archive.monthlyreview.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-09-2016-02_5
REVIEW
Clerics and Communists
BASHIR SAADE
Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab, The Shi‘ites of Lebanon:
Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah’s Islamists (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2014), 350 pages, $49.95, hardcover.
In the West today, political Islam is mostly equated with ISIS’s spectacle
of violence, and with the narrow, bigoted understanding of religion and
society that inspires it. It will thus intrigue many readers to discover that
the legacy of Islamic intellectual and political activity, from the turn of
the twentieth century until today, bore the imprint of a complex interaction between Communist and leftist traditions. A recent book by two
professors at McGill University, Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab,
takes on the ambitious task of tracing the history of the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes confrontational relationship among Shi‘i communities
and clerics in Lebanon, along with occasional discussions of related issues in Iraqi politics. Based on a rich set of primary documents from
both countries, the authors describe in great detail the rise and fall of the
Communist experience in the region, the shortcomings of the left as it
was gradually superseded by Islamic party formations, and the deep debt
of the latter to the former.
The historical period under study spans from the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century to the partition of the
Middle East into states. The authors constantly shift between the era’s
two geographical “stages,” the first being the south of Lebanon. Starting
with the period of the French mandate in the 1920s, they narrate the
social and political changes that took place in this Shi‘a-majority region,
transforming it from a trade center linking Palestine to the rest of the
Ottoman Empire and Europe to a marginalized border area within the
newly founded nation-state of Lebanon. The second major stage is the
Iraqi city of Najaf, whose famous religious schools were an inevitable
stopping point for any Shi‘i scholar seeking promotion in the socio-religious sphere. But the city suffered a crisis of legitimacy in the aftermath
of the creation of the Iraqi state under British colonial auspices in 1921.
Again the authors lucidly map the formation of the state and its impact
on various social groups, most notably the religious clerics of Najaf, who
Bashir Saade is a teaching fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His first book, Writing Nations: Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
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emerged from decades of malaise into a kind of renaissance in the late
1960s and onwards, after confronting the influence of the Communist
Party and Marxist thought.
In Lebanon, key figures in the Shi‘i community stand out as having
resisted French occupation and aligned politically with a greater-Syria
or greater-Arab state project—although their political claims were never fully clear, a result of the climate of uncertainty that prevailed not
only for the Lebanese Shi‘a but throughout post-Ottoman Arab societies—which helped make Arab nation-states an unchallengeable reality.
However, Abisaab and Abisaab are not just interested in tracing the political history of an elite movement, but in a far broader range of socioeconomic issues that drove mass politicization. They closely examine the
plight of the peasants of south Lebanon, along with their relation to a
minority landed aristocracy and their rising political influence as they
came into contact with a state that had previously ignored them.
What stands out in Abisaab and Abisaab’s book is their thorough analysis of the various cultural and intellectual changes that accompanied
the rise of Lebanese social movements, the formation of political parties
and organizations, and their relation to the modern state of Lebanon.
The Shi‘ites of Lebanon is partly an intellectual history of major political
movements that developed at the intersection of different historical currents, and all the epistemological baggage of Western modernity that
this entailed. This modernity brought new technologies and especially
institutional and organizational novelties, such as the political party itself, that allowed these movements to mobilize resources and voice social demands differently from their “traditional” counterparts.
Moreover, this is a book about the struggle of a peculiar social class–
the Shi‘i clerics–to grapple with the political upheaval brought by the
fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of a modern state.
The colonial legacy of French and British institutions triggered questions
of culture and belonging, mostly framed by binaries such as tradition
and modernity or religion and secularity. Marxism not only offered a
language to understand the new socioeconomic setting of the state, capitalism, and colonialism; it also conveyed a notion of progress that destabilized the traditional consensus over what constituted “legitimate”
knowledge of social reality. And just like other Western political ideologies, Marxism brought with it the framework of the political party in
order to advance these ideas. Shi‘i leaders drawn to Marxism increasingly
found the complex balance among social, legal, and political authorities
of premodern Lebanon as lacking the appropriate tools to respond to the
changes remaking their society.
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Abisaab and Abisaab show clearly that for the Shi‘i Muslims of Lebanon,
Marxism proved to be the most seductive worldview for a reassessment
of both cultural identity and political action, because it provided a necessary vocabulary to denounce state oppression and stark social inequalities. A beautiful chapter entitled “Communists in Ulama’s Homes” details the tempestuous encounters between several Lebanese clerics and
their students, whose Marxist ideas caused some to adopt historical materialist conceptions of the world. Marxism became both a toolkit for
organized political action and, according to the authors, a philosophical
framework in which questions of faith and metaphysics could be posed.
The extent of Marxism’s influence is evident in the lives of the three
sons of the marja’ Sayyid Muhsin al-Amin, a prominent south Lebanese
jurist, all of whom flirted with Marxism in different ways. One son,
Hashim, studied in Najaf and came back a staunchly atheist, Marxist
intellectual, only to revert back to religion, as he relates, after his experience with Lebanese Communists. Sayyid Ja’far clashed with the state
in the name of several activist movements and was later imprisoned,
an act he imputed to betrayal by the Communists, from whom he distanced himself for the rest of his life, although he remained dedicated
to peasant social causes.
Another Lebanese cleric’s son, Husayn Muroeh, had a more turbulent
experience. He traveled to Najaf to study religion and quickly grew concerned with adapting notions of “Enlightenment” and “progress” in the
context of Islamic tradition. Reading these notions through the lens of
anti-colonial struggle, he became a convinced Marxist, and by the 1960s
Muroeh was one of the chief ideologues of the Lebanese Communist
Party. Muroeh moved back and forth between the secular world of leftist
activity in Damascus and Baghdad to the clerical one of Najaf. As Abisaab
and Abisaab put it: “In Baghdad, he would change his appearance by taking off his religious garb and turban. On his way back to Najaf, he would
don them again” (70). Muroeh is representative of a larger spirit of intellectual questioning that originated with the Nahda (“awakening”) of
the late nineteenth century, when both internal reform and Western
influence began to reshape Arabic writing and philosophy. The Nahda’s
intermingling of literature and politics left a long legacy: so many of
the clerics of Najaf were also poets, it was almost part of the religious
curriculum, and Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, one of the pioneers of
modern Islamic politics from the 1970s on, was the author of several collections of poetry.
Based on interviews with Lebanese Communists, Abisaab and
Abisaab show that party members used the Ashura ritual, an annual
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commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn, Muhammad’s grandson,
to inspire awareness of social issues. In one instance, when Labor Day
coincided with the tenth day of Muharram, which marks the last day of
mourning for the killing of Husayn in Karbala, the Communists turned
the Ashura into an all-out demonstration against the state, couched in
terms of oppression and injustice drawn from both the Shi‘i and Marxist
repertoires. Years later, the founder of the Shi‘i party Amal, Musa al-Sadr,
and Hizbullah would do exactly the same thing. Such political syncretism is highly reminiscent of Communist mobilizations in Italy and their
relation to Christian rituals and practices, as described by David Kertzer
in his book Comrades and Christians.
Whereas Lebanon’s Shi‘ites, whether through Communist or clerical
efforts, were largely excluded from state power, leaving them mired in
identity crises, in Iraq, Communist Party members made up a majority
of Shi‘a, and came very close to controlling the state. As a result, the
relation between Communists and Shi‘i jurists was much more confrontational, as the increasingly powerful party pressed for agrarian reforms
that would weaken the class of large landholders. The religious class’s independence from politics was supported historically by an alliance with
these powerful landowners, who assured the former’s financial security.
As Abisaab and Abisaab recount, Iraqi Communists were at the forefront
of resistance against British colonialism in the 1940s. Personal Status law
reforms under ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim, whose 1958 rise to power was largely due to Communists’ revolutionary efforts, marked a further threat
to the clerical class’s management of private and public life. Likely as a
result of their relative power, Iraqi Communists were more comfortable
than their Lebanese counterparts with blending a Shi‘i identity with progressive or leftist understandings of social change. Abisaab and Abisaab
quote extensively the poetry and other writings of Iraqi leftist militants
and intellectuals, who used Shi‘i historical motifs such as the battle of
Karbala, or the figures of Husayn or Ali.
Modern Shi‘i politics emerged in the heyday of Iraqi Communist
power, with the formation in 1957 of the Islamic Da’wa Party, before
spreading to Lebanon in the 1970s. It was also then that a small group
of clerics, especially Baqir al-Sadr and his Lebanese student Muhammad
Husayn Fadlallah, criticized the Communist old guard’s failure to attract
younger generations and espoused more actively leftist language. It is
interesting to note that even these pioneering figures of contemporary
political Islam never officially aligned themselves with political parties
such as Da’wa, signaling the persistence of the clerical class’s traditional
remove from direct politic engagement. Abisaab and Abisaab provide a
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detailed analysis of this tension between quietism and activism within
the clerical class, a conflict that would push al-Sadr to think of new ways
to “institutionalize” the notion of marja’, which had traditionally represented leading scholars of Shi‘i jurisprudence. This also may have been
a strategy to assume a leadership role that transcended party structures,
as seen first with Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran. Under al-Sadr’s influence
Najaf, once perceived as a symbol of cultural stagnation, became the region’s main center of Shi‘i political contestation. Young Shi‘i students of
religion came from Lebanon and elsewhere to study with al-Sadr, who
developed the first full-fledged Islamic critique of Marxism and other
materialist conceptions of history and philosophy.
In a very Gramscian vein, Abisaab and Abisaab show that the structure of the modern political party became the locus for social change in
the fight to either capture or at least confront the colonial state. Baqir
al-Sadr, they write, “realized that for any Islamist movement to compete with communism, it would have to address economic relations,
state legislation, and social justice” (97–98). In the 1960s another cleric, Sayyed Musa al-Sadr, an Iranian with Lebanese origins, was more
forceful in leading and developing the party structure in Lebanon that
came to be called Amal. Musa al-Sadr built on leftist social concerns, but
was accommodating of the sectarian arrangement of the state against
which Communists had traditionally fought. Abisaab and Abisaab argue
that Musa al-Sadr wanted to preserve the authority of the clerics, thus
his creation of the Supreme Islamic Shi‘ite Council. The authors’ reading of Musa al-Sadr as “augmenting religious difference” in Lebanon is
rather pessimistic, and it should be remembered that Musa al-Sadr took
active part in all kinds of political dialogue and religious initiatives,
not to mention his involvement in the Cenacle Lebanais, an intellectual society founded in 1946 that brought together eminent Lebanese
scholars, both lay and religious, for seminars and conferences. Yet it is
definitely true that after the disappearance of Musa al-Sadr in Libya, the
later Amal became as thuggish as the rest of the militias active in the
Lebanese civil wars from 1975 to 1990.
The formation of the organized Islamic resistance against Israel under
Hizbullah marks a turn in Shi‘i politics in Lebanon. Abisaab and Abisaab
explain well the rise of Hizbullah, whom they call “advocates of political
and public religion,” and how the group is “adapting Khomeini’s theory
of wilāyat al-faqīh (deputyship of the jurist) to fit the local aims of their liberation movement against Israel” (126). Hizbullah demarcated itself from
Amal as being solely focused on fighting Israel. The political history that
the authors survey is exhaustive, but one important highlight is the
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difference between Communist and Islamist appeals to resistance, given
that the Communist Party was also involved in actions against Israel, especially in the 1980s, along with other pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel organizations. If both Communists and Islamists were known for their moral
rectitude, the former gradually weakened because of its feeble response
to the Israeli occupation, while Hizbullah emerged as far more effective.
The important point here is that the general culture of Communists
and (at least Shi‘i) Islamists have very much overlapped and it was the
effectiveness of their political praxis on the ground, of interacting with
the state or mobilizing through political parties, or even engaging in
militant actions, that made both groups more prominent. The rest of the
book focuses mainly on explaining Hizbullah’s relation to the Lebanese
state and their political environment in the post-civil war era, their successful resistance against Israeli occupation, and the liberation of territories in 2000. In outlining the different forms of public Islam prevalent
in Lebanese society today, the authors engage in a complex theoretical
discussion of modernity’s compatibility with politicized Islam. Although
in line with the book’s major themes, this contrasts curiously with their
earlier attempts to understand how political actors themselves engaged
with the ambiguous concept of modernity, shifting instead to the authors’ own view of whether Islamists are “modern” or not.
On a broader level, the authors accomplish three important tasks in
thinking about the political experiences of postcolonial states. First, they
argue that understanding, preserving, or even “modernizing” the legacy
of Islamic politics requires close study of the histories of the various states
in the region that came to be known as the Middle East. The second task,
one that this book does very well, is to show the extent to which Islamist
ideologies and political practices are less dependent on some fixed, ahistorical doctrines or strains of Islam than on the various socioeconomic
contexts in which these movements emerged. Finally, they show that
grappling with the very idea of modernity is a more complex and urgent
challenge than either rejecting or affirming religious identifications.
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