Treating Sectarianism in Lebanon

In the wake of the great uproar of the past month, which sowed division in the ranks of the Lebanese and stirred up religious factionalism anew, we received the following word from one of our thinking women of letters, in which she proposes a remedy for this rampant national disease.

A psychological complex, in the view of the psychologists, is an idea surrounded by an emotional halo that screens off sound thinking and drives its bearer to aberrant or mistaken conduct.

Such is sectarian consciousness among the Lebanese generally: a latent psychological complex whose symptoms flare up at every opportunity and every occasion, like the chronic diseases that make their presence felt at every change in the weather.

Yet the disease of sectarianism, though it is among the dangerous diseases, is not an ill beyond cure. The cause of its spread and of its ravages among us is only that we still, to this very hour, nourish its causes, entrench it in our soil, and smooth for it the means of growth, applying no remedy at all — though we know it to be the deadliest of our diseases, and though we speak, in secret and in the open, of the evils and injuries it inflicts upon us.

And when I say that we are responsible for its spread, I mean I, and you, and every Lebanese.

What have we done, until now, to combat sectarianism?

What have we done to fuse the parts of this homeland in a single crucible, making of its inhabitants harmonious, concordant elements that work for the good of the whole, and that regard every part of Lebanon as a homeland for all, and every one of its inhabitants as a brother to the other, as true patriotism and the modern democratic conceptions require?

The fact is that we have done nothing but widen the gulf standing between one sect and another, between district and district, between quarter and quarter — nay, between individual and individual.

Our schools are a medley clashing in tendencies, languages, methods, and aims, in which the discord of the sects and the collision of policies are mirrored.

Our public institutions, our organizations and our associations, are further instruments of division: each of them belongs to a sect or a party, and you will not find among them a single one free of the influence of certain leaderships and the effect of certain propagandas.

The laws of personal status embody our doctrinal differences, and their charge has been entrusted to people whose interest is to keep the old upon its oldness, stamped with the stamp of the Middle Ages; they fear for it any change that would bring us nearer the spirit of modern civilization and spread among us a measure of understanding and harmony.

Our democratic constitution is one of the pillars of division, for it decrees the distribution of the parliamentary seats and the distribution of offices and posts on the basis of sectarian representation. This means that every step we take, and every project, governmental or otherwise, obliges us to observe this principle, to follow the path of appeasement and compromise, and to beware of angering this sect or that. The clear result of it is the sacrifice of competences for the sake of appeasement and deference — and at times the creation of superfluous posts and works, the squandering of vast sums, and the neglect of pressing and essential needs, in fulfillment of the principle of sectarian balance.

Nor do the consequences stop at this limit. We observe, beyond this, that the relations of the sects among themselves rest on a basis of rivalry instead of cooperation. And rivalry is not always happy in its outcomes; often it drives its parties into recklessness and absurdity. Nor is it hidden from us how the sects race to display the outward shows of religion, competing in the magnification of feasts and rites and in the bolstering of husks that are no part of religion at all — alongside their neglect of the spirit of religion, which commands brotherhood and requires the purification of the inward before the outward.

I halt my word at this limit, wary of pressing deep into a subject that requires a closer and further-reaching study. Perhaps it will be granted someone among the people of sincerity to study it at length. And perhaps the progressive groups in this country will hasten to treat the danger before it grows rampant, by calling for a campaign of reform that uproots the disease from its base, and is not content with sedatives and patchwork, as has been our habit heretofore. At the head of the list of reform stands the abolition of the principle of sectarian representation in the constitution; for it is the fundamental reform that can draw behind it a chain of the needed reforms in the fields of education, law, and society.

If we wish to erase sectarianism from souls, let us begin by erasing it from the registers and the texts. Its existence or its passing hangs upon our will.