Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance
Writing the Lebanese Nation

This book explores Hizbullah's understanding of 'being Lebanese' to meet evolving political challenges and gain influence within Lebanon and the wider region.

Bashir Saade (Author)

9781107101814, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 August 2016

188 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.4 cm, 0.4 kg

'Saade offers a compelling account of how Hizbullah's ideologues and intellectuals address history - both their own and that of others - to continually rearticulate a common political project. Along the way, this work unsettles prevailing accounts of Hizbullah's ideological development and of the writing of the Lebanese nation and provides the most theoretically sophisticated analysis of Hizbullah writings yet published in English.' Michaelle Browers, Wake Forest University, North Carolina

Born out of the Israeli occupation of the South of Lebanon, the political armed group Hizbullah is a powerful player within both Lebanon and the wider Middle East. Understanding how Hizbullah has, since the 1980s, developed its own reading of the nature of the Lebanese state, national identity and historical narrative is central to grasping the political trajectory of the country. By examining the ideological production of Hizbullah, especially its underground newspaper Al Ahd, Bashir Saade offers an account of the intellectual continuity between the early phases of Hizbullah's emergence onto the political stage and its present day organization. Saade argues here that this early intellectual activity, involving an elaborate understanding of the past and history had a long lasting impact on later cultural production, one in which the notion and practice of Resistance has been central in developing national imaginaries.

Introduction
1. Mapping the ground of Hizbullah's ideological production
2. Martyrology and conceptions of time in Hizbullah's writing practices
3. Imagining the Lebanese Christians through writing history
4. The debt to the left and the enemy: the politics of resistance
5. Confronting the state: writing space and Hizbullah's politics of legitimacy
Epilogue. Confronting the state: between party and community
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Revolutionary groups & movements [JPWQ], Nationalism [JPFN], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]