Suchergebnisse

As one of the Middle East's more open countries, Lebanon is fairly congenial to foreign researchers. Classified as "partly free" by Freedom House, it ranks ahead of all the region's countries, except Israel, Tunisia, and Turkey. However, when it comes to researching Hizbullah, this openness and congeniality subsides. While Hizbullah contains political and social branches, it is first and foremost a military and guerilla organization—the self-proclaimed Islamic Resistance in Lebanon (al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya fi Lubnan). Like any military and guerrilla organization—especially one that is subjected to Western terrorist designations and economic sanctions—Hizbullah is innately and justifiably secretive, vigilant, and suspicious of foreigners and outsiders, including academics, scholars, and researchers. Based on my personal experiences researching Hizbullah in Lebanon, these characteristics have ebbed and flowed with its organizational evolution and situational context. At the international, regional, and local levels, the complexities and dynamics of the politics surrounding Hizbullah have shaped my experiences as a researcher in Lebanon and have demonstrated the importance of being aware of these politics and adapting to them. These convoluted and shifting politics have also revealed the inherent merits and challenges of ethnography—a rigorous, informal, and improvisational endeavor and process that necessitates, above all else, flexibility.

The basic question of this article is to study how religious, political, and national discourse is used to justify martyrdom for Islamic movements, in particular the Lebanese Hizbullah. The author's main concern is to analyse how the religious authorities of Hizbullah deal with this question, and how this discourse changes overtime. It is argued, that martyrdom operations - whether carried out by Islamic movements or resistance movements - are altruistic, self-sacrificial operations conveyed in the form of symbolic capital (honour and dignity). (Orient/DÜI-Hns)

What might the wreckage of a former prison in south Lebanon that was destroyed during Israeli bombardment in 2006 have in common with a series of "family-oriented" amusement parks built by a corporate investment group? How might these sites be related to an ecotourism facility high in the mountains above Saida and the 70-some cafés and restaurants that have opened in the southern suburbs of Beirut since 2000? Aside from being fieldsites in our ongoing research on Islam and leisure in Lebanon, these places are significant to the political party Hizbullah. They tell us something about the relationship of culture to politics in the Hizbullah community, and they can be considered part of a recently emergent "Islamic milieu" in Lebanon.

International audience ; Among the cultural production on borderlines in the Middle East, the Hizbullah Museum on the site of "Mleeta" drawn on several aspects that inscribes it as a borderscape as it links politics with aesthetics. Built in 2010 on the former frontline of the Israeli occupied zone in South Lebanon, Mleeta articulate heritage, memory, and leisure with politics, education and morality. As part of the resistance society building, the blurring of the boundaries between tourism, architecture and ideology is done through the specific using that is ordering the landscape and the natural environment of this southern borderland as a vantage ground for its vision of the world. This major transformation of the borderland into a borderscape was render possible because of the transformation of South Lebanon into a Hizbullah's military stronghold since the end of the 1980s and thanks to a new political trade-off after the Syrian withdrawal of Lebanon (2005) that confirmed its influence over the Lebanese political game. The memorial museum of Mleeta is part of a broader cultural policy adopted by Hizbullah that intends to transform the previous occupied zone of South Lebanon into a touristic landscape including several other sites and a "resistance trail". In this framework, the site of Mleeta provide with a powerful narrative about resistance and memory due to its location on the former borderline set up during the Israeli occupation of South of Lebanon (1978-2000).

International audience ; Among the cultural production on borderlines in the Middle East, the Hizbullah Museum on the site of "Mleeta" drawn on several aspects that inscribes it as a borderscape as it links politics with aesthetics. Built in 2010 on the former frontline of the Israeli occupied zone in South Lebanon, Mleeta articulate heritage, memory, and leisure with politics, education and morality. As part of the resistance society building, the blurring of the boundaries between tourism, architecture and ideology is done through the specific using that is ordering the landscape and the natural environment of this southern borderland as a vantage ground for its vision of the world. This major transformation of the borderland into a borderscape was render possible because of the transformation of South Lebanon into a Hizbullah's military stronghold since the end of the 1980s and thanks to a new political trade-off after the Syrian withdrawal of Lebanon (2005) that confirmed its influence over the Lebanese political game. The memorial museum of Mleeta is part of a broader cultural policy adopted by Hizbullah that intends to transform the previous occupied zone of South Lebanon into a touristic landscape including several other sites and a "resistance trail". In this framework, the site of Mleeta provide with a powerful narrative about resistance and memory due to its location on the former borderline set up during the Israeli occupation of South of Lebanon (1978-2000).

This paper discusses the long history of the Hezbollah organizational movement from its initial formation which was still in the form of military-based movements based on jihad to transforming into a political movement based on idealism-democratization. Until Hezbollah finally became an influential political force in Lebanon. This paper also contains the author's analysis of the changes that were originally Hizbullah a community organization based on a strong Shia understanding of the breath of the resistance which later became an organization that could enter and win elections and occupy strategic positions in the Lebanese government. Keyword: Hezbollah, Religious, Political