by Kim Ghattas
While Hezbollah was making inroads within the community, the armed resistance against the Israeli occupation in the south was still dominated by a coalition of leftist and communist militias as well as Amal, which was entrenched across the south. Even after the dramatic suicide bombings of 1982 and 1983, the Islamists were not yet the dominant force. The Lebanese National Resistance Front had battled alongside the Palestinians when the Israelis had invaded but they were now on their own, carrying out small attacks against the Israeli occupation across south Lebanon. There were more suicide bombers, a whole wave of them in 1985. Not Shias dying in the name of God, but secular nationalists dying for the nation, including a seventeen-year-old girl from West Beirut, Sana Mohaydali, who drove off in a Peugeot and blew up Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. There was a communist woman who carried a suitcase through a checkpoint; there were Christian leftists and Sunni communists. And unlike the Islamic Jihad group that had blown up the French and Americans but remained in the shadows, these suicide bombers wanted the credit and the theatrical, morbid prestige of martyrdom. They wanted to show they were as valiant as—if not more valiant than—the religious fanatics. And so they introduced a new phenomenon to the world of guerrilla warfare and suicide bombers: they videotaped their farewell words and made posthumous appearances. After school, the young Sana had worked in a shop selling VHS tapes, and she had helped a suicide bomber record his farewell message. “The Bride of the South,” as she would be called after her death, also taped her farewell message. “I am a future martyr. I do what I’ve decided to do with my soul at peace,” said the young woman from beyond the grave. “I do my duty for the love of my people and my country.”
The French magazine Paris Match ran a two-page color spread about her titled “La Kamikaze.” Publications across the Middle East published pictures of her sweet, smiling face, framed by long dark hair, a red beret on her head. The goal, according to one politician at the time, was to prove that secular national resistance against the Israeli occupation was the alternative to a religious fanatic jihad. Hezbollah was just a momentary craze, a strange phenomenon in the chaos of war. But in the end, the left was no match for the zealousness with which Hezbollah applied itself to the battle, not just against the Israelis, but against their own rivals. The left in Lebanon would soon be eliminated ruthlessly, just as they had been in Iran.
Hezbollah itself used the tactic of suicide bombers very sparingly—it did not want to waste able-bodied men. Suicide was also forbidden, haram in Islam, but willingly making the ultimate sacrifice in battle and dying a shaheed, a martyr, was a quest that Hezbollah recruits began seeking with enthusiasm. Khomeini inspired a frenzied, exalted zealotry and obsession with martyrdom that was profoundly changing Shiism, in Iran and in Lebanon. Four years into the war with Iraq, Iran was sending waves of weaponless young boys to their death. Wearing red headbands and armed only with a metal key supposed to open the gates of heaven, thousands of teenage boys walked across minefields to clear the way for tanks, their bodies hurled into the air by the explosions. Volunteers or forcibly rounded up, these human waves were breaking enemy lines. Religious fervor permeated Iranian troops and the volunteer Basij forces, willing to die for the nation, for Khomeini, and for Imam Hussein. As ideological resolve took hold and death in martyrdom became desirable, Ashura was every minute of every day—at least for Khomeini, who insisted on war until victory. This was not an understanding of the Shia faith that Husseini could recognize, neither was it the one that Imam Sadr had preached. Even the martyrdom of Imam Hussein had been disfigured by Khomeini, according to former Iranian prime minister Bazergan, who wrote a celebrated open letter to the ayatollah in 1986 decrying how the revolution had made martyrdom a goal into itself.
Out of power, Bazergan was still in Iran and remained a member of parliament until 1984. He continued to fight for a different Iran, more democratic and less theocratic. He was unsuccessful of course, but in his letter he took Khomeini to task on political and theological grounds. In Fouad Ajami’s book Dream Palace of the Arabs, which explores the demise and failure of Hawi’s generation, Ajami delves into the letter, detailing how Bazergan reminded Khomeini that Imam Hussein had not marched willingly to a certain death. In fact, the Hussein of Bazergan’s rendition, just as in Imam Sadr’s, was a wise man who decides to return from whence he came when he realizes that the men who have called on him to help fight Yazid have withdrawn their invitation. He tries to avert a clash with his enemies, but it’s too late. His war, then, was a defensive war, not a quest for martyrdom. Therefore, Karbala cannot be used to justify “war, war until victory,” against Iraq or others. Bazergan said that Khomeini had strayed from “the objective realities and the lessons of the apostles and the imams.”
The letter would be forgotten, its message of moderation irrelevant in the midst of war with Iraq, drowned out by the systematic indoctrination, the frenzied fervor of those seeking martyrdom on the battlefield, and the chants for Imam Hussein, a fervor that was washing over the Shia community in Lebanon.
* * *
In 1985, Israel pulled out from most of the territory it had occupied since 1982, including the large towns of Sidon and Tyre. It began to set up a buffer zone along its border, a few miles wide. Tens of thousands of Lebanese, Muslim and Christian alike, would continue to live under Israeli occupation for another fifteen years. In the villages that were now free of Israeli soldiers, Hezbollah got busy. The pattern was the same as in Baalbek but harsher and wider-ranging: rampaging against shops selling alcohol, closing down cafés, banning music, banning all other political parties. Fear descended onto people as Hezbollah imposed its law and a wave of assassinations began. Critics and rivals, especially leftists and communists, were eliminated ruthlessly. The crimes were not investigated; no one was caught. But everyone knew. Hezbollah recruited and organized: many joined willingly, others were rounded up. The more men fought in battle against the Israelis, the more there were martyrs, and the more martyrs there were, the more families became indebted to a system of patronage that looked after widows and orphans, ensuring loyalty to Hezbollah. Posters announcing the death of those who had died fighting the occupation began to look different: gone were the smiling faces of young women or clean-shaven men with sideburns who had died for the nation. The battle was now fought in the name of Islam; the men had beards, and the colors were black for mourning and green for Islam—signed: “Islamic Resistance.” Many of the posters were exact copies of those on the walls in Iran—designed with the help of artists who had come specially from Tehran to help train local artists to produce public obituaries that were also used as propaganda.
In 1986, the oppressive, ruthless darkness in Iran had become too much for the Fahs family, and they decided to leave Tehran. The truth of what his dreams had helped birth had become a crushing burden for Sayyed Fahs. Nothing had changed; everything was worse: Khomeini’s embrace of the Palestinian cause had delivered no victories; a radical Islamist militia was on the rise in his country; and friends were being executed in Iran. The purge that had first targeted the secular left and other opponents of Khomeini was extending its reach, silencing former committed revolutionaries. A whole new wave of executions was under way. It wasn’t easy to leave, and it wasn’t a clean break. Sayyed Fahs went back and forth for a few years, until he cut all ties in 1988. Just like severing ties with a loved one, the extrication process was hard, drawn out, as one hangs on to slivers of hope that perhaps the other can still change. In the case of the Iranian regime, there was always this hope that perhaps the sage Khomeini simply wasn’t aware of the abuses being committed in his name. But he was.
Fahs was shaken to his core when one of his closest friends was defrocked, jailed, tortured horribly, and then executed. Beyond the horrific details, there was the shattered grand dream. Fahs had envisioned a borderless Muslim community, and had gone to Iran believing the wave would start from there. Instead, he had found Shia sectarianism and Persian nationalism. The combinat
ion was toxic. He rediscovered his own identity, his Arab belonging, his Lebaneseness. Sitting in Tehran, listening to Fairuz, he cried. The family returned to Lebanon only to find that darkness had preceded them. In their village of Jebsheet, the only woman to wear the full black cloak in the 1970s had been Fahs’s wife, as was incumbent on the wife of a cleric. Now there were chadors everywhere. Relatives who had never veiled were covering their hair. His daughter Badia felt as if there had been a coup in their absence, an overnight takeover. She had left Iran a country where there were still daily acts of defiance against the new regime despite the dangers. She came home to find that villagers had fully absorbed the ideas that Khomeini was peddling. Far from the heart of the revolution, unaware of its abject horrors, people wanted some of its shine. There were benefits. With generous funding from Iran, Hezbollah was creating a copy of the Iranian system in Lebanon: schools, charities, martyrs’ associations, Mahdi scouts, religious seminaries attached to Qom instead of Najaf. And there were reciters. Professional chanters of religious eulogies for Imam Hussein or others came from Iran to teach and spread a specific style among the Shias of Lebanon.
Badia could hardly believe her ears when she first heard the chanting blaring from loudspeakers mounted on the roof of a car driving around the village. Rhythmic, repetitive, entrancing. But nothing she’d ever heard in Lebanon before. In Iran, yes, but not here. Badia had spent a year studying in the Qom hawza for women but had found it too heavy to bear, almost neurotically devotional. There were too many fables and too much Persian haughtiness. She moved to a hawza set up for Arab students and found an even worse environment, surrounded by students who had left everything to join what they thought was a utopian Islamic state. They were detached from reality, drowning in a fanaticism that would make it hard to return to their home countries. She left there, too.
In Lebanon, Ashura had always been an occasion for reciting poetry and retelling the story of Imam Hussein. Men cried and gently thumped their chests with an open hand, sitting on the floor of a husseiniyya, a congregation hall specifically reserved for ceremonies mourning Imam Hussein. The gesture of grief and self-flagellation was known as latmiya. In various corners of the world, there were Shias who engaged in a more forceful, sometimes bloody latmiya, self-flagellating with chains, cutting their foreheads and beating them with their hands to make the blood flow—just as Easter passion processions run the gamut from parades through villages in Italy to actual crucifixions in the Philippines. Lebanon had been on the tamer side. But now Ashura, and every funeral of a Hezbollah fighter, was an occasion for mobilizing, indoctrinating, and forcefully thumping one’s chest.
A famous religious chanter from the Arab Ahwaz region of Iran had come to Lebanon to propagate the Iranian-style latmiya. Known as Asakiri, it was his voice blaring from the cars driving around villages, chanting, rhythmic, militaristic—the new soundtrack to life. He stood in husseiniyyas as acolytes, men with full beards in military fatigues, led the crowd and demonstrated the gestures: arms swinging above the head, crossing over the chest, and open palms thumping over the heart. Asakiri chanted in Arabic:
O lover of jihad
O lover of jihad
Swing, cross, thump. Swing, cross, thump. “All together now, all together!” Some in the crowd looked lost, clapping instead. Some used one hand only, thumping gently as they had done all their life. The most enthusiastic seemed to be the youngest in the front row, swinging their arms energetically.
O lover of jihad, O lover of jihad
Ruhollah Khomeini, Ruhollah Khomeini
On the battlefield of jihad
O lover of jihad, O lover of jihad
Grab your weapons, Grab your weapons
Let’s go to the battlefield, Hezbollah calls you
Hezbollah calls you, to remove all sedition
Make war against the enemy
Even the soundtrack of revolution had changed. The left had hummed other songs and strummed guitars. Their bard was the Lebanese composer Marcel Khalifeh with his oud, the lute-like pear-shaped stringed instrument that is central to Arab music. Khalifeh sang verses of the most famous Palestinian poet of all, Mahmoud Darwish.
Between me and Rita is a rifle and those who know Rita
Prostrate themselves and pray to the amber in her eyes.
Khalifeh still sang, but he couldn’t fill stadiums anymore. His public had become a target of the Islamists, a campaign to ruthlessly silence those who could offer an intellectual alternative to the Shia community: Shia-on-Shia violence, opposite worldviews clashing.
In Pakistan, the time had come for a new phenomenon that had no precedent in recent history: systematic Sunni-on-Shia killings.
8
SHIA KAFIR
PAKISTAN
1980–88
I went to the West and saw Islam but no Muslims;
I got back to the East and saw Muslims but no Islam.
—Muhammad Abduh, nineteenth-century modernist religious scholar
In the summer of 1987, Pakistani Sunnis went into a village on the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and killed Shias, fellow countrymen. Then Shias killed Sunnis. Almost two hundred people died. The violence was not the result of communal riots, nor a feud between tribes. Neither was it a war between nations, as was unfolding between Iran and Iraq. The two neighboring countries had been fighting each other for almost seven years by now, but Iraqi Shias were fighting loyally under their country’s flag against Iran, and the narrative of a Persian-Arab clash was only just beginning to take sectarian overtones. No, the bloodletting in Pakistan was the first premeditated, state-sponsored attack by one sectarian militia against another sect, the first such killings that the Muslim world had witnessed in modern times. The sectarian killings were born out of the seeds of the Iranian Revolution and its clash with Saudi Wahhabism, with a dose of provocative zealotry from Zia ul-Haq, still in power thanks to his 1985 referendum appointing him as the upholder of the country’s piety.
Each camp had its foot soldiers. But before the blood and the sectarian militias, there were the evangelists: two Pakistani allamas—religious scholars with rival worldviews—one aligned with Iran, the other with Saudi Arabia. The two men met only once, but the parallel tracks of their lives tell the tale of the proxy war that the House of Saud and Khomeini began to fight in Pakistan in the 1980s. Their words chart the radicalization of their respective communities, and their brutal deaths mark the start of modern-day Sunni-Shia sectarian violence that would spread across Pakistan before making its way to the Middle East. The two men lived in a separate world, almost a separate country from the one that the television anchor Mehtab was living in, but over time, their Pakistan would come to dominate hers.
Allama Ehsan Elahi Zaheer had studied at the Islamic university in Medina and was a protégé of its powerful vice rector, the blind Saudi sheikh Bin Baz. Allama Arif Hussaini had studied in Najaf and was one of the first Pakistani religious students to embrace Ayatollah Khomeini, attending his evening prayers and lectures in his place of exile and pressing fellow Pakistani students to show support to the Iranian reactionary.
Allama Zaheer had a perennially angry voice and wore the uniform of a nationalist: a karakul hat, worn most famously by Pakistan’s founder, Jinnah, and a salwar kameez with a waistcoat on top. With his trimmed dark brown beard and his gold-rimmed glasses with tinted lenses, he looked more like a rabble-rouser than a theologian.
Allama Hussaini was tall and stood out in a crowd, dressed in the long cloak of a cleric, his black turban a mark of his lineage as a sayyed, a descendant of the prophet. His speeches were fiery, but not angry. They both mastered Arabic, Hussaini with a soft, Persian-inspired inflection, Zaheer with the more strained, guttural accent he had picked up in the Gulf.
Zaheer and Hussaini were born a year apart, on either side of the country, just as the 1947 partition of British India was giving birth to an independent Pakistan. Hussaini came from the small village of Paiwar, in the Kurram distri
ct of the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan—the only district with a large Shia minority, estimated at around 40 percent. He hailed from the Shia Turi tribe; other tribes were mixed Sunni-Shia, like the Bangash. Zaheer came from the Punjab, where the rich landowners were often Shias and the workforce Sunni.
Pakistan’s Shias were the largest minority in the country, the second-largest Shia population outside Iran, but unlike Shias in the Arab world they had never felt downtrodden. Anti-Shia sentiment existed on the subcontinent, even in pre-partition India, but just as in the rest of the Muslim world until then, its expression was limited to a minority of clerics and their followers, a strand of thought that did not pervade the general population or undermine a country’s stability. Communal violence flared every now and then, especially around religious festivals. Sometimes it erupted over petty disputes, like the height of a minaret or the path of a procession, or more serious (but not deadly) matters, like land disputes. Shia leaders spoke out for the rights of all Pakistanis but their demands as a minority community were also heard.
