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To understand Hezbollah

Book review written by Hans Henrik Fafner
Faith and Resistance: The Politics of Love and War in Lebanon
Forfatter: Sarah Marusek
Forlag: Pluto Press (Storbritannia)
Hezbollah has Islamized the class struggle. The belief gives strength to an ignored population, concludes author and researcher Sarah Marusek after two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon.

In the West, religion is considered a conservative force. Therefore, religious movements are considered reactionary or fundamentalist. This view, however, fails to seize the revolutionary potential of religious activism: Just think of Malcolm X or Pastor Martin Luther King jr. during the American civil rights struggle, or the Christian church in South Africa. The latter played a significant role in the fight against apartheid by publishing the Kairos document in July 1985, challenging the church's response to the apartheid policy of the white regime in Pretoria.

The revolutionary potential of religious activism.

Many continue to distrust religions as such, since Western understanding of concepts such as believe og rationality was changed. . .

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Hans Henrik Fafner
Fafner is a regular critic in Ny Tid. Residing in Tel Aviv.

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