Khomeini: Godfather of Lebanon’s Hizbullah

For a tiny country only seven tenths the size of Connecticut, Lebanon (population of about 3.7 million) has had its share of problems since religious civil war broke out in 1975 and devastated the country’s long-time position as a Middle Eastern entrepot and banking hub. Although the civil war ended in 1991, Lebanon’s most identifiable symbol today is not its beautiful thousand year-old cedars on the slopes of the Mount Lebanon mountain range, and its Bekka (or Bekaa) valley reminiscent of California’s Central Valley, but its rascally Hizbullah—“the Party of God”—a radical Lebanese Shiite Islamist organization/ social movement that is world renown for its terrible efficacy in achieving its aims.

Hizbullah’s Big Three: Ayatollah Khameini (left) (current Supreme Leader, Iran), Ayatollah Khomeini (center, deceased), and Hassan Nasbollah (right) (current Secretary-General of Lebanon’s Hizbullah). Hizbullah’s yellow flag is in the center.

Source: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://homepage.mac.com/drysdale/Images/
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An excellent new book about Hizbullah is “In the Path of Hizbullah” by Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh (2004). Hamzeh, who is a political scientist at American University of Beirut, explores Hizbullah in terms of its structure and functions (see Conceptual Framework model below). He argues that four crisis conditions catalyzed the emergence of Hizbullah:

1. Identity crisis and persecution

2. Structural imbalance

3. Military Defeat

4. Demonstration Effect ( Iran’s Islamic Revolution)

Hizbullah responded to these four crisis conditions in two ways:

1. Islamic juristical ideology

2. Clerical leadership and organization.

Hizbullah has implemented its response to the crises in two ways, to bring about the Islamic order it has sought:

1. Militant approach

2. Pragmatic approach

Lest this sound dry, trust me, it is not by the time Hamzeh gets through with it.

1. Identity crisis and persecution

Shiite Muslims believe that their community, because of its lineage through the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and thenceforth through the imams, is the legitimate interpreter of Islam. Sunni Muslims beg to differ, asserting that the rightful successor to the Prophet was Abu Bakr, who died in 634. To illustrate their point, the Sunnis murdered the Prophet’s son-in-law (661), as well as his own son (670). For fourteen hundred years, the Shiites have bewailed their “legacy of martyrdom, persecution, torment, suffering, powerlessness, and insecurity, resting on a religiously sanctioned belief that Islamic history was derailed when political power passed from the hands of the family of Prophet Muhammad (died 632) in the seventh century.” (Hamzeh, p. 7) In short, they have what Westerners would call a “persecution complex.”

The pattern of Shiite settlements in Lebanon from the eleventh century onward reflects this history of persecution. Originally they settled in Kisirwan and the coastal cities of Lebanon, but were expelled by Turkish Mamluks and replaced by Sunni Muslims because “the coastal cities constituted vital trade centers for the Mamluks.” (p. 9) When the Shiites moved to the lower mountain areas, they were expelled from there, too, shifting to the area known now as South Lebanon and the plain of the Bekka Valley. The Shiites lost out even to the expanding Christian Maronites and Druze people. Following World War I and the break up of the Sunni Muslim Ottoman Empire, a French force of nearly four thousand soldiers, assisted by Maronite volunteers, crushed the Shiite forces, leading to the formal proclamation by France of the new State of Greater Lebanon (1920), which the Maronites ran. When Lebanon became independent on November 22, 1943, “the Shiites felt that they were the despised stepchildren of a state governed by a Maronite-Sunni alliance.” (p. 12) The Shiites were ripe for Hizbullah’s overtures in 1982.

2. Structural imbalance: political and economic disfranchisement

Hamzeh argues here that Shiites were politically underrepresented, based on the National Pact of 1943, which vested legislative and executive as well as military positions in rough proportion to the demographic size of the country’s eighteen (18!) recognized sectarian groupings. In 1946, the Christian Maronites and the Sunni Muslims occupied 40 and 27 percent, respectively, of the highest civilian posts. The Shiite occupied but 3.2 percent. By the 1980s, Shiites had become Lebanon’s largest single confessional community with almost 1,400,000 people, surpassing the Maronite and Sunni populations, which were each estimated at nearly 800,000 a piece (p. 13) The Shiites believed that their representation was not commensurate with their numerical size.

Economically the broader Shiite community in Lebanon was very poor. Almost 85 percent lived in the rural region of South Lebanon and in one area of the Bekka, and subsisted on what they earned, mostly from selling tobacco to the state monopoly or growing vegetables. They were also exposed to the military fighting between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). To escape these conditions, many Shiites migrated to the slums of eastern Beirut and shantytowns in the suburbs south of Beirut. Hamzeh writes that “[t]hese two areas, known as the “belt of misery,” became the breeding ground of Shiite militancy in the 1980s. (p. 14) Even in the 1970s, the charismatic leader Imam Musa al-Sadr, who later (1978) mysteriously disappeared during a trip to Libya, began to activate the politically quiescent Shiites of Lebanon.

3. Military defeat: the Israeli invasions of Lebanon

Hamzeh argues that “[w]hen identity crisis and structural imbalance are reinforced by military defeat, a society’s militancy potential increases markedly. Military defeat followed by foreign occupation opens the way for militant movements fostering political organization or employing guerrilla warfare and enjoying widespread grassroots support.” (p. 15) This is exactly what happened when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, which led directly to the emergence of Hizbullah and its guerrilla organization.

How did Israel become involved in Lebanon anyway? Lebanon has only two neighbors: Syria and Israel. When the United Nations created Israel in 1948, many Palestinian Arabs fled to Lebanon and Jordan. Following civil war in Jordan (1970-71), tens of thousands of armed Palestinian guerrillas moved to South Lebanon and challenged the authority of the Lebanese government, establishing a state-within-a-state encompassing South Lebanon, much of the Bekka and parts of Beirut. The Lebanese Shiites eventually figured out that the Palestinians might try to make Southern Lebanon into a Palestinian homeland. Israel meanwhile believed that the Palestinian military in South Lebanon posed a threat to Israel’s northern settlements and thus invaded much of South Lebanon in 1978 creating a so-called “security zone” that would prevent direct attacks by the Palestinian armed groups. (p. 16) In the process of this invasion, the Israelis killed more than one thousand civilian Shiites, leading to a mass exodus of yet more Shiites refugees to the Beirut slums. Israel, in response to the deployment of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, then withdrew from Lebanon.

But Israel was not through with Lebanon. In 1982, it undertook Operation Litani whose two objectives were to disembowel the PLO from Lebanon and disassociate Lebanon from Syria’s influence. Israel hoped that “a Lebanon freed form Syria and the PLO, with a Christian-dominated regime, would bring peace and closer connections between the two countries.” (p. 16) A Multinational Force (mostly U.S. Marines and French troops) in September 1983 forced the PLO to evacuate. (These troops had a bad fate awaiting them.) Unfortunately, Israel massacred a lot of Shiites living in the two Palestinian refugee camps known as Sabra and Chatilla. Israel’s 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon bolstered the fortunes of Hizbullah by “providing a politic-military environment that legitimated the group and gave a rationale for its guerrilla warfare. Similarly, the presence of the Western foreign troops in Lebanon, particularly of the U.S. Marines, also boosted the fortunes of Hizbullah, which considered fighting such forces to be as legitimate as fighting the Israeli occupation.” (p. 16)

4. Demonstration effect: Iran’s Islamic Revolution

According to Hamzeh, “ Iran’s revolution had its greatest impact in Lebanon,” even though the two countries are not adjacent, because Lebanon’s long-suffering Shiites were most receptive to Iran’s Islamic revolutionary message (p. 18) Shiite clerics from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, in particular Khomeini, had known each other well in the Shiite city of Najaf in Iraq where they participated in their “circles of learning.” “Reportedly, during his tenure in Najaf after being expelled by the shah in 1964, Ayatollah Khomeini and his Iran-based colleagues were at the center of the religious and political resurgence. In 1978, however, Khomeini was expelled by the Iraqi regime as a consequence of his anti-shah activities. Soon after Khomeini’s victorious return to Iran in February 1, 1979, he became the unchallenged leader and chief ideologue of the Shiites inside and outside Iran.” (p. 19) He met with militant Shiite clergy (e.g., Shaykh al-Tufayli, Sayyid Abbas al-Musawi) and other militants in August 1982 at the Islamic Movements conference in Tehran—the so-called First Conference for the Downtrodden. “Bursting with vision of an Islamic Lebanon and liberated Jerusalem,” al-Musawi cried: “We are ready to fight Israel, we are martyrdom seeking, and we fight them even from the graves.” (p. 25) (Israel obliged by killing Musawi , his wife, and 3 year old daughter by helicopter fired Hellfire missiles in February of 1992, at which time Ayatollah Khameini asked Hassan Nasrallah to take over leadership of the movement.)

The name of the new organization—Hizbullah—came of course from a verse in the Quran. “Hizbullah thus emerged from a marriage between the Lebanese Shiite militants and Islamic Iran” and “Iran’s new presence in Lebanon afforded the first direct point of contact between the Islamic regime and a major Shiite community in the Arab world—the largest community outside Iraq.” (p. 25) “Working invisibly under Iranian sponsorship and with Syria as a willing accomplice, Hizbullah waited until February 1985 to declare the birth of its organization publicly” through a communiqué famously called “The Open Letter.”

Hizbullah fighter recruits.
Source: http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/Hizbullah_Time_Warp.asp

How did Hizbullah deal with the crises it embraced? It first laid out its Islamic juristical ideology, which was, according to Hamzeh, patterned directly after Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideology. This ideology says that the jurisconsult (wali al-faqih) will shape the actions and the future of the intended Islamic order. This intended Islamic order is first of all “necessary,” meaning the Muslim’s primary mission is not only the worship of God but also the establishing of an Islamic order as the expression of God’s just society. In Hizbullah’s ideology, the “fulfillment of the obligation to create an Islamic order is closely tied to the concept of the elitism of the clerics, which resonates with Khomeini’s theory of the guardianship of the jurisconsult (wilayat al-faqih). Since the Shiites’ last true imam (descended from the Prophet’s son in law) was killed centuries ago, Khomeini “took the radical step of claiming that the imams’ right to rule devolved upon the religious jurists,” incidentally, like himself. (p. 31) Hizbullah leaders followed right along.

Hizbullah leaders always pledged loyalty to Khomeini and to his successor, Khamenei, who the Lebanese Shiites today consider their “wali al-faqih.” The highest ranking Hizbullah leader today, Hassan Nasrallah, asserts that decisions of peace and war are in the hands of the clerics (jurisconsult, ultimately Khamenei) and not in the hands of intellectuals, researchers, scientists, and regular politicians. (p. 33)

How did Hizbullah correct what it perceived as the crisis situation in Lebanon? First, it used holy jihad—that is, a militant approach (guerilla warfare) occasionally boosted by input and men from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, to remove Israel and the U.S. from Lebanon. Below are two tables from Hamzeh’s book (pp. 89 and 82) that express the utter totality of this effort.

Hizbullah-linked groups bombed the U.S. Embassy in Ras-Beirut in April 1983, killing 80 embassy personnel and visitors, including U.S. agents in charge of security matters in the region. Six months later, in October 1983, two suicide commanders, each one driving a car loaded with high explosives, attacked simultaneously the compounds of the U.S. Marines and French troops, instantly killing 241 U.S. Marines and 80 French paratroopers in their barracks. Hizbullah was deeply implicated in the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight to secure the freedom of 766 Lebanese prisoners held in Israel. In 1986, the Iran-Contra deal proposed to use Iran to lean on Hizbullah to release Western hostages they held in return for American arms needed by Iran in its war against Iraq. Hamzeh writes, “Eventually, when Iranian national interest dictated that all hostages be released in 1990-91, neither Hizbullah nor its allied groups were able to prevent the releases from being pushed through.”(p. 86) Israel pulled out of Lebanon completely on May 27, 2000.

The second approach used by Hizbullah, at least since the 1990s, is what Hamzeh calls “gradualist pragmatism,” that is, legally capturing parliamentary seats in Lebanon’s secular government. Thus, even though it does not at all believe in Western-style democracy, Hizbullah isn’t stupid. Those Hizbullah party members who are elected to parliament vote as they are told to vote by Hizbullah clerical leadership, who vote the Khomeini/Khamenei line.

Editor’s Note: Hizbullah’s great Islamist adventure so far appears to be working, at least at an emotiono-religious level, for Lebanese Shiites. Hizbullah has successfully thrown out the U.S. and Israel and is working on getting Syrian troops to get out of Lebanon, too. But Lebanon’s economic situation is grim. Its economy is finally growing after years of negative growth, but the nation carries a debt load of 186 percent of its GDP. Its government finances in 2002-2004 were sustained only by massive receipts from donor nations. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) always believed that the Arabs were great fighters, but less adroit at running things, especially big things like countries, on a long-term basis. Hizbullah would like to prove Lawrence wrong.