Genealogies—representations of kinship and narratives of origin—are in the transnational Shi‘ite world intimately connected to politics of piety, the production of nationalism, and struggles over authority. In this essay, I am concerned with certain inflections in the links between genealogy and piety that make these terms central to contests over notions of territoriality in contemporary Shi‘ite politics. Nationalism replaces the sovereignty of God with the exclusive sovereignty of a “people” over a clearly demarcated territory, but religious language, identifications, and imagery often play prominent roles in how the imagined community of the nation is fashioned and delimited. Here I will show how, mediated through genealogy, religious leaders and pious movements with transnational ties produce religious authority, and create links to territory, to assert themselves as exemplary cultural citizens.
The Middle East is now characterized by the rise of influential and popular Islamist movements. To better understand the conflicts and allegiances that the region's state and non-state actors forge with each other and with Western powers, we must analyze how pious movements operate and create national identities within the realities of the nation-states era. Equally important is how they produce these identities in light of their transnational ties, and their rhetoric that the region's nation-states are arbitrary creations of colonial powers.
As Peter Mandaville argues, the rise of transnational Islam does not necessarily have a homogenizing effect but may lead to “a new politics within Islam as different interpretations and political tendencies compete for followers throughout the umma” (Reference Mandaville2007: 299). One such new politics, I suggest, is the production of religious nationalism through linking practices of piety to the making of national memories (van der Veer Reference Van der Veer1994), and one theme these movements focus on is that of sacred territories. Islamist movements such as the Lebanese Shi‘ite party of Hizbullah are eager to create their ideal state and society by taking over secular state structures. By suggesting that the boundary between the secular and the religious is permeable (Asad Reference Asad2003), I do not mean simply that religion and politics go hand in hand. Nor do I intend to merely distance myself from instrumentalist and functionalist analyses of Islamists' activities in a national context, such as those recently suggested by scholars like Oliver Roy (Reference Roy2004: 70). Rather, I am concerned with how activists themselves define and interrelate these categories. To defend their pious credentials, that is, to create godly selves, Shi‘ite ethnic entrepreneurs draw on a variety of definitions of politics and religion. At times, they suggest an understanding of religious identities as postmodern, partially resembling what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri view as a collapse of binary oppositions where the spheres of religion, politics, culture, and economy are hardly distinguishable (Reference Hardt and Negri2001). At other moments, Shi‘ite activists strictly differentiate those spheres, and their arguments over the nature of religious and political identities read more like Oliver Roy's instrumentalist position toward religion (2004).
In what follows, I employ detailed historical and ethnographic discussion to elucidate pious subject formations in a deeply politicized transnational Shi‘ite context. For those involved, public piety means more than an active and visible religious practice; primarily it means to position believers in a specific historical context, creating a web of associations and co-ocurrences between persons, events, and landscapes. This locating, first, allows for certain activities to be marked as sacred and pious, and second, it offers justifications for these pious aspirations. Public piety and godly social norms are then established and reproduced by making historical memories which in turn help frame a range of practices as pious. In the Iranian-Lebanese Shi‘ite context, since the early 1960s public piety has inevitably had a transnational dimension, which forces participants to continuously redraw the boundaries of piety and redefine its public form. Often, such redrawing entails nationalizing piety in an attempt to justify religious leadership credentials. One way piety can be cast in a national context is through the appropriation of secular notions of territoriality—internationally recognized, modern political borders—to produce sacred space. Shi‘ite activists then position themselves as part of that space's history to justify their claims to authentic and legalistic piety. Genealogy is one strategy they use to create ties to the land.
A literature exists on the ongoing relevance of genealogy for the politics of nationalism (Shin Reference Shin2006; Shryock Reference Shryock1997) and the formation of diasporas (Ho Reference Ho2006). However, scholars working on the importance of genealogy in present-day politics have paid scant attention to the dense connections between genealogy and piety. Here, I will argue that these are key to understanding the dynamics of the contemporary transnational Shi‘ite world. Further, scholars examining contemporary pious movements in the Muslim world have for the most part concentrated on how the regimes of piety that these groups promote are intricately involved in the disciplines and routines of everyday life (Deeb Reference Deeb2006; Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Schielke n.d.). They have been less concerned with how their projects feed into struggles over nations and claims to modern political territories. Piety and nationalism continue to be imagined as distinct categories, even when these same scholars have established that the issue of piety also belongs to the “public” realm and is tightly entwined with politics.
My analysis will explore the biography and activism of two Lebanese Shi‘ite leaders who maintained intense transnational ties to Iran during the 1970s and 1980s. I will also examine current Iranian cultural politics in Lebanon, and Hizbullah's vision of South Lebanese history. My aim is to show how piety is often imagined through nationalist categories and produced by creating a sense of rootedness in a territory. To explain how religious scholars and pious movements create religious nationalism and assert their leadership, I will highlight the tensions surrounding the “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” of pious spaces.
Drawing on my case studies, I make four broad arguments about the links between piety, modern territoriality, and genealogy. First, assertions of piety can be supported by appropriating Western concepts of territorial integrity. Shi‘ites make use of a range of political and philosophical traditions to declare piety, not just those considered local and “non-Western” but also traditions that most analysts would recognize as “Western” ones connected to modern regimes of governance. Second, piety can be produced through engaging in discourses of genealogy in diverse ways, not only through emphasizing genealogical purity linking a person directly to an ancestral source of authority. Mixed origins and backgrounds may also be stressed, and hybrid genealogies can be a source of piety. Third, piety is tightly connected to visions of the modern nation, and this is one dimension in which religious traditions are experienced and refracted through nationalist ideologies. Claims to share common notions of piety across borders do not necessarily diminish the importance of national borders, and in fact can contribute to more effective narratives of the nation in struggle with others over its ownership.
Fourth and finally, class plays an important role in how subjects personalize piety, and how they offer unique interpretations of past events and actions to position their own transformative experiences. Thus, while state and non-state “piety entrepreneurs” provide subjects with some discourses and practices to express their piety, class and educational background (and gender, but that is not my focus here) can enable subjects to express their own piety in creative ways so as to distinguish themselves from the pious masses. In this competition for distinction, these subjects also compete for access to symbolic and political capital with those who already have access to them based on claims to biological genealogy. At one level, then, piety politics is a struggle with a class dimension in which those involved contest the legitimate criteria for access to resources and power. In one particular version of this contest, which I will discuss later, pious intellectuals distinguish themselves from the masses and other elites through their education and knowledge rather than through their professed biological genealogy. Thus it is important to understand how class identities are produced within such pious movements, movements that often maintain that their only way to differentiate among members is according to their degree of piety, an idealized notion of morality that supposedly removes subjects from socio-economic, cultural, and historical contexts.Footnote 1
SACRED JABAL ‘AMIL AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN LEBANON
I will analyze three contrasting genealogies in which actors in a transnational Shi‘ite world between modern Iran and Lebanon establish links to Jabal ‘Amil as a genealogical source of authority. Jabal ‘Amil is a geographic entity regarded as one of the prestigious centers of Twelver Shi‘ite learning from which many well-known Shi‘ite scholars emerged. It now corresponds roughly to South Lebanon.
Embedded in ‘Amili oral history, and later in ‘Amili writings, has been the view that a close companion of the Prophet Muhammad, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari (d. 651 C.E.), introduced Shi‘ism to the region. ‘Amilis then “prided themselves on being among the earliest if not the first converts to Twelver Shi‘ism” (Jurdi-Abisaab Reference Jurdi-Abisaab1999: 4). They also claim Jabal ‘Amil as the leading center of Shi‘ite scholastic leadership, against historical evidence that points to Hilla in Iraq as a prestigious seat of religious learning where, during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, many important Jabal ‘Amili scholars received their training. Only during the fourteenth century did ‘Amili scholars establish centers of learning throughout Jabal ‘Amil and the number of ‘Amili scholars increase. By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there was a clear shift from Hilla to various villages in Jabal ‘Amil, which now became the most accredited place of Shi‘ite learning, with an emphasis on linguistic, legalistic, and doctrinal disciplines. By the first decade of the sixteenth century, however, due to a range of economic and political reasons, Jabal ‘Amil's religious schools began to decline and there was a large-scale out-migration of scholars that lasted for about two centuries. A total of 159 left for the Safavid Persia (1501–1722), whose rulers were eager to spread the Twelver Shi‘ite faith quickly and effectively. During the sixteenth century, these ‘Amilis held lucrative posts at the court and enjoyed high respect due to the reputation of Jabal ‘Amili scholars as representatives of the Shi‘ite legalistic tradition (Jurdi-Abisaab Reference Jurdi-Abisaab1999). By the mid-seventeenth century, however, due to the political changes in the Safavid court and its religious tastes and inclinations, interest in ‘Amili's version of Shi‘ism waned and the migration of ‘Amili scholars declined (Jurdi-Abisaab Reference Jurdi-Abisaab2004: 95, 102).
Shi‘ite authenticity debates are important not only in the Shi‘ite world; they must also be situated within both the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Lebanese national context. Lebanon is a multi-sectarian state with a population of about four million people, almost 40 percent of them Shi‘ites. The French mandate created Lebanon in 1920 on the premise that it would serve as a refuge for the Christian Maronite community in the mainly Muslim Middle East. In this new Lebanon, Maronites held the most important political positions while Shi‘ites, in particular, were barely acknowledged as cultural citizens. From its inception it was recognized that Lebanon was a unique place for Muslim-Christian coexistence. Citizenship is mediated through membership in a religious community, and political posts are distributed according to the subject's religious background. This combination of public religion, unequal access to political power, and the coexistence formula all motivated inter- and intra-communal debates over the authenticity of religious traditions. Two questions were central: Whose religion is more capable of coexistence? And who in the community deserves to represent it in the political arena? Piety became tightly connected to power struggles on the state level and served as the only effective discourse through which to participate as cultural citizens in Lebanon. It is within this Lebanese discourse of coexistence, which frequently compels politics to be expressed in religious terms, that competing claims to Shi‘ite piety (and public performance of it) and ideal citizenship need to be situated. Piety and exemplary citizenship have become two facets of the same issue, each supporting the other.
Scholars of nationalism (Anderson Reference Anderson1991; Gellner Reference Gellner1983) have not only distanced themselves from primordialist and purely instrumentalist understandings of nationalism, but more recent work has deconstructed the previously taken-for-granted link between secularism and nationalism (Colley Reference Colley1992; van der Veer Reference Van der Veer1994). These scholars have shown how religion is an integral part of envisioning a nation, and have argued that religious practices and national politics are often intriguingly intertwined (Juergensmeyer Reference Juergensmeyer1994). But while national identities often appear to both Islamists and secularists as self-evident social realities, nationalist discourse and practice often are preconditions for political participation, gaining access to economic resources, and acquiring symbolic capital.
Against this background, one of the principal protagonists who traces his genealogy back to Jabal ‘Amil is the well-known Iranian-born Lebanese Shi‘ite leader, Sayyid Musa Sadr, whose ancestors moved from Jabal ‘Amil to Persia roughly 150 years ago. Sadr moved to Lebanon in 1959 and by refashioning his ‘Amili background claimed religious authority and rootedness there. In the ongoing competition over community leadership he met hostility from many Lebanese Shi‘ite leaders who labeled him an inauthentic Shi‘ite and an Iranian.
Another protagonist in this struggle over genealogical authority is the Lebanese Shi‘ite scholar Sayyid Hani Fahs, who currently resists the Iranian religious ruling elite's hegemonic claims in Lebanon. He draws a connection between piety and national territory and produces a certain type of memory of Jabal ‘Amil by creating indexical relations between people and land. Fahs highlights the existence of a vibrant Shi‘ite theological-legal tradition, with well-known scholars who presented voices of authentic Shi‘ism in Jabal ‘Amil during the late Middle Ages. For him, it is above all the borders of the Lebanese nation-state that safeguard Shi‘ite authenticity and its purity from presumably inauthentic Iranian Shi‘ite traditions.
The third protagonist whose politics of piety and territoriality I will address is the current Iranian government. In building its ties to Jabal ‘Amil, the government relies on a different genealogical logic from that of Fahs.Footnote 2 Its representatives present authentic Shi‘ism as the product of joint efforts between the ruling religious elite in Iran and Hizbullah, which declares itself the guardian of South Lebanon—in other words, of Jabal ‘Amil. The Iranian government asserts piety by emphasizing a hybrid religious history, one presumably created in the sixteenth century through the migration of Jabal ‘Amili scholars to Persia.
GENEALOGY BETWEEN PURITY AND HYBRIDITY
Studies of genealogy can be broadly divided into three fields of inquiry: nationalism, diasporas, and religious orders. Scholars of nationalism have analyzed the politics of genealogy in nationalist projects, and also how subaltern groups have often engaged in a different set of genealogical discourses to resist state-envisioned nationalism. These subaltern groups instead offer alternative national narratives that place them in a prominent position in the nation. For example, notions of nationhood based on genealogy can be found in official Korean nationalism, in which the idea of a shared bloodline serves as the basis to imagine Korea as a nation with a homogenous ethnic identity. Advocates of Korean nationalism often imagine Koreans as the descendants of Tan'gun, the mythic founder of the Korean nation (Shin Reference Shin2006: 4–5). As for subaltern resistance to such official nationalisms, Andrew Shryock shows how the Balga tribes in Jordan resist official Jordanian nationalism that aims to create a roughly homogenous nation that erases Balga's claims to represent the real Jordanians based on a genealogical model of community. The Balga ethnic entrepreneurs each offer alternative readings to this state-sponsored nationalism. By producing what Shryock calls “tribal literature,” in which Jordanian identities are based on blood, these spokesmen establish the identity of “true Jordanians” (Reference Shryock1997: 314).
In this context, genealogy is a form of symbolic capital, a mode of distinction that may be based on shared blood, history, ethnicity, language, and ethics. Membership in such genealogy often justifies forms of seniority and authority. Genealogy is also about unequal access to and safeguarding of territory as participants envision direct relations between people, territory, and polity by which they give territory a specifically moral character. Participation in such a genealogy also means to share a vision of a moral world and carry responsibility for its realization. Genealogy here emphasizes purity.
Other scholars have shown how diasporic communities engage in genealogic discourses to imagine a homeland and their ongoing relations to it, and to organize their lives in the diaspora. Engseng Ho examines how the possession of genealogical texts justifies diasporic transcultural movements. Ho illustrates how by the seventeenth century the (Yemeni) Hadrami sayyids developed a genealogical thinking and produced textual sources that often served to give moral guidance. “The elaboration of genealogical concepts amounted to the creation of theories of and for a diaspora: how it moved through time and space, what kinds of exchanges it could and should have with other peoples, how it could maintain a corporate identity through generations of intermarriage with foreigners abroad, and whether imperatives existed for doing so” (2006: 153). In other words, genealogies were not only about becoming rooted, but also about justifying hybridity and giving moral guidance in a hybrid world.
Finally, other scholarly works point to how religious leaders trace their genealogies to authoritative sources to legitimize their piety and authenticity. For example, el-Sayed el-Aswad explains how the Sufi leaders of the al-Ahmadiyya al-Shinnawiyya Sufi order in the Nile Delta of Egypt trace their genealogy to the Prophet Muhammad and his family. After undergoing a specific rite de passage their members often believe that they share the same genealogy. To them, spiritual genealogy means “the affiliation and allegiance among members adhering to certain religious or sanctified principles, values, rituals, and practices expressed in hereditary, social and transsocial or spiritual terms” (Reference El-Aswad2006: 503). In the view of its leaders and members, this spiritual genealogy replaces blood and tribal affiliation, and instead emphasizes a shared sense of piety as a basis for creating a community.
A common theme in the first two strands of scholarship is that the subjects of the study are either born into or are part of a diasporic community claiming descent from the territory to which they create genealogical links. The third strand explains links between genealogy and piety. I intend to show the triangular relation between genealogy, religious authority, and the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of space constantly produced and reproduced as sacred. Specifically, I want to lay out the political and historical context of the creation of indexical relations between people and land through genealogy, and to illustrate how these three categories of legitimization—genealogy, territory, and piety—become intrinsically linked in Shi‘ite claims to leadership.
Hybrid Genealogy, or Deterritorializing and Reterritorializing Jabal ‘Amil
Competing claims to piety and authority between Sadr, Fahs, and the Iranian ruling religious elite come to fore in the three contrasting visions of their ties to Jabal ‘Amil. These debates surrounding piety do not only reflect different understandings of religious performances or interpretations of historical events invested with sacred significance, such as the battle of Karbala (Deeb Reference Deeb2006). Equally important to the visions of tradition they articulate are other, presumably profane historical events. Muslim leaders’ notions of piety must certainly be understood on their own terms, in terms of their own understandings of subject formation rather than those of secular-liberal and Western intellectual traditions (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005). However, one means through which they produce piety is by appropriating initially Western concepts of modern territorial integrity.
As I will show, Sadr and Fahs actually maintain their religious authority by relying on the secular geography of Lebanon. Genealogic purity here is an attempt to fix the sacredness of Jabal ‘Amil within the Lebanese national borders and limit access to it to certain Lebanese Shi‘ite citizens. This discourse of genealogic purity, then, creates a hierarchical relation between Lebanese Shi‘ite citizens, and can be read as intra-Shi‘ite attempts to define qualities of cultural citizenship in Lebanon. The debate over this citizenship is therefore not limited to conflicting Christian, Sunni, and Shi‘ite narratives of the Lebanese identity and geographic center-periphery struggles; as the example of debates over Jabal ‘Amil show, yet another center-periphery debate is at work among members of the “periphery.”
By contrast, the Iranian ruling elite creates genealogical ties to Jabal ‘Amil through engaging in a discourse of hybridity. Claims to religious authority in this context are created as a result of intense interactions between the Ottoman Jabal ‘Amili scholars and the Safavid court, and between present-day Lebanon and Iran. Although memories of the Safavid empire in post-revolutionary Iran are certainly contested, the Iranian outreach organizations in Lebanon de-emphasize these Iranian debates to legitimize their current presence in Lebanon as part of a longstanding tradition of interaction between Shi‘ite Iran and Shi‘ite Lebanon.
As scholars of Creole cultures in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean have pointed out, acknowledgment of hybrid identities in the celebration of Creole cultures do not necessarily imply benign pluralism or religious and ethnic harmony. These identities have formed in the context of struggles over cultural citizenship and hegemony over the Creole nation (Eisenlohr Reference Eisenlohr2007; Khan Reference Khan2001; Munasinghe Reference Munasinghe2002). Similarly, I suggest that the Iranian government's drawing on a discourse of hybridity is less about a vision of a pluralistic Shi‘ite world without so-called artificial national borders and very much intertwined with its nationalist agenda and hegemonic desires in Lebanon. A hybrid genealogy justifies the Iranians’ involvement in Lebanese Shi‘ite debates over cultural citizenship and Iran's support of one vision of Lebanon over another through its backing of a particular Shi‘ite group, in this case Hizbullah. Unlike Ho's case study, genealogy here does not buttress hybridity, but the genealogy itself is imagined as hybrid in a quest for political and moral dominance.
Iranian and Arab nationalism are frequently envisioned as in opposition, so that boundaries between the Persian and Arabic languages are often sharply drawn, and Iranians and Arabs are assumed to be from different races. Therefore, it would be difficult for the Iranian government to propagate a hybrid identity comprising Lebanese and Iranian Shi‘ites based on ethnic and linguistic mixing (although on the linguistic level they are experimenting). Instead, by tracing the origins of these Shi‘ite scholars to their birthplace, through which the ‘Amili migration to Safavid Persia becomes part of the narrative of continuous relations between Iran and Lebanon, the Iranian government presents Hizbullah as only the most recent cooperation between these two countries and peoples, whose interactions can be traced back five hundred years.
MUSA SADR: GENEALOGY AND DIASPORA
Musa Sadr was born in Qom/Iran in 1928 to an elite Shi‘ite ‘ulama family refashioning ‘Amili origins. His father, Sayyid Sadr al-Din Sadr, had been an influential Ayatollah teaching at the religious seminaries in Qom. Sadr studied at Tehran University and eventually moved to the religious seminaries in Najaf and relocated to Lebanon in 1959 when he began his career as an Imam in the mosque in Tyre, in southern Lebanon. Among his activities had been the opening of the Supreme Islamic Shi‘ite Council (SISC) in 1967, as the first step to creating institutions that solely dealt with Shi‘ite concerns. Sadr became the head of SISC until his disappearance in Libya in August 1978. He also organized the Harakat al-mahrumin (The movement of the deprived) with a military wing of Afwaj al-muqawama al-lubnaniyya (Amal) in 1974. Since Sadr's disappearance this has been under the de facto leadership of the lawyer Nabih Berri, a Lebanese Shi‘ite from South Lebanon. Amal is known as the first Shi‘ite political party in Lebanon.
One avenue followed by Sadr and his opponents in their contests for political power was to perpetuate a discourse of citizenship and national identity. Determining whether Sadr was Iranian or Lebanese illuminates how many Lebanese Shi‘ites in the 1960s and 1970s imagined the link between piety, territory, and genealogy. For both Sadr and his opponents, piety was linked to Jabal ‘Amil, and genealogy was the key to accessing this symbolic capital which would enable him to compete with other Lebanese Shi‘ites for leadership positions. While Sadr traced his biological genealogy back to Jabal ‘Amil to authenticate his credentials as both a pious leader and as a Lebanese, his opponents highlighted his birthplace and legal citizenship (instead of his cultural citizenship) to question his piety and consequently his leadership abilities. They insisted that claims to cultural citizenship are secondary to legal citizenship.
In what follows, I first focus on the local Lebanese context from 1959–1978. There I examine two trends that one could call the “Lebanonization” and the “Iranization” of Sadr. In the second part, I briefly explain the transnational Shi‘ite context from 1970–1979 in order to situate post-revolutionary Iranian debates about Sadr's identity. A third section then lays out why after his disappearance he was labeled Lebanese, Iranian, or a Shi‘ite transnational. I suggest that the figure of Sadr has become a paradigm through which Lebanese and other Shi‘ites have conceived the place of Lebanese Shi‘ites in a wider Shi‘ite world in divergent ways. In referring to debates over his identity as a paradigm I mean that the memory of Sadr involves not only a core narrative. It also has ritual and mythical elements (mythical in the anthropological sense—removed from a particular time and space, an abstract story) that can be drawn on to generate multiple and sometimes opposed accounts of Lebanese Shi‘ites within a Lebanese nation and of their relationships to Shi‘ites elsewhere, above all Iran. For example, over the years, within that Lebanese paradigm, there has been a shift in Sadr's identity from his being portrayed as anti-Palestinian to his being depicted as the leader of the resistance, from his being an Iranian spy to being a Lebanese national figure whose trademark was coexistence. These shifts stand in a clear dialogic relationship with Lebanese Shi‘ites’ national and international politics.
The Lebanonization of Musa Sadr
Three principal groups within the Shi‘ite community opposed Sadr's activism and saw it to threaten their own positions and power: the leftists, the feudal lords from the south, and some prominent religious families and religious scholars. One means of resisting Sadr's popularity was to refuse his claim to be an authentic Lebanese.
To many of Sadr's political opponents he was born in Qom and he held an Iranian passport—although he did receive Lebanese nationality before his disappearance—and he spoke Arabic with a Persian accent. These were reasons enough to label Sadr an Iranian. To his followers, like all Amal members who agreed with Sadr's activism, he was clearly a Lebanese, and his Persian accent was simply part of his charm and charisma, the result of a historical coincidence without deeper implications. As we will see, both his supporters and opponents engaged in a discourse of origins to decide his identity. Some traced his genealogy back to the nineteenth century to include him within the Lebanese context, while others took his birthplace as a starting point from which to exclude him from Lebanese political life.
Sadr contributed to this narrative confirming his Lebanese identity as he actively positioned himself in the Lebanese context and in particular in South Lebanon. In the Middle East of the 1960s, especially at the peak of rivalries between the Shah of Iran and Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Lebanese Shi‘ites’ support of Nasser's brand of Arab nationalism, Sadr's tracing of his genealogy to Jabal ‘Amil was crucial to Lebanese Shi‘ites accepting him as an Arab political leader. For example, Sadr in his Persian-accented Arabic introduced himself in the following way only two years after his arrival in Lebanon in 1961:
Interviewer I know your origins are Lebanese (min asl lubnani), but when did your family emigrate, and why?
Sadr My origins can be traced back to Sayyid Salih Charafeddine, who emigrated with his son Sadr al-Din to Iraq 150 years ago … . Ever since then, a large family section, which took the name Sadr, has lived in Iran and Iraq (al-Hayat, 22 Dec. 1961).
By 1966, when the need became more pressing to clarify his position toward the Shi‘ite feudal lords in the south and the larger public, Sadr changed his position slightly, and his tracing of his genealogy to the south and Jabal ‘Amil became central. He also emphasized how the Sadr family, in what he presented as a diasporic existence in Iran, kept its ‘Amili title, and, implicitly, its heritage. To the question, “Is it right what some say that you are a descendent of a Persian family?” he responded: “I am from a Lebanese religious family who used to live in the south, my grandfather Sayyid Salih had emigrated from the village of Ma‘rake, in the vicinity of Tyre during the Turkish period… . We used to live in Iraq where my grandfather established a family known as the bayt al-Sadr. Then his son Sayyid Sadr al-Din traveled to Iran to visit the tomb of Imam al-rida. When passing through Isfahan his relatives urged him to stay, due to their custom of respecting Lebanese ‘Amili ‘ulama, so he stayed and established a large family… . Both families in Iran and Iraq have kept their title of al-‘Amiliyyin” (al-Hawadith, 7 Oct. 1966, my emphasis).
The Iranization of Musa Sadr and Rapprochement
Among those who resisted Sadr's political activism in Lebanon, especially his attempts to institutionalize Shi‘ism, were many religious scholars, some of them from the well-known ‘ulama families from the south. I will concentrate on one such family, the well-known al-Amins. The prominent religious scholar Muhsin al-Amin was known for his advocacy of taqrib, Sunni/Shi‘ite rapprochement and solidarity. In this context, he was for example active in debates over the “proper” modes of performing and interpreting the battle of Karbala. He saw some public Shi‘ite activism as creating divisions among the Muslims, and of course as reinforcing the image of Shi‘ites as backward and anti-modern (Weiss Reference Weiss2007). In August 2000, just prior to Hasan al-Amin's death, I conducted two lengthy interviews with him. Many Lebanese Shi‘ite religious scholars were opposed to Sadr, who was associated with the Charafeddine clan, the rival family of the al-Amin's, and Hasan al-Amin, who was the son of Muhsin al-Amin, expressed what they thought of Sadr's activism.
To al-Amin, Sadr was an agent of the Shah who wanted to create divisions among Lebanese Muslims and ally the Shi‘ites with Maronites in order to weaken the regional position of Sunnis and ultimately that of Nasser. This group was strongly opposed to the idea of creating the Supreme Islamic Shi‘ite Council and separating Shi‘ite affairs from the Sunni Dar al-Fatwa. In al-Amin's view, the creation of the Council was a turning point in the relationship between Sunnis and Shi‘ites:
At the time Sayyid Musa came to Lebanon it was customary that the call for prayers in the official radio was said in the Sunni tradition. He complained to the ministry of media and argued that they should recite both forms of azans (call for prayers) on the public radio since the Shi‘ites are part of the Lebanese nation and government, too. The fitna [strife], began right there. Sunnis rejected this proposal while many Shi‘ites insisted upon it. It was agreed that in the evening call for prayers the phrase “hayi ‘ala al-khayr al-‘amal” [which indicates adhering to Shi‘ite faith] be added while in the early morning calls, the phrase was not to be included (interview with author, Beirut, Aug. 2000).
Hasan al-Amin continued with his anti-Sadr narrative by explaining how, amid this fitna, Sadr began to create an alliance with the Maronites and thus began to pray and hold convocations in churches. This, in his view, “was naturally a step against the Sunni interest.” In this context, he comments on Sadr's acquisition of Lebanese citizenship:
Musa Sadr was an Iranian with an Iranian passport, he was the representative of Iranian politics in Lebanon and his activities were coordinated with the Lebanese deuxième bureau. Usually, a person needs to be a permanent resident of Lebanon for at least ten years to apply for citizenship. But those Maronites who saw in Sadr a good ally found a loophole in the citizenship law, which excluded religious leaders from this law. However, this law was created during the French Mandate to simplify the movement of French religious leaders and missionaries especially. Nonetheless, Sadr was able to receive Lebanese citizenship (ibid.).
Al-Amin presents Shi‘ite-Sunni power relations as a zero-sum game, while Sadr's interest in institution-building must be considered in the context of political sectarianism and the setup of the Lebanese constitution. In accusing Sadr of inciting sectarianism in a country whose foundational myth is coexistence, they attempted to neutralize him politically. However, al-Amin's dissatisfaction with Sadr need to be situated in the South Lebanese context as well, specifically with respect to the bitter rivalries between the al-Amin and Charafeddine families. His critique of Sadr as a stooge of the Iranian embassy and the deuxième bureau must be explained in relation to the anxieties of some Shi‘ite religious elites over institutionalization of Shi‘ism and the consequences this would have in Lebanon. For example, some expressed their anti-establishment critique in theological discourse, calling the creation of the Supreme Islamic Shi‘ite Council an innovation (bid‘a) or a step towards ruining the (imagined) autonomy of the ‘ulama, since it would closely work with the state (Sankari Reference Sankari2005: 145). In addition, as I have noted Muhsin al-Amin believed that the only way Shi‘ites could be empowered in the new nation-state of Lebanon was to reconfigure their relations with the more powerful and established Sunni community. For instance, he was opposed to the sectarian law advanced during the French mandate to separate Shi‘ite personal status courts from the Sunnis (Abisaab and Jurdi-Abisaab n.d.). Naturally, Sadr's entire project to establish Shi‘ite institutions in Lebanon ran against al-Amin's vision and his longstanding efforts for Sunni-Shi‘ite rapprochement. Among these elite Shi‘ite rivals, Sadr's ties to Jabal ‘Amil did not guarantee his Lebanese identity nor bolster his leadership qualities. Rather, for these opponents, what would authenticate Sadr's genealogical ties to Jabal ‘Amil was Sadr's vision of what constitutes Shi‘ism (and of course Lebanese Shi‘ite identity) and how the Shi‘ite community should regulate its relation to Sunnis in a country dominated by non-Muslims.
The Arab-Israeli Conflict and Politics of Genealogy
At one level, debates over Sadr's national identity in Lebanon between 1959 and 1978, and in post-revolutionary Iran up to the mid-1990s, were tightly connected to what these opponents believed was Sadr's insufficient commitment to Palestinians. Thus the credibility of Sadr's genealogical ties to Jabal ‘Amil also depended on how those judging his background viewed the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Between 1970 and 1979 Lebanon served as a base for Iranian anti-Shah activism. Two Islamic opposition movements were connected to varying degrees with Sadr, and both expressed opposition to the Iranian Shah's internal and external politics in discourses over the authenticity of Shi‘ite identity (among other available discourses). One of these was the Liberation Movement of Iran abroad (henceforth LMIa); the other was made up of close associates of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who called themselves maktabis. The latter accused Sadr of being pro-Shah and anti-Palestinian. That the Shah maintained close economic and political ties with Israel outraged opposition leaders such as Khomeini, who in his speeches condemned him as a fire-worshiper. Within this milieu, the question of support for the Palestinian cause and degree of Shi‘ite authenticity became tightly interwoven (Shaery-Eisenlohr Reference Shaery-Eisenlohr2008). In a way, it was accidental that Lebanon provided a safe haven for these anti-Shah activists (due to its lack of a strong state) at a time when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict played such a large role in the lives of Shi‘ites, especially in the south. Simultaneously, the Iranian Islamic opposition to the Shah began to link Shi‘ite authenticity with uncompromising support of the Palestinian cause. Sadr was caught in between two debates that at some points overlapped. The first was situated in the local Lebanese context, where he had to prove what his opponents referred to as his Lebanese component of identity, and that was only possible if he bowed to their vision of Shi‘ite authenticity and accepted their claims to leadership. Otherwise he would be labeled as an Iranian spy. In this local debate the support of the Palestinian cause was important.
The second debate was among various Iranian anti-Shah activists stationed in Lebanon and Iraq, in which Sadr was accused of representing an inauthentic Shi‘ism. Elsewhere I have described in some detail the ties between Amal and the Iranian anti-Shah opposition prior to the Iranian revolution in the 1970s (Shaery-Eisenlohr Reference Shaery-Eisenlohr2007). Suffice it to say here that both the Sadr and Amal leadership maintained close ties to members of the Iranian Liberation Movement (LMI), an anti-Shah Islamist party whose members held important positions in the Iranian government from the revolution until 1982. After 1982, LMI members lost their power to maktabis, those closely associated with Khomeini's vision of an Islamic government, and relations between Amal and the Iranian government deteriorated and eventually broke off. Amal rejected the concept of the vilayat-i faqih, the rule of the jurisprudent, according to which Khomeini would be the sole religious and political leader of Shi‘ites worldwide. Instead, Amal members continued to follow the teachings of their source of emulation, Ayatollah Abul Qasim Kho'i (d. 1992), a rival of Khomeini residing in Najaf. The Iranian government helped Amal al-Islami, a spin-off group from Amal created in 1982, to become a full-fledged political rival to Amal and to fight for the allegiance of Shi‘ite community members. Hizbullah, a party whose main members consisted of Amal al-Islami members, followed the teachings of Khomeini and pledged allegiance to the concept of vilayat-i faqih. On the diplomatic level, in the early 1990s relations between Amal and the Iranian government improved during Ayatollah ‘Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's presidency and reached normalcy when Ayatollah Muhammad Khatami was elected president in 1997. Amal reopened its political office in Tehran in 2001.
In the climate of hostile relations toward the Iranian government that emerged in 1982, how did Amal members position Sadr, their leader who had been born in Iran, held an Iranian passport, and spoke Arabic with what the listeners heard as a heavily Persian accent? In my conversations with Amal members, whenever I pointed out that the accent they so often evaluated in negative terms is the same Persian accent Sadr was also known for, they responded by pointing to Sadr's “Lebanese roots” and his genealogy and the answers shifted to the assessment of family origins (asl). Seeking to reconcile the status of a revered leader with his accent—now read as a sign of foreignness, religious inauthenticity, and character deficiencies—my interlocutors emphasized that Sadr was actually from Jabal ‘Amil, that he was only born in Iran, and that his family was Lebanese. Here Jabal ‘Amil becomes part of Amal's national narrative, as well as evidence of their superior position in the wider Shi‘ite world. Many Amal members and affiliates brought up the issue of the senior and thus more authentic position of Lebanese Shi‘ites within that world, because of the ‘Amili scholars and the significance of Jabal ‘Amil. One man, Hasan, had gone to Iran in 1981 to fight against the Iraqi invasion. He analyzed for me Amal-Iranian relations of the 1980s, which he characterized as the phase of Iranian support for Hizbullah against Amal. In an unhappy tone he asked, “After all, the Lebanese Shi‘ites were from Jabal ‘Amil, and the ‘Amili scholars had brought Shi‘ism to Iran, so is it then right for Iran to fight us [i.e., Amal] like this?”
The Lebanonization of Musa Sadr: 1979 to the Late 1990s
Shortly after the disappearance of Sadr in Libya, the Iranian revolution succeeded. Iranian-Amal relations were multilayered and contradictory between 1979 and 1982 because the Iranian government was fragmented, being composed of those who associated with Amal as well as those who despised Sadr and Amal. Amal and LMI(a) members, who now occupied central positions in the government, continued their close ties both on a personal and political level after the success of the Iranian revolution.
Until 1982, Amal delegations regularly visited Iran to get information about the fate of Sadr, since they saw in the revolution's success a chance to rally international support and to find him. On these visits they would meet with prominent religious figures such as Khomeini, as well as with Iranian officials. None of these attempts were successful. LMI members did not have the power to terminate or even interfere with persons such as Sadiq Khalkhali, Muhammad Montazeri, and Jalal al-Din Farsi, who continued to entertain Qaddafi and his entourage, whom Lebanese Shi‘ites have considered responsible for Sadr's disappearance. Nor did Khomeini exert his power to find Sadr or learn about his fate, despite rejecting to meet with an official Libyan delegation that came to Iran to congratulate Khomeini on the victory of the revolution.
After the revolution's success and the maktabis’ marginalization of the LMI leaders by 1982, and the consequent takeover of the government by Khomeini's close followers, official Iran became silent over Sadr's fate. By 1985, Hizbullah had been created in Lebanon as a rival party to Amal, to which it imagined it had radically different goals and visions for Lebanon, and no shared political origins. To deflect responsibility for Sadr's whereabouts, and because of the pre-revolution differences between Sadr and the maktabis, the Iranian government claimed him neither as one of its own leaders nor as an Iranian. Amal, in turn, did not stress Sadr's transnational background but instead presented him as deeply rooted in Lebanon with no connections to the transnational Shi‘ite ties created between Iran and Lebanon. Throughout Lebanon, commemorations of Sadr are held every 31 August in various cities, but in Iran the government forbid Sadr's family members from commemorating his disappearance in any official manner or creating any organizations bearing his name.
In short, the Lebanonization of Sadr and the tracing of his genealogy to Jabal ‘Amil in this post-revolutionary context had two divergent meanings: For the Iranian ruling elite it fulfilled the functions of presenting Sadr as marginal to the Shi‘ite movement and warding off responsibility for his whereabouts. In this context, Iranian officials did not insist on Jabal ‘Amil as a hybrid space, but instead deemed it Lebanese territory. For Amal, it meant creating boundaries to the religious elites in Iran and resisting their political and religious hegemony in Lebanon.
The Transnationalization of Musa Sadr: Khatami and Beyond
Genealogy as a paradigm reveals much about local, national, and transnational religious networks and their politics. One of the best ways to clarify the nexus of piety, genealogy, and territory is to show how membership in such genealogies shifts over time. Participants can on occasion consider themselves as part of a genealogy and declare its sacred territory as a supranational space to demonstrate their piety. At other times, the same actors, and also governments, highlight instead the significance of national borders in order to deny involvement in such genealogies and to avoid moral responsibilities that can come with such genealogical affiliations. In other words, visions of hybrid and pure genealogies are flexible, and actors may shift from one to another according to context and their moral vision at a particular political juncture. In the previous section we saw that after the Iranian revolution the Iranian religious elite did not insist on its ties to Jabal ‘Amil to legitimize its claims to leadership. Indeed, they insisted that Musa Sadr was a Lebanese Shi‘ite. In the mid-1990s, after Khomeini's death in 1989 and the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, Iranian politicians and religious leaders realized they needed to cooperate with Amal in influencing Lebanese politics. They initiated the so-called “rapprochement phase” between Amal and Hizbullah, and Amal became indispensable for the Iran's political plans in Lebanon. This change of course began during the Rafsanjani period but was put fully into effect after Khatami's election as president in 1997.
Ever since Sadr's disappearance, the cultivation of his memory has assumed ritual and mythical elements, as is evident in the yearly commemorations of his disappearance and the recurring association of his fate with the occultation of the twelfth Imam. I suggest that we can understand subsequent debates over Sadr's background and identity as a paradigm, a prism through which we can discern much about Lebanese Shi‘ite identity politics in both national and transnational contexts. Local considerations and changes in the Iranian political landscape resulted in Hizbullah's official adaptation of the person of Sadr as part of their own party. Now one can observe Hizbullah members carrying Sadr's picture in parades and on other occasions alongside those of other Hizbullah leaders like Khomeini, Khamenei, ‘Abbas Musawi, and Hasan Nasrallah. Nasrallah does not attend the commemorations of Sadr's disappearance personally, but he delivers a speech on the day, and addresses Sadr with respect as “our absent Imam.” During the May 2005 parliamentary elections, when Hizbullah and Amal created alliances in the south, Nasrallah justified this move as follows: “In the south, for example, the alliance between Hezbollah and the Amal Movement is primarily a political alliance that aims at protecting the resistance, to which both parties belong, and which has a single imam – namely, Sayyed Musa al-Sadr…” (Noe Reference Noe2007: 345–46).
Certainly, Sadr was not viewed as the father of the resistance in 1982. At that time Musawi was a member of the religious seminary in Ba‘albak, and in 1991 he was elected to be Hizbullah's general secretary. He had volunteered to take part in one of the Iranian military training camps located in Ba‘albak. He said people had to follow Khomeini because the Lebanese Shi‘ite community lacked, in Musawi's words, an “aware leader” (rahbari agah), one who would stand against Israel's aggressions in Lebanon. Musawi referred to the animosity between “some Shi‘ite groups in the South” and the Palestinians, and stated that the “believers” (mu‘minun) among the Shi‘ites in the South wanted to cooperate with the Palestinians but because they lacked a “pious leader” this cooperation had failed until “these believers found their voice in Imam Khomeini” (Omid-i Inqilab Reference Omid-i Inqilab1982: 18–19).
Sadr was incorporated into Hizbullah's political narrative for several reasons. One was the rapprochement between Amal and Hizbullah. In addition, in the mind of many, Sadr was associated with coexistence activities and Hizbullah thus benefited from claiming him as one of its own leaders in its effort to participate in postwar state politics (Gharbieh Reference Gharbieh, Monsutti, Naef and Sabahi2007: 78). But equally important was that the Iranian religious elite began to realize Sadr's symbolic importance to its own purposes. When in 2003 I spoke with the Iranian cultural attaché to Beirut, Sayyid Muhammad Hashemi, he told me: “Not every transformation in the Lebanese Shi‘ite community can be traced back to the Iranian revolution. One needs to go back to Sadr. Of course he was also Iranian, but he was the person who undertook the first steps to change the plight of the Shi‘ites. But the Iranian revolution strengthened that movement immensely” (Beirut, 2003). In 2003 this view was not yet expressed in activities of the Iranian Cultural Center, such as commemorations of Sadr or conferences held on his behalf.
In order to present their ties to Hizbullah as deeply continuous, Iranian cultural and political producers represent Sadr first as an Iranian, and second as part of a movement whose logical outcome was Hizbullah. To trace the genealogy of the resistance back to Sadr propagates both of these goals. We have seen that after the success of the revolution neither the Iranian government nor Khomeini gave much thought to Sadr's fate. They considered him Lebanese and believed that any official investigations had to be undertaken by the Lebanese government. Since the reopening of Amal's political office in Tehran in 2001, Amal has held yearly, modest commemorations of Sadr. Also, the Sadr Foundation has been allowed to open a branch in Tehran, though as an association rather than as an official foundation.
So, who was Musa Sadr? He was an Iranian-Lebanese Shi‘ite religious figure actively involved in politics, working with other activists who defined their identities as in diametric opposition to one another, who capitalized on his genealogy in order to participate and to shape many political currents. But he was drawn into some of these debates precisely because others interpreted and utilized certain aspects of his genealogy and therefore expected him to participate in those debates. Until his disappearance in 1978, Sadr and others attempted to define and redefine his leadership qualities for Lebanon through ongoing discussion of his origins, the precise place to trace his genealogy back to, and the precise time when his genealogy began.
HANI FAHS: INTELLECTUAL GENEALOGIES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS
Hani Fahs was born into a humble tobacco farming family in 1946 in Jibsheet, then a small village in South Lebanon. After completing his secondary education in Nabatiyya, in 1963 he began study at the religious seminary in Najaf. He returned to Lebanon in 1972, having received the title of hujjat al-Islam, denoting a mid-rank religious scholar who has completed the secondary level of hawzavi education. From 1982 he lived in Iran, and in 1985 returned to Lebanon where he still resides. In the biographical summary in his 1996 book al-Shia wa al-dawla fi Lubnan (Shi‘ites and the state in Lebanon) (Fahs Reference Fahs1996) the first and last entry after 1972 notes that in 1996 he became a member of the Supreme Islamic Shi‘ite Council, first created by Musa Sadr. His affiliations and positions between 1972 and 1996 are simply omitted. The book's introduction was authored by Nabih Berri, who is mentioned only in his function as the head of the Lebanese parliament. But Berri is also the leader of the first Lebanese Shi‘ite party of Amal born out of Sadr's Movement of the Disinherited. An outsider who reads Fahs’ biography in this book might easily conclude that he was part of the Sadr's Amal movement in the 1970s and that he continues to support Amal. This need to ignore this part of his life from 1972 to mid-1996 elucidates why Fahs is an exceptionally good representative of the many discourses that Shi‘ite religious leaders engage in to produce genealogies to Jabal ‘Amil. As I will show, through a genealogical logic that connects him to Jabal ‘Amil, Fahs was able to distance himself from his past association with the Iranian government and pledge loyalty to a specific idea of a sovereign Lebanon. In this idea, transnational connections to post-revolutionary Iran are viewed as harmful to coexistence and national unity. Genealogy here is not employed merely to create a certain type of memory or reaffirm existing ideas about selfhood; it also creates a new personality, consciously distancing the person from their past actions and thoughts.
Although other Lebanese Shi‘ite figures spent years living in post-revolutionary Iran, I have chosen the person of Fahs to discuss the politics of genealogy in the Shi‘ite transnational context, for several reasons. First, Fahs does not belong to an elite ‘Amili family with a long tradition in religious studies and ties across borders to Iran and Iraq. His background is relatively humble, with no prior links to Iran, and he chose to get involved in transnational Shi‘ite politics and networks in the 1970s. Therefore, in order to play a leadership role in the Lebanese Shi‘ite community Fahs has had to engage in a more complex set of discourses to create a genealogy to Jabal ‘Amil and draw from its image as a place of Shi‘ite high culture. He compensates for his lack of elite background by creating intellectual genealogies to those ‘Amili scholars who turned their backs to the wealth the Safavid rulers offered them, presumably in order to maintain their dignity and piety. Piety here compensates for a lack of credible claims to descent from elite ‘ulama background, while Sadr, coming from a well-to-do and established ‘Amili family, could draw on genealogy to establish his standing. Class, then, is intimately connected to piety politics and to the multiple ways in which memories of a territory are interpreted and links are created to it. Second, Fahs is among the few Lebanese Shi‘ites who maintained ties to Iranians prior to the revolution's success. Third, his more recent political perspectives are a radical departure from his pre-revolution vision of Lebanon and Lebanese Shi‘ite politics.
Genealogy and Reterritorialization
When Fahs returned from Najaf to Lebanon in 1972 the political scene and especially Shi‘ite politics there had changed dramatically from a decade before. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, with Yasir Arafat as its leader, had moved to Lebanon after their 1970 expulsion from Jordan. In addition, Sadr's demands on the state had assumed more palpable forms. The Supreme Islamic Shi‘ite Council was created in 1967 and Sadr had become its head. Organized strikes, sit-ins, and rallies had become common events in Beirut, the south, and Ba‘albak. Increased Israeli attacks in South Lebanon had forced many more Shi‘ites to move to the poor southern suburbs of Beirut. The tensions between the Christian parties and the Islamic and left groupings grew. The dominant political discourses that voiced diverging national imaginations of Lebanon had taken the shape of either supporting or rejecting Palestinian presence and activism there. In addition, some Iranian anti-Shah resistance groups had established contacts to Fatah and to Sadr and were either living in Lebanon or visiting there regularly. In Najaf, Fahs had come to know Khomeini, who was then in exile in Najaf and had a circle of devoted Iranian students. Upon his return to Lebanon Fahs became the Shi‘ite spokesman for Fatah in the south.
Fahs despised Sadr for several reasons. First, there were personal envy and class differences. Just like Fahs, Sadr was a hujjat al-Islam, a mid-ranking religious scholar, but he came from a Sayyid family with links to the Sharaf al-Din clan in the south, a distinguished family with a longstanding tradition of Shi‘ite theological learning. His family origins and title (al-asl wa al-nasab) were markers of distinction widely known among Lebanese Shi‘ites. Sadr therefore could refashion both his wealth and ‘Amili background, both of which Fahs lacked, and Sadr had become an internationally known Shi‘ite figure.Footnote 3 Second, over the years ideological differences between the two grew. Fahs, like some other Lebanese Shi‘ite scholars and intellectuals, was against the establishment of a Shi‘ite council because he believed it would deepen the rift between Sunnis and Shi‘ites. However, once the Council was established Fatah became interested in appointing Fahs as its head, and then as head of Amal (Kamalian and Kermani Reference Kamalian and Kermani1999: 117). Through his activism in Fatah, Fahs connected himself to Iranian anti-Shah resistance activists such as Jalal al-Din Farsi and Muhammad Mohtashami, both staunch enemies of Sadr. The two men were divided by the question of Lebanese Shi‘ites’ support of Palestinians and their right to launch attacks against Israel from Lebanese soil. Fahs was part of Fatah, some wings of which had come to dominate the south, and many Shi‘ites resented them. Still, to Khomeini and the Iranian Islamist group close to Fatah, Sadr's concern for the Shi‘ite situation in the south was a sign of his anti-Palestinian and thus presumably pro-Maronite sympathies.
Only three days after Khomeini's arrival in Iran, Yasir Arafat, accompanied by Fahs (and his wife) and Farsi flew to Iran via Damascus. From 1979 to 1982 Fahs was prevented from moving to Iran by tensions between members of the Iranian Liberation Movement, those closely associated with Sadr and the Amal party in Iran, and the maktabis, those following the line of Imam in his vision of the total control of political power in the hand of the vali. Fahs was still dedicated to Fatah in Lebanon, but in 1982 Israel staged its largest invasion of Lebanon, and the PLO leadership had to be evacuated to Tunisia. It was then that Fahs left with his family for Iran. They lived for part of their stay in a well-to-do neighborhood in northern Tehran, and Fahs commuted between Tehran and Qom and taught classes at a religious seminary there. He also took on the job as the head of an institution concerned with Shi‘ite affairs in a global context, whose responsibility it was to coordinate and provide economic support for various Shi‘ite affairs in the world.
Fahs revealed in one of our conversations how he, like many other Muslims, Sunni and Shi‘ite, had viewed the Iranian revolution as a successful example of an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial uprising, only to be disappointed by its rapid routinization and bureaucratization. He specifically mentioned his disillusionment when he realized that the revolution had not resulted in the establishment of an ideal Shi‘ite state that would support pan-Islamic unity. He also worried about what he referred to as the condescending attitude of Iranian religious leaders towards Arab Shi‘ites. As a result of these disappointments, in 1985 Fahs and his family returned to Lebanon, in the midst of its civil war.
In our first meeting in Beirut in the summer of 2000, when we began talking about Iranian-Lebanese relations Fahs recited to me a quatrain (ruba‘iyya) from the ‘Amili scholar Husayn b. al-Samad (d. 1576 c.e.), who had lived during Shah Tahmasib's rule in Safavid Persia and was then an elderly man residing in Bahrain. The poem was written in a letter to his poet son Baha'i:
If this world is what you seek,
Then leave to India
If the hereafter is what you desire,
Then you must come to Bahrain
But if you seek neither this world nor the next,
Then reside in PersiaFootnote 4
To many Shi‘ites, al-Samad's poem has been read as al-Samad's warning to his son Baha'i against remaining at the Safavid court, since he felt alienated there and considered Shi‘ite religious practices to be inauthentic in comparison to Bahrain. Yet, recent scholarship contextualizes it in a quite different manner, and argues that the poem showed al-Samad's discontent with the Safavid Shah's lifestyle and the small degree of power the Shah was willing to grant him. Thus al-Samad wanted Baha'i to have a more generous patron, which he trusted he could find in the Mughal Empire, whose rulers were known to appreciate poetry (Jurdi-Abisaab Reference Jurdi-Abisaab2004: 41). In this reading, these verses expressed not so much a dismay at the Empire's declining morale and piety, as Fahs chose to interpret them, but rather a father's wish for his son's economic security.
Like many Muslim scholars, Fahs relies on a written text to create genealogical authority (Messick Reference Messick1996), in this case the biography of the distinguished ‘Amili scholar with ties to Safavid Persia. Specifically, by citing this poem he positions himself in the literary culture of Jabal ‘Amil, which holds poetry in high regard. Through decontextualizing and recontextualizing this poem by reciting it in the setting of our conversation about recent Iranian-Lebanese relations, Fahs voiced his position on several topics simultaneously. He displayed his detailed knowledge of ‘Amili history and text, and thus his intellectual ability and qualifications as a religious scholar worthy of a leadership position, despite his lack of credible decent. Knowledge of Arabic poetry requires a firm grounding in the standard language and classical literary tradition and reading and writing such poetry has since the late Ottoman period been intimately connected to building proto-national identities among South Lebanese Shi‘ites (Abisaab and Jurdi-Abisaab n.d.). While many Amal members argue that they practice a more legalistic and authentic Shi‘ism than do Iranian Shi‘ites, precisely because of Jabal ‘Amil's position none of my Amal interlocutors, most of them with high school or even university degrees, ever relied on any ‘Amili scholarly texts to underline their points, or referenced any poetry.
Fahs was also creating a narrative of Shi‘ite relations between Iran and Lebanon stretching across five hundred years. In his view, current Shi‘ite ties are a continuation of the migration of ‘Amili scholars to Safavid Persia, and he sidelines the importance of nationalisms that have given new meanings to these ties. Yet, this view is quite misleading, for Safavid Persia's interest in ‘Amili scholars is not identifiable with post-revolutionary Iran's politics in Shi‘ite Lebanon. Nor have Lebanese Shi‘ite scholars such as Fahs left for Iran under the same conditions or for the same reasons as did the Syrian or Ottoman Jabal ‘Amilis.
By reciting this poem, as he interpreted it, Fahs also positioned himself as one of the circle of ‘Amili scholars who have been disappointed with the piety of the Safavid rulers. However, while ‘Amili scholars went to Persia as producers of Shi‘ite religious and cultural traditions, Fahs had gone to Iran in the early 1980s because Iran was then viewed as the center of Shi‘ite politics and religion. Post-revolutionary Iran did not lack religious scholars, nor did the government need religious justification for its rule. Instead, Lebanese (and Bahraini and Iraqi) Shi‘ites migrated to Iran for hawzavi education, and to seek refuge and organize politically.
Through the poem Fahs expressed personal disappointment and his bitterness over the insistence by religious ruling elites that they have authority. He had explained this in an earlier conversation in reference to their pursuit of nationalist aspirations rather than pan-Islamic unity. In a discourse of genealogical logic, Fahs connected himself to al-Samad, the ‘Amili scholar, and justified his rejection of any Iranian leadership in the Shi‘ite world.
Finally, through the poem Fahs distanced himself from his past close association with official Iran and the Palestinian cause. He created a sense of his having been betrayed, his having now found his true self, and his rejection of former visions of his moral world, just as he chose to interpret al-Samad's poem.
Since the late 1980s, Fahs’ vision of Lebanon and a Lebanese Shi‘ite identity has changed. He now openly condemns Iranian government politics in Lebanon. He is currently a member of al-Hiwar, a forum for Muslim-Christian dialogue in Lebanon, and he presents himself as a longstanding friend and follower of Sadr, one of the founding members of interfaith dialogues in Lebanon. Few non-Shi‘ites now know of Fahs' past associations with the Iranian religious world, and many Lebanese Shi‘ites who view Hizbullah's ties to Iran with suspicion consider Fahs to be deeply committed to coexistence and refer to him as a moderate Shi‘ite voice in Lebanon.
HYBRID IDENTITIES AND “GRAFTING INTO” JABAL ‘AMIL
I now turn to the reasons for and consequences of envisioning hybrid genealogies and also the discursive strategies for representing such hybridity. Hybrid genealogy does not necessarily imply equality among participants. In the case I will describe it serves to justify a hierarchical relationship between the leader in Iran, who is also the highest authority in the Iranian government, and the non-state actor Hizbullah. These party associates engage in the production of genealogies linked to Jabal ‘Amil so as to create pious credentials, to defend their resistance activities and involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and to control South Lebanon in the service of creating their vision of a moral society. For a variety of reasons, the so-called resistance society follows its leadership closely and agrees and contributes to the reproduction of such hierarchical relations.Footnote 5
Muhammad Kurani is a historian of Jabal ‘Amil who associates with Hizbullah and is widely respected among its members. He legitimizes the sacredness of Jabal ‘Amil by providing four types of evidence. For this he relies, like most ‘Amili historians, on authoritative scholarly texts, especially Amal al-Amil by the well-known ‘Amili scholar Muhammad al-Hurr al-‘Amili (d. 1693 c.e.). To Kurani, Jabal ‘Amil is sacred because it is connected to Jerusalem (Kurani Reference Kurani1993: 24). Relying on these early texts, he explains the senior position of Jabal ‘Amil in Shi‘ism by asserting that a companion of the Prophet Muhammad introduced Shi‘ism to Jabal ‘Amil. He also points to the many important religious scholars who originated from Jabal ‘Amil. Finally, he says the uniqueness of Jabal ‘Amil becomes apparent when it is compared to its neighboring territories. This, he says, is obvious in the existence of many graves and sites of prophets and religious scholars scattered throughout its villages and mountains (1993: 26).
Kurani makes the Islamic resistance traditional there by interpreting any unrest in Jabal ‘Amil between the local population and others in terms of the Shi‘ites’ jihad against non-Muslim tyranny. For instance, he traces the history of the resistance back to the Crusaders' invasion in 1108 of Tyre (now part of South Lebanon with a majority Shi‘ite population) and frames its inhabitants' battles against the Crusaders as a Shi‘ite resistance against foreign invaders and infidels. He interprets the Israeli assaults in South Lebanon since PLO's 1970 relocation there as the “Jewish enemy's desire to annex the land of Jabal ‘Amil but without its people.” Kurani argues that even then, under such war conditions, “the ‘Amilis … clung to their land … their hearts connected to the oak trees and to the roots of the olive trees, to the arcades of the home, to the tobacco fields, and to the spike of the wheat” (1993: 344).
Liisa Malkii, in her study of how the lived experiences of exile shape the construction of national identity and historicity among two groups of Hutu refugees in Western Tanzania, shows how the “naturalizing process of linking people to places is conceived in botanical metaphors.” These, together with metaphors of breeding, race, and kinship, shape “thinking about nations and national identities,” which “may take the form of roots, trees, origins, ancestries, racial lines, autochthonism, evolutions, developments, or any other number of familiar, essentializing images” (Reference Malkii1995: 27–28). Hizbullah evidently envisions its connection to the land in a similar array of metaphors. If Hizbullah connects itself to South Lebanon in such an organic manner, how does the Iranian government present its close ties to Hizbullah and justify its activities there?
The Iranian government seeks to produce evidence of its old-age ties to Shi‘ites in Lebanon, and to present the creation of Hizbullah as one instance of these longstanding ties. They invent such traditions through both discursive and practical activities carried out through its outreach organizations in Lebanon. The Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beirut (ICC) is one such institution, heavily invested in confirming Iran's ties to Jabal ‘Amil in multiple ways. One strategy is to construct a particular memory of the migration of ‘Amili scholars to Safavid Persia. This is a nationalist reading of the past and presentation of current Iranian-Lebanese Shi‘ite relations as a continuation of older ties. Here, the ICC creates an indexical relation between people and land, and thus the ‘Amili scholars become an index for Jabal ‘Amil. Although most of these scholars settled in Persia and never returned to Jabal ‘Amil, the ICC confines their identity construction to their birthplaces, and engages in a politics of origin to connect itself to this sacred space.
Earlier we saw how Lebanese Shi‘ites expected post-revolutionary Iranian officials would find Sadr, who was born in Iran. In that context the officials brushed off Sadr's birthplace as irrelevant and instead focused on his roots in Jabal ‘Amil to deflect responsibility for finding him. For example, when asked to evaluate the cultural activities of the ICC, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Hashemi, the Iranian cultural attaché to Beirut in the first half of 2000, began by pointing out, “The cultural ties between Iran and Lebanon are not new, they are old relations dating back through a long history of interaction. … As you know, Jabal ‘Amil played a large role in the production of knowledge, culture, thoughts, and sciences. Jabal ‘Amil in Lebanon produced many well-known scholars, some of whom moved to Iran… . There are good relations between the Iranian government and the Lebanese government as well as between the people of Iran and the people of Lebanon; continuous relations…” (Ajyal al-Mustafa Reference Ajyal al-Mustafa2002: 16–18).
The ICC propagates this vision of history in its journals by publishing the works of the Jabal ‘Amili scholars, by restoring the tombs of some of them in the south, and by holding seminars to honor them and discuss their contributions to Shi‘ite scholarship. The ICC's second strategy, as I will show, is to create a genealogy to the land and soil of Jabal ‘Amil. As in the first instance, it works through collapsing past and present and creating contemporaneities, but now the present is projected into the past and the relations are “traditionalized.” This is only possible through hybridization and the creation of an organic relation to Hizbullah, defined as a Lebanese Arab Shi‘ite party who defends the south, that is Jabal ‘Amil. The ICC underscores its ties to Hizbullah and its activism in the south to confirm its ties to Jabal ‘Amil. For instance, regarding the impact of the Iranian revolution in the Arab world, Hashemi stated, “The alliance (payvand, literal: grafting) between the Islamic resistance in Lebanon and the Islamic Republic of Iran is the best and most fruitful (porbartarin) consequence of the Imam Khomeini movement. This auspicious alliance (payvand-i mobarak) created (afarid) a group of young believers in the sacred land of Jabal ‘Amil (khak-i moqadas-i jabal ‘amil) who succeeded in fighting the enemy” (Iranian Cultural Center 2002).
While the Iranian government can claim neither lineage ties to Jabal ‘Amil nor ‘Amili heritage though the births of any of its members there, it nonetheless succeeds in creating ties to the land, as the metaphor of grafting shows. In the eyes of the Iranian cultural producers, this grafting, although not like a tree with deep roots in the land itself, has proven more effective than the tree itself. The grafting resulted in the production of Hizbullah, “the young believers” who have been able to fight Israel and defend South Lebanon, “the sacred land of Jabal ‘Amil.” The Iranian government, though only a branch connected to the tree, thus becomes indispensable for Jabal ‘Amil's existence and future. Hizbullah's identity becomes a hybrid, but not necessarily in ethnic or linguistic terms, because Hizbullah certainly insists on its Arab identity. Support from the Iranian ruling religious elite has helped Hizbullah's members maintaining their image as Arab heroes. They envision themselves as a hybrid entity that is the product of a shared religious history.
To grasp this propagated notion of “shared history,” readers must know how ‘Amili scholars in Persia created a distinct ‘Amili identity a century after their arrival there. Muhammad al-Hurr al-‘Amili was an ‘Amili scholar who resided in Persia in the seventeenth century, whose work Kurani relied upon to emphasize Jabal ‘Amil's sacredness. He compiled his biographical work Amal al-Amil at a time when the role of ‘Amilis in Safavid Persia had declined. This biographical work has to be understood as a response to the ‘Amilis’ de facto marginalization at the Safavid court. The narrative of the “oldness of ‘Amili Shi‘ism” appears here for the first time, to enhance the attractiveness to the court of the ‘Amili brand of legal Shi‘ism (Jurdi-Abisaab Reference Jurdi-Abisaab2004: 95). In a move that is ironic though perhaps typical for nationalist projects, the present-day Iranian government decontextualizes and appropriates this seventeenth-century emphasis on a unique ‘Amili identity. Through its outreach activities in Lebanon, the government takes advantage of Jabal ‘Amil's importance as the place of origin of prominent scholars who resided in Persia. Five hundred years ago the declining ‘Amili religious elite created a well-defined ‘Amili identity as a way to resist being marginalized. Today, when the establishment in Iran insists on its origins in Jabal ‘Amil, it hopes to accomplish two tasks: to assert its own privileged position in Jabal ‘Amil, and to marginalize those Shi‘ites who claim an explicit ‘Amili identity apart from official Iran. ‘Amili scholars have created a distinct category of identity that links territory to religious authority, and many Lebanese Shi‘ites draw upon this to resist Iranian domination. But in doing so, they have provided material for the Iranian government's own narrative of shared religious history and hybridity.
Within this context, the ICC can capitalize on Jabal ‘Amil's trans-local ties. Most of the earlier Lebanese Shi‘ite historians whose work influenced the emergence of nationalist visions of South Lebanon's past paid little attention to these, and were concerned mainly with positioning Shi‘ites within the newly defined Lebanese national boundaries. According to the Iranian reading of these ties, defenders of Jabal ‘Amil, that moral and sacred land representing authentic Shi‘ism, and those who support their activities, are pious subjects and exemplary citizens. Here, hybridity results in piety. In this interpretation of events in Jabal ‘Amil, the activities of the Islamic resistance become the logical outcome of Jabal ‘Amil's history. The Islamic resistance asserts itself in the south by occupying the public space through such activities as putting up party flags, parading, winning in municipality elections, and organizing processions, but it also does so by creating genealogies to the land it defends. Kurani's narrative aims not only to make the history of Jabal ‘Amil Islamic, but also to situate the Islamic resistance as rooted in Lebanon and thereby deflect accusations that it is of foreign origins. By presenting the Islamic resistance as a hybrid, Iran's involvement in South Lebanon appears organic and natural.
CONCLUSIONS
Genealogy can justify leaders’ credentials as pious and as authentic citizens, and help to defy political and moral opponents. As a paradigm, it can reveal much about national and transnational religious networks and their dynamic politics. As symbolic capital, genealogy can be envisioned as pure, in a linear manner, or as hybrid, as a result of joint efforts. Advocacy of hybrid genealogies does not necessarily translate as a project of inclusion; it is often a discursive strategy of domination. However, religious actors evoke genealogy differently, as they rely on both the lack as well as the possession of credible decent to establish their pious credentials. Those that lack biological genealogy distinguish between biological and intellectual genealogy, and claim more value and importance for the latter. Regardless of which is stressed, however, a clear genealogical thinking is prevalent. In projects of genealogy making, there is a tight connection between historical narratives of a territory claimed by all actors to be sacred, the actors' own positions in those narratives, and the moral responsibilities these are said to imply. As religious leaders establish and enhance their legitimacy and piety they shift their visions of sacred territory; from being a supra-national entity it becomes redefined and confined within modern political borders. In other words, in this religious nationalism, legitimization of piety and national memory making are part and parcel of the same project. Both are preconditions for accessing the political and symbolic power necessary to shape local and regional politics. This politics of legitimacy raises questions about the morality of maintaining transnational ties, and consequently at the nexus of nationalism and transnationalism we encounter debates over what constitutes loyal citizenship. Both Islamic scholarship and popular culture place great emphasis on validating an account or legal practice according to how far back it can be traced, and its links to the Prophet Muhammad and the Twelve Imams. In this way, genealogical thinking influences how secular notions of territoriality are naturalized or, alternatively, are regarded as arbitrary.
Piety is not produced only within institutions or grass-root movements, or through sets of religious rituals and their interpretation. It is constructed within larger visions of territory. Piety is produced foremost through a creative reworking of (secular) memories and of debates over the territorial ownership, drawing importantly on Western concepts of territorial integrity. Nationalist ambitions stand in a dialogic relation to Islamist ideological production, and in this sense piety production is intertwined with nationalism. The discourse of genealogy can both underline solidarity between state and non-state actors and emphasize difference and hierarchical relations. That is, genealogy can reveal how people imagine and position themselves within a larger context. But genealogy can also express personal grievances, disappointments, and class struggles.
By focusing on how religious authority is deterritorialized and reterritorialized in the Iranian-Lebanese Shi‘ite network, I have critically reassessed established notions of center and periphery, and binary oppositions of nationalism versus transnationalism in the Shi‘ite world. In approaching this ‘Amili-Persian link, a historian might emphasize fluidity, hybridity, and change over time, or, alternatively, highlight separate civilizations and mindsets, boundaries, and static ideas about the Other. But this is not only a choice for historians; Shi‘ite religious and political leaders, too, strategically reinforce one of these two visions in pursuing their political goals. Shi‘ite politics is both dependent upon and constrained by nation-states, yet it simultaneously creates a transnational arena. Both realms create both possibilities for and limitations on Shi‘ite political and religious figures. Each way of envisioning and territorializing Jabal ‘Amil has implications for what the nation of Lebanon should be, and for how it should position itself in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Genealogy and piety are ongoing projects, as the ownership of territories, especially those considered sacred, is negotiated and fought over in our transnational era.
