He dismantled the foundational myths which many of Lebanon's communities were attached to, and replaced them with a complex portrait of the nation as an intricate mosaic of disparate but interconnected communities, over which no one group exerted dominance. He was strongly opposed to sectarian politics, believing that it had been the ruin of his country, and was one of the first Lebanese to remove his sect (madhdhab) identification from the Lebanese census records. He pinned a copy of his new ID, which has 'I' for his madhdhab outside his apartment in Ras Beirut.