Ibtissam Klait, a scholar and educator specializing in international relations and global affairs, spoke to a July 27 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes her comments:
Lebanon’s two competing centers of power are the constitutional state versus Hezbollah, “a political party, a social movement, and an armed group that maintains military capabilities independent of the Lebanese state.” Officially announcing itself in 1985, Hezbollah evolved from a movement inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution into a power limiting the Lebanese government’s ability to “exercise a unified national security policy.”
Rising to power and advocating for Lebanon’s socioeconomically disadvantaged Shia population, al-Sadr became the first president of Lebanon’s Supreme Islamic Shia Council in 1969 to represent the Shia community.
Imam Musa Sadr is a historical figure whose legacy influences Lebanese politics and Shia political identity to this day. Born in Iran in 1928, he relocated to Lebanon after forming roots in both Iran and Iraq and became a leading Shia cleric who engaged with a wider religious network across the region. Rising to power and advocating for Lebanon’s socioeconomically disadvantaged Shia population, al-Sadr became the first president of Lebanon’s Supreme Islamic Shia Council in 1969 to represent the Shia community.
While studying in Iran during the 1950s, al-Sadr circulated in the same scholarly network as the Ayatollah Khomeini. The latter lectured on the doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih in 1970 prior to ascending to power as Iran’s Supreme Leader following 1979’s Islamic Revolution. The doctrine is specific to Shia Islam and grants absolute authority over Islamic law and the state to a supreme Islamic jurist. It was likely that al-Sadr’s activism among the Shia communities in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon disseminated Khomeini’s lectures, through which al-Sadr supported Khomeini’s vision that “an Islamic state is obligatory; monarchy is illegitimate.”
In 1973, al-Sadr’s recognition of the Alawite community in Syria accomplished two objectives. First, it gave Hafez al-Assad’s regime legitimacy, and second, under al-Sadr’s leadership, the regional alliance among Shia communities in Iran and Lebanon became connected to Syria’s political power.
Hezbollah emerged in 1985, six years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and during the Lebanese Civil War, which was sparked by sectarian conflicts that boiled over in 1975. The Iranian regime dispatched its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as advisors to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley where Hezbollah was based because Hezbollah was not just another militia, but “a revolutionary ideological movement” to exploit. Its manifesto of obedience to one leader under the doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih, a.k.a., “the Hezbollah Program,” was published and distributed across Lebanon that year. “That document therefore fused territorial, religious, [and] ideological arguments” into a singular concept of resistance.
The young Shia generation of militants forged by Lebanon’s civil war were drawn to Hezbollah’s message of a religious identity with the transnational Islamic community, the ummah, rather than political allegiance to any “territorial nationality.” They believed that the Iranian regime’s revolution represented “a broader Islamic awakening.”
Hezbollah’s view of Lebanon is that it is only one front in the global Islamic struggle. In linking Lebanon to Iran’s revolutionary vision, Hezbollah weakened Lebanon as a nation state.
During Lebanon’s civil war, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to oust the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and put an end to the PLO’s cross-border attacks against Israel’s northern border communities. As part of its broader revolutionary doctrine, Hezbollah’s manifesto focused on its hostility toward Israel as a struggle against “Zionist occupation” rather than a diplomatic or border dispute, framing resistance “as both a political necessity and a religious obligation.”
Hezbollah’s view of Lebanon is that it is only one front in the global Islamic struggle. In linking Lebanon to Iran’s revolutionary vision, Hezbollah weakened Lebanon as a nation state. From its origins during the Lebanese Civil War as an armed resistance movement, Hezbollah evolved to become a state within a state and developed parallel institutions—military, social, financial, educational, and political—“while participating in Lebanon’s constitutional system.” In its current stage today, Hezbollah has completed its evolution from a state within a state to become a state against the state.
“The greatest obstacle to [a] durable Lebanon/Israel peace is not simply disagreement over borders or historical grievances. It is the unresolved question of sovereign authority.”
