Belonging's Belongings: Sunni Waqfs and the Limits of Community in Beirut

Abstract

Lebanon is often described as being plagued by interreligious conflict among the country's eighteen religious communities. Since the mid-2000s, with the political dominance of Shiʿi Hezbollah, Sunni-Shiʿi tensions have been particularly acrimonious in multireligious Beirut. This article examines the role of Sunni communal property known as waqf in the making and unmaking of these religious identities in the last 20 years. Ethnographic and archival research shows that, because these waqfs are most inexorably linked to community, they are fertile ground for reproducing exclusionary discourses. Concurrently, because they bring together multiple forms of Sunni belonging (family, religion, associations), they bring to the surface tensions among them, which are likely to unravel that community. Waqfs then reveal that what appears like interreligious conflict also hides intragroup tensions. They also provide a cautionary tale for scholars and activists advancing communal property as a “fix” against capitalist exclusions, since such forms of property can produce different forms of exclusions. Such so-called small Sunni-Shiʿi tensions over waqf showcase the inner workings of sectarian difference that is reflected in global geopolitical conflicts, such as the current war on Palestine and Lebanon.