Lebanese religious leaders are often treated as authentic representatives of their sects and are given broad powers over religious affairs. However, their leadership is not organic, nor are they necessarily popular, as these individuals are trained and selected by elite institutions. Lebanon’s political system institutionalizes the representation of various religious sects and grants their leaders broad powers over religious affairs, including personal-status courts, wealthy endowments, places of worship, education, and the centralized employment of clerics. Lebanese religious leaders do not incite sectarian hatred. They are invested in coexisting within and preserving the political system that confers their power. In some respects, religious representatives are well-placed to defuse sectarian tension. They tend to publically oppose the politicization of sectarian divisions, and can be instrumental in deradicalization. But the way Lebanon recognizes and empowers exclusivist religious leaders also exacerbates the country’s difficulty in faithfully representing its religious diversity. These leaders promote narrow orthodoxies that marginalize and at times radicalize nonconformists such as Islamists or secularists. Religious leaders help perpetuate a sectarian system that inhibits social integration and has suppressed the representation of diversity rather than improved it. Their monopoly over religious affairs maintains divisions between citizens and confines them to communally bound lives.

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Why has Religious Studies failed to gain ground in Middle Eastern universities? This article aims to move beyond a lens of under-development to think about the significance of Muslim opposition to the discipline. When we suppose that studying religion and religions is an obvious thing to do, we risk casting those who deliberately avoid it as somehow irrationally refusing to see what is in front of them. But what if their objections reveal something troubling about the received terms through which we talk about cultures around the world? By taking seriously a certain Islamic perspective on the terms of Western scholarship, this article highlights ways in which it supports Timothy Fitzgerald's critique in The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000). It poses a challenge to the idea of value-free study of religion, religions and the religious as conducted through any discipline. This author's hope is that a focus on Muslim voices may bring these concerns home in particular to the fields of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, where the terms of comparative Religious Studies have been embraced as an escape from Orientalism.

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This article examines a secular liberal state’s demand for religious representation of minorities, exploring how one heterodox Muslim community has responded to this demand in a context of intense public scrutiny. In order to gain recognition and rights as a legitimate religious community in modern Lebanon, Druze leaders created a new figurehead to look something like the head of a Christian church. Their project offers a striking case of how a secular democracy can end up generating the “religion” it expects to find; how the politics of religious representation can transform Muslim communities that lack a church-like structure; how ambiguous the notion of “religious representation” turns out to be when these Muslims try to do it from scratch; and how much harder heterodox Muslims often have to work to gain recognition within a world religions paradigm.