A presidential proposal for civil marriage in Lebanon has caused an unholy row at a time when Muslims are celebrating the Feast of Sacrifice and Christians are celebrating Easter. And when the president boycotts the patriarch on Easter Sunday it means the row is serious.
Last month the president, Mr Elias Hrawi, a Maronite Catholic, secured cabinet approval - by 21 votes to six - for a proposal to introduce optional civil marriage in a country where marriage has always been performed by prelates of the 18 religious communities.
This means that in Lebanon there is no marriage between people of different religions unless one partner converts to the faith of the other. The only alternative is to marry abroad. Mr Hrawi intends his proposal to herald the much delayed secularisation process stipulated in the Taif Accord which ended the 15year Lebanese civil war in 199091. But both traditional politicians and prelates have condemned the initiative because they depend for power on the sectarian system established by France in the 1930s.
Tensions have risen between traditionalists, seeking to protect their positions by maintaining sectarianism, and reformers, striving for pluralist democracy. In Lebanon, tension always breeds sectarian strife.
The Prime Minister, Mr Rafiq Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, voted against the proposal but the proposition was supported by the Speaker of Parliament, Mr Nabih Berri, a member of the Shia Muslim community, the largest single sect, who warned that sectarianism was a "simmering volcano" which had to be abolished if the country was to progress.
The heads of the Muslim and Christian religious establishments reacted promptly. The Sunni Mufti, Shaikh Muhammad Qabbani, and the Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, threatened excomunication of anyone marrying under civil law. This prompted the president to refuse to attend Easter services at the patriarchate.
So instead Mr Hrawi, Mr Hariri and Mr Berri, the troika which rules Lebanon, met yesterday at the summer residence of the Syrian President, Mr Hafez al-Assad, a member of the heterodox Shia Alawite sect, who will impose peace and good will on the squabbling Lebanese, as Damascus has done since Syria became the main foreign power broker in Lebanon in 1991. But this time, damping down tension and defusing a crisis will not be easy, because marriage is not the only issue at dispute. There is also a major problem about money. Here the dispute is between haves and have-nots, between the rich and powerful and the poor and weak. Since Mr Hariri became prime minister in 1992, the government has focused on rebuilding the country's infrastructure, destroyed during the civil war and two major Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982. But reconstruction has left the poor in the lurch. Last year the government spent 50 per cent more than it earned on grandiose projects from which contractors and politicians made money, raising the national debt from $10 to $14 billion. This left no funds for rehabilitation of the south, or for the inhabitants of the slum suburbs of south Beirut whose homes have been bulldozed in order to make way for roads and bridges, or for people "displaced" during the civil war who need financial help to resettle in their home villages.
To make matters worse, economic growth fell from a high of 8 per cent in 1994 to 3.5 per cent last year and is expected to slide to 3 per cent this year. Corruption, always endemic, is now rampant at every level of the bureaucracy.
In the absence of national political parties, the economic pinch has made ordinary people more than ever dependent on communal leaders, politicians and organisations for jobs and even securing permits and licences. Consequently confessional communalism, the root cause of Lebanon's problems and of the civil war, has been reinforced and strengthened at a time when the country is supposed to be reforming the sectarian system and transforming itself into a "true" democracy.