Social Science Research Council

"The Making of Sectarian Shi`i Lebanon, 1926-1948"

My dissertation begins from the premise that the "Lebanese Shi`a" became a legible historical figure at a particular historical conjuncture in the second quarter of the 20th century, at a moment in which Lebanese sectarianism and nationalism merged into one. While the Shi`i community has historically-and persistently-been portrayed as lying just beyond the pale of the Lebanese sectarian-national body, I argue that Lebanese Shi'i marginality was socially and culturally-not to mention ideologically and politically-produced. For the most part, lachrymose representations of Lebanese Shi'is and South Lebanon (Jabal 'Amil) hinge on the erasure of concrete material processes that contributed to their underdevelopment. On those rare occasions in which historians have paid attention to the history of the Lebanese Shi`i community, it is most often by resorting to elite political and religious history or the economic history of the southern Shi`i heartland. By contrast, I will suggest a more fruitful approach to this problematic-the shifting nature of Lebanese state-Shi`i society relations-one that highlights the importance of institutions for the production of multiple Shi`i identities. Through a reading of French colonial records, the communal and national press, religious tracts, law manuals, memoirs and Shi`i Islamic court records, I seek new ways of thinking about Lebanese Shi`i history. Such a perspective will demonstrate the extent to which the production of Lebanese Shi`ism has been grounded in the social and cultural history of religious practices, the infrastructural (under)development of South Lebanon and the Biqa` as well as the operation of various legal and educational institutions. My dissertation shows how the making of sectarian-nationalist identities through institutional and popular practices was a dynamic process and a critical element in the forging of 20th century Lebanese state-society relations. I will conduct nine months of archival research in, among other sites, Shi`i courts, schools and religious institutions in Beirut and southern Lebanon, flanking a three month summer stint at the French foreign ministry archives in Nantes.