Mervin Sabrina (ed). Le Hezbollah. Etats des lieux.

AuthorMeier, Daniel
PositionBook review

Mervin Sabrina (ed). Le Hezbollah. Etats des lieux. Paris: Actes Sud, 2008. Paperback, no price indicated. 363 pages.

In her foreword, Sabrina Mervin defines the perspective outlined in the book: understanding the "Party of God" as a "social fact"--in a durkheimian perspective--rather than as a Shi'a militia, as a terrorist entity or even as an Islamic party. The main objective of such a standpoint is to embrace a much wider context as well as the broader living conditions around the party itself. To a certain extent, this book implies something larger than what the title merely describes: it is not the party anymore, but the society in which the latter evolves that is the core element of the book, i.e. the Islamic sphere (al-hala al-islamiyya) or more precisely the resistance society (mujtama' al-muqawama). She explains more precisely her approach by defining the main objective of the book as the study of Hezbollah's action within the society.

Such a program may seem rather ambitious but by reading the table of contents one can easily notice the extensive spectrum of topics that fall under the objective defined previously. Nineteen authors participated in this undertaking, some of them signing more than one chapter. Each chapter looks like a short article, as if it was structured to suggest where to continue the inquiry or the fieldwork. Besides, in its very structure, the book astonishes the reader again by dividing the book into unnamed parts: in the table of contents, groups of chapters (mainly three or four) are gathered and separated with a blank space from the next group of chapters. The main explanation of that structure lies in the project itself: when observing the society of Hezbollah, how can you clearly divide one structure from the other when, as a researcher, your daily observations show an intertwined relation between different sectors (social, political, tourism, finance or religion)? Hence, this suggestive organization of chapters and parts of the book safeguards the core idea: Hezbollah is a somewhat complex system whose sections are not independent from each other.

Although it would be difficult to discuss in detail every single article out of the eight "parts" of this book, we would like to emphasize some of them as key elements of the so-called "etat des lieux". Firstly, the media are an excellent point to start with the analysis of the Party of God. Olfa Lamloum's paper highlights the evolution of the concept of...

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