Anti-Muslim hate on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean: Lebanon, the Hijab, and modernity/coloniality

ABSTRACT

Informed by the theorization of the modernity/(de)coloniality studies collective, this paper thinks alongside hijabi women in Lebanon – a small Arab Mediterranean country – and their lived experiences in “mainstream Lebanese society”. Drawing on six-months of qualitative fieldwork through in-depth interviews and focus groups with photo-elicitation, the paper documents and analyses lived experiences of discrimination, exclusion and erasure. Identifying dehumanization, civility and progress, and a present potent wider rejection of Islam in Lebanon, it argues for a framing of participant’s shared experiences as anti-Muslim racism under modernity/coloniality and highlights the need to de-exceptionalize the region and the analytical tools mobilized to understand it.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Muslim hate
• racism
• hijab
• Lebanon
• Islam
• decolonial

Acknowledgment

This project benefitted from the Institut Francais du Proche-orient AMI 2018 Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is important to note here that this Christian hegemony was in line with a gendered enforced secular-religious binary, one that was common across post-colonial settings (Al-Ali 2000; Kandiyoti 1991). This remains beyond the scope of this paper, see Maldonado-Torres (2014).

2 Lebanon is governed by what can be described as a hybrid political order with significant complexity. The entwinement of the Lebanese state with contemporary coloniality and historical colonialism and the production of the ensuing order require an exploration beyond this paper.

3 Some fieldwork data and quotes from participants used in this paper have appeared in Kassem (2020) where I advance a critique of the state-centric and legal-centric approach to anti-racist resistance and religious freedoms.

4 It is important here to acknowledge and affirm the prevalence of various other forms of exclusion in Lebanon, from anti-blackness and colourism to migratism and the Kafala system.

5 The service sector is a key sector of the Lebanese economy, playinh a central role in imagining Lebanon. See, for example, Maasri (2016) and Kardahji (2015) for an analysis of Lebanon’s postcolonial formation by a westernised elite as a laissez-faire haven of commerce, finance and tourism.

6 A key finding of this research was the consistency of these experiences across sects, although some minor variations do exist. Evidencing this consistency and the minor variations remains beyond this paper.

7 It should be noted that Muslims are prohibited from living in a number of Christian regions across Lebanon, at times through official municipal decisions.