Summary
In Lybarger’s Chapter 4, the process by which identity in Palestinian Chicago became organised along religious-sectarian lines as secular nationalism lost its cultural and political hegemony — registering in Islamization and in a mirroring Christian nationalism (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.136-137).
Details
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The generation of 1948-67 established the Islamic shift’s institutions, polarising the religious and political fields; polarisation deepened with Hamas’s rise in the Occupied Territories during the late 1980s and 1990s and marked the generation of 1987-2001 (PDF p.136-137 / printed p.115-116).
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Christians stood excluded from the Islamized space except in overlapping zones such as downtown demonstrations, Nakba commemorations and crisis organising meetings; as shared secular space receded, many Christians retreated into alternate sectarian loci, as in Munir’s narrative (PDF p.137 / printed p.116).
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Munir described an interlocking, interactive sectarianization transcending Palestine and the United States: Christians closed ranks in response to Islamization, itself a response to the xenophobic reaction after September 11, and diaspora institutions displaced Palestinian identity within interethnic religious loyalties on both Muslim and Christian sides (PDF p.140 / printed p.119).
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Sectarianization intensified in the post-September 11 generation, whose orientations formed through integration into already established sectarian institutions, in two trajectories in Lybarger’s data: sectarianized nationalism and denationalized sectarianism (PDF p.130-131, p.141 / printed p.109-110, p.120).
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Chapter 4’s conclusion (PDF p.153 / printed p.132) states that after distinct sectarian milieus emerged, religious subjectivities moved along the diverging axes of sectarianized nationalism and Denationalized sectarianism, determined by integration within religious-nationalist structures and by the relative absence of a desectarianized secular space.
Related pages
Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile · Secularism · Religious turn · Syncretic secularity · Denationalized sectarianism