Sunday, February 12, 2006

Sectarian does not mean religious


Hizballah is the only mainstream party in Lebanon that is not merely sectarian, but religious. It's agenda is not political, it is also social. Lebanese Shi'a who are secular, but defending that organization as a result of their sectarian impulses must understand the repercussions of their support.

Do they really want to live in the society that Hizballahis want to create?Posted by Picasa

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I totally agree with your classification. IMO the FPM is where it should be.

The quality of the picture suck though

Ms Levantine said...

One of the problems with the religious model is that the economies are not competitive. It can work for a while in a country sitting on huge oil reserves (Iran, KSA), in Lebanon we will end up looking like Afghanistan under the Talibans.

Anonymous said...

Isn't the sectarian ultimatelty reigious and the religious ultimately sectarian? Can we really say that the social is separate from the political and both are separate from the economic? Aren't these compartments artificial? In the real world society is a whole , the different fields of knowledge are there only in order to simplify.

Ms Levantine said...

Jumblatt/Hariri/Aoun are sectarian, they defend the interests of their sect within the larger framework of a sectarian democracy. HA is a religious mvt. that is looking to impose its values on the country as a whole. Jumblatt does not want to transform Lebanon into a Druze Republic. So I think we can argue that there is a difference bet. sectarian and a religious in a political sense, sectarian being a more innocuous version of religious. I agree with Raja on this one.

Anonymous said...

Why the disclaimer on the communist party? It's one of the few that is both non-religious and non-sectarian. You can fault them and the SSNP via other criteria (anti-jewish tendencies in SSNP+ overt nationalism, Stalinism in the leadership of the LCP), but you can't fault them in the oversimplified model you propose.

At the moment the LCP comes out as the cleanest of the mainstream parties on the offering in lebanon, even though I'm not completely enamoured with Marxist-Leninism.

Anonymous said...

I don't know how big they are, but shouldn't the "Yassar Demokrati" be in the lower-left corner too? Or are they really with the 'etc...' portion of the lower-right corner? Do you know whether they're non-sectarian in practice, or just in principle (like the "Tayyar" and others).

Rola said...

How about including the Democratic Left Movement in Lebanon in the non-religious non-sectarian cell...it certainly deserves to be there.
Rola

Raja said...

rola,

You are right. But, I never night the Democratic Left was an official party.

I am considering a new visual representation of Lebanese political parties and movements - one that is more nuanced and detailed. If I do so, then I will definitely include the Democratic Left.