Islamic visibility in Lebanon, the banking sector and Eurocentric modernity: erasure, development, and the post-colonial nation-state

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on in-depth reflexive and qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2018 thinking alongside visibly Lebanese Muslim women. Based on participants' shared experiences, the paper argues that visibly Muslim women are excluded from employment in the Lebanese banking sector in line with this sector's pursuit and larger alignment with Eurocentric modernity. It identifies powerful narratives of development, progress, and the Lebanese nation-state with its post-colonial imaginary as key forces underlying this exclusion as well as key horizons it pursues. Accordingly, it posits that private capitalist financial institutions such as Lebanese banking function as apparati of Eurocentric Modernity's contemporary hegemonic establishment and reproduction through everyday lived experiences. Challenging the dominant representations of Lebanese banking as emancipatory and progressive, it examines contemporary national banking ‘from below’ as a contribution to emerging decolonial research in political economy, international political economy (IPE), everyday IPE, and cultural IPE.

KEYWORDS:

• Banking sector
• Islam
• decolonial
• financial institutions
• Lebanon

You can never be hijab-wearing and work in a bank [in Lebanon]. I know people who have taken the hijab off to get a bank job. (Focus group, Dahieh)

In 2018, I conducted qualitative reflexive fieldwork exploring the lived experiences of visibly Muslim women in Lebanon. Throughout conversations, the Lebanese banking sector emerged as a space where visibly Muslim women were excluded and erased from employment – an exclusion absent from scholarly as well as public and media debates in the country. Analysing participants’ shared experiences, the paper argues that this exclusion falls within the Lebanese banking sector’s pursuit and larger alignment with Eurocentric modernity. In this sense, the paper identifies powerful narratives of development and progress and the Lebanese nation-state and its post-colonial imaginary as key forces underlying this exclusion as well as key horizons this exclusion pursues. Accordingly, it concludes that capitalist financial institutions such as Lebanese banking function as apparati of Eurocentric Modernity’s contemporary hegemonic establishment and reproduction through everyday lived experiences.

Challenging dominant representations of Lebanese banking as emancipatory and progressive, the paper presents an innovative empirical examination of Lebanon’s banking sector ‘from below’ and in the contemporary moment. This is particularly important given that this is a case-study of everyday experiences within the Arab-majority region, beyond dominant focus on both the global north and macro-institutions and analyses. It shows how questions of religious semiotics and racialized socio-cultural practices are aggressively controlled by an imagined national economy shaped by a wider and global Eurocentric modernity in which national banking occupies a central position. Offering an important intervention into the study of financial institutions in the Arab-majority space, the paper invites a rethinking of private banking and its examination beyond ‘economic’ functioning as it contributes to international political economy (IPE), everyday IPE, and cultural IPE. Particularly, it complements growing decolonial and emerging ‘decolonial political economy’ scholarship where modern states and global financial institutions are shown to be powerful apparati of Eurocentric modernity by showing how national private banking also performs such a role at the level of everyday lived experiences.

Eurocentric modernity, decoloniality, and racialization

Holding that conventional paradigms of political economy are inadequate and insufficient in making sense of the visibly Muslim women’s erasure from financial institutions encountered in the field, this paper is informed by the work of the decolonial studies collective as a body of theorization that generatively engages with this project’s data. In this decolonial theorization, modernity is conceptualized as a narrative and a project of domination: seen from the outside of Europe, it is the colonial and imperial pursuit of a universal world where the Eurocentric is enforced as the ‘present of history’ and the centre of the world (Mignolo, 2012). Here, the western and European is transformed into the definition and measure of progress, development and civility – functioning narratives concealing Eurocentric modernity’s ongoing movements of assault and erasure (Vázquez, 2012, p. 242; Mignolo, 2012).¹ This movement, this scholarship argues, operates as a global ‘matrix of power’ that builds on the ‘legacies of Empire’ including the world’s post-colonial nation states as potent apparati of Eurocentric modernity’s hegemony and reproduction (Mignolo, 2012).

In this ‘matrix of power’, racialization is a key structure – understood as ‘a classification according to a certain standard of “humanity”’ rather than a classification based on phenotypical features (Mignolo, 2012, p. 55; Grosfoguel, 2016). Institutionally produced and established, racialization accordingly anchors a complex ‘global hierarchy’ of control and hegemony (Grosfoguel, 2016, p. 10; Tilley & Shilliam, 2018). In this sense, race holds multiple articulations whereby different forms of racisms exist – coded by different contextual markers including ‘colour, ethnicity, language, culture and/or religion’ (Grosfoguel et al., 2015, p. 636). Drawing on this conceptualization of racialization and race, the case here will focus on Islam as a racialized identity.

Religion is indeed a key instance of such a racialization with Eurocentric modernity being both Christian-centric and, simultaneously, secularizing. With its narrative since the seventeenth century, Eurocentric modernity has identified humanity with ‘being secular bourgeois’ as Christianity ‘looms in the background’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, 2014).² Eurocentric modernity consequently situates Islam and the Islamic as its antithesis, producing powerful anti-Muslim racism (Grosfoguel, 2016; Tlostanova, 2014). A discourse of time is key here. Through such a discourse, the Islamic is racialized as inferior, backward, as well as historical while the Eurocentric is defined as the developed future (Vázquez, 2009). This racialized Islamic further intersects with gender and patriarchy where Eurocentric modernity presents itself as championing women’s emancipation while concealing its own deep patriarchy as it establishes and mobilizes gender inequalities for its hegemony (Brayson, 2019). Islamic dress has here occupied a central position where a ‘criminalizing [of] Islamic dress evidences the attachment of the colonial past to the present and future’, as the visibly Muslim woman becomes an ‘“avatar” in the public-political imaginary’ of a gendered anti-Muslim racism (Brayson, 2019, p. 62; Barras, 2010).

While capitalism has not received sufficient attention in contemporary decolonial scholarship, key decolonial thinkers have noted its constitutive role as a key component of Eurocentric modernity’s emergence and movement of erasure (Bhambra, 2021; Mignolo, 2012). In line with this, an emerging body of scholarship has called for moving away from conventional paradigms of political economy towards a ‘decolonial political economy’ approach that centres racialization, colonial legacies, and Euro-American epistemic and material domination situated within the larger structures of Eurocentric modernity’s project of hegemony (Grosfoguel, 2007; Gradin, 2016; Tartir, Dana & Seidel, 2021; Tilley & Shilliam, 2018). Aligned with this decolonial scholarship and informed by developments in ‘everyday political economy’ and ‘cultural political economy’ (Hobson & Seabrook, 2007; Sum & Jessop, 2014; Mezzadri et al., 2021; Elias & Rai, 2019; Elias & Roberts, 2016), this paper situates itself as everyday decolonial IPE. By examining banking institutions’ relation to Eurocentric modernity’s establishment at the level of everyday experiences. Through a centring of the excluded’s own lived experiences, it contributes to the much needed conversation between IPE, everyday IPE, and decolonial studies (see Rutazibwa, 2020; Hamm & Smandych, 2019). Importantly, this includes complementing the standard macro and structural analyses that have so far been put forth within decolonial IPE through a case study of a complex neoliberalized and plural country from the eastern Mediterranean. Cultural and everyday IPE, on the other hand, are often dominated by studies of cases from the global North where religious semiotics, racialization, and private banking institutions have received little attention. This paper offers a redress to these significant gaps. Indeed, the paper makes visible the value of such research for a better understanding of Eurocentric modernity’s complex contemporary workings and, ultimately, the possibilities of resistance.

Lebanon: unequal citizenship, westernization, capitalism, and a (Eurocentrically) modern banking sector

Lebanon is a small country on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean that ‘never existed before in history but is rather an invention of the Franco-British colonial partition of the Middle East’ (Traboulsi, 2007, p. 75). A key pillar of Lebanon’s foundation in the early half of the twentieth century was its projected role as a beacon of the French mission civiliatrice in the Arab East (Traboulsi, 2007; Salibi, 1998) as part of Eurocentric modernity’s larger project of domination and hegemony in the region. In this construction, religion was a key racializing marker in the country leading to Lebanon’s significant Muslim population being relegated to second-class citizenry as per Eurocentric modernity’s hierarchization (Firro, 2002; Zogheib, 2014).

In 1975, a long civil war in relation to complex shifts in both regional and global geopolitics began and did not end until 1991 with the Taif accords and an ensuing power re-distribution. Asserting Lebanon’s ‘Arab face’ (but not identity under a powerful movement to keep the country distinct from its Arab surrounding in line with dominant Eurocentric narratives of Arab inferiority), the accord left the Lebanese constitution and much of the nation’s colonially instilled structures intact. Today, Lebanon survives through a delicate power balance under a confessional political system as it navigates multiple lines of global division (Hajjar, 2009; Hakim, 2013; Hermez, 2015; Peri, 2014).

As a result of decades-long systematic efforts by Christian nationalists both the Lebanese founding myth as well as the majority of the Lebanese contemporary scene continue to be characterized by a distancing from Arab culture and a rapprochement to the European one (Felsch, 2018; Kaufman, 2004; Nair, 2013, p. 11; Nammour, 2007; Stone, 2007).³ With the country often imagined as being in the Arab Middle East but not of it, Lebanon remains a space where a cosmopolitan ‘Western-oriented Lebanese subjectivity’ stands prime across social spheres as Eurocentric narratives dominate its socio-cultural space (Maasri, 2016, p. 138; Buccianti-Barakat, 2006).

At the economic level, a capitalist, liberal, laissez-faire economic model has long been dominant in Lebanon – arguably since the country’s very post-colonial establishment as part of a larger reorientation of the region’s economy in line with European interests (Kardahji, 2015). With finance, trade, and services central in this economic model, Lebanon was birthed as a nation of deep inequalities and instabilities (Safieddine, 2019). Prior to the civil war, this system was powerfully controlled by political Christian Maronitism. Yet, with the Taif accord and the ensuing power redistribution, a capitalist liberal western-oriented Muslim political elite emerged (Traboulsi, 2007; Baumann, 2017). In deep entwinement with Gulf Petro-money, this ‘westernized elite’ (Baumann, 2017; Grosfoguel, 2016) aligned itself with Lebanon’s post-colonial western-oriented invention and continued work toward Eurocentric ‘development’ in deep entanglement with the international neoliberalizing capitalist institutions of IMF and World Bank.

The financial and banking sector in Lebanon, on the other hand, forms a key pillar of the Lebanese economy; often presented as the ‘only … backbone of Lebanon’s struggling economy’ (Platt, 2008, p. 22) as well as the historical ‘apex of the Lebanese political economy’ (Hourani, 2015, p. 138, 2010; Moore, 1983). Until the October 2020 crisis, the sector has indeed long been framed as an exceptional success in both public and scholarly debates.⁴ This framing dates back to the end of the 1950s, shortly after Lebanon’s post-colonial establishment, when banking was made into the county’s most powerful economic sector (Abou-Zeinab, 2006; Kardahji, 2015). The sector then quickly developed into the ‘main financial centre of the Arab region’ by the 1970s and survived the civil war ‘without major disruptions’ (Hakim & Neaime, 2005, p. 121; Safieddine, 2019). Historical research on the financial sector shows the sector to be deeply entwined with the Lebanese state’s westernized ruling elite alongside a powerful alignment with global capital (Safieddine, 2019). In this sense, Hourani (2015) conceptualizes the sector as ‘an embodiment of politico-economic power and as the institutional interface between the dependent Lebanese economy and the global realm’ where political and economic power fused with one another and entangled with westernizing ‘globalization’ in the reproduction of the Lebanese nation-state (Hourani, 2015, p. 141; 2010; Safieddine, 2019).

While historical analysis forms the overwhelming majority of the literature on Lebanese banking, some financial and academic literature has sought to cover more recent times. Throughout, a narrative of the sector’s exceptionalism both in relation to other sectors of the Lebanese economy as well as to banking within the wider Arab region can be identified (See, for example, Dudley, 2012; Hancock, 2015; Keay, 2016; Naimy & Karayan, 2016; Gardner & Schimmelpfennig, 2008). Most importantly, the sector is here standardly represented as ‘developed’ with leading ‘modernizing technological advancement’ and ‘international’ ‘high-standard’ services (Abou-Zeinab, 2006; Audi et al., 2016; Kardahji, 2015; Koksal, 2016; Tarhini et al., 2016). Saad (2011), for example, describes the Lebanese banking sector by repeatedly referring to its praiseworthy ‘similarity’ to ‘developed countries’ and the ‘west’ (Saad, 2011, p. 20). In examining this literature, narratives of Eurocentric progress and modernity ultimately dominate as the sector is claimed to be a prime example of Lebanon’s semblance of the west and dissimilarity from the wider Arab region. The elaborate website and publications of the official Association of Banks in Lebanon similarly reproduce such representations of a sector the ‘forefront’ of ‘international’ and ‘modern developments’.

A key issue in the literature is women’s longstanding significant presence within the sector’s workforce, constituting around 50% of employees since at least 2001 according to the Lebanese Banking Association’s official website.⁵ Within this website, this presence is highlighted as a ‘key feature’ of the sector and an indicator of its ‘modernization’. Indeed, the Lebanese banking sector is standardly presented as a sphere ‘evidencing’ Lebanon’s difference ‘from its neighbouring Arab counterparts by a higher degree of democratization and women emancipation’ (Safieddine et al., 2006, p. 639; Kobeissi, 2006). Across scholarship, this is explicitly claimed to be a result of Lebanon being ‘more open to the West’ (Jamali et al., 2005, p. 584; Tlaiss, 2013; Crossman & Abou-Zaki, 2003). In this sense, this presence is presented as a key avatar of the country’s development and progressiveness under hegemonic narratives of Eurocentric modernity’s association with women’s emancipation and the non-west’s construction – particularly the Islamic and the Arab – as misogynistic and oppressive of women (see Al-Saji, 2010; Massad, 2015). Ultimately, Lebanese banking is drawn in academic scholarship and beyond as a developed and modern sector and a prime case of Lebanon’s national post-colonial westernized identity. The remainder of this paper, instead, will problematize this representation and make visible the deeply exclusionary and assaulting nature of Lebanese banking and will situate this exclusion within this same semblance and proximity to Eurocentric modernity and pursuit of Lebanese post-colonial identity.

The research: qualitative fieldwork and decolonial listening

This paper is based on qualitative fieldwork conducted across Lebanon between May 2018 and December 2018. It draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus-groups using photo-elicitation with visibly-Muslim Lebanese women. For the purposes of this work, visibly Muslim Lebanese women is understood as women committed to any form of distinctly Islamic dress in line with the way this category was understood in the field.⁶ The hijab, or the Islamic headscarf, is the key example of this category but was certainly not the only one as various other forms of dress considered to be Islamic exist in Lebanon. Certainly, visibly-Muslim Lebanese women is a heterogenous category impacted by variables including sect, class, and age, for example. Participant’s lived experiences are accordingly complex and heterogenous, structured by the intersection of multiple identity variables. This paper focuses on participant’s Islamic visibility, leaving it for future work to analyse the wider elements and intersectional nature of visibly Muslim women’s lived experiences in Lebanon.

Fieldwork began through contacts in the country from previous research projects and then snowballed. Questions and conversations in the field revolved around the lived experiences of being visibly-Muslim in Lebanon across economic, political, and social spheres. The data presented here is based on these conversations, all conducted with participant’s informed consent to contribute and partake in the project.⁷ Data collection was conducted by myself, an identifiably Lebanese Shia Muslim male based in the English academy. While I shared a nationality, religion, ethnicity, and language with participants, I did not share their gender and was situated as someone who studied and worked in the UK. This meant I occupied a complex positionality where a generative insider/outsider combination exists (Adu-Ampong & Adams, 2020, p. 591). With different participants, different elements of this positionality were highlighted in line with what would help establish rapport. Nevertheless, while participants shared plenty and while much enthusiasm was encountered in the field, my positionality certainly impacted conversations, including specific things being left unsaid.

By the conclusion of fieldwork, 88 participants had taken part with 45 individual interviews and 43 focus-group contributors. The participants were diverse in demographics, socio-economic backgrounds, occupations, and residence; both Sunni and Shia, from housewives to entrepreneurs and from Beirut’s upper classes to the Lebanese South’s poorer populations, with an age range of 18–69. This covered Greater Beirut and its suburbs, Saida, Tripoli, Tyr, and a number of smaller villages in the Lebanese South, North, and Bekaa. Despite this, Beirut was over-represented in my data, and a significantly higher number of urban dwellers and of people from younger age groups participated compared to non-urban dwellers and older people. This was largely due to the methodology of the project, networks mobilized, limitations in resources, as well as constraints by the ethics committee where interviews could not be held in private homes, making access to people in non-urban areas more difficult. The arguments presented here must be understood with these limitations in mind. All interviews were conducted in colloquial Lebanese Arabic to then be transcribed and translated to English. The data was then analysed with the assistance of NVIVO. All reporting is done using pseudonyms.

This paper is shaped by a methodology of decolonial listening whereby research works alongside Eurocentric modernity’s Others in a pursuit to voice and analyse the lived experiences shared with the researcher, as they themselves experience them (Maldonado-Torres, 2010, p. 116; Vázquez, 2012). Through such a methodology, the workings of Eurocentric modernity, its apparati, and its power in everyday experiences can be identified, analysed, theorized, and ultimately resisted. In this sense, the paper centres a methodology of reflecting around everyday lived experiences as a potent site through which larger power structures and dynamics may be examined and resisted. In this, the everyday is conceptualized as a site of political struggle and the reproduction of social structures (see Elias & Rai, 2019) where the invisibilization of racialized Others can be theorized and resisted. The paper makes no claim of representativeness whereby an external reality is identified or captured. Rather, it labours to convey and analyse what its participants voiced within this project. Further, this position holds that those assaulted by Eurocentric modernity can speak for the conditions of their oppression. Their understandings of these conditions is accordingly engaged with as thoughtful and legitimate knowledge without falling into epistemic populism where everything said by Eurocentric Modernity’s Others is already equivalent to ‘critical thinking’ (Grosfoguel, 2012, p. 101; Adams, 2014).

Banking: from absencing to Eurocentric development and to the Lebanese nation-state

The following discussion will be divided into two sub-sections. In the first, I will identify and present participant’s experienced exclusion from employment in the Lebanese banking sector and situate this within Lebanese banking’s performance and pursuit of Eurocentric modernity. In the second, I will turn to analyse data identifying development and the post-colonial nation state as underlying conditions of this exclusion as well as its pursued horizon to argue that private banking functions as a powerful apparatus of Eurocentric modernity’s establishment.

Lebanese banking, the absence(ing) of Islamic dress, and Eurocentric modernity

Across conversations in the field, participants persistently referred to the Lebanese banking sector as a space distinct from its surrounding: from security guards to luxurious designs and advanced technological features. Within it, participants explained, religious and Islamic symbolism could not be found and hijab-wearing women were powerfully and explicitly excluded from employment:

In banks here or the surrounding towns, you wouldn’t find a hijab-wearing [employee], no way! (Shirine)

Throughout fieldwork, I did not encounter any bank employee wearing Islamic dress. Nevertheless, Maha, a young Sunni participant from Beirut, had a clear framing of such an event should it occur:

And if it so happened, by the rare thing, that you found a hijab-wearing in a particular position [in a bank] it would be that she was not a hijab-wearing and then wore it while she was already there. She might get fired, they might go after her until she leaves, they might postpone or bring her down in terms of position. This happened to my brother’s wife. She wasn’t hijab-wearing and when she wore it, they went after her. She used to work in a bank here in Beirut. She was the assistant to the director and then they started demoting her until they eventually appointed her as data entry. So she got upset and left. And this is despite the fact that she has no work with customers, she is not on the front. (Maha)

Exclusion was not just exclusion from gaining employment in a bank, it was also exclusion from retaining one’s employment and rank should they choose to wear Islamic dress whereby Muslim women’s labour became of less value, even dispensable. Semblance to anti-Muslim racism in the global north echoed across the field as a powerful rejection of Islamic dress appeared hegemonic and normalized.

Banks are like neutral, you don’t see anything that tells who you are there. Especially nothing Islam-related, impossible! (Focus group, Beirut)

Particularly potent in customer-facing roles and in presenting the sector’s identity, Lebanese banking was as a space powerfully performing secularity where religious, especially Islamic, symbolism was rejected. This absencing of Islamic symbolism indicated the banking sector’s pursuit of a hegemonic secularization that further echoed the assault on Islamic dress across the west (Brayson, 2019). As explained above, such secularization is key in allowing the sector’s claim to Eurocentric modernity and development, as I will argue in the coming paragraphs.

In the field, I was told that this lived experience was exacerbated by prevalent religious and sectarian struggles and the country’s political polarization. This is especially relevant for analysing the heterogenous geographic and spatial dimension of this discrimination. Yet, my data and participants clearly evidenced how, despite this heterogeneity, discrimination against visibly Muslim women was prevalent within Muslim-majority areas and Muslim communities themselves as well as outside of them:

Most of these banks, if I [as a hijab-wearing] go to their hamra branch, there’s no way I can get a job. If I go to the Dahieh branch, they’ve started leaning a bit to reality: no, you find one hijab-wearing. Of course, there is a particular kind of dress only allowed so yes it’s a baby step but it’s a step. It’s still [the case] that a girl in a abaya [long black cloack]: [there is] no way she can work in a bank, this is a big X. A girl in an isharb [conservative form of hijab], no way. (Zeinab)

Hamra is a central district in Beirut with a mixed population, a Muslim-majority, and a powerful hegemony of Eurocentric modernity as the home of the missionary American University of Beirut and the country’s secularizing and Eurocentric cosmopolitan cultural scene. Dahieh is Beirut’s southern suburb, considered to be the stronghold of the country’s most powerful Shia political party: Hezbollah. There, in a space described as an ‘Islamic milieu’ (Deeb & Harb, 2011), my participants explained how a ‘fashion hijab-wearing woman’ – meaning a woman wearing a hijab that is in line with the latest trends and that greatly resembles non-Islamic dress and appearance – might have a chance to work in the ‘backstage’ of a bank, although this remains unlikely. A woman wearing more conservative Islamic dress did not where the Abaya (a long black cloak) and the Isharb (a conservative form of long hijab) emerged as pertinent examples of the abjection of any difference from modern secular and ‘international’ wear – with the international referring to the western.

Consequently, this exclusion could not be reduced to the dominant lenses of sectarianism or religious difference in Lebanon as Lebanese Muslims themselves emerged as significant exclusionary actors. The criteria on which the gradual acceptance in the bank’s backstage in Dahieh was developing resembles globalized westernized dress and appearance while the banking sector pursued a performance of modernizing secularism. Aware that Islamic dress, particularly for women, functions as an avatar of the wider erasure of the Islamic (Brayson, 2019), I hold that this absencing is deeply entwined with Eurocentric modernity and the banking sector’s performance of the Eurocentrically modern identity for which it is celebrated in public and scholarly work.

Ultimately, the designation of Dahieh as an ‘Islamic milieu’ appeared to have its limitations as Muslim-affiliated political and even economic power seemed incapable of decentring Lebanese banking’s erasure of the Islamic. In this respect, questions of self-orientalism and self-hate where a desire to distance oneself from Islam is internalized among Muslims themselves (See Bayrakli & Hafez 2018; Grosfoguel & Mielants 2006) appear relevant to the analysis. Indeed, Eurocentric modernity appears to be working not only through those at the top of the racial, religious, and gendered hierarchy but also through everyday Muslims. This, importantly, helps make sense of how little relevance and impact the rise in Muslim politico-economic power over the past decades has had in alleviating the aggression against Muslim women or shifting the erasing pursuit of Islamic visibility.

It is worth noting here that no participant mentioned Islamic banking, which entered Lebanon relatively recently in 2004. With assets in 2012 at less than 1% of the banking market, this sector remains subordinate, under-developed and unable to contend with conventional banks (Jouni, 2012). With limitations of space and scope and the multiple particularities of this banking type, especially in terms of its complex relation to Eurocentric modernity, the lack of data on the presence or absence of visibly-Muslim women within it, and its potential role in challenging this exclusion of visibly Muslim women, it remains beyond the scope of this paper.

Development, racialization and the post-colonial nation-state

As conversations in the field developed, hijab-wearing women argued that their exclusion from the banking sector was deeply entwined with wider stereotyping in Lebanese society:

If they see you as a committed Muslim, they will have these stereotypes: these are ignorant people, these are poor people [… .] Someone who is old-minded, traditional, not modern, not progressive. (Nadine)

For them [the hijab] is backwardness and tazammot [pejorative extreme strictness] and they still see it in that light. No matter how educated you are, no matter how much you have more skills, the hijab is still in that frame of backwardness. (Maha)

In such common formulations, the specific Eurocentric conceptualization of progress emerged hegemonic. While economic progress and growth were central, participants explained that progress here engulfed wider questions ranging from education to ‘manners’.

Participant 1: the woman in Islamic dress is seen as backward, has nothing to do with civilization, nor with development, nor with progress, and nor with culture! It [just] means limited culture [to employers]!

Participant 3: well put, limited culture. This is even in our community, regardless of [wider] Lebanese society. (Focus group, Dahieh)

Participants elaborated how a visibly Muslim woman is assumed to have less: less knowledge, less understanding, less civility. A prominent example was language, where English (and French) proficiency were presented as a form of needed ‘progress’ that visibly Muslim women were assumed to lack. As Esseili (2017) argues, Arabic in Lebanon is usually associated with the Islamic, increasing the prestige and powerful presence of English (and French) in the country in line with a pursuit to dissociate from the Arab and the Islamic and associate with the west. In this pursuit, an assumed (Muslim) lack of English knowledge results in significant discrimination.

With dominant tropes of backwardness, this stereotyping associated hijab-wearing women with the past, a past that needed to be surpassed. As a subject from a different (historical) time, she was not a subject suitable within the space of the country’s modern and pioneering banking sector. Rather, the bank’s workforce needed to embody the sector’s international and progressive identity, values, and ethos, where ‘development’ and ‘progressiveness’ were central. Aligned with Islamophobic discourses across the global north (see Tyrer, 2013), Eurocentric development accordingly emerged as a key pillar of the hijab-wearing woman’s abjection under a powerful modernizing drive loaded with erasure.

Grosfoguel (2017) notes the centrality of ‘development’ as both a structuring narrative and pursued horizon within Eurocentric modernity across scales (also see Rutazibwa, 2019). Further, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015) argues that development has long been a core discourse, idea, practice, and policy in Eurocentric modernity with international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank occupying a key role. From their various projects and funding calls to their aid programs, structural adjustment policies, and numerous ‘roadmaps’ of control, anti-colonial and decolonial scholars have argued that such institutions are key apparati of Eurocentric modernity’s hegemony within and beyond the economic. Complementing this scholarship, this paper thus puts forth national private banking as a financial actor working towards this Eurocentric ‘development’ at the level of culture, subjectivity, and everyday performance.

Further, participants in the field stressed that this exclusion under the guise of development and progress could not be understood independently from an understanding of the Lebanese nation-state, its post-colonial identity, and the ongoing reproduction of this identity. As Maya, a highly-educated upper-middle-class urban planner from the South of Lebanon, explained:

Lebanese people are not meant to be hijab-wearing … The Lebanese is coloured, hair, eyes, they are different from other Arabs, they are very fashionable. This is the ideal Lebanese woman you hear all over. The hijab-wearing is [outside]. I don’t know why … I guess it’s from the mandate. It’s the French system, that we’re not like the Arabs, that we are developed, that we are Phoenicians, that we are all these things and not that. (Maya)

Lebanon as a post-colonial state, the French mandate, and the construction of Lebanese socio-cultural identity through its differentiation from ‘other’ Arab nations as progress was pursued were issues participants raised across the field. As Maya’s elaboration indicated, these hegemonic discourses meant that hijab-wearing women did not align with the construction of Lebanon’s modern post-colonial ideal citizen: ‘developed’, westernized and performing secularity (see Zogheib, 2014). The headscarf has become a key battleground where questions of national belonging and secularizing modernization unfold across Europe and Turkey (Yel & Nas 2014). Similarly, the dress revealed itself as a key site where a similar battle unfolded within the sphere of banking. Rima, a middle-class participant from Beirut, explained:

Look, we can’t deny that the hijab is not yet part of the image of the Lebanese woman […] We are hardly an Arab state: we are a state with an Arab face. There are portions of the Lebanese who don’t see themselves as Arabs but as Phoenicians. There are many Lebanese who if you ask them about who they are, they wouldn’t say Arab. They wouldn’t even accept to be compared to Arabs. Like an Arab like the Syrian or the Iraqi or anyone like that. We are the Lebanese, the Phoenicians, we are very different from all Arab countries. We live among them, but we are different. And this continues. (Rima)

This Lebanese difference, Rima argued, revolved around a sense of superiority resulting from claimed Lebanese ‘development’ and ‘civility’. In this sense, to explain why the hijab-wearing woman is not the ‘ideal Lebanese woman’, my participant drew upon the very imagined nature of the Lebanese nation as associated with, and resembling of, the European.

While I had made no mention of ‘race’, skin colour, eye colour, or ethnicity (i.e. being Arab or Phoenician), I ultimately found that many participants referred to such labels and descriptions when speaking about the general construction and rejection of Islamic dress and its wearer within Lebanon. Indeed, my fieldwork revealed the construction of the visibly Muslim woman as an equivalent to a phenotypical category which stands in contrast to that of a desired non-Arabeness: lighter skin and coloured eyes. Consequently, this exclusion emerged as a prime instance of Eurocentric modernity’s racialization of the religious distancing Lebanon from non-European races, ethnicities, and cultures where the imaginary of the post-colonial nation-state stood prime.

Now, the hijab doesn’t really fit well with them in the Lebanese state. Like they can’t hire her. (Maryam)

Hijab means Muslim, and they don’t want any of this. That is why we have all this [discrimination]. (Focus group, Beirut)

My participants understood and presented Lebanon as a structure aligned with the Eurocentric and thus incompatible with visibly and publicly practiced Islam.⁸ Its banking sector’s exclusion of Islamic dress can consequently be situated within this post-colonial and ongoing pursuit of erasure under the global hegemony of Eurocentric modernity. Many participants eventually merged their discussion of Islamic dress’s abjection from the banking sector with that of its abjection from the Lebanese nation-state – both controlled by what Grosfoguel (2016) terms a ‘westernized elite’ including both Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. This revealed a nation-banking amalgamation. Accordingly, I contend that this abjection of the visibly Muslim woman enacted by the country’s banking sector was entangled with the Lebanese nation-state. Most importantly, this was a tool through which this nation-state’s colonial construction was performed and reproduced within the wider pursuit of Eurocentric modernity in Lebanon. Exclusion in the banking sector was both rooted in Lebanon’s post-colonial imaginary as well as performed and reproduced this within the larger performance and reproduction of Eurocentric modernity. Such a finding is in line with the decolonial argument that post-colonial nation-states are powerful apparati of Eurocentric modernity, while complementing this by advancing the entwined role of private financial institutions such as national banking sectors within this establishment.

Brayson (2019) shows how the state’s legal apparatus aggressively functions to establish Eurocentric modernity through a juridical erasure of France’s Muslim Others. My analysis here reveals a similar functioning pursued by private financial institutions independently from state legislation and management but entwined with the nation-state’s post-colonial imaginary. Based on this analysis, the need to examine Eurocentric modernity’s establishment and anti-Muslim exclusion beyond an exclusive focus on the state-form – and with a focus on the economic and financial sector and its institutions entwined with the modern post-colonial nation-state – emerges as particularly important.

Safieddine (2019) has shown how Lebanon’s central bank formed a key pillar of Lebanon’s historic (post-)colonial state formation (also see Hourani, 2015). The arguments made here complement this by looking at how private banks similarly operate to form and reproduce the post-colonial state. The state has long worked to ensure the interests of the banking sector in Lebanon in line with its pursuit of Eurocentric development (Safieddine, 2019). This paper suggest that the private banking sector also reproduced the nation-state’s post-colonial imagination. This occurred at the level of the everyday within the ongoing wider pursuit of global Eurocentric modernity.

Bergeron (2006) has argued that post-colonial national identity construction included the construction of ‘an imagined economic community’ – in line with the ‘imagined national community’ as theorized by Anderson (1991) – where ‘notions of progress and modernity’ dominate as ‘the newly independent country needed to look “forward” and toward the West to regain its sovereignty and place in the world’ (Bergeron, 2006, p. 19). In this respect, she explores how particular economic forms and practices were pursued while others, including much rural and household work, were delegitimized. Throughout, gender and women’s bodies emerge as central nodes where development and a modern nation-state identity intersect. My participants’ experiences here reveal the continued control of women’s bodies in the construction of the ‘imagined economic community’ in contemporary Lebanon many decades past the country’s colonial establishment. The case of Islamic dress in Lebanon showcases how this construction of an imagined post-colonial community functions well-beyond the question of specific forms of economic activity. It aggressively and oppressively dominates questions of religious semiotics and bodily rituals as well as racialized socio-cultural associations and practices. In Lebanon, a specific imaginary of the economy had been established where racialized religion and gender entwined to situate Islamic visibility outside the realm of the accepted and the respected. It was, I would argue, a powerful instance of an erasing absencing (Vázquez, 2012) in the realm of the coloniality of being (rather than power/knowledge) by a banking sector aligned with a westernized imagined economy allowing the wider reproduction of Eurocentric modernity as the totality of the real.

It is important to realize that many of my participants, contrary to what might be assumed, did not simplistically crave to be incorporated within the banking sphere. Rather, a powerful movement of dissociation from banking emerged. An older Shia participant from Dahieh and an older Sunni participant living in Saida argued:

The banks … they’re like … they’re not befitting places. They’re not for us. Working there, I’m against that. What does it mean for a woman wearing the hijab, the symbol of Islam, to be employed in a bank? What does it mean? (Focus group, Dahieh)

 … Anyway, there’s no way a niqab-wearing woman could ever work in a bank and she shouldn’t. The hijab-wearing too, shouldn’t. A bank is to start with is anti-Islamic, it’s all interest and the like. (Focus group, Saida)

The bank was therefore not a modern liberated place where participants dreamt of working but could not. Rather, many even passed strong judgments on those women who do work in banks, branding them as lacking in both Islamic knowledge and chastity. Yet, alongside this negative framing, a sense of ambivalence, as a double-consciousness, emerged. Indeed, many participants explained that the issue was ‘complex’ especially as the entry of hijab-wearing women into the banking sector was seen as essential for their empowerment in Lebanon and even for ‘Islam’s position’ in the nation-state. As a Sunni working mother of two in her mid-30s expressed:

The other day, I went to a bank and saw a hijab-wearing woman. I was surprised. I sort of fell into a dilemma: should I accept that or not? because it’s haram, for me, to work in a bank in the first place. From my point of view. So how if it’s a hijab-wearing? But then you get a second idea: the hijab-wearing woman is working in a bank! They are accepting that she be on the front desk! This is the most level of interaction with clients in the bank! She was working as teller or something. That’s so good! She managed to get to the position where you could never have even imagined a hijab-wearing woman working or accepted. So yes, good that she be accepted but why is she accepting? (Rabab)

Ending with no consensus in focus groups, this ambivalence was sometimes resolved by arguing that there was a need to reach a stage where hijab-wearing women are accepted in banks, get the jobs, and then collectively reject the jobs. Intensified by local religious and sectarian realities and in line with a neoliberal order and daily lives riddled with precarity and enforced underdevelopment, women’s bodies ultimately emerge as wounded sites as they bear an ambivalent double-consciousness vis-à-vis Lebanese banking – far from assumptions of an Other simplistically craving to assimilate. Craving, rather, to be admitted as equal on their own terms, their negotiations emerge as important acts deserving significant attention and research beyond the scope of this paper.

Conclusion

This paper has demonstrated the exclusion of visibly Muslim women from employment in the Lebanese private banking sector. Analysing its participants’ lived experiences in the everyday, it has identified similarity to anti-Muslim racism in the west, the powerful presence of a secularizing narrative, and the pursuit of a semblance to the western. From participant’s standpoints, this exclusion is deeply entwined with Lebanese banking sector’s performance of a Eurocentric modern identity. Further identifying hegemonic narratives of Eurocentric progress and development entwined with the post-colonial Lebanese nation-state, its westernized imagined ideal citizen, and its western-looking identity, the paper has argued that this exclusion is enacted through a nation-banking amalgamation. With secularism, racialization, and self-hate, this amalgamation was shown to be both structured by and functioning to reproduce Eurocentric modernity.

This analysis offers a grounded critique of the Lebanese banking sector and its standard representation in both public and academic debates. Rather than being an emancipatory and progressive sector, my participants’ experiences raise the question of how a western-looking economic sector and its development, internationalism, and modernization are deeply exclusionary, discriminatory, and assaulting. This ‘development’, in other words, held an unseen ‘darker side’ (Mignolo, 2012) that this paper has made visible. Showcasing the value of a decolonial everyday IPE approach, this paper concludes that contemporary (capitalist) financial institutions can function as apparati of Eurocentric modernity’s establishment and as sites of its contemporary (re)production at the level of everyday lived experiences. In this sense, the everyday contemporary role of national financial institutions in Eurocentric modernity’s (re)production – alongside that of the state and international financial institutions – is raised as an important contribution to decolonial scholarship and an important avenue for research and theorization across geographic and national divides. Particularly aware of developmental drives, westernizing economies, and colonial national imaginaries across the Arab-majority and Muslim-majority geography from the Gulf region to Turkey, this discussion accordingly puts forth the urgent need to rethink, analyse, and resist financial institutions’ role(s) in the hegemony of Eurocentric modernity within and beyond the economic across the region, and globally.

Acknowledgements

My deepest appreciation goes to the guest editors and the anonymous reviewers who generously read and commented on the multiple versions of this paper. My gratitude particularly goes to Hannes Baumann without whose efforts, insights, and generous support this paper would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institut Francais du Proche Orient: [Grant Number AMI 2018]; University of Sussex, LPS School. This publication was made possible (in part) through the support of the Arab Council of the Social Sciences with funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York for the Early Career Fellows program (Cycle 7). The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

Notes on contributors

Ali Kassem

Ali Kassem is postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Al-Waleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh where he also teaches at the School of Social and Political Science. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow with Arab Council for the Social Sciences and the Carnegie Corporation of New York affiliated to the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from the University of Sussex, UK where he also taught between 2018 and 2021. He has held research and/or teaching positions at the Finnish Institute for Middle East Studies and the University of Helsinki, the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, the Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies, the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese American University, and others. His main interests are in Post-, anti-, and decolonial work, ethnic and racial studies, inequalities, Islam and Knowledge making on which Ali has published multiple peer-reviewed and non-academic articles and essays.

Notes

1 It is important to note here that this ‘outside’ is not an essentialised exterior, and it is neither romanticised nor considered as pure or absolute. For further elaboration of this, refer to Mignolo (2012, 2018) and Maldonado-Torres (2010).

2 It must be noted here that the Christianity referred to here is the civilisational project of European ‘white’ Christianity, more accurately referred to as ‘western Christendom’.

3 Certainly, the two identities are not mutually exclusive but rather exist in a complex relationship that differs across sects, regions, age groups and classes. This has also developed across time. An exploration of this remain beyond the scope of this paper.

4 In October 2020, a collapse of the Lebanese economy and state began, with the banking and financial system at the core of this crisis. These developments and their effect remain beyond the scope of this paper.

5 This, and other documents reflecting this self-representation of the Lebanese banking sector can be accessed on www.Abl.org.lb

6 While women wearing different forms of Islamic dress face different experiences, these differences remain beyond the scope of this paper which focuses on a wider analysis of experiences common across forms of Islamic dress.

7 It is worth noting that this analysis is informed by informal conversations, accounts, and ethnographic reflections from the field. Despite this, all the data and quotes presented come from participants who officially participated and consented for the inclusion and use of their shared experiences.

8 It is important to note here the absence of the state when participants spoke of their resistance against any discrimination they faced as resistance emerged beyond the state-form.