The Lebanese state is structured through religious freedom and secular power sharing across sectarian groups. Every sect has specific laws that govern kinship matters like marriage or inheritance. Together with criminal and civil laws, these laws regulate and produce political difference. But whether women or men, Muslims or Christians, queer or straight, all people in Lebanon have one thing in common—they are biopolitical subjects forged through bureaucratic, ideological, and legal techniques of the state. With this book, Maya Mikdashi offers a new way to understand state power, theorizing how sex, sexuality, and sect shape and are shaped by law, secularism, and sovereignty. Drawing on court archives, public records, and ethnography of the Court of Cassation, the highest civil court in Lebanon, Mikdashi shows how political difference is entangled with religious, secular, and sexual difference. She presents state power as inevitably contingent, like the practices of everyday life it engenders, focusing on the regulation of religious conversion, the curation of legal archives, state and parastatal violence, and secular activism. Sextarianism locates state power in the experiences, transitions, uprisings, and violence that people in the Middle East continue to live.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History critically examines the defining processes and structures of historical developments in North Africa and the Middle East over the past two centuries. The Handbook pays particular attention to countries that have leapt out of the political shadows of dominant and better-studied neighbours in the course of the unfolding uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. These dramatic and interconnected developments have exposed the dearth of informative analysis available in surveys and textbooks, particularly on Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria.

Lebanon may be the most complicated place in the world to be a "mixed" couple. It has no civil marriage law, fifteen personal status laws, and a political system built on sectarianism. Still, Lebanon has the most interreligious marriages per capita in the Middle East. What constitutes a mixed marriage is in flux as social norms shift, and reactions to mixed marriage reveal underlying social categories of discrimination. Through stories of Lebanese couples, Love Across Difference challenges readers to rethink categories of difference and imagine possibilities for social change. Drawing on two decades of interviews and research, Lara Deeb shows how mixed couples in Lebanon confront patriarchy, social difference, and sectarianism. In the drama that ensues as women and young men make their own marital choices, they push gender boundaries and reveal the ultimately empty nature of sect as a category of social difference. Love won't end sectarianism, but it can contribute to reducing sect's social power. Through the example of Lebanon, we can learn about our own social worlds, about the assumptions we make around social difference, and about how people react when forced to change their ideas of who can be made kin through marriage.

Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference? Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading it, sometimes deploying it strategically, to a variety of effects and consequences. The collection advances an understanding of sectarianism simultaneously constructed and experienced, a slippery and changeable concept with material effects. And even as the book's focus is Lebanon, its analysis fractures the association of sectarianism with the nation-state and suggests possibilities that can travel to other sites. Practicing Sectarianism, taken as a whole, argues that sectarianism can only be fully understood—and dismantled—if we first take it seriously as a practice.

The Middle East is often portrayed as oppressively patriarchal and homophobic. Yet, in recent years the region has become a vibrant and important arena for feminist and LGBTQ activism. This book provides an insight into this emerging politics through a unique analysis of feminist and LGBTQ social movements in the context of Lebanon's postwar sectarian system. Resisting Sectarianism argues that LGBTQ and feminists social movements are powerful agents of political and social transformation in Lebanon. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes the reader inside these movements to see how they attract members and construct campaigns, forge alliances, and the multiple ways in which they generate important forms of resistance to, and change within, the sectarian system. The book also traces the strong obstacles that sectarian parties and religious authorities employ to weaken LGBTQ and feminist activism.

In 1943, Lebanon gained its formal political independence from France; only after two more decades did the country finally establish a national central bank. Inaugurated on April 1, 1964, the Banque du Liban (BDL) was billed by Lebanese authorities as the nation's primary symbol of economic sovereignty and as the last step towards full independence. In the local press, it was described as a means of projecting state power and enhancing national pride. Yet the history of its founding—stretching from its Ottoman origins in mid-nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth—tells a different, more complex story. Banking on the State reveals how the financial foundations of Lebanon were shaped by the history of the standardization of economic practices and financial regimes within the decolonizing world. The system of central banking that emerged was the product of a complex interaction of war, economic policies, international financial regimes, post-colonial state-building, global currents of technocratic knowledge, and private business interests. It served rather than challenged the interests of an oligarchy of local bankers. As Hicham Safieddine shows, the set of arrangements that governed the central bank thus was dictated by dynamics of political power and financial profit more than market forces, national interest or economic sovereignty.

These volumes consist of selected primary documents from Ancient Rome, covering a range of over 1,000 years of Roman culture, from the foundation of the city to its sacking by the Goths.The selections cover a broad spectrum of Roman civilization, including literature, philosophy, religion, education, politics, military affairs, and economics.

The Liber mahameleth is a work in Latin written in the mid-12th century based (mainly) on Arabic sources from Islamic Spain. It is now our principal source on mathematics in Islamic Spain at that time; There are few extant Arabic texts and no one is as complete as the LM. It is also the second largest mathematical work from the Latin Middle Ages (the other is by Fibonacci, some 50 years later). Since the three main manuscripts preserving it are incomplete and there are many scribal errors, a reliable Latin text has been established, which reports (in notes) the various readings of the manuscripts and the errors in them. This is how a so-called critical edition is made. This edition of the Latin text is preceded by General Introduction, describing the various manuscripts, the content of the work and what we know about its author. Part Two of the volume is a translation of the text and ends with a glossary of Latin terms. The glossary will be of great importance for the knowledge of Latin scientific terms from that time, since there is no other mathematical text of this size from the 12th century. Part Three begins with a short introduction and then analyzes all the problems from the text, with a summary of the mathematical methods involved in each chapter. The commentary is a companion to the translation and explains the author's solving methods.