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 6 examines what accounts for Tawhid’s involvement in high-level, seemingly ideological violence in 1983 against Tripoli’s leftist movements and Christians. It acknowledges the causal role of ideology in this exercise of violence, mainly through the activism of a handful of highly ideologized Tawhid cadres who lobbied the leaders to engage in militant Islamist behaviour and exacerbated a climate of ideological polarization. But it also notes that, in spite of their increasing success in steering the movement’s behaviour in ideologically driven ways, these figures were a minority. Instead, the chapter finds that many of the rest of Tawhid’s members and leaders were not primarily guided by ideology in their exercise of violence, but rather by considerations of a primarily political, strategic, geopolitical and social nature. The heterogeneity of motivations which had led Tawhid to engage in violence became evident as the dynamics of conflict exposed too much variation across space and time to be solely guided by ideology. And, in a show of how the movement’s internal diversity could affect its behaviour, Tawhid would eventually be penetrated by criminals who steered its behaviour and exercise of violence in a direction at odds with its Islamist ideology.

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 4 investigates why, despite a grand ideology which in theory had the potential to resonate in Lebanon’s entire Sunni Islamist constituency, Tawhid’s membership remained overwhelmingly confined to Tripoli. This, it is argued, partially stemmed from the highly fluid and heterogeneous nature of its militant Islamist ideology, which, beyond reflecting the commitment of some members, resulted from the fact that it fulfilled functions. These included outbidding rivals, strengthening internal cohesion and activating bonds of ideological solidarity with like-minded foreign actors to solicit their support. The fluid nature of Tawhid’s ideology, which drew on disparate Sunni but also Shia Islamist references, contributed to restricting its appeal among Lebanon’s more orthodox Sunni Islamists. Yet this chapter notes another factor which limited the appeal of Tawhid outside of Tripoli: the sense that its Islamist discourse was deeply embedded in local identities and narratives. And, while it partially traces this to a movement strategy to recruit locally, it suggests that it also resulted from its own internalized rootedness, which led non-Tripolitan Lebanese Islamists to conclude that Tawhid was more of a Tripolitan than an Islamist movement.