Reconstructing the nation-state: The modernity of sectarianism in Lebanon

Middle East Report

Volumn , Issue 200, 1996, Pages 23-26

  Makdisi, Ussama ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONFLICT; ELITE POLITICS; SECTARIANISM;

LEBANON;

EID: 5744232443     PISSN: 08992851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3013264     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. As witnessed by its use to describe developments in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, "Lebanonization" has come to refer to any process of national disintegration and failed modernization throughout the world.
2. See Leila Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (London:I.B. Tauris, 1994); Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: The Center for Lebanese Studies in association with I.B. Tauris, 1993).
3. See Leila Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (London:I.B. Tauris, 1994); Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: The Center for Lebanese Studies in association with I.B. Tauris, 1993).
4. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
5. Ahmad Beydoun, Le Liban: Itineraire dans une guerre incivile (Paris: Karthala, 1993), p. 22.
6. See Kamal Salibi in A House of Many Mansions: History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), p.134.
7. Henri Lammens, La Syrie: precis historique (Beirut: Dar Lahad Khater, 1994 [1921]), p. 365.
8. This is part of a wider study of sectarianism that is the subject of my unpublished doctoral thesis, "Fantasies of the Possible: Colonialism and the Construction of Communalism in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon."
9. Partha Chatterjee dealt with the subject of how the colonial government in India tirelessly sought to "unambiguously" classify the Indian population into coherent castes that defied the complex and often "uncolonizable" voices of actually-existing Indian people; see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.220.
10. The ideologies of the Young Turks are very well described by Sukru Hanioglu in The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Rashid Khalidi, "Ottomanism and Arabian in Syria Before 1914: A Reassessment" in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih and Reeva S. Simon (eds.), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1991).
11. The ideologies of the Young Turks are very well described by Sukru Hanioglu in The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Rashid Khalidi, "Ottomanism and Arabian in Syria Before 1914: A Reassessment" in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih and Reeva S. Simon (eds.), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1991).
12. An independent Lebanon, wrote Lammens, was the only guarantee "to allow full liberty" for the Lebanese, whose Christianity required a separate republic that could be protected from Muslim domination. The declaration of Grand Liban signified France's sacred duty to help Syria and Lebanon "develop" independently Lammens, op. cit., p. 300.
13. James L. Gelvin has written an important essay on the populist dimension to the rise of Arab nationalism in Damascus that moves away from elite-based analyses to stress what he calls a "populist political sociability" that explains the emergence of Arab nationalism as a mass-based ideology. "Social Origins of Popular Nationalism in Syria: Evidence for a New Framework" International Journal of Middle East Studies 26 (1994).