Chapter 1 commences with a brief review of the genealogy, transmutations, and historical semantics of political secularism in the Western tradition and Arab intellectual history. Intellectually and ideologically, the author proposes that the perception of secularism in Lebanon and the Middle East has been skewed by an often polemicized understanding of European history, a phobia-plagued discourse on religion, and an essentially premodern patron–client paradigm of social and political relationships. The chapter also looks at the possible linkages between the rise of secularism and capitalism.