Lebanese Women at the Crossroads: Caught between Sect and Nation

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Thirty years after the end of the civil war, Lebanese women are still struggling for gender equality. This study builds on recent scholarship on womens activism in the Arab world, in the context of the Arab Spring. It examines how discourses of secularism and equal civil rights have informed the contemporary Lebanese womens movement in their campaigns for a domestic violence law, womens nationality rights, a womens quota in parliament, the reform of personal status law and the recognition of civil marriage. This book argues that women are caught between sect and nation, due to Lebanons plural legal system, which makes a division between religious and civil law. While both jurisdictions allocate women relational rights, guided by the logic of patrilineal descent, womens inequality is central to the reproduction of sectarian difference and patriarchal control within the confessional political system, as a whole.

Reviews

This book explores the nature and persistence of gender inequality in Lebanon in the context of the political and social upheavals triggered by the 2011 Arab Spring. In October 2019, activists again mobilized street demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience calling for an end to state corruption, economic failures, and rampant inequality, including gender discrimination. Using interviews, surveys, and archival and ethnographic research, Hyndman-Rizk (Univ. of New South Wales, Australia) reveals the dynamics of gender inequality and its role in the countrys unique sociopolitical and legal systems. A legacy of the French mandate, the Lebanese state formally recognizes 18 distinct religious communities resulting in a plural legal system, where personal status codes that regulate marriage, divorce, and inheritance are embedded in the different religious laws of each confessional community. The authors careful analysis reveals the deep-rooted patriarchal values entrenched in both the civil and religious laws that trap women between sect and nation in Lebanon. Ongoing popular demands for secularization and democratic reform will, no doubt, lead to improvements in gender equality, a goal that Lebanese women activists continue to strive for. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

* Choice *
Lebanese Women at the Crossroads is a must-read handbook for activists and policymakers, showing how Middle Eastern women can exploit the lingering disruptions of the Arab Spring to fight for equal rights. In her up-to-date study of womens activism in Lebanon, Hyndman-Rizk argues that civil marriage is the key to unlocking colonial-era patriarchy and to unleashing freedom for women and democracy for all. The primary task ahead, therefore, is wage a longterm campaign, online and off-line to change popular opinion and so to challenge the continued resistance of religious elites. -- Elizabeth F. Thompson, American University

Author Bio

Nelia Hyndman-Rizk is lecturer in cross-cultural management at the University of New South Wales.