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.

The paper will examine the subject of divorce specifically divorce sans the husband’s approval (khul’) in contemporary Lebanese Islamic Shi‘i jurisprudence. Historically, the wife was denied divorce without the husband’s approval except under cases of extreme duress. However, recent legal reforms in Islamic law pertaining to gender in Lebanon and in Iran have opened the subject for wider legal debates. In Lebanon, these legal changes emerged within the wider socio-political and religious reform projects of scholars such as the late Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din. In the last three decades, Shi‘i scholars have inextricably linked the issue of the wife’s right to divorce without the husband’s approval to the subject of the authority of the jurist-guardian (wilayat al-faqih). This link was established in Lebanon by Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din in response to debates that took place in Iran on Khomeini’s legal theory of wilayat al-faqih. Consequently, two opposing legal views (absolute authority versus restricted authority) adopted by different Shi‘i jurists emerged. I will shed light on these competing legal views through an examination of both the traditional and the contemporary juristic manuals and texts. I will specifically analyze Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din’s unstudied work, The Breaking of the Marital Relation (Fasad al-`alaqah al-zawjiyyah), in addition to legal manuals and Islamic normative texts such as Jawahir al-Kalam, Tafsir al-Tabarsi and Tafsir al-Amthal that have been traditionally used to bring to light this issue. Shams al-Dīn, then head of the Supreme Islamic Shi‘i Council (SISC) and overseeing the religious courts in Lebanon dealing with Personal Status laws (marriage, divorce, child custody, inheritance laws), witnessed firsthand women’s suffering, loss of rights, and the long court battles when a husband refuses to divorce. The injustices committed against women by some men have prompted Shams al-Dīn to find the juristic basis for the curtailment of men’s power and to defend women’s rights to custody, maintenance, and deferred bridal gift. Shams al-Din examines in the aforementioned work the scope and limits of the jurist’s authority, and whether such authority allows the jurist to effectuate divorce sans the husband’s approval. Shams al-Dīn’s understanding of the concept of the jurist’s authority over the unwilling husband coupled with his theoretical considerations on marital relations has wider implications for Lebanese Muslim Shi‘i women and Ja‘afari Shari‘ah courts in Lebanon.

The act of writing history is not only inseparable from politics but is also shaped by it. This paper examines the concerted efforts made by Hizbullah through the organization’s educational and cultural institutions to narrate a particular history of the Shi‘a of Lebanon. By examining the historical documentary films produced by Hizbullah’s media division along with children’s history textbooks used in Hizbullah-affiliated schools, this paper delves into the process of historical narrativization adhered to in these Hizbullah-affiliated spaces. Based on research gathered from Hizbullah’s media center (Dar al-Manar/Manar TV), and the Shi‘i affiliated schools of al-Mahdi and al-Mustafa (which use history books produced by a publishing house, Dar al-Mustafa, with ties to Hizbullah), this paper examines the historical narratives produced about the Shiʿa of Lebanon under the auspices of Hizbullah. By examining a number of historical documentaries (“Resurrection of Rifles,” “Territory of Rose,” “Musa al-Sadr” etc.) and historical textbooks (such as “Us and History”), this paper reveals how the space of cultural and intellectual production serves as a forum to ascribe a certain narrative of Shi‘i history and place within the Lebanese grand national story. In looking at these different Hizbullah spaces of historical production, this paper examines how these narratives inscribe and articulate the Shi‘a into the history of the Lebanese nation-state. This paper asks the following questions: Who is the intended audience and what purpose do such narratives serve? How do these narratives inscribe and articulate the place of the Shi‘a in the Lebanese nation-state, both as members of a sect and as citizens of the state? How do these narratives delineate the community’s boundaries? Most importantly, why has there been an invested effort by Hizbullah to narrate history? This paper explores the context, motivations, practices, and assumptions concerning historicization as a means of integrating the Shiʿa into the broader national history. This paper will begin with a critique of Lebanese historiography that has traditionally marginalized the Shi‘i community followed by an examination of Hizbullah’s efforts to inscribe a particular history. In particular, this paper argues that such efforts by Hizbullah are a way to counter Maronite-Sunni-centric histories that have long dominated Lebanese historiography and neglected its Shiʿi population.

Hizbullah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has become known for his oratory skills. Less explored are the speeches he gives during the Ashura ritual. These interventions have reinvented understandings and practices of the ritual while molding themselves to its basic structures. This paper investigates the effectiveness Hizbullah has deployed in blurring the boundaries between the religious, the social and political, and how speech “acts” have been central to this phenomenon. In so doing the paper will explore the last few years of Ashura commemorations, the spread of representations of the Syrian crisis and the fight against Sunni radical militant formations. The paper will argue that that main discursive strategy followed by Hizbullah is to “reclaim” an “authentic” Islam through ritual performance, re-writing history, and re-interpreting the prophet's legacy. This reclaiming process cuts through imaginings of community that is conducive to producing a form of non-secular nationalist discourse, which stands between ethical precepts and communitarian identity.

Based on fieldwork in Iran and Lebanon, this paper examines the export of Iran’s development organization, Construction Jihad (Jihād al-Bināʾ, hereafter JB), to Lebanon in cooperation with Hizbullah. The case of JB demonstrates that Hizbullah did not exclusively exist as a client or extension of Iran, but also sought autonomy from and clashed with it. Although JB received Iranian training and funding during its establishment in 1988, Hizbullah eventually gained control of its central council, fully localized its personnel, and diversified its finances toward foreign donations and indigenous contributions. In response, Iran established another development organization in Lebanon that paralleled and rivaled JB, and created tensions with Hizbullah. Apart from shedding light on Iran and Hizbullah’s cooperative, yet tense relationship, JB offers insight into the merits and shortcomings of Hizbullah’s holistic approach to development that encompassed its religious and material dimensions. JB’s mosques, seminaries, shrines, and congregation halls allowed Hizbullah to indoctrinate constituents and symbolically transform the physical landscape into an “Islamic sphere” and “resistance society” (Deeb 2006, Harb 2010). JB’s disproportionate focus on religion prevented it from fully addressing its beneficiaries’ socioeconomic needs and bred exclusivity despite Hizbullah’s efforts to project a nonsectarian image. JB materially improved living conditions by supplying water and electricity, establishing schools and hospitals, providing agricultural assistance and vocational training, and renovating and rebuilding infrastructure, housing, and businesses that had been damaged and destroyed by the civil war and Israeli attacks. In a clientelistic fashion, JB enabled Hizbullah to attract committed recruits, popular support, and electoral votes, and reinforced its status as the Shiʿi community’s largest employer and service provider. While granting this community political empowerment and economic security, Hizbullah subjected itself to bottom-up pressure in the form of rising expectations, demands, disappointment, and criticism. This outcome constituted the byproduct of a development model that was more top-down and distributive than participatory and sustainable as well as a constituency that valued performance and accountability alongside religiosity and resistance.