LeVine and Salvatore 69themselves as agents of change, socioreligious movements relate to the
societies as an extension of their own discourses of justice, something
they are intimately part of and equal to in a web of relationships that are
partly horizontal and partly vertical, since they are based on ties of (imag-
ined or effective) authority.
e largely egalitarian and voluntaristic modes of interaction make Th
Islamist charities often effective and sometimes hegemonic. At the same
time, these strategies are woven into larger, global financial and moral
economy networks that have become inseparable from resistance—sup-
ported by a variety of organized uses of violence—by these same groups
to the military occupations of Palestinian, Lebanese, Afghani or Iraqi ter-
ritories. Once such movements engage in or support violent resistance
activities, it is very difficult for them to avoid an ambivalent and often
suspicious and offensive stance toward those they view as external to and
encroaching upon their communities.
ven when supportive in principle of larger nationalist projects, E
these movements can undermine the legitimacy of those projects through
alternative educational and social policies, political rhetoric, and particu-
larly, violent activities. Hamas and the Iraqi insurgency are cases in point.
This has been the main thread of the relationship between Hamas and the
Palestinian National Authority, but it can also be applied, mutatis mutan-
dis, to the attitude of the ultraorthodox movement and party Shas to the
Israeli state. With this understanding, we propose to explore socioreli-
gious movements and the public spheres they create as rational responses
to insufficient provision of crucial services (health, education, welfare,
security) by either “public” or other “private” institutions. While before
the war of July 2006 the integration of Hizbullah into the Lebanese politi-
cal culture and system seemed to provide a counterfactual example to this
general assessment, the current situation now represents yet another case
of ambivalence between the communitarian power and the hegemonic
challenge launched by socioreligious movements. The latter component
still consists in the project to restructure the national community in more
democratic terms than allowed by the sectarian bias of the Lebanese polit-
ical system.