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Secular Coexistence in Lebanon: Christians, Muslims and Subjects of Law

Online ISBN:
9781399507561
Print ISBN:
9781399507547
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Secular Coexistence in Lebanon: Christians, Muslims and Subjects of Law

Raja Abillama
Raja Abillama
Fordham University
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
6 December 2023
Online ISBN:
9781399507561
Print ISBN:
9781399507547
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

Secular Coexistence is a study of the coexistence of Christians and Muslims in Lebanon as it takes shape through Lebanese law. Coexistence, it argues, is a response to the contingent fact that Christians and Muslims are encompassed within the space of the secular state. As such, coexistence is neither a current projection onto an imagined past, nor an abstract ideal for a distant future, but a constitutive principle of an eminently secular social formation, embedded in the very concepts, practices, and attitudes that articulate it. The book shows that secular coexistence in Lebanon consists in a legal arrangement through which Muslims and Christians are secured in place and, at the same time, secured a place from which they are constrained and enabled to articulate their distinctiveness and difference in ways that are legally intelligible while containing their religious passions. Thus, coexistence is a constitutive power in so far as it requires of Christians and Muslims specific modes of belonging to comparable and interchangeable forms of life as (by) dispassionate bodies. Secular Coexistence in Lebanon is an anthropological contribution to scholars and students of secularism, religions, law, and the Middle East.

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