The social and cultural experiences of women related to the Hezbollah’s martyrs in the southern suburb of Beirut (Al-Dahiya)

Abstract

Three main assumptions prevail when the subject of how women who lost their loved ones: their sons, fathers and husbands or husbands-to- be fighting with Hezbollah, deal with their pain of grief, is brought into discussion. It is often presumed by some outsider observers that these women are traumatized, indoctrinated and brainwashed and that they are all the same. These assumptions are chiefly driven by the liberal dogma dictating that it is ‘uncivilized’ to embrace pain, rendering the hope these women find in the martyrdom of their dear ones profoundly unacceptable. Having a free self, we hear the liberal voices saying, does not entail the option of choosing death over life, nor gracefully welcoming the annihilation of someone we care about. I intend to investigate in this thesis to which extent these accounts are misguided, by trying to ethnographically capture the voices of these women, the complexity of their social worlds and the grief tensions of conflicting emotions, namely between contentment and grief, between worldliness and otherworldliness and between the individualizing and the collectivizing of grief. I am intending to show how a specific conception of death as martyrdom shifts the way one sees and respond to one aspect of the human life that it is primarily thought of as universal: death.