Over the past few years, my research has focused on the development of the Lebanese Hezbollah and its adoption of the concept of Muq?wama (resistance) as an integral part of its identity and that of its supporters. The proposed paper focuses on a significant medium that plays a central role in the production of a hegemonic Muq?wama project: Al-Akhbar newspaper. While Al-Akhbar is influenced heavily by Hezbollah, it’s not directly controlled by it. The relative freedom from Hezbollah’s control is central to understand the new phase into which Hezbollah has entered in order for it to build and re-instill the Muq?wama project into Lebanese, Arab-Islamic, and global collective awareness. In this paper, I will examine a broad sample of Al-Akhbar editions, as well as the history of the newspaper, the writers and their backgrounds, and the journalistic articles and reports published since the newspaper’s launch. This will help shed light on the nature of the opposing and allied streams and forces inside the newspaper that have come together to construct Muq?wama as an alternative hegemonic project in Lebanon and the wider region. The paper will demonstrate how Al-Akhbar has become a platform for intellectual and ideological interaction between the various movements that constitute the Muq?wama project in Lebanon. In analyzing the data, this paper will use qualitative methods, alongside some quantitative methods that will help examine the types of texts published in the newspapers.

Since 1967, Syrian political writers have sought to identify the cause of “Arab defeat” through reference to their own religious traditions. In his Critique of Religious Thought (1969), Sadik Jalal al-Azm argued that religious thinking is not only contrary to scientific thinking, but also reinforces existing rules and orders, thus hindering all political and social liberation. In his work The Immutable and the Transformative (1975), Adonis similarly argued that “religious knowledge”, as typically expressed in the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya, underpins an “immutable culture”, which is in turn linked to Arab authoritarianism. According to Adonis, this culture is characterized by a mystical and nostalgic way of thinking, as well as by a separation between meaning and word. As such, it favors authoritarian regimes that reject diversity and intellectual difference. These two writers, who represented educated Syrian opinion at this time, even if they differed in some respects, basically expressed similar points of view: a theological way of thinking, supported by a belief in the “uniqueness of truth”, is totally inconsistent with modernity, freedom and democracy. By contrast, Burhan Ghalioun was less critical of religion in his work Critique of Politics: State and Religion (1991). In opposition to those who ascribe the cause of Arab decline to Islam, his analysis focuses rather on the distinct historical processes through which the state and religion developed, and whereby the former eventually came to overwhelm and dominate the latter, especially after the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. As Ghalioun notes, the reduction of all causes to “religious culture” runs the risk of essentialism, while overlooking the specific logic of politics, as operative in every country of the world. In fact, the political experience of the Arab world during the mid-20th century teaches us that “secular states” covertly reproduced authoritarianism rather than realizing true democracy. In the words of Yasin al-Haj Saleh, since the 1970s, Ghalioun has “synthesized two different positions: self-criticism of secularism and criticism of authoritarian regimes which do nothing but lie”. In my presentation, I would like to examine how Syrian political thinkers have analyzed the different logics of politics and religion, thus identifying an alliance between secularism and authoritarianism.

In recent research, more attention has been paid to various non-Western forms of secularism that are often labelled as global or multiple secularisms. This trend attests to growing understanding that Western models are not inevitable result of the modernization process. Apart from Turkish secularism, Middle Eastern variants of secularism have so far been hardly analyzed through recent secularism research. The term secularism here refers mainly to institutional state-religion arrangements based on politics of secularism. The paper analyzes the development of Lebanese secularism and inter-related debates since the onset of the second republic. The themes analyzed are debates over citizenship (sectarian versus secular), proposals and attempts to establish civil marriage, and interference in politics by religious authorities. The paper accepts David Buckley’s division between critical junctions of “secular emergence” and “secular evolution.” The basic rules are open for debate during the former, typically after independence or revolution. In the Lebanese case, such junction was evident when the Civil War ended and the rules of the second republic were formed. Significant development also takes place after the establishment of the basic model, during the period(s) of secular evolution. In other words, state-religion relationship remains contested and dynamic during the latter phase as well. Such development typically leads to institutional renegotiation within existing pattern or, sometimes, to the breakdown and replacement of the basic model. The paper argues that at the critical junction of the establishment the second republic, Lebanon accepted a variety of secularism that has been labeled as benevolent secularism in other contexts. Three main elements of this variety are 1. basic differentiation of state and religious institutions, 2. close institutional cooperation between state and religious actors, and 3. a principally equal treatment of various religious groups. Especially points 1. and 3. set the Lebanese model apart from other variants within the MENA area. During later periods of secular evolution, the Lebanese model has been under pressure from different contradictory tendencies: strengthening of a global liberal democracy discourse, emerging sub-national discourses, such as sectarianism, and individualism of consumer culture. Consequently, new understandings of secularism have emerged and the Lebanese institutional model is under much heavier pressure from various coalitions than ever before.

This paper analyzes transformations in Palestinian identities in exile, specifically in Chicago, in response to the weakening of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the emergence of Islamic reformist structures since the late 1980s. At approximately 85,000 strong, Palestinian Chicago constitutes one of the largest concentrations of Palestinians in North America (Cainkar 1988 and 2009). Prior to the 1980s, secular community organizations that aligned with the PLO factions and with politically left and pan-Arab nationalist currents constituted the political and ideological center of Palestinian Chicago. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, a discernible religious shift began to take place. Halal stores, increased attendance at Friday prayers, sartorial changes (men cultivated beards, women began wearing the hijab), and the closing of the secular community centers signaled the change. Several other factors contributed to this transformation: the fracturing of the Palestinian movement with the emergence of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) during the first Intifada (1987-1993); the Oslo Peace Process (1993-present) and the consequent diminishing of the PLO with the formation of the Palestinian National Authority; the post-September 11 backlash that emphasized “Islam” as the primary identity category for Muslim immigrants in the United States; and the formation of well-endowed Islamic organizations such as the Mosque Foundation, which replaced the secular-nationalist community centers in the suburban enclaves to which Palestinians had begun to move. The paper—based on NEH-supported fieldwork (2010-2015); more than 80 in-depth interviews; relationships with community leaders dating to the early 1990s; and extensive prior research in the Occupied Territories— makes three claims. First, secularism despite weakening has not disappeared in the Chicago community. Rather, younger activists expressing secularist orientations remain active within different spaces. They have had to respond, however, to the new Islamic institutions and the spread of piety. In doing so, they have accommodated the new religiosity, altering the meaning of secularism in the process. Second, secularism’s continuing vitality shapes the new Islamic orientations, particularly in groups like American Muslims for Palestine, which articulate a type of sacralized nationalism. Finally, new secularisms have emerged from within the Islamic reformist milieu itself. Hybrid in character, they constitute rebellions against the piety-minded milieu. Fieldwork examples illustrate these findings. The paper concludes that the complexity of secularism and religion as sources of identity among Palestinians in the diaspora must force a reevaluation of what secularity and religiosity mean in discussions of Palestinian identity dynamics today.

Violence As Discursive Event: The Islamic State and Public Punishment This paper examines the practice of public punishment by the group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) during its period of territorial control in Iraq and Syria. IS, or broader jihadi, violence has been sensationally framed as “senseless” in official and media discourse. Scholarly research has sought to understand IS violence through such lenses as performativity/performance, spectacle and public sphere. Seeking to expand our understanding of public violence, I develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that fuses discourse theory with the concept of sovereign power in Foucault and Agamben’s works, as well as jahiliyya and hakimiyya in Islamic political thought, I suggest we should understand IS’s practices of public punishment as discursive events designed to disseminate certain discourses of power, produce specific subject positions/roles, and signal the ruling power’s expectations of appropriate behavior on the part of the ruled populations. Unlike other uses of it, the notion of discursive event that I propose here entails understanding public punishments as embodied texts through which the sovereign power imparts certain interpretable meanings to the intended spectators/audiences. Analyzing a number of primary IS-produced multimedia communication materials pertaining to public punishment, I argue that through such spectacular performances of violence in public spaces IS projected itself as the absolute sovereign power in control of the lives and territories it ruled. This I call a discourse of temporal (in the sense of this worldly) sovereignty. But public punishments were not just an expression of (brute) power and strength. They were also designed to generate a discourse of piety and legitimacy by justifying the punishments as a demonstration of the group’s commitment to a strict understanding and implementation of huddud (or punitive) provisions of the Islamic sharia law. This vision of huddud, although stripped of the nuances of spatial-temporal context, reflected a critical part of IS’s ideology that considers real sovereignty to be a prerogative of God (hakimiyya), and hence implementation of shar’i huddud as an unwavering sign of piety and religious legitimacy. Ultimately, the projections of both strength and religious piety were devised to construct different subject positions and roles. The discourse of temporal sovereignty aimed to discipline the ruled populations and create obedient subjects. The discourse of religious piety (or the group’s self-perception as an implementer of divine sovereignty) sought to ensure loyalty among religiously ultraconservative individuals, and produce loyal and dedicated subjects.