Hizbullah’s Post-Islamist Trends in the Performing Arts

Joseph Alagha

doi:10.3390/rel11120645

Abstract

This article outlines Hizbullah’s shift to post-Islamism and its various cultural activities in Lebanese society that underpin this shift. The Party’s involvement in these activities is integrated in current research on post-Islamism and its various social, political, and cultural manifestations. In its Islamist stage, Hizbullah anathematized the Lebanese political system and state institutions. In its post-Islamist phase, Hizbullah became pragmatic by embarking on a policy of opening-up (infitah) in politics along with cultural and social practices. This article studies Hizbullah’s popular culture and lifestyles by focusing on its purposeful art or ‘resistance art’, which is a cultural resistance against oppression, domestic deprivation, disenfranchisement, and repression, as well as foreign aggression, invasion, occupation, and subjugation. Hizbullah exploits the concepts of cultural citizenship and cultural politics to encourage, in mixed gender spaces, purposeful performing arts: music, dancing, singing, revolutionary theater, and satire. Hizbullah appears to equate modernity with European art forms rather than indigenous forms. In its ideology and politics, Hizbullah fluctuated between Islamism and post-Islamism. While in its performing arts, Hizbullah conveyed a post-Islamist face legitimized by the principle of maslaha (public interest).

Highlights

The Lebanese Hizbullah evolved in the 1980s from a militant organization with a well-defined exclusivist Islamist ideology—based upon the Iranian principle of the ‘Guardianship of the Jurisprudent’(Islamism)—to a political party in the 1990s engaged in the democratic process via parliamentary and municipal elections, but without stopping its struggle to liberate occupied land from Israel (Post-Islamism)
Islamism deploys a religious language, favors conservative social mores, espouses a patriarchal disposition, places emphasis on individual duties, shows intolerance toward different ideas and lifestyles, and, on a general note, strives to establish an Islamic state based on shari‘a law (Bayat 2013, p. 7)
Bayat conceptualizes the term as a project and a condition wherein religiosity and faith merge with freedom, liberty, and civil rights; post-Islamism aspires to a pious society within a democratic state (Bayat 2013)

Summary

Introduction

The Lebanese Hizbullah evolved in the 1980s from a militant organization with a well-defined exclusivist Islamist ideology—based upon the Iranian principle of the ‘Guardianship of the Jurisprudent’(Islamism)—to a political party in the 1990s engaged in the democratic process via parliamentary and municipal elections, but without stopping its struggle to liberate occupied land from Israel (Post-Islamism). In addition to the regional struggles and the continuation of the ‘Arab-Israeli’ conflict, which boosted its argument for keeping its arms, domestically Hizbullah portrays itself as the defender of Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity, by using the pretext of the land-border conflict with Israel and the maritime border disagreement over the oil and gas blocks. This might explain why Hizbullah’s military capabilities and modern weaponry eclipse those of the Lebanese Army by a great margin. It is notable that Hizbullah’s deterrent policy seems to have borne fruit—on 14 October 2020—with the beginning of the indirect negotiations between Lebanon and Israel in the border town of Naqoura, under the auspices of the UN and the mediation of the US, with the physical presence of David Schenker—the U.S State Department’s

Results

Discussion

Conclusion