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POSTREVOLUTIONARY IRAN AND SHIءI LEBANON: CONTESTED HISTORIES OF SHIءI TRANSNATIONALISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2007

Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr
Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr
Affiliation:
Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and International and Area Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Mo. 63130-0899, USA; e-mail: rshaerye@artsci.wustl.edu.
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In 2002 the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beirut invited Mehdi Chamran to visit Lebanon. Chamran's late brother, Mustafa, was a member of an anti-Pahlavi opposition movement with bases in Lebanon from 1970 to 1979. During his visit, Chamran was to meet several Lebanese Shiءi personalities and to visit Shiءa-run institutions in South Lebanon, including institutions affiliated with the Lebanese Shiءi political party Amal (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya), which is headed by the current speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, in order to speak about his late brother. In fact, many of the Lebanese Shiءa attending the speech had personally known Mustafa. He had, after all, offered military training to many active in Lebanon's first Shiءi militia, which subsequently became the Amal movement. On February 15, at the Nabih Berri Cultural Complex (Mujammaʿ Nabih Berri al-Thaqafi), in Tallat al-Radar, a town near Nabatiyya, in South Lebanon, Chamran began a speech by reading passages from his brother's letters and notes from 1973 that described the political atmosphere in South Lebanon amid Israeli military attacks. Chamran went on to discuss the relationship between the Islamic Revolution and Lebanese Shiءa, emphasizing the theme of closeness and unity. For a moment, as he read these passages, Chamran implied that Iranian and Lebanese Shiءa had been moving back and forth for centuries between their respective countries and hence were what one scholar calls “distant relations.”

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ARTICLES
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , May 2007, pp. 271 - 289
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© 2007 Cambridge University Press

In 2002 the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beirut invited Mehdi Chamran to visit Lebanon. Chamran's late brother, Mustafa, was a member of an anti-Pahlavi opposition movement with bases in Lebanon from 1970 to 1979. During his visit, Chamran was to meet several Lebanese Shiʿi personalities and to visit Shiʿa-run institutions in South Lebanon, including institutions affiliated with the Lebanese Shiʿi political party Amal (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya), which is headed by the current speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, in order to speak about his late brother. In fact, many of the Lebanese Shiʿa attending the speech had personally known Mustafa. He had, after all, offered military training to many active in Lebanon's first Shiʿi militia, which subsequently became the Amal movement. On February 15, at the Nabih Berri Cultural Complex (Mujammaء Nabih Berri al-Thaqafi), in Tallat al-Radar, a town near Nabatiyya, in South Lebanon, Chamran began a speech by reading passages from his brother's letters and notes from 1973 that described the political atmosphere in South Lebanon amid Israeli military attacks. Chamran went on to discuss the relationship between the Islamic Revolution and Lebanese Shiʿa, emphasizing the theme of closeness and unity. For a moment, as he read these passages, Chamran implied that Iranian and Lebanese Shiʿa had been moving back and forth for centuries between their respective countries and hence were what one scholar calls “distant relations.”1

Houchang Chehabi, Distant Relations. Five Hundred Years of Iranian–Lebanese Relations (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

However, although Chamran's reading of his brother's notes performatively evoked the events of the 1970s in 2002, Lebanese politics and Lebanese–Iranian relations have changed dramatically in the intervening years. This quasi-ritual commemoration was aimed at collapsing time and creating a sense of contemporaneity between events, downplaying the differences between the political context of the 1970s and the present. The Iranian government claims Mustafa Chamran as part of a Shiʿi network linked to Ruhollah Khomeini and associates him with the current activities of the Iranian government in Lebanon. In this way, cultural programs such as the visit of Mehdi Chamran propagate a narrative in which his brother's activities, such as fighting against the Israelis in South Lebanon prior to the Iranian Revolution, become a logical step leading to the creation of Hizbullah.

In reality, however, postrevolutionary transnational ties between Iran and Lebanon are not simply a continuation of prerevolutionary Shiʿi ties, according to the preferred official narrative of the Iranian government and the religious ruling elite in Iran. Scholars such as Houchang Chehabi privilege this official Iranian narrative of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi relations in their analysis of postrevolutionary Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi ties and frame the creation of Hizbullah as the latest episode in a long-standing relationship of mutual Shiʿi influences. Juxtaposing the 16th-century migration of scholars from Jabal ʿAmil (parts of present day South Lebanon) to Persia who assisted the Safavids in making their domain Shiʿi with the 20th-century migration of Shiʿi activists and scholars from Iran to Lebanon who played key roles in the recent religious and political mobilization of Lebanese Shiʿa, Chehabi concludes, “In a sense, history has come full circle.”2

Ibid., 45.

In contrast to such a vision of deep continuities, this article shows how the history of these interactions is deeply disputed and emerges in the tension between at least two contesting narratives about these Shiʿi ties, which must be contextualized against the background of larger religious and political struggles.

An account in which these relationships have “come full circle” is not a neutral description of the historical record, but indeed only one preferred reading of these ties, which by no means all participants in Lebanese–Iranian Shiʿi networks share. Here, I emphasize the importance of memory as a category of political practice. In other words, attention must be paid to the interplay between power dynamics and struggles over memory for the analysis of this transnational Shiʿi network. Both remembering and forgetting of historical events then stand in a dialectic relation to current political context. Scholarly analyses of historical events are often incomplete without paying attention to the meaning the participating actors attribute to such events. Memory, then, is not simply the mental ability to retrieve past events but a practice in dialogue with our surroundings. I emphasize the political nature of social memory and the consequences of such memory production, whereas commemorations of particular events, such as the death of Chamran, constitute authoritative representations of the past.3

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1941]). See also Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001).

Scholars of memory in the Middle East have shown how selective readings of the past have contributed to the production of nationalism and have explained the cultural logic of this memory production within single national frameworks. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, for example, show how monuments and commemoration of events have been central to creating an Egyptian nationalist collective memory.4

Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Commemorating the Nation, Collective Memory, Public Commemoration, and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Yael Zerubavel explains how the battle of Masada between Jewish defenders and Roman conquerors in 73 CE began to be commemorated by Palestinian Jews in the 1920s. The author argues that interest in the Masada narrative increased with the rise of Zionism as it became a popular symbol of Jewish resistance and an appropriate national symbol for the state of Israel.5

Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

In contrast to these approaches, I am concerned with the transnational dimensions of memory production among Shiʿa in the Middle East, particularly how interpretations of past events can establish differences among Shiʿa as well as create Shiʿi solidarities across borders. Focusing on how Shiʿa remember the figure of Mustafa Chamran, I analyze the debates that inform the creation of such contested memories while discussing the reasons for and the consequences of their divergence.

The visit of Mehdi Chamran illustrates how the Iranian government imagines the modern history of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi relations and how his visit was organized to foster this vision. Iranian government representatives in Beirut highlight a reading of the recent history of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi ties that makes these relations seem self-evident while placing Iran at the center of a Shiʿi world based on a discourse of organizational origin.6

Amal members make use of a similar discourse of origin to break the hegemonic claims of the Iranian government in Lebanon. Through a nationalist reading of the past, they point to the 16th-century migration of Ottoman Jabal ʿAmil ʿulamaء who were invited to the Safavid Persian court to spread Shiʿi Islam. See Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shiʿite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Construction of National Identities (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). For the multiple ways in which the memory of Jabal ʿAmil–Safavid Persia ties can be relevant in defining and imagining modern Lebanese–Iranian Shiʿi ties, also see my paper entitled “Genealogies, Lost Hopes, and Local Politics in Lebanon: A Biography of Sayyid Hani Fahs,” to be presented at the University of Chicago Middle East History and Theory Conference, May 2007.

Performative commemoration of Mustafa Chamran's life and activism serves to legitimize the Iranian government's involvement in South Lebanon by “reminding” Amal members that Shiʿi ties to Iran were crucial for the foundation of their party. Iranian government representatives achieve this by depoliticizing the links between the two countries, by sidelining differences and disagreements, and by presenting multiple sets of relations as one network. Such activities, often carried out as part of Iranian cultural programs, serve to justify an official Iranian presence in Lebanon with hegemonic Iranian interests vis-à-vis Lebanese Shiʿa.

The Iranian religious elite in charge of the Islamic republic's government constructs a particular official narrative of the history of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi relations. However, Amal members contest such representations, in part by offering an alternative narrative of Chamran's stay in Lebanon.7

It is not the goal of this article to discuss how LMI members commemorate and represent Chamran. My point here is to show how struggles between two dominant Shiʿi groups to represent themselves at the center of Shiʿi world are reflected in the way Chamran is incorporated in their narrative about Iranian–Lebanese relations. The religious ruling elite in Iran had successfully marginalized LMI members by 1982.

Amal members emphasize the central role played by their leader, Musa Sadr, in the realization of the Iranian Revolution because he offered shelter to these anti-Shah Iranian opposition members. They also point to Musa Sadr's wide network to international media, through which Khomeini was able to spread his message. However, most importantly, they do not connect Chamran to the current postrevolutionary Shiʿi network operating between Iran and Hizbullah. Thus, they effectively reject the official Iranian narrative of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi history in which they are defined as a junior and marginal group. By highlighting the importance of Musa Sadr for anti-Shah activists, they place themselves in a more central position in the Shiʿi world. I suggest that these two narratives should be read as part of a larger struggle over claims to centrality in the Shiʿi world and over the relegation of other Shiʿi populations and their homelands to peripheral status.

In the following I first present the history and debates between Iranian and Lebanese Shiʿa in the 1970s, through a discussion of Mustafa Chamran's political biography in order to historicize this contested memory. I argue that Chamran does not seamlessly fit into a narrative emphasizing the continuity in Lebanese–Iranian ties before and after the Iranian Revolution. To institutionalize this memory, the Iranian government commemorates Chamran in elaborate ways. I analyze how his life and activities are commemorated in postrevolutionary Iran, arguing that the Iranian religious ruling elite has posthumously claimed Chamran as one of its own as a way to remind Amal members that one of the founding figures of their movement was presumably a member of Khomeini's circle. I then discuss how Amal members in Lebanon remember Chamran differently. Instead of considering Chamran as part of the movement of Khomeini, they assign both Chamran and Musa Sadr more prominent positions than Khomeini in recent Shiʿi history. These commemorative practices then function as the realization and localization of these contested social memories. In my conclusion, I show how memories can support and sustain group identities in Shiʿi transnational networks.

Before proceeding, note that when I write of the Iranian religious elite, I refer only to those religious leaders and politicians who have been active in maintaining a transnational Shiʿi network between Iran and Lebanon. Some of them have been high-ranking religious leaders such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Husayn ʿAli Montazeri, and others have been midranking (ḥujjat al-Islam) religious scholars such as ʿAli Akbar Mohtashami (former ambassador to Syria), Sadiq Khalkhali, ʿAli Khamenei, Murtida Elwiri (a former major of Tehran), and Sayyid Hamid Rawhani (a former member of the parliament). I also think of lay actors who identify closely with the religious elite, such as ʿAli Vilayati (the former Iranian foreign minister) and Jalal al-din Farsi (formerly Fatah's representative in Iran), who were in leading positions of government in the 1980s. Although religious elites such as Husayn ʿAli Montazeri were marginalized in the post-Khomeini era, Montazeri was nonetheless actively involved in supporting the development of a particular type of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi relations prior to the death of Khomeini. His son, Muhammad Montazeri, was one of the main supporters of creating the Lebanese Hizbullah.

The election of President Muhammad Khatami in 1997 caused people such as Mohtashami to lose some of their power in defining Shiʿi relations between Lebanon and Iran, since the new government was more interested in conducting relations between the two countries on a state-to-state level. Nonetheless, the Khatami government was not able to fully control and define Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi relations. Since the election of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in 2005, it seems that the Iranian government is rebuilding its nonstate networks with groups such as Hizbullah, restoring them to a level similar to that of the era before Khatami.

THE HISTORY OF THE CONTESTED MEMORY

The most important transnational network existing among Iranian and Lebanese Shiʿa in the 1970s was the close relation between the members of the Nehzat-i Azadi-i Iran, or the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), an anti-Shah opposition movement, and Musa Sadr and Amal.8

In addition to this network, two other networks operated between Iran and Lebanon and centered on links between Palestinian organizations and Iranian opposition groups. The first link was the connection between the Iranian Mojahedin-i Khalq and Fatah, the dominant movement in the PLO, in Lebanon. The People's Mojahedin of Iran, a movement that split from the LMI in the early 1960s, was characterized by an outlook combining Islam and Marxism. For information on the history of establishing these networks with Fatah, see Sharh-i taءsis va tarikhcheha-i vaqaye-ءi sazman-i mojahedin-i khalq-i Iran 1344–1350 (Long Beach, Calif.: Sazman-i Mojahedin-i Khalq-i Iran, 1980). The second link was the network between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian Marxist faction led by Dr. George Habash, and the Marxist Iranian Cherikha-i Fadai-i Khalq, which received military training from the PFLP. For detailed information on how the Cherikha-i Fadai-i Khalq established contacts with PFLP, see Iraj Sepheri, Az jebheء nabard-i Felestin: Khaterat-i rafiq kargar-i fadaءi shahid Iraj Sepehri (Tehran: n.p., 1977).

Musa Sadr was born in Qom into a family with a long-standing tradition of religious education and family networks across Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq. In 1959 he moved to Tyre, in South Lebanon, at the request of Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Khuءi, who preceded Ayatollah ʿAli Sistani as head of the theological schools (ḥawza) in Najaf. Sadr organized the first Shiʿi militia, Amal, in 1974, just a few years before his “disappearance” under mysterious circumstances in Libya in August 1978.

Perhaps the best-known member of the opposition to the Shah residing in Lebanon was Mustafa Chamran. Born in 1933 into a religious family in Tehran, he pursued studies in electrical engineering at the Technical College of the University of Tehran, where he became politically active in the National Resistance Movement, which came into existence shortly after the fall of Muhammad Mussadiq in 1953, and whose members were mostly from a religious bazaari background.9

For details on the members of the National Resistance Movement and their activities, see Houchang Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 128–39.

Chamran left Iran on a scholarship in 1959 to continue his studies in the United States, receiving his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He later moved to the east coast of the United States to be closer to the anti-Shah activities of his friends such as Sadiq Qutbzadeh (d. 1982) and Ibrahim Yazdi, both prominent in the Islamic Student Organization. In late 1963 Chamran made his first trip to Egypt, because the representatives of LMI abroad (LMI(a))—mainly Mustafa Chamran, Sadiq Qutbzadeh, and Ibrahim Yazdi—hoped to find backing for a military wing to fight the Shah in Iran. However, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had other ideas about how to oppose the Shah's influence.

Chamran left Egypt for the United States in 1966 and only returned to the Middle East in 1970, but this time he went to Lebanon, since he knew Musa Sadr from his university days in Tehran. Chamran stayed there until the success of the Iranian Revolution in February 1979, when he returned to Iran.10

Nehzat-i Azadi-i Iran, Zendeginameh-i sardar-i rashid-i Islam shahid doktor Mostafa Chamran (Tehran: n.p., 1983); Bonyad-i Shahid Chamran, Zendeginameh: Shahid doctor Chamran (Tehran: Bonyad-i Shahid Chamran, n.d.).

In his memoirs, Lobnan,11

Mustafa Chamran, Lobnan (Tehran: Bonyad-i Shahid Chamran, 1983).

he wrote,

I spent eight years in Lebanon, a hard and dangerous period in the midst of death and life and martyrdom. I am proud to have been the organizer of the largest ideological movements in Lebanon: Harakat al-Mahrumin and Amal [the military wing of Harakat al-Mahrumin], which was established by Imam Musa Sadr. The organization of Amal was my responsibility. I have been in the midst of political and revolutionary currents in Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries, and I know more than anyone else about the issues in this region, and I have been more than anyone else involved in the destiny of the Shiʿa.12

Ibid., 20.

Chamran's undertakings in Lebanon were thus not confined to anti-Shah opposition activities; he was also deeply involved in Lebanese Shiʿi affairs associated with Musa Sadr.

Upon his arrival in Lebanon, Sadr began organizing Lebanese Shiʿa, who were among the most disadvantaged and marginalized citizens in Lebanon on a communal level. Citizenship in Lebanon has been shaped by the sectarian system of political representation, according to which the division of seats in the Lebanese Parliament is supposed to reflect the relative size of the communities. Therefore, the relations between Lebanese citizens and the state are mediated by officially recognized sectarian communities. The Maronite-dominated Lebanese state institutions were mostly uninterested and at times unable to address the needs of the Shiʿa, who, based on their growing numerical weight, were starting to voice claims to a larger proportion of positions in the decision-making arena of the state and to take part in the shaping of the identity of the Lebanese nation. As a result of the state's failure to accommodate the Shiʿa, Sadr and his associates began taking the road that other communities in Lebanon had taken previously, namely to institutionalize themselves as a sectarian community and to claim their rights as citizens in Lebanon on this basis. The Shiʿa national vision of Lebanon as an Arab state with Shiʿa positioned at its center stood in contrast to the Maronite idea of Lebanon as part of an imagined larger Mediterranean civilization in which Muslims and especially Shiʿa (perceived as an underclass) were marginalized.

Sadr opened small, Shiʿa-run technical schools for boys and girls throughout South Lebanon to improve the educational level of Shiʿa, which he believed was key in occupying positions in the state. Mustafa Chamran became the director of one of these schools in Tyre upon his arrival in Lebanon in 1970 and remained in this position until his departure to Iran in 1979. Chamran also offered military training to Amal members, some of whom were drawn from these schools.

As a result of this close cooperation and friendship, several other anti-Shah opposition groups began to associate LMI(a) members and their ideologies with Sadr and his activism and outlook in Lebanon. This association became an important ideological tool in the hands of the LMI(a) opponents who helped to establish Hizbullah as a rival party to Amal in Lebanon after the success of the Iranian Revolution. By 1982 LMI leaders whose activism was crucial to the success of the Iranian Revolution and whose leaders held government positions were sidelined by more conservative figures who claimed to more closely follow the line of Khomeini (Khatt-i Imam). Chamran, who became minister of defense after the success of the Revolution, was killed on the front at Susangard during the Iran–Iraq War, on 21 June 1981.

SHIʿI AUTHORITY AND THE PALESTINIAN CAUSE

The LMI(a) with Chamran as its representative in Lebanon was not the only anti-Shah activist group based in Lebanon in the 1970s claiming an Islamic orientation. Muhammad Montazeri,13

For information on Muhammad Montazeri's activities after the success of the revolution, see Wilfried Buchta, Die iranische Schia und die islamische Einheit, 1979–1996 (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut, 1997), 119–20.

Jalal al-Din Farsi,14

Jalal al-Din Farsi, Zavaya-i tarik (Tehran: Hawze-i Andishe va Honar-i Islami, 1994). Farsi intended to run for president, but rumors about his Afghani origin prevented him from doing so. As a result, Abu al-Hasan Bani Sadr became president of Iran, and Farsi became his archenemy.

and ʿAli Akbar Mohtashami,15

ʿAli Akbar Mohtashami, Khaterat-i siyasi, vol. 2 (Tehran: Daftar-i Adabiyat-i Jomhuri-i Islami, 2000). Mohtashami was a close relation of Khomeini and was Khomeini's personal secretary in Paris. In 1982 he became the Iranian ambassador to Syria.

then close associates of Ruhollah Khomeini and often referred to as the founding figures of Hizbullah in Lebanon in the early 1980s, also mention in their memoirs their stays in and regular visits to Lebanon in the 1970s.

Looking at the debates between these two camps, between Chamran's LMI and several figures who later became members of the Iranian government closely associated with Khomeini, I suggest that we can distinguish between two different transnational Shiʿi anti-Shah networks with ties to Lebanon operating in the 1970s.16

This becomes most obvious in Murtida Elwiri's memoirs when he mentions his meeting with Qutbzadeh, a leading member of LMI(a) in Paris. Murtida Elwiri, Khatirat-i Murtida Elwiri (Tehran: Daftar-i Adabiyat-i Jomhuri-i Islami, 1997), 59.

Chamran considered himself closely associated with both Musa Sadr and Khomeini, but persons such as Jalal al-Din Farsi and Mohtashami claimed that commitments to these two figures were mutually exclusive. Their debates, as we will see, illuminate to some degree the conflicts that have arisen between the postrevolutionary Iranian religious ruling elite's vision of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi relations (and ultimately of Lebanese Shiʿi identity) and that of Amal, the first major Lebanese Shiʿi movement.

Muhammad Montazeri, Jalal al-Din Farsi, and ʿAli Akbar Mohtashami turned into opponents of LMI(a) activism, which they equated with Amal politics. They disagreed with the focus of Sadr's activism for several reasons. They criticized what they saw as Sadr's lack of cooperation with the PLO in Lebanon and believed his first priority should have been to serve as a spokesperson for Palestinian interests in Lebanon. Based on this position, these key figures in what would become the postrevolutionary Iranian government also accused LMI leaders for their lack of enthusiasm in putting the Palestinian cause at the center of their politics. When Chamran gave a speech in Hamburg to a crowd of Iranian students, according to the source published by these students, he talked about clashes between Palestinians and Lebanese Shiʿa in South Lebanon and how, in his view, many Lebanese Shiʿa desired to get rid of the Palestinians. He supposedly said, “The Shiʿa beg us to give them weapons so they can kill the Palestinians.” Some students in the audience accused Chamran and Sadr of having incited Lebanese Shiʿa against Palestinians to the extent that they would favor “such illogical actions.”17

Tahlili az awza-i junub-i Lubnan. Zasman-i Amal va doctor Chamran (n.p., n.d.), 47. For a similar argument, see Sayyid Sadiq Rawhani, Imam va risalat-i jahani (Tehran: Sazman-i Asnad-i Inqilab-i Islami, 1995), 3:821–22.

After the success of the Iranian Revolution, Sayyid Hamid Rawhani even went so far as to call the party of Amal the “first security belt of the Israelis in south Lebanon.”18

Ibid., 832.

Another reason why Khomeini's inner circle opposed Sadr and Chamran was because Sadr maintained relations with the Iranian embassy in Beirut, a place representative of the Shah's anti-Palestinian attitude. In addition, Iranian embassies worked closely with the Iranian secret service, Savak, in monitoring the political activities of Iranians residing outside Iran. They therefore accused Sadr of being nonrevolutionary and an agent of the Shah's regime, despite the fact that Sadr's contact with the Iranian embassy was limited and related to securing monetary support from the Shah for Lebanese Shiʿa.19

The Shah of Iran can be considered a third Shiʿi transnational politician, as he did at times give monetary support to Lebanese Shiʿa and invested in the renovation of Shiʿi holy tombs, such as Sayyida Zaynab in Damascus. However, this article is concerned with how the memory of the 1970s Shiʿi network between Iranian opposition leaders and the party of Amal frames postrevolutionary relations between the two groups. For the relation between Musa Sadr and the Iranian embassy in Beirut and the Shah's charitable support of Lebanese Shiʿa, see Abbas William Samii, “The Security Relationship between Lebanon and Pre-Revolutionary Iran,” in Distant Relations, 162–79.

He did not cooperate with the Iranian embassy; in embassy documents, one can read how officials often complained about Sadr's lack of cooperation with the Pahlavi regime in turning in Iranian anti-Shah activists based in Beirut.20

Imam Musa Sadr: Yaran-i imam bi ravayat-i asnad-i Savak (Tehran: Markaz-i Barressi-i Asnad-i Tarikhi-i Vizarat-i Itilaʿat, 2001), 481.

In this context, the anti-Sadr group also extended to Chamran and other members of the LMI accusations of cooperating with Savak.21

Asnad-i faje-i Lubnan (n.p., n.d.), 21.

Of interest, the Iranian embassy in Beirut classified Chamran as a leftist and was not aware of the extent of the ties between him and Sadr.22

See Chamran's Savak files, Shahid-i sarafraz doctor Mustafa Chamran: Yaran-i imam be ravayat-i asnad-i savak (Tehran: Markaz-i Barressi-i Asnad-i Tarikhi-i Vizarat-i Itilaʿat, 2000), 289, 327.

Despite these accusations, Sadr was unwilling to subordinate the interests and aspirations of Lebanese Shiʿa to those of Khomeini, and he did not take a public anti-Shah position until 1977, shortly before his disappearance and probable death. Therefore, these associates of Khomeini labeled both the LMI and the party of Amal as nonrevolutionary and anti-Palestinian in their political orientation. As both the Lebanese Maronites, who dominated the Lebanese state up to the beginning of the civil war in 1975, and the Shah of Iran were not invested in the Palestinian cause, in a discourse created by Khomeini followers, any association with these two governments meant that these people were automatically anti-Palestinian.

For all of these reasons, Sadr was accused of standing for an inauthentic Shiʿi Islam. In the words of his opponents, “How can the LMI leaders present Sadr as the leader of the Shiʿa in Lebanon and of the Muslims [sic]? Islam and Shiʿa hate the deeds and stance of Musa Sadr and LMI, and the Lebanese Shiʿa have expressed their hatred for their treacherous deeds.”23

Tahlili az ouzaء-i jonub-i Lobnan, 62.

In fact, Musa Sadr's standing and popularity were a potential threat to Khomeini's claims to leadership. Sadr did not want the Lebanese Shiʿa to be marginal in the Shiʿi world and subordinated to Khomeini, whose interest lay principally in the Iranian context of opposing the Shah.24

During his exile in Iraq, Khomeini approached Iraqi ʿulamaء to support his political activism against the Shah of Iran, but religious scholars such as Ayatollah al-Hakim did not agree to support him in the manner he wished. Iraqi religious scholars worked within the logic of the Iraqi state and were more interested in gradual change. See Joyce Wiley, The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Shiʿas (Boulder, Colo./London: Lynne Rienner, 1992) 41.

Followers of Khomeini had begun to view him as their source of emulation (marjaʿ), whereas Sadr and Lebanese Shiʿa followed the teachings of the marjaʿ Ayatollah Khuءi (d. 1992), whom Khomeini viewed as his rival. Sadr was active in supporting the anti-Shah resistance movement, especially the LMI(a), where Chamran was most active, but he saw this anti-Shah activism as a personal stance in which he initially did not want Lebanese Shiʿa to be involved. This was the case, at least until the fortieth-day commemoration of the death of ʿAli Shariʿati in 1977, which took place in Beirut with the support of Musa Sadr. Sadr then could not avoid taking a public stance against the Iranian government.

Yet, these questions of leadership were not always directly debated. Instead, they were often framed as a competition over who had the most impeccable credentials in supporting the Palestinian cause and the Palestinians in Lebanon. Sadr clearly was not willing to support Palestinian militias in South Lebanon to the extent that it would harm Lebanese Shiʿa more than the Palestinian–Israeli clashes in the south already had, no matter how intensely other members of the Iranian opposition movement criticized him for this position, accusing him of being an inauthentic Shiʿa and a traitor.25

Az Shah ta Chamoun (n.p.: 1978).

Mohtashami, for example, claims that on one of his visits to Tyre, Sadr gave a speech blaming the Palestinian presence in South Lebanon for Israeli military attacks there. Mohtashami reveals how this incident “caused him to worry” and how he began “to feel the danger for the future of the Palestinians” because what he saw “would sour the minds of the people of the south and [would] create a situation where the Palestinians would not be able to attack Israel from South Lebanon.” Thus, he decided to meet with “the imam [Khomeini]” as soon as he returned to Iraq in order to “explain the various dimensions of this matter.”26

Mohtashami, Khaterat-i siyasi, 143.

Mohtashami wanted to leave Lebanon as soon as possible, for “the undesirable political situation in Lebanon was not in accordance with political inclinations of people like me.” In addition, he noted how disappointed he was with the “political line” and “the so-called nonrevolutionary behavior of Mr. Sadr (barkhourdhay-i be istelah ghayr-i inqelabi-i aqay-i Sadr).”27

Ibid. Throughout his memoirs Farsi expresses similar comments and opinions about Musa Sadr in a more indirect way. He emphasizes the “good relations” between Musa Sadr and the Shah, for example, which was equal to labeling Sadr as traitorous in the eyes of anti-Shah opposition activists. Farsi, Zavaya-i tarik, 252–53, 256–57, 261.

It is highly unlikely, however, that Sadr had ever given such a speech, as he did support the Palestinian cause and his anti-Israeli stance was well known.

The relations between Shiʿa and Palestinians in South Lebanon were in fact more complex on the ground than what these Iranian anti-Sadr opposition members reported in their memoirs. For example, before the founding of the Amal party, in 1974, many Lebanese Shiʿa were active in Palestinian organizations, from which they received military training. Yasir Arafat regularly visited these training camps, often located in villages around Baʿlbak (Yamunah and ʿAyn al-Boniyyeh), and gave speeches during their graduation ceremonies.28

Chamran, Lobnan, 92, 98, 122.

Even after the founding of Amal, for the first few years many of the Amal military trainers remained Palestinians, and Chamran would accompany his students from the technical school in Tyre to these training camps. Many of the Fatah fighters were also Shiʿa. One gets the picture that Shiʿa closely identified the Palestinian plight with the Shiʿa's disadvantaged situation in Lebanon, and both cooperated with each other in the early 1970s.

However, in the view of Chamran, the most important problem some South Lebanese Shiʿa faced with Fatah was its lack of discipline in exercising its power among its fighters in Lebanon. One wing of Fatah coordinated activities with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), a coalition of mainly Muslim and leftist groups in Lebanon led by Druze leader Kamal Jumblat, whose secularist politics were opposed to Sadr's vision of a nonsecular Lebanon. Nonetheless, at the beginning of the civil war in 1975, Amal cooperated with the LNM.

However, some Palestinian guerillas had already split off from Fatah and were acting on their own in the south, often harassing the Shiʿi inhabitants in the Fatah-controlled region. Sadr grew increasingly impatient with Fatah's loose organization in the south, with Israeli retaliation attacks that killed mainly Shiʿa, and with Yasir Arafat's cooperation with the LNM, which competed with Amal to win Shiʿi members. By 1976, the clashes between Palestinian militias in the south and Shiʿa had increased to the extent that it led Sadr to side with the Syrians. They had initially entered Lebanon in May 1976 to support the Lebanese forces and to limit the PLO's activities in Lebanon.29

See Richard Norton, Amal and The Shiʿa. Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1987), 42–48.

Despite these clashes and their ideological differences, according to Chamran, on the occasion of the fortieth-day commemoration of the death of Dr. ʿAli Shariati in 1977, Arafat proclaimed in Beirut that “Amal is Fatah and Fatah is Amal; if Amal does not support Fatah there would be no Fatah.”30

Chamran, Lobnan, 129–30.

In fact, Sadr had mediated between Hafiz al-Asad and Arafat and had organized many meetings between them. As a result of what he saw as a lack of discipline and an incoherent ideological stance, Chamran noted that despite Arafat's claim of close relations between Amal and Fatah, clashes between Shiʿa and Palestinians were increasing, the latter still exercising their power on a daily basis over Shiʿa in the south. These frequent clashes increased resentment among some Shiʿa toward Palestinians, whom they had come to view as responsible for their plight by drawing Israeli attacks in the region. South Lebanon in fact was often called “Fatahland,” implying total Palestinian militia control.

To the close followers of Khomeini, who mainly heard about these events rather than witnessing them, these incidents were rare and mainly instigated by Amal members and leaders, who—these followers of Khomeini argued—viewed Palestinians as unwelcome guests.31

Rawhani, Imam va risalat, 821.

Although Chamran remained faithful to the fight against Israel, he became increasingly suspicious toward Fatah's attitude in South Lebanon. Arafat also became closer to Iranian opposition members such as Jalal al-Din Farsi, who supported the PLO fight against Israel on Lebanese territory without paying attention to Lebanese Shiʿi interests and local politics.

In short, while Sadr was supporting Iranian opposition activities based in Lebanon, a rift opened between members of the Islamic anti-Shah bloc, revolving around the issue of leadership of the opposition movement. In the view of Sadr's enemies, he was not qualified for a leadership position for one main reason: his attitude toward the Palestinians in Lebanon. Based on this, they criticized him for his supposedly compromising attitude toward the Shah's regime and the Maronite state, both known for their anti-Palestinian position. In the view of his enemies, either one was a supporter of the Palestinian cause and paid the price for it, or one was in the camp of the Maronites (whom the Shah supported), some of whom desired to expel Palestinians from Lebanon and to establish relations with Israel. In their view, there was no third choice as Sadr argued, which was to support the Palestinian cause but simultaneously to advance the political and social interests of Shiʿa in Lebanon. He considered their fate his first priority and wanted to promote their chances to play a central role in the Lebanese national arena. Sadr was thus accused of creating a specific type of Shiʿi Islam or “Shiʿi-Crusader sect” (firqiء Shiʿi-Salibi)32

Ibid., 62.

based on his supposed political decision to cooperate with the Maronites against the Palestinians.

These Iranians opposed to Sadr's activism in Lebanon in the 1970s did not share his outlook and politics vis-à-vis the multireligious composition of Lebanese society, within whose logic Sadr operated. He was criticized for praying in a church or for inviting non-Muslims to lead the Friday prayers.33

Az Shah to Chamoun, 93.

His Shiʿi identity was questioned repeatedly by those who desired to see the Lebanese Shiʿa unconditionally support the Palestinians without taking into consideration the potential risks to their own communal interest.

The clashes between Amal and various Palestinian factions in the south were most intense from 1978 until 1982, and it was amid this fighting that Sadr disappeared and the Iranian Revolution succeeded. On 17 February 1979 a plane took off from Damascus to carry Arafat and Jalal al-Din Farsi to Tehran to congratulate Khomeini on the success of the revolution. Arafat was the first official visitor to postrevolutionary Iran, landing just days after the arrival of Khomeini himself. Jalal al-Din Farsi, the spokesman for Fatah in Iran, was by then an open enemy of Sadr. On 24 February Chamran and a delegation of Amal leaders—Husayn Husayni and Nabih Berri as well as the Lebanese Shiʿi religious scholar then associated with Amal, the late Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shamseddine—also left Beirut for Tehran. They considered themselves to be as much a part of the success of the Iranian Revolution as did Arafat and his associates.

Nevertheless, clashes between Palestinian forces in South Lebanon and Shiʿa continued while power struggles unfolded in Iran between LMI leaders and those claiming to follow the line of Khomeini more closely. Finally, in 1980, the idea of sending Iranian troops to South Lebanon to fend off Israeli attacks was brought forward by Jalal al-Din Farsi and Muhammad Montazeri, surely not only to oppose Israel but also to fill the void of leadership they thought had been created in the Lebanese Shiʿi community by the convenient “disappearance” of Sadr in August 1978 in Libya. Amal leaders strongly opposed the idea, which they saw as an act of interference in local Lebanese politics. They sought the help of LMI members such as Sadiq Qutbzadeh and Mustafa Chamran. Qutbzadeh and Chamran made several trips to Lebanon to assure Lebanese Shiʿi leaders such as Husayn Husyani, former leader of Amal, that the Iranian government would not interfere in internal Lebanese affairs and that those who were behind such plans did not represent the Iranian government.34

Amal members also interviewed Rababa Sadr, the sister of Musa Sadr, on this issue, as they thought of her as an Iranian who understood the complexities of Iranian politics. Amal, 4 January 1980; Amal, 11 January 1980; Amal, 3 May 1980.

Nevertheless, LMI leaders were only able to delay this measure.

In 1982, just a year after Chamran's death, Mohtashami, then the Iranian ambassador to Syria, organized the first units of Iranian revolutionary guards to enter the al-Biqaء region of Lebanon across the Syrian border, and—along with large numbers of former Amal members—helped create the party of Hizbullah. As a result, Amal and the Iranian government broke official contact until 2001. At least after 1982 it seemed that the religious ruling elite in charge of the Iranian government was in fact able to marginalize Amal and establish its hegemony over a large number of Lebanese Shiʿa. However, Amal continued to fight such attempts at marginalization, as had its former leader, Musa Sadr.

Since the split of the Amal party in 1982 and the creation of Hizbullah, fully encouraged and supported by the Iranian government, Amal–Iranian political relations have undergone many changes. Hizbullah, financially and ideologically backed by the religious elite in Iran, became a full-fledged rival party to Amal, competing for resources, members, and political power in Lebanon. Hizbullah's claim of unconditional support of the Palestinian cause, its uncompromising fight against Israel, and its adaptation of postrevolutionary Iranian government ideology such as the celebration of martyrdom (istishhād) served as the basis for a new interpretation of Shiʿi identity centered around the Palestinian cause. To Amal members, the outbreak of fighting between them and Hizbullah in 1988–1990, which cost the lives of at least 3,000 Lebanese Shiʿa, was a direct fault of Iranian intermingling in Lebanese politics.

Yet, both the death of Khomeini and the Taʿif Accord in 1989 (which put an end to the Lebanese civil war) opened a new page in Amal–Iranian relations. In 1996, an official Amal delegation visited Iran for the first time, during the presidency of Ayatullah Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–1997). In the same year, Muhammad Khatami, then acting as the minister of culture, visited Lebanon to give a series of lectures on civil society and democracy. Amal members regard Khatami with favor, often stating how Khatami's views on Lebanon reminded them of Sadr. By this, Amal positions itself as the Shiʿi party that favors a multicultural and multisectarian Lebanon and that encourages coexistence but casts Hizbullah and the religious ruling elite in Iran as those in favor of an Islamic republic in Lebanon.

It was no surprise, then, that the 1997 election of Khatami to the Iranian presidency was a milestone in improving relations between the Iranian government and Amal. On his three-day visit to Lebanon in May 2003, Khatami stated clearly that “our support is a support for all Lebanon; it is not a support for a particular sect or a particular group.”35

Daily Star, 14 May 2003.

Khatami's comments stand for the Iranian reformists' views on how far Iran should be involved in Lebanese Shiʿi affairs. Although the special relationship between Iran and Lebanese Shiʿa is not denied,36

Both Lebanese Shiʿi political parties, Amal and Hizbullah, had organized a large rally for Khatami at the Beirut sports stadium where Khatami delivered a speech in Arabic to the Shiʿi audience. In conversations with some Shiʿi intellectuals and Amal members, they revealed their surprise at Khatami's move to deliver a speech just for the Lebanese Shiʿa; they viewed it as a contradiction of his claimed desire to maintain relations with all Lebanese.

the Iranian reformists prefer to use official state channels to shape Iranian–Lebanese relations.

To improve relations with Amal, the director of Khatami's presidential office, Sayyid Muhammad ʿAli Abtahi, opened negotiations with Muhammad ʿUbayd, then a high-ranking Amal member and former director of the ministry of media. Abtahi's personal friendships with some high-ranking Amal members and the more official negotiations resulted in Amal reopening its political office in Tehran in 2001, where the government allowed Amal to commemorate the disappearance of Sadr in an official manner for the first time since the revolution. As another gesture of improving relations, the Iranian government provided funds for Amal educational facilities and helped build a new school in the former occupied territories in South Lebanon.

However, despite these political accommodations, as we will see, the commemoration of Mustafa Chamran in 2002 in Beirut, twenty years after the creation of Hizbullah, reflected continued rivalry between Amal and the Iranian government. Amal members formulated an alternative reading of Iranian–Lebanese Shiʿi relations that does not view the 1970s networks as a preparatory step to current Iranian involvement in Lebanon.

OFFICIAL COMMEMORATION OF CHAMRAN IN IRAN

In postrevolutionary Iran, Chamran is commemorated in official publications and official media presentations. Iranian government publications include compilations of commemoration notes, poems, and pictures. There are semiofficial publications composed of poetry and prose written by Chamran himself, as well as his paintings, which are also shown on Iranian national television on the anniversary of his death, on 21 June. Finally, another set of materials consists of government-funded children's books published in Iran that present Chamran as an example to emulate. In them, he is extolled as a saintlike figure.37

Paveh-i sorkh (Tehran: Hawzeh-i Honari-i Sazman-i Tabliqat-i Islami, 2000).

In all these representations, Chamran is taken out of the context of transnational ties between Sadr and LMI(a) associates; instead, his activism in Lebanon is smoothly connected to postrevolutionary Iranian activism in Lebanon. Few Iranians know that Chamran was in fact a close associate of LMI and Sadr and that he disagreed about sending troops to South Lebanon in 1980 with Farsi and Mohtashami, both of whom ultimately helped create Hizbullah as a rival party to Amal. In this sense, the official media in Iran has been successful in establishing its vision of Chamran among Iranians.38

I am of course aware that many Iranians do not watch such state-sponsored programs. In addition, they often do not distinguish between the various anti-Shah networks operating outside of Iran in the 1970s but view them as one network. In contrast, it shows that the current government has been successful in establishing the idea that Chamran was part of the network that help create Hizbullah despite the fact that many Iranians often question the integrity of state-sponsored information.

Poems written in Persian by students taking part in poetry competitions are an important way of constructing current Iranian ties to Lebanese Shiʿa. These poems describe Chamran's heroic deeds in Lebanon as well as his heroism during the Iran–Iraq war, and the two are presented as being closely connected. What is striking in several of these poems is the way he is portrayed as the link between the Shiʿa of Iran and the Shiʿa of Lebanon and as the one who organized the Amal party:

O, you who gave an organization to Amal

in the continuous fight in Lebanon

O, you who taught martyrdom

to the pure martyrs of Khuzistan

O, you martyr, who in the west of Susangard

in the path of truth, rolled your body in the blood

O, you seasoned old fighter of Iran.39

Yadnameh-i Mustafa Chamran (Tehran: Bonyad-i Shahid Chamran, 1982), 140.

Another poem celebrates his achievements on behalf of the Amal movement:

I still see him

when in Harakat al-Mahrumin of Lebanon

he planned, saving a deprived human being

and still his voice full of hope is echoing in Amal barricades40

Ibid., 143.

These poems clearly represent how the religious ruling elite in Iran, by effortlessly presenting Chamran as part of its own group, legitimizes its current presence in Lebanon.

Published photographs of Chamran have also contributed to the highlighting of Chamran's ties to Lebanese Shiʿa. Photographs of his South Lebanon days are often placed next to photographs of him on the front during the Iran–Iraq war. These pictures show him mostly in military dress, surrounded either by young Lebanese Shiʿa or by a group of young Iranian soldiers at the front. In these pictures he is smiling, praying, or holding a weapon in his hand with a Palestinian scarf.41

Chamran, Lobnan; Yadnameh.

The main message that these pictures convey is that Chamran was a strong religious character, a Shiʿa for whom the Palestinian cause was most important. These photographs give the impression of an ideal Shiʿa, one for whom borders are artificial constructs. He fights wherever there is “injustice” in the transnational Muslim and Shiʿi space, exactly as the postrevolutionary Iranian government presents itself even as it downplays its own self-interest. Again, from their perspective, piety and championing the Palestinian cause are linked. This is part of the background informing the display of photographs showing him with Lebanese Shiʿa. One picture, for example, shows him in the Technical School in Tyre as he is supervising young Lebanese Shiʿa in a dormitory. While the students are all in bed, on mattresses on the floor, he sits among them, looking at them in a caring way. An educated, popular, and loved person, he is portrayed as a selfless character. However, Chamran is simultaneously a national “hero,” one who crushes “separatist revolts” among Kurds in Iranian Kurdistan42

In return for their support in overthrowing the Pahlavi regime, Khomeini promised ethnic and religious minorities more rights and relative independence in the new government. After the success of the revolution, he did not keep his word, which resulted in an uprising in Kurdistan. Chamran was one of the leaders who crushed what the government had labeled as separatist rebellion of Kurds and was celebrated officially as a national hero. Iranian Kurds, on the contrary, remember him as a murderer (qātil).

and fights the Iraqi invasion of Iran.

Other hagiographic portrayals of Chamran are television programs shown on the anniversary of his death. Special programs on particularly important martyrs on their martyrdom anniversary are regularly shown on Iranian television. On Chamran's day, his paintings are shown on television while his poems are recited, and interviews are conducted with his Lebanese wife, Qana Jaber, and his brother, Mehdi. He is celebrated as a master of guerrilla warfare, underlining how he is still remembered fondly by the Lebanese Shiʿa. In these televised commemoration programs, it is striking that no links are shown between Mustafa Chamran and other LMI members such as Ibrahim Yazdi or Mehdi Bazargan, who fell out of favor after the revolution. More than anything else, Chamran's mystical side is emphasized, taking him out of a political context that the Iranian government would rather downplay.

AMAL MEMBERS COMMEMORATE CHAMRAN

Whereas the Iranian government's commemorative programs connect Chamran to the Khomeini movement, Amal members highlight Chamran's association with Musa Sadr. Two members of an Amal delegation who had just returned from an official trip to Iran in 2002 agreed to talk to me about their impressions of Iran. Not long after showing me pictures of their trip to the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, one of them put in front of me a photograph of Chamran's grave: “You see how simple the grave is? Compare it to that of Khomeini [which is a great monument in southern Tehran]!” He shook his head and continued, “Don't you think he deserved a better larger grave? Wasn't what he did for the revolution worth a bit more cement?” To these Amal members, the simple grave of Chamran was yet another attempt of the postrevolutionary Iranian government to marginalize Amal's importance in the Shiʿi world. They consider Chamran, next to Musa Sadr, as the founding father of their movement and party.

For Hasan Shaqra, a Shiʿa from South Lebanon now in his middle forties, it was his admiration for and friendship with Mustafa Chamran that led him to the decision to go to Iran and fight against the Iraqi invasion along with approximately 600 other Amal members. He had been so impressed with Chamran's activism for the Lebanese Shiʿi cause in the south that he was convinced Chamran would not fight against an enemy if it were not for a just cause. Hasan Shaqra explained the importance of Chamran: “We respected the Iranian Revolution and Imam Khomeini; we didn't know Iran would turn against us. At any rate, once Chamran was martyred, we all returned to Lebanon; our connection to Iran was through Chamran.”43

Interview with Hasan Shaqra, Nabatiyya, 23 November 2002.

For Abu Kharif it was a similar story. He had been close to Chamran during the formative years of Amal, and there was no question of leaving Chamran alone in this fight, since Chamran had not left them alone in their fight against the Israelis. He recalled, “The question was not about Arabism. Saddam was against the Shiʿa, and he had killed Shiʿi leaders. We hated him.” He then took an envelope out of his pocket and showed me pictures from his time in Iran. One showed him close to Chamran in Kurdistan; the other was a scene of him kissing the hand of Ayatollah Taleqani. At the end of our conversation, he sighed, telling me, “Now it is all about politics. There is no genuine belief anymore, all party politics and money [referring to Iranian–Hizbullah ties]. It wasn't always like this.”

The memory of Mustafa Chamran is highly valued among Amal members and Musa Sadr's relatives in Lebanon. As a way to acknowledge Chamran's activism in Lebanon, Amal has named one of its schools Martyr Chamran's Education Complex (Muءassasat Shahid Chamran), located in Beysarieh near Tyre, in South Lebanon. In addition, commemorations of Chamran's death are held yearly on 21 June in Beirut and in several locations in South Lebanon by Amal members, where Chamran's former friends and comrades deliver speeches on his activism. In these commemorations, Chamran's nationality as an Iranian is often sidelined, and more emphasis is given to his activism among Lebanese Shiʿa. Although these Amal commemorations idealize Chamran, they do not highlight his ties to Iran but focus more on his activism in the Lebanese context. In this way, Amal constructs its own narrative of Chamran's stay in Lebanon that differs significantly from the official narrative of the Iranian government.

This Amal narrative places Lebanese Shiʿa at the center of a Shiʿi world, for it argues that it supported and gave refuge to important members of the Iranian anti-Shah opposition, facilitating the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Chamran, whom Amal members consider part of their own organization, was simultaneously a leading figure in the success of the Iranian Revolution. For example, at the height of tensions between the Iranian government and Amal in 1985, Nabih Berri, the head of the Amal party, wondered how the Iranian government could label Amal and its members nonbelievers (kafirs), all the while forgetting how Amal supported anti-Shah activism and how the Iranian Revolution was rooted in and crucially supported by Shiʿi Lebanon.44

Al-Nahar, 1 September 1985.

CHAMRAN: “A BRIDGE BETWEEN IRAN AND LEBANON”

Iranian government representations of Chamran as an “Iranian in Lebanon prior to the revolution” and Amal's representation of him as an exceptional person, sidelining Chamran's national background and highlighting a different memory of his 1970s ties, exist in tension. The implications of these contrasting narratives became obvious during the commemoration of his death in Chiyah, a southern suburb of Beirut, in 2002. I found this commemoration of special interest because it was the first year after official relations between Amal and the Iranian government had resumed; Amal had inaugurated its political office in Tehran in 2001. As a result, the then-Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Muhammad ʿAli Sobhani, was invited to give a speech at an Amal-organized commemoration of Mustafa Chamran.

In this speech, Sobhani describes Chamran's character as exemplary (shakhsiyat-i nemuneh) and educated; he was an innocent mystic (ʿarifi pak). Sobhani then adds that “in order to understand the unique characters of such persons, one needs to speak of the movement of Imam Khomeini,” which he does for most of the rest of his speech. In it, he compares Khomeini's and Chamran's levels of mysticism and suggests that the success of the revolution was in large part due to the level of postnationalism that these persons had reached.

He then moves on to stress that next to Musa Sadr, Chamran also played a large role in the renewal of Lebanese Shiʿi identity (tajdid-i huwiyyat-i Shiʿi). He mentions that when he met members of the resistance (guruh-i muqaweme, here referring to Hizbullah members), they told him that they were either students or friends of Chamran in the 1970s. In this, Sobhani clearly connects Chamran to the postrevolutionary Iranian government and justifies Iran's political involvement in Lebanon by highlighting that Hizbullah members knew this prominent Iranian prior to the revolution. To underline this, he further points out that when Chamran came back to Iran in 1979, he introduced himself to Iranians by saying, “I have come from Jabal ʿAmil, the land of ʿAbu Dharr [al-Ghifari]. I am the representative of the people of South Lebanon.” Sobhani concludes from this statement that, because of Chamran's unique position in South Lebanon, “Chamran was able to bring dialogue and unity between the people of South Lebanon and Iran.” Sobhani says a prayer at the end of his speech: “Let us maintain this strong bridge that Chamran has created with his blood and the blood of young Lebanese and Iranian fighters between the people of Iran and Lebanon, especially between Iran and the people of South Lebanon.”

Sobhani evidently viewed the prerevolutionary networks that linked the LMI and Musa Sadr as a preparatory step for present relations between Iran and Hizbullah, as evident in the metaphor of the bridge. By reminding attendees—who were mainly Amal affiliates—of Chamran's statement that he had come from Jabal ʿAmil, in South Lebanon, supposedly the place where the companion of the Prophet Muhammad introduced Shiʿi tradition to Jabal ʿAmil, Sobhani justified and in a certain way naturalized the current official Iranian presence in Lebanon, above all in the South. Chamran was obviously of Iranian origin, a representative in South Lebanon prior to the revolution. According to Sobhani, Chamran helped renew Lebanese Shiʿi identity and legitimized Sobhani's presence in Lebanon some twenty years later.

After Sobhani's speech, Amal deputy ʿAli Kharis began his commemorative speech on Chamran. Although he praised Chamran's unique character in a way similar to Sobhani, his vision of Chamran differed greatly. Kharis situated Chamran in a different Shiʿi network of the 1970s. Kharis's speech stresses the importance of Musa Sadr to the success of the Iranian Revolution by suggesting how “Musa Sadr and Chamran were the backbone (jism al-asāsī) of the Iranian Revolution and how one cannot speak of the Iranian Revolution without mentioning these two people.” Kharis does not subordinate Musa Sadr and Chamran's activism to that of Khomeini. Instead he reverses the hierarchical order evident in Sobhani's speech. In Sobhani's speech, Musa Sadr's activism is peripheral to Khomeini's, but Kharis suggests a reversal of this order as he speaks at length about Musa Sadr's activism in Lebanon and what he considers Sadr's fundamental role in the success of the Iranian Revolution.

CONCLUSION

I began my analysis by suggesting that the ruling religious elite in Iran and Amal contest the memory of prerevolutionary ties between Iranian anti-Shah activists and Amal. The contested memory of Mustafa Chamran demonstrates the nexus of power struggles, debates over religious authenticity, and production of national identity. Prerevolutionary ties between Amal and Iranian opposition members were not a preparatory step to the creation of Hizbullah—the reading of history propagated by the Iranian government. Through its activism in Lebanon, such as in ritual commemoration, the Iranian government aims to propagate the memory of a long history of interaction between Iran and Lebanese Shiʿa in order to justify its current activities and presence in Lebanon. Amal members, on the other hand, resist this reading of prerevolutionary ties and correctly insist that Chamran was not part of the network that helped create the rival party to Amal, Hizbullah, in 1982. In resisting Iranian hegemonic claims in Lebanon, Amal mobilizes the contested memory of the figure of Mustafa Chamran.

I have analyzed the conflicts between the two anti-Shah Islamist opposition activist groups in Lebanon in order to demonstrate that Chamran was in fact not part of the postrevolutionary Shiʿi network supporting the creation of Hizbullah. I have shown that their debates revolved around Musa Sadr's relations with three different actors: Palestinian militias in Lebanon, the Maronite-dominated government, and the Pahlavi regime. In this conflict, the anti-Sadr activists equated the larger Palestinian cause with Palestinian activism in Lebanon and unjustifiably accused Sadr of not supporting the Palestinian cause because he wanted to limit Palestinian activism in Lebanon out of concern for Lebanese Shiʿa in the South. Those claiming to follow the line of Khomeini accused Sadr and those closely affiliated with him, in particular the LMI leaders and Amal, of practicing an inauthentic form of Shiʿi Islam. The question of support for Palestinians then became closely related to debates about Shiʿi religious authenticity, a debate that was not confined to religious scholars or doctrinal issues but that included lay political activists as well.

These struggles over Lebanese Shiʿi support for Palestinian activism through Lebanon continued after the success of the Iranian Revolution. They also motivated the religious ruling elite in Iran to support the creation of Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shiʿi party committed to Palestinians regardless of the consequences to local Shiʿi. The Iranian government and Amal broke diplomatic relations in 1982, and the Iranian religious elite often accused Amal members of being agents of Israel and the Maronite government.

One needs to ask why these memories are important and situate memory production in sociopolitical contexts. Transnational Shiʿi networks offer an interesting site to study such memory production because they have existed for decades and because their participants have multiple ways of interpreting their ties. At the same time, members of Shiʿi networks are engaged in forms of identity production that combine religious and national dimensions in complex ways.

Previous studies on Shiʿi Islam in the Middle East have either explained differences among Shiʿa as the product of nationalism or downplayed the importance of national ideologies by emphasizing transnational solidarity. Raymond Hinnebusch45

Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Politics of Identity in the Middle East International Relations,” in International Relations of the Middle East, ed. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 171.

and Graham Fuller and Rend Franke46

Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shiʿa: The Forgotten Muslims (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

exemplify the former tendency, explaining the differences between Shiʿa in Iran and the Arab world with reference to preexisting ethnic, linguistic, and “cultural” differences. The historian Juan Cole, in contrast, inspired by the work of Prasenjit Duara on Chinese history, has issued a call to “rescue Shiʿi Islam from the nation,” warning against adopting the lens of contemporary national boundaries and ideologies for the study of 18th- and 19th-century Shiʿi worlds.47

Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shiʿite Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 1.

As the example of Chamran—an Iranian activist in Lebanon—shows, nationality, ethnicity, and language are categories of political practice rather than useful analytical categories to describe the dynamics of transnational Shiʿi Islam and Shiʿi identity production in their national contexts.

One can neither simply suggest that language, “culture,” history, and ethnic and national identity are obvious barriers separating Shiʿa from each other, nor can one argue that religious identities self-evidently link Shiʿa across borders.48

Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, “Imagining Shiʿite Iran. Transnationalism and Religious Authenticity in the Muslim World,” Iranian Studies 40 (2007): 17–35.

It takes ideological work to construct differences as well as create solidarities among Shiʿa, and this work needs to be situated within larger political, religious, and socioeconomic contexts. Contested memories are central for the formation of group identities among members of transnational Shiʿi networks, negotiating cross-border solidarities and national difference. National borders can suddenly matter or seem less relevant at different moments. Social memories are not static but are in dialogue with the political contexts. They often shift in the dynamic world of Shiʿi transnational politics.

Author's note: I thank the four anonymous IJMES reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Many friends and scholars helped throughout the researching and writing of this article. My appreciations go to Mojtaba Akhlaghi, Louay Charafeddine, Fred Donner, Patrick Eisenlohr, Mohammad Eskandari, Sayyid Hani Fahs, and Chris Toensing. This article is based on my master's thesis, “Transnational Religious and Political Networks between Iran and Lebanon in the 1970s,” completed at the University of Chicago in 2000. Versions of this article were presented at the University of Chicago Middle East History and Theory Workshop in 2000 and 2001, at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2006, and at MESA in 2006. Support for additional research came from the University of Chicago Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation (CASPIC) MacArthur Scholars Fellowship 2001–2002 and Social Science Research Council—Program on Global Security and Cooperation Fellowship 2002–2004. To hayat albi Patrick.