Hizballah explained in four parts, over four weeks. 

This is the first of four posts on Hizballah. The conventional story is wrong. Hizballah's survival and tactics were not the result of Iranian design, but of the work of Lebanese Islamic clerics, most notably Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah and Imam Musa al Sadr. 

Hizballah, its survival and tactics were the result not of Iranian design, but of the work of Lebanese Islamic clerics, most notably Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah and Imam Musa al Sadr.

SUMMARY

During the 1960’s it was Imam Musa al Sadr’s leadership that was instrumental in making of the of the Shi’a community in Lebanon a unified, confident body capable of taking their place within the Lebanese system.

This was the first step towards the formation of Hizballah.

But Sadr’s views never extended to a wider Islamic Revolution and, by the end of the 1970’s, he was almost completely opposed to the Palestinian cause which the by then ascendant Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary philosophy sought to support.

But Tehran was at this point entirely distracted by war with Iraq. And when Israel embarked on its devastating 1982 invasion, it was able to provide only half-hearted support.

Instead it was Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah who played the critical role in translating Khomeini’s powerful revolutionary message into a Lebanese context wholly concerned with countering Israel’s aggression.

And it was Fadlallah who aligned the various groups and maintained the support of the Syrian regime so as to allow the formation of the loose coalition which was the precursor for Hizballah.

And in legitimising, in his text “Islam; the Logic of Power”, both the use of force by the traditionally quietist Shi’a and “self martyrdom,” he permissioned the suicide attacks which proved a powerful counter to overwhelming western military capacity. But throughout, Fadlallah’s guidance was necessarily specific to his Lebanese context and ambivalent to Khomeini, explaining the latter’s limited role.

Imam Musa al Sadr and the origins of Lebanese Shi’a power.

The origins of Hizballah lie in Lebanon in the period of political turmoil in the 1970’s, well before the Islamic revolution in Iran and the advent of its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Imam Sayyed Musa al Sadr’s charismatic leadership from 1959 focused on building the institutions and services needed to gain Lebanon’s recognition of the significant Shi’a community in southern Lebanon. His Supreme Islamic Shia Council (SISC) and Amal militia converted the Shi’a from the voiceless, deprived people they had been into a unified, confident body capable of expressing and defending their homeland and of supplying the backbone from which Hizballah would ultimately be fashioned.

From its arrival from Jordan in 1970, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had begun to conduct raids into Northern Israel. These raids passed through Shi’a villages en route to their targets. When Israel retaliated with indiscriminate bombing it was the Shi’a who suffered. In addition, the Palestinians’ involvement in the civil war trapped Lebanon’s Shi’a between the new arrivals and the Israeli supported Christian regime and caused a mass exodus for the slums of Beirut1. So, by the outbreak of civil war in 1975, Sadr was no longer sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.2 and his plans had narrowed to self-preservation. As a result, already close to the Shah3 and Lebanon’s Christian Maronite government,4 and unsupportive of velayat e faqih5, the Lebanese Shi’a were increasingly at odds with Khomeini’s revolutionaries.

Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah

Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah was raised and educated in Najaf, Iraq. He studied alongside Sayyed Baqr al Sadr, collaborating with him on a journal at the same time as Baqr’s founding of Hizb al Dawa.6 His family were wealthy Lebanese, from Aynata in Southern Lebanon.7 When he arrived in 1966, Lebanon’s consociational democracy provided an attractive platform for his ideas.8

Unlike Sadr, Fadlallah in common with many believed that the obstacle to Shi’a independence was Imperialism. His was a deliberately socially aware version of Islam and a pan-‘Muslim’ approach which competed with Nasser’s secular pan-‘Arab’ rhetoric, arguing that only a unified Islamic struggle could liberate Palestine, maintaining that if the Sadr’s Shi’a simply opted out they would be victimised.9 The disenchanted young found the message appealing.10

Fadlallah based himself in Nabaa, East Beirut, a shantytown made up of Palestinian refugees mixed with poor young Shi’a. He opened a Husayniyya, established a social association to supervise clinics and youth clubs and founded a middle school for Islamic studies. The young occupants of Nabaa proved a receptive audience; Fadlallah’s regular sermons and talks addressed the matters that concerned them. He urged them away from secularism in favour of Islam. His natural ecumenicalism extended his appeal to the Sunni and he quickly began to develop a following, although it was not until the advent of civil war in 1975 that his leadership moved out of the shadows.11

Image: Fourfold Muhammad in geometric Kufic script, which can simultaneously be read Ali in the white interstices, a very complex design. This "Four Muhammad/Ali" pattern (known as 'Char Muhammad' in Persian) is often used in Islamic architectural decoration, particularly that of the Mamluks. Its earliest extant use is in the 1224 Rukniyya Madrasa of Damascus, growing in popularity throughout Mamluk lands in the 13th and 14th centuries. Spreading to Ottoman lands in the late 14th remaining popular into the 16th. With some rarer examples in Safavid Iran.

1 Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam (Cornell University Press, 2012). p.162-3 

2 Martin Kramer, The Oracle of Hizbullah: Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, in Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders in the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 83–181. p.12 

3 H E Chehabi, Rula Jurdi Abisaab, and Centre For Lebanese Studies (Great Britain, Distant Relations : Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years (Oxford: Centre For Lebanese Studies ; London, 2006). p.176 

4 Reisinezhad, Shah p.244 

5 Ibid p.297 

6 Kramer, Oracle p.6 

7 Ibid p.6 

8 Ibid p.8 

9 Ibid p.11 

10 Ibid p.9 

11 Ibid p.10 

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