The chapter explains how youths, families, and the educated middle class took over Tripoli’s al-Nour square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment in October 2019. Al-Nour square had been the site of Sunni Islamist demonstrations of solidarity with the Syrian opposition, and against the Shiʿa Hizbullah movement from 2011-2013. The 2019 protests in al-Nour Square, against the sectarian political system, challenged the widespread idea that Tripoli was a conservative Sunni Islamist city, where non-Sunnis could not feel welcome.

Tripoli faced a number of interlinked challenges. Although security in Tripoli deteriorated in the shadow of the war in Syria, it was not the primary challenge for the city. A 2014 security plan helped Tripoli regain some stability. Lebanon’s and Tripoli’s primary struggle lay in the collapse of its public services and the decline in the rule of law. People felt that the country’s sectarian political leaders, including Saad Hariri, ultimately only served their own interests, yet no real alternative leaders emerged. Tripoli’s clientelist political system continued to show some degree of resilience even after the 2019 revolutionary moment.

The 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri unleashed a political earthquake in Lebanon. Tripoli and its surroundings became a Sunni base for the Future Movement, led by Rafiq Hariri’s son Saad and other neoliberal elites from Lebanon’s nouveaux riches political class. For the first time, Tripolitanians rallied around a political party based outside their own city.

Many Tripolitanians supported the Future Movement in 2005 because they hoped that Saad Hariri, with his personal wealth and connections to Saudi Arabia, might bring investments to marginalized areas in northern Lebanon. However, these expectations were not met.

The Future Movement was an elite-based party, and its strategies of outreach to the poor had severe shortcomings. It used divisive sectarian (anti-Shiʿi) electoral strategies in Tripoli and empowered Sunni radicals, leading to a spiral of violence. Sunni hardliners gained prominent roles in Tripoli after Hizbullah and its allies turned their weapons inwards in Beirut in May 2008. However, this sectarian resource was insufficient to help the Future Movement maintain its popularity in Tripoli in the long run.

This chapter departs from the curious Memorandum of Understanding signed between Hizbollah and some of Tripoli’s Salafis in 2008. Tripoli’s Salafis, who perceived themselves as custodians of the Sunni doctrine and identity, were known for their very antagonistic discourse vis-à-vis the Shiʿa Hizbollah movement.

This chapter shows how sectarianism and the new political polarization in Lebanon after the Syrian pull-out in 2005 caused the Islamists in Tripoli to change their strategies and divide. The more liberal, but highly conflictual, climate empowered the Islamists on the one hand, but also divided them along a variety of political issues being debated in Lebanon on the other. Some aligned themselves with the March 14 Alliance and the Future Movement, while others came closer to Hizbullah, Future’s opponent. Yet, Islamists in Tripoli also came together to collectively engage in pan-Islamist protests. This indicates that most of Tripoli’s Islamists are independent actors, and that Islamists cannot be viewed as one collective political force.