Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance

Bashir Saade is a Teaching Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Previously a Lecturer at the American University of Beirut, he holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from King's College London. He focuses on the subject of culture and how language and symbols affect political processes. Saade's current research aims at proposing new perspectives on understanding the relations between Islamic movements and states.

• 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.

'Through his focus on Hizbullah's cultural production, Bashir Saade has provided a wonderful intellectual discursion into what sets it apart from almost any other contemporary Arab politico-military movement. Central to this book is the notion that ideas are sticky, and tend to survive political changes: Hizbullah has turned them into traditions of doing, of action, through what [Saade] calls archival processes, a politics of remembering, and writing strategies that [Hizbullah's] secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, familiar to us all, both synthesizes and epitomizes with remarkable precision.' Yezid Sayigh, Carnegie Middle East Center