Beirut

Marie and Siad want to get married. They are in the middle of the wedding preparations. They have already booked their flights to Cyprus. Cyprus? Yes, Cyprus, because the couple wants a civilian marriage, and that is not possible in Lebanon. “We live a secular life; why should we celebrate a Muslim marriage?” Marie asks. Siad, her future husband, is a musician. He plays the traditional oud, the oriental guitar. In his songs, he satirises his country’s history dominated by religion.

Couples like Marie and Siad have a hard life in Lebanon. There virtually is no public family law comparable to the European system in this country. Everything that has to do with weddings, divorces or inheritance matters is handled by the religious groups. There factually is no separation of state and church; even the parliament seats and ministerial offices are distributed according to the proportion of the 18 religious communities in the country.

Lebanese are assigned to one of the 18 groups at their birth. People who place no value on their religion or belong to a different religious community are faced with problems. Reverend Habib Badr, for example, reverend of the National Evangelical Church (NEC), has quite a few stories to tell about absurd meetings. “A young couple came to me once; they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They wanted me to marry them.”

Although the Protestant church does not accept Jehovah’s Witnesses, Reverend Badr offered to marry them if they accepted the Protestant liturgy. The plan failed, because Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in the triune God. They did not have the money for a wedding abroad. Today, the Lebanese Association for Civil Rights takes care of such cases. One of the activists there is Rima Ibrahim. She says: “We urgently need civil matrimonial law in Lebanon; that is what we are fighting for.” She and her husband Fadi Abi Samra, an actor, were among the first who dared to marry abroad in a civil marriage ceremony ten years ago. “It was really easy”, Fadi remembers, “we flew to Turkey for a week; it only took one day, and we were married without having to register in advance.” They presented the Turkish documents to the Lebanese authorities; they were translated and accepted without any problems.

So Rima and Fadi are accepted as a married couple now. That was important to them, because they wanted children. “It is virtually impossible to have children if you aren’t married”, Fadi says. Today, they have two daughters, Sarah (10) and Mira (6). The only thing one can do is wish them a long happy life together. Because if they wanted a divorce, they would be faced with the same problems again. “The public administration would tell us to go to our sheik and that they have nothing to do with divorces. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

The Lebanese state does not even feel responsible for inheritance matters. They are also dealt with by the clergy. And lead to blatant injustice, especially with respect to women. A Sunni woman only inherits half as much as her husband, while Shiites and Christians treat women equally in this respect. Once there was a Sunni Prime Minister who converted to become a Shiite so that his daughter would obtain the entire inheritance.

A kind of wedding tourism has developed in the past few years. The preferred country for marriage is Cyprus. You are there in 45 minutes with the plane, and the ceremony does not take much longer either. “Thousands of people get married that way”, Rima estimates.