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.

Chapter 4 looks at the restitution of liberalism as a potential model for political change during the Arab Spring and then its inability to shape outcomes in Egypt and Syria due to structural, organizational, and international reasons. The chapter refutes the narrative that the Arab Spring was the result of a leaderless movement of an alienated youth and loose associations of activists. It asserts that this overall analysis ignores the years of liberal activism against the extant patterns of domination and authority in the region, and the fact that protestors rallied behind a set of ideas that were consistently different from the ones rallied behind in the 1950s–1960s.What is missed in most studies is the deep and consistent transformation and reformulation of the object of discontent. Millions confronted their States despite the threat of violence, and in so doing they showed that liberal notions were vibrantly hiding in plain sight.

Chapter 2 sheds light on the liberals’ public and private work and discourse within the authoritarian and repressive sociopolitical context from the 1960s to the end of the 1990s. It particularly focuses on their “hidden” and not so hidden transcripts, in other words their work beyond their seeming silence and absence, to shed light on their ongoing active engagement despite the contextual conditions forcing them to largely go underground. It argues that while the liberal democrats were eclipsed by the region’s authoritarian regimes, by illiberal leftists, and conservatives such as the pan-Islamists, they nonetheless remained vital and continued to have a sociopolitical impact through other means than via direct political engagement and a focus on the institutions of the State.

The brief but powerful emergence of the liberal intelligentsia and liberal democratic ideas and assertions in the aftermath of the Arab Spring (2011–2012) have revealed a different dimension to Arab society and political life and provide insight into a parallel reality and movement bubbling along beneath the surface. And while the conservatives and the autocrats quickly took over the popular uprisings, liberal notions, ideas and actors enjoyed immense popularity and displayed vitality, courage, and defiance in that moment before their forced eclipse. The question thus emerges: Where did these ideas and people come from, and where are they now?

Chapter 1 offers historical context and an overview of the intellectual and political history of Classical Liberalism during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the region. The focus of the chapter is on how classical liberals approached questions of despotism, civil freedoms, rights and democracy, and on how they have conceived of political change. These questions have been ignored within most of the academic literature, which has tended to focus on these intellectuals and politicians’ pan-Arabist and nationalist agendas instead of on their liberal and democratic outlooks. Overall, the chapter provides an essential historical and analytical background about the region’s earliest liberal intellectual and political history; it shows that liberal concepts were not “foreign concepts” imposed suddenly on an unsuspecting public. The chapter informs the rest of the study and sets the boundaries of the movement.