Husayni Revolutionism Old and New: From Local Transformation to Global Liberation*

From atop that high hill in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam, cries and ululations interwoven with tears soared skywards, proclaiming the birth of a new era of the Husayni revolution. It was 23 May 2000, when the people of the town, together with people from other southern towns, stormed the Israeli detention center built on that hill, where thousands of Lebanese and Arab prisoners, men and women, had endured the merciless lashes of their tormentors; for fifteen years, they had been thrown into the corners of the cells in a cruel, unending rotation, and had tasted every kind of pain and death in the darkness of the torture rooms or on the torture poles standing beneath the blazing sun.

The collapse of the prison’s Zionist guards and torturers and their Lebanese collaborators, and their flight before the surge of the prisoners’ families and the people of the region toward the prison that day, were among the first effects of the Israeli government’s decision to withdraw its army from Lebanon under the blows of the resistance, after an occupation that had lasted eighteen years. During those years, the features of the new era of liberationist Husayni revolutionism took shape, an era in which the love of martyrdom is the most powerful weapon against the occupier and the most radiant embodiment of the symbolism of Husayn’s martyrdom. That symbolism of defeat surrounding the events of the tenth of Muharram at Karbala, draped in grief and black for thirteen centuries and tanning the Shia political culture of the Husaynis with a sense of victimhood throughout all those centuries, up until the fall of Khiam prison and the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon on 25 May 2000, was profoundly transformed by this event. The event also reshaped the social imaginary of the Husayni Shia and their self-awareness, and thus brought about a shift in their identity: from a persecuted, marginalized, and inward-looking group to a strong, active community with influence on the course of history, one that achieved victory over a brutal army before which most Arab armies had been defeated, and liberated the land of southern Lebanon unconditionally.

The figure of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was an exceptional phenomenon in bringing about these transformations and in reproducing the revolutionary Husayni identity and the Shia social imaginary, both of which rest on the elements of strength and victory rather than on the collective sense of victimhood that had governed Shia existence and Shia identity in the era following the martyrdom of Husayn. Throughout that era, the Husaynis lived in a state of political withdrawal and of social and doctrinal taqiyya (precautionary dissimulation), under states and regimes marked at times by marginalization and at other times by repression and persecution of the Husayni Shia and of other Islamic and religious sects that diverged from the Sultanic Islam that has prevailed in many models of government since the founding of the Umayyad state.

In the victory speech that immediately followed the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on 25 May 2000, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah stood in the southern city of Bint Jbeil, on the day after the withdrawal, to declare before the Husayni public and in full view of the world the centrality of the Palestinian cause and of the Arab–Israeli conflict to the project of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon. He thereby renewed the horizons of the resistance as a liberation project against Zionism and imperialism, rather than as a local liberation resistance whose role ends with the end of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Sayyed Nasrallah went on to reaffirm this in many later speeches, through his emphasis on the unity of the fronts and his famous statement: “We will be wherever we must be.” In doing so, he gave the struggle, waged by the resistance, a liberationist, humanist, and internationalist dimension that transcends the geographic lines of the artificial political entities of the region. The true dimensions of this soon became apparent in the American political offensive against Lebanon after the liberation, which culminated in the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 in 2004 to disarm the resistance, and then in the launching of a color revolution against these weapons, crowned by a US-backed political coup project. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was able to confront both and to thwart their effects through a mass popular mobilization that defeated the weapon of “the street” and the media disinformation on which color revolutions depend, as well as the international pressure to implement Resolution 1559.

This is what drove the United States and Israel to wage a military war against Lebanon in 2006, which had been prepared before the resistance captured Zionist soldiers on the border, with the aim, once again, of seizing the weapons of the resistance and changing the geopolitical map of the Middle East, and of building a new Middle Eastern order subordinate to imperialist and Zionist projects in the region. Under the leadership of Sayyed Nasrallah, the resistance managed to withstand this aggression and to thwart that project, which, had it not been for the steadfastness and victory of the resistance in that war, would have been completed by an American war against Syria and against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the pivotal state and rear base of the resistance forces in the region.

Yet these events did not come from outside the historical context of the contradictions and developments that the region has known over the last century, just as the Husayni defeat did not occur in isolation from the historical context of the political and social developments surrounding the Alid–Husayni path from the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala. That martyrdom caused a historical shock that helped awaken the Husayni revolutionary spirit in popular sentiment and religious thought, and in the political culture and the social imaginary, not only among the Shia of Ali, but also among elites and broad segments of Muslim societies in general.

What, then, is the significance of this victory, and of this historic shift in collective Husayni identity? Can this identity serve as a cultural, doctrinal, and behavioral frame of reference, and as a liberation model to be emulated by national liberation movements in the Arab and Islamic world and in other parts of the world, amidst the persistence and growing savagery of imperialist–Zionist projects of domination; the retreat of other intellectual models, nationalist and leftist; the failure of the nation-state model in the region and the decline of its independence, its sovereignty, and its capacity to resist American dictates, after turning its armies into instruments for protecting ruling regimes rather than defending their homelands; and the dominance of a pragmatic approach in international relations at the expense of the interests, rights, and causes of peoples, and at the expense of the international laws and norms that are supposed to protect those causes and rights? Accordingly, can the contemporary Husayni revolutionary experience succeed in expanding beyond the sectarian circle in which the forces historically opposed to it – the forces that controlled political and religious authority in the region – managed to imprison it, by claiming that it was merely the expression of a struggle for power on a tribal or kinship basis, rather than the expression of a contradiction between two paths, each of which reflects social interests and political, doctrinal, and moral visions opposed to those of the other? Accordingly, can the contemporary Husayni movement emphasize its doctrinal and moral premises and its principled Muhammadan–Alid–Husayni approaches, whose humanist dimension transcends the sectarian partisanship that became entrenched in revolutionary Husayni identity, as social and political conditions accumulated over history? And accordingly, how can the revolutionary Husayni vision be renewed, on the basis of those same Muhammadan–Alid–Husayni premises, in order to deal with the developments, contradictions, conflicts, and civilizational and human crises of this age?

This calls for a re-examination of that revolutionary liberation experience and of the social and political conditions in which it arose, alongside shedding light on contemporary Arab liberation movements, on the social and political conditions in which they too arose, and on the intellectual transformations they underwent; and for an inquiry into the intellectual model, or rather models that could serve as a frame of reference for contemporary liberation movements in a way that upholds respect for cultural diversity of the world’s peoples. That was the result of the policies of the colonial West, by imposing its intellectual models, its cultural experiences, and its value systems that have caused destructive distortions and imbalances in many cultures of the world’s peoples, with the aim of dominating them and plundering their resources and wealth.

1 – The Social, Political, Moral, and Value Backgrounds of Husayni Revolutionism

Barely three years after the Umayyads and most of the merchants of Quraysh had reluctantly entered Islam, following the confrontations, wars, and acts of persecution they had waged against the early Muslims, which ended with the conquest of Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad died, and the Ansar (allies) and the Muhajirun (immigrant allies) became preoccupied with choosing his successor (khalifa). Those years were not enough to shake the social structures and relations, the networks of economic interest, and the value systems that the class of merchants, notables, and wealthy men of Quraysh and Mecca cherished and adhered to, even though some new Islamic laws had begun to be applied in the Prophet’s lifetime, such as the prohibition of usury (riba) through the Farewell Pilgrimage (hijjat al-wada’), the institution of the zakat system, and the regulation of markets, etc. No sooner had the Prophet died, and no sooner had his family and companions finished the rites of his burial, than the Umayyads and the great merchants and notables of Quraysh began working to undermine what the Muhammadan call had brought: a monotheistic creed, a value system, moral standards, and laws and measures that threatened the economic interests and the social and tribal standing of that group.

Disagreement and confrontation, open and hidden, began to crystallize and widen between two tendencies from the earliest stages of choosing the Prophet’s successors and the criteria adopted for that choice:

A pragmatic tendency, led by the Umayyads, which sought to overturn the principles, laws, and measures that Islam had brought, and which had begun to lay the foundations of a new social and political order that would sweep away the order prevailing in the pre-Islamic era (the Jahiliyya). That order rested on social and economic relations governed by injustice, exploitation, slavery, and class and racial discrimination, under which a small group of notables, nobles, and chiefs of the great tribes enjoyed obscene wealth, while a large proportion of the inhabitants of Mecca and of the rest of the Arabian Peninsula lived in abject poverty, destitution, exploitation, and enslavement.

And a principled tendency, led by Imam Ali after the Prophet’s death, which worked to consolidate the new values and principles that Islam had brought, and which were beginning to lay the foundations of a society governed by justice and equality: a society with no slavery and no class, ethnic, or tribal discrimination, no exorbitant usury crushing the people, and no worship of idols ranked one above another according to the standing of the dominant tribes and social classes. Thus, Islam came to make people equal before the One and Only God, with no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab except in piety. It imposed a just social order that put an end to exploitation, enslavement, and monopoly and secured the conditions of life for all, making people partners in three things: water, pasture, and fire. It established a system of social welfare and mechanisms for redistributing wealth and for protecting the poor, the downtrodden, slaves, clients (mawali), and freedmen, and it made it binding to “give the hired worker his wage before his sweat dries.”

This disagreement between the two tendencies took the form of two different approaches in debate and in relations, in social and political conduct, and consequently in the doctrinal premises, value systems, ethics, and conflicts that would gradually come to prevail in Islamic society from the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs up to the reign of the Umayyads. This difference was present, to varying degrees, in the processes of choosing the caliphs after the Prophet and in the repeated efforts to exclude Ali from the caliphate because of the different path he represented. This paved the way for the Umayyads to regain their influence and to overturn the principles of Islam, and, conversely, for the principled tendency represented by Imam Ali to take root and to assume a revolutionary course with his son Husayn, once injustice, tyranny, corruption, and despotism had reached such levels under Mu’awiya, and then under Yazid, that it was no longer possible to confine opposition to words, even though Husayn lacked the means for military confrontation. The choice of martyrdom was therefore the culmination of the revolutionary path that Husayn adopted in defense of the principles of Islam and its new values of justice and equality. The battle of Karbala thus launched this revolutionary path, which would in time become a new revolutionary school in Islam and in the world, with its own doctrinal approach and interpretive visions (ta’weel), and its own value and moral system, expressing the essence of Islam as a religion that came to liberate human beings from idolatry, poverty, ignorance, injustice, slavery, exploitation, corruption, and racial, tribal, and class discrimination, and to instill in them the spirit of sacrifice, of support for the weak and the oppressed, and of the refusal of humiliation, culminating in the love of martyrdom, when death becomes an unavoidable choice for awakening consciousness in defense of people, land, and principles.

Thus the concept of liberation in the Husayni revolutionary school, with its Muhammadan–Alid frame of reference, rested on two basic pillars: the pillar of human liberation from poverty, hunger, ignorance, partisanship, corruption, injustice, slavery, and domination; and the pillar of doctrinal liberation, which through interpretation (ta’weel) frees the text from its formalistic constraints and literal limits and releases it toward its inner meaning (batin) and its depths, where faith reaches the limits of reason.

2 – The Historical, Social, and Political Backgrounds of Contemporary Husayni Revolutionism

After Karbala, Husayni revolutionism entered a long era of political and military retreat, in contrast to the great effort expended at the jurisprudential, value, and educational levels. Despite the repression that the Husayni Shia of Ali suffered at the hands of both the Umayyad and the Abbasid states, religious activity, organization, and legislation continued after the martyrdom of Hasan and Husayn. The imamate passed to Husayn’s son Ali Zayn al-Abidin, then to his son Muhammad al-Baqir, then to his son Ja’far al-Sadiq, then to Musa ibn Ja’far al-Kazim and the other imams, all of whom played a major role (especially Ja’far al-Sadiq) in developing and spreading Shia jurisprudence and in systematizing it on scholarly and rational foundations, down to the twelfth imam, the hidden Imam Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi, after whom the Twelver Shia entered a long era of waiting and taqiyya. By then, a Sultanic school of Islam, invented by Mu’awiya, had come to prevail in the ruling systems in the region. This Sultanic school worked to grant legitimacy to the caliph and to entrench his rule and his unjust authority, and it used Islam as a formal and legislative façade to protect the sultan and the interests of the ruling class (in contradiction to the principles, ethics, and values of the Muhammadan call and its bias toward the poor and the downtrodden), on the pretext that the interests of the state and the guarantee of its security and stability take precedence over principles, so that obedience to the ruler is obligatory even if he is tyrannical and unjust. Mu’awiya and his son Yazid turned Islam into a tool for legitimizing their exercise of power and for suppressing any criticism, opposition, or challenge to it, using means of manipulating religion and its texts for political ends: fabricating false Hadiths and promoting fatalist (Jabri) and Murji’i concepts that make the actions of the ruler, however tyrannical, part of God’s will, so that any objection to them becomes an objection to God and His will. Thus, from Mu’awiya onward, this Sultanic Islam became a political tool serving the unjust sultan for centuries, in various models of the Islamic state.

Thus, the Shia of Ali remained in a state of retreat, isolation, and taqiyya at the political, social, and doctrinal levels throughout those centuries, especially with the emergence of the Hanbali school from the mid-third century AH (around mid-9^th century AD), under the patronage of the Abbasid state, and its subsequent spread in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. From its womb, later emerged takfiri schools, chiefly the school of Ibn Taymiyya and then the Wahhabi school, from which in turn sprang the phenomenon of bloody takfiri jihadism, which has generally been employed in the service of American plans of domination in the region, even through local intermediary regimes.

Nor was this reality changed by the founding of the Safavid state in Persia by Shah Ismail I, who made Twelver Shiism the official sect of the Safavid state. This strengthened the position of the Shia religious authority (marja’iyya) in the country, which was bound to the Safavid rulers, and after them to the Afsharids and on down to the Pahlavis, by a contractual relationship that enhanced the religious and social standing of the Shia without their acquiring any influential political role until the late nineteenth century, when Persia entered the era of colonial penetration into its internal affairs by the British who began to control and exploit its natural resources. The first signs of the return of the Shia religious authority to the political arena after a long retreat then began to appear. This time, the return to politics carried a broader horizon than just internal opposition to an unjust and corrupt rule: it extended to confronting colonial ambitions, giving contemporary Husayni revolutionary vision, over time, a new anti-colonial and anti-Zionist dimension, alongside its confrontation of injustice, corruption, Westernization, the squandering of national wealth for the benefit of foreign states and their interests, and the Shah’s efforts to curb religious culture and the role of religion in society.

With the growth of foreign influence in Iran and the seizure of its national wealth under Pahlavi rule, which plundered the country, spread corruption throughout it, impoverished its people, and adopted a policy of Westernization, of surrendering national sovereignty, and of rapprochement with Israel, the Husayni approach took root, both to the contradiction and struggle with the ruling regime and with colonial penetration of the country, and to the model of the state that should be founded to confront colonial plans and the regime subordinate to them. Support for Mosaddegh’s campaign against the Shah, the formation of a national government, and the nationalization of oil in 1951 represented the first serious participation of religious authorities in confronting the Shah’s regime and foreign interests in the country. Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Kashani played the most prominent public role in supporting Mosaddegh’s government and the decision to nationalize oil, and even in supporting armed action against the Shah’s regime. He also took a hard-line position against the expansion of British influence in Iran. Then the figure of Imam Khomeini began to emerge publicly in the 1960s as a religious authority leading the opposition to the Shah’s regime and to its domestic and foreign policies, which were tied to Western interests and their colonial plans in the region, after he had spent some two decades of his life in covert activity. Imam Khomeini became the most prominent religious authority in Iran, working to revive Husayni revolutionism, and from then on, he began preparing a Husayni revolution to overthrow the Shah’s regime, free the country from foreign influence and Israeli penetration, and establish an Islamic republic on the Husayni path. According to Twelver Shia doctrine, this orientation required a guardian (wali al-faqih) who must be a qualified, highly learned, and just jurist capable of leading this Islamic state during the occultation of the Imam. Imam Khomeini therefore developed his theory of the Guardianship of the Jurist (wilayat al-faqih) from the 1960s onward, and struggled for many years to launch the revolution, even from his exile in Iraq from the mid-1960s, until the revolution broke out and triumphed, and contemporary Husayni revolutionism founded its own state.

The victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran was thus the first political victory of Husayni revolutionism and the first founding of a Husayni state in history. It was the first revolution of the twentieth century to come from outside Western intellectual models and paradigms, in both their liberal-capitalist and socialist variants; it was also considered the second revolution of the twentieth century, after the Bolshevik Revolution, to be born as an idea and to grow, develop, triumph, and govern without any external support. Hence, from its inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran, as a model different from the Western liberal model and threatening Western geostrategic interests in the Middle East, and as a state opposed to American imperialism and to Israel, faced the challenge of the colonial West not accepting its existence nor adapting to it, especially the United States of America, which since the end of the Second World War has long worked to dominate the world and to unify it according to its own liberal capitalist model, driven by economic, political, and cultural imperialist motives alike. This led the US to wage various conflicts and wars, and hard and soft intervention programs, after the Second World War in the context of its Cold War against the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, as an economic-political, cultural, and ideological model different from it and also threatening its interests. It was no coincidence that, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, the United States moved from talk of the communist threat to talk of an Islamic axis of evil, where its primary target was the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

3 – The Historical Background of the Husayni Liberation Resistance Movement in Lebanon

The Husayni liberation movement in Lebanon and the region was not, in turn, born out of nothing. It arose against the background of the transformations in political thought since the early twentieth century and after the First World War, and therefore against the background of the transformations in political party experiences and national liberation movements in the region and the world after the Second World War, and of the balances, divisions of interests, plans of domination, and mechanisms for plundering the Third World that they produced.

The last three centuries had witnessed radical civilizational transformations that carried humanity, in vastly uneven proportions and with sharply differing outcomes, from the “primitive” or “uncivilized” age, as characterized by the Eurocentric perspective (across intellectual, economic, social, political, administrative, and technological levels), into an era in which human civilization witnessed new models and patterns of the state, of the relations and means of production, of social, cultural, and philosophical structures, of the international order, and of political and legal legislation, and consequently of political thought and of social and political movements. At the time when Europe was entering the age of the modern state, capitalist relations of production, the industrial revolution, steamships, and firearms, the last caliphate state in the Islamic world was entering its senility and failing to absorb the technological and modernizing transformations that Europe was undergoing. These transformations were reflected in the military, technological, and commercial balance of power and opened the gates for the escalation of colonial expansion in the region and the world.

This civilizational challenge between the two models, the advanced European and the declining Islamic, generated an asymmetric clash between them, in which Napoleon’s invasion of the region at the end of the eighteenth century was perceived as a pivotal event. This clash led to an Ottoman political, economic, scientific, cultural, and military retreat in the face of the European surge in all these fields, in a way that redrew the balance of power in the region and the world, culminating in the collapse of the Ottoman state after the First World War and the fall of the Arab and Islamic world under Western colonization.

Parallel to this dramatic field transformation, political thought in the Ottoman state was entering a new phase that expressed this civilizational clash, with all the opportunities, challenges, and dangers it carried. At the center of the Ottoman state, political thought retreated toward a Turkish-centered Turanian tendency, reflecting Ottoman identity’s abandonment of its supra-national Islamic horizons and its withdrawal into the bounds of Turkish identity. In the Arab peripheries of the Ottoman state, by contrast, political thought took another course, pulled between several tendencies. These ranged between (1) an inclination to renew Islamic thought in light of certain Enlightenment concepts and Western models of modernization, though on the basis of an all-embracing Ottomanism and an Islamic frame of reference, and (2) an inclination to retreat toward Arab identity, to seek an Arab renaissance project, independent of the Ottoman sphere and its Islamic frame of reference, and to imitate the Western Enlightenment and modernist model, in search of a project for a modern Arab nation-state, built on the one hand, on that model and on the civilizational achievements the West had realized in its modern state, and on the other, on imagined, backward-looking conceptions of Arab identity and of the historical Arab state, rich in civilizational, scientific and architectural achievements in the Middle Ages. These conceptions are governed by an Arab egocentrism that veils the broad Islamic dimension of those achievements and reinforces an Arab, or sub-Arab, partisanship that has in turn veiled, on the one hand, the cultural diversity of the Arab peoples and, on the other, the pivotal role that the elites of the neighboring non-Arab peoples played in those civilizational achievements. This is an imagined Arab identity partisanship whose first seeds were sown in the era of Mu’awiya, the first to deny the human dimension of Islam that transcends national identities, and who distinguished between Arabs and mawali to strengthen his rule and authority; it was then nourished, from the second half of the nineteenth century, by the nationalist wave that invaded Europe in that century.

However, the great historical trauma to this Arab political thought, in all its tendencies, was the outcome of the First World War, which confronted this thought with new challenges. The dismantling of the Ottoman state confronted the Islamic tendency, within this thought, with the challenge of finding a new Islamic caliphate to inherit the Ottoman state; and once the new Turkey had left the Ottoman sphere and Islamic thought for secularization and Westernization, the hoped-for Islamic caliphate had to be established on Arab land, as at the dawn of Islam. The first broad political organization founded on this Islamic political thought was the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1928, which did not produce a clear and effective liberation approach against colonialism. On the other hand, the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration confronted the nationalist tendency with a major challenge. The Arab renaissance tendency had seen in the liberal, enlightened West, a modernizing and enlightening model, worthy of emulation, and alongside where most of its elites were deceived by the promises of the West. Those elites had stood against the Ottomans in return for the West’s deceptive promises to establish an Arab nation-state in the Levant in exchange for their support in driving the Ottomans out of the Arab East. This West soon broke its promises and revealed its colonial face in the region, and its support for the Zionist project, which would swallow Palestine and become the spearhead of imperialist projects of domination in the region and the principal instrument for destroying the region’s foundations through the series of successive wars that the Zionist entity continues to wage against it to this day, with blatant American and European support.

Thus, facing an Islamic model in retreat whose last empire had just exited history, and a Western model with a liberal tongue and colonial fangs, a model of government emerged amid the First World War from outside the historical course of events. It was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which caused a sharp disruption in the development of the global capitalist system, with its nationalist tendencies, whose core states were competing to control and dominate the world and to divide their influence and interests among themselves. The socialist revolution came from outside the box of that system that was then taking shape to the rhythm of the war’s outcomes. This revolution introduced a new tendency in global political thought that became a revolutionary frame of reference for critical thought, class consciousness, and anti-colonial liberation action, under a global capitalist system in whose core states wealth accumulated and concentrated on the basis of exploiting the labor power of the toiling classes and plundering the wealth and natural resources of colonized countries.

After the Second World War, with the victory of the Soviet Union and its emergence as one of the two poles of the postwar world order, socialist thought and the Soviet Union, alongside China, became an intellectual, political, and military frame of reference for independence and national liberation movements in most parts of the Third World, and for the network of communist parties there, whose emergence was at times not free of a fashion-driven tendency, and at other times of a paternalist tendency subordinate to the Soviet center. At the same time, the objective conditions for this emergence were present: the growing longing of colonized peoples for liberation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the escalating intensity of class exploitation, abject poverty, economic plunder, and the concentration of wealth and property among those peoples, under capitalist relations of production in the West, or pre-capitalist ones in many regions of the Global South, from Latin America, Asia, and Africa to the Arab region, where confrontation against the Zionist project in Palestine and liberation from colonialism, along with Arab unity and social justice, constituted the central cause for many Arab political parties, especially the nationalist and leftist ones. In this context, these two tendencies (nationalist and leftist) occupied a pivotal position in the national liberation movement and in the armed resistance factions, fighting to liberate Palestine from 1950s or Lebanese territory from the late 1970s. In parallel, the Free Officers’ revolution took place in Egypt in 1952, and over time, under Nasser’s leadership, its positions took a more radical turn, both in adopting the Arab unionist approach and in its liberation stance against colonial interests in the Arab sphere and in the African and Islamic spheres. Nasser worked to free Egypt from British colonial domination and made Egypt a base state supporting armed resistance factions and Arab political parties of nationalist and liberationist orientation; he supported the Algerian war of liberation and national liberation movements in Africa generally. Nasser’s Egypt thus came to occupy the position of the pivotal state supporting liberation movements and factions in the Arab, African, and Islamic spheres, alongside the Soviet Union, which was the ideological, political, and military-supply frame of reference for resistance factions and national liberation movements worldwide.

However, the Arab defeat in the June 1967 war was a turning point for the nationalist orientation in the course of the Arab national liberation movements and the armed resistance in the region. The defeat of  Nasser and of the Baath Party in Syria in that war; followed by Nasser’s death in 1970 and Egypt’s abandonment of its liberationist and Arab course when Anwar Sadat took power, then abandoned the strategic cooperation that had bound him to the Soviet Union and joined the American project in the region, which led to Egypt’s removal from the Arab–Israeli struggle after the October 1973 War through the signing of the first “peace” agreement between the Arabs and Israel: all of this dealt a heavy blow to the tide of Arab nationalism in the region.

Only a few years after Egypt signed the Camp David Accords and “peace” with Israel in 1978 and 1979, Israel launched a war against Lebanon in 1982, one of whose main objectives was to eliminate the Palestinian resistance, whose armed factions were the spearhead of the Arab liberation movement and armed resistance, and which had been concentrated entirely in Lebanon since leaving Jordan in 1970 in the wake of the events of Black September. Through that war, Israel succeeded in evacuating the Palestinian resistance from its main bases in Beirut and in the occupied southern half of Lebanese territory. In practice, Lebanon’s role as a base for armed Palestinian resistance against Israel came to an end in the 1980s, whether because of the Israeli occupation since 1982, or because of the War of the Palestinian Camps in 1985–1988 or as a result of the Second Gulf War of 1991, which dealt a heavy blow to the Palestinian cause and its resistance after the official Arab order emerged from that war defeated and subject to American dictates. That war of 1991 effectively removed the Palestine Liberation Organization from the circle of resistance against Israel through the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords of 1993, and opened the way for the Arab slide toward normalization with Israel later on, especially after the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 and the major upheaval it caused in the region. Yet these setbacks in the arena of Palestinian resistance gradually contributed to the rise of the Islamic resistance in the Lebanese and Palestinian arenas, after the Palestine Liberation Organization had abandoned this role of resistance.

At another level, the Arab, regional, and global left was going through a deep intellectual, organizational, and model crisis, mainly, the failure of the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to achieve a successful model of government, whether in economic development and growth rates, in the modernization of the means of production, in governance and administrative efficiency, in democracy and public freedoms or in popular satisfaction, alongside the role of the Cold War and its Iron Curtain in besieging the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc economically and technologically.

The role of socialist experiments in the Arab region then declined in turn, and the Soviet Union retreated from supporting liberation movements around the world after Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Thus, in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, the region gradually witnessed an intellectual and ideological shift toward religious thought, which took on orientations and expressions with diverse aims, based on awakening the sectarian, jurisprudential, and functional frame of reference on the one hand, or the jihadist one on the other. This included the tendency that concerns us here, the revolutionary Husayni Shia tendency, distinguished by its revolutionary dimension from its inception. The way for it had been paved by repeated Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon since at least the 1970s, and by the policy of neglect and marginalization long adopted by the Lebanese state toward the peripheral regions and the countryside, especially the South. These gave rise to a revolutionary, liberationist tendency that the people of the South expressed by joining, in the 1960s and 1970s, the resistance work then embodied by the Palestinian resistance factions and by the Lebanese left, which, for its part, spoke to the social deprivation and economic marginalization that the people of the South suffered as a result of the unbalanced development policies the Lebanese state pursued toward them.

Yet this liberationist consciousness among the Shia of Lebanon, especially the people of the South, had early antecedents dating back to the 1920s, with the French occupation of Lebanon after the First World War, which gave rise to an early anti-colonial independence and liberation movement that was not isolated from the Arab nationalist climate prevailing in the region, starting in the final years of the Ottoman state. The religious authority Imam Abd al-Husayn Sharaf al-Din and the fighter Adham Khanjar played a prominent role in this regard in southern Lebanon, both in resisting the French occupation from the 1920s and in supporting the Great Revolt in Palestine in 1936. However, awareness of Shia identity and of the deprivation that afflicted the Shia, began to emerge strongly with the rise of Imam Musa al-Sadr on the Lebanese political scene from the mid-1960s; he was the main factor in awakening Shia identity and in stirring waters that had lain stagnant in Shia life for centuries. Then came the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which ignited the revolutionary Husayni liberation spirit among most of Lebanon’s Shia, and the resistance was launched. In its early years, it included forces of different ideological backgrounds, most prominently the Husayni Islamic Resistance, the left, and the Syrian Nationalists. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s leadership of the Islamic Resistance from the early 1990s played the most prominent role in this regard, for he knew how to speak to Husayni revolutionism and to inculcate it into popular consciousness and among the resistance fighters in the struggle against the Israeli enemy over nearly three decades, which culminated in driving the Israeli occupation out of Lebanon and in elevating this liberationist Husayni current to take on a regional and international dimension, as mentioned above.

Yet this development of Husayni revolutionism in Lebanon was not, in turn, separate from the Husayni revolution that Iran experienced in 1979, which over time has become the main source of support for the resistance factions fighting Israel in Lebanon and Palestine, then the American occupation of Iraq after 2003, and on to Yemen. To this day, it remains the spearhead in confronting the Zionist entity and the American imperialist project of domination in the world, and it has paid a heavy price in this confrontation, which has continued since 7 October 2023 (Toufan al-Aqsa). Since then, the confrontation has taken on a Karbala-like character, embodied in its ugliest and most savage form in the genocide in Gaza, which represents the Karbala of our age, and in which events resemble those that encircled Imam Husayn on all sides, when he was left alone that day except for a small Husayni band that stood with him, as it has stood with Gaza.

With the gradual dissolution of the nationalist and leftist political tendencies and national liberation movements in the region after the Second Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in the early 1990s, liberationist Husayni revolutionism has become almost the only model, or at least the pivotal model, confronting Zionism and imperialism in the world.

4 – The Epistemological and Conceptual Grounding of Liberationist Husayni Revolutionism

Discussing the prospects of a revolutionary Husayni national liberation movement requires shedding light on certain political, doctrinal, moral, and behavioral aspects of the Husayni revolutionary experience, which extended over some eleven years, from the martyrdom of Hasan, poisoned at the hands of Mu’awiya’s men in 50 AH, to the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala on the tenth of Muharram 61 AH. Those years were enough to clarify the causes of the dispute between Husayn and Mu’awiya, and then Yazid; the political and moral dimensions of this conflict; Husayn’s way of dealing with contested issues; and the principled and moral dimension of Husayn’s approach as opposed to the contrary, pragmatic, and amoral approach of the other side in the conflict. This period of the conflict also reveals the revolutionary dimension of this Husayni approach, which knows no surrender and teaches lessons in the leader’s commitment to what he says and in applying his slogans to himself before demanding that others apply them. This approach affirms the principle that ethics and politics are inseparable in the Husayni school, culminating in its teaching a lesson in the meaning of sacrifice through readiness for martyrdom for the sake of others, and in the refusal of humiliation or surrender.

Research on Husayni revolutionism must start by establishing a definition of revolutionism that speaks to the Husayni experience and its epistemological background, according to a contemporary critical approach that redefines the concept of revolutionism amid the transformations that are stripping it of its principled and normative dimension, that is, of its moral commitment and its clear stance against injustice and in defense of justice and human equality, and confining it to its formalist, functional, and liberal dimension:

Revolutionism is an intellectual, mental, and active condition that emerges from the existing situation, intellectual and practical and what lies between them, then departs from it and rises against it, at the opportune historical moment, with the aim of changing it radically for the better, according to a new intellectual vision, new way of thinking, new moral and value standards, and new behavioral method.

This definition contains a set of elements that speak, in contemporary language, to the Husayni experience and to its doctrinal, moral, and normative Muhammadan–Alid backgrounds, which founded Husayni revolutionism. These elements also respond to the modernist and postmodernist definitions of and approaches to revolution prevailing in the West, especially in their “color” version, in an age of liberal and neoliberal imperialist hegemony, which strip the concept of revolutionism of some of its main dimensions. The most important of these are the dimension of change for the better; the dimension of political affiliation; and the normative dimension that identifies the main contradictions governing the struggle in society and thus determines the direction of the revolution, its position on these contradictions, and the side it represents and takes in the ongoing struggle; in addition, of course, to the moral dimension, of which no revolution or revolutionary vision can be stripped. All of these dimensions were present in Husayni revolutionism and in its Muhammadan–Alid epistemological frame of reference.

Revolutionism includes: (1) an intellectual condition, (2) a mental condition, and (3) an active condition; it involves (4) emerging from the existing situation, that is, arising out of it; (5) departing from that situation, that is, rejecting it, distinguishing oneself from it, and not being bound by its epistemological, moral, and value systems or by its behaviors and the relations that govern it; then (6) rising against it, that is, revolting against it to overthrow it; and (7) changing it. This change covers the various levels of the existing situation, beginning with the (8) intellectual level and ending with the (9) practical and behavioral level, and passing through the (10) cultural, moral, value, doctrinal, and institutional levels, among others. This change is (11) radical, not partial, superficial, or formal, and it is (12) for the better. “Better” here carries a normative dimension, for not every change is for the better. “Better” is determined by the goals of the revolution and by the group on whose behalf the revolution is made, and the criterion of “better” here is siding with a specific social group: the poor and the downtrodden, who make up the majority of any people. This change takes place according to (13) new thought, (14) a new way of thinking, new (15) value and (16) moral standards, and (17) a new behavioral method.

How was this revolutionism, with its various elements and dimensions, manifested in Husayni revolutionism?

If we take into account that the Husayni revolution is an extension of the Muhammadan revolution, which came to change the situation that existed in pre-Islamic society in its various doctrinal, cultural, moral, social, political, and economic dimensions, and that it came to confront the reversal of the changes that Islam had brought about after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, then a fundamental part of the goals of the Husayni revolution complements those of the Muhammadan revolution: unifying humanity, supporting the poor and the downtrodden, confronting injustice and class exploitation, and combating obscene wealth, the concentration of wealth, corruption, tribal division, and ethnic discrimination…

To say that Husayni revolutionism emerged, with its thought, principles, way of thinking, ethics, and active conduct, from the existing situation means that it was born of the social environment into which Husayn was born, as Ali and Muhammad had been before him. It means that this liberationist revolutionism arose in a poor environment that knew the meaning of hunger, want, weakness, injustice, exploitation, and discrimination, and the meaning of the reversal against the Muhammadan message after the Prophet’s death, a message that had come to deliver the poor from their poverty, the hungry from their hunger, and the oppressed from their oppressor. This was a situation that Husayn rejected, as Ali had rejected it; so both departed from the prevailing situation and lived their lives in a different way, based on austerity, asceticism, holding fast to the truth, rejecting injustice, calling for the reform of the situation, and striving to change it. Before long, Husayn rose against this reality to change it, when it was no longer possible to go on living with it under Yazid, whose course had begun to threaten to destroy the Muhammadan message. Husayn did not retreat from these revolutionary choices, and he chose martyrdom for their sake. But although the intellectual and mental conditions of Husayn’s revolutionary path were complete, the weakness of its active condition, owing to the circumstances surrounding him and to people deserting him out of fear or greed, as well as the imbalance of power between the two sides, prevented the conditions for the success of the revolution from being met. So Husayn decided to triumph over Yazid’s sword with his blood, an approach that represents the pinnacle of revolutionism. After his martyrdom, this revolutionism took off powerfully at the epistemological, jurisprudential, value, and emotional levels, but it withdrew from action for thirteen centuries, until it reappeared in active form in contemporary liberationist Husayni revolutionism in Iran, Lebanon, and the region, with clear differences in the historical circumstances of each stage and in the nature of the ongoing conflict, since the external factor has entered as a basic factor in the present conflict, which is governed by the existential dimension of the struggle with Zionism, American imperialism, and the political regimes and groups subordinate to them in the region, unlike the first Husayni revolution, which was based on internal conflict within the same society.

The intellectual background of Husayni revolutionism thus encompassed a wide range of principles with a Muhammadan–Alid frame of reference, most prominently the monotheistic vision of human beings as equal in their being before the Creator. This means abolishing any tribal, racial, ethnic, class, or regional discrimination among people from birth, and making the moral and functional factor of the duality of good and evil the factor that distinguishes human beings, not in their being and essence, but in their role in society and their moral conduct (piety and good works). On this basis, the distinction among people in the Husayni intellectual background took on a normative dimension carrying a principled bias toward the poor and the downtrodden, which this intellectual background expressed in positions that clearly called for rejecting injustice and supporting the oppressed, abolishing racial and class discrimination, and fighting slavery and bondage, economic exploitation, exorbitant usury, monopoly, and the concentration of wealth; and that advocated social justice, the welfare state, the redistribution of wealth, combating corruption, supporting the oppressed, rising against the ruler if he becomes tyrannical and corrupt, refusing humiliation, and the love of martyrdom.

This revolutionism adopted a way of thinking derived, in turn, from the Alid frame of reference, which adopts the interpretive approach that links faith to reason, frees the reading of the Holy Quran from textualism and formalism, and connects it to human, social, and political reality. This strengthened the revolutionary Husayni intellectual approach to social and political issues and its principled positions on those issues.

As for the active, behavioral side of Husayni revolutionism, it rests on principle rather than pragmatism; on commitment to the cause of reforming the community (umma) and to enjoining good and forbidding evil; on the principle of not separating ethics from politics and of not keeping silent about wrongdoing; on adopting the principle of justice rather than the principle of domination in judging contested issues; on commitment to truthfulness as opposed to deception; on adherence to ethical conduct even with opponents; on the refusal to surrender; and on self-sacrifice for the sake of others’ lives, culminating in the choice of martyrdom when it is the only means available to uphold the truth.

5 – Liberationist Husayni Revolutionism: From the Local to the Internationalist

The final question remains: can liberationist Husayni revolutionism serve as an internationalist model for national liberation movements?

There is no doubt that history does not repeat itself. But many social structures and relations, and individual psychological tendencies, such as love and hatred, sympathy and pity, the desire for possession and gratification, fear, selfishness, interests and others, are all elements that can be found in different human societies, regardless of the great transformations taking place in those societies and the changes in many of the concepts, priorities, determinants, and relations prevailing in society.

But when certain social structures, relations, and contradictions, and certain individual tendencies, recur in a large number of societies in different historical periods, these phenomena, structures, relations, and tendencies turn into social and psychological laws or rules, or into structural components of society and of individuals. Consequently, to speak of some of these phenomena, relations, and tendencies, including the elements that make up Husayni revolutionism and the continuity of their presence in contemporary societies, is not, methodologically, ahistorical or a projection. Injustice still exists, and social discrimination, whether tribal, ethnic, national, or class-based, still exists, even though its presence varies from one society to another, from one historical period to another, and from one model of government to another. Likewise, the drive to dominate, the love of possession, the love of power, corruption, poverty and obscene wealth, the concentration of wealth, hegemony, criminality, savagery, pragmatism, instrumentalism, amorality, fanaticism, racism, greed, self-interest, and contradictions: all these, and others, are elements that existed in the pre-Islamic era, and then in the Islamic era to varying degrees from one experience to another. The main conflict that arose between the principled tendency represented by Ali and then Husayn, and the pragmatic tendency represented by the Umayyads and by a class of tribal chiefs, so-called nobles, and merchants, rests fundamentally on certain social laws that still hold today, most importantly interest, influence, power, and domination, as opposed to the rejection of injustice and the pursuit of justice (enjoining good and forbidding evil). This conflict between the two tendencies was grounded in social realities. The message revealed to a man who spent his childhood and youth between bare subsistence and poverty came primarily to unite human beings and make them equal before their one Creator, and to confront poverty, injustice, and slavery (and other contradictions that remain present in contemporary societies in one way or another); and those who fought Muhammad and his message were people who represented the other face of society, the face of obscene wealth, usury, monopoly, influence, domination, and racial and class discrimination, embodied mainly in the merchants of Quraysh and the Umayyads, a contradiction that persists to this day. It is no coincidence that, after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, the conflict rested on the same elements of contradiction, and that the defense of the Muhammadan message was led by Imam Ali, who came from the same poor social class and who defended the principles of that message, in which he found what protected him and others like him who suffered poverty, injustice, slavery, and discrimination. Nor is it a coincidence that Husayn continued along the same path; and it is no coincidence at all that Imam Khomeini came from the same class, that Imam Khamenei came from the same class, and that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, too, came from the same class, and from the same Muhammadan–Alid–Husayni revolutionary liberationist school of thought. This is the intellectual, active, and revolutionary thread that binds history together.

Certainly, in the past this conflict took an internal course, that is, between parties divided over contradictions within the same society. Today, however, the conflict is no longer confined to the internal contradictions of each society separately; rather, especially in the age of globalization, it takes on an external, global course in which internal divisions, contradictions, and interests intertwine with external contradictions and interests and with projects of political domination and economic plunder, facing liberation movements against imperialist projects of domination that can no longer be confronted at the level of local liberation movements in each country separately, so much so that external support for any local liberation movement has become an absolute necessity. The nature of the contradictions, conflicts, and balances of power prevailing today urgently requires an internationalist liberation project that converges on the basic principled, visionary, active, and moral issues necessary for such a project. After the retreat of the modernist intellectual models, nationalist and socialist, that prevailed in the last century and served as an intellectual frame of reference for many national liberation movements around the world until the 1980s, liberationist Husayni revolutionism has become the spearhead in confronting Zionist and imperialist projects of domination in the region and the world.

To strengthen this internationalist role of liberationist Husayni revolutionism, this Husayni revolutionism must work to regain the standing it held in Husayn’s time, as a humanist movement that, in its social and political goals and in its Muhammadan–Alid doctrinal and intellectual frame of reference, transcends any national, tribal, or religious boundaries of the environment in which it arose, and any sectarian boundaries within which the Umayyad and Abbasid onslaught, and the Sultanic Islam that ruled the Arab region for centuries, succeeded in besieging and imprisoning it. That onslaught also succeeded in turning the Shia of Ali, who had defended Muhammad’s message with its humanist, unifying dimension when it faced a wave of reversal after the Prophet’s death, and in turning the revolution of Husayn, which defended the oppressed, the poor, and the downtrodden and liberationist principles that transcended the tribal, ethnic, and national loyalties prevailing in his society, into a religious sect, and in turning the Shia of Ali into a closed group, so as to block its path as an intellectual, political, revolutionary liberation movement with a humanist, monotheistic doctrinal frame of reference.

Therefore, Husayni revolutionism cannot be confined within the bounds of a sectarian group whose identity and belonging are inherited, and whose political, intellectual, and interest-based orientations, inclinations, and alignments are diverse. Not every Shia is a Husayni revolutionary, and not every liberationist Husayni revolutionary is necessarily Shia by birth. Shiism began as a popular current that sided with Ali during the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphate and in his principled dispute with Mu’awiya; it later expanded and developed, but it was besieged within the bounds of a persecuted sectarian group. A sect is an inherited identity framework that does not necessarily express agreement or harmony on the national and social issues of daily life or on contemporary political approaches. A Shia can be a Husayni, and can be a liberal; can be a liberationist resistance fighter, or a supporter of America in its wars against the region. A Shia can also be principled or pragmatic, honest or corrupt. For Shiism, or any other sectarian affiliation, as an identity rather than a creed and a revolutionary liberation movement, does not bind its members to a political or economic position or to a class affiliation. Liberationist Husayni revolutionism, by contrast, is a doctrinal, intellectual, behavioral, moral, and political school that does not stop at the boundaries of sects and groups; rather, its members are united in creed, vision, conduct, ethics, and values, and around the fundamental issues in their own lives and in the lives of others, such as social justice, support for the oppressed, the rejection of racial, tribal, and class discrimination, confronting injustice, upholding integrity and ethics, rising against the unjust ruler, resisting Zionism, colonialism, and American imperialism, and maintaining courage, sacrifice, and the love of martyrdom…

In the face of these great global challenges, especially in the period after 7 October, during which Gaza was subjected to the most horrific and bloody Karbala-like ordeal in human history, an ordeal that extended to Lebanon, Iran, and the region with the aim of eliminating this liberationist Husayni revolutionism, which is a spearhead in confronting American imperialism and Israel… in the face of all these challenges, it has become necessary to work to bring contemporary liberationist Husayni revolutionism out of the confines of the sectarian group and to release it toward the humanist liberation horizons from which it set out in its first generation with Husayn, which defended a creed with a humanist, monotheistic dimension, as well as, defended crushed social classes whose belonging transcends tribes, sects, and nationalities. This is what Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah came to emphasize in this age, as Husayn emphasized it in his.

It is this humanist doctrinal identity of liberationist Husayni revolutionism that gives this Husayni revolutionism an internationalist dimension, enabling it to serve as a doctrinal, moral, political, and active frame of reference for all honorable mujahideen, revolutionaries, and liberation fighters in the world. Through this vision, liberationist Husayni revolutionism takes its place in history, in the global liberation movement, and in contemporary human civilization.

This is how liberationist Husayni revolutionism endures and lives on.