Phares (political science, Florida Atlantic U.) examines the historical roots and emergence of Lebanese Christian nationalism, challenging the current state of Lebanese studies. He demonstrates the intellectual integrity of the Lebanese Christians' claims, and documents the deterioration of the political and military resistance and the loss of the Christian enclave. Includes numerous bandw maps, and an extensive listing of books, articles, periodicals, news media, radio programs, and documents in English, French, and Arabic. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
"With the contemporary discussions of political Islam, how do minority Muslim communities approach the traditional concept that Islam is both "religion and politics"? How do Muslim minorities address the issues of Islamic social organization when they are either a minority or living within a pluralistic state? Do Muslims who are integrated within a pluralistic state approach the traditional aspects of Islamic social-political organization in a manner different than those Muslims whomake up a majority? This study examines the Islamic categories of Christians under Islamic law and compares them with the status of Christians within Lebanon. David Grafton reviews the opinions of four Lebanese Muslim scholars (two Sunni and two Shi'a) regarding Christian political rights during the Lebanese Civil War. In such a diverse and complicated social context as Lebanon, who do these scholars respond to the position of the Christian community which claims political supremacy by maintaining its hold on the presidency? The debate on political Islam has, to this point, neglected to look seriously at Muslim communities in pluralistic contexts, and how such contexts affect their opinions of traditional social-political organization. This text attempts steps to reverse this trend."--Bloomsbury Publishing.
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.
The Yearbook of International Religious Demography presents an annual snapshot of the state of religious statistics around the world. Every year large amounts of data are collected through censuses, surveys, polls, religious communities, scholars, and a host of other sources. These data are collated and analyzed by research centers and scholars around the world. Large amounts of data appear in analyzed form in the World Religion Database (Brill), aiming at a researcher’s audience. The Yearbook presents data in sets of tables and scholarly articles spanning social science, demography, history, and geography. Each issue offers findings, sources, methods, and implications surrounding international religious demography. Each year an assessment is made of new data made available since the previous issue of the yearbook. The 2018 volume features a wide range of subjects, including approaches to measuring religious violence, religious changes in the Indian Subcontinent, religious demography in Lebanon, Baptism and Godparenthood in Catholic Europe, the relevance of social media data for religious demographic research, and the methodological and practical challenges of measuring religiosity in Turkey. Contributors are: Todd M. Johnson, Gina Zurlo, Peter Crossing, Robert Brathwaite, J. K. Bajaj, M. D. Srinivas, Wissam Raji, Yves Rahme, Marc Zeinoun, Charbel Zeidan, Guido Alfani, Joey Marshall, Zubeyir Nisanci, Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa, María Concepción Servín Nieto.
This study chronicles the evolution and history of the Maronite Church and Christians of Lebanon, from their controversial beginnings to the present. The book explicitly and significantly explains the survival of the Maronites caught in the hostile environment of the Middle East. Also it reconstructs the history of Lebanon and its Catholic Church within the context of the Lebanese state and indicates the importance of the Maronites to the region and well beyond.
A reissue of Randal's widely acclaimed 1983 study of the right-wing Christian militias in Lebanon, that in 1975 launched a bloody bid for power that plunged the country into a decades-long cycle of war and civil conflict. For this 2012 reissue, he has added a piercing new Preface that reflects on the meaning of those events, both then and today.
The Maronite Church is one of twenty-two Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with the Pope of Rome. Her patriarch is in Lebanon. Forty-three bishops and approximately five million faithful make up her presence throughout the world. The story of Maron, a fifth-century hermit-priest, and the community gathered around him, later called the Maronites, tells another fascinating story of the monastic and missionary movements of the Church. Maron's story takes place in the context of Syrian monasticism, which was a combination of both solitary and communal life, and is a narrative of Christians of the Middle East as they navigated the rough seas of political divisions and ecclesiastical controversies from the fourth to the ninth centuries. Abbot Paul Naaman, a Maronite scholar and former Superior General of the Order of Lebanese Maronite Monks, wisely places the study of the origins of the Maronite Church squarely in the midst of the history of the Church. His book, The Maronites: The Origins of an Antiochene Church, published during the sixteenth centenary of Maron's death, offers plausible insights into her formation and early development, grounding the Maronite Church in her Catholic, Antiochian, Syriac, and monastic roots. Abbot Paul Naaman is a Maronite scholar and former Superior General of the Order of Lebanese Maronite Monks.
Lebanon is more than a country, it is a message': these words of Pope John Paul II illustrate Lebanon's post-war endeavor to preserve its age-old Christian-Muslim coexistence and power-sharing formula and to invalidate Samuel Huntington's assumption of a 'Clash of Civilizations.' Lebanon's current challenge is also the challenge of a whole region, the Middle East, where the fate of minorities, including Eastern Christians, reveals the prospects of democracy, pluralism and political participation. Carole H. Dagher, a journalist for Lebanese media as well as an academic, presents an insightful account on how Christian and Muslim communities emerged from the sixteen year-old Lebanese war, what their points of friction and their common grounds are, and what the prospects of Lebanon's communal representation system and pluralistic society are. She describes the central role played by the Holy See and John Paul II in bridging the gap between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, and analyzes the impact other countries such as Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia have had on the power game and, conversely, the impact of Christian-Muslim interaction on the future of the Arab-Israeli peace process. Bring Down the Walls draws crucial lessons from the recent history of Christian-Muslim relations in Lebanon.
In this book, author Nader Moumneh–a Canadian senior policy adviser of Lebanese descent– examines the research of the formation and evolution of the Christian resistance in Lebanon he performed as a graduate student at the American University of Beirut in the early 1990s. He has conducted hundreds of lengthy interviews with senior Lebanese Forces leaders who were thoroughly impressed by his communicative yet assertive personality, his scrupulous presentation of facts, his obsessive attention to detail, and most importantly, his unwavering determination to unveil behind-the-scenes events. Mr. Moumneh drew upon his self-acquired persuasion tactics and negotiation strategies to earn the Lebanese Forces’ trust and gain access to top secret, never-before published information. Since then, he has continually revised and expanded the manuscript to address the rapidly changing situation in Lebanon and the Middle East. The Lebanese Forces: Emergence and Transformation of the Christian Resistance has taken twenty-five years to produce and is unique in its own right. Mr. Moumneh’s work is not a typical re-telling of the Lebanese crisis, rather it is a magnificent blend of skillful craftsmanship, an unprecedented wealth of painstakingly referenced chronological research and now declassified intelligence information.
