Chapter 1 — Becoming Poor: Deprivation and Religious Decline in Shī‘Ī Lebanon (1920-1960)

REBEL PREACHERS: THE MAKING OF ISLAMIC ACTIVISM IN SHĪ‘Ī LEBANON (1960-1985) A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Islamic Studies By Nabil Al-Hage Ali, M.A. Washington, DC July 7, 2016 Copyright 2016 by Nabil Al-Hage Ali All Rights Reserved ii REBEL PREACHERS: THE MAKING OF ISLAMIC ACTIVISM IN SHĪ‘Ī LEBANON (1960-1985) Nabil Al-Hage Ali, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Felicitas M. M. Opwis, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This study investigates the intellectual and organizational genesis of the Shī‘ī religious community that burgeoned in Lebanon in the 1970s. It demonstrates how several competing religious currents in the Shī‘ī community evolved through several overlapping phases of religious education, mobilization, revolutionization, and consolidation. Predominant academic opinions link the formation of new religious consciousness and new religious movements that succeeded the formation of Hizbullah in Shī‘ī Lebanon to Iran’s exportation of its “Islamic Revolution.” Not only does this study reopen the discussion on the transformation of forms of religiosity in Shī‘ī Lebanon, but it also elucidates the identity and origins of groups and ideas that constitute the contemporary Shī‘ī milieu that crystallized in the 1980s. This study, thus, offers a reconceptualization of present time orientations and positions in the religious field as products of an eventful past through analysis of several religious projects that appeared two full decades before the rise of Hizbullah. It looks at several religious paradigms that interacted in contexts of sectarianism, economic crises, and wars. Organizational and intellectual analysis explain the means by which the religious activists acquired legitimacy and reproduced, marketed, and delivered their views within the constraints of their social space, conditions of existence, changing political opportunity structures, and accumulating past iii socialization. Through analysis of religious structures, positions of activists within social structures, and religious production (ideas, discourses and practices), the study reveals how the activists developed a religious project that drew on earlier strategies, experiences and repertoires of the Shī‘ī Iranian, Iraqi, and Lebanese activists–including secular ones. This study links the eruption of religion in the Lebanese public sphere in the 1980s to a larger tide of global religious renaissance, which, in the Shī‘ī case, began around the middle of the Twentieth century in Iraq and Iran. iv To my father and my mother for whom I chose this path, To my family, Without whose pure love and endless support, This work would not have been possible. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION — PROBLEMS, CONTEXTS, AND OBJECTIVES ..................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 — BECOMING POOR: DEPRIVATION AND RELIGIOUS DECLINE IN SHĪ‘Ī LEBANON (1920-1960) ............................................................................................... 33 CHAPTER 2 — MODERNIZATION IN REVERSE: ROOTS OF POLITICIZATION OF CONTEMPORARY SHĪ‘ISM ............................................................................................... 78 CHAPTER 3 — SUNNI INFLUENCE ON SHĪ‘Ī ISLAMIC THOUGHT: FOUNDATIONAL TEXTS........................................................................................................ 111 CHAPTER 4 — MORE THAN A POLITICAL MOBILIZER: MŪṢĀ AL-ṢADR’S RELIGIOUS PROJECT.............................................................................................................. 143 CHAPTER 5 — TWO ISLAMIC PARADIGMS BEFORE THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION: QUR’ĀNIC ISLAM AND THE DA‘WA ...................................................... 181 CHAPTER 6 — REBEL PREACHERS: ISLAMIZATION AND REVOLUTIONIZATION IN SHĪ‘Ī LEBANON .................................................................................................................. 215 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 272 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 287 vi INTRODUCTION PROBLEMS, CONTEXTS, AND OBJECTIVES Many in Lebanon today declaim that Hizbullah (lit.: Party of God) represents an anomaly in the history of the Lebanese Shī‘a, who supposedly were always an integral part of the social fabric of Lebanon.1 These claims often imply that Hizbullah invited foreign-Iranian interferences and transformed the political culture of the Shī‘a, making them less loyal to Lebanon than Iran. Similar discourses are often oblivious to the grievances of the modern Shī‘a and to the plight that made the youth of the sect join almost every form of secular or religious opposition that attempted to change the Lebanese political system since the independence in 1943. Both living memory and academic studies on the history of modern Lebanon, in fact, agree that the Shī‘a of Lebanon were culturally, economically, and politically peripheral since the formation of the Lebanese state.2 Many Shī‘a worked in low-paid jobs as craftsmen, laborers, shoeblack, and porters, and resided in the impoverished neighborhoods and towns around Lebanon. The fortune of the sect, however, began to change at the intersection of economic and political developments on the local and regional levels since the 1950s. Around that time, a new generation of activists appeared in the religious seminaries in Iraq and Iran. This generation included religious scholars 1 Hizbullah is often written in different variants including Hezbollah and Hizbollah. I use Hizbullah for it is closest to the transliteration of the Arabic term: Ḥizbullāh, often pronounced as Ḥizaballāh. The term derives from the two Arabic words Ḥizb, which means Party, and ’Allāh which means God; hence the term Ḥizb ’Allāh. I will use it as Hizbullah. 2 For studies that address the Shī‘ī revival and situation of the Shī‘a before their political mobilization, see Augustus R. Norton, Amal and the Shi'a: struggle for the soul of Lebanon, 2 ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988); Majed Halawi, A Lebanon defied: Musa al-Sadr and the Shi'a community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shi'a of Lebanon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Salim Nasr and Diane James, "Roots of the Shi'i Movement," MERIP Reports, no. 133 (1985). 1 such as Sayyid Mūsā al-Ṣadr, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlullāh, and Muḥammad Mahdī Shams al- Dīn who set their gaze on empowering the Shī‘ī community early in their religious and political careers. The first to arrive to Lebanon was Mūsā al-Ṣadr who came from Iran in 1959 and set out to change the rules of the political game.3 Against the background of marginality in Lebanese politics and widespread wretchedness among the Shī‘ī population, Mūsā al-Ṣadr and his peers formed several religious schools and organizations which constituted the bases of the Ḥarakat al-Maḥrūmīn (Movement of the Deprived) in 1974. Meanwhile, most discontented youth were still seeking change through the more powerful Arab Nationalist and leftist movements, which began to mobilize in the Shī‘ī community even before Mūsā al-Ṣadr’s appearance. While “sectarianization” of the Shī‘a arguably began when the French mandate authority forged the Lebanese state,4 Shī‘a began to work as a collective, calling for their equal share in power in Lebanon, mainly in the shadows of Mūsā al-Ṣadr’s religious symbolism. In 1975, however, the raging civil war hampered al-Ṣadr’s empowerment strategy and entailed realignment of his political discourses. His political credibility as a mediator in the civil conflict received a setback for several reasons, particularly when the political scene realized that he had been running a 3 Mūsā al-Ṣadr, transliterated from Arabic as Mūsā al-Ṣadr, is better known as Sayyid Mūsā or the Imam al-Ṣadr. The term Sayyid refers to the descendants of the Prophet from the progeny of Imam Alī b. Abī Ṭālib and his wife Fāṭima, the daughter of the Prophet. It is usually used as an honorary title, particularly for those descendants who study religion. While a religious scholar from the progeny of Fāṭima is often called Sayyid, non-Sayyid cleric is called Shaykh. Thus in the Shī‘ī community you would hear people calling Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlullāh (or Fadlallah) by the title Sayyid. However, they would call a cleric of an equal status, like Muḥammad Mahdī Shams al-Dīn. by the title of Shaykh, because he does not come from a family of Sayyids. 4 Max Weiss thesis on the “sectarianization” of the Shī‘a “from above” and “from below” during the post- independence era offers useful insights. See Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi'ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). 2 covert project to organize a Shī‘ī militia, that became known as the Amal movement.5 His personal career and apparent goal to integrate the Shī‘a into the sectarian fabric of Lebanon ended abruptly, when he vanished mysteriously without a trace on a visit to Libya in August 1978. Mūsā al-Ṣadr disappeared at a critical moment in Lebanon and the region. Few months earlier, in March 1978, Israel launched “Operation Litani” offensive against the Palestinian fighters. Within seven days, hundreds were killed and the Israelis occupied a belt of land in south Lebanon, the home to many Shī‘a. Many youth began to organize Shī‘ī

Load more