Author's note: I thank the IJMES anonymous reviewers and the IJMES editors for helping me to fine-tune my argument, and for directing me to an enriching literature. I also thank Yezid Sayigh and Vivienne Jabri for having had the patience to listen to my ideas, even when they went down tortuous paths.

¹ See, for example, Kramer, Martin, “The Moral Logic of Hizbullah,” in Origins of Terrorism Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kramer, , “Hezbollah: The Calculus of Jihad,” in Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militancy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. For a critique of this approach and a compelling account of the general social processes behind suicide attacks in southern Lebanon, see Sevag Kechichian, “The Many Faces of Violence and the Social Foundation of Suicide Bombing, Lebanon 1981–2000” (unpublished paper, 2007). For another “terrorism”-focused study that relied upon Israeli intelligence material, See Ranstorp, Magnus, Hizbʾallah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).Google Scholar

² The rest of the article establishes parallels with Iranian martyrdom culture. As a closer, local example, Palestinian organizations also ritualized the recollection of martyrdom, though in different ways. See Khalili, Laleh, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The systematization and institutionalization of this practice reached unprecedented levels with Hizbullah. Revealingly, decades later other Lebanese political organizations began to imitate Hizbullah, among them their self-declared arch-enemies, the Christian-denominated Lebanese Forces, who after 2005 organized annual masses to remember their martyrs. Yet in this case, the names of the martyrs were not displayed, and no banners depicting them appeared on the roads.

³ Moussawi, Ibrahim and Hilal, Khashan, “Hizbullah's Jihad Concept,” Journal of Religion and Society 9 (2007): 1–19.Google Scholar

⁴ Swidler, Ann, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 273–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ This assumption is made in most works on Hizbullah. See, for example, Alagha, Joseph, The Shifts in Hizbullah's Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology and Political Program (Isim and Leiden: Amsterdam University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion (London: Pluto Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Hamzeh, Nizar, In The Path of Hizbullah (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

⁶ I call this phenomenon the “Politics of Remembrance,” aspects of which (including martyrology) I explore further in a forthcoming book titled Writing Nations: Hizbullah Politics of Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

⁷ This article does not attempt to explain how Hizbullah's ideological production influences a particular audience or targeted constituency.

⁸ For a detailed discussion of the centrality of Hizbullah's military wing to the party, see Daher, Aurelie, Le Hezbollah: Mobilisation et pouvoir (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ For the most recent conceptual articulation of ideology, see Freeden, Michael, Ideology and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid., 99.

¹¹ See, for example, the seminal work of Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).Google Scholar

¹² Studies on ideology do recognize its emotional underpinning but do not generally turn this into an analyzable phenomenon, perhaps because of the modern epistemological differentiation between acts of rationalizing and emotional investments. John Gerring, for example, identifies three locations of ideology: thought, behavior, and language. See his article “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis,” Political Research Quarterly 50(1997): 957–94, and esp. 967. For a rebuttal of this binary and the merging of reason and emotion, see Sayer, Andrew, Why Things Matter to People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ The first issue of al-ʿAhd was dated 28 June 1984. Facing copyright issues (the title was already in use by another print media outlet), Hizbullah changed the journal's name to al-Intiqad in 2000. When al-ʿAhd stopped printing and became solely Internet based, it returned to the original name. The journal is accessible via http://alahed.com.lb. Author's interview with Ibrahim Moussawi, former editor of al-Intiqad, July 2010.

¹⁴ Author's interview with Muhammad Raʿad, Lebanese parliamentary member, June 2010.

¹⁵ For example, Waddah Sharara has argued that Hizbullah is an Iranian proxy that gradually implanted itself in Lebanon and worked diligently to “Islamize” the country by taking hold of the state. See Sharara, Waddah, Dawlat Hizbullah (Beirut: Dar Annahar, 1998)Google Scholar. Although Sharara's sociological analysis of Hizbullah's clerical cultural background is interesting, the main leitmotif of his text, that Hizbullah is simply an Iranian “alien” proxy, blurs the richness of the analysis. Meanwhile, Joseph Alagha has described Hizbullah's totalizing “shifts in ideology,” from a revolutionary, radical, and confrontational program to a pragmatic, reconciliatory, and cooperative one. Alagha never defines what he means by “ideology” or “identity,” two terms that at times he seems to use interchangeably. See Alagha, Joseph, The Shifts in Hizbullah's Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology and Political Program (Isim and Leiden: Amsterdam University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Alagha, , Hizbullah's Identity Construction (Isim and Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ For a great overview of the multiple uses of the word ideology in the social sciences, see John Gerring, “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis.”

¹⁷ Ibid., 980.

¹⁸ Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Origins of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid., 25; Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar

²⁰ In premodern imaginaries, religious narratives were also a reflection of cyclical rural life. An example of how to understand notions of cyclical or vertical eras is the idea of the beginning of a prophetic tradition and its end with, for example, notions of judgment day or the apocalypse.

²¹ Deeb, Lara, “‘Emulating and/or Embodying the Ideal’: The Gendering of Temporal Frameworks and Islamic Role Models in Shiʿī Lebanon,” American Ethnologist 36 (2009): 244CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² Ibid.

²³ Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 193.Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., 197.

²⁵ For example, see Volk, Lucia, Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Haugbolle, Sune, “Public and Private Memory of the Lebanese Civil War,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25 (2005): 191–203.Google Scholar

²⁶ Haugbolle, “Public and Private Memory,” 201.

²⁷ Fischer, Michael, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 21.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., 13–27.

²⁹ Ibid, 27–32.

³⁰ On the importance of the hawza and the clerical intellectual, see Abisaab, Rula, “The Cleric as Organic Intellectual: Revolutionary Shiʿism in the Lebanese Hawzas,” in Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years, ed. Chehabi, H. E. (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies, I. B. Tauris, 2006).Google Scholar

³¹ There is a prolific literature on the ʿAshuraʾ ritual in Lebanon. See, for example, Deeb, Lara, “Living Ashura in Lebanon: Mourning Transformed to Sacrifice,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25 (2005): 122–37Google Scholar; Mervin, Sabrina, “Les larmes et le sang des chiites: Corps et pratiques rituelles lors des célébrations de ‘ashûrâ’ (Liban, Syrie),” Revue des mondes musulman et de la Méditerranée 113–14 (2006): 153–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Picard, Elizabeth, “The Lebanese Shiʿa and Political Violence in Lebanon,” in The Legitimization of Violence (London: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1997), 189–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² In this case, Hizbullah is merely drawing on social rituals of mourning traditionally practiced by most communities (i.e., various Muslim, Christian and Jewish sects) in the Middle East, and rearticulating them in terms of contemporary political concerns.

³³ Al-ʿAhd 14, 28 September 1984, 2.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Talebi, Shahla, “An Iranian Martyr's Dilemma: The Finite Subject's Infinite Responsibility,” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 33 (2013): 172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and Function of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West, 1966).Google Scholar

³⁷ Talebi, “An Iranian Martyr's Dilemma,” 182.

³⁸ Cook, David, Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁹ See Talal Asad, “Thinking about Religion and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), in which he widens the scope of belief from its “discursive” or “symbolic” bias to introduce a practical, dispositional, and emotional dimension. I also rely here on Asad's argument that religion as a private set of beliefs held by the individual is the product of a recent sociopolitical context developed in Western Europe through the notion of the secular. Asad, , Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Derrida, Jacques, Spectres de Marx: L'Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 14.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 15.

⁴² Mcintyre, Alasdaire, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 211.Google Scholar

⁴³ See Messick, Brinkley, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Al-ʿAhd, 18 August 1984. ʿAli, son of Husayn, son of ʿAli bin Abi Talib, is considered the third Imam in Twelver Shiʿism. He had different names, including Imam al-Sajjad and Zayn al-ʿAbidin (Ornament of the Pious), as it is said that he was very devout and prayed constantly. In the Shiʿi tradition, all of the imams died either by poisoning or in battle, from Husayn in the Karbala episode, to Zayn al-ʿAbidin, to the last Imam, who is expected to return in the future.

⁴⁵ This is a famous hadith that is part of the hadiths of the family of the prophets (ahl al-bayt), which are popular mainly in Shiʿi Islamic traditions.

⁴⁶ In an interview, the leader of the Hizbullah parliamentary coalition, and former editor-in-chief of al-ʿAhd in its formative years, Muhammad Raʿad, described to me the painstaking process through which al-ʿAhd journalists collected information from martyr family members in regions either occupied by Israel or considered highly sensitive in terms of security. Author's interview with Mohammad Raʿad, Lebanese parliamentary member, June 2010.

⁴⁷ Al-ʿAhd, 20 Sepember 1986.

⁴⁸ Al-ʿAhd, 13 December 1986.

⁴⁹ Led by General Antoine Lahd, this army was known as the South Lebanon Army.

⁵⁰ Al-ʿAhd, 13 December 1986. Lusy, Sarira, and the Dalafeh bridge are regions of southern Lebanon.

⁵¹ For discussion of this, see Asad, Talal, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 52.Google Scholar

⁵² Mustafa, Amin, al-Muqawama fi Lubnan: 1948–2000 (Beirut: Dar al Hadi, 2003), 458.Google Scholar

⁵³ This sentence is independent and constitutes an explication of the previously invoked word “purchase”; a variant reading has the passive verb come first (fa yuqtalūnā wa-yaqtulūn, or “they shall be killed and shall kill”), meaning that some are killed while those who remain fight on.

⁵⁴ Qurʾan, Surat al-Tawbah: 3. See Altafsir, accessed 11 July 2015, http://altafsir.com/ViewTranslations.asp?Display=yes&SoraNo=9&Ayah=0&toAyah=0&Language=2&LanguageID=2&TranslationBook=3. All English translations of Qurʾanic text that appear in this article are drawn from this website.

⁵⁵ After Israeli forces withdrew from the coastal city of Saida (as well as other southern areas) and settled south of the Litani river, Hizbullah began to more systematically claim martyrdom operations.

⁵⁶ Al-ʿAhd 72, 8 November 1985.

⁵⁷ Al-ʿAhd 58, 3 August 1985, 2.

⁵⁸ See Al-ʿAhd 48, 24 May 1985. One week later, in issue 49 (1 June 1985), the newspaper published an interview with the family of Qasir.

⁵⁹ The irony here is that, looking through the data from the time, Hizbullah carried out significantly less suicide operations than other organizations on the ground, such as Amal, the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the Baʿth Party, and the Communist Party.

⁶⁰ There are two versions of the story. According to one, Harb reached his house where his killers found him and, after knocking on the door, killed him as he opened it. The other claims that Harb was intercepted by a group of people riding in a Chevrolet car as he walked down the street on his way to visit friends. The presence of multiple versions of the story enhanced the creativity around the narrations of Harb's martyrdom.

⁶¹ Al-ʿAhd 1, 28 June 1984, 1.

⁶² Al-ʿAhd 34, 16 February 1985. Dalīl is most accurately translated as “the one who points to directions or signs.”

⁶³ Ibid., 5.

⁶⁴ Al-ʿAhd 35, 23 February 1985.

⁶⁵ Musa al-Sadr is another important Hizbullah figure. He was the first to found a political movement (Amal) representing the Shiʿi community in Lebanon. Many Hizbullah members came from a specific branch of Amal called Amal al-Islami, which in the mid-1980s felt that Amal's main leadership had deviated from the main political objectives of al-Sadr, including battling Israel. Jerusalem Day is an annual commemoration instituted by Khomeini to recall the occupation of a sacred Islamic site, the al-Aqsa Mosque.

⁶⁶ Al-ʿAhd 36, 26 February 1985.

⁶⁷ Al-ʿAhd 191, 20 February 1988.

⁶⁸ The president of the Lebanese Republic during this period was Amin Gemayel, the brother of the assassinated president Bashir Gemayel who had also led the Lebanese Forces, an offshoot of the Phalangist party. For this reason, Hizbullah members antagonistic to this party used to say that the Gemayel presidency was ruled by the Phalangists, which was a slight simplification since Gemayel had his differences with what was gradually becoming various Phalangist factions.

⁶⁹ Al-ʿAhd 282, 17 October, 1989.

⁷⁰ Al-ʿAhd 295, 16 February 1990.

⁷¹ Al-ʿAhd 294, 9 February 1990.

⁷² Ibid., 1.

⁷³ I am drawing on Althusser's notion of interpellation here. See his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

⁷⁴ “Sayyid” is a term given to people whose family lineage can allegedly be traced to the Prophet Muhammad. Those who are religious figures wear a black turban (as opposed to the white turban worn by ordinary shaykhs such as Harb).

⁷⁵ Al-ʿAhd, 11 July 1992.

⁷⁶ Examples of such commemorations include ʿAshuraʾ (10 Muharram), Jerusalem Day (the last day of Ramadan), Liberation Day (25 May), Yawm al-Ghadir (18 Dhu al-Qiʿda), the anniversary of the Iranian Islamic Revolution (11 February), and the birth of the Mahdi (15 Shaʿban). Notice that some dates are fixed in the Islamic calendar, while others are fixed in the Gregorian calendar.

⁷⁷ Qurʾan, Surat al-Asra: 12. Altafsir, accessed 11 July 2015, http://altafsir.com/ViewTranslations.asp?Display=yes&SoraNo=17&Ayah=0&toAyah=0&Language=2&LanguageID=2&TranslationBook=3.

⁷⁸ This categorization of operations according to days, months, and years began to appear in al-ʿAhd in the early 1990s. See, for example, al-ʿAhd 333, 16 November 1990, 21; al-ʿAhd 502, 20 January 1994; and al-ʿAhd 504, 11 February 1994.

⁷⁹ These calendars also contain English and other “Western” proverbs, as well as random scientific and technological “information,” on the pages for some dates.

⁸⁰ Ironically, the Israeli invasion falls on 14 March, the day on which massive demonstrations took place in downtown Beirut against the Syrian political presence in Lebanon, and after which the political coalition against Hizbullah took its name. One reads on this calendar that it was on 14 March that Hizbullah's non-Shiʿi division of fighters, al-sarāya al-lubnāniyya, was formed.

⁸¹ Hassan Nasrallah on the occasion of Week of the Resistance (16 February 2006).

⁸² Al-ʿAhd, 30 December 1984.

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Al-ʿAhd, 11 October 2008.

⁸⁵ Author's interview with an anonymous employee of Athar al-Shuhadaʾ, July 2009.

⁸⁶ Messick, The Calligraphic State.

⁸⁷ Ibid.; Derrida, Jacques, De la grammatologie (Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1967).Google Scholar

⁸⁸ See Wedeen, Lisa, “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science,” American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 713–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁹ Idriss, Nisrine, ʿUrs ʿAylul (Beirut: Dar al-Hadi, 2001), 3.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ For a historical overview of the development of Al Manar TV, see Lamloum, Olfa, “L'Histoire sociale du Hezbollah à travers ses médias,” Politix 87 (2009): 169–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar