Why Lebanon was not religiously divided, and how the West made it this way

Lebanon is unique. It is a highly diverse country in terms of religion, while its culture reflects contrasting aspects of Westernization and traditionalism. This small Middle Eastern country is a microcosm for the entire Islamic world, as it incorporates many different conditions that parallel situations elsewhere. Through intensive study of Lebanon, one could gain insights into nearly every issue found in the Muslim world. I want to quickly mention here how a sustained Western presence throughout the 19th and early-20th centuries fundamentally altered the inter-religious dynamics of Lebanon, causing excesses of violence and disharmony.

Among Lebanon’s most well-known institutions, The American University of Beirut was formerly called the Syrian Protestant College, which was started in the 1860s by Western missionaries. In particular, American Protestant missionaries, who first came to Lebanon around 1819, left the most lasting impact on its social landscape. At the time, Lebanon was associated with Biblical scriptures, and so the premeditated efforts of missionaries stemmed from preconceptions of Lebanon’s social terrain. Unfortunately, the fundamental structures of Lebanese society were drastically dissimilar to those of the United States or Western Europe, and immediately missionaries acted to enforce their familiar social categorizations based on religion. The problem was that Lebanon had always been an inter-religious place, where diverse sects of Muslims and Christians cohabitated without discrimination.

To make a long story short:

Beginning around 1820 and continuing through the next century or so, history is fraught with specific instances where the policies of Western actors, be they missionaries, militaries, or mercantilists, indelibly affected Lebanese society for the worst by harming its religious harmony. It began with the empowerment of certain Christians, which soon interrupted a delicate economic balance, and caused a civil war in 1860. The conflict actually began in Syria and proceeded to spill over, just like the ongoing conflict in this area today. The themes of religious hierarchy and categorization that were introduced by American Protestant missionaries beginning in 1819 were soon reinforced by British and French foreign policy beginning in 1860. Lebanon was among the chief suppliers of silk to Western Europe, where the Industrial Revolution meant a newly booming textile industry. A disruption of the flow of silk welcomed direct British and French involvement, which directly followed the social layout imposed earlier by missionaries.

Eventually, the theme of religious categorization would be made permanent by Confessionalism. Per the Sykes-Picot Agreement during WWI, Lebanon was a French colonial mandate. In 1926, Lebanon’s new constitution called for a government based on Confessionalism, which meant that representation in the government would be proportional to the population percentage of a religious confession. This equated to a Maronite Christian president, a Sunni Muslim prime minister, and a Shi’a Muslim speaker of the house. For the longest time thereafter, Shi’a Muslims represented a majority of Lebanon’s population, but held minority power. AMAL and Hezbollah were two Shi’a groups that arose to fill the political void for those marginalized from power, particularly in Lebanon’s rural south. Yet, even today, when someone from south Lebanon dies as a martyr, be it fighting in any conflict, he is sometimes memorialized on a roadside billboard. This applies to all religions equally. Christians and Muslims of all types are shown the same honor and respect from the inter-religious community. Why? Because this is how it had always been. Inter-religious solidarity for the sake of community traditions and well-being had always eclipsed religious division. Look at Lebanon’s numerous civil wars. On the surface, they appear to be inter-religious conflicts, when the real causality, which is apparent upon careful research, actually rests overwhelmingly with political and economic factors.

Where else might this be the case?

*More specific/related information on this subject to follow in later posts.*

 

About the author

Ethan Lazuk

Born in Montana in 1989, I attended high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and college at Northern Arizona University and The University of Connecticut, before finally coming to The University of Montana, from which I recently earned a Bachelor's degree in Central and Southwest Asian Studies. I currently live in Washington D.C.


Although American English is my first language, I also have an intermediate/advanced knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic, with some Lebanese and Gulf vocabulary, as well as a basic knowledge of Farsi-Persian. My academic areas of interest include Cultural Anthropology, Islamic Studies, and Environmental and Human Geography. While my research interests include pre-Islamic religions and socio-political structures from the Middle Eastern and Central Asian regions; the formative years of Islam and the subsequent developments of alternative interpretations, or madhabs; intra-communal and inter-religious relationships in a pre-colonial context; the effects of colonial encounters on indigenous community structures and socio-religious ideologies; Orientalist versus indigenous historical narratives and interpretations; and political Islam and modern-day social movements, especially in response to Western foreign policy. In 2010, I was a summer intern with the Department of Defense, working on Ft. McNair Army Base in the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, and I have traveled in Istanbul, Turkey and lived for three months in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.


I am a third-generation American of Polish descent. My great-grandparents fled Eastern Europe during the Bolshevik Revolution and entered the United States through Ellis Island. Today, my parents and sister live in Colorado, where they are surrounded by the beautiful Rocky Mountains. I am also happily married to the love of my life named Dania. Originally from al-Madinah, Saudi Arabia, she came to the United States two years ago as an exchange student. She is a practicing Muslim. But I am a searcher who finds beauty in all religions, and therefore I do not belong to any one religion in particular. But her and I having different religious beliefs has not negatively affected our marriage. In fact, it has brought us closer together. We respectfully embrace our differences, while cherishing our infinite similarities. If being in an inter-faith marriage has taught me one thing, it is that religious differences are not a cause for division, but for collaboration.

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