This book asks readers to re-examine their view of the Islamic world and the development of sectarianism in the Middle East by shining a light on the complexity and diversity of early Islamic society. The focus here is on the tenth century, a period in Middle Eastern history tha…
The ancient historian Josephus records that Palestine witnessed a surge in Jewish sectarianism during the second and first c. BCE, resulting in the proliferation of groups associated with the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Qumran sects. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,…
The central argument of this thesis is that football in Scotland has acquired characteristics which make it a nationalistic, political and cultural repository. This has its origins in the post-Reformation period in Scotland, Irish immigration into Scotland and Scotland/Britain's…
This thesis examines the case of civil marriage in Lebanon as an example of the contestation of sectarian identities and a political system. Sectarianism in Lebanon and in the Middle East has become not only a seemingly naturally-produced social categorisation, but also the hege…
This thesis addresses the relationship between sectarianism and state-making and nation-building in Iraq. It argues that sectarianism has been an enduring feature of the state-making trajectory in Iraq due to the failure of the modern nation-state to resolve inherent tensions be…
Affective Socialists explores the story of the Chilean and Bahraini Marxist left, their rise to political and cultural prominence, and their subsequent removal from power during the peak of their influence. This thesis covers the period between 1964 and 1975, during which both n…
In many parts of Lebanon, residents negotiate access to basic services such as electricity and healthcare through a byzantine web of private, public and informal networks run by local political parties organized around ethnicity or sect. My dissertation, based on fieldwork condu…
This thesis, based on field research in Lebanon, explores how the confessional nature of the Lebanese state affects the construction of civil society. It elaborates on the state's role as a social service provider and its legal and bureaucratic relationship with the Lebanese NGO…
This dissertation investigates the question of why and how sectarianism emerged as a major feature of the modern Palestinian Arab political landscape. It follows the declining political fortunes of Palestinian Arab Christians during the mandate period, from a prominent and influ…
This dissertation is a literary and historical study of the relationship between canonization of texts and religious community formation. A story that is not represented in accounts of Muslim history, this project examines how the modern day Ismaili community has come to be iden…
How did a call for peaceful protests citing political and socio-economic grievances come to be overshadowed by brutal sectarian violence? This thesis uses process tracing to argue that the increased sectarianization of the Syrian conflict was due to the increased dominance of op…
This dissertation is a literary critique of select Lebanese theater, television, and film from the 1980s and 1990s (the Civil War and post-war periods) that deal with sectarianism and language. This is not a study of media. The dissertation shows that the fictional Lebanons, cre…
The growth of sectarianism in the mid-nineteenth century, and its institutionalization in the early twentieth, made religious affiliation the dominant mode of organizing society and politics in Lebanon. While the National Pact of 1943, an unwritten agreement enumerating the sect…
Now more than ever, Iraqi sectarian and ethnic identities have assumed larger roles in Iraq's political conflict due to a sectarianism discourse and sectarian infighting. Since before the 2003 Iraq war, many US policymakers and the media have sustained this discourse by presuppo…
This dissertation investigates the practice of sectarianism as well as the remaking of sectarian forms of identification among the Lebanese Shi`i community during the first half of the twentieth century. Shi`i religious scholars, the colonial state, new political leaderships as …