Bashir Saade

The Lebanese political organization Hizbullah has developed its own style of commemorating ʿāshūrāʾ, the Shiʿi period of mourning in remembrance of the Battle of Karbalāʾ. Previous scholarship has analyzed Hizbullah's ʿāshūrāʾ with prevailing conceptual bina-ries such as politics/religion, reason/tradition, or reason/emotion. This article challenges such binaries by looking at the series of speeches given by Hizbullah's secretary general, Ḥasan Naṣrallāh, during the annual ʿāshūrāʾ rituals. Naṣrallāh's oratory skills, and most importantly the careful structuring of the ten-day mourning event, show clearly that the production of reasoned arguments through speech involves the cultivation of intense emotions and states of consciousness. These are conducive not only to collective action and identity formation but also to ethical practices.

In this article, I argue that using a specific technology of remembering their dead, Hizbullah affiliated intellectuals constructed an elaborate conception of both history and time that gave ideological coherence to the “Islamic Resistance” project. I show that early writings of the formative period of the 1980s were instrumental in producing ideological templates that were replicated throughout time up until today. Through a set of ritualistic practices, Hizbullah related intellectuals archived anything related to martyrs and other human legacies, a process that fed into an ever present, and at times anticipated, history of the Resistance. The Islamic Resistance gained significance each time a constantly renewed sense of history or the past was periodically actualized. This is because writings of history involved a transmission of ethics that martyrs witness and testify of as they haunt the living. This phenomenon sheds light on processes of national imaginaries and aspects of political Islam.

Music traditions form in separate corners of the world. They occasionally meet, and ideas are exchanged. These meetings do not happen at one point in time; they take decades and centuries to unfold, slowly transforming the received traditions. A tradition can be thought of as a “way of doing” or “expressing” that has become a habit, a language. But whereas a particular language is incomprehensible to the foreign listener, music bridges the rigidities of words and talks to the intelligence of the heart. Music lends a favor to the tradition that longs to show to others its levels of perfection.