In Search of the Lost Messiah Bloody and abandoned in Lebanon.
Morrison, Micah
"In Search of the Lost Messiah Bloody and abandoned in Lebanon." Lebanon has become for us a kind of empty parable about endless violence, a morality play with no moral, no message. It is a feudal land, an idea of a nation imposed upon reluctant lords and...
...A blind albino sat on the hood of a car, surrounded by children: people came over to touch him, perhaps for luck...
...The Syrians invaded in the summer of 1976, ostensibly to put an end to the fighting...
...We have become more or less familiar with the current cast of characters strutting across the crowded Lebanese stage: the Christian president, Amin Gemayel...
...Coming from a prestigious Iranian clerical family with roots in Lebanon, Sadr was a tireless organizer and speaker...
...Although Damascus is creeping its artillery and support lines down toward Israel, the Syrians appear to have their hands full with their own Lebanese problems, the failing Syrian economy, and the uncertain health of Hafez Assad...
...It is the story of Kamal Jumblatt and Bashir Gemayel and Yassir Arafat...
...So far he has not succeeded...
...It was there because Musa al Sadr had fulfilled his Shia fate by showing his people the way to power, by being betrayed by obscure and evil forces, and vanishing...
...Hafez Assad thinks he can channel Lebanese geo-strategic resources into the service of his own designs for the region...
...one often feels this is a deeply senseless exercise...
...What is the "significance" of the creeping advance of Syrian military units in southern Lebanon...
...Yet there was little of that silent hostility Westerners might encounter in, for instance, some of the radical cities of the West Bank...
...Ambitious men rise, fall, sons and brothers and newcomers take their place...
...It's possible that Lebanon may simply exhaust itself, that there is some finite point the carnage cannot continue past...
...Outside of Kerbala 5,000 troops surrounded Hussein's camp and, on the tenth day of the Moslem month of Muharram, the day of Ashura, the Imam was killed by repeated blows of lance and sword, his body was trampled beneath the hooves of many horses, and his head was carried to Damascus...
...Certainly not at the expense of the tenacious Druse...
...In the fall of 1982, about four months into the occupation, I happened to be in southern Lebanon on a day that afforded me a glimpse of the Lebanese, and particularly the Shia, strangeness...
...The wailing crested...
...After the singing and the beating and the bleeding, the eyes of the flagellants shone with a placid madness...
...The Americans...
...The reader looking for insight into the confusing Lebanese scene would do well to consult Ajami's book...
...That, of course, is the Lebanese story...
...I t is not difficult to see why many Shiites today think of themselves as living in a messianic era...
...and they believe God is on their side and a Messiah is waiting in the wings...
...In March 1978 the Israelis swept into— and then out of—southern Lebanon in the anti-PLO Operation Litani...
...I n 1982, after months in Lebanon, the Israelis knew little about their Shia neighbors...
...Or perhaps a new powersharing arrangement will be negotiated and will hold...
...Rival forces fell to feuding...
...Yassir Arafat thought Lebanon could be both an "alternate homeland" for the Palestinians and a launching pad for his war against the Jewish state, but he was driven out by the Israelis and returned to be driven out again by his own people...
...And in Lebanon too (and this is really the subject of Fouad Ajami's fascinating book) a would-be messiah came from Iran in 1959 and brought the Lebanese Shiites up from their submissive sleep...
...This was an affront Damascus could not tolerate...
...He was the guiding force behind the creation of the Higher Shia Council, which put forward the long-ignored Shia claims for roads, schools, medical clinics, for more power and political patronage...
...You can't scare the Lebanese anymore," a former cabinet minister told the New York Times...
...For now, the Syrians are the less-thanomnipotent kingmakers in this chaotic country...
...The latest killings, and the possible ramifications they would have on "the situation," were the main topics of conversation on the bus...
...For the first time in many years people here can celebrate their Ashura...
...Mostly Shiite, a center of commerce before the PLO began to terrorize the region in the 1970s, Nabiteyeh's population had shrunk from around 30,000 to about 8,000 in the years of Palestinian dominance...
...The Shah...
...We—journalists, academicians, and visitors upon whom Jerusalem wished to impress the notion of a "benign occupation's— were traveling in a small convoy of jeeps and buses from Beaufort Castle, an old Crusader fort that the PLO had used to direct fire into Israel, toward the town of Nabiteyeh...
...What was the meaning of his alliance with Assad of Syria...
...Kerbala, as it were, insisted on permanent relevance...
...But the rumors and the stories will continue, because the truth of Musa al Sadr's life has merged into the legend of the Hidden Imam and the longing of the Shiites for power and vindication...
...Would the Russians allow this to happen again...
...To the Sunni, the term imam means prayer leader...
...A weird chanting cut through the day, and up ahead we could hear the sounds of a great crowd...
...the Druse leader, Walid Jumblatt...
...Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon thought they could remake Lebanon...
...The idea of a radical Shiite republic in Lebanon makes just about everybody very, very nervous...
...As I looked down at him from the bus window, he raised a knife to his forehead and with a quick twist of his wrist proudly and unflinchingly cut away a tiny piece of his flesh...
...Among the Palestinians and the parties of Sunni West Beirut," Ajami comments, "Musa al Sadr was seen as the enemy of everything 'progressive.' He had not shared in the exuberance of the left...
...A man with a blood-spattered sheet wrapped around his chest staggered by, smiling...
...Although there was no sense of immediate danger, the festive air carried something slightly crazed in it, as if at any moment the celebration could take a decidedly bad turn...
...It could happen again...
...This time events took a more tragic turn...
...Our "guide," a young officer with an uncertain grasp of English, was completely bewildered but said with authority that they were probably taking part in some sort of "local hohday...
...Religion and politics were one for him...
...Too many groups smell victory in the air...
...from Iraq came the call of the faithful: travel here and be our guide and teacher...
...A boy, perhaps nine years old, raised a knife to his forehead...
...Great concentration is needed to place in proper order the exact sequence of "important" assassinations and massacres and bombings...
...He was held captive in the south all the time...
...The PLO is gone," our guide said, after descending to the street and obtaining some information...
...Whatever you do to them, they have been through it twice already...
...He tried to balance all sides in disputes—Sadr was a talented diplomat, not a fanatic—but frequently he found himself at odds with the Palestinians and the Christians...
...His playboy son, Walid, would soon replace him...
...Reading Ajami's book, one has the sense of a man suddenly dwarfed by events, of a confident man controlling his destiny until one unnoticed day his country's destiny was controlling him...
...If so, would Israeli retaliation be a repeat of June 1982, when Jerusalem's forces decimated Syria's Sovietsupplied weaponry...
...Establishment Moslems were also unhappy with this "foreigner" who stirred up the poor...
...He was an enigmatic figure and rumors swirled around him...
...Is Damascus planning to draw Israel back into Lebanon and make a grab across the Golan Heights...
...twelfth Imam was believed to be hidden in a state of occultation, or noncorporeal existence...
...671 sealed the Shia sense of separateness...
...Violent death became the Lebanese way of life...
...Blood welled up and ran down his face...
...It was too late to turn back...
...These people were interested in enjoying themselves and getting their pictures taken...
...The crowd turned ugly at the sight of their oppressors—on this day of all days the memories of the persecutions of the Imam Hussein gave extra passion to their lives—the soldiers had to shoot their way out of the enraged town...
...Later, when all Lebanon was sliding into civil war, he founded Amal as a defense militia...
...It is a feudal land, an idea of a nation imposed upon reluctant lords and restless subjects...
...Would a massive Soviet resupply effort bring the Americans back into the picture...
...Two citizens died...
...It was the worst possible day for a show of arms—and that is what I meant about the arrogance of power, about learning nothing of the customs and complexities of a place and a people...
...They were wrong...
...A year after I was in Nabiteyeh, another Israeli convoy tried to pass through the streets on Ashura...
...The Shiites want more power, and they deserve it—but at whose expense...
...A power struggle ripped apart the young Islamic faith soon after the death of the Prophet, and the events at Kerbala in A.D...
...The street began to fill with people and cars...
...Now it appears that Lebanon is turning on itself again...
...His friends wrapped a cloth around his forehead and patted him on the shoulder...
...They aren't even afraid of the people they should be afraid of...
...In the Shia community, Lebanon's largest in number and weakest in political power, Nabih Berri's Amal movement competes with religious radicals who draw inspiration and material support from Khomeini's Iran...
...What is important, it seems to me, is what the event can show us about the arrogance of power, even a power full of the best intentions, as Israel was toward the local residents who did not take up arms against it...
...appears to be the force of radical Shia Islam...
...A holiday of the Shia...
...What is the Syrian game...
...They have won some significant battles, and they have the backing of Khomeini's Iran...
...The security zone concept is working for Israel in the south and will probably remain there for a long time...
...L ebanon has become for us a kind of empty parable about endless violence, a morality play with no moral, no message...
...As the narrow highway curved closer to the parallel road, it became apparent that the men were singing and striking themselves in the back with small whips and sticks as they ran...
...Arafat would like nothing more than to get back in, but the Syrians and the Shiites and the Micah Morrison, former Israel correspondent o/The American Spectator is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and editor of its monthly publication, Contentions...
...The deeds of men faltered, men awaited the return of the Hidden Imam...
...When Israel finally moves in 1982 to end the PLO's terrorizing of its border region, a rumor flys through the Shia slums of Beirut: Musa al Sadr has been found...
...Dangerous ideas and untested forces threaten the entrenched powers...
...he could no longer tolerate Palestinian control in southern Lebanon or pass over it in silence...
...The Americans have given up, gotten out...
...Ashura, I later learned, is the sole property of the Shiites...
...Not at the expense of their Sunni brothers...
...Four months after the June invasion, the welcoming atmosphere was starting to fade but the Israelis were still seen as liberators, as the powerful nation that had come to expel their mutual enemy, the Palestinians, who in little more than a decade had turned their quiet backwater into a land of casual savagery...
...Not at the expense of the Christians, who are losing ground fast...
...The rumor, like all the previous rumors, was not true...
...Our convoy pushed slowly through the crowd...
...A final tenet was welded to the faith: the •Cornell University Press, $17.95...
...Ahead, one of the soldiers in the jeep was nervously tapping his mounted machine gun and smiling tightly at the crowd...
...A few days later Musa al Sadr was in Libya...
...Our lead jeep stopped for a consultation with the bus drivers: it was decided that we would go around Nabiteyeh...
...they have the old legends of martyrdom and oppression, and they have yesterday's news of victory—both can be used to stir their followers...
...No one has seen him since...
...History became usurpation," Ajami writes...
...In this messianic view, which shares its essential salvationism with Jewish and Christian eschatology, the Hidden Imam returns as a great avenger, a mahdi, a savior...
...It was his picture that was plastered all over Nabiteyeh, all over Shia Lebanon...
...But what happens if the Syrians buckle, if Christian power selfdestructs— will the Shiites be the next kings of Lebanon...
...Who did he really work for...
...Looking out the window, I saw across a dusty field on the outskirts of Nabiteyeh what appeared to be a large group of barechested joggers running in loose formation along a parallel road and rhythmically thrusting their arms skyward...
...My ignorance of what was happening is, in some senses, unimportant...
...of a way of life much different from ours, sustained by different myths, cultures, traditions...
...as Lebanon disintegrated, the charismatic cleric grew increasingly powerful: his followers multiplied, and so did his enemies...
...The revised edition of Itamar Rabinovich's The War for Lebanon, 1970-1985 (Cornell, $9.95 paper) complements the Ajami book by examining all the factions in Lebanon's struggle...
...The Lebanese have learned to live with the madness...
...The season of the suicide car-bombers lay ahead in the unimagined future...
...And the hardest, most uncompromising force in hard, uncompromising Lebanon (so different from the Lebanon of old...
...We obliged, although the atmosphere in the bus was far from relaxed...
...Soon after Musa al Sadr disappears—it is all but certain that Qaddafi killed Sadr as a favor to his good friend Arafat— the Shah is toppled...
...Ajami writes: "The late seventhcentury event marked with its themes of righteous defeat an entire branch of Islam...
...In an only slightly different way it is the story of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, and possibly of Hafez Assad...
...Nabiteyeh fell away behind us...
...Emphatic Arabic writing surrounded the posters of this man, which appeared in Shia strongholds throughout Lebanon...
...The left despised him...
...To each his fiefdom, to each his legacy of bloodshed...
...Israeli commanders in the region were complacent: "the situation" was well in hand...
...No system of logic, no amount of "game plans" can encompass the Lebanese situation...
...to the Shiite, the imamate is the repository of Divine Truth, and the term can be bestowed on a religious or political leader of great influence, such as the Imam Khomeini...
...The convoy slowly moved up a side road that turned into an alley, wound up a hill, curved past whitewalled houses thick with grape arbors, and dropped us right into the center of the city...
...In this the Shiites were not unlike the Jews...
...the Shia Moslem Nabih Berri...
...As Johns Hopkins University scholar Fouad Ajami notes in his excellent new book, The Vanished Imam,' the early division in Islam was "a struggle between two ideas of succession: a religious one, claiming rule through descent from the Prophet, and a worldly one resting on the wealth and power of the expanding Moslem state and its formidable troops in the province of Syria...
...His name was Musa al Sadr and his fate was at once peculiarly Shiite and absolutely Lebanese...
...From Damascus came an order to the Imam Hussein: pledge allegiance to our rule...
...the Sunni Moslem prime minister, Rashid Karameh...
...It was 1983 and the occupation had gone far too long...
...The PLO buildup in the south continued...
...In Algeria, it was suggested to Sadr that he go see Libya's Muammar Qaddafi...
...Christians want him to stay out, so the fighting in that particular little war continues to sputter around the Palestinian slums and refugee camps...
...Now, we heard, the old residents had begun to return...
...It happened in Iran and it almost happened in Lebanon with Musa al Sadr...
...After only a decade in the country, the title Imam came to him...
...The Shiites had taken the brunt of the Israeli strike, and now the PLO was back to continue tormenting them while building their "mini-state" in the south...
...The Western targets are mostly gone...
...The Syrians would like nothing more than to get out and retain control, but that is impossible, so they get in deeper and deeper...
...Arafat of the PLO...
...Is Arafat, at odds with Assad, trying to provoke Israel into attacking Damascus...
...His article, "Christmas in Bethlehem," appeared in last December's TAS...
...Every day is Ashura, and every place is Kerbala,' Shia history taught...
...What is the "meaning" of the Syrian connection to European-based terror attempts against Israeli targets...
...knew little indeed, it seems in retrospect, about the murderous Lebanese thicket...
...It was a bad sign, and Israel would have to live through almost two more years of bad times, including the nightmare of Shia fanaticism and the suicide car-bombers, until it could finally extricate itself from the cursed country...
...Are the Shiites...
...Throughout the milling, happy throng, men were shouting and striking themselves on the back with bladelike sticks and whips...
...It is a holiday of their martyr...
...In American eyes, the symbol of mysterious Lebanon has come to be the Bekaa Valley, a zone of almost mythological sinisterness, with its hashish fields, its inexplicable terrorist gangs, its Western hostages...
...The civil war had been in full swing for nearly two years...
...Seeking funds and political support, Sadr embarked on a tour of Arab capitals...
...Will the radicals triumph over Berri's Amal...
...In March 1977, the powerful Druse chief Kamal Jumblatt was assassinated...
...With the disappearance of the twelfth Imam, a child who vanished from an Iraqi mosque and was probably murdered by agents of the ruling dynasty, Shiism entered a long period of darkness and messianic yearning...
...The only comparable gaze I have ever seen is the pre-dawn look in a person's eyes after a long night in the grip of a powerful hallucinogenic drug...
...The story of Musa al Sadr differs only in its Shia aura, its messianic patina...
...Tragedy and disaster followed them for centuries...
...On the bullet-pocked walls were slogans in Arabic, posters of the grimacing Ayatollah Khomeini, and many more posters—some fading, some fresh—of another cleric, a man with a much gentler, almost forlorn expression...
...The Israelis have given up, gotten out...
...Here were more young men wrapped in bloody sheets and turbans, their eyes glazed, smiles fixed on their faces...
...But the PLO simply retreated with the civilian population and returned when Israel departed...
...Black flags hung from many of the houses...
...What is the Israeli game...
...Hussein left the Hijaz birthplace of Islam, in western Saudi Arabia, and with a small band of followers he started for Iraq...
...Soon after that, the Imam Khomeini begins a holy war against Iraq—there are Shiites there too, after all, and Shia holy places, such as Kerbala...
...now the locals were starting to say that it was time for Israel to go...
...the cries of passion surrounding Kerbala can still be heard echoing in Islam today...
...Are the Syrians letting terrorists infiltrate toward Israel's "security zone" in southern Lebanon...
...The Imams, from the first to the twelfth, came to tragic ends at the hands of the enemies of Shia Islam...
...In Iran, Khomeini rose and destroyed the Pahlavi dynasty...
...In Beirut in the last few weeks, the PLO had finally boarded the boats for Tunisia, president-elect Bashir Gemayel and many of his top aides had been killed by a bomb planted by a Syrian agent, and Christian forces had passed through Israeli lines and entered the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatilla to avenge the death of Bashir by murdering an unknown number— scores certainly, hundreds probably— of people, including women and children...
...Things began to slip away from Musa al Sadr's control...
...The killings have been "localized...
...In front of one of the posters of the quizzical-looking cleric, a teenager called out to us...
...It marks the death in battle of a direct descendant of the Prophet, the Imam Hussein, on the plains of Kerbala, in southern Iraq...
...the violent display of self-flagellation we had stumbled across in Nabiteyeh was a public display of grief, part of the passion play that annually revives the tribulations of the Imam...
...But don't bet on it...
...And if the Syrians or the Palestinians get in too deep, too close to the border in the south, the Israelis will come back in...
...Assad of Syria...
...In the beginning the south Lebanese had thrown rice and rosewater...
...For years he traveled the country—and often beyond Lebanon's borders—binding together the disparate Shia community...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
