Everyday Jihad
Résumé
In a book that drew on my doctoral dissertation in political science – le Jihad au quotidien (PUF, 2004) eventually translated into English as Everyday Jihad (Harvard University Press, 2007) – I tried to show how a jihadist milieu was constituted in the “city” of Aïn el-Héloué, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, in what is, in effect, a slum inhabited by 40,000 people in the midst of a population of 400,000 refugees.
In post-war Lebanon, mention of the Palestinians stirred up a mix of rancor (among those who blamed them for the 1975 war), guilty conscience (on the part of former allies), fear (by those dreading the demographic impact of a permanent presence) and revenge (among those remembering the outrages committed). The majority therefore acquiesced in the strategic choice by the Syrians to maintain the status quo on the question – in the form of economic and social exclusion – while waiting for a resumption of peace negotiations thought to be imminent at the time.
Locked into this context, religious actors within and outside the camp recast the causes of Palestinian and Arab misfortune in religious terms, metamorphosing it by their rhetoric into a metonymy of Muslim misfortune. With numerous instruments of socialization at their disposal, they sought to enlist the young generations in a religious symbolism in which the global geography of jihad surreptitiously supplanted Palestinian national history. Despite the geographic proximity of Palestine (less than fifty kilometers distant), certain segments of the camp’s population internalized this dreamed-up jihadism. The most determined ones among them set out to destroy the system of territorial and nationalist references.
My research at the time consisted of analyzing the mechanisms with whose help this new group was fashioned, how it was used to undermine the national and institutional memberships forged by the PLO starting in the 1960s, and the resistances that this transformation succeeded in stirring up. The camp ceased being a society. It turned into a theater of conflict over the legitimate interpretation of Islam and the definition of collective identities.
This work reconnected with the fundamental intuitions of Weberian and Durkheimian sociology. The Weberian dimension relates to the sets of meanings woven by the producers of meaning – be they entrepreneurs of protest (the jihadist sheiks) or entrepreneurs of conformity (the militants of the “loyalist Fatah,” defenders of the Oslo process) – to respond to the insecurities of the refugees about their collective future. The Durkheimian analysis helps to understand the importance of totemic symbols in sustaining a collective identity (the partial disappearance of the PLO “totem” shattering the group’s coherence). An ideological dynamic that originated in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s called into question the very existence of solidarity linking this microsociety of 40,000 people perpetually on the brink of civil war. Here was an opportunity to reengage with fundamental questions of political philosophy: How to make One from the many? Which authority could mirror the reconstitution and maintenance of a collective? How do the ways of belonging condition obedience?
Thanks to painstaking, patient field ethnography consisting of “thick description,” extended interviews, collection of documents and participant observation, it was possible to develop intuitions that revealed themselves as extremely fruitful. Thus, listening to seemingly trivial conversations in an Islamic bookstore proffered the chance to understand the actors’ scale of actions and consequently adjust the research direction. This exemplifies just one of many dimensions a researcher with an arbitrary fixation on a micro- or macrosociological framework might have missed taking into account. The local could not be explained by the local, and it therefore was necessary to capture the flows that came to irrigate the camp from outside.
The links with the “Londonistan” of the jihadist sheiks (returnees from Afghanistan who found asylum in the English capital during the last half of the 1990s), with Denmark or with Australia (countries that many Palestinian and Lebanese settled in to escape arrest by the Syrian army) drew an invisible geography that could never have been imagined or perceived without serendipitous field expeditions. The Palestinian merchants of Copenhagen paying the annual zakat (the annual payment of alms obligatory for every believer) to the sheikhs in the camp played a decisive role in financing the most radical religious infrastructure. Those who managed them became economically independent. By emancipating themselves from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), they escaped the humiliation of refugee status. Almost daily contacts with the “brothers” exiled in London allowed the imams of Aïn el-Héloué to feed their Friday sermons from religious wellsprings developed by jihadist intellectuals in London. Similarly, a jihadist monthly edited in Sydney (the Internet did not exist yet) circulated in the camp’s radical circles thanks to regular visits by Palestinian-Australian families. The paper thus furnished new “Muslim causes” with which to identify – even the most exotic as seen from Lebanon, such as the East Timor crisis,“ snatched from Muslim Indonesia by the Christians.”Through its framings of Arab and international current events, “Aïn el-Héloué religious television” broadcasts justified a new vision of the self and the other. “Targeted assassinations” directed at representatives of “heretical sects” were the subject of close coordination with Saudi religious figures that were asked to issue the necessary fatwas from the kingdom to legitimize these acts. The camp was on the map of the Middle Eastern and North African jihadism underground as a geographic destination that offered shelter and refuge to militants from Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq (among them future leaders of the Islamic State).
This enlistment in transnational jihadism had as its immediate consequence the widening of rifts inside the camp. This was evident in exclusive control of neighborhoods and posting of conspicuous rallying signs by jihadists and nationalists (verses and hadiths in the Salafist-jihadist sectors versus Palestinian flags and portraits of Yasser Arafat in Fatah’s zones). Inside families, the brother might become the enemy, while the stranger returning from a jihadist front in Afghanistan or in Chechnya was adopted as a new brother. Doing in-depth identity work implied acting on the collective memory. Thanks to their mastery of classical Arabic and internal capabilities of mobilization, the clerics obtained teaching positions in the UNRWA schools. This position of influence left them free to forbid the mixing of boys and girls that was previously the practice in the secondary schools. They were even able to influence the curriculum by prohibiting, for example, the study of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, one-time counselor to Arafat and, most damnably, a personification of the Palestinian cultural heritage.
By visualizing the camp as a metonymic image of the contradictions that ran in a subterranean manner through the Sunni Middle East, it was possible to analyze – holding back from writing “anticipate” here! – the elements foreshadowing a challenge to the legitimacy of Sunni Arab leaders vis à vis their respective political and/or confessional communities. Indeed, the special case of Aïn el-Héloué offered the unique chance to observe a situation in which the Palestinian political personality was attacked from inside in encountering a dual religious dynamic – one Shiite and one Sunni – each taking advantage of the stymied peace process to develop its propaganda argument.