Abstract
The Hezbollah movement emerged at the height of a crisis in the Lebanese political system as an expression of political and social processes within Lebanon and in the region, from the 1960s on, that paved the way for the emergence of radical elements in the Shiite community. The Islamic revolution in Iran and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon shook the Shiite community in Lebanon and sparked off a poignant internal debate. This debate raged between the followers of the pan-Islamic approach, who advocated loyalty to Khomeini’s leadership and did not recognize the validity of the Lebanese state, and the Amal movement, which perceived itself as a national-secular Lebanese movement operating within the framework of the Lebanese political system. In July 1982, Amal leader Nabih Berri decided to join the Lebanese National Salvation Front.1 A schism occurred in the movement following this step, and some of its members, including Berri’s deputy, Hussein al-Musawi, retired from it. These dissidents, in full agreement with Shiite fighters and a group of young clerics who had graduated from the religious seminaries in Najaf, founded Hezbollah in the summer of 1982 with Iranian assistance.2
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Notes
Wadah Sharara, Dawlat Hizb Allah, Lubnan mujtami’an Islamiyyan (Beirut, 1998), 118–19
Isan Al-A’zi, Hezbollah: Min Alhilm Alideology Ila Wakai’a Alsiasia (Beirut, 1998), 21–23.
Ayla Hammond Schbley, “Resurgent Religious Terrorism: A Study of Some of the Lebanese Shi’a Contemporary Terrorism,” Terrorism 12 (1989): 213–15.
Juan R.I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Shi’ism and Social Protest (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 1–29
Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shi’a Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin, TX: 1987), 15.
Shimon Shapira, “The Shiite Radicalism in Lebanon” (master’s thesis, Tel-Aviv university, 1987), 2–4.
Fouad Ajami, The Hidden Imam, Hebrew version (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1986), 66–69.
Helena Cobban, “The Growth of Shi’i Power in Lebanon and Its Implications for the Future,” in Shi’ism and Social Protest, ed. Juan R.I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 138–43.
Joseph Olmert, “The Shi’is and the Lebanese State,” in Shi’ism, Resistance, and Revolution, ed. Martin Kramer (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987), 194–200; Ajami, 68–80.
Shimon Shapira, Hezbollah between Iran and Lebanon, (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2000), 11.
Wadah Sharara, Dawlat Hizb Allah, Lubnan mujtami’an Islamiyyan (Beirut, 1996), 42, 56–58, 64.
Salim Nasar, “Roots of the Shi’i Movement,” Merip Reports 15, no.5 (June 1985): 11; Sharara, Dawlat Hizb Allah, Lubnan mujtami’an Islamiyyan, 180–89.
Norton, Amal and the Shi’a Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon, 6–7, 14–17; Ajami, 1986, 218.
Augustus Richard Norton, “The Origins and Resurgence of Amal,” in Shi’ism, Resistance, and Revolution, ed. Martin Kremer (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987), 203–17.
Shimon Shapira, “The Iranian Policy in Lebanon between the Years 1959–1989” (PhD thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1994), 179–82.
Magnus Ranstrop, Hizb’allah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1997), 26. Sharara, 108–09.
Hamzeh, “Lebanon’s Hizbullah,” 323; Hala Jaber, Hezbolla: Born with a Vengeance (Columbia University Press, 1997), 29–30.
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© 2009 Eitan Azani
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Azani, E. (2009). The Shiite Community in Lebanon and the Background for Hezbollah’s Emergence. In: Hezbollah: The Story of the Party of God. The Middle East In Focus. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116290_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116290_3
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