ABSTRACT
Hizbullah, better known as the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, is infamous for its ‘terrorist’ global reach and militant face. Hizbullah’s former top-down strategy of forcibly imposing an Islamic state against the will of significant parts of the Lebanese society has changed toward an integrative, bottom-up strategy of infitah. In the 1980s, Hizbullah advocated the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon and maintained the ahl al-dhimma category with respect to non-Muslims. Hizbullah’s metamorphosis could be attributed to changed historical and social circumstances, but more importantly, to the results of interactions with other political actors, which resulted from its infitah policy. Hizbullah’s active military engagement in the Arab Uprisings on the side of its coreligionists in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen boosted its radical Islamist face of the 1980s at the expense of its post-Islamist infitah policy of the 1990s.
