In the aftermath of the first bloody siege of Shatila by the Amal militia in 1985, Umm Muhammad, resident of Shatila, declared that the siege wasn't “the first massacre that has been committed against us. Since 1947 our lives have been affected by them. My four children and husband were killed at the hand of the Israelis and the Kata'ib in the Sabra and Shatila massacres – even those Lebanese who were married to Palestinians were killed there” (al-Hurriyya, 8 Feb. 1985: 14). For Umm Muhammad, the siege was unambiguously one in a long chain of massacres committed against Palestinians. It was the historic persistence of massacres that created an “us” against whom atrocities were committed. This “us” was the Palestinian refugee, whose political identity was so dangerous that even Lebanese citizens married to Palestinians were targets of violence. While Umm Muhammad considered the War of the Camps – as the successive sieges of the camp by Amal came to be known – as one massacre in a chain of massacres, the conflict has also been described as a heroic battle, and as an example of quotidian steadfastness.

Transformations in transnational discourses, outlined in the previous chapter, were accompanied with local political changes that crucially provided the indigenous terrain for appropriation of transnational discourses. Local institutions – whether nationalist political parties or humanitarian and human rights NGOs – became the conduits for these discourses, but they did not leave them unchanged. While Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have been restricted by the severely circumscribed borders of their camps and by the repressive control of the Lebanese state, nevertheless, world events and regional conflicts have profoundly influenced their lives, and their political contention in turn has been incisive in shaping the broader contours of Palestinian nationalism and political developments in the region.

To understand the politics of Palestinian nationalist commemoration, one has to look at the confluence between these transnational discourses and local political institutions, and to best understand the latter, a brief study of the historical background of Palestinian refugees' presence in Lebanon is necessary. Palestinian history in Lebanon is punctuated by the transformative events which led to the refugees reorganizing their social relations within the camps, choosing new modes of political mobilization, or articulating their demands for political participation in new ways. The exile from Palestine has been an originary cause of all subsequent conflicts in which they have found themselves.

In July 1959, in the last throes of the Algerian revolutionary war, Frantz Fanon (1963: 32), who had become one of the most eloquent spokespersons of that struggle, declared that:

The awareness of a world whose sympathy can be mobilized in defense of one's cause and the successful overcoming of national boundaries in appealing to large audiences are distinguishing features of many political movements of the post-Second World War era. Transnational networks of solidarity and sympathy have come into being in universities, religious institutions, solidarity organizations, battlefields, and conferences, and different movements have provided one another with financial resources, volunteers – both militant and pacifist – and arms. But alongside the more material manifestations of global affiliations, transnational discourses are forged in particular places which are then borrowed, nurtured, translated, and transformed across borders.

A political demonstration ends at the Shatila Martyrs' Cemetery, where orators point to the grave of Ghassan Kanafani and remind the demonstrators of the obligation the martyrs have placed on their shoulders. An elderly woman wearing an embroidered dress waves a large old-fashioned key in the air. A young girl receives via email a digital image of the remnants of the destroyed village her grandparents inhabited. A calendar published by a political faction chronicles battles and massacres on every page. The image of a young martyr stares out from a large and colorful mural on the walls of a camp alongside ubiquitous posters commemorating Abu Jihad. During a tour of Burj al-Shamali camp's monument to unsung martyrs, a young NGO activist pleads for international sympathy.

In the realm of commemorations, Palestinian political institutions and the refugees themselves have a mutual relationship. The refugees' lives, language, and experiences provide the raw materials co-opted by the institutions and transformed into the narrative content of their commemorations. On the other hand, the manner in which the refugees engage in or reject these practices indicates the extent to which these commemorations resonate with them – or not.

Arafat's funeral in Cairo and Ramallah, on 12 November 2004, exemplified the distinction between two sorts of heroic commemorative narratives: the first, an official ceremony mourning a founding father and head of state, and the other, that of a liberationist-nationalist movement burying a “martyred” icon of armed resistance. The entire spectacle was inflected through the lens of Israeli military occupation, which had made itself “invisible” for three days but which had ultimately set the parameters of the ceremony and subsequent burial (Jerusalem Post, 16 November 2004). In Cairo, attendance at the funeral organized by President Husni Mubarak was limited to dignitaries and was strictly closed to the public.

During May 2002, a “Memorial Exhibition” titled 100 Shaheeds, 100 Lives was held at the UNESCO Palace in Beirut. The exhibition was planned to coincide with the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Nakba on 15 May. Despite severe restrictions on leaving the OPT and entering Lebanon, exhibition organizers had brought the artefacts – which consisted of objects belonging to and photographs of the first 100 martyrs of the second Intifada – from Ramallah to Beirut. The Ramallah organizer of the exhibition was the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre; its Beiruti counterparts included the Arab Resource Centre for Popular Arts. The 100 martyrs were the first 100 casualties of the al-Aqsa Intifada killed by Israeli gunfire during protests, stone-throwing, in suspicious circumstances, or as bystanders.

The exhibition of quotidian objects belonging to the deceased was accompanied by a sophisticated modern arts exhibition, a concert, and a film festival. The attendees – particularly on the opening night when a Palestinian singer from Ramallah was set to appear – represented a wide social spectrum: Lebanese leftists of all sectarian backgrounds, Lebanese Islamists, middle- and upper-class assimilated Palestinians, Lebanese and Palestinian intellectuals and artists, international activists, and last but certainly not least in numbers, Palestinians from the camps in Beirut and further afield.

By now, we know the images that flicker across the television screens during CNN or BBC or al-Jazeera news broadcasts about Palestinians: mournful or angry funerals of martyrs; walls papered with images of young dead men and, now and again, women; poignant or proud commemorations of collective death spoken in the idiom of battles and massacres; pasts that seem to linger; exile that is not forgotten; histories of suffering that are declared and compared. We hear about a surfeit of memory. Some claim that this mnemonic abundance is the final bulwark against capitulation – or compromise, depending on where you stand politically.

This book has been about the struggles, failures and triumphs of a nationalist movement in imagining the nation. I have argued that a fundamental practice in the constellation of Palestinian nationalist practices is commemoration, and that narratives contained within commemorative practices are crucial in shaping the stories of Palestinian peoplehood. These commemorative practices – ceremonies, rituals, memorials, and history-telling – all represent, reinterpret, and remember the national past in an ongoing and dynamic way and in so doing, set the stage for crafting future strategies. In trying to better understand nationalism, in earlier pages I have examined Palestinian commemorative forms and the narratives of heroism, suffering and sumud they contain, the emergence of these narratives at the intersection of available transnational discourses and local political institutions, and the diverse and dynamic performances of these narratives for different audiences.

Form and content of commemorations

This study shows that commemorative practices have forms and contents.

Literature on Saudi Arabia often starts by making the obvious observation that the regime derives its legitimacy from Wahhabiyya. Yet not many studies go further than this, for example to analyse the internal dynamics and dialectics of this legitimacy. In this book I have explored the ways in which Wahhabiyya became a hegemonic discourse under the patronage of the state. Rather than being a tradition opposed to modernity, Wahhabiyya flourished and its advocates became prosperous as a result of the immersion of Saudi Arabia in modernity. Wahhabiyya became a dominant discourse because of state patronage, oil and modernity. However, the same factors that consolidatedit have led to its contestation. This has resulted in the emergence of multiple Wahhabi discourses, all constructed against the background of state control.

The creation of the modern state in 1932 consolidated a religious tradition that grew in the shadow of the sultan. After the state eliminated undesirable elements and interpretations in the 1920s, Wahhabiyya became the dominant religious discourse, whose consolidation was dependent on financial and moral support from the political elite. Wahhabi scholars developed intoa class of noblesse dʾétat with its own interests and role in the political realm. This elite originated in the small oases and settlements of southern Najd and Qasim that produced religious interpreters. Until the 1970s aimat al-da ʿwa al-najdiyya represented a close circle of people of knowledge.

Lewis Atiyat Allah is but one activist who aspires towards reformulating modernity according to his own principles. Other Saudis are eqully concerned with the same questions that torment Lewis, but their preoccupation may differ in its focus and strategy. Yet they all have one common denominator: the search for the unmediated word of God. This search is at the heart of the Saudi debate in the twenty-first century.

Previous chapters demonstrated thatofficial ʿulama, Sahwis and Jihadis are engaged in fierce intellectual battles over religious interpretation. None of these battles is likelyto go as far as openly challenging the religious discourse of the ancestor, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, or the heritage of aimat al-da ʿwa al-najdiyya. However, contesting this heritage – or at least the way it is practised, applied and interpreted by official scholars – is an ongoing intellectual preoccupation.

Traditional Saudi ʿulama regard themselves as theintellectual heirs of the reformer's heritage and as the only true Muslims. Both dissident Sahwis and Jihadis consider many contemporary official ʿulama to be latecomers who corrupted the initial original message of the reformer under the patronage of the Saudi regime. They both aspire to free religious interpretation from their monopoly. This position was particularly clear among those described previously as Salafi–Ikhwani and Jihadis. Yet not many activists openly scrutinise the interpretations of the ancestor. If they have minor reservations about the eighteenth-century message, they remain silent in the public sphere.

Official Wahhabiyya created consenting subjects. Wealth allowed the Saudi regime to consolidate aspects of religion in the public sphere while pursuing gradual but determined political secularisation. Saudi society and the public sphere were ‘Islamised’ while politics and the modern state remained an autonomous field beyond the reach of most senior religiousscholars. Official ʿulama developed a discourse that sanctioned thisschism. The Wahhabi tradition described in the last chapter ensured that politics remained in the hands of those who claim to know people's interest. The guiding principle was – and still is – ʿal-hukam aʿlam bi almaslaha' (the rulers know the public good). Official Wahhabi scholars removed not only themselves but the rest of society from political matters. They prohibited engagement in public affairs. Their religious discourse, especially that which confirmed the potential corruption and blasphemyof the umma, reinforced the marginalisation of the public and their exclusion from the political decision-making process. Under the banner of the state, official Wahhabiyya refined and consolidated a religious discourse that disenfranchised society and disenchanted politics.