Women In Lebanon

Combining insider and outsider perspectives, Women in Lebanon looks at Christian and Muslim women living together in a multicultural society and facing modernity. While the Arab Spring has begun to draw attention to issues of change, modernity, and women's subjectivity, this manuscript takes a unique approach to examining and describing the Lebanese "alternative modernities" thesis and how it has shaped thinking about the meaning of terms like evolution, progress, development, history, and politics in contemporary Arab thought. The author draws on extensive ethnographic research, as well as her own personal experience.

In Women and Gender in a Lebanese Village: Generations of Change, Nancy W. Jabbra presents a detailed analysis of change in gender roles in a Christian community in rural Lebanon.

Thirty years after the end of the civil war, Lebanese women are still struggling for gender equality. This study builds on recent scholarship on women’s 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 women’s movement in their campaigns for a domestic violence law, women’s nationality rights, a women’s 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 Lebanon’s 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, women’s inequality is central to the reproduction of sectarian difference and patriarchal control within the confessional political system, as a whole.

Evelyn C. Shakir paints tales that are rich in history and background. She sets her stories in different eras, from the 1960s to the present, peopled with Lebanese women of different ages, sometimes writing letters, often reminiscing, looking back as far as the turn of the century. In different ways, these first and second-generation women struggle with feminist issues overshadowed by the demands of dual cultures. In Young Ali a teenager tries to listen to her beloved father’s time-honored tales of males in friendship and marriage. Aggie of House Calls is a deceased matriarch who returns to haunt her family with reminders of the customs she fought to uphold while alive. Shakir’s other heroines include a thrice-divorced thirty-year-old woman quibbling with a modern matchmaker, an elderly non-Lebanese woman who spies on Muslim neighbors in the wake of 9/11, and a traditional wife and mother who thinks she has found a route out of Old World womanly duties. Many of the authors’s women grapple with reclaiming or abandoning ancestral demands, and finessing age-old male-female relationships. In Oh, Lebanon a war-haunted Lebanese-born woman willfully departs from the mores of her upbringing, with surprising results. With agile humor and emotional truth, Shakir offers multiple perspectives on Lebanese women trying to change roles in a new landscape without surrendering cultural identity.

After fifteen years of reconstruction in a relatively peaceful environment spanning the years 1990 to 2004, Lebanon has experienced successive violent political events resulting from complex entangled internal and external struggles. The Syrian crisis and its political, economic and demographic consequences on Lebanon have increased these tensions. This atlas sheds light on these new challenges and adds new data that complete the analyses already published in the Atlas du Liban. Territoires et société (Atlas of Lebanon. Territories and Society) released in 2007 by the same research team. Some of its components are included in this edition. Beyond the international regional crisis and the population movements, it takes into account Lebanon’s socio-economic dimensions, the environmental issues linked to uncontrolled urbanization and to natural risks, as well as conflicts due to local territorial management. This atlas is the result of a collaborative endeavor between French and Lebanese researchers. It uses a geographical approach that puts in the foreground a spatial analysis of social and natural phenomena. Public sources are scarce in Lebanon, especially at the local scale. They are sometimes less reliable and difficult to access. It is particularly the case for the Lebanese census data, conversely data are abundantly available on the refugees population, which is less known than the population of refugees. International data help compare Lebanon to its neighbors. Thematic data produced by some ministries are helpful to provide a detailed view regarding specific domains. Analyses processed on aerial and satellite images have produced essential data on urbanization and environment. Local thematic fieldwork surveys have provided additional data. The book consists of seven chapters. The first one deals with the territorial state-building seen in the light of regional geopolitics, and emphasizes internal violence and the reemergence of militias and armed groups that fight each other and the state army. Lebanon is once again perceived as a territory divided between multiple allegiances. The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of population dynamics, despite the lack of reliable data whose sources are subject to discussion. It includes analyses of internal population flows, the Lebanese diaspora, and the assessment of Syrian refugees’ influx. The third chapter shows the fragility of the Lebanese economic model. Its dependency on foreign investments and on...

"In Line with the Divine": The Struggle for Gender Equality in Lebanon supports the movement to eradicate gender-based violence in Lebanon and throughout the Arab World. This book contributes to eliminating gender inequality by documenting, analyzing, and showing ways to overcome social, legal, and familial relationships that condone violence. Strengthening women's resolve and women's empowerment to define the basis and execution of their own discourse of revitalization and activism is one important path towards that goal. In engaging and tackling Islamic modernism and secular nationalism discourses, the contributors and editors of this book advance women's rights and claim space for women's agency to become effective. This book features research on gender equality in the family (Rita Sabat), campaigns against domestic violence in Lebanon (Nicole Khoury), Laure Moghaizel's pioneering activism for women's rights (Rita Stephan), the civil marriage debate (Nelia Hyndman-Rizk), Shi'ite women in the Eastern Beqa'a Valley (Sherifa Zuhur), Lebanese women and divorce (Mireille Aprahamian), women entrepreneurs in Lebanon (Hayfaa Tlaiss), women left behind after men's migration (Stephanie Hjorth), Syrian women refugees in the Lebanese media (Rouba El Helou & Maria Bou Zeid), and Lebanese women's transnational immigrant experiences (Dalia Abdelhady). "In Line with the Divine": The Struggle for Gender Equality in Lebanon and its editors are the first recipients of the Rita Sabat Award, which ABAAD: Resource Center for Gender Equality (Beirut, Lebanon) established in recognition of the late Dr. Sabat's contribution to gender equality, justice, and human rights. Abelian Acacemic's new Gender, Religion, & History (GRH) series publishes books that advance ambitious, challenging, creative, and yet accessible academic research on questions that are at the heart of human identity and the ability of women and men to live together in society in meaningful, enriching, and satisfying ways. One of the series' important goals is to further the study of the lives, histories, representations, contributions, and experiences of women in the Middle East and adjacent regions, throughout history and in contemporary settings.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women’s work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.