Muslim army officer who moved into the village and fit right in. There was a Druze man who converted to Shi‘i Islam to marry and was disowned. There was a woman whose first marriage, to someone of her sect, failed, while her second marriage, to someone of a different religion, was a great success.

Over the years, I heard more stories about failures than successes—mixed relationships that ended before marriage, often because one or both partners couldn’t handle the pressure. Lebanese interreligious couples face family opposition while dealing with laws that confound their efforts to build a life together, snide comments about their partner, myriad stereotypes wielded as weapons, and social norms telling them they are wrong—all on top of the usual stresses of growing a relationship and planning a wedding. Those who make it are rare. Most people don’t even contemplate breaking the rules. It may be unthinkable, or their social worlds might limit them to appropriate partners. Or they might suppress their desires, refusing to date someone of a different religion, or end mixed relationships before they get serious. The risks, hassles, and potential damage to family and social worlds simply isn’t worth it to them. It’s not all romance and kumbaya. Romeo and Juliet didn’t make it. Neither did Layla and Qays. The couples who make it to marriage, the couples whose stories you will read about in the pages that follow, are the exceptional ones.

So, who are they? They come from all the major Lebanese sects: Sunni Muslim (25 percent of my interviewees), Shi‘i Muslim (12 percent), Druze (16 percent), Maronite Christian (19 percent), Roum Orthodox Christian (16 percent), and other Christian sects (12 percent), including Armenian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Roum Catholic, Syriac, and Protestant. While Druze may appear to be overrepresented in my interviews because they are estimated to comprise less than 5 percent of the Lebanese population, this is in fact a close approximation of their representation in mixed marriages. The numbers Mohammad Zamzam crunched suggest that as of 2018, 19 percent of Lebanese interreligious marriages involved Druze. In other words, Druze seem to be more likely, per capita, to marry outside their sect than other Lebanese. Similarly, while I interviewed about half as many Shi‘i versus Sunni Muslims, our data shows that this is also a close approximation in terms of mixed marriages, as Shi‘i marriages to non-Muslims are 60 percent of such Sunni marriages.

My interviewees come from Lebanon’s cities, towns, and villages, from the North and the South, the coast, the mountains, and the Bekaa Valley. Most of them (57 percent) spent significant time in their youth in Beirut; others (10 percent) grew up outside the capital or abroad. No matter where they spent their childhoods, like many Lebanese, one-third lived outside the country for a time before marrying. By the time I interviewed them, they lived mostly in Beirut (58 percent) or in diaspora (25 percent).

They were primarily well educated. Two percent had never attended high school. Those who did attended a variety of institutions: charitable foundation schools (2 percent), the not-quite-free public schools (14 percent), relatively affordable parochial schools (24 percent),²⁴ and private schools ranging from the relatively affordable (20 percent) to the very expensive (29 percent).²⁵ Nine percent went to high schools outside Lebanon. Over half attended private universities in Lebanon (62 percent), while others went to the public Lebanese University (15 percent), studied outside the country (13 percent), or attended technical school (5 percent). Just under a quarter have graduate degrees in a variety of fields.

These educational backgrounds, combined with where they grew up, what their parents did for work, and their own self-identifications, tell us something about their class backgrounds. Approximately 30 percent hailed from the Lebanese elite or from wealthy families, 45 percent were from families with professional parents or self-described as “upper middle” or “middle class,” 10 percent were from families with parents who were teachers or public employees, 10 percent were working class, and 4 percent were from the rural poor. When I interviewed them, they worked in a wide range of fields, including finance/business (14 percent), academia (14 percent), UN/NGO/INGOs (8 percent), health care (7 percent), media (6 percent), the service industry (6 percent), education (5.5 percent), and as homemakers (5 percent), plus a few in advertising, engineering, IT, architecture, law, accounting, politics, sex work, agriculture, manual labor, and a few who were unemployed. These categories don’t capture Lebanon’s deep class polarization and related social segregation—marrying someone of a lower class is so unimaginable that the language for objecting to it scarcely exists. The categories also don’t capture the massive gap between those who are financially secure and those who are not or how wide that gap has grown.

There are no existing studies that would allow me to compare the demographics of my interviewees with the demographics of all Lebanese in mixed marriages. The data Mohammad extracted tells us that mixed marriages are indeed more common in Beirut than elsewhere, though growing up in Beirut doesn’t guarantee family approval. It’s clear that my interviewees are skewed toward the middle and upper classes. I don’t know if that is an accurate reflection of who is intermarrying, but I do know that Lebanese usually meet marriage partners from other sects at university or in their workplaces. Gender norms of employment make this less likely in working-class communities, and since the civil war, the affordable public Lebanese University has grown sect segregated. So, while my interviewees are wealthier than average and are centered in Beirut, it is plausible that so are Lebanese mixed marriages overall.

At the same time, family disapproval cut across geographies and class backgrounds. As one of my interviewees put it, “You’d be surprised; sometimes the people you think are not fanatics turn out to be. The ones who think of themselves as agnostic or secular will say ‘No way, no way’ to a mixed marriage in the family. Then someone whose family is politically conservative and very religious won’t have an issue with a mixed marriage. Sometimes you can predict it. But sometimes people really surprise you.”

In some places and times, especially when religious difference is linked to political divides, mixed marriage represents the ultimate in transgressive love and the transgression of communal boundaries through love. When Mohandas Gandhi’s son Manilal wanted to marry a Muslim woman, Fatima Gool, Gandhi wrote him a letter asking him to change his mind, for his own sake, the sake of his dharma, and, crucially, “the interests of our society.”²⁶ In twenty-first-century India, Hindu-Muslim couples that persevere are rare and generally part of the urban elite.²⁷ Islamophobia and anti-Muslim political agendas fuel the Hindu Right’s sensationalist allegations that an organized “Love Jihad” is tricking Hindu women into converting to Islam and marrying Muslim men.²⁸ Northern Ireland is another place where mixed marriages—between Protestants and Catholics—have been met with hostility and are rare.²⁹ Mixed marriages also lend themselves to imaginations of a more diverse, more peaceful future. Christian women married to Jewish men in pre–World War II Germany famously rescued their spouses through the only major German protest against the Nazi deportation of German Jews.³⁰ Scholars have asked whether increasing rates of ethnically mixed marriage among the nations of the former Yugoslavia might lead to greater acceptance of one another³¹ or whether intermarriage might be “a catalyst for social change” in Northern Ireland.³² In the US, concerns about Protestant-Catholic marriages (and later, Christian-Jewish marriages) moved from anxieties about the immigration of non-Protestants to evidence of their assimilation into white Protestant cultural worlds.³³

My interviewees had the capacity to see a future with the person they love despite social and familial forces insisting that such a future is impossible. And they had the capacity to act in ways that created that future. Some of them understood their own battles as part of something larger, part of an effort to change the sectarianism entrenched in Lebanon’s laws, institutions, and social dynamics. Others believed that love is blind to sect. Some held that they had the right to marry whomever they want; for them, it was a matter of independence and free will. Others knew they were breaking the rules and did so deliberately. Some struggled with their own defiance of convention, whether for reasons of faith or because of stereotypes or their desires for parental approval or social conformity. Others were caught off guard when their parents rejected their partners. And some refused to even acknowledge the rules they were breaking, denying convention power through their refusal. Their stories ranged from dramatic elopements or decade-long romances like Nina and Ali’s to short, intense conflicts or even unflappable family harmony.

Even when it was easier, it was rarely easy. “It was fine, though of course my parents would have preferred a [choose your sect] woman.” “We had no problems, but of course my parents would have rather had a [choose your sect] son-in-law.” It’s worth reading a little more into those statements, as some people hesitate to paint their parents or families in a negative light. Most of my interviews took place years after the stories people told me had ended with some approximation of a happily ever after. Their stories have been shaped and reshaped over time. In their retrospective narrations, they laughed about moments that now sounded absurd but were once painful. Underneath the words are people, relationships, knots of love that are being forcibly reshaped, strained, and sometimes torn in the process.

In some cases, emotions were still raw or relationships still sundered, pain seeping out like sap, even years later. One young woman who was shocked when her father denied her permission to marry her boyfriend began crying as she relived his rejection, reexperiencing both her anger and her empathy for how trapped he must have felt in order to do this to her. Others cried while remembering derogatory remarks relatives had made about their spouses. The most difficult moments were when people spoke about the loss of a parent who had not approved of their marriage—parents who passed away before forgiving their children or before giving them their blessing to marry.

I never pressed the issue. Some people paused the interview or began telling me another part of their story. But in most cases, emotion was in the past, surfacing in the narrative as a simple description: “It was hard.” “It was difficult.” As you read these stories, place yourself into their narrators’ shoes. Imagine what it would feel like to lose a relationship with a loved parent or sibling. Imagine what it feels like to have to choose between the person you want to marry and a parent, knowing that you could lose one of them. That feeling is in all these stories, even when it doesn’t appear on the page.

I wish I could tell all the stories I gathered, but there simply isn’t space. You’ll rarely meet people twice in these pages, and many of their stories fit well in multiple chapters. As you read them, I hope you build a collective sensibility about their themes and patterns, as I did during my research. To protect people’s privacy and identities as much as possible in this compact social context where I have to assume that people might know or know of one another, I’ve done more than change names. (There’s one couple in the book who insisted that I leave their names as is, but I’m not telling you who they are.) I blurred some incidental details in ways that don’t alter their stories. If I changed a job, I chose something associated with the same class and status. Artists didn’t become doctors, nor did pharmacists become rural laborers. I specified only those neighborhoods that matter, using regions of the country instead, or descriptors like “Christian foothill town” or “mountain suburb of Beirut.” The length of time between meeting and marriage might have shifted by a year or two. The sofa in the living room might be beige instead of brown. Numbers of siblings might have changed.

I also followed up with people to check how they were doing. In early 2021, I sent drafts of stories to most of my interviewees for confirmation that I had adequately protected their identities. The responses were overwhelmingly positive. Very few asked for changes, most said they enjoyed reading about themselves in the third person, and some found it odd. Two people hated the pseudonyms I had chosen and asked me to change them. Nina chose her pseudonym to echo one of her favorite works of art, a sculpture representing a tragic interreligious love story.³⁴ A few people asked me to reinsert details I had removed (like the type of work they do) or corrected errors of detail. A few asked me to change additional details. And a few asked me to delete harsh comments their parents had made or the “likes” and “ums” that peppered their speech. I honored all these requests. The vast majority made no changes to their stories.

Many also shared both happy and sad news. Some had lost parents in the year(s) since we had last spoken. One had divorced. Some had been injured or had family members severely injured in the devastating August 4, 2020, explosion in Beirut, though thankfully none of them lost their lives. In the wake of Lebanon’s economic collapse, some had emigrated, often with heavy hearts. Others were thinking about doing so or trying to adapt to a new reality in the country. Despite the overall tragedy of 2020, others shared joy: new babies, a child who had graduated, a new job or opportunity, a renewal of vows.

December 30, 2020

Hey Lara,

It’s been a long time. Much has happened. We left Lebanon and we are now in Abu Dhabi. Actually we are doing our 14 days quarantine. We had to leave. Although I was “thawra” [revolution] to the bone and one of the front liners who used to get beaten up, at the end I decided that as much as I love my country, I love my kids more and they deserve to be pulled out of this abusive relationship that has been going on for generations in Lebanon.

To end the story on a positive note though, this Christmas my parents invited Ali’s parents to spend Christmas Eve with us and they came and everyone had a good time. After corona, the crisis, the nuclear explosion in Lebanon we have all learned that other than love and family nothing else matters.

I now sleep next to a few Virgin Marys on my bedside that I collect. Although I used to be agnostic, I have found love and peace in praying and I now do that almost every other night before I go to sleep. I have the Mar Charbel oil that I put on my head, Ali’s, and my children’s every other day. Ali on the other hand is still a scientist at heart but he allows me to put the oil on his forehead when I pray. It’s funny when I read this! So much has changed since I last saw you but I am still in love with my husband and grateful to life and God or spirit for everything it has given me, for protecting my babies when they were at home alone when the explosion happened. True I left Lebanon with no money, uprooted, and that house you wrote about I cried many tears over, as I looked up from the street for the last time remembering all the good times we had there, but Lebanon gave me the love of life, my family, and the resistance to live no matter the circumstances.

Xx from Abu Dhabi,

Nina

As I wrote this book, many of the people who generously shared their stories with me found their lives upended. Since completing my interviews, Lebanon has undergone a revolution that began in October 2019 (in which many of my interviewees took part) and its subsequent suppression by the state,³⁵ experienced a massive explosion in Beirut (heard as far away as Cyprus and felt in the mountains), and is in the throes of an economic crisis and currency devaluation so shattering, so deep, that it is predicted to rival the civil war and great famine in terms of devastation wreaked in the country. Salaries in local currency became virtually worthless, medications disappeared from the market, and prices for basic necessities, when one could find them, increased tenfold, practically overnight. When I began my interviews, the poverty rate was 20 percent; as I write, it has jumped to more than 80 percent.³⁶ Meanwhile, Lebanon and California, where I am located, along with the rest of the world, have weathered the Covid-19 pandemic as well as heat waves, floods, fires, and other symptoms of climate change. And as this book goes to press, the Israeli military is executing a genocidal assault in an effort to eliminate Palestinians from Gaza, and regularly bombarding southern Lebanon.

How does one write from 7,430 miles away from a place that holds a piece of one’s heart as that place is shattered by layers upon layers of violence and criminal negligence? When the narrators of the stories you tell have had close calls, relatives hospitalized, homes destroyed? When we are all experiencing tidal waves of shock and grief and disbelief and rage? When couples who once imagined flying to Cyprus for a civil marriage can no longer afford the airfare, and courtships have been delayed or broken because people have died, or can’t afford to find a place to live together, or have emigrated, seeking to make a living?

I hold to the idea that these stories of love and family, tears shed over disapproval rather than stitches and wounds, matter—as history, as fantasy, and as dreams for the future. All anthropological research, all ethnography, is always about the past. We imagine that it’s about the contemporary moment, and that it’s the job of our historian colleagues and friends to take up what came before. But there is no such thing as the present once you try to grasp it, ponder it, write about it. Living in time limits human beings, including anthropologists, to writing about the past. The ideas and interviews in this book grew before the multiple crises that uprooted Nina and many others, but those ideas and desires and problems continue into the imagined future, as discriminations to be dismantled and instantiations of possibility, including kinship possibilities that cut across sectarian identities and assumptions. In these conditions of crisis upon crisis, social networks are more important than ever as a source of support, even necessary for survival. Whether expanding or disrupting the social norms of kinship, the consequences of mixed marriage have only grown deeper.

With that, I invite you into these Lebanese social worlds.

Notes

1. Nina later told me she bought the “Muslim painting” from a Syrian antique dealer and the Christian one from a Vienna flea market. She knew the latter was a copy of an “old master” painting. My colleague Luis Salés helped identify it as an inexact copy of Raffaello Sanzio’s Madonna del Prato, 1506.

2. “Roum Orthodox” officially translates to “Greek Orthodox,” but to avoid conflation with Greek ethnicity, I follow their self-identification in Arabic.

3. Whether Druze counts as a sect of Islam depends on whom you ask and for what purpose (marriage, census numbers, etc.). Most Lebanese consider Druze a different religion altogether.

4. I explain how I came to these numbers in the final chapter of the book.

5. McCarthy, Interfaith Encounters, 126.

6. Estimates of Christian populations vary widely and are politicized, but it is safe to say that Lebanon has at least three times as many Christians as Egypt or Jordan.

7. Adely, “A Different Kind of Love,” 111; Haddad, “Christian Identity.”

8. See Mahmood, Religious Difference; and Erwin, “Reconciling Conflicting Identities.”

9. In “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Deniz Kandiyoti classically terms women’s strategizing within the limitations of their social world the “patriarchal bargain.”

10. Mikdashi, Sextarianism, describes this intersection between sect and sex as “sextarianism.”

11. See also Allouche, “Love, Lebanese Style.”

12. Merton, “Intermarriage,” 362 (emphasis added).

13. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.”

14. Mikdashi, Sextarianism.

15. Haddad, “‘Sectarianism’ and Its Discontents,” details this lexical confusion around “sectarianism.”

16. The largest of these categories are Sunni Islam, Shi‘i Islam, and Maronite Christianity. There are also significant populations of Roum Orthodox Christians, Melkite Roum Catholics, and Druze (counted as Muslim by the state but not always by other Muslim communities). The state also recognizes two additional Muslim groups (‘Alawites and Isma‘ilis), nine Christian ones (Roman Catholicism, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholicism, Assyrian or Nestorian, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholicism, Chaldean Catholic, Coptic Orthodox, and Protestants/Evangelicals), and Judaism.

17. There are fifteen of these personal status laws; three sects follow close approximations.

18. The French, with local elites, established this system during their post–World War I mandate to give Maronite Christians political dominance. The quotas are based on a questionable, politically motivated 1932 census. See Maktabi, “The Lebanese Census.”

19. Scholars have thoroughly debunked the ideas that sect and sectarianism are primordial and explain all conflict in the Middle East. See, inter alia, Beydoun, Al-Jumhuriyya al-mutaqatti’a; Gökarıksel and Secor, “Uneasy Neighbors”; Haddad, “‘Sectarianism’ and Its Discontents”; Harik, Politics and Change; Hurd, “Politics of Sectarianism”; Joseph, “Politicization of Religious Sects”; Kern, Imperial Citizen; Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism; Traboulsi, History of Modern Lebanon; and Weiss, Shadow of Sectarianism.

20. Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism.

21. On how sectarianism is maintained and reproduced in the civil, political, legal, religious, and economic realms, see Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come; Cammett, Compassionate Communalism; Clark and Salloukh, “Elite Strategies”; Deeb and Harb, Leisurely Islam; Joseph, Gender and Citizenship; Kingston, Reproducing Sectarianism; Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism; Majed, “In Defense of Intra-sectarian Divide”; Mikdashi, Sextarianism; Monroe, Insecure City; Salloukh et al., Politics of Sectarianism; and Salti and Chaaban, “Role of Sectarianism.”

22. Deeb, Nalbantian, and Sbaiti, Practicing Sectarianism.

23. Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, 98.

24. These were mainly Catholic schools but included Orthodox and Protestant schools. For 2023–24, Beirut Baptist College tuition is $2,000, and Saint Coeur Catholic School tuition is between $1,650 and $1,900. The latter can be paid in Lebanese lira, making it more accessible for families without access to dollars. A Human Rights Watch January survey completed in 2022 found that the median household income in Lebanon was $122 per month ($1,464 annually). See Human Rights Watch, “Lebanon: Events of 2022.”

25. Local private school tuition for 2023–24 ranged from $1,500 to $4,000. Schools like Rawda ($5,000), Sagesse, and Ahliyyeh were more expensive. The most popular elite schools among interviewees were International College (IC) and Collège Protestant (CP), followed by Collège Louise Wegmann, the American Community School (ACS), and Brummana High School. In 2023–24, ACS cost $11,000. IC lowered its tuition after the economic collapse to $7,000, matching CP.

26. Gandhi, Collected Works, 35.

27. Chopra and Punwani, “Discovering the Other.”

28. Gupta, “Hindu Women, Muslim Men”; Rao, “Love Jihad.”

29. Leonard, “It’s Better to Stick to Your Own Kind,” estimates that 2 to 10 percent of all marriages are mixed in Northern Ireland.

30. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart.

31. Kandido-Jakšić, “Social Distance.”

32. Leonard, “It’s Better to Stick to Your Own Kind,” 99.

33. Cromer, “Intermarriage Handbooks”; Campbell and Putnam, “America’s Grace.”

34. Dainius, “Moving Statues of a Man and Woman.”

35. Karam and Majed, The Lebanon Uprising of 2019.

36. Human Rights Watch, “Lebanon: Events of 2022.”