We deal with sectarianism as if it were a shameful matter, a birth defect that must be masked and denied, a crippled child kept in a secluded room and whose cries embarrass us in front of the guests. Unfortunately, we know that most of the time, sectarianism will not disappear. This is not only because we hate it and are embarrassed by it, but because it is an objective fact, which has nothing to do with our desires. Indeed, it is consolidated by the population's awareness and the interests of large groups that cling to sectarianism both in public and in private. Sectarianism, in its quality of a social system and a system of identity perception, has brought perpetual challenges. Its rigidity has been at times infiltrated by our fragile ideas about cultural and inter-class divisions that were in fact never too strong. This proves that sectarianism is what stirs the people; that it is solid and ‘authentic' and that its enemies had little chances of success throughout more than a century of distorted and partial Arab ‘modernity.' Upon conducting a comparison between the terms used to criticize sectarianism – as being the main cause for all the disasters in our region and an epidemic induced by colonization and nurtured by Israel in order to tint our good life in light of the paradisiacal brotherhood where lambs live alongside wolves – and the serious studies aimed at understanding this phenomenon and placing it under a historic and social framework, the comparison indicates that, even in a country like Lebanon where social and political studies have been abundant since the 1960s, we have not paid an adequate amount of attention to this phenomenon and to its amazing ability to revive and produce differences between people living in close and even geographically intertwined areas. The attempts in that direction were said to be regressive, sectarian, and affected by the orientalist vision of our situation. Some say that sects are essential entities that always remain unchanged. But the talk about the geographic, economic, and racial factors is overlooked. These factors cause the sectarian plurality to be a constantly present fact in this part of the world. They are even the reasons why all the demographic groups, even the most numerous of them, are in reality mere neighboring minorities. On the other hand, denying sectarianism and its effect is as harmful as considering that sectarianism is the only tool for us to understand our reality. The school that denies sectarianism, despite its secular and progressive claims, is in reality no different from the school that clings to sectarianism as the only way to explain the current situation, thus relying on a single element to evaluate the situation on the one hand and overlooking ‘history' and dropping it from the present calculations on the other hand. In a region where the past weighs heavily on the present, overlooking history seems to be an act of political immaturity and a deadly train of thought. But the problem here is that, like all the tools at hand, history is being ill-used to justify tyranny and to use the language of the mutual ‘injustices.' One must say that there is a major difference between the practice of political sectarianism, which leads to eradicating citizenship and to imposing differences in the rights and duties between the citizens in a manner that destroys the bases of justice between them; and the comprehension of the sectarian aspect of politics and finding effective mechanisms to transcend it in the direction of justice for all in the state and its institutions. The models of political sectarianism that were adopted in Lebanon and are being promoted in Iraq are not fit for generalization. They are just lessons about what must be avoided when building pluralistic states. Today, the surviving groups and the winning sects are rising, with an enviable vigor, to demand their rights. They are using a past that has been taken out of context in order to sketch a road to a future that carries death threats. Despite all that, we cannot but fight this scourge; and the denial of the facts; and the attempts at alienating the others either through the barbaric massacres or the speeches that implicitly bring about a slow death.
