Map 1. Major cities, and some important towns and villages, as well as Lebanon’s six provinces and the areas of deployment of United Nations peacekeepers.
It was an easy summer evening in August 2004. The Shiʿi Muslim village lies about five miles southeast of Tyre, Lebanon’s southernmost city, and the border with Israel is eight miles due south. Al-Bazuriya boasts a few simple shops and a couple of hundred homes of stone or cinder block, and we are gathered on the large balcony of one of these homes. Grapes, begging for picking, hang overhead on a thick fabric of vines, shading a long table brimming with Lebanon’s famous mezze (appetizers)—tabbouleh, hummus, pickles in pastel shades, finger-shaped wrapped grape leaves stuffed with rice and herbs, milk white cheese, breads, and other delicacies of vivid red, brown and orange hues. The mezze and the meats, fish, and chicken that would follow were to celebrate the visit of a son of the village of al-Bazuriya, a successful surgeon, and his bride, from Michigan. Many of the people around the table—parents, siblings, cousins, and friends—moved easily between Arabic and English, especially and most helpfully when this author lost his way in Arabic. English has been the preferred second language in almost every Lebanese Shiʿi family for decades.
This is a successful middle-class Shiʿi family, for which, like many others in Lebanon, education and emigration are the steps on a ladder to a good life. In other families and villages, the destinations would vary—Abidjan instead of Dearborn, Michigan; Ivory Coast instead of Brazil—but the pattern is the same. The Lebanese emigrants, whether their path of migration is circular, as with those who work in Africa as merchants and traders and return to Lebanon to marry and invest their earnings, or goes in one direction, as with those who end up in the Americas, typically sharing the largess they accumulate abroad with their extended families still in Lebanon. These remittances are vital to their families. By one credible estimate, the annual remittances of all Lebanese abroad totaled nearly $2.5 billion in 2001 (Hourani 2006, 27).
Over dessert and, later, small glasses of sweet hot tea, the conversation drifted from the cozy trivialities of family intimacy to serious talk about the politics of Lebanon now that the South was “liberated.” A little more than four years before this gathering, in May 2000, Israel had withdrawn its occupation army from southern Lebanon under pressure from Lebanese fighters, especially the self-styled “Islamic Resistance” led by the Shiʿi Muslim Hezbollah (the “Party of God”). Mention of the two-decade-long Israeli occupation of their country and the retreat of the occupiers still inspired pride and a joyful ilhamdilillah or nushkur allah (“praise to God” or “thank God”) within this circle of family and friends. Like many Lebanese, this family, in the course of the 1990s, had come to believe that the Israelis might never leave.
These sons and daughters of Bazuriya wanted me to know that theirs was the village where Hasan Nasrallah, now the leader of Hezbollah, grew up and went to school. One of his teachers, who was present at the family gathering, recalled young Hasan’s serious cast of mind and his piety even as an adolescent. Like many religiously minded young Lebanese Shiʿi men before him, Nasrallah went to study in the famous Shiʿi seminaries of Iraq’s al-Najaf, one of the great shrine cities of Shiʿism. Nasrallah became secretary-general of Hezbollah in 1992, and ever since has been detested by Israel and America but widely admired in much of the Muslim world.
It was in al-Najaf as well as Karbala that key episodes in Shiʿism occurred, and multitudes of Shiʿa visit annually to pray there alongside the tombs of two of Shiʿism’s epic figures. For Shiʿi Muslims, such as the young Nasrallah, the language, food, and hospitality of al-Najaf and Karbala were familiar. In contrast, the seminaries of Iran were further removed culturally, linguistically, and physically. Still, these days it is just as likely that scores of young Lebanese men will journey to Iran for their religious instruction than to Iraq. This is not so much because of a sudden new affinity for Iran but because Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, became a menacing place for Shiʿi students. Also, the country has been dangerous and chaotic since the Anglo-American invasion in March 2003. In any case, the Iranians offer an attractive stipend to entice young Shiʿa to their seminaries. One of the cousins, in fact, who was present on that summer evening in Bazuriya in 2004, was a pleasant young seminary student home for the summer from Qum in Iran. He was intent on welcoming a non-Arab visitor from America and eager to engage me in conversation, especially on the topic of his computer classes in Qum and the relative merits of Microsoft computer software.
In Bazuriya and villages across southern Lebanon, as in Shiʿi locales in and around Beirut and in the Beqaa valley, political affinities and loyalties are multilayered and constantly shifting. Although the parties on the secular left have lost their appeal for most of the Shiʿa, the secularist Communist Party of Lebanon, with its emphasis on social and economic equity, retains pockets of fervent support. Some villages are renowned for the continuing grip of leftist ideologies (further to the east, the village of Kafr Rumann, for instance, is jokingly called “Kafr Moscow” by its neighbors). Traditional land-owning elites, who have held sway over their clients for nearly a century, retain pockets of support, especially when they are understood to have changed with the times and have cultivated reputations for fair dealing and honesty. But the two major political players are now Amal, the reformist movement described in detail in chapter 1, and Hezbollah, the militant party introduced in chapter 2. Accurate membership figures are hard to find, but Amal, now more of an extensive patronage network than an institutionalized political party, clearly retains widespread support, especially in southern Lebanon. In fact, just down the street from the balcony dinner a large billboard commemorates ten Amal martyrs from Bazuriya who died fighting Israel. In contrast to Amal, Hezbollah enjoys broad-based support in all three areas where the Shiʿi Muslims predominate in Lebanon, namely, in the South, in Beirut and the vicinity of the city, and in the northern Beqaa valley and Hirmil region. Both these parties draw heavily on the rich history of Shiʿi Islam, especially the sect’s famous martyrs and, in particular, Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. This history is recounted in chapter 3.
Following the attack on the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, Hezbollah has been associated with violence and terrorism in the minds of informed Americans. Chapter 4 addresses the broad question of violence with regard to Hezbollah and the implication that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.
Over the last fifteen years Hezbollah has evolved from an Iranian-influenced conspiratorial terrorist group rejecting participation in Lebanese politics, to a party with considerable autonomy and a talent for playing politics and winning elections. The Shiʿi party is now part of the Lebanese government but simultaneously adopts an opposition demeanor, with a Janus-faced profile that infuriates detractors while seeming perfectly reasonable to its defenders and supporters. Chapter 5 describes and analyzes the organization’s evolution and its complex profile on the Lebanese political landscape.
The pleasant summer evening described above marked an all-too-short period of calm in Lebanon’s history. Just a few weeks later, Syria, Hezbollah’s ally and the power broker in Lebanon, would force the extension in office of an unpopular president and trigger momentous developments in Lebanon and internationally. In the coming months a famous former prime minister would be blown to pieces by a bomb that also killed twenty-two of his colleagues. March 2005 saw nearly a million and a half people rise up in two massive demonstrations in Beirut streets, one condemning Syria for its likely role in the assassination, and the other praising Syria for its involvement in Lebanon.
In July 2006 Hezbollah launched an operation to capture two Israeli soldiers in Israel, thus provoking an Israeli invasion that would leave much of Hezbollah’s constituency homeless and more than a thousand, predominantly Shiʿi Muslim Lebanese dead in a war the Lebanese call Harb Tammuz (“the July war”). Hezbollah evidently had miscalculated, never anticipating Israel’s furious onslaught. Although neither Israel nor Hezbollah were unequivocal victors, the war solidified Hezbollah’s role as both a political player in Lebanon and a regional exemplar for other opposition-minded Muslims. How and why the war broke out when it did—after six years of relative calm on the Israeli-Lebanese border after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000—is the subject of chapter 6.
Internal pressure on Hezbollah, once awash in praise and adulation for its leading role in forcing Israel’s 2000 exit from Lebanon, now mounted to disarm its militia. France and the United States, working in rare unison under UN Security Council Resolution 1701, would support the fledgling Lebanese government and pressure Hezbollah to disarm. How the unexpected war of 2006, and its aftermath, will affect the course of Middle East history is still unclear, but the war certainly brought Hezbollah to the fore as a key influence on the region’s political landscape. Hezbollah is not easily understood either by simplistic stereotypes that typically inform depictions of the organization in the newspapers and on the airwaves of the Western world nor by black and white worldviews. The purpose of this book is to offer a more balanced and nuanced account of this complex organization.