The marital state: Personal status laws, discourses of reform, and secularism in Lebanon
Item
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Title
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The marital state: Personal status laws, discourses of reform, and secularism in Lebanon
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:1608d16e3700:11464
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identifier
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11921
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Creator
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Abillama, Raja,
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Contributor
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Talal Asad
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cultural anthropology | Middle Eastern studies | Law | Religion | Ethnic studies | Christianity | Islam | Lebanon | Marriage | Secularism | State
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Abstract
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An important aspect of the modern Lebanese state is the arrangement of personal status laws, which consigns matters of marriage and its consequences to the several Islamic, Christian, and Jewish religious authorities. With the absence of civil jurisdictions, some individuals choose to get married under the civil laws of countries, such as France, Cyprus, and Turkey. Recurrent attempts to make civil marriage in Lebanon legal have proven to be controversial and ended ultimately in failure. The problem of marriage has accompanied the system of personal status since the formation of the Lebanese state under French Mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This dissertation aims to offer an account of what is at stake in marriage. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Lebanon, it analyzes the terms of the controversies over legal reform, opinions about civil marriage, as well as the decisions of the Maronite Catholic, Sunni Islamic, and civil courts in matters of personal status. It argues that at stake in marriage is the very assumption upon which the modern Lebanese state rests, namely, that Lebanon consists essentially of a variety of religious communities each possessing a distinctive personal status. The formal articulation of that status is the several religious personal status jurisdictions that oversee marriage. This assumption gives rise to a specific configuration whereby marriage, religious communities, and the state, are interconnected. Rather than adopt a perspective that sees in the problem of marriage an opposition between secularism and religion, this study seeks its conditions in tensions internal to the secular itself, in the ambiguities between moral autonomy and religious belonging, freedom and equality, religion and law.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Anthropology
