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Paper Short Abstract:

Lebanon has been experiencing one of the worst worldwide economic crises since WW2, and Sulṭān Yaʿqūb is a small rural Sunni countryside village. How can villagers survive it? This contribution considers the multilayered encounters featuring a religious-moral idiom that elucidates this question.

Paper Abstract:

Lebanon has been experiencing one of the worst worldwide economic crises since WW2, and Sulṭān Yaʿqūb is a small rural Sunni countryside village. How can villagers survive it? This contribution considers transnational multilayered encounters that elucidate this question.

Sulṭān is close the Lebanese-Syrian border and a significant part of the residents has strong transnational ties to Brazil. Narratives of the success of the village when compared to the rest of Lebanon tend to emphasize the Will of God and Islamic praxis. Entrepreneurship, while central to the experience of the Sulṭānese within Lebanon, Brazil or elsewhere, is only seen as the indirect cause of success, which in turn depends on moral capital. Both financial and moral capital translate into active roles in the village’s institutions, which in turn translates into sociopolitical power in the village and beyond. Overall, the village is characterized by complex and multilayered encounters between people, community, and moral conceptions of the self, significantly expressed in moral economies, with religious, economic, political, and sociocultural undertones, and staged especially in Lebanon, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and North America. These encounters are framed by the Sulṭānese through a religious nexus ubiquitous to daily life, accounting for the “success” of the moral community and represented in patterns of sociopolitical organization. While unique, Sulṭān’s case is also an iteration of a larger structure. It illustrates a pattern that occurs throughout Lebanon, accounting for much of its social dynamics.