Academic studies link the eruption of Shī‘ī religiosity in the public sphere to the success of the Islamic Revolution. Likewise, they often attribute the formation of revolutionary narratives and religious discourses about Islamizing society and the state in Lebanon to the influence of the Iranian revolution after 1979. In this paper, I reconsider the roots of religious activism in Shī‘ī Lebanon. Rather than understanding the contemporary Islamic movement in light of mounting Iranian influence, I view the Lebanese Islamic founders of the Shī‘ī movement as independent thinkers, social entrepreneurs, and strategists. I argue that on the eve of the civil war in 1975, and in a context of secularist upsurge and raging sectarianism, the Shī‘ī intellectual field generated important documents and foundational texts. These writings were heavily based on the intellectual production of Sunni ideologues like Sayyid Quṭb and Abu al-‘ala al-Mawdūdī and Shī‘ī ideologues of the movement in Iraq, such as Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr. Through analysis of intellectual production of representatives and respected leaders, specifically Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlullāh and Muḥammad Mahdī Shams al-Dīn (who had by then moved to Lebanon from Iraq), the paper traces the major ideas that reflect the influence of Sunni intellectuals on their Shī‘ī peers. Why did Shī‘ī scholars rely on Sunni authors rather than draw on existing Shī‘ī resources? What are the major areas on which the Shī‘ī borrowing concentrated? The paper proposes that clerics of the Shī‘ī Islamic movement consciously and selectively adopted Sunni interpretations to fill a gap in the Shī‘ī literature of “political Islam”, but they actively sought to produce particularistic Shī‘ī texts and ideas, as part of the ongoing process of constructing the Islamic identity of society. It argues that the synthesis of discourses and practices began in the 1970s and continued through the early 1980s. The intellectual ideas and experiences that the migrants from Iraq brought with them became part of the heritage of the contemporary Shī‘ī movement despite the influence of the Islamic revolution in the Shī‘ī religious field.