Hizballah: A Primer

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero073106.html

Hizballah: A Primer

Lara Deeb

July 31, 2006

(Lara Deeb, a cultural anthropologist, is assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of California-Irvine. She is author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon.)

Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi‘i movement whose militia is fighting the Israeli army in south Lebanon, has been cast misleadingly in much media coverage of the ongoing war. Much more than a militia, the movement is also a political party that is a powerful actor in Lebanese politics and a provider of important social services. Not a creature of Iranian and Syrian sponsorship (my emphasis), Hizballah arose to battle Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon from 1982-2000 and, more broadly, to advocate for Lebanon’s historically disenfranchised Shi‘i Muslim community. While it has many political opponents in Lebanon, Hizballah is very much of Lebanon -- a fact that Israel’s military campaign is highlighting.

THE LEBANESE SHI‘A AND THE LEBANESE STATE

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Until the 1960s, most of the Shi‘i population in Lebanon lived in rural areas, mainly in the south and in the Bekaa Valley, where living conditions did not approach the standards of the rest of the nation. Following a modernization program that established road networks and introduced cash-crop policies in the countryside, many Shi‘i Muslims migrated to Beirut, settling in a ring of impoverished suburbs around the capital. The rapid urbanization that came with incorporation into the capitalist world economy further widened economic disparities within Lebanon.

ORIGINS

Initially, this growing urban population of mostly Shi‘i poor in Lebanon was not mobilized along sectarian lines. In the 1960s and early 1970s, they made up much of the rank and file of the Lebanese Communist Party and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party. Later, in the 1970s, Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, a charismatic cleric who had studied in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf, began to challenge the leftist parties for the loyalty of Shi‘i youth. Al-Sadr offered instead the “Movement of the Deprived,” dedicated to attaining political rights for the dispossessed within the Lebanese polity. A militia branch of this movement, Amal, was founded at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. Alongside al-Sadr, there were also other activist Lebanese Shi‘i religious leaders, most of whom had also studied in Najaf, who worked to establish grassroots social and religious networks in the Shi‘i neighborhoods of Beirut. Among them were Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, today one of the most respected “sources of emulation” among Shi‘i Muslims in Lebanon and beyond, and Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah. A “source of emulation” (marja‘ al-taqlid) is a religious scholar of such widely recognized erudition that individual Shi‘i Muslims seek and follow his advice on religious matters. Among the Shi‘a, the title of sayyid denotes a claim of descent from Muhammad, the prophet of Islam.

Between 1978 and 1982 a number of events propelled the nascent Shi‘i mobilization forward and further divorced it from the leftist parties: two Israeli invasions of Lebanon, the unexplained disappearance of Musa al-Sadr and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In 1978, while on a visit to Libya, al-Sadr mysteriously vanished, and his popularity surged thereafter. That same year, to push back PLO fighters then based in Lebanon, Israel invaded the south, displacing 250,000 people. The initial consequence of these two events was Amal’s revitalization, as Amal militiamen fought PLO guerrillas in south Lebanon. There were increasing Shi‘i perceptions that the Lebanese left had failed, both in securing greater rights for the poor and in protecting the south from the fighting between the PLO and Israel. (my emphasis) The following year, the Islamic Revolution in Iran set a new sort of example for Shi‘i Muslims around the world, and provided an alternative worldview to Western liberal capitalism different from that espoused by the left.

The final, and doubtless the most important, ingredient in this cauldron of events was the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. This time Israeli troops, aiming to expel the PLO from Lebanon entirely, marched north and laid siege to West Beirut. Tens of thousands of Lebanese were killed and injured during the invasion, and another 450,000 people were displaced. Between September 16-18, 1982, under the protection and direction of the Israeli military and then Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a Lebanese Phalangist militia unit entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, and raped, killed and maimed thousands of civilian refugees. Approximately one quarter of those refugees were Shi‘i Lebanese who had fled the violence in the south. The importance of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the formation of Hizballah cannot be underestimated.

(much more at link -- I really hope folks will go to the link and read the whole thing.)