In Lebanon, all matters of personal status -- marriage, divorce, custody, and inheritance -- are governed by religious codes, of which there are 15 recognized by the state. Each religious sect follows a distinct set of personal state laws (several of the country's 18 sects fall under a single jurisdiction). By shunting citizens into religious communities, the personal status laws fracture the country's four-million-strong population along sectarian lines in an intimate, personal way.

It's the seedy underbelly of Lebanon's notoriously divided political system, which apportions government positions (and access to government resources) according to sectarian quotas. And while its macro effects make headlines -- political bickering that periodically escalates into violence, or deteriorates into months-long stalemates during which the country remains effectively ungoverned -- its micro effects rarely receive the same scrutiny.



The 15 different sets of religious laws converge on one issue: all of them discriminate against women in one or more fields. For example, the personal status law for Evangelical Christians sets the minimum age of marriage at 16 for males and 14 for females, as does the Armenian Orthodox Church. A Druze woman needs her male guardian's permission to marry if she is under 21. In the Sunni and Shi'a tradition, a male witness to a marriage is considered equivalent to two females. Articles in the Armenian Orthodox and Assyrian laws state, "The man is the head of the family and its representative in law." In the Sunni community, a husband's young children from a previous marriage can live with him without his wife's consent, while she must have her husband's. The list goes on.

Hoping to find a loophole in -- or an alternative interpretation of -- the law, Omari sought help from lawyers, religious leaders, and local politicians.

"I saw everybody in town," she said, "every turbaned person I could get my hands on." A moderate sheikh sympathetic to her situation told her he wished he could advocate on her behalf, but the laws were clear-cut. "He told me, 'I know you could support the kids, and you work, and I think they should be with you. But you can't get what you want. Better off to make peace with him and negotiate with him amicably.'"

For a month and a half, she didn't see her children. Eventually, she began visiting them at her mother-in-law's house, where they were staying, and then to negotiate with her former husband. Although she never got legal custody of the children, they are now living with her.

"The scary thing is, he could have kept that up for a very long time," she said.

The story of how Lebanon's law and society got this way is, like many stories here, one of outside influences and complicated political compromise. As in several other countries in the region, personal status law in Lebanon is a by-product of Ottoman and colonial history. The early Ottoman millet system gave authority over family law to four recognized religious groups: Jews, Armenians, Christian Orthodox, and the majority Sunni Muslims. By the mid-1800s, sectarianism -- defined by historian Ussama Makdisi as "the deployment of religious heritage as a primary marker of political identity" -- seeped into political consciousness, a side effect of 19th century Ottoman reforms known as the Tanzimat, which declared that all citizens were equal under the law, regardless of religion.