@article{abillama_2022, title={“The Love That Muslims Have for Mary”}, volume={42}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9698073}, DOI={10.1215/1089201x-9698073}, abstractNote={Abstract
               The end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) brought a renewed insistence on the coexistence of Muslims and Christians. The “formula of Christian-Muslim coexistence” would seem to circumvent any injunction for the separation of religion and the state along “Western European” lines—for example, laïcité as state ideology—and to allow for religion to mark the state in one shape or another, without that entailing the legal grounding of the state in sharia as is prevalent among Arab states. It would seem an appropriate compromise between two different visions of the state, visions that are bound with the different experiences that Christians and Muslims have had of the circumstances and processes in which the modern Lebanese state was formed. “Muslim-Christian coexistence” would make it possible to deal adequately with religious difference and some of its more destructive political consequences. But, is it the case that the principle is as exclusive of the secular as it appears? In this article, the author argues that Christian-Muslim coexistence is a distinctively Lebanese articulation of a secular sensibility, one that privileges certain ways of being Muslim or Christian, ways that would require Christians and Muslims to constitute themselves, or be constituted, as proper legal subjects.}, number={1}, journal={Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East}, publisher={Duke University Press}, author={Abillama, Raja}, year={2022}, month={May}, pages={51–62} }
 @misc{joanne randa nucho, everyday sectarianism in urban lebanon: infrastructures, public services, and power, princeton studies in culture and technology (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016). pp. 192. $27.95 paper. isbn: 9780691168975_2019, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743819000746}, DOI={10.1017/s0020743819000746}, abstractNote={Joanne Randa Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power, Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Pp. 192. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780691168975 - Volume 51 Issue 4}, journal={International Journal of Middle East Studies}, year={2019}, month={Nov} }
 @article{abillama_2018, title={Contesting Secularism: Civil Marriage and Those Who Do Not Belong to a Religious Community in Lebanon}, volume={41}, DOI={10.1111/plar.12259}, abstractNote={AbstractIn late 2012 the first civil marriage in Lebanon and, at the end of the following year, the first Lebanese baby to be not registered as belonging to a community, were officially recognized months after administrative delay and legal argumentation. These recognitions unsettled the Lebanese consensus that all citizens belonged to one of the communities of Muslims, Christians, or Jews that, moreover, had long held exclusive jurisdiction over the marriages of their members. A space seemed to have opened up in which a secular alternative could be pursued in the conduct of matters of state and personal life. Based on an analysis of the constitutive processes of this recognition, I trace the lineaments of a distinctively Lebanese secularism, which, I argue, consists of the assumption that marriage and identity are joined together in a mutually dependent relationship. I show that although the recognition of civil marriage and non‐belonging may seem to drive a wedge between marriage and identity, they are in fact a different way of rearticulating this assumption and the attitudes, norms, and practices that sustain it. Far from securing their stable separation, the recognition shifts their point of tension from the community to the individual, and from legal to administrative power.}, journal={POLAR-POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW}, author={Abillama, Raja}, year={2018}, pages={148–162} }
 @inbook{the sectarian as a category of secular power: sectarian tensions and judicial authority in lebanon_2014, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.7135/9780857283092.008}, DOI={10.7135/9780857283092.008}, abstractNote={Sectarian tensions figure in contemporary commentaries on certain regions of the world as exemplary manifestations of religious violence or, among the more cautious ones, of its conditions. As the darker corollaries of religious diversity, the bête noire of an otherwise peaceful multiculturalism, they point to the bloody outcomes of unreason and intolerance evoked in age-old images of inter-religious slaughter. As such, sectarian tensions are a permanent trace of that forgotten past, its continuous din in the anxious ears of the self-proclaimed secular who sees a potential threat in any religious multiplicity. In that capacity they are seen to be propitious for the causes of dictators, who opportunistically exploit them for their own purposes, as an expert on Middle Eastern affairs writing about Syria has recently warned. “[I]t is now clear,” he writes, “that Assad's strategy is to divide the opposition by stoking sectarian tensions” (Nasr 2011). They also occasion “consternation” and “condemnation” which, while “ultimately provid[ing] the main democratic guarantee against the narrowly factional exploitation of sectarianism” (Sen 1999, 5), may also entail a justification of political intervention. The same expert advises Washington that while it “can hope for a peaceful and democratic future […] we should guard against sectarian conflicts that, once in the open, would likely run their destructive course at great cost to the region and the world” (Nasr 2011).}, booktitle={War and Peace}, year={2014} }
 @misc{abillama_2006, title={Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict by Samir Khalaf}, volume={14}, url={https://www.jstor.org/stable/27933989}, number={2}, journal={Arab Studies Journal}, author={Abillama, Raja}, year={2006}, pages={173–76} }