Eva Dingel - Power Struggles in the Middle East: The Islamist Politics of Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood

Eva Dingel has worked as a consultant and researcher with a variety of non-governmental organisations and academic institutions focusing on the Middle East, over the past ten years. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Freie Universitt Berlin (FU Berlin).

Dingel makes a timely and important contribution to the debates surrounding the topic of political Islam. The book is an innovative, well-argued and thoroughly researched addition to the debates surrounding the development of political Islam, and very nicely complements the political science literature on power structures and transformation processes in the Middle East.

Rachid Ouaissa, Philipps-Universitt Marburg

A very timely and original book which tackles a research question of extremely high relevance in both academic terms and from a policy perspective. It is not only timely with regard to most recent events in the Arab world, but also speaks to the ongoing more general debate about whether or not Islamist movements and liberal democracy go together or not.

Thomas Risse, Freie Universitt Berlin

POWER
STRUGGLES
IN THE MIDDLE
EAST

The Islamist Politics of Hizbullah and the
Muslim Brotherhood

E VA D INGEL

Published in 2017 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2017 Eva Dingel

The right of Eva Dingel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book.
Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

Library of Modern Middle East Studies 180

ISBN: 978 1 78453 433 2

eISBN: 978 1 78672 115 0

ePDF: 978 1 78673 115 9

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

To my mum

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

Model of analytical framework.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without the support mental, emotional and technical of many different people, and I would like to thank them all sincerely. My first thank you goes to my family, my parents and my sister, who have made it all possible and have occasionally helped me out in times of financial difficulty during the writing and completion of this book. Secondly, I'd like to thank my supervisors for adopting and supporting the dissertation project this book is based on as well as making the thesis defense a collegial and friendly affair. Orient Institute Beirut have generously supported the field phase of this project with a research scholarship, for which I am very grateful. In terms of inspiration for the project, I thank all my Lebanese and Egyptian friends and acquaintances for the many enlightening conversations on politics, the world and the meaning of life, which have in one way or another found their way into this book. I also thank them for their patience with me while using these conversations to build my knowledge and reduce my ignorance Thank you also to all my interview partners for taking time to talk to me and sharing information, knowledge and insights with me without their help, this book would not exist. Most of my Egyptian interview partners are now in prison and I have decided not to mention their names in this book. Invaluable thanks in conducting the interviews go to Sarah Hani, who helped in translating a number of them and was an intrepid interview companion. I thank my inspiring teachers at Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Aix-en-Provence as well as my colleagues at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin (Volker Perthes, Muriel Asseburg, Ahmed Badawi, Iris Glosemeyer, Isabelle Werenfels, the late Johannes Reissner) for introducing me to the study of the Middle East region in the first place, and for setting extremely high standards for this research that I always keep in firm view, although surely do not reach at all times. But I try.

For reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript, I owe many thanks to Manfred Sing, Muriel Asseburg and Henriette Rytz, in particular. Thanks also to my friend and fellow scholar Claudia Hofmann for going through the research design with me and helping to make it less wobbly and more of a stable affair. I thank Ulrich Schneckener for the opportunity to present the dissertation project at a conference early on that proved very helpful. My gratitude also goes to Madeleine Sauer and Judith Vey, who patiently listened to problems with the writing process, helped me organise my arguments and draft them into a first version. Finally, I thank many friends and dear ones for their invaluable emotional support on this, in particular: Gesche Knolle, Julia Ehrt, Silke Lode, Lili Krause, David Koschel, Frans Willems, Sarah Hartmann, Laura Stielike, Tobias Koepf, Ingrid Jacobs, as well as my fellow martial artists and teachers Maria Saraceno, Tina Mller, Heinrich Knuck, Gundula Bischoff and Stephan Schaks. Last but not least, a million thanks to my copyeditor Karin van der Tak for sticking with the book project through a number of hangups, including data loss due to a break-in into my apartment. Also, I'd like to acknowledge the support I received from anyone who ever liked my PhD statuses on Facebook, and I apologize to anyone I might have omitted from this list. Needless to say, all mistakes in this book remain my own. The transliteration of place names and people's names in this book does not rely on one coherent system, but instead and for reasons of easy recognition, uses the most common spelling employed in the English-language press and literature on the subject.

INTRODUCTION

The idea for this book came to me while I was living and working in Lebanon in 2006. One hot day in July, skirmishes were being reported in South Lebanon between Hizbullah forces and the Israeli army. I remember thinking that this was not unusual, and continued with my day, making my way to work through the chaotic traffic of Beirut in the humid summer heat. Soon enough, however, it became obvious that this was indeed an unusual event. Hizbullah had attacked an Israeli army patrol, killed three soldiers and kidnapped another two. To most Lebanese, it was immediately clear that this would not remain without consequences, and that Israel would retaliate. In fact, around midday, Israeli fighter planes flew raids on Beirut's international airport and destroyed the runways, halting all international air traffic. As it turned out, they were acting upon a retaliation plan that had previously been drawn up, and things started to happen very fast. I remember the eerie feeling inspired by the fact that my most obvious way out of the country, by airplane, had now been cut, and that I was stranded, together with 5 million Lebanese, on the wrong side of an Israeli army attack. In the course of the four weeks that followed, the Israeli air force destroyed most major infrastructure in the country, and pounded civilian areas in South Lebanon as well as in the suburbs of Beirut that it deemed strongholds of Hizbullah. Around 1,400 Lebanese civilians were killed; many, many more were injured, traumatized, lost family members and loved ones, in addition to their material possessions and houses. I left on a German government evacuation plane via Turkey about a week after the attacks started. At the end of all this, one question stood out for me personally: Why? Why had Hizbullah decided on this attack and the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers? What did it stand to gain, when the losses for the whole country were so glaring and obvious? (And why did the Israeli army retaliate, yet again, against civilians, hoping this would undermine Hizbullah's credibility, when previous campaigns had revealed that the opposite was likely to happen and that its legitimacy and popularity were going to increase?)