Re-anchoring Lebanon’s Shiites in the Lebanese Project

The history of Lebanese Shiism is too often told backwards, or worse, flattened by a teleological reading that presents Hezbollah as the natural culmination of a long religious and political continuum. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scholarly work on the ulama of Jabal Amel, on the contrary, allows us to reconstruct a very different genealogy—one rooted in doctrinal pluralism, a conscious relationship to the state, and a non-theocratic conception of religious authority. It is precisely this tradition that has been broken.

Historically, Ameli Shiism developed within the framework of wilayat al-umma: a community of believers endowed with moral and spiritual autonomy, but not with a project of political domination. The choice of marja‘iyya was free and plural, often oriented toward Najaf, within a deliberately distanced relationship between clerical authority and political power. This tradition acknowledged the diversity of religious authorities, rejected doctrinal centralization, and, above all, did not seek to govern society in the name of the sacred.

The rupture came with Khomeini’s invention of wilayat al-faqih: a radically new construction that cannot be reduced to a theological debate, but rather constitutes a major political upheaval. By replacing the plurality of marja‘iyyat with the exclusive authority of a Supreme Guide, by transforming the cleric into a sovereign and religion into a state ideology, revolutionary Iran broke with Najaf and imposed Qom as an imperial center. Shiism thus ceased to be a diverse religious tradition and became an instrument of geopolitical projection.

In Lebanon, this graft did not occur on virgin soil. Lebanese Shi’a have always adhered to the project of the state, in line with the Ameli logic of inscription within a given national space. But since independence—and even earlier—they have been socially and economically marginalized, kept on the periphery of development, and subjected to local feudal authorities who spoke in their name without ever emancipating them. This structural marginalization partly explains why, as early as the 1950s and 1960s, a segment of the community turned toward secular parties hostile to the confessional system, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and its syndical and intellectual offshoots.

The emergence of Imam Musa al-Sadr marked a decisive rupture. He embodied an uprising against social injustice and marginalization without breaking with the state as the ultimate horizon. His project was profoundly Lebanese—in the broad, non-ideological sense of the term—even as it remained open to regional dynamics. He sought neither to Islamize Lebanon nor to detach it from its pluralism, but to fully integrate Shi’a as citizens in their own right. It is precisely this position—neither submissive nor instrumentalizable—that explains his disappearance, at the moment when another, radically antagonistic project was emerging: that of the alliance of minorities, anchored in regional authoritarian logics.

After him, the Amal Movement gradually shifted, under Nabih Berri, into the Alawite sphere through its alignment with the Assad regime. Hezbollah went even further. From the early 1980s onward, it led Lebanese Shi’a in direct opposition to their Ameli heritage, uprooted them from the logic of the state and territory, and inserted them into that of wilayat al-faqih, turning Lebanon into a mere functional space serving an Iranian project. The community was thus satellized rather than represented.

Secular, liberal, or simply Lebanese-oriented Shi’a were systematically marginalized: through tailor-made electoral laws, intimidation, forced exile, or assassination—from Mahdi Amel to Lokman Slim. This domination unfolded under Syrian and then Iranian occupations and was accepted, realpolitik obliges, by the international community, which from the 1990s onward had no difficulty accommodating Hezbollah, despite its past, its activities, and its true nature.

In the face of this hegemony, the Lebanese-oriented Shi’a project survived only in isolation, carried by a handful of major intellectual and religious figures such as Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, Hani Fahs, and Mohammad Hassan Al-Amin, among others. All defended a clear vision: Lebanon as a definitive homeland, the state as a finality, coexistence as a horizon, and the rejection of any identity fixation based on majority status or privileged community.

This school has been marginalized for far too long. It is time to stop trying to appease or save Hezbollah. The challenge is no longer tactical; it is strategic. What is needed is the emergence of a new Shi’a elite—modern, non-traditional, freed from external tutelage, having pledged allegiance to Lebanon, and to Lebanon alone, and having renounced any logic of domination over other communities. But this demand cannot be unilateral. One cannot ask Shi’a to stop behaving as a tribe in search of guarantees and privileges if the other communities do not also put their own house in order.

The Shi’a question is not exclusively Shi’a. In Lebanon, the affairs of each community are the affairs of all. There are no exclusive zones and no partial security perimeters. There is only one national security perimeter: Lebanon, within its borders, its project, and its vocation. The solution to the Shi’a question is Lebanese. It lies in transversal parties and movements capable of breaking the communal, sectarian, and tribal framework, without external allegiance. Still, this requires thinking in strategic terms rather than in terms of immediate electoral gains, in a country obsessed with deadlines and power balances, to the detriment of its future.