Sectual Healing ?

The campaign everyone is talking about is cute. But is it effective?

The people behind the amam campaign are well intentioned. Some of them are good friends of mine and one of them used to be my student. The campaign is catchy, but besides making a point, what are they really achieving with the 300 billboards spread all over Lebanon?

The stated purpose of the campaign is to increase our awareness of a problem we have, to shock ourselves and realize how medieval our sectarian system is. The campaign states its raison-d’etre in its website:

The campaign focuses on the ridiculous/harmful side of sectarianism/confessionalism and its excesses in our every day life. [It] is bound to make you both laugh and think. The tone, which is innovative, provocative, funny and straight to the point, will most certainly generate debate and provoke much-needed thinking about the reality of how far confessionalism dictates our every day social behaviour.

But that seems like a redundant task. Do we really need to be reminded of something so pervasive in our daily life? The Post’s Shadid himself writes:

By tradition, the president is Maronite, the prime minister Sunni, the parliament speaker Shiite. Other posts are reserved for Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Druze. Boy scouts are organized by community, not country — the Mahdi Scouts for the Shiites, for instance. Television stations have their own sectarian bent — the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. for Christians, Future for the Sunnis. Christians are partial to the Sagesse basketball team, Sunnis the Riyadi team. There are even two Armenian soccer teams — Homenmen and Homenetmen — one faithful to Armenian leftists, the other to the community’s right wing. Before this summer’s war, Sunni soccer fans loyal to Ansar brawled in a stadium with Shiite youths loyal to Nijmeh.

The problem with the campaign, is that it asks us to “stop” sectarianism without actually telling us how to do that. It’s one thing to make fun of the system, and it’s something else to tell your parents that you’re marrying someone from a different religion. (As people behind the campaign themselves know very well)

In a country where religious courts are the sole authorities in determining matters like marriage, divorce, inheritance and child custody (did you know for instance that if a Muslim woman marries a Christian man, she loses all her inheritance rights?), making fun of a problem is still not solving the problem.

In other words, unless serious efforts to take the campaign from the billboards to legislation are under way, the large amounts of money spent on this campaign will be spent on nothing but a sheer curiosity.