[Originally posted at NOW]
As Sunni jihadists alarm the world, the Party of God seeks to brand itself a bastion of moderate Islam. Nobody should be fooled.
One has to hand it to whoever had the idea for Al-Akhbar’s interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah earlier this month. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri may have nicknamed Saad Hariri “Santa Claus” after his return to Lebanon bearing a billion-dollar gift from Riyadh, but the Future Movement leader’s goateed grin was no match for the jolly beam of the silver-bearded Sayyid at his avuncular best.
He follows the gossip on Facebook. He likes Maradona, and supported Argentina in the World Cup final, which he watched with his son. His favorite dishes include mulukhiyya. When he has time, he watches TV and reads novels or the poems of Khalil Gibran. Who knew the fearsome, black-robed warrior-sheikh from the podium was really just a regular guy like you and me?
The true knight’s move, though, was his mention that he’s been reading a lot lately on “the phenomenon of takfir;” the doctrine of jihadist groups like Islamic State (IS) that holds Muslim opponents guilty of kufr (disbelief), a charge punishable by death. He wants, he says, to understand its “history, causes, and orientations.” We’re invited to picture the bespectacled scholar frowning in puzzlement at strange tracts detailing the arcane teachings, innocently gasping in horror at the thought of fundamentalists using violence to advance sectarian agenda. The whole act would almost be amusing if it weren’t inevitable that many readers, including not a few Western pundits, will have fallen for it (an English translation was also published).
It’s considered terribly crass and indecorous nowadays to bring up the early years of the Party of God, when Christians were “invited” to convert, Shiite women were forcibly veiled and men couldn’t get a drink even in famously convivial Tyre. That period was an aberration, we’re now told; all the fault of the “horrific” then-leader, Subhi Tufayli, and some “crazy” Iranians, as the otherwise supportive Asaad Abu Khalil recently phrased it. That’s all changed, it’s said, under the civilized stewardship of Nasrallah; the party has matured; been tamed; been ‘Lebanonized’ (and its Khomeinist patrons, presumably, are no longer “crazy”).
Very well; let’s not dwell on the kidnapping and murder of Western journalists in Beirut in the 1980s, or the old black-and-white videos of Nasrallah calling for a regional Islamist empire (why does that sound familiar?) or his claim that “He who rejects the authority of the [Iranian Supreme Leader] rejects God […] and is almost a polytheist” (even though Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, in her highly sympathetic 2002 study, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion, says that sentence “still provides a fair reflection of the party’s conception of the [ideology] today”). The following two examples from within the past 10 years should suffice to show the Party continues to have rather more in common with takfir, and Islamist extremism generally, than its fellow travelers care to acknowledge, and that such differences as exist tend to be, at most, ones of practice rather than principle.
In 2006, as anti-European riots erupted across the region following the publication of cartoons satirizing Islam in a Danish newspaper, Nasrallah took to the podium not to urge his co-religionists against the resort to violence but to say: “If a Muslim had implemented the fatwa of Imam Khomeini regarding the apostate Salman Rushdie, those despicable people would never have dared insult the Messenger of God” [italics added]. That’s to say, if only someone had murdered a British novelist for a work of fiction, artists the world over would be far too intimidated to ever consider satirizing our beliefs again (rather an odd outlook, incidentally, for someone who told Al-Akhbar he was a literature fan). Calling for a “severe” response to the cartoons (and getting his wish: days later, a mob torched the Danish consulate in Beirut and, for good measure, stoned a nearby church), he then went on to restate his belief that the Holocaust was all “fables” (asateer), as “proven” by 9/11 Truther Roger Garaudy.
Forgiving types would no doubt chalk this all up to mere ‘rhetorical posturing’ or some such formulation (as though calls for the heads of civilians were acceptable political currency). But we learn from Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, that the Party’s Hussein Musawi took the cause, as it were, very seriously at the time, threatening to kill British hostages if the fatwa weren’t carried out and offering to spare one if Rushdie were delivered to Beirut. What’s more, Rushdie was told by British intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were themselves trying to liquidate him as late in the day as 1998. True or not, in any case, the ‘Affair’ is clearly something Nasrallah is unable to let go (he brought it up yet again in 2012).
The second example comes from a year later, when the journalist Thanassis Cambanis was granted permission by Hezbollah to spend a day in the company of their youth branch, the Mahdi Scouts (named, rather suggestively, after the Twelfth Imam, the messianic figure most Shiites believe will one day return from occultation to establish perfect justice worldwide). Describing the guided tour of one of the Scouts’ dozens of camps in his excellent book, A Privilege to Die, he recalls watching children as young as six enjoy activities ranging from puppet reenactments of Nasrallah speeches to Quran memorization to readings from a manual titled “I Obey My Leader.”
“The Mahdi Scouts is charged with building the interior of kids,” as scout chief Bilal Naim told him. Some 60,000 children, Cambanis writes, are thus indoctrinated year-round with Hezbollah’s “unvarnished ideology, beginning with wilayat al-faqih, the concept of absolute clerical rule first implemented by Ayatollah Khomeini.” The program is highly effective, he adds, not just at grooming future generations of fighters, but also at Islamicizing the wider Shiite public from the bottom up: “examples abound” of parents and siblings adopting the ideology acquired by their juniors at the camps.
Of course, Nasrallah’s pose of religious moderation to Al-Akhbar was calculated with Syria in mind; the war next door having at different times dragged the Party in contradictory directions. Early in the conflict, Nasrallah’s speeches could be overtly sectarian, equating Sunnis to the killers of the Imam Hussein at the 680 A.D. Battle of Karbala – the very event that sparked the Sunni-Shiite schism – and, naturally, portraying Shiites as the righteous descendants of the martyr.
But in a landmark February 2013 speech, a new script was born, with Nasrallah suddenly striking an almost neoconservative tone, insisting on the urgency of “confronting terrorism” and warning without a trace of irony that Sunni jihadists in Syria sought “to transform Lebanon into a part of their Islamic state.” This theme, intended to convince the outside world that the pro-Assad camp is the comparatively secular one in Syria, has generally been kept up ever since, though the mask does slip on occasion, like when in a rousing August 2013 appearance Nasrallah thundered, “We are the Shiites of Ali Ibn Abi Talib! […] We are Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic Party of the Twelfth Imam!”
It will no doubt be argued by ‘realists’ and their kind that the brutality of groups like the IS is orders of magnitude greater than anything done by Hezbollah today – that, whatever its transgressions, the Party doesn’t round up and crucify or behead people, or threaten minority sects with extermination. Which is true enough, even if Hezbollah-trained Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq speak of their desire to ethnically cleanse towns of Sunnis, and even if summary executions and other atrocities committed by Hezbollah in Syria have been documented, as have the killings of opponents at home like Hashem Salman. The point is rather that the very debate over which kind of heavily armed Islamists to prefer over another is a debased and degrading one to begin with. The IS may be the worst of a bad bunch, but it would be a strange sort of ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive’ indeed who would be content with Holocaust-denying totalitarians in their stead.
As Sunni jihadists alarm the world, the Party of God seeks to brand itself a bastion of moderate Islam. Nobody should be fooled.
One has to hand it to whoever had the idea for Al-Akhbar’s interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah earlier this month. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri may have nicknamed Saad Hariri “Santa Claus” after his return to Lebanon bearing a billion-dollar gift from Riyadh, but the Future Movement leader’s goateed grin was no match for the jolly beam of the silver-bearded Sayyid at his avuncular best.
He follows the gossip on Facebook. He likes Maradona, and supported Argentina in the World Cup final, which he watched with his son. His favorite dishes include mulukhiyya. When he has time, he watches TV and reads novels or the poems of Khalil Gibran. Who knew the fearsome, black-robed warrior-sheikh from the podium was really just a regular guy like you and me?
The true knight’s move, though, was his mention that he’s been reading a lot lately on “the phenomenon of takfir;” the doctrine of jihadist groups like Islamic State (IS) that holds Muslim opponents guilty of kufr (disbelief), a charge punishable by death. He wants, he says, to understand its “history, causes, and orientations.” We’re invited to picture the bespectacled scholar frowning in puzzlement at strange tracts detailing the arcane teachings, innocently gasping in horror at the thought of fundamentalists using violence to advance sectarian agenda. The whole act would almost be amusing if it weren’t inevitable that many readers, including not a few Western pundits, will have fallen for it (an English translation was also published).
It’s considered terribly crass and indecorous nowadays to bring up the early years of the Party of God, when Christians were “invited” to convert, Shiite women were forcibly veiled and men couldn’t get a drink even in famously convivial Tyre. That period was an aberration, we’re now told; all the fault of the “horrific” then-leader, Subhi Tufayli, and some “crazy” Iranians, as the otherwise supportive Asaad Abu Khalil recently phrased it. That’s all changed, it’s said, under the civilized stewardship of Nasrallah; the party has matured; been tamed; been ‘Lebanonized’ (and its Khomeinist patrons, presumably, are no longer “crazy”).
Very well; let’s not dwell on the kidnapping and murder of Western journalists in Beirut in the 1980s, or the old black-and-white videos of Nasrallah calling for a regional Islamist empire (why does that sound familiar?) or his claim that “He who rejects the authority of the [Iranian Supreme Leader] rejects God […] and is almost a polytheist” (even though Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, in her highly sympathetic 2002 study, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion, says that sentence “still provides a fair reflection of the party’s conception of the [ideology] today”). The following two examples from within the past 10 years should suffice to show the Party continues to have rather more in common with takfir, and Islamist extremism generally, than its fellow travelers care to acknowledge, and that such differences as exist tend to be, at most, ones of practice rather than principle.
In 2006, as anti-European riots erupted across the region following the publication of cartoons satirizing Islam in a Danish newspaper, Nasrallah took to the podium not to urge his co-religionists against the resort to violence but to say: “If a Muslim had implemented the fatwa of Imam Khomeini regarding the apostate Salman Rushdie, those despicable people would never have dared insult the Messenger of God” [italics added]. That’s to say, if only someone had murdered a British novelist for a work of fiction, artists the world over would be far too intimidated to ever consider satirizing our beliefs again (rather an odd outlook, incidentally, for someone who told Al-Akhbar he was a literature fan). Calling for a “severe” response to the cartoons (and getting his wish: days later, a mob torched the Danish consulate in Beirut and, for good measure, stoned a nearby church), he then went on to restate his belief that the Holocaust was all “fables” (asateer), as “proven” by 9/11 Truther Roger Garaudy.
Forgiving types would no doubt chalk this all up to mere ‘rhetorical posturing’ or some such formulation (as though calls for the heads of civilians were acceptable political currency). But we learn from Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, that the Party’s Hussein Musawi took the cause, as it were, very seriously at the time, threatening to kill British hostages if the fatwa weren’t carried out and offering to spare one if Rushdie were delivered to Beirut. What’s more, Rushdie was told by British intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were themselves trying to liquidate him as late in the day as 1998. True or not, in any case, the ‘Affair’ is clearly something Nasrallah is unable to let go (he brought it up yet again in 2012).
The second example comes from a year later, when the journalist Thanassis Cambanis was granted permission by Hezbollah to spend a day in the company of their youth branch, the Mahdi Scouts (named, rather suggestively, after the Twelfth Imam, the messianic figure most Shiites believe will one day return from occultation to establish perfect justice worldwide). Describing the guided tour of one of the Scouts’ dozens of camps in his excellent book, A Privilege to Die, he recalls watching children as young as six enjoy activities ranging from puppet reenactments of Nasrallah speeches to Quran memorization to readings from a manual titled “I Obey My Leader.”
“The Mahdi Scouts is charged with building the interior of kids,” as scout chief Bilal Naim told him. Some 60,000 children, Cambanis writes, are thus indoctrinated year-round with Hezbollah’s “unvarnished ideology, beginning with wilayat al-faqih, the concept of absolute clerical rule first implemented by Ayatollah Khomeini.” The program is highly effective, he adds, not just at grooming future generations of fighters, but also at Islamicizing the wider Shiite public from the bottom up: “examples abound” of parents and siblings adopting the ideology acquired by their juniors at the camps.
Of course, Nasrallah’s pose of religious moderation to Al-Akhbar was calculated with Syria in mind; the war next door having at different times dragged the Party in contradictory directions. Early in the conflict, Nasrallah’s speeches could be overtly sectarian, equating Sunnis to the killers of the Imam Hussein at the 680 A.D. Battle of Karbala – the very event that sparked the Sunni-Shiite schism – and, naturally, portraying Shiites as the righteous descendants of the martyr.
But in a landmark February 2013 speech, a new script was born, with Nasrallah suddenly striking an almost neoconservative tone, insisting on the urgency of “confronting terrorism” and warning without a trace of irony that Sunni jihadists in Syria sought “to transform Lebanon into a part of their Islamic state.” This theme, intended to convince the outside world that the pro-Assad camp is the comparatively secular one in Syria, has generally been kept up ever since, though the mask does slip on occasion, like when in a rousing August 2013 appearance Nasrallah thundered, “We are the Shiites of Ali Ibn Abi Talib! […] We are Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic Party of the Twelfth Imam!”
It will no doubt be argued by ‘realists’ and their kind that the brutality of groups like the IS is orders of magnitude greater than anything done by Hezbollah today – that, whatever its transgressions, the Party doesn’t round up and crucify or behead people, or threaten minority sects with extermination. Which is true enough, even if Hezbollah-trained Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq speak of their desire to ethnically cleanse towns of Sunnis, and even if summary executions and other atrocities committed by Hezbollah in Syria have been documented, as have the killings of opponents at home like Hashem Salman. The point is rather that the very debate over which kind of heavily armed Islamists to prefer over another is a debased and degrading one to begin with. The IS may be the worst of a bad bunch, but it would be a strange sort of ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive’ indeed who would be content with Holocaust-denying totalitarians in their stead.
