Most scholars of contemporary Shi‘i history point towards the appearance of Musa al-Sadr and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in mid-twentieth century Lebanon and Iraq as the start of an “awakening” of Shi‘i political consciousness, leading to the establishment of political parties and sectarian differentiation. Relying on “great men” historiography that has dominated the field, scholarly focus on these two figures overemphasizes their influence and obscures a significant reformist movement that rose in southern Lebanon during the late nineteenth century, one that exerted considerable internal influence within the Arab Shi‘i educational centers of Najaf and Karbala in the early twentieth century. This paper will challenge the “awakening” thesis by analyzing published and unpublished materials from Muhammad Rida al-Muzaffar’s Najaf-based educational society and school network, Muntada al-Nashr and Muzaffar’s writings, such as al-Mantiq al-Islami and al-‘Aqa’id al-Shi‘iyya, to show the ways in which reform movements in Lebanon and Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century laid the foundations for religious and political reformers a generation later. The changes that Muzaffar initiated in Iraqi society both inside and outside of the Shi‘i religio-political education system, beginning in the 1920s, led to the emergence of a unique Arab Shi‘i socio-political philosophy, based on a “dynamic Islam.” The stage was set upon which actors such as Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, ‘Izz al-Din al-Jaza’iri, Mahdi al-Hakim, Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah and Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din could enact long-lasting structural reforms to the social and political organization of the Shi‘a of Iraq and Lebanon. While Max Weiss and Sabrina Mervin have focused new attention on the late-nineteenth century Lebanese Shi‘i reformers, this study will shed new light on the development of Arab Shi‘i socio-political structures. This paper highlights the gradual processes through which the flexible nature of the Shi‘i educational centers (hawzat) incorporated reformist elements, an incorporation that simultaneously enacted structural changes within and without the hawza system itself.