Today, every Lebanese confessional group, whether Shia, Sunni, Maronite Christian or Druze, has a former leader who has achieved a near sanctified status after an assassination or a "disappearance", as in the case of Musa Sadr, a Shia leader who vanished on a visit to Colonel Gadafy's Libya in 1978.
"It's a confessional group," she said.
It takes some doing to truly listen to someone, and I was grateful for the guidelines put out by the Urban Confessional group.
As a start, present day Syria and Iraq combined would have a more balanced composition of ethnic and confessional groups.
Many Shia Muslims, the largest but historically most disenfranchised of Lebanon's 18 recognised confessional groups, still see Syria as the ultimate champion of the notion of "resistance".
There is, of course, a government in Lebanon, split up among the country's many confessional groups — Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and Druze, mainly.
Since Lebanon's civil war ended, the peace has held because the country's main confessional groups — the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Christians — have been very careful not to grab too much power.
One of them narrowly escaped assassination on October 1st.This has all left Lebanon, whose fragile prosperity rests on a careful division of spoils among some 18 confessional groups, in a dangerous state of polarisation.
But the failure to bring his killers to justice has revived the bitter mistrust among Lebanon's main confessional groups — Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Druse — opening the way for Hezbollah's alarming rise.
Following the model of French cities, this religious system was replaced by a mayor and a citywide council composed of representatives of the confessional groups (millet) across Istanbul.
However despite good intentions and ideas, including a 2005 Lebanese television show which saw two teams, each comprising a member of the 18 different confessional groups answer questions about their identity and role in Lebanon's history, 'nostalgic visions of prewar Lebanon dominated the representations of the civil war that emerged from calls to counter state-sponsored amnesia'.
