Background on the Lebanese Shiites
Amazing, the power of the internet! Big thanks to all who emailed me with offers of help on PDF-ing my 1984-85 monograph titled The Shia community and the future of Lebanon. A reader from west-coast USA was able to do it for me from a version that I faxed over to her.
Here it is.
I must have written it in late 1984. I found a copy of it in my father's estate after he died in 1999; it had in it the letter, dated January 1985, that I tucked in the front cover when I mailed it to him in England, from Washington DC where I was then living.
What a lot has happened since then, eh? It wasn't till February 1985 that a new, previously unknown organization called "Hizbullah" issued a letter publicly announcing its formation...
In the monograph you can find background material about the Shiite community of Lebanon from which Hizbullah sprang. You can find out about the origins of the Amal movement, the political body from which Hizbullah's founders had split off. And you can read my "policy conclusions" for the US:
- The inter-sect system in Lebanon is a delicate mechanism, often fristratingly bloddy in its operation. At the moment it is undergoing a long-term shift in power [from Maronite dominance to Shiite dominance] which is probably comparable to the one experienced from 1825 to 1861 [from Druze dominance to Maronite dominance]. Neither the US nor any other outside actor can do much to reverse this shift. But the US can change its policies--as the Israelis already have done, in part-- to align themselves with rather than against the historical processes at work. That necessarily includes addressing the political dimension of Lebanon's increasingly pressing Shia question.
The child in question was safely born, grew up healthy (thank G-d), and is now nearly 20 years old.
As for Hizbullah....
(By the way, apologies for the poor quality of the photos in the PDF file. I may or may not be able to get something done about that. Especially, no offense at all intended to Nabih Berri for the fact that he came out looking a bit bad there. Technical factors were at work considerably beyond my ability to control.)