The conclusion reflects on the rise and fall of Tawhid in 1980s Tripoli, pulling the story together and summarizing the concepts developed in the book’s attempt to grasp Islamist movements from below and how space and ideology affect contentious politics. In doing so, it suggests their wider relevance and offers a tentative agenda for future research.

Chapter 3 provides an account of some of the other factions and individuals which created Tawhid in 1982. One of them, the Movement of Arab Lebanon, was like the Popular Resistance an originally leftist militia which embraced Islamism instrumentally, but its leader and members later turned more sincerely committed. Other factions and individuals, like Soldiers of God and scattered groups of Islamist individuals, had for their part always been sincerely committed Islamists. In addition to detailing their respective origins and trajectories, this chapter also traces the root of the merger of all these Tripolitan Islamist factions and individuals back to two regional events which threatened to spill over onto Tripoli – Syria’s February 1982 Hama massacre and Israel’s June 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Tawhid posed as a militant Islamist movement which claimed it would protect the city from foreign invaders, take the struggle to Syria and Israel and create an Islamic Republic in Lebanon. As a result, it rapidly attracted the constituency of Tripoli’s committed Islamists.

Chapter 2 zooms in on the Popular Resistance, one of the militant Islamist factions which would merge within Tawhid upon its creation in 1982 and was disproportionately strong in one neighbourhood of Tripoli only, Bab al-Tebbaneh. It explains how this originally Marxist group embraced Islamism instrumentally in 1980. This was because its leader, who also acted as the neighbourhood strongman or informal local leader, sensed that this ideology would fulfill strategic functions to his district in a new security environment, one especially marked by Syria’s 1976 military intervention in Lebanon and occupation of Tripoli. In this increasingly repressive context, Islamist ideology not only allowed the Popular Resistance to continue mobilizing Bab al-Tebbaneh’s residents and to keep their local solidarities alive; it also enabled the faction to ally across space and class with resource-rich ideological actors and to enlist the support of militant Islamist militias in the local feud which opposed the inhabitants of the neighborhood to the Alawi and pro-Assad nearby district of Jabal Mohsen. After the Popular Resistance eventually merged within Tawhid in 1982, it would drag the movement into its neighborhood rivalry unrelated to ideology, which affected its behavior.