Lebanese Women at the Crossroads: Caught between Sect and Nation by Nelia Hyndman-Rizk (review)

Abstract

LebaneseWomen at the Crossroads is an incisive intervention into a series of questions that Nelia Hyndman-Rizk calls the “women’s rights puzzle” in Lebanon (114):Why is women’s political representation so low inLebanon?Why iswomen’s participation in the labor force relatively thin, even though they are highly educated in aggregate? Why can Lebanese women not pass Lebanese citizenship on to their children? In facing these questions, Hyndman-Rizk asks whether introducing a secular nationality and civic marriage law would solve themany legal, political, social, and economic contradictions that women face in Lebanon. Although it would not be a panacea, it would nevertheless guarantee that “citizenship status will be absolute, irrespective of sect or gender, rather than relational based upon sect and gender” (114). Thefirst part of the book, “Formations” (introd.–chap. 3), is a broad overview (based on original research and a wide range of secondary sources) of the ways that Lebanese people, specifically Lebanese women, have been constructed under differing legal regimes between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It examines “the formation of Lebanon as a congressional democracy and explores the plural system of personal status law in Lebanon, wherein women experience differential and relational rights under both religious and civil law” (113). The introduction situates the ongoing challengeswomen face in Lebanon within the arc of the Arab uprisings between late 2010 and 2013. Some accounts assert that thenewer uprisings that began again in the late 2010s, including those in Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, Palestine, and Lebanon (particularly its October 2019 uprising), are volutions of the still-ongoing uprisings, which contain similar discontents, motivations, and strategies. Likewise, Hyndman-Rizk asserts that the women’s movement in Lebanon is currently in a fourth phase that “is an extension of previous waves of activism in theMENA region” (4–5). She acknowledges that women’s issues in Lebanon are rooted