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The Sunnis had found themselves quite alone when Yasser Arafat's PLO boarded French ships, with all their arms and equipment, bound for Tunisia. It was August 30, 1982; Bachir Gemayel had been elected President of the Republic, and the Israeli army was about to move into West Beirut. With the departure of Abu Ammar and his contingents, who had fueled Lebanon's civil and sectarian war, a chapter had come to a close. Taking stock of the situation, President Takieddine al-Solh, a shrewd statesman and keen observer, expressed himself with bitterness in these words: "The Muslims sacrificed so much that they perished in the process" (1). By this he meant the Lebanese Sunnis—more precisely those in urban centers—who had so wholeheartedly embraced Arab causes that, in the end, they found themselves defeated and, what is more, realized just how far power had slipped from their grasp! In the wake of these fast-moving events, the daily newspaper Al-Safir published a documentary spread over several issues under the title: " Al-Dahiya, rubᶜu al-Watan " (2). It was a warning shot heralding the imminent rise of the Shiite confessional group—long marginalized—onto the Lebanese stage. This was not without stirring legitimate concern among native Beirutis. Indeed, the Twelver community was about to take over from the Sunni community as the leading Muslim actor on the political scene. Moreover, when the February 1984 uprising led by the Amal movement and the PSP broke out, seasoned journalist Sarkis Naoum did not hesitate to make prophetic remarks. He announced to anyone who would listen in the corridors of the daily An-Nahar that Lebanon had entered the "Shiite era," as West Beirut had slipped out of Amine Gemayel's control! And from that point on, the influence of political Sunnism would steadily shrink throughout the 1980s. This current would lose its footing to another branch of Islam—a younger branch—that was asserting its rights both in the courts and on the battlefield. Even the rise of Rafik Hariri to power from 1992 onwards, which offered a brief respite, was not enough to restore the luster of a community whose political ascendancy stretched back to the Mamluks and the Ottomans. The rubble and the "resetting" The rest of the story is well known: Mobilized and radicalized by Iran, organized through Amal and Hezbollah, and backed by the Alawite regime in Damascus, the Shiite community asserted itself—it must be admitted—against every other component of the Lebanese mosaic. Yet, seized by the hubris that spares no one, it came to believe it could play in the big leagues. Among other blunders, it managed to alienate both the United States and the State of Israel, and it intervened militarily in the Syrian civil war—two fatal mistakes that would lead it straight to ruin and mire it in unwinnable conflicts. For Hezbollah, its armed wing, remotely controlled from Tehran, had believed that by supporting Bashar al-Assad it could maintain its grip over Sunni masses that were either exhausted or incapable of finding common ground. Only a charismatic leader like Nasser could have united them and galvanized them out of their stupor. But such a hero, capable of carrying out a political "resetting," was slow to emerge. For a long time, "Sufianism" (3)—or political Sunnism—would keep a low profile, biding its time for better days. "Sufianism" and the rise to power But fate has a way of springing pleasant surprises and toppling even the most entrenched regimes. And so the Syrian people would rid themselves of the usurper Bashar al-Assad, while unfortunately harboring a deep and lasting resentment toward those who had attacked them—whether from Lebanon or from Iran. The latter, belonging to the Shia orbit and led by Hezbollah as their figurehead, had become militarily involved on the various fronts of the civil war. As a consequence, in the Syrian collective imagination, Umayyad Damascus had been desecrated, and the blood that had been shed was crying out for vengeance. This thirst for retribution—this eye-for-an-eye logic—will continue to poison relations between Lebanese Shiism and the Sunni heartland of Syria for a long time to come. But in the meantime, the Sunni establishment, suddenly reinvigorated by Assad's fall, would henceforth refuse to endure in Lebanon the indignities it had suffered on a daily basis as long as the Alawite Assad dynasty sat enthroned in Damascus. No encroachment upon its reserved share in the public administration or the state apparatus would henceforth be tolerated. 'Sufianism' would slowly, and even painfully, reconstitute itself, while Iran and its proxies were busy fighting Americans and Israelis elsewhere. Yet this Sunni resurgence hardly meant that our President of the Council would be free, without hindrance, to take the initiative in governing! A quiet struggle would be waged at every political juncture to make one viewpoint prevail over the other. And what about the Egyptian hypothesis, then? As it happens, on August 7th, a defense agreement was concluded in Mecca between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. Some have seen in it a Sunni NATO designed to confront both Israel and Iran. This was no doubt reassuring for 'Sufianism,' yet a key player was conspicuously absent from the table: Egypt! If the land of the Nile were to join the Mecca alliance, its contribution would be undeniable: possessing the largest Arab army, it would bring its diplomatic weight, strategic depth, and Arab legitimacy to the table. It would serve as a balancing factor, and some are already saying that its entry into the alliance 'would prevent it from being overtly anti-Iranian.' Who knows! In any case, Egypt would counterbalance Turkey, which has Finlandized Syria. And, last but not least, its new status would certainly raise eyebrows in Tel Aviv, whose relations with Ankara are already deteriorating. As far as Lebanon is concerned, however, an Egypt somewhat more engaged in regional rebalancing can only strengthen the position of our President of the Council and of the executive branch in general. Yet its most important role would be to temper the vindictive impulses of the Syrians toward a Lebanese confessional community whose militias blundered into a civil conflict that was not their own. And as far as we are concerned, that is precisely where Cairo could prove indispensable to our civil peace! 1) «Tafana al-muslimun hata fanu». 2) Which plainly meant: 'The Shia southern suburb represents a quarter of the homeland.' The message could not have been clearer: from now on, it had to be reckoned with! 3) Political 'Sufianism' (al-Sufianiya al-Siassiya) refers to Muᶜawiya ibn Abi-Sufian, founder of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus.

Relations between Turkey and Israel have hit rock bottom: three days after an Israeli airstrike on a disused base in northwestern Syria — which Israel suspects Ankara intends to use — two new offensives, this time verbal, have accelerated the deterioration of ties between the two Eastern Mediterranean powers. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office on Friday called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan an "antisemitic dictator," stating that Israel would act against "Turkey's attempts to destabilize the region." "We will not tolerate Turkish military entrenchment advancing southward, as it poses a threat to us," Netanyahu had said on Wednesday, while Turkey denies any presence at the bombed Syrian site. "Israel has long since stopped being impressed by Turkey's hypocrisy. Erdogan is an antisemitic dictator who has massacred Kurds, supported the massacre carried out by the terrorist organization Hamas, and oppressed his own people," Netanyahu's office said in a statement. In a separate statement released Friday, Netanyahu's office accused the Turkish president of seeking to "extend his aggression against Israel into Syria." Ankara warned on Thursday that it would "resolutely" continue to protect Syria's territorial integrity and sovereignty. However, the Turkish presidency was quick to clarify that it had no plans to retaliate and that Ankara would not fall "into the trap" set by the Israeli Prime Minister. But Turkey drove the point home on Friday by issuing an international "arrest warrant" for the Israeli Prime Minister, as part of an investigation into the brutal and humiliating interception of the "Gaza Flotilla" and the detention of the activists on board. Red notices Turkey's Justice Minister said he intended to "issue red notices for the international arrest" of Netanyahu on charges of "crimes against humanity, genocide, aggravated deprivation of liberty, assault and battery, torture, destruction of property, aggravated looting, and hijacking of transport vehicles," the ministry specified. The roughly 430 crew members aboard the approximately fifty vessels boarded by the Israeli military in the Mediterranean, west of Cyprus, had been forcibly brought to Israel, then detained before being deported in May. Israeli (far-right) National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir shared footage showing dozens of flotilla participants kneeling with their hands bound. They were forced to crawl on all fours and ordered to say "Long live Israel" on camera, while speakers blared the Israeli national anthem. The release of the video sparked an international diplomatic uproar and drew condemnations from several foreign governments, as well as criticism from within Israel's own government. Once a reliable ally of the Jewish state, Turkey has become one of Israel's main adversaries since Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist-conservative party came to power. Beyond the personal animosity between the two leaders, Erdogan positions himself both as protector of Syria's new Sunni administration and as a standard-bearer of Islam against the Zionist enemy. Recently, the Turkish president announced his country's participation in the "Mecca Alliance," a mutual defense pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Pezeshkian seeks "a dignified way out" On the Iranian front, President Massoud Pezeshkian said Friday that it was time to end the standoff with the United States, with Tehran in his view "in a position of strength and dignity" vis-à-vis Washington, which seeks to impose a new "economic war." "The whole world recognizes our victory and points out that the United States attacked our schools, our hospitals, and our infrastructure in violation of all the rules," he added. "They are despised around the world." The Iranian president also defended the conclusion, in June, of a memorandum of understanding with the United States aimed at finding a way out of the conflict, lashing out at critics who would see it as a sign of Iranian weakness. "They will not find a single clause in this agreement that indicates a surrender; all the commitments concern the other party," he assured. Pezeshkian's statements — he holds what is theoretically the highest position within the official state structure — come on the heels of several other signs pointing to the power struggle between him and the regime's "hardline" camp, embodied by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who commands the ideological army of the Revolutionary Guards. Khamenei had hinted at reservations about the agreement. "I had a different opinion, but I gave my authorization," he had said.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, was entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism.” Its text is presented here in a revised and expanded version, as part of a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Neoplatonism in Islam through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broad Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop two distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the Peripatetic tradition of falsafa, and al-Kirmānī within Ismaili theology. Despite their different intellectual contexts, their systems remain in constant dialogue around the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody two contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the eighth part of this ten-part series. VIII - Reconciling Eternity and Revelation in the Islamic Tradition Al-Kirmānī stands as a transformative figure in the history of Shiʿi Ismaili philosophical mysticism. A thinker of rare pedigree, he spent the better part of his career in the “Persian and Arabian Iraqs,” lands geographically removed from the Fatimid heartland yet central to his mission of defending the Caliphate’s intellectual legitimacy. From this vantage point, al-Kirmānī sought to safeguard ʿirfān (mystical gnosis) from its own radical tendencies. He pursued this through a dual approach. First, by “rationalizing” the Universal Soul so that it mirrored the Universal Intellect, he integrated the Farabian hierarchy of the Ten Intellects into Ismaili cosmology. Second, he took a firm stand against the deification of the Fatimid Caliph-Imam al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh. While rejecting al-Ḥākim’s divinity, he positioned the Imam as the essential earthly culmination of the celestial hierarchy, the vital anchor of cosmic balance in the physical realm. For al-Kirmānī, this equilibrium was the very soul of the state. He envisioned a perfect harmony between Truth (ḥaqīqa) and Law (sharīʿa), the Esoteric (bāṭin) and the Exoteric (ẓāhir). In his worldview, the Empire’s very survival depended on maintaining this tension; without it, the imperial project would lose its raison d’être. Ironically, al-Kirmānī’s plea for stability was written during an era of profound upheaval. His death followed closely upon the mysterious disappearance of the Caliph al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, an event that triggered the permanent separation of the Druze from their Ismaili origins. This marked the beginning of a long road toward fragmentation, yet it already represented a stark departure from the Fatimid Empire’s zenith around 1000 CE. At that time, the Caliphate reigned as a preeminent Mediterranean power, its authority extending from North Africa and Egypt across the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, while also establishing a foothold in southern Italy. This presence began with direct Fatimid rule over Sicily following the conquest of the island and eventually extended to the Italian mainland, where a strategic presence was maintained in regions such as Calabria. Subsequently, under the Kalbid dynasty, the territory flourished as a vital vassal center of Fatimid culture and commerce until the mid-eleventh century. Al-Kirmānī successfully synthesized philosophy with Shiʿism within its Ismaili framework. Centuries later, figures such as Mīr Dāmād, Mullā Ṣadrā, and Sabzawārī would achieve a comparable synthesis, albeit within a Twelver context. As for Avicenna, who was raised in an Ismaili Shiʿi environment, he truly emerged as the philosopher we know only by asserting his independence from the tradition of receiving knowledge through an Imam. His philosophy largely “secularized” the premises of this mystical-gnostic intellect rather than adopting them wholesale. This was precisely the distinction the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri refused to accept. Instead, al-Jabri argued that mystical gnosis reached its most tyrannical culmination in Avicenna, whom he held responsible for the subsequent civilizational deadlock. The Sunni Revival and al-Ghazālī’s Dual Assault With the passing of al-Kirmānī, around 1021 CE, and Avicenna, in 1037 CE, these thinkers departed just as the tide began to turn in the Islamicate world. A few decades later, the page turned on what some historians have labeled the “Shiʿi Century,” marking the beginning of the era of the Sunni Revival. Although the Ismailism of Alamut represented a counter-current to this revival, al-Ghazālī, at the end of the eleventh century CE, launched a dual assault against the falāsifa (philosophers) on the one hand and the Bāṭiniyya (Ismailis) on the other. His aim was to raze the Islamic “Platonopolis,” the dream of the philosophical city, to its very foundations in all its various forms. Al-Ghazālī viewed the philosophers and the Ismailis as two sides of the same “heretical” coin. His accusations against the Ismailis ranged from atheism to the doctrine of dyadism. He argued that the Ismailis endowed the Originator (al-Mubdiʿ) with such absolute transcendence that they stripped Him of both existence and non-existence. They then positioned the First Intellect as the actual governor of the universe and the practical object of worship. For al-Ghazālī, this rendered the First Intellect a second god alongside the Creator, moving them away from pure Islamic monotheism toward dualism. Al-Ghazālī emphasized that the ultimate goal of the Bāṭiniyya was to lead the seeker to a station where religious obligations (taklīf), such as prayer and fasting, are dropped once the “hidden meaning” is known. Al-Ghazālī’s intellectual project can be understood as a sophisticated, dual-fronted maneuver in which he skillfully deployed the defense of Reason or Revelation depending on the perceived adversary. In his confrontation with the Ismaili doctrine of taʿlīm, he adopted the guise of a rationalist defender to undermine the necessity of the Infallible Imam. By challenging the Ismaili premise that the human intellect is inherently incapable of grasping divine truths without an external authoritative guide, al-Ghazālī sought to demonstrate that such reliance on charismatic authority inevitably leads to the atrophy of the mind and the abdication of critical thought. This defense of Reason was, however, entirely instrumental, as evidenced by his simultaneous assault on the falāsifa. In this second theater of conflict, al-Ghazālī pivoted to the role of guardian of Revelation, attacking what he perceived as the over-inflation of Hellenistic logic at the expense of dogma. His critique focused on three fundamental points of contention that he believed struck at the heart of the faith. First, he targeted the Avicennian thesis of the eternity of the world. While the philosophers employed Neoplatonic emanation to bridge the gap between an eternal God and a temporal universe, al-Ghazālī viewed this synthesis as a dangerous reduction of the divine nature. For him, a God who emanates by necessity is a mechanical cause stripped of the volitional Free Will essential to the Qurʾānic “Creator.” Furthermore, al-Ghazālī vehemently rejected the philosophical proposition that the Divine knows only universals and not particulars. From his perspective, such a limitation on God’s knowledge effectively nullified the possibility of Divine Providence, severing the intimate, personal connection between the Creator and the individual creature. Finally, al-Ghazālī confronted the philosophers’ conceptualization of the afterlife. Even as they moved away from the more radical Aristotelian views on the total mortality of the soul, he found their insistence on a purely spiritual survival to be an intolerable deviation. By denying bodily resurrection, the philosophers stood in direct contradiction to the literal and symbolic weight of the Qurʾānic texts, which affirm the ultimate resurrection of the flesh. Turning the Philosophers’ Logic Against Them The sharpest point of al-Ghazālī’s attack was his accusation that Avicenna and the philosophers failed to adhere to the very rules of demonstration they had established in their logic, such as those derived from Aristotle’s Organon, when they ventured into metaphysics. Al-Ghazālī’s fundamental maneuver was one of internal critique: he ostensibly accepted the philosophers’ own logical criteria, only to challenge the rigor of their application within the realm of metaphysics. This approach defines the essence of his Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), wherein he seeks to demonstrate that the Neoplatonic synthesis constructed by al-Fārābī and Avicenna was not the seamless, demonstrative science it claimed to be. Rather, he exposes it as a fragile architecture of contradictions, effectively turning Aristotelian logic against the very system that sought to canonize it. By shifting the battleground to the consistency of their own methods, al-Ghazālī did not merely reject the falāsifa on dogmatic grounds; he attempted to dismantle their authority from within, arguing that their metaphysical conclusions failed to meet the high standards of proof they demanded in the formal sciences. Historically, al-Fārābī and Avicenna felt the need to present Greek philosophy as a harmonious system. They attempted to bridge the gaps between various schools on the basis of Neoplatonic emanation. The conflicts of ancient philosophy either did not reach them or were ignored in favor of presenting philosophy as a unified and consistent science, “Greek Science,” which could serve as a stable alternative to the fragmented theological and legal sects of their time. Ultimately, al-Ghazālī’s deepest realization was that the “One” and the “Necessary Being” of the Hellenized Muslim philosophers resulted in a “philosophical religion” fundamentally different from the religion al-Ghazālī himself was formulating, a vast synthesis of Sufism and Logic embodied in his project, The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn). One Truth, Not “Double Truth” Despite the ferocity of his attack, al-Ghazālī did not accuse the philosophers of holding a “Double Truth” theory, for a reason both simple and profound: Avicenna and al-Fārābī never claimed that there were two contradictory truths. For them, Truth was one and indivisible. The difference lay not in the essence of truth, but in the mode of its expression. The philosopher grasps truth through demonstration. The Prophet grasps the same truth through the Sacred Imagination, through symbols, stories, and parables. Therefore, for them, Philosophy and sharīʿa (Divine Law) were identical in depth; sharīʿa was simply “philosophy for the masses.” Al-Ghazālī’s attack arose because the philosophers attempted to “occupy” the space of religion and interpret prophecy as a psychological or intellectual phenomenon. By contrast, the attack in medieval Europe on “Latin Averroism,” associated with figures such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, arose because those influenced by Arabic falsafa were perceived as creating an independent domain for Reason, or philosophical truth, functioning separately from Theology. While the “Latin Averroists” were famously accused by the Church of promoting a “Double Truth,” suggesting that something could be true in philosophy while its opposite was true in faith, al-Ghazālī’s critique took a different psychological turn. Instead of “Double Truth,” al-Ghazālī accused the Eastern philosophers of “Deception” (talbīs). He saw them not as maintaining two separate but equal spheres, but as pretending to adhere to the sharīʿa (religious truth) while strategically dismantling its foundations from within through their doctrines of the world’s eternity and the denial of bodily resurrection. In al-Ghazālī’s eyes, this made them intellectual conspirators with the Bāṭiniyya, despite their rejection of the Ismaili reliance on the “Instruction” (taʿlīm) of an Infallible Imam. Averroes and the Restoration of Aristotle While al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut was a death blow to the specific Neoplatonic-Islamic synthesis of Avicenna, Averroes’ response was less a defense of Avicenna than a project of restoration. Averroes essentially “threw Avicenna under the bus” to salvage the purity of Aristotle. He argued that Avicenna’s famous distinction between essence and existence, in which existence is treated as an “accident” befalling an essence, was a linguistic and philosophical blunder. Furthermore, he dismissed the Theory of Emanation, with its logic that “from one, only one can proceed,” as a Neoplatonic myth that had corrupted Aristotle’s more rigorous focus on the Prime Mover. Much of the confusion Averroes sought to rectify stemmed from the Theology of Aristotle, falsely attributed to the Stagirite. The Cordovan philosopher was deeply suspicious of this contaminated legacy. His Long Commentaries were a deliberate attempt to scrape away the “Gnostic and Hermetic” barnacles that had attached themselves to the Aristotelian ship during its long transit through Hellenistic and Syriac traditions. For Averroes, philosophy was a demonstrative method; if a doctrine failed, it was simply because the philosopher was not being “Aristotelian” enough. Consequently, the battle lines had to be redrawn around the eternity of the world. This Aristotelian premise flatly contradicted the “creation from nothing” central to the Abrahamic faiths, sparking a fundamental metaphysical clash. From al-Kindī to Avicenna: The Problem of Eternity Al-Kindī, the first in the lineage of “the Philosophers” and the quintessential “Philosopher of the Arabs,” descending from the Kinda tribe, sought to circumvent this conflict. He committed himself to the temporal creation of the world, asserting that God is the “First Cause” who brought existence out of “non-existence,” and that the world is a product of Divine Will, not eternal alongside God. Al-Fārābī, on the other hand, was preoccupied with reconciling Plato’s Timaeus with Aristotelian metaphysics. In the Timaeus, the world is understood as “generated,” yet the Demiurge does not create matter from nothing; rather, he is a “Divine Architect” who imposes order (Cosmos) upon a primordial, chaotic receptacle (Chōra) by gazing at the eternal Forms. To bridge the gap between Plato and Aristotle, al-Fārābī argued that Aristotle did not mean that the world was independent of a cause, but rather that it was eternal in time while dependent in existence upon the First Cause. To achieve this, he employed the theory of Emanation (fayḍ): the world flows from God as light flows from the sun; it is “contingent” in its dependence upon the Other, yet “eternal” by virtue of the eternity of the Divine Act. Plato’s notion that time was created with the world as a “moving image of eternity” later allowed Avicenna to formulate the theory of “Temporal Eternity and Essential Contingency.” For Avicenna, God is the “Sufficient Cause,” and logic dictates that a sufficient cause cannot be temporally separated from its effect. To avoid equating the world with God, he introduced a surgical distinction: the world is eternal in time, in the sense that there is no “before” preceding it, yet it is “contingent in essence.” In its own nature, the world is “possible,” and, left to itself, it would be nothingness; its existence is borrowed from the “Necessary Being.” This metaphysical framework provoked al-Ghazālī’s charge of apostasy (takfīr). He argued that the philosophers stripped God of “choice,” reducing Him to a natural necessity, like the sun, which must shine, or fire, which must burn. He mocked the principle that “from the One, only one can proceed,” claiming that the philosophers were restricting God’s omnipotence within the confines of their own man-made geometric rules. Averroes: Eternity as Continuous Creation In response, Averroes sought to defend the eternity of the world without relying on the theory of Emanation. He proposed the concept of “Continuous Creation.” For him, the world is in a state of perpetual “becoming,” dependent moment by moment upon the First Cause. Against the theologians (mutakallimūn), he argued that claiming God “decided” to create at a specific moment implies a change in God’s essence, raising the question: why now and not before? In The Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-Maqāl), he argued that the literal text of Scripture does not categorically support creation from absolute nothingness, citing verses such as “And His Throne was upon the water” to suggest that a primordial matter preceded the world’s current form. For Averroes, truth does not contradict truth. The “connection” between Scripture and Wisdom was not a diplomatic truce between two separate truths, but a unified witness to the same reality. However, as Latin Averroism, associated for example with Siger of Brabant, emerged, it struggled to maintain this “nexus” between demonstration and faith, leading its detractors to accuse it of the “Double Truth” theory, the idea that two contradictory truths could coexist.

As the Iranian mullah regime continues its relentless near-daily hangings of Iranian teenagers and young people — most of them schoolchildren and university students — from cranes, the Trump Administration has effectively declared an all-out economic war against the Islamic Republic, as President Donald Trump stated unequivocally in the early hours of Thursday. At a press briefing, the White House chief announced that the United States would shortly impose 'unprecedented' economic sanctions designed to completely isolate Iran economically. Later on Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — now a sworn enemy of the mullah regime — was even more explicit, stressing that 'Iran will face the most severe sanctions ever imposed on any country,' and adding that U.S. authorities will take measures against any country that continues to maintain trade relations with Iran. But the most fundamental point raised by Scott Bessent — one of highly strategic significance — concerned the fate of the Islamic Republic in the shadow of this economic war. 'The Iranian regime will collapse; we will bring down the Iranian regime,' the Treasury Secretary declared. Oil exports halted This is arguably the first time a senior American official has stated so clearly and explicitly the U.S. Administration's intention to simply and straightforwardly topple the mullah regime. Until now, senior officials in Washington had emphasized that their goal was to achieve 'a change in the regime's behavior, not regime change.' Next Monday, Mr. Bessent is expected to hold a press conference to announce in explicit detail the sanctions to be imposed on the Islamic Republic. But even before the new measures on the horizon are formally announced, Iran's socioeconomic and financial situation is already teetering on the brink of total collapse. The Governor of the Iranian Central Bank, Nasser Hemmati, acknowledged on Thursday — arguably for the first time — that Iranian oil exports have been completely halted. 'We are no longer exporting any oil whatsoever, and the other problem we face is our inability to access our financial resources,' the Governor stated. Against this explosive backdrop, Lebanese Shia opposition circles, drawing on information from Tehran, indicate that stirrings of discontent are beginning to emerge in certain segments of the population, while the impact of American sanctions and the naval blockade is increasingly translating into a growing paralysis of the state's administrative apparatus. This situation is further compounded, the aforementioned circles assert, by deep divisions and power struggles within the ruling establishment. Hezbollah: 'a terrorist organization under the command of the Revolutionary Guards' In the wake of this American escalation against the regime — which on Thursday evening condemned Washington's 'economic terrorism' — the U.S. Administration simultaneously launched a serious escalation in its campaign against Hezbollah. The Treasury Department announced that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has re-listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization operating under the direct command of the 'Jerusalem Brigade' of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This effectively implies that Hezbollah is regarded as an Iranian organization rather than a Lebanese one. In this context, OFAC has imposed sanctions on around ten individuals linked to Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards. They are accused of covertly funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah from Turkey through commercial flights. Joseph Aoun received by the Pope On the ground in Lebanon, attention is primarily focused on the extensive underground military fortifications at Ali el-Taher (in the Nabatieh region), where, according to a Hezbollah source cited Thursday evening by Al-Hadath, around a hundred Shia militants and senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers are holed up, besieged by the Israeli army, which is tightening its grip daily. Israel's objective is to carry out gradual encroachment operations in order to trigger the collapse of the tunnels and infrastructure built by the Iranians over several years. The aforementioned Hezbollah source emphasizes that the Ali el-Taher fortifications represent for the Shia party not only a strategic military asset, but above all carry a 'particular moral significance.' As a result, the source notes that Hezbollah would rather see the Israeli army simply destroy this infrastructure outright than have it handed over to the Lebanese army, as some local circles had suggested. Finally, in this broader context, President Joseph Aoun was received early Thursday morning by Pope Leo XIV. On this occasion, the head of state urged the Supreme Pontiff to continue his efforts with international bodies to 'pressure Israel into complying with the provisions of the framework agreement' signed last June by Lebanon and Israel under US auspices. The Vatican has expressed its support for this framework agreement, which outlines the process approved by both Beirut and Tel Aviv to achieve a situation that would permanently put an end to the state of war between Lebanon and Israel.

During one of my visits to Canada, I stopped, as I usually do, at Volume bookstore, which carries valuable intellectual works that are no longer in print. There, I came across a small book by a Canadian author, Michel Poulin: Vivre et laisser vivre . I picked it up immediately because it deals with how people live together, what we in Lebanon call “coexistence.” The book’s central idea appears simple: my freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins. But the real question is: who determines those boundaries? The book rejects two extreme ideas: absolute freedom, which leads to chaos, and total control, which leads to repression. In place of these two, it proposes another form of freedom: “responsible freedom.” These ideas come close to John Stuart Mill’s thinking and his “harm principle,” according to which society or the state may legitimately exercise coercion over an individual against their will for one purpose only: to prevent harm to others. They also echo Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatment of the social contract, namely the attempt to reconcile man’s absolute individual freedom in the state of nature with submission to political and legal authority in civil society, without losing that freedom or becoming dependent on others. What is particularly compelling about this book, however, is that it does not offer a theoretical discourse. Instead, it begins with lived examples drawn from everyday life, from the family to the workplace and then to the public sphere. It uses concrete situations to show how the principle of freedom turns into a daily struggle for influence and power, and therefore into disagreement over the very definition of “right” itself. How does this play out in Lebanon? Let us begin with a question: do we have a single definition of freedom? Or does each group define freedom according to its own interests? One group believes that only its weapons protect its freedom. Another considers those very weapons a threat not only to its freedom, but to its existence and to Lebanon’s existence itself. A third believes that its influence is what protects its freedom. These conflicting conceptions bring competing freedoms into conflict. Instead of complementing one another and allowing peaceful coexistence, they lead to an imposed coexistence or a forced balance. Lebanon’s competing sectarian communities do not clash because their religions or cultures differ, but because they are driven by the same “mimetic desire,” to borrow René Girard’s term: the desire for domination, monopoly over power, and recourse to foreign powers in order to strengthen themselves. Every community has, at some point in Lebanon’s history, enjoyed a period of political hegemony: Maronite political hegemony, then Sunni political hegemony, and now Shiite political hegemony. At each stage, the other communities felt the desire to imitate the dominant group, viewing it at once as a “model and a rival.” Thus, when one community possesses weapons or enjoys regional influence, the others do not necessarily demand its disarmament from a purely civic standpoint. They are also driven by a form of “mimetic envy” and by the desire to acquire a power advantage of their own, both to protect themselves and to reinforce their position by relying on an external power. Lebanon’s communities are “rival twins” who sacrifice national interests to similar impulses: domination and monopoly over power. But this mimetic rivalry has now reached its peak. The social order is in crisis as state institutions, the only common denominator among all the adversaries, collapse. This is what drives some to demand autonomous security arrangements and cantons. The paradox is that the demand for autonomous security arrangements and cantons does not arise from a coherent political vision. It is, rather, one of the clearest expressions of “mimetic rivalry,” a mirror response to an unequal balance of power. For decades, Hezbollah has succeeded in building its own “private canton,” with its military apparatus, financial institutions, social services, and independent security system. When the other communities see this group, entirely autonomous within its own “state,” while at the same time dominating central decision-making, they do not see an equal partnership. Their natural sociological response, driven by fear for their very existence, becomes: if the central state is unable to protect us, then we must build our own cantons in order to survive. This is precisely what Girard warns against when he speaks of “rival twins.” In trying to resist Hezbollah’s model or protect themselves from it, the other communities end up reproducing its behavior and demanding isolated areas of their own. In doing so, they serve Hezbollah’s objective: to make the establishment of a sovereign, civil, centralized state governed by the rule of law impossible. The “Mimetic Crisis” and Collapse: The War of All Against All When mimetic rivalry reaches its peak, the social order collapses and boundaries and distinctions begin to dissolve. This is what Girard calls the “mimetic crisis.” We seem to be at the heart of such a crisis, because state institutions, our only common denominator, are collapsing. When the state collapses, each community comes to see itself as the absolute victim and the other as the demon that must be eliminated. This is what happened during the civil war we lived through, and whose return continues to haunt us today as sectarian divisions deepen and Lebanese citizens endure one shock after another. Historically, Lebanon’s pluralistic system has managed, after every crisis we have gone through, to reproduce itself. Each time, the communities, or rather their leaders, manufactured a “scapegoat” to whom they assigned full responsibility, as a way of releasing collective violence and reviving coexistence. It began with the phrase “the wars of others” on our soil, used to explain the civil war. Then came the Palestinian refugee issue, followed by the Syrian refugee issue, with these “foreigners” blamed for the economic collapse. Judge Bitar then became the system’s scapegoat in the aftermath of the crime at the port. Even the political class itself was targeted in 2019, when the street chanted, “All of them means all of them.” And when the system managed once again to save itself, it sacrificed a few figures. The governor of the Banque du Liban, Riad Salameh, thus became the scapegoat made to carry the sins of the entire banking system, 40% of whose owners are themselves members of the political class, as well as those of the political system as a whole. The rest survived. Can this truly be called “coexistence”? Or is it a ritual that worships fear? This coexistence, endlessly recycled and reproduced through political rituals that the system has excelled at marketing, national dialogue sessions, sectarian allocation of posts, and mutual vetoes, is not intended to build a state in any real sense. Its purpose is to prevent “mimetic rivalry” from exploding. It is a coexistence built on fear of a return to conflict. In other words, what is sacred in Lebanon is a “precarious civil peace,” worshipped like an idol, in whose name justice, the law, accountability, the rights of the port victims and of depositors are sacrificed, to the point of sacrificing the state, the land, and the country itself. But we are now living through the most dangerous phase Lebanon has ever known, and the gravest of its crises, because the “scapegoat mechanism” is beginning to lose its effectiveness. The system can no longer invent a victim capable of convincing all Lebanese. The fracture has deepened, and there is no longer any “shared victim’s blood” capable of bringing the adversaries together. The hope is that the new generations, who will assume tomorrow’s responsibilities, will reject this “false coexistence” built on burying the truth. The hope is that the new generation will demand a transition from a society that bargains away its victims to one that holds people accountable, and toward a state governed by law and justice, whether for the port or for the country as a whole.

One does not have to look far to see that several wars are being waged, with Iran’s blessing, across the Arab world and beyond. In Yemen, the Houthis are trying to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait by seeking to retake the Yemeni port of Mokha, from which they were driven in 2014 by local Yemeni forces backed by the United Arab Emirates. Will Iran manage to control both the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the gateway to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, through the Houthis in Yemen? Iran has made no secret of its decision to pursue an offensive policy on several fronts. But for the Revolutionary Guards, the priority today remains maintaining Iran’s grip on Iraq. A genuine struggle is underway there, centered on the weapons held by sectarian militias affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. These militias were brought together under the banner of the “Popular Mobilization Forces,” which receive funding from the Iraqi state budget and seek to exercise over the state the same dominant role played by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards’ attachment to the Popular Mobilization Forces and their arsenal explains the importance Iran places on Iraq, which has now been put at the service of multiple Iranian interests benefiting the regime in Tehran. Among those uses is financing part of Iran’s budget. A few days ago, the governor of Iran’s central bank traveled to Baghdad to demand payment of $12 billion for Iranian gas used in Iraq to generate electricity. The Iranians have forgotten that closing the Strait of Hormuz prevents Iraq from exporting a large share of its oil and therefore costs Iraq billions of dollars. Iran is demanding billions from Iraq while at the same time seeking, for reasons of its own, to prevent it from exporting most of its oil. Those reasons stem from the fact that the Strait of Hormuz has become Iran’s most powerful weapon in its confrontation with the United States, with Iraq now among the victims of that confrontation. Regardless of what the “Islamic Republic” derives from Iraq’s resources, particularly its oil, Iraq remains the grand prize handed to Iran by the United States. That happened under the administration of George W. Bush, which insisted in 2003 on overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime and handing Iraq to the “Islamic Republic” on a silver platter. The US administration is now seeking to wrest Iraq away from Iran. Yet it appears to ignore a fundamental reality: since 2003, Iraq has effectively been ruled by sectarian militias linked to the Revolutionary Guards, the very militias that fought the Iraqi army during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. These are Iraqi militias that returned from Tehran, riding American tanks into Baghdad. They took control of the key institutions of the Iraqi state and prevented any genuine reform capable of turning Iraq into a normal state, one able to balance its relations with Iran and its Arab neighbors. This is an Iraqi reality that Donald Trump’s administration neglects because of its failure to understand the depth of Iranian penetration into Iraq… The George W. Bush administration rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist, family-run regime. It was necessary to get rid of that regime, both brutal and foolish, but only if one knew who would replace it. The Trump administration is now trying to address the consequences of a disaster that befell Iraq, which is now being asked to become a dagger in the side of Arab security. Attacks against Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are launched from Iraq. Iraq is also used as a launchpad for attacks on specific targets in the Kurdistan Region. It is no coincidence that Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, made a point of beginning his latest visit to Iraq with a stop at the memorial to Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, who was killed in a US strike alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, shortly after they left Baghdad airport in early 2020. Qalibaf, one of the most prominent figures in the Iranian regime, came to Baghdad to confirm Tehran’s opposition to the disarmament of Iraqi militias, in direct opposition to the efforts of Ali al-Zaidi’s government, which finds itself in an unenviable position. Qalibaf did not say so explicitly. But his visit to the Qassem Soleimani memorial, where he delivered a speech glorifying the “resistance,” carries a clear message. Above all, it means that the “Islamic Republic” still regards Iraq as an “arena” within its orbit, and indeed as an essential asset in its confrontation with the Trump administration, a confrontation that is sometimes quiet and at other times overt, punctuated from time to time by public or secret negotiations. Iraq can now be regarded as an integral part of the wars unfolding across the region, from Yemen to the Strait of Hormuz, from the Arab Gulf states subjected to Iranian attacks to South Lebanon. Who will have the final say in Iraq? How far can Iran continue to exert pressure? To what extent can Ali al-Zaidi’s government withstand the armed militias? Will the visit to Saudi Arabia by Faiq Zidan, president of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, help secure Arab support for Ali al-Zaidi’s government? It should be noted that Faiq Zidan has recently emerged as a major player in Iraq’s domestic politics, including in the choice of prime minister. These are the questions that will define the next phase, with Iraq itself at the heart of them. It is in Iraq that Iran is defending its regime and seeking to assert that there will be no turning back, no return to the situation that existed before 2003. That year, the George W. Bush administration decided to make the “Islamic Republic” the custodian of Iraq under the pretext of Iraq’s “Shiite majority.” Can Donald Trump’s administration correct a historic mistake that upended the balance of power across the Middle East, the Near East and the Gulf?