Belonging's Belongings: Sunni <i>Waqf</i>s and the Limits of Community in Beirut
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".