Western academic and bourgeois intellectual spaces continue to mischaracterize Hezbollah, alongside powers and forces of Islamic Resistance in the region, such as Iran or Palestine, as representing the intellectual pauperization of Arab resistance, inferior to the archetypal Arab left. All too often, Leftist movements and interpretations of history hold a Manichean dichotomy between secularism and religion that, ironically, contributes to a more idealistic and dogmatically atheistic view on struggle. Western academia and its ideological compradors in the Arab world fail to acknowledge the Islamic Resistance on its own terms – doing so would expose contradictions in the Westernized epistemology of history and decolonization devoid of its full spiritual and dialectical dimensions. As Martyr Imad Mughnieh said, ‘The material element is a component that helps the axis, but the essence of this axis is the spirit’ (Tasnim News 2015).
Deficiencies in understanding the Islamic resistance – and its main state backer, Iran – are also due to an adversarial relationship between the US and Iran, the lack of translation and general access to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Islamic Revolutionary literature. More importantly, there is a widespread hostility against anti-imperialist scholarship in Western academia, where structuralist approaches are seldom offered to understand the Islamic Republic and the regional resistance factions, and the challenges imposed upon them by US imperialism, thus contributing to a ‘poverty of analysis’ (Farnia 2023).
Palestinian Prisoners’ Day: On the Experience of Struggle Inside the Prisons
By free prisoner Wael Jaghoub