Fields of Blood (66 page)

Faraj reveals the “idolatry” that is every bit as present in some forms of political Islamism as in secularist discourse, for he made the ummah a supreme value. “It is obligatory for every Muslim to seriously strive for the return of the Caliphate,” Faraj argued; anyone who fails to do so “does not die as a Muslim.”
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In the past Islam had been a religion validated by its success. Until the modern period, the powerful position of the ummah had seemed to confirm the
Quran’s teaching: that a rightly guided community would prosper because it was in tune with the way things ought to be. The ummah’s sudden demotion has been as theologically shattering for some Muslims as Darwin’s evolutionary theory has been for some
Christians. The sense of shame and humiliation has been acute and is exacerbated by a sense of past greatness. Much of modern Islamism represents a desperate struggle to put history back on track. But this dream of a gloriously restored ummah has become an absolute, an end in itself, and as such justifies the means of an aggressive jihad—in this case, a criminal assassination. In Islamic terms, this constitutes the prime sin of
shirk,
an idolatry that places a political ideal on the same level as Allah. As one commentator observed, far from condoning lawless violence, the ideal of jihad originally expressed the important insight that “the final truth for man lies not in some remote and untarnished utopia but in the tension and struggle of applying its ideals to the recalcitrant and obstructive stuff of worldly sorrow.”
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Faraj’s primitive theology is apparent when he explains why it was more important to fight Sadat than the
Israelis: if a truly Islamic state were established in Egypt, he believed,
Jerusalem would automatically revert to Muslim rule. In the Quran, God promised Muslims that he would bring disgrace on their enemies and come to the Muslims’ aid. In a nihilistic abandonment not only of his modern scientific training but also of the Quranic insistence that Muslims use their natural intelligence, Faraj reverted to a particularly naive form of the
perennial philosophy that amounted to little more than magical thinking: if Muslims took the initiative, God would “intervene [and change] the laws of nature.” Could
the militants expect a miracle? Faraj answered yes. Observers were puzzled that there was no planned uprising after the assassination. Faraj believed that God would step in and do the rest.
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He did not.
Hosni Mubarak became president with a minimum of fuss, and his secular dictatorship remained in power for thirty years.

Terrorism has often cropped up in the Muslim world when the nation’s boundaries do not accord with those set up by the colonial powers for the state.
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Lebanon had been put together particularly ineptly by the colonialists. It had also inherited a pattern of economic disparity and had its own unique and tragic problems. Its Shii population inhabited the infertile country between Tyre and Sidon, which until 1920 had been part of Greater
Syria and so had no historic ties with the
Sunni Muslims and
Maronite Christians of the north; and they had not participated in the modernization process, whereby a prosperous
bourgeoisie had made Beirut the intellectual capital of the Middle East. Southern Lebanon remained undeveloped, because the constitution made each confessional community responsible for its own welfare and social institutions. Shii poverty meant that most of their three hundred villages had neither hospitals nor irrigation, and because Shii tended to be uneducated, they were inadequately represented in the national government. During the 1950s, unable to make a living on the land, thousands migrated to Beirut, where they lived in the shantytowns of Maslakh and Karantina, known locally as the “misery belt.” They never assimilated and were regarded with disdain by the more sophisticated population.

In 1959, however,
Musa al-Sadr, a brilliant, cosmopolitan Iranian cleric, arrived from
Najaf, where a circle of ulema had created a revisionist form of
Shiism. Using Shii ideas to help the people reflect on their political and social position, Sadr began to transform this backward community into one of the leading factions in Lebanon. Part of the problem, Sadr believed, was that the traditional quietism of the Shiah had contributed to Shii marginalization. The Sixth
Imam had adopted this policy of sacred
secularism in order to protect Shiis from
Abbasid violence. But the conditions of the modern world required Shiis to go back to the spirit of Imam
Husain and take their destiny into their own hands. In Husain they should find a model of courage and political choice.
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Sadr criticized the ulema and feudal landlords for failing to provide their community
with adequate guidance. Together with
Ayatollah Muhammad Fadl Allah, another member of the
Najaf circle, he provided the community with badly needed social services and began to build a culture of Shii self-reliance and resistance to the systemic injustice of
Lebanon.
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All the elements of the structural violence that typically contributes to the development of an
Islamist movement were therefore present in Lebanon. A gulf separated a Westernized, privileged
elite from the unmodernized masses;
urbanization had been too rapid; there was an inequitable social system, and also physical and social dislocation. The situation of Lebanon was further complicated by the intractable
Arab-
Israeli conflict. After the
Cairo Agreement of 1969, the
Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO) was allowed to establish bases in southern Lebanon from which to attack Israel, and once the PLO had been expelled from
Jordan in 1970, Lebanon became its main base. In southern Lebanon, therefore, the Shii suffered heavy casualties in Israel’s retaliatory bombardment. The demography of the country had also changed. The Shii birthrate had increased dramatically, with the population rising from 100,000 in 1921 to 750,000 in 1975. Because the
Sunni and
Maronite birthrates had declined, by the mid-1970s the Shii formed 30 percent of the population and had become the largest confessional community in Lebanon.
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When both Sunni and Shii Muslims requested a restructuring of political institutions to reflect this change, a catastrophic civil war broke out (1975–78). Lebanon became a dangerously violent place, where fighting was no longer a choice but essential to personal survival.

Shii Islam became militant as a result of ubiquitous warfare and the systemic oppression of Lebanese society. Sadr had already established training camps to teach Shii youth self-defense and after the outbreak of the civil war founded
AMAL (“Battalions for Lebanese Resistance”), which brought the poorer classes together with the “new men”—Shii businessmen and professionals who had managed to climb the economic ladder. They fought Maronite supremacy alongside the
Druze, a small, esoteric Shii sect. The Shii probably suffered more than any other group during the civil war. Their shantytowns were destroyed by the Christian militias, thousands were left homeless, and thousands more had to flee the south of the country during the ongoing struggle between Israel and the PLO. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 to oust the PLO, Shii homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands were forced to seek refuge in
Beirut.

At this crucial moment, Musa al-Sadr made a visit to Libya and disappeared, perhaps murdered by
Qaddafi, thus becoming the
Lebanese “
Hidden Imam.” This loss split AMAL: some followed the secularist, American-educated
Nabih Berri, who advocated peaceful action, but the more literate “new men” followed Fadl Allah, a scholar whose views would come to be very controversial in the community of learned authorities. His
Islam and the Use of Force
(1976), written in a society torn apart by violent conflict, had argued that
Muslims must be ready to fight and, if necessary, die like Husain in the struggle for justice and equity.
Martyrdom was not just a pious deed but a revolutionary political act, a refusal to submit to oppression and cruelty. Rightly used, force enabled a person to take charge of his life and was the only way to survive with dignity in a violent world:

Muslims
should not shy away from economic success and modern technology but use them to resist injustice and marginalization. They would not be aping the West, because instead of making the nation-state an instrument of the market economy, Shii would build a humane state based on the values of community and self-respect. The ends were Islamic, but the means were new.

In 1979, inspired by the
Iranian Revolution and with funding and training from
Tehran, Fadl Allah founded
Hizbollah, the “Party of God.” Western people were puzzled that the revolution had failed to spread to Shii communities closer to Iran in the Gulf and
Saudi Arabia but had taken root immediately in faraway Lebanon.
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In fact, Iran and Lebanon had a long relationship. In the sixteenth century, when the Safavids had founded their Shii Empire in Iran, then a largely
Sunni country, they had asked the Shii scholars of Lebanon to instruct and guide them; so it was natural for Lebanese Shii to join the Iranian revolutionary network. Hizbollah first came to the world’s attention during the Israeli invasion (1982) and the subsequent U.S. military intervention (1983–84), when on October 25, 1983, Hizbollah suicide bombers killed 241 American and
58 French peacekeeping troops in their military compound near Beirut airport; this
martyrdom operation was followed by further attacks on the U.S. embassy and the U.S. barracks.

To explain its violent actions, Hizbollah communiqúes cited the United States’ opposition to
Khomeini and its support for
Saddam Hussein,
Israel, and the Christian
Maronites. Fadl Allah spoke of the “arrogant silence” of Western powers in the face of Third World suffering.
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These operations were not simply inspired by religious zeal but had a clear political objective: to compel foreign occupiers to leave Lebanon. This was “revolutionary suicide.” As to methods, Fadl Allah pointed out that the Shii were engaged in an asymmetrical struggle:

These were not random, bigoted, and irrational acts but “legal obligations governed by rules” that Muslims must not transgress.
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One of these rules forbade the deliberate targeting of civilians, which is prohibited under Islamic law—though Hizbollah did take American, British, French, and German civilians as hostages to secure the release of Shii prisoners held elsewhere. In the West the suicide attack immediately recalled the
Assassins, who symbolized the fanaticism that Westerners had long attributed to Islam. But while Hizbollah had indeed pioneered this controversial method in the Middle East, most suicide bombing in Lebanon during the 1980s would be carried out by secularists. According to one survey, Hizbollah was responsible for seven suicide operations; the secular
Syrian Nationalist Party for twenty-two, and the socialist
Baath party for ten.
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By 1986, however, the resistance leaders had decided that Hizbollah must change direction, since its operations were too often irresponsible and counterproductive; it was suffering heavy casualties and dividing the Shii community. There was tension between Hizbollah and AMAL, and the villages resisted Hizbollah’s attempts to impose Islamic rules.
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By this time Fadl Allah had concluded that violence, after all, did not bring
results: What had the PLO achieved with the terrorism that had shocked the world? Lebanese Shii must take a new path, he argued, working “from within the objective and actual circumstances” in which they found themselves.
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Fadl Allah knew that it was impossible to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon and in 1989 even suggested that it was time for the
Iranians to begin “the normalization of relations with the rest of the world,” since like any political movement, revolutions go through many stages and change with a changing world: