Al-Akhbar as a Platform for Interaction Between Secularity and Religion: The Resistance as a Synthesis

Over the past few years, my research has focused on the development of the Lebanese Hezbollah, and its adoption of the concept of Muqāwama (resistance) as an integral part of its identity and that of its supporters. The proposed paper focuses on a significant medium that plays a central role in the production of a hegemonic Muqāwama project: Al-Akhbar newspaper. While Al-Akhbar is influenced heavily by Hezbollah, it’s not directly controlled by it. The relative freedom from Hezbollah’s control is central to understand the new phase into which Hezbollah has entered in order for it to build and re-instill the Muqāwama project into Lebanese, Arab-Islamic, and global collective awareness. In this paper I will examine a broad sample of Al-Akhbar editions, as well as the history of the newspaper, the writers and their backgrounds, and the journalistic articles and reports published since the newspaper’s launch. This will help shed light on the nature of the opposing and allied streams and forces inside the newspaper that have come together to construct Muqāwama as an alternative hegemonic project in Lebanon and the wider region. The paper will demonstrate how Al-Akhbar has become a platform for intellectual and ideological interaction between the various movements that constitute the Muqāwama project in Lebanon. In analyzing the data, this paper will use qualitative methods, alongside some quantitative methods that will help examine the types of texts published in the newspapers.