Hizballah: A Primer ________________________________
* To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * Subject: Hizballah: A Primer * From: Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED] ^^^^^^ Extraordinarily good on the social, political, and religious character of Hizballah. Indispensable. -- Yoshie Hizballah: A Primer Lara Deeb July 31, 2006 (Lara Deeb, a cultural anthropologist, is assistant professor of women's studies at the University of California-Irvine. She is author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon.) Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi'i movement whose militia is fighting the Israeli army in south Lebanon, has been cast misleadingly in much media coverage of the ongoing war. Much more than a militia, the movement is also a political party that is a powerful actor in Lebanese politics and a provider of important social services. Not a creature of Iranian and Syrian sponsorship, Hizballah arose to battle Israel's occupation of south Lebanon from 1982-2000 and, more broadly, to advocate for Lebanon's historically disenfranchised Shi'i Muslim community. While it has many political opponents in Lebanon, Hizballah is very much of Lebanon -- a fact that Israel's military campaign is highlighting. THE LEBANESE SHI'A AND THE LEBANESE STATE In Lebanon, the state-society relationship is "confessional" and government power and positions are allocated on the basis of religious background. There are 18 officially recognized ethno-confessional communities in the country today. The original allocations, determined in 1943 in an unwritten National Pact between Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims at the end of the French mandate, gave the most power to a Maronite Christian president and a Sunni Muslim prime minister, with the relatively powerless position of speaker of Parliament going to a Shi'i Muslim. Other government positions and seats in Parliament were divided up using a 6:5 ratio of Christians to Muslims. These arrangements purportedly followed the population ratios in the 1932 census, the last census ever undertaken in the country. This confessional system was stagnant, failing to take into consideration demographic changes. As the Shi'i population grew at a rapid pace in comparison to other groups, the inflexibility of the system exacerbated Shi'i under-representation in government. Meanwhile, sect became a means of gaining access to state resources, as the government shelled out money to establish sect-based welfare networks and institutions like schools and hospitals. Because the Shi'a were under-represented in government, they could channel fewer resources to their community, contributing to disproportionate poverty among Shi'i Lebanese. This effect was aggravated by the fact that Shi'i seats in Parliament were usually filled by feudal landowners and other insulated elites. Until the 1960s, most of the Shi'i population in Lebanon lived in rural areas, mainly in the south and in the Bekaa Valley, where living conditions did not approach the standards of the rest of the nation. Following a modernization program that established road networks and introduced cash-crop policies in the countryside, many Shi'i Muslims migrated to Beirut, settling in a ring of impoverished suburbs around the capital. The rapid urbanization that came with incorporation into the capitalist world economy further widened economic disparities within Lebanon. FULL TEXT: <http://www.merip.org/mero/mero073106.html> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org <http://mrzine.org/> > <http://monthlyreview.org/> _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
