Contesting Secularism: Civil Marriage and Those Who Do Not Belong to a Religious Community in Lebanon

Abstract

AbstractIn late 2012 the first civil marriage in Lebanon and, at the end of the following year, the first Lebanese baby to be not registered as belonging to a community, were officially recognized months after administrative delay and legal argumentation. These recognitions unsettled the Lebanese consensus that all citizens belonged to one of the communities of Muslims, Christians, or Jews that, moreover, had long held exclusive jurisdiction over the marriages of their members. A space seemed to have opened up in which a secular alternative could be pursued in the conduct of matters of state and personal life. Based on an analysis of the constitutive processes of this recognition, I trace the lineaments of a distinctively Lebanese secularism, which, I argue, consists of the assumption that marriage and identity are joined together in a mutually dependent relationship. I show that although the recognition of civil marriage and non‐belonging may seem to drive a wedge between marriage and identity, they are in fact a different way of rearticulating this assumption and the attitudes, norms, and practices that sustain it. Far from securing their stable separation, the recognition shifts their point of tension from the community to the individual, and from legal to administrative power.