Sonic Messages: Hizbullah’s Mawlid an-Nabi Celebrations in Lebanon

Weinrich, Ines

Abstract

This chapter analyses ritual practices of the Lebanese Hezbollah, a recent Twelver Shi’i organization and political party. Hezbollah operates in a highly competitive field, both religiously and politically. The chapter reads Hezbollah as an “aesthetic formation” (Birgit Meyer 2009), that is, a social formation based on ideology that uses distinct aesthetic styles to attract new followers and bind existing ones. The focus lies on the period between 2000 and 2013 and the party’s aesthetic markers and sensational forms employed in the mediation of its religious worldview. The starting point is the analysis of the party’s central celebration commemorating the Prophet Muhammad’s birth (mawlid) in 2012. The chapter briefly introduces the historic and political background, situates the mawlid celebration within the context of other political and religious rites of Hezbollah and briefly summarizes its general sonic repertoire, before moving to the mawlid celebration itself. Since a great part of research in material religion has focused on the visual culture, the main focus of my analysis is on the sonic practices. It provides an in-depth analysis of two musical stage presentations in the celebration. The poetic and sonic choices of the performed repertoire as well as its aesthetic styles convey intertwined political messages which are not necessarily verbalized. The analysed poetic and sonic repertoire reveals confluences with Sunni mawlid celebrations observed during the same time frame in Syria and Lebanon and thus feeds into politics of Sunni-Shi’i rapprochement and Lebanonization. In a broader and long-term perspective, the chapter argues, the presented sonic aesthetics mediate and generate Hezbollah’s visions of Shi’i religiosity and appropriate ritual practices and are tangible in other ritual contexts such as Ashura rituals.