The chapter explains how youths, families, and the educated middle class took over Tripoli’s al-Nour square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment in October 2019. Al-Nour square had been the site of Sunni Islamist demonstrations of solidarity with the Syrian opposition, and against the Shiʿa Hizbullah movement from 2011-2013. The 2019 protests in al-Nour Square, against the sectarian political system, challenged the widespread idea that Tripoli was a conservative Sunni Islamist city, where non-Sunnis could not feel welcome.

Tripoli faced a number of interlinked challenges. Although security in Tripoli deteriorated in the shadow of the war in Syria, it was not the primary challenge for the city. A 2014 security plan helped Tripoli regain some stability. Lebanon’s and Tripoli’s primary struggle lay in the collapse of its public services and the decline in the rule of law. People felt that the country’s sectarian political leaders, including Saad Hariri, ultimately only served their own interests, yet no real alternative leaders emerged. Tripoli’s clientelist political system continued to show some degree of resilience even after the 2019 revolutionary moment.

This book has asked whether and why Sunni secondary cities in the Middle East have a higher propensity for unrest and ideological-political activism than capital cities. Taking Tripoli in northern Lebanon as a microcosm of the crisis of Sunnism in the broader Middle East, the book tells a story of urban violence in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Throughout the Tripoli case study, this book identified a feature of secondary cities that I call city corporatism. The root of violence in secondary cities is that these cities often see themselves as united during national turmoil, as a base for one political faction, generally the opposition.

The book identifies four causal mechanisms that jointly explain why urban violence erupts in secondary cities: external meddling; the personal ambitions of local elites; local residents’ willingness to join the fighters; and the existence of competing, or hybrid, Lebanese sovereignties. Each mechanism helps explain why Tripoli has been prone to violence in recent decades.

Tripoli, October 2019: Young people from various religious backgrounds and all walks of life sang and danced together in the city’s central al-Nour Square, shattering the myth of Tripoli as a ‘cradle of terrorism’ or ‘citadel of Muslims’. The Islamists who had often dominated Tripoli’s urban space retreated, and youths, families, and members of the educated middle class filled al-Nour Square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment.

Why and how did Tripoli become the country’s prime centre of contentious politics in otherwise-peripheral Lebanon?

The introduction presents the main argument of the book, introducing the concepts of the dethronement of secondary cities, politics of autochthony, and erosion of city corporatism in Tripoli. It then discusses the broader lessons of the Tripoli case, which speak to three strands of literature: studies of Lebanon and the Levant; discussions on sectarianization in the Middle East; and debates on the ‘Sunni Crisis’ in the Middle East. Lastly, the research methods used for data collection are presented.

The 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri unleashed a political earthquake in Lebanon. Tripoli and its surroundings became a Sunni base for the Future Movement, led by Rafiq Hariri’s son Saad and other neoliberal elites from Lebanon’s nouveaux riches political class. For the first time, Tripolitanians rallied around a political party based outside their own city.

Many Tripolitanians supported the Future Movement in 2005 because they hoped that Saad Hariri, with his personal wealth and connections to Saudi Arabia, might bring investments to marginalized areas in northern Lebanon. However, these expectations were not met.

The Future Movement was an elite-based party, and its strategies of outreach to the poor had severe shortcomings. It used divisive sectarian (anti-Shiʿi) electoral strategies in Tripoli and empowered Sunni radicals, leading to a spiral of violence. Sunni hardliners gained prominent roles in Tripoli after Hizbullah and its allies turned their weapons inwards in Beirut in May 2008. However, this sectarian resource was insufficient to help the Future Movement maintain its popularity in Tripoli in the long run.

How did Tripoli, a medium-sized secondary city, become the centre of Lebanon’s anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist protest movement?

Anti-French mobilizations in Tripoli created a unique city corporatism that helped to unite most of the Sunni population politically until the 1970s. When Tripoli was carved out of Syria and attached to the new state of Greater Lebanon in 1920 by the French mandate, the city lost its importance and was demoted to secondary status.

This paved the way for a strong, Arab nationalist city identity in Tripoli, driven by Abdulhamid Karami, a man of religion turned politician. Tripoli’s nationalist identity subsequently morphed into various Islamist trends, involving the bourgeois Islamists, the pro-Palestinian Islamists and the Maoist-turned-Islamist urban poor.

Nationalist and Islamist ideas found a foothold in Tripoli due to the many ties between the city and prominent nationalists and Islamists in Syria. However, Tripoli’s ʿAlawites and Christians contested the Arab nationalist identity of Tripoli as formulated by its Sunni leaders.

This chapter departs from the curious Memorandum of Understanding signed between Hizbollah and some of Tripoli’s Salafis in 2008. Tripoli’s Salafis, who perceived themselves as custodians of the Sunni doctrine and identity, were known for their very antagonistic discourse vis-à-vis the Shiʿa Hizbollah movement.

This chapter shows how sectarianism and the new political polarization in Lebanon after the Syrian pull-out in 2005 caused the Islamists in Tripoli to change their strategies and divide. The more liberal, but highly conflictual, climate empowered the Islamists on the one hand, but also divided them along a variety of political issues being debated in Lebanon on the other. Some aligned themselves with the March 14 Alliance and the Future Movement, while others came closer to Hizbullah, Future’s opponent. Yet, Islamists in Tripoli also came together to collectively engage in pan-Islamist protests. This indicates that most of Tripoli’s Islamists are independent actors, and that Islamists cannot be viewed as one collective political force.

The Islamic Tawhid Movement, an Islamist militia, emerged in 1982, and seized military control of Tripoli, which lasted until 1985. This chapter explores the Islamic Tawhid’s curious alliance with its most significant sponsor, the nationalist Palestinian Fatah group, and how they failed to mobilise support from Tripoli’s conservative middle class.

The emergence of the Islamic Tawhid Movement was closely linked to regional political events. The Lebanese Left and the Palestinian commando movement in Lebanon suffered a humiliating defeat during the 1982 Israeli invasion, and nearly 15,000 Palestinian commandos were forced to flee to Tunisia.

Tripoli became the last resort in Lebanon for al-Fatah. However, Syria, with a troop presence in Lebanon since 1976, did not accept the arrival of the Palestinian commandos, and a Syrian–Palestinian war broke out in the city. Tripoli’s Sunnis were generally pro-Palestinian and fiercely opposed to the Syrian Assad regime. Many youths in Tripoli turned to Islamism after the demise of the Left. However, the conservative middle class in Tripoli loathed Tawhid’s violence against civilians and despised its weak religious foundations.

Previous studies of Lebanese Salafism have neglected the analysis of the local adaptation of global Salafism to the Lebanese context. This chapter seeks to fill that gap by exploring how Salafism found a foothold in Tripoli in the 1990s and how local repertoires and identities were instrumental in popularizing Salafism among the local poor. Northern Lebanon and Tripoli constituted as the primary cradle of Lebanese Salafism; the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon constituted as a further Salafi hotspot.

Lebanese Salafi in the Tripoli discourse had distinct characteristics. More pragmatic and more business-oriented than Salafism in other Arab countries, it depended on financial patronage from the Gulf. The Lebanese Salafis’ lack of religious autonomy created an opening for jihadi underground organizations. Although Salafi ideology is important in explaining why males joined jihadi groups in Tripoli, social factors often played an even more decisive role. This chapter explores how jihadi groups could readily gain a foothold in poor quarters, taking advantage of the prevailing informality and making these hiding places for outlaws and armed groups.

Tripoli suffered as much from the post-war period as from the war itself. This chapter investigates the structural causes of the crisis of Sunnism in Tripoli in the 1990s, after the revival of Lebanon’s state institutions. Why were local and national politicians unable to rebuild the infrastructure and political spirit of the city after the war?

Lebanon’s post-war system of representation had severe shortcomings. The situation was particularly dire in Tripoli, where Syrian power politics were more direct and far-reaching. Syria’s representatives played various Tripolitanian strata against each other. Crony capitalist networks, which benefited Syrian and Lebanese political and economic entrepreneurs, created new internal divides. The new neoliberal political elites and the bourgeois Islamists turned their backs on the urban poor in Tripoli. As the state eroded and corruption increased, Muslim confessional welfare societies gained an important role in Tripoli’s educational sector.

Chapter 3 discusses the phase spanning from the 2000s until the start of the Arab Spring in 2011–2012. It pays particular attention to how activists and communities have come together in pursuit of shared liberal notions and goals, and how they have taken tangible political action and impacted political conduct and affairs. To do so intellectuals and activists moved beyond dogmatic and rigid interpretations in their attempts to re-appropriate, make sense of, and reclaim liberal values. They reintegrated the public masses who became the main focus of activism. And they created public forums, took to the streets, and engaged in open debates about separation of powers, pluralism, and individuality, stressing issues of civil rights and political freedoms and individuals’ right to self-rule. Even leftist thinkers who lost faith in the contentions of the radical era turned to a “liberal-ish” agenda that emphasized liberal rights and freedoms and criticized state monopolies over power and the economy.