Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 0-520-21846-9.
In his Culture of Sectarianism, Ussama Makdisi conceives
sectarianism as a modern phenomenon, one that emerged with the
Ottoman Tanzimat in the 1840s, and concurrently with the European
interventions in the internal affairs of "the sick man of
Europe" that followed. It is this cut between the old and
the new, or the pre-reforms and the Tanzimat, that structures
not only the major thesis of the book itself, but many of the
narratives that the author uses in support of his thesis. Makdisi
would thus like to present an historical and dynamic view of sectarianism,
at least one that does not lock the various Lebanese confessional
communities into permanent ahistorical and religious conflicts
whose essence would be in some presupposed "tribalism"
of those Arab milal. Thus, besides being an outcome of
the reform policies, sectarianism "is a discourse that is
scripted as the Other to various competing Ottoman, European,
and Lebanese narratives of modernization" (p. 6). The assumption
here is that the Ottoman imperial bureaucracy, European governments,
their protégés and consuls (in particular the British
and French), and the Lebanese élite muqata'ji
families (in particular the Maronites), all created discourses
of modernity, and even though different, they still overlapped
with one another in that they all construed Mount Lebanon as a
region of archaic and sanguine conflicts, described in terms of
"tribes" and "religions" with never ending
conflicts. They were thus all oblivious to the fact that a couple
of regional and international factors have contributed in a shift
of power relations, first between the central imperial bureaucracy
and the various Lebanese communities, and then, within those same
communities, and, finally, between the notable families and their
base, in particular the peasantry (but also possibly the Maronite
clergy from which originated for the most part the popular and
laborious classes of society). To be sure, the Egyptian occupation
of Greater Syria (1831-40) was what initiated the watershed, followed
by the demise of the Shihabs in 1841, who had been ruling Mount
Lebanon since late in the eighteenth century, but who were granted
so much protective privileges under the Egyptians that the withdrawal
of the latter meant their own final demise. Since then, and a
fortiori after the peasant revolts in 1858, the massacres of 1860,
and the mutasarrifiyya rule that followed, Mount Lebanon
had a difficult time.
How was then this sectarian discourse of the Other construed?
To begin, Makdisi does not look at the Ottoman discourse-the one
at least that emanated from the central imperial bureaucracy-as
one from the "inside," meaning that it was one, among
several competing others, that the local ahali-or
ra'iyya in Ottoman usage, or the 'ammiyya, as the
peasants and commoners in the 1858 uprising called their "movement,"
or the juhhal ("ignorants"), as their clueless
masters labeled them-had to confront; hence the sectarian discourse
of the Other was a "protective" shell that would eventually
lead those communities in the modern era. In fact, Makdisi insists
that "Mount Lebanon was communally reinvented [since the
1830s] in the sense that a public and political sectarian identity
replaced a nonsectarian politics of notability that had been the
hallmark of prereform society" (p. 68). The assumption, therefore,
is one of "break" (coupure) between communities
constructed on religious identities-prior, say, to the Egyptian
rule in the 1830s-and those same communities who had to struggle
with modernity by constructing sectarian identities. Thus, Makdisi
perceives the sectarian project as so different from its religious
predecessor that even the attempt to conceive the reforms and
their aftermath in terms of "the reemergence of a coherent,
primordial religious identity" (ibid.) as an historical fallacy
to which many historians have succumbed, since "They have
not examined the anxiety inherent in this new elite sectarian
project; nor have they sufficiently noted its obvious contradictions,
its tentativeness, and its underlying fragility" (ibid.).
But since the book is mostly rooted in the early and later Tanzimat,
with only a sketchy account of the Egyptian experience in the
1830s, and with even sketchier accounts of the traditional-or
pre-modern-communities of the early nineteenth century, it is
difficult, at least from my standpoint, to get any convincing
view of where the difference lies between the "religious"-or
should we say the "confessional"?-and the newly emerging
"sectarianism," and more importantly, why wouldn't a
revival of the old confessionalism be possible?
The problem lies, I think, in Makdisi's characterizations of
the Lebanese ancien régime as one of "elite
violence deployed to reaffirm a rigid, status-based social order
defined as the rule of knowledge over ignorance. Local communities
did not identify themselves tribally or nationally, and they subsumed
their religious identities within a political and public space
that accommodated differences of faith" (p. 29). Such an
order, we are told, cut Lebanese society in two: at the top, stood
the notable muqata'ji families, with the commoners, ahali,
at the bottom of that hierarchy, and rank rather than religion
was what brought those communities together through a minimal
cohesion of their élites: "Family alliances occurred
across religious lines, creating alternate kinships that transcended
differences of faith" (p. 35). But while Makdisi proceeds
to draw that picture of cohesion "from the top," one
that brought a de facto stability to the "old régime,"
we remain uncertain as to how the peasants and commoners managed
the abusive fiscal conditions instituted by their notables. Was
it enough, one might rightly ask, that the social flirtations
at the top--which did not even include religious intermarriages,
but only formal "tolerance"--be enough to establish
a status quo within the "limits of Ottoman influence"?
Considering that a rich historiography of the social and economic
conditions of Ottoman Mount Lebanon exists, inaugurated in the
late 1960s with the work of Iliya Harik and Irena Smilianskaya,
and then revisited only few years later by Dominique Chevallier,
and more recently by Richard van Leeuwen (the long and protracted
civil war has apparently discouraged many historians for more
archival work), I find it erroneous that Makdisi fails to integrate
their findings within the framework of his own research. That
would have definitely complicated his limited picture to the point
perhaps that the "narratives of violence" might have
taken another dimension, or at least we might have perceived them
under another light. Instead, contributions to the socio-economic
history of Lebanon are listed in the lavish bibliography, and
sporadically commented in the long and equally lavish footnote
section (pp. 175-229). In one such footnote, Makdisi laments that
"Materialist historians such as Irena Smilianskaya and sociologists
like Samir Khalaf have argued that the violence in 1860 was in
essence a corruption and a 'diversion' of class struggle into
sectarian life" (p. 212). Such an attitude, one might add,
was common throughout the recent civil war (1975-90) when pro-Marxist
intellectuals, among others, also construed the war as a "hidden"
class struggle with a religious (sectarian) ideology at the surface.
But there is no need, however, and no point in simply reversing
that formula: it is not really a question of materialist versus
spiritual, or socio-economic versus sectarian for that matter.
In the same way that, to use Makdisi's own concept, there is an
historical discourse of sectarianism, one that evolves in space
and time, and which brings politics together with geography, violence,
and religion, there are "economic" discourses of property,
contract, tort and crime, and kinship, which may overlap at times
with other discursive practices. The point here is that if we
manage to draw, based on the available historiography and documentation,
a broader picture than the one imposed by Makdisi, under what
light will the history of modern Lebanon appear?
To begin, there is no need to postulate religion-whether in
the old régime or the new one-as some kind of social epiphenomenon
that accompanies much deeper social and economic transformations.
Nor is it helpful to conceive of sectarianism, as Makdisi does,
as that problematic evil spirit that the Lebanese had to go through,
and still go through, in order to survive the modern times. And
finally, the conception of sectarianism as the discourse against
the colonial Other (or should we say one that mirrors that Other?)-whether
Ottoman or European-is not helpful either. For one thing, religion
is a total phenomenon, one that absorbs daily life, politics,
the economy and law. Religion does not structure the lifeworld
causally, but it provides a system of values that provide opportunities
for a group of people to structure their daily experiences with
meaningful norms. In a society like Mount Lebanon, where the economic
does not dissociate itself as an autonomous level from the religious
and political, landowning patterns and fiscal policies were thought
from within the politico-religious hierarchy. Thus, the Maronites,
because of their special religious status as dhimma, had
legally protected themselves with what Ibrahim Aouad had termed
a "droit privé," a mixture of customary
practices and canon law, and a system where women did not inherit
much property, and where arbitration was directly under the tutelage
of the clergy. Moreover, when Maronites opted for the Beirut Sunni
courts rather their own clergymen, it was precisely because women,
under Hanafi practice, could be kept outside the system of waqf
beneficiaries. The conversion of some factions of the Shihabs
from Sunni Islam to the Maronite faith (even though Bashir II
kept his faith play like a riddle to his own entourage), was,
to be sure, a unique case in Ottoman Syria, but also an example
that proves the rule; namely, when a notable family decided to
expand its domination beyond its own districts, it had to had
the "right" religious coloring. There were things that
the Shihabs could do as Maronites--for example, special ties to
the Church; or landholding and inheritance patterns not subject
to shari'a law--that would have been costly to maintain as Sunnis.
They also kept their relations for the most part endogamic, intermarrying
among cousins--a practice that the Catholic Church in Rome considered
as incestuous, but which they nevertheless maintained because
they thought of it as economically advantageous (in the same way
as the Druzes did)--and when they married from the outside, they
gave preference to Circassian slave girls.
The point here is that if we consider religion as a total phenomenon,
which historically manifests itself in different forms, then any
disruption at any level, in particular if it triggers a crisis
within the values of the community, could provoke a massive restructuring
over a long period of time, and, to be sure, the Tanzimat period
as a whole did represent such a challenge. But conceptualizing
the transformations for that period and its aftermath as sectarianism-in-practice
does not add any explicative value to the nature and scope of
the societal changes that Mount Lebanon went through. For one
thing, it unnecessarily fragments Lebanese history into a pre-modern
and modern typology, without, however, even bothering as to the
historical consequences of such a division. Makdisi describes
such entities of the "old régime" as the family,
village, and rank as "secular identities," while a public
and political culture existed that "functioned through an
unspoken recognition of the temporality of loyalty," and
with the nobility knowing and accepting its limits (p. 36). But
what was it that made the old-régime family "secular,"
and how did it then get sectarianized--together with identity,
landscape, and the politics of the nobility--with modernization?
I find it hard to conceive an institution like the family outside
the realm of the religious. For one thing, anything from marriage,
divorce, inheritance and death, all fall within the domain of
religious law, and all share a direct economic value. Moreover,
those are typically the kinds of institutions whose change, under
an historical period of intense restructuring, is extremely slow,
almost imperceptible, and always to be accounted on a longue
durée basis. We therefore need to follow their evolution
over very long durations--longer, say, than economic cycles of
prosperity, crisis, and decline--to determine when, how, and under
what circumstances they were subject to change.
A more compelling analysis would not dissociate family, identity,
and rank from the religious in the first place, and they definitely
did not get sectarianized during the early or late reforms, nor
did the politics of the nobility for that matter. Makdisi has
a hard time describing those historical changes, thus reducing
them all to a newly-born sectarian politics, simply because he
did not invest enough effort to track them down to their complex
institutional roots. He traps himself into simplified images of
the "old régime," thus secularizing institutions
that had nothing secular in them, then sectarianizes what was
already religious and always functioned as such. In short, instead
of eliciting how the religious assumes different historical roles,
he proceeds by sudden cuts, first from one period to another,
and then within the institutional frameworks of each period.
Despite such shortcomings, I would agree with Makdisi that
the period under scrutiny had something very different from the
early part of the century, but what exactly? Speaking of the beginnings
of confessional troubles in the 1840s, right after the demise
of the Shihabs, Makdisi notes that "the local elites knew
that in the post-Tanzimat world this power was to be had
only along sectarian lines" (p. 76). And those same élites
"sought to transform their religious communities into political
communities and to harness invented traditions into their respective
causes" (p. 77). Then, regarding the 1860 massacres and their
aftermath, Makdisi notes that "At stake in Kisrawan was more
than a physical struggle over control of land. There was a contest
to redefine the term ahali, a well-embedded trope in old-regime
chronicles. A single, undifferentiated category of the ahali
was, after all, a construction of old-regime chronicles; it was
a source of legitimacy for those rulers who guaranteed the tranquillity
of the common people and who maintained a stable social order"
(p. 104). Several things were at stake in this transitional period,
outpaced perhaps by the notion of the destabilization of the existing
social order. To begin, we need to work the first half of the
nineteenth century thoroughly to check whether the "disruption"
claimed by Makdisi was not already at work even prior to the Egyptian
invasion. To be sure, the extensive silk cultivation and manufacturing
in Mount Lebanon has linked a primitive economy to European capitalism,
a process that must have affected landholding patterns, fiscal
policies, and hierarchies within the nobility, either within the
confessions or across confessional lines. Pro-Marxists, or those
who look upon the "material conditions" as having their
last word, might perceive such transformations as crucial in undermining
the old feudal order and placing Lebanon under the yardstick of
world-capitalism, meaning that classes will not only inevitably
replace the old social categories, but more importantly, they
will constitute the new paradigmatic existence of the various
Lebanese communities. In short, modernization implies a new class-struggle
paradigm within that of the newly formed nation-state. But, as
Makdisi rightly argues, sectarianism has prevailed, beginning
with the Tanzimat and up to the modern period.
The disruption of the old order-whether historicized on a longue
durée basis, or perceived as an inevitable outcome
of the reforms-implies that the old hierarchy of knowledge has
been disrupted as it is no more exclusively produced and circulated
by élite groups, whether secular or religious. The ahali
were no longer a single coherent group, whether in the eyes of
their own nobility or in their perception of one another. The
tools and forms for the transmission of knowledge have been enormously
complicated by the ubiquity of what Benedict Anderson has labeled
"print capitalism." Division of labor in society has
in turn become more complex, opening the way to new professions
and markets. But excessive professionalization, and the ubiquity
of the printed materials that eventually led to a new form of
knowledge circulation, only helped in the isolation and alienation
of individuals from their social milieu, hence from their religious
groups. In other words, both professionalization and the proliferation
of knowledge from various sources, by dismantling the old hierarchies,
contributed in the loosening of individuals from their communities;
but, paradoxically, it was that kind of individualization that
disrupted the old communities and that was to create a new revamped
role to religion-call it sectarianism, if you wish. An essential
aspect of modernization implies the demise of the old empire systems,
which will effectively only take place by the end of the First
World War, and their replacement by a combination of colonial
nation-states. But the culture of the nation-state assumes individuals
accepting the common political language of that state, a proposition
that turns out to be problematic in multi-sectarian societies
like Lebanon. In effect, with the dismantlement of the old political
hierarchies, which in themselves were centers for the production
of knowledge, a new common political language sets itself gradually
within the (mostly religious) community, but this time that language
does not emanate from visibly established centers of powers. Instead,
it is a common and confusing pool of contributions and power-distribution,
and within such a milieu the religious gains new grounds simply
by virtue of being the most common language within the community.
In short, religious language achieves an unprecedented source
of notoriety.
The Tanzimat are often referred to in modern Ottoman historiography
as "centralizing" attempts from the imperial bureaucracy.
Indeed, centralization, and its corollary decentralization, have
been widely demarcated as concepts that denote either hegemonic
policies, or in periods of weakness, the relaxation of such policies.
Centralization, however, is a western concept that fits well with
the coming of the nation-state, but is unsuitable to describe
the imperial policies of an empire. In fact, centralization is
too radical a concept as it presupposes the application of a set
of norms over a national territory, while decentralization implies
the bureaucratic delegation of such tasks to various authorities.
But such concepts do not work well in the context of an empire
simply because empires do not attempt to impose unified norms
over their multi-ethnic territories. They rather proceed by implementing
various plans of rationalization primarily with fiscal purposes
in mind. Thus, the iltizam system had such a scope: it was considered
more efficient and rational than its predecessor, the timar; and
so were the Tanzimat, which unsuccessfully attempted to abolish
the iltizam, and only managed to revamp the judiciary by drastically
limiting the role of the shari'a courts. Makdisi associates the
birth of sectarianism with the evolution of the Tanzimat on the
basis that the ahali found themselves into an alien
discourse of modernization. There was thus, following this view,
an internal process of Ottoman colonization that preceded the
French one and prepared for it. I tend to see a slow implementation
of the Tanzimat in Greater Syria, one that probably grew stronger
in Mount Lebanon because of the uprisings and massacres. Moreover,
there was a unique dynamism in the Lebanese socio-economic relations
that led to bypass, since early Ottoman rule, the timar system,
which in turn led to an early adoption of the iltizam; and by
the nineteenth century, the evolution of silk manufacturing, and
the disproportionate expansion of Beirut, all led to an autonomy
of the Lebanese system that was not much related to the Ottoman
reforms. Moreover, the various Lebanese communities did not grow
along similar lines-a further indication of religion as a "cosmos"
that absorbs the lifeworld-but diverged greatly, and more so under
the impetus of a proto-capitalism in the region, which contributed
in their internal tensions. Thus, the Maronites and the other
Christians, who embraced more forcefully than others the economic
expansion, had their nobility lose for the most part control of
politics, and gradually a "middle class" came into being,
one already anticipated in the dissolution of the ahali,
while both Druzes and Shi'is managed to maintain their old feudal
families. Thus, while the Druzes "won" a military victory
in 1860, their political hierarchy was so well conserved that
it represented all by itself a political defeat. That pattern
could in fact be observed throughout the twentieth century, and
to date, the Druzes are still represented by the Junblats and
Arslans.
To conclude, unless we look at religion as a total historical phenomenon that shapes the societal relations within a community in their totality, we then face the danger of misrepresenting transitional periods by attributing to them historical missions that they certainly would not have shared.
Zouhair Ghazzal
Associate Professor,
Loyola University Chicago
Department of History
820 North Michigan
Chicago, IL 60611
Fax: (312) 803-0532
zghazza@luc.edu