‘This is no capital of culture: it’s a wrestling ring’
Tripoli, October 2019: young people from various religious backgrounds and all walks of life sang and danced together in the city’s central al-Nour Square. The sight shattered the myth that Tripoli was a ‘cradle of terrorism’ or a ‘citadel of Muslims’. The Islamists who had often dominated Tripoli’s urban space retreated, and instead, youths, families and the educated middle-class filled al-Nour Square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment. The socio-economic demands of protestors throughout Lebanon found strong resonance in northern Lebanon, one of the country’s poorest and most unequal regions. As Tripolitanians came together in a wave of protests, Tripoli became known as the ‘bride of the revolution’.
This was a complete turnaround for Tripoli’s image. Since the 2000s, Tripoli had been seen by outsiders as an Islamist city, a sort of ‘Lebanese Kandahar’. Ever since I arrived in Tripoli in spring 2008 for the first time in a series of visits that would last more than a decade, most Tripolitanians I spoke to expressed resentment of portrayals of their city ‘as a city of terrorism, a city of jihad’.Footnote 1 A senior official in Dar al-Fatwa complained in 2013 that: ‘journalists never come to Tripoli to write about sports or cultural events, even though they do not hesitate to put themselves literally under the bombs to cover rocket attacks in Bab al-Tibbeneh and Jabal Mohsen’.Footnote 2 He alluded to the many NGO workers and journalists based in Beirut or abroad who would visit conflict-prone areas to assess the humanitarian situation or interview the fighters, but who would not take the time to see anything else in Tripoli.
Al-Nour Square is one of the main spaces of political protest in Tripoli. It is the first place visitors encounter when they enter Tripoli from the Beirut road. In its roundabout stands a statue with the words of ‘Allah’, erected by the Islamic Tawhid Movement in the 1980s to replace a statue of a prominent political family. The square thus projects and embodies Tripoli’s Islamist identity. During the first years of war in neighbouring Syria, the square was the site of weekly Islamist demonstrations of solidarity with the Syrian opposition, and of protests demanding ‘Sunni rights’ in Lebanon against the Shiʿa Hizbullah movement. During the anti-sectarian anti-corruption protests of 2019–2020, however, the square was filled with youths, students and families from all walks of life and all religions. A myriad of different anti-sectarian groups were present, from communists to human rights activists and students, forcing the city’s Islamists to retreat.
Both Tripoli’s Salafi leaders and its anti-sectarian youth movements have attempted to claim the public space to project a specific identity of Tripoli. While Tripoli’s Islamists want the city to remain conservative, other forces wish to project a more inclusive image. This struggle, central to Tripoli’s history, is visible in al-Nour Square.
In this book, I analyse political violence and urban identity in Tripoli and its crises, in light of the city’s history of political protests. The city has in recent years faced multiple concurrent crises in the political, economic, financial and health sectors, made more challenging by the needs of over 233,000 Syrians who, having fled the war in their home country since 2011, settled in northern Lebanon.Footnote 3 , Footnote 4
This book constructs an argument about Tripoli as a secondary city, informed both by rich descriptions of the city and a review of the theoretical literature and regional comparisons. It is one of the first monographs in English, French or Arabic on urban politics in Tripoli since 1967, and it builds on extensive primary material and more than 300 interviews. My book contributes to three fields of literature: the study of Lebanon and the Levant; the literature on sectarianization and identity politics in the Middle East; and debates about the causes of jihadi violence.
In this chapter, I first describe the present-day physical setting of Tripoli. Next, I review ways in which Tripoli is a microcosm of the ideological movements of the Middle East as a whole, introducing the concepts of dethronement of secondary cities, politics of autochthony, and erosion of city corporatism in Tripoli. I then discuss broader lessons of the Tripoli case. After outlining my methods, the chapter concludes with a brief overview explaining how the rest of the book is structured.
The Geography of Modern-Day TripoliFootnote 5
Tripoli is Lebanon’s second-largest city and the capital of Sunni north Lebanon. Its middle-class lived in modern and comfortable quarters in the city’s West End (see maps of Tripoli in the first pages of the book), near the incomplete futuristic fairground designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1963. In this part of Tripoli, tall luxury buildings on concrete pavements have mostly replaced the more traditional two-storey houses that were surrounded by orange groves and gardens. In the southern extension of this area, close to the road south toward Beirut, lies Tripoli’s newest quarter, al-Damm wa-l-Farz, created since 2000. It is evidence of the dynamism of the city’s real estate sector,Footnote 6 one of few sources of wealth generation in contemporary Tripoli. Al-Damm wa-l-Farz has wide boulevards busy with Western-style cafes and restaurants.
In stark contrast is Tripoli’s poverty-stricken old city and the poor quarters in the northeast. Tripoli’s old city is of Mamluk origin and its historic Mamluk architecture, dating back centuries, is second only to that found in Cairo.Footnote 7 However, security concerns often deter tourists who might visit the old city. After a flood damaged much of the old city in 1957, Tripoli’s notable families moved out to newer and more modern quarters, snubbing old traditions. The old city was then inhabited by immigrants from the countryside.Footnote 8 It became neglected by the local bourgeoisie, whose focus was on profits to be made in newer quarters.
Between these two urban universes, the old and the new, is the commercial area of Al-Tall, with its Ottoman clocktower donated by the last Sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909). Despite his despotism, Abdulhamid II was popular in Tripoli and other Arab cities because he represented the traditional Islamic values of the old order.
South of Al-Tall on a hill is the residential quarter of Abi Samra, which has come since the 1970s to house the headquarters of most of Tripoli’s Islamist movements. The area was favoured by the wealthy classes before the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) because of its pure air and olive trees, but has since become more urbanized and populous. Down the hill from Abi Samra, towards the old city in the north, is the citadel of Saint-Gilles created by the Franks during the European invasions of Crusades (1109–1289).
Abu Ali River divides Tripoli. The river is today covered in concrete, making space for the booths of itinerant vendors and a vegetable market.Footnote 9 Across the river to the east of Abi Samra is Tripoli’s poorest quarter, Bab al-Tibbeneh. The area was described by the French scholar Michel Seurat in the 1980s as twice marginalized: Tripoli, marginalized from the rest of Lebanon, and Bab al-Tibbeneh from the rest of Tripoli. Its economic and political situation has since deteriorated further.Footnote 10
In Bab al-Tibbeneh and other poor areas in Tripoli’s outskirts, unemployment and school dropout rates create a ‘poverty culture’.Footnote 11 Abuse of tobacco, alcohol, solvents and paint thinners is widespread, as is the use of habb (a light narcotic bean). Some young men try to make themselves look tough, with tattoos and scars from self-inflicted cuts.Footnote 12
Many unemployed young adults have dark views of the future, and suffer from low self-esteem and depression.Footnote 13 Many are neglected by their parents, or have broken families, as the sons and daughters of widows or divorcees, or with fathers who are addicts or behind bars.Footnote 14 These are youth ‘who face problems with everything in their daily life, with water, with electricity, and who have no ambitions for their future, who see no future and who have nothing.’Footnote 15
To the north of Bab al-Tibbeneh lies the road leading to Lebanon’s northernmost governorate of Akkar and beyond to the Syrian border. To the east of the road is Syria Street, and across Syria Street is the ʿAlawite-dominated ghetto of Jabal Mohsen. Surrounded by Sunni quarters, Jabal Mohsen lies on a hill. Further up the hill is the quarter of al-Qibbeh, where the barracks of the Lebanese army are located, along with a branch of the Lebanese University in Beirut created in the 1980s. Jabal Mohsen was until recently (2014) dominated by the ʿId family, a political dynasty closely tied to Damascus; the ʿId protected Tripoli’s ʿAlawite minority but also subordinated them to its political goals, which ran contrary to those of most of Tripoli’s Sunnis.
Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tibbeneh fought each other frequently during the civil war (1975–1990). The conflict re-erupted with Lebanon’s political crisis in 2006. Since 2011, the conflict in Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tibbeneh has begun to mirror the war in neighbouring Syria. Internal violence has created new militant identities in both quarters, endangering Tripoli’s city corporatism and social cohesion.Footnote 16 The deprivation in the quarters reflects the broader urban and political crisis in Tripoli and throughout Lebanon.Footnote 17
Tripoli as a Microcosm of Ideological Movements
Why did so many episodes of Lebanon’s contentious politics in the last century have their centre in Tripoli? What explains Tripoli’s propensity for ideological-political activism? Why is Tripoli’s political identity so fluid, so frequently transformed? What can Tripoli tell us about broader dynamics in Middle East cities? I argue that the answers to these questions are central to understanding the future shape of democracy, mass participation, and regime stability in the Middle East.
Lebanese history has usually been viewed from the perspective of Beirut, Christian Mount Lebanon, or the Shiʿa south.Footnote 18 Lebanese history is rarely told from the perspective of Sunni northern Lebanon or Tripoli. The last book in English about Tripoli dates back to 1967;Footnote 19 in Arabic, the most respected one only covers the period up until 1950.Footnote 20 More recent books focus on Tripoli’s Salafis, but do not explain why Tripoli has so many protest movements and so much ideological-political activism.Footnote 21
This book contributes to the debate about urban identity, contentious politics, and violence in Lebanon and beyond. It examines Tripoli’s ideological-political activism from 1920 until 2020: the city has a particularly militant history of resisting the Lebanese state that goes back to its establishment in 1920 under the French mandate. Militancy in Tripoli transcends specific ideological expressions.
In Tripoli, various political Sunni and non-sectarian movements have demarcated sectors of the city by displaying political posters, flags and religious symbols in the built environment. A wealth of various and contradictory political Sunni movements are present at the same time on a particularly fragmented and hybrid Islamist scene. Since 1920, Tripolitanians have associated themselves with most of the powerful ideological currents running through the wider Middle East. Many of Tripoli’s Sunnis considered the Lebanese state illegitimate, since it was devised by the French to allow dominance by the Maronite Christian sect. Many Tripolitanians resisted the state until its independence in 1943. Thereafter, they reluctantly accepted the state of Lebanon, but their primary cultural identity continued to be with the regional trends of Arab Sunnism beyond Lebanon’s borders. Tripolitanians have, ever since, had a significant historical propensity for such nationalist protest movements as pan-Arab nationalism, Nasserism, Baʿthism, and Palestinian nationalism.
During Lebanon’s civil war, the primary political identity for militant youth in Tripoli transformed: once Arab nationalists, they began to see themselves as Islamists. An Islamist militia ruled the city militarily for three years, which resulted in the flight of much of the city’s Christian population. Tripoli’s reputation has, since that time, been linked to Islamist movements and Islamist radicalism. However, this ignores the many other layers of Tripoli’s identity. Moreover, most of Tripoli’s Islamists are moderate, non-violent, and accept the state.
Domestic and regional upheavals often pit Lebanon’s confessional-political camps against each other.Footnote 22 This became worse after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in the heart of Beirut in 2005. Tripoli then became the electoral stronghold of the Sunni-dominated Future Movement, and a Sunni counter to Shiʿa-dominated southern Lebanon. The spread of sectarianism, in the sense of opposition to Shiʿism, added a new layer to Tripoli’s hybrid political identity.
Regional Arab Gulf states considered Tripoli, Lebanon’s primary Sunni city, as their main entry-point for exporting Salafism into Lebanon. Their aim was to contain Hizbullah and what they saw as Iran’s expansion in the Mediterranean. Thus, in the years between 2005 and 2014, many of Tripoli’s religious clerics developed direct links, often monetary ones, with governments or embassies of Arab Gulf states. A mixture of regional and domestic support empowered Tripoli’s Islamist movements.
Despite its small size, Tripoli developed one of the most diverse Islamist scenes in the entire Middle East. It became a microcosm of all the Islamist movements present elsewhere in the Arab Middle East, including the Muslim Brotherhood; the ultra-orthodox Salafi trends, the pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian Sunni Islamist movements, the transnational Hizb al-Tahrir movement, the puritanical Tabligh movement, and jihadi underground networks. Yet, anti-sectarian and non-Islamist movements and groups were also strong in Tripoli, as the city’s contribution to Lebanon’s October 2019 uprising showed.
Tripoli as a Secondary City
Since 1920, Tripolitanians have tended to side with all ideological movements that opposed the Lebanese state: Arab nationalism, Nasserism, Palestinian nationalism (a nation without a state), and Islamism. Writing in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, the French scholar Michel Seurat pointed out that Tripoli is a city where the majority of the population was Sunni Muslim. He wrote that Tripoli’s urban poor rejected the Lebanese state for several reasons: the state had been created by the French; the presidency was reserved for a Maronite Christian; its economy was based on a ruthless type of capitalism and structural inequalities; and it did not provide adequate state services to poor quarters like those in Tripoli and Lebanon’s other secondary and tertiary cities.Footnote 23
Seurat argued that the historical propensity of Tripoli’s residents to resist the Lebanese state went back to the city’s ‘dethronement’ in 1920: large territories had been detached from Syria and attached to the area of Mount Lebanon to form a new state dominated by the Maronites, and Beirut became its capital.Footnote 24
At the symbolic level, Tripoli’s Sunni Muslim population associated Beirut with the minority sect in power, the Maronites. In opposition, they saw northern Lebanon as a fortress of Arab Sunnism. They brandished the flag of conservative Sunnism and used traditional myths and values to defend themselves against dominance by the capital and the central government.
These narratives revealed a city patriotism rooted in the Ottoman and Fatimid era, when Tripoli had been a larger and more prosperous city than Beirut, and a centre of religious Sunnism. Tripoli was, between the 16th and 19th centuries, the capital of an Ottoman province (wilāya).Footnote 25 Sunni Muslims had ruled the land of Greater Syria, as co-religionists of the Ottomans.
Tripoli is one in a broader universe of ‘secondary cities’ in the Arab Middle East, in which certain populations perceive themselves as ‘dethroned’ from power over the affairs of the state.Footnote 26 A ‘secondary city’ is a large city with a recent history of significant decline in its power and prestige. Some of the most radical general transformations in the Middle East in recent years have taken place in secondary cities that exist under the shadow of the capitals from which the regimes rule. Most Sunni secondary cities in the Levant and Iraq, including Tripoli as well as Aleppo and Mosul, are former Ottoman provincial capitals that lost their status with the creation of the modern state in the 1920s.Footnote 27 They often have disputed identities and also often suffer the economic and political consequences of urban unrest.Footnote 28
Seurat argued that the dethronement of Aleppo, Tripoli, and Mosul at the creation of the modern state planted seeds of rebellion in the ‘personality’ of the Levantine secondary cities.Footnote 29 Their economies suffered from the creation of new borders and the resulting isolation from their former trading partners in Greater Syria and Iraq.Footnote 30 They tended to develop ambivalent relationships with the modern state, because of their historical rivalry with the capital. Thus, they emerged as hubs of resistance to the modern and colonial order. Secondary cities tended to develop an exceptional ‘city patriotism’ and were also more conservative than the cosmopolitan state capitals.Footnote 31 However, as I argue in subsequent chapters, successive and competing mobilizations since the 1960s gradually eroded urban cohesion in Tripoli.
Secondary cities are central to much of the current political crisis in the Middle East. Such secondary cities have a higher propensity than capital cities for unrest. Urban Sunni protest movements in the Levant and Iraq are more likely to emerge in secondary cities than in the capitals. As I explain in Chapter 1, since Tripoli’s ‘dethronement’ in 1920 when it became a neglected periphery in the Lebanese state, Tripoli has opposed the government in Beirut for regional and sectarian reasons .
City Corporatism in Divided Cities
Tripoli’s role within Lebanon’s conflict economy was as an electoral and demographic stronghold for Lebanese Sunnis and Arab nationalists.Footnote 32 Because of this historical role, Tripoli has long been more cohesive than other divided cities such as Karachi, Jerusalem, Nairobi, Belfast, or Beirut. As will be seen throughout this book, a stable, common understanding of Tripoli’s identity was shared by most residents over long periods of time.
City corporatism is an elite mechanism for organizing and integrating the political, economic and social realms of the city or other polity.Footnote 33 In the corporatist idea, the city is conceptualized as a harmonious organism, and differences are minimized. Class differences, for example, are downplayed, and internal conflict within the group is not perceived as legitimate.Footnote 34 The aim of this model of organization and narrative is not only power projection, but also to defend common interests and a ‘common social conscience’.Footnote 35
Urban protests in Tripoli as far back as 1920 produced a city corporatism that united the city’s Sunnis in collective action. The concept of city corporatism sheds light on how Tripoli united politically in certain periods against outsiders to the city. In the 1920s, most of Tripoli’s population united into a cross-class political front, around common norms, against the French mandate. The political front created in the 1920s outlasted the mandate period. The legacy of the anti-French struggle united the city’s Sunnis and many non-Maronite Christians from various social classes until the late 1960s, if not longer. All actors within Tripoli’s field of Sunnism opposed the political centre in Lebanon and resisted ‘political Maronitism’.
This strong internal cross-class solidarity was possible because of Tripoli’s small size, but also because of the strength and entrepreneurship of the dominant Karami family. This political family created cohesion in Tripoli around a common political and identity project, working from the dominant sentiment of the city’s population, Arab nationalism. Said differently, Tripoli’s cohesion did not follow inevitably from being a secondary city, from being Sunni, or from dethronement; it required political entrepreneurship. In Tripoli’s case, Sunni leaders took an active role in defining insiders and outsiders; they defined the city’s economic, political and symbolic interests, often based on their own interests. Such boundary work sometimes used violent means, involving feuding rivals.
The Karami family was seen as representative of Tripoli and its anti-colonial inclinations until the 1990s. Their power ensured the cohesiveness of Tripoli’s elite and created shared narratives about Tripoli’s conservative identity. These narratives — Tripoli as a city of refusal, and as a citadel of resistance — have continued to function as a resource for various local political elites and movements.
Tripoli’s self-identification as a Sunni Muslim conservative city can also be seen as a product of fifteen years of civil war between 1975 and 1990. Collective identity in Tripoli, or city corporatism, was also maintained by collective action, protests and mobilization at various levels, both bottom-up and top-down, in the years between 1920 and 1980. With these narratives, Tripolitanian Arab nationalists also established boundaries against the religious minorities arriving from the countryside.
Thus, Tripoli’s Sunni leaders forged the image of the city and its citizens. Although around a third of Tripoli’s population was Christian in the 1960s and 1970s, the city’s leaders portrayed Tripoli as a cohesive, Sunni-majority, Islamic conservative, and Arab nationalist city. The Christians in Tripoli considered themselves part of the city identity of Tripoli regardless of their religion, and the city identity as projected by Sunni elites included the Christians, but the city identity did not give much space to the city’s Christians.
Although Tripoli is cohesive, there are also out-groups that try to destroy cohesion, for example, the Syrian regime (long-standing enemy of Tripoli’s Sunnis), the Maronites in nearby Zgharta (allied with President Sleiman Frangieh in the 1970s)Footnote 36 and the ʿAlawites in Tripoli’s Jabal Mohsen quarter (allies of the Syrian regime since 1973).Footnote 37
Why was Tripoli so much more cohesive than, for example, Mosul, another dethroned secondary city, where an outright war of ‘all against all’, in Batatu’s words, was taking place in 1959?Footnote 38 The literature on the politics of autochthony shows that internal political struggles are the norm in contemporary cities, and in particular in cities where different ethnic groups live side-by-side.Footnote 39 Cities such as Karachi, Jerusalem, Beirut, Baghdad, Nairobi, and Belfast are notoriously divided,Footnote 40 with walls symbolising ethnic, political, and spatial segregation.Footnote 41 Unlike in these cities, where groups were of relatively equal size and no one group was able to achieve dominance, Tripoli had a large Sunni majority, which defined the city as Sunni and Arab nationalist. Conflict was minimized inside Tripoli for long stretches of time, although social peace came at the cost of structural domination of minorities and a high level of social control by the majority.
In urban settings, ethnic or sectarian groups come into contact with one another on an everyday and often competitive basis.Footnote 42 Ethnic or religious groups that, historically, had lived isolated from each other, ended up side-by-side in the city after rural-urban migration.Footnote 43 Political competition between rival ethnic or national groups is mirrored in the urban space, where each group marks its internal boundaries within the city and struggles with others for control.Footnote 44
In Tripoli, politics of autochthony led to intermittent conflicts; the city’s Arab nationalist majority has fought several battles against out-groups. One such protracted battle is analysed throughout this book, between Sunni Muslims from the urban area of Bab al-Tibbeneh and ʿAlawites from the neighbouring quarter of Jabal Mohsen.Footnote 45
Despite Tripoli’s city corporatism, internal interest groups always have competed politically. Three main categories compete for dominance in Tripoli’s Sunnism or Sunni politics. The first category comprises of the political elites, the zuʿamāʾ (singular: zaʿīm ), from Ottoman-era notable families. They can be compared with political bosses in other emerging democracies.Footnote 46 The Islamist bourgeoisie make up the second category, of which al-Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya (JI), the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the main expression. The third category is the ‘urban poor’, the underclass of people in poor areas such as in Bab al-Tibbeneh.
Despite internal differences, these three groups for a long time remained allies against other sub-state groups, in particular against political Maronitism and against the capital city, Beirut. This was because of the central perception that Tripoli as a whole was dominated by Beirut and by foreign imperialists. During both the pre-war period and the civil war, Tripoli’s internal politics were guided by a norm of communality and a need to avoid internal conflicts, which were seen as shameful.Footnote 47 The ‘Tripolitanian family’ expressed the norm, reflecting Tripoli’s city corporatism.
Since Seurat published his ideas in the mid-1980s, Tripoli has been transformed. Immigration, predominantly of Sunnis from the countryside, has led to increased urbanization, while Christians have moved out of Tripoli. The city has become more plural in class terms, but more homogeneous in sectarian terms, as many Christians have left the city. Despite the demographic transformations of Tripoli, however, the city’s self-image, and the image as seen from the outside, have remained fairly constant. The city maintained its identity as newcomers were socialized into and adopted specific local myths and narratives as their own political resources.Footnote 48
The myths and narratives created over time by Arab nationalist leaders — for example, Tripoli as a city of religious knowledge and religious scholars — have been adjusted by the impacts of new ideologies, but they have seldom been overturned entirely. The poor quarters, characterized by traditional habits of rural origin from the 1980s onwards, built upon and used the established narratives as political resources as they adopted Islamist and Salafi movements .Footnote 49
The Erosion of City Corporatism
Starting at the end of the 1980s, city corporatism eroded in Tripoli as a result, particularly, of Islamist violence, and for cultural and economic reasons.Footnote 50 This led to greater class differences among Tripoli’s Sunnis, who stopped sharing common norms, and it created a crisis of delegitimation of political leadership. As a result of the decline of city corporatism, the poor quarters became increasingly isolated from the rest of the city, and some urban poor youths were alienated. The rise of alternative leadership, for example, militant Islamist groups, was a symptom of this. Yet, until the mid-2010s, the adaptability of the patronage system helped keep the city together. This alleviated the leadership crisis in Tripoli until 2019.
At the beginning of the civil war in 1975, Tripoli was generally united as a self-defined Sunni-majority secondary city. Although Tripoli’s Sunnism had moderate and radical flanks, most of Tripoli’s political leaders were in agreement that the city was a fortress of Arab nationalism and Sunni Islam. Tripoli’s three main constituencies – the political elite, the conservative middle-class and the urban poor – were allied against political Maronitism and against the centralism of Beirut.
However, starting in 1982, Tripoli’s middle-class and its urban poor became divided from one another, due to the dynamics of external alliances and proxy war (see Chapters 2 and 3). In the late 1960s, some of Tripoli’s urban poor had become militant as a result of their support to the Palestinian Fedayyeen Movement. Then, in 1979, many of Tripoli’s urban poor movements abandoned Arab nationalism for Islamism, due to dynamics explained in Chapters 1 and 2. Islamist militias, representing the urban-poor Islamists, took over the city in 1983 and ruled it militarily for two years. This caused a rift within the Sunni front that had been unified in previous times. Moreover, when the Syrian army came in to crush Tripoli’s urban-poor Islamist movement, the Sunni middle-class opted for stability over justice: having more to lose, they split away from the urban poor and aligned themselves with Syria. Narratives about treason spread among the urban poor, who were prevented from developing alternative political expressions and political movements. Many of Tripoli’s Christians emigrated, fearing Islamist retribution. They took their investments with them, leading to an increased economic and cultural impoverishment of Tripoli.
The split between the urban poor and the middle-class continued in the 1990s and 2000s due to ideology, elite strategies, and the maintenance of socio-spatial boundaries. Related to this was the renewal of Lebanese elites, including Sunni elites, after the end of the civil war, and the decline in popular trust in the elites and in the representative institutions of the state.Footnote 51 Most of Tripoli’s middle-class moved away from Arab nationalism at the turn of the millennium to become defenders of Western-style economic liberalism. The new leaders were said to have a ‘neoliberal habitus’.Footnote 52 This rupture with the traditional focus of Tripoli’s elites as anti-imperial and nationalist has contributed to disrupting the historical city corporatism in the past two decades.
The second reason for the erosion of city corporatism in Tripoli was the rise of Salafism in urban poor quarters in the 1990s. Salafism is an ultra-orthodox and literalist branch of Sunni Islamism that claims to emulate the lifestyle and religion of the pious ancestors (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ, or the first three generations of Muslims).Footnote 53 It is a globalized and contemporary reinvention of Wahabism, a form of Islam that developed in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century (see Chapter 4). Most Salafis are peaceful actors who focus on purification through religion, education and prayer, not jihad.Footnote 54 Yet, the police fear otherwise: thus, a rise of Salafism becomes an excuse for stronger police controls in urban poor quarters, reinforcing urban marginalization and the socio-spatial boundaries in Tripoli. This in turn creates fertile ground for increasing alienation and protest politics in urban poor quarters. The result was a city divided not only socially and spatially, but also culturally, politically and ideologically .
Broader Lessons from Tripoli
The relevance of Tripoli as a case is based on how the city is framed — and stigmatized – as a Sunni Muslim city,Footnote 55 and also on how Sunni identity has different expressions depending on how it intersects with class and regional identities.
Political Leaders as Communal Champions
Tripoli is a case study of boundary-drawing in an urban setting and, more broadly, it is also a case of in-group socialization in Lebanon. It shows how different Lebanese sects educate their members and incentivize them in various ways to identify themselves as being Sunni, Shiʿa or Maronite Christian.Footnote 56
In-depth studies of communal socialization in Lebanon are surprisingly rare, especially in English, although more numerous in French.Footnote 57 Scholars working on Lebanon have highlighted the role in socializing members of communal groups of civil war memories and commemorative practices;Footnote 58 urban segregation; urban demarcations such as posters, graffiti, flags; private schools; religious leaders and ceremonies; and political leadership.
Northern Lebanon, Lebanon’s historic centre for Arab nationalism and urban resistance, is understudied. It is a Sunni-majority region having tight historical, commercial, and family bonds with its Syrian hinterland. Prominent in communal socialization in northern Lebanon is the role of Islamic preachers as brokers in the clientelist system. The few published books existing on Tripoli all deal with the subject of Sunni radicals;Footnote 59 by contrast, this book analyses Sunni socialization not solely within the prism of radicalism but as a case of Lebanese clientelism.
The focus in the literature on political leadership in Lebanon since the 1990s has been on elite strategies rather than on how these have been implemented and perceived on the ground.Footnote 60 By contrast, my book analyses communal socialization from bottom up, that is, from the perspective of regular citizens, and at the micro-level. My point of departure is Michael Johnson’s classic study of clientelism in Lebanon, Class and Client in Beirut, which analyses Sunni Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 61 Since then, the Lebanese society and politics have been profoundly transformed by the civil war, the erosion of city corporatism, and the increase of sectarian attitudes that followed the war. This book explores how the mechanisms of Lebanese clientelism have been transformed due to local political processes that occurred during the war and during the Syrian tutelage of Lebanon.Footnote 62 Moreover, Islamism has replaced Arab nationalism as the main mobilizing ideology among Sunnis.Footnote 63 However, as shown throughout this book, Islamism excludes and alienates Christians , and it does not unite Sunnis across social classes in the same way as Arab nationalism did.Footnote 64
This book offers a bottom-up perspective on patronage, which therefore also includes religious actors into the analysis. In Tripoli after 2005, religious leaders, including Salafis, were clientelized by Sunni institutional leaders.Footnote 65
Tripoli, like other places, is subjected to the dirty tricks of power-seeking politicians. For example, elected officials in Tripoli frequently build alliances with armed gangs who can be used for voter intimidation. A review of the comparative literature shows that impunity for criminal enterprises as a form of political patronage from elected officials is also common in neopatrimonial states in sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote 66 In Lebanon, as elsewhere in the global south, such gangs may take on a life of their own, shifting to criminal activities or sectarian violence, after the election campaign has ended.Footnote 67
At least since 2005, Tripoli’s Sunni politicians have granted impunity to sectarian hardliner militias even outside election periods. Lebanese elected officials therefore bear significant responsibility for the explosion of sectarian attitudes in the population, which became more prevalent from 2006. They also have some responsibility for the sectarian Sunni-ʿAlawite violence that began in Tripoli from 2006 onwards. Although Tripoli’s political patrons undertook hard crackdowns, arresting sectarian hardliners between 2007 to 2008 and then again in 2014, it proved very difficult for political leaders to cool down the sectarian tension they had encouraged.
Sectarianization, Regionalism and Class in the Middle East
The Anglo-Irish historian Benedict Anderson argued that, beyond primordial villages, all communities are in a sense ‘imagined’.Footnote 68 In the following chapters, I take his insights as a point of departure to analyse Lebanese communal identities, that is, Lebanese sectarianism.Footnote 69 I see national as well as sectarian identities as imagined, instrumentalized, and contested.
‘Sectarianization’ is the political instrumentalization of sectarian identities by identity entrepreneurs or an external political climate that heightens the salience of sectarian attitudes.Footnote 70 Politicians can benefit from increasing sectarian tensions, because sects then tend to display internal solidarity, and this also diverts attention away from elite shortcomings on such issues like economic policy.Footnote 71
Tripoli after 2005 is a classic case of sectarianization. Building on the Tripoli case and recent scholarly debates, this book shows how the sectarianization process is more subtle than researchers have previously argued, and is intertwined with considerations of class, region, and ethnicity.Footnote 72 Tripoli has both a Sunni identity and a strong northern regional identity: regionalism and sectarianism thus overlap to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. In practice, the salience of sectarian identities depends strongly on whether other overlapping group interests are also present.Footnote 73
Sectarian identities have been somewhat eased in Lebanon and Iraq since 2015, due to anti-sectarian protests against corruption in both countries.Footnote 74 Yet, there are reasons to believe that sectarian tensions may heighten again due to new sub-state or regional conflicts. Therefore, this book examines the volatility, mutations, and resilience of sectarian identifications.
Within the secondary city perspective, it can be difficult to unpack and disentangle the two factors, regionalism and sectarianism, as motivations for socio-political protests.Footnote 75 Here it helps to contrast Tripoli with other cases of secondary cities in the Middle East. Mosul in northern Iraq is a secondary city that also has a conservative Sunni identity, intermixed with regionalism of northern Iraq. Aleppo in northern Syria also has a regionalist identity and a Sunni-majority population, yet the city is more cosmopolitan than Tripoli and Mosul and, until 2011, was more prosperous.Footnote 76 Basra in southern Iraq is a Shiʿa-majority secondary city contesting the authority of a Shiʿa-led government. It is thus an example of an anti-sectarian regionalist identity.Footnote 77 Analysis of how regionalism and sectarianism are intertwined in a comparative study of Tripoli, Mosul, Aleppo, and Basra (and alternatively, also Homs and Hama) would be helpful.Footnote 78
The concept of a dethroned secondary city has the most explanatory power in states associated with the Ottoman legacy and the former Ottoman provinces (wilāyat) where borders were redrawn in the first decades of the 20th century: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, mandatory Palestine, Libya, parts of Saudi Arabia, and possibly areas of Yemen.Footnote 79 In such cities, nationalist elites activated the memory of Ottoman history to mobilize the local population that was hit economically and sidelined culturally (‘dethroned’) by the creation of the state in the early 20th century. Secondary cities in this former Ottoman space had a propensity for becoming strongholds of powerful social movements and contentious politics in the twentieth century. Some of these trends have continued into the twenty-first century.
Analysing sectarianization must also take into account the class factor. Identity politics (sectarianism, or ethnic politics) is more salient for electoral mobilization in poor urban areas than it is in middle-class areas.Footnote 80 Political violence based on identity politics is also more prevalent in low-income areas. This is because low-income areas are more prone to provide a refuge for gunmen than wealthier areas, because distrust of the state gives opportunities for ethnic militias.Footnote 81 In addition, poor areas are almost always monocultural (inhabited by one sect only), whereas middle-class areas may be mixed.Footnote 82 This can make monocultural poor areas more conservative than middle-class areas.
This matches findings from Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s,Footnote 83 as well as my research from Tripoli: sectarianization processes play out differently in different classes and different urban areas. The same is true for Mosul, where the Arab Sunnis are internally fragmented between recently urbanized tribal groups and old families.Footnote 84 My work also shows that dissimilarity in schooling and norms create distinct forms of religious practice. Thus, Islamism cannot bridge the class gap in the Sunni community in the way that Arab nationalism and left-wing ideologies did.
However, sectarianization is never solely a top-down process: local, national, regional, top-down, and bottom-up factors all interact in the sectarianization process.Footnote 85 Elite instrumentalization could not work unless it found an echo in the population.Footnote 86 In the Tripoli case, political movements from various levels intertwine: locals, Lebanese national politicians, regional Middle Eastern movements and states, and transnational movements like Islamism all act on the political spectrum, as sectarian hardliners, Islamist religious leaders, and anti-sectarian movements interact in the urban space.
In Tripoli, the weakness of the Lebanese state and the perpetuation of sect-based patronage networks allowed sectarianism to flourish after the end of the civil war .
‘Sunni Crisis’ as State Crisis
Much non-state political violence in Tripoli since 1990 has occurred in the name of political Islam, so it is important to understand the ideology of Islamism and how it is adapted to the Lebanese context.Footnote 87 Yet, a narrow focus on political Islam would neglect broader social frames of analysis that could help us to understand political violence and Tripoli’s political development. Urban politics, the state, and sectarianism are all important to understanding urban violence and urban crisis in Tripoli. To find possible solutions to Tripoli’s troubles, we cannot automatically postulate that they are due to Islamism.
Thus, this book makes two important adjustments compared to most other literature on Islamist movements (in Tripoli or elsewhere): first, it relates Islamism to a wide range of social and political phenomena in Tripoli and Lebanon (urban crisis, the state, sectarianism, political clientelism). Second, it analyses urban mobilization and contentious politics in Tripoli since the city’s contemporary beginning in 1920 to explore how nationalist and left-wing movements and parties were Islamized over time. These adaptations help us see Islamism in the Lebanese reference frame. This leads to the conclusion that Islamists in Tripoli have themselves been ‘Lebanized’ over time, in the sense that they have adapted to the domestic political scene.
The concept of a Sunni crisis, Sunni tragedy, or Sunni predicament comes up in policy debates about polarization, radicalization and violent extremism in the Middle East.Footnote 88 This term is often used in the media and policy discussions of the emergence of Daʿish, also known as the ‘Islamic State’ organization.Footnote 89 Daʿish is often seen as a result of the alienation of ‘Sunni Arabs’ in Iraq since the U.S led invasion in 2003. Yet the term ‘Sunni crisis’ is never clearly defined. Is this a crisis existing everywhere in the Middle East or only in certain countries? What is the relationship between Sunni crisis and state crisis? Is the Sunni crisis related to political Islam?
In his compelling study of Islamism in Tripoli, Rougier related Tripoli’s crisis to Sunnism, and to Sunni Islamism in particular. Basing his argument on a persuasive empirical study, Rougier argues that, while Shiʿa Islamism solidifies state authority, the non-state character of Sunni Islamism sidelines Sunni elites and opens a path into jihadi militancy for a segment of Sunni youth.Footnote 90 This leads to the fragmentation of the state in the Levant and Iraq.Footnote 91 Rougier makes a persuasive case that that the fragmentation of religious authority in Sunni Islam accounts for the emergence of Daʿish.
The focus of this book is whether the cause of Tripoli’s troubles is a Sunni crisis, a state crisis, or both. Are Tripoli’s troubles a result of general flaws or voids in state governance, or are they the result of a specifically Sunni, or Islamist crisis? Whether one highlights the political governance dimension, or the Islamist dimension, it would give different indications for how to address the challenges facing Tripoli or other cities plagued with political corruption and Islamist violence.
Rougier’s approach is very helpful to analyse Sunni Islamism; however, in this book, which focuses on political Sunnism and not only on religious Sunnism, I relate the idea of a Sunni crisis to a crisis of governance. I define this crisis as the Sunni political leaders’ loss of power to Shiʿa leaders and to Sunni hardliners.Footnote 92 Many factors that explain Tripoli’s troubles are not specifically ‘Sunni’, but are linked to a more general state crisis in many Arab countries in the Middle East: the regimes have lost credibility with the population. Lacking a successful governing strategy, they muddle through crisis after crisis. Conditions are worse in Tripoli because of the marginalization of northern Lebanon, due to structural inequalities that have plagued the Lebanese state since its creation in 1920.
Yet, there are some challenges that are specifically Sunni. The state crisis is aggravated by the current challenges within Sunni Islamism, documented by Bernard Rougier. Violent forms of transnational Islamism – jihadism in particular – undermine Sunni leadership and divide the Sunni community. Moderate ‘old-fashioned’ Sunni elites are undermined by and opposed to Sunni sectarian hardliners, including jihadi groups like Daʿish.
Radical ideologies can find a foothold in Tripoli only because of voids in governance. The fragmentation of Sunni religious authority would not have mattered so much, had it not been for the weaknesses of the state and its inability to provide physical and psychological security to the urban poor. The cause of Tripoli’s troubles, therefore, can be found less in its sectarian specificities than in the structural deficits of Lebanese state governance .
Notes on the Methodology
The empirical data in this book has been collected during field research over a twelve-year period (March 2008–March 2020). The book draws upon and expands my 2015 PhD thesis.Footnote 93 It is also informed by new fieldwork in Tripoli and additional fieldwork in northern Iraq.
I conducted more than 350 interviews with more than 150 different people in Lebanon between 2008 and 2020, from cabinet ministers to street-level Salafi leaders in Tripoli. Considerable participatory observation was conducted in Bab al-Tibbeneh, Abi Samra, and other areas, as I lived in Tripoli and interacted regularly with people. While most of my research was conducted in Tripoli, I also travelled to libraries throughout Lebanon and Europe to consult primary and secondary literature.
I spoke relatively fluent Arabic and communicated in local dialect, but my fair skin and blonde hair usually disclosed my outsider status.Footnote 94 I often attempted to blend in by wearing a veil and long skirts and blouses; a shopkeeper once described me as ‘the falsely veiled’. However, as a woman I could enter the more private sphere of many conservative families, meeting with wives and children. The active presence of women during interviews with Islamist sheikhs indicated that patriarchal dominance was not absolute. Moreover, as a woman, I was seen as less of a security threat by various people in Tripoli and Beirut.
Working in a volatile and polarized context, where there were often several versions of the truth,Footnote 95 data and informant triangulation was clearly necessary.Footnote 96 Moreover, as Wood writes, field researchers should take reports and observations as data reported within a particular context.Footnote 97 Since my fieldwork continued over a long period of time, punctuated by periods of distance from the field, it was relatively easy to identify change.
For work on a security-loaded topic, attention to fieldwork ethics was crucial. I committed to the principle of ‘do no harm’ and anonymized many of my sources, even many of those who did not ask for it.Footnote 98 I did not anonymize interviews with public figures unless they explicitly asked me to do so. I was transparent about my project, and asked my interviewees for informed consent. I never encountered pressure from security officials or political parties in Lebanon, but I have reasons to believe that scholars studying other political parties in the country (Hizbullah in particular) are subject to such pressure. I had to manage other issues of fieldwork ethics such as how to respond to occasional gifts or excessive generosity.Footnote 99 As I became acquainted with the field over time, I was able to gain trust. This helped me greatly, as did working with local scholars.
Particularly in the early years of my fieldwork, some voiced fears and scepticism. Many asked why I had chosen to work on Tripoli: had I been sent there by someone? Often people warned me that I must not believe everything that is written in Western media about Tripoli. What they meant was that I should not buy the argument that the city was a ‘cradle of terrorism’. My years of research and analysis have amply persuaded me that Tripoli is far more complex, and far more fascinating.
Overview of the Book
This book is structured chronologically as much as possible. The first two chapters outline the historical context. Chapter 1 analyses mainstream Sunni leadership and the rise of various protest movements since the 19th century, with a focus on the period after 1920. It traces the roots of communal (inter-sectarian) conflict in Tripoli. Chapter 2 portrays the rise and fall of the Islamic Tawhid Movement during the civil war, showing how violence fragmented Sunni politics in Tripoli.
Chapter 3 and 4 begin after the end of the civil war. Chapter 3 focuses on the neoliberal Sunni elites in Tripoli in the context of the postwar renewal of elites. Chapter 4 analyses the transformation of Tripoli’s religious scene in the 1990s and how Lebanese Islamists adapted to the specific conditions and constraints of operating in Tripoli. It also explores the social roots of Islamist mobilization, and how the ideology intersects with other identities such as class and gender.
Chapter 5–7 deals with the reconfiguration of local networks in Tripoli after the 2005 Syrian withdrawal. Chapter 5 examines Saad Hariri’s elite strategies in the context of domestic political crisis between 2005 and 2008, and the role of the Sunni radical flanks. Chapter 6 discusses the independent agency of Tripoli’s Islamists. Chapter 7 examines Tripoli’s contentious politics and the regulation of violence, from the Syrian uprising of 2011 until the Lebanese protests that began in late 2019. A final chapter sums up the book and points a way forward for further research.
