In 1978 Barbara Pillsbury and I dedicated our coedited book, Muslim–Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political and Social Origins (Westview), with these words: “To those who struggle to demystify religion and to those who suffer and die because the struggle is yet unfinished.” Charles Issawi observes in his preface that the contributors to the volume tend to interpret the conflicts more in economic and political terms than in “religious” terms. In an effort to develop analytical tools, my introduction distinguishes between “religion/religious identity and consciousness” (as theology/theological consciousness) and “sect/sectarianism” (as social organization, relationships, dynamics/group identity, and consciousness). I argue that sectarianism is about how “differences” are constructed; because people can believe they are very different when they are not, the task of the scholar is to describe what differences do exist, how they emerged, and why people believe they are different. Differentiation is a process, I suggest, that operates through the everyday—through socialization, through family systems, and through various other aspects of social organization in both systematic and erratic or contradictory ways.

The goal of the introduction was to destabilize standing categories of analysis as much as it was to disaggregate apparent social formations. I conclude, “For as soon as we ask about Muslim–Christian conflicts, we assume not only conflict, but also the category of religion and sectarian forms of social organization. A far more productive approach . . . is to start not by asking about religion, but by asking about people. We need to start not by assuming conflict, but by inquiring about the nature of social order, the character of the cleavages, the nature of integration, and the history of change.”

The increasing “politicization” of religion (not that religion is not always political), the bloody tearing apart of Lebanon, and the popular and at times scholarly misreading of the war in Lebanon as mainly about “religious” differences were my driving concerns in 1978. I was also driven to correct my graduate training, which had led me to conflate the power of religion with belief. I was trying to understand the power of belief to construct differences, the power of constructed differences to create and transform material reality, and to document that this power is not easily crippled, even by scholarly “expositions.”

Thirty years later, analyses of conflicts as “religious” and the elision between “religion” and “sectarianism” continue to be applied to Middle Eastern (and non-Middle Eastern) countries—Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon—despite the profoundly shifting and contradictory ways in which religion (and sectarianism) has operated or manifested itself in the past quarter century or more in the region. The issue, oddly enough, is the same. It is not, what are religious differences? Rather, it is a series of questions: What do specific people believe these differences to be at specific points in time and specific places? How have they come to believe them? How have those shifting beliefs transformed into motivations that have material effects? What people believe religion to be, as it transforms into motivation, however, needs to be carefully woven into the complex web of other motivational forces that knit into the social fabric as well as into the psyche.

While we work to critically analyze social realities on the ground to understand how religion is at play, it is as important to ask why, of the myriad motivational forces at play, we in the West focus on “religion.” That we (scholars as well as layfolks) tend to see motivational structures in non-Western societies more driven by “culture” (with religion being the signatory metaphor for culture, followed closely by gender) and less by politics, economy, and other variables has been well rehearsed. The task is to work against essentialization of categories of analysis as well as the disaggregation of social formations.

“Sectarianism” as an analytical tool for sociological analysis with its focus on the construction of social forms is useful for this project. However, the slippery slope between sect as social organization and religion as theology continues to lead to analytical slippages between the deployment of “sectarianism” and “religion” as conceptual tools. The most urgent step is to ground “sectarianism” as a sociological concept and as social formation in history. Here, the work of Ussama Makdisi is one of the best examples of the usefulness of the term “sectarianism.” His insistence that “sectarianism as an idea and as a practice belongs to the realm of the modern” situates sectarianism historically.Footnote ¹ Just as important, his fine-tuned analysis of “the culture” of sectarianism highlights the process of production, how it is that ideas are produced and transformed into materiality.

Sectarianism, used sociologically and historically grounded, is a critical concept for analysis of the Middle East and other regions. It remains the case, however, that we need nuanced categories of analysis that capture sociological and motivational dynamics while not cementing themselves or the dynamics they are designed to analyze. It is a challenge not only of vocabulary, but also of ways of thinking. We must learn how to think “sectarianism” while thinking of all that it is not, how to deploy categories of analysis while asserting their instability, how to capture the materiality of the moment while historicizing it, and how to grasp the power of religion while demystifying it.