A Shi'i Religious Perspective on Lebanese Sectarianism: The Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council under...

Journal of Shi'a Islamic Studies Spring 2015 ■ Vol. VIII • No. 2

A Shi'i Religious Perspective on Lebanese Sectarianism: The Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council under Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din (1978-2001)

F a r a h K a w t h a r a n i University of Michigan, Dearborn, USA

ABSTRACT: This article examines the development of the position o f Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din (d.2001), who headed Lebanon’s Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, ISSC, from 1978 to 2001, on the Lebanese sectarian system. I trace the progression of his positions which underwent three phases: first, accommodation with sectarianism, albeit with reforms proposals, during the phase of collaboration with Sayyid Musa al-Sadr in the 1970s; second, a more radicalized position that rebutted the sectarian system in the midst of the civil war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; and finally, a de facto acceptance o f the war-ending Ta’if Agreement of 1989 that consolidated sectarianism. I argue that the changing political context o f post-war Lebanon and the rise of Hezbollah as a contending force on the Shi'i Lebanese scene have propelled Shams al-Din to seek rapprochement with the Lebanese state, in line with the legacy that Musa al-Sadr had initiated in Lebanon when he founded the ISSC.

KEYWORDS: Shaykh M uhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, the Shi'i Islamic Supreme Council, Lebanese sectarian system, Lebanese Shi'is, Sayyid Musa al-Sadr

Introduction

The position of Shi'i citizens in the Lebanese sectarian system has been at the core of Lebanese Shi'i politics for the last forty years. This paper focuses on one Shi'i religious figure who has grappled politically

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and intellectually with the predicament of the sectarian system and its repercussions for Lebanese Shi'is during an important phase of Lebanon’s turbulent modern history: Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din (d. 2001). The paper traces the progression of Shams al-Din’s position on Lebanese sectarianism, its flaws, and the reform proposals and visions he produced in a changing political context that witnessed the beginning and end of the civil war (1975-1989), as well as two Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982. Shams al-Din was a close associate of Sayyid Musa al-Sadr and a prolific intellectual Shi'i jurist who headed the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, ISSC, after the disappearance of al-Sadr in 1978. He was concerned with ameliorating the position of Shi'is in a sectarian political system that marginalized them considerably in its early beginnings. Building on the legacy of Musa al-Sadr and his own intellectual work, he developed reform visions for the Lebanese conflict that were more inclusive of Shi'is’ rights within a constantly changing political context, which witnessed the shifts of Shi'i youth from engagement with leftist and secular parties towards militant Islamist politics, with the rise of Hezbollah.

Lebanese sectarianism

The question of official sectarianism in Lebanon has produced a multitude of historiographical works that reflected diverse ideological convictions and debates on the question of the national identity of modern Lebanon, flaws of the sectarian system, issues of national integration, and the viability of the state. Many historians agree that the origins of the Lebanese Republic and the social roots of sectarianism and modern political culture lie in the mutasarrifiyyah of 1861 in Mount Lebanon,1 which was the first territory to enjoy a semi-autonomous administration within Greater Syria.2 The mutasarrifiyyah introduced the notion of a ‘privileged religious community’ at the top of the sectarian hierarchy,3 thus ensuring Maronite Christian hegemony over other sects. This formed the foundation for the sectarian power-sharing formula in modern Lebanon.4 Usama Makdissi, explaining the roots of sectarianization and the genesis of mutasarrifiyyah, showed how the conflation of three factors in the 1830s: the Ottoman reforms of 1839 or tanzimat, the Egyptian campaign of Ibrahim Pasha to Mount Lebanon,

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and the European pressures resulted in creating a new order for Mount Lebanon characterized by the sectarianization of politics in which the former elite solidarity across religious affiliations ended. The new politics featured local elites each representing their respective religious communities.5

Sectarianism was further reinforced in the 1920s with the edicts of the French mandatory authorities that institutionalized eighteen sects as ‘religious communities,’ most of which enjoyed recognition in public law.6 The Shi'is, like other religious groups, saw their own confessional community established officially by the French Law no. 3505 of 27 January 1926, which recognized the Shi'i legal school as autonomous with its own courts.7 This formalization and bureaucratization of the courts contributed to the rise of a sectarian consciousness among the Shi'is under the French mandate.8 The sectarian structure was reinforced further with Article 95 in the Constitution of 1926,9 which stipulated that ‘provisionally and for the sake of justice, equity, and concord, the religious communities would be equally represented in public employment and in cabinet posts without prejudice or harm to state interests.’10

The distribution of the primary power offices was concluded under the arrangements of the National Pact of 1943, settled under French rule and represented by the Christian Maronite president Bishara al-Khuri and the Sunni Muslim prime minister Riad al-Sulh: the presidency of the republic was allocated to the Christian Maronite sect, the office of the prime minister given to the Muslim Sunni sect, and the speakership of the parliament went to the Muslim Shi'i sect. Although the National Pact was a tacit gentlemen’s agreement that was not officially enclosed in the constitution, it instituted proportional representation and distribution of political offices by sect, setting the norm for future distribution of governmental offices. The representation of Christians and Muslims in the parliament was kept at a ratio of 6 to 5 respectively, in order to provide guarantees for the Christians.11 Key political and military positions in the state bureaucracy were reserved to the Maronites.12 This sectarian hierarchy furnished the Christian sects with greater representation than the Muslim ones.’3

In addition to Article 95 of the Constitution, mentioned above, other articles also reinforced the autonomy of the communities. Article 9, for example, granted personal status law to each religious community while Article 10 protected the independence of sectarian educational

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institutions. There was also the Law of 19 December 1967 (no. 72/76) organizing the affairs of the Shi'i community.14 The sectarian principle also regulated personal status law.15 Secular critics of sectarianism believed that the association between sectarian interest and personal status laws created several problems, reinforcing divisions among citizens by applying different personal status laws to citizens of the same state. It also denied a citizen’s right to dissolve his association with a given religious sect and by consequence her/his religious identity.16

In addition to the challenge posed by the development of the sectarian structure to the foundation of the nation-state of Lebanon, there were at play also the contesting narratives about its national identity. Questions about the national identity of Lebanon were contested among the various sects. Christians were anxious to establish national validity for the emergence of Lebanon as a state independent from Syria. In order to achieve this goal, they sought, with French backing, to win over Muslim support for the idea of an independent Lebanon.17 Indeed, unless Muslims accorded their approval to the independence of Lebanon as a nationstate, the legitimacy of the Lebanese Republic as a state remained in question.18 But Muslims couched their eagerness to terminate French rule in Arabist terms, which Christians feared could indicate an inclination for unification with Syria.19 On the other hand, from the Muslim Arab nationalist view, it was unacceptable to accord independence to a French- created Lebanese Republic as a nation-state independent from Syria, since this was seen as a colonial plot to divide the Arab world.20 Therefore, the birth of the modern state of Lebanon came at the crossroads of two polarizing narratives, Lebanese nationalism and pan-Arab nationalism.

The two narratives on the national identity of modern Lebanon led its architects to perceive the modern construction of Lebanon as a symbiosis of two distinct cultures, one in Beirut with a Sunni and Greek Orthodox population and one in Mount Lebanon, with a Maronite and Druze population. The subtle interaction between these two contradictory yet complementary ‘cultural’ cores, ‘the liberal urban Levantine traditions’ flourishing in Beirut, and the political heritage hailing from ‘the tribal and manorial dynasties’ of Mount Lebanon, shaped the identity of modern Lebanon in the nineteenth century and served as a ‘foundational narrative’ that justified its later independence.21 These themes were formulated during the French mandate by Michel Chiha, seen by some scholars as the ideologue of Lebanese nationalism.22 Flowever, other

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scholars saw that his work aimed to bridge the gap between Lebanese nationalism and Arab nationalism, trying to find common denominators to blend into a single nation the multi-communal identities of Lebanon. Chiha’s writings re-articulated Lebanese nationalism into a discourse acceptable to Muslims that emphasized the concept of ‘communal coexistence’ among sects, and formulated a power-sharing formula that included non-Maronites.23

Historian Kamal Salibi’s emphasis on the two defining cores of modern Lebanon, Mount Lebanon and Beirut was symptomatic of the national assumption that the rest of the territories which formed Grand Liban in 1920 were simply annexed to Mount Lebanon for practical reasons, as was the case with the Shi'is of Jabal ‘Amil or South Lebanon. This is further compounded by his view that an essentially separate culture and material relations existed in the South. On the latter, Kamal Salibi wrote: ‘No effort of imagination could convincingly depict them as part of a general Lebanese heritage.’24

Shi'is and sectarianism

Lebanese Shi'is have grappled in various ways with official narratives and foundational myths that underpinned modern Lebanon, justified its raison d’etre, and legitimized its sectarian basis. Lebanese Shi'is faced the challenge to inscribe their collective history in the two polarizing narratives of pan-Arabism and Lebanese nationalism, and to carve a more advantaged position in the sectarian system that marginalized them. Indeed, literature on the modern history of Shi'is in Lebanon concludes that this community entered Lebanon as the most politically and economically disadvantaged group.25

Shi'is ofjabal ‘Amil felt that they had no representing voice in the two foundational narratives of Libanism and Arab nationalism.26 On the eve of the genesis of Grand Liban, the sympathies of the Shi'is ofjabal ‘Amil were divided:27 Only a limited intellectual elite maintained its attachment to the Arab government of King Faysal in Damascus, preferring unity with Syria.28 The local population leaned towards autonomy within the new political order,29 while the political elite recognized the potential political benefits accruing from integration in the new nation-state in the form of access to resources as the representatives of South Lebanon.30

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The early political activism of Shi'is took shape within the frameworks of leftist and secular parties in the early 1960s. However, the foundation of the harakat al-mahrumin (the Movement of the Disinherited), later the AMAL Movement, by Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, in the 1970s, marked the beginning of the first political movement for Shi'is that emphasized their sectarian identity, focusing on pious and religious practices instead of the secularism of leftist parties. Lara Deeb argues that the search for spirituality and public piety infused the political awareness of Shi'is, which, in combination with their economic marginalization, led to their sectarian mobilization. Musa al-Sadr has in turn shaped most of this mobilization by responding to the Shi'is’ needs for both public piety and political assertiveness.31 Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr notes that many of the social, political, and religious activities and practices of Lebanese Shi'is, since the 1960s, promoted a sectarian identity, which have helped marginalized Shi'is to position themselves in the centre of Lebanese national narratives.32 These Shi'i political experiences have problematized this ideological polarization with their religious Shi'i Lebanese-centred nationalism.33 Moreover, Max Weiss argues that Lebanese Shi'is had become sectarian before the advent of Musa al-Sadr, the emergence of AMAL Movement, and Hezbollah;34 they were inevitably led to construct themselves, through gradual and implicit processes, as a sect because sectarianism was imposed on them as part of a modern Lebanese identity, even before the advent of Musa al-Sadr.35 Be that as it may, it is certain that Shi'is have been developing a sectarian identity despite the former influence that the leftist movement had exercised on their political mobilization. Despite the avant-garde role in critiquing the sectarian system by Shi'i leftist secularists, Shi'is eventually developed with full force a sectarian political identity that enhanced their position within Lebanese sectarianism vis a vis other sectarian groups. This is most noticeable with the almost exclusive political leadership that Hezbollah, the Shi'i movement, has secured among the majority of Lebanese Shi'is.

Biography o f M uhammad M ahdi Shams al-Din

Influenced by the Lebanese context in which he found himself, Shams al-Din examined the predicament posed by sectarianism, particularly for Shi'i citizens, and proposed reform visions to mitigate its discriminatory

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repercussions. In doing so, he had to navigate many ideological paradoxes that emanated from his complex position as a religious scholar having formerly sympathized with the Islamic movement of Iraq only to be alienated from emergent forms of Shi'i Islamism in Lebanon - a position he developed concomitantly with his critique of Khomeini’s wilayat al-faqih on both political and legal grounds. In Lebanon, the radicalization and violence perpetrated by the various warring confessional factions in the midst of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) assuaged his earlier opposition to sectarianism which he had professed during the mid-1980s. This happened as a result of experiencing the perils of territorial divisions caused by the Israeli invasion of 1982 and the radical propositions of both ultra-right wing Christian parties for the division of Lebanese territories, and radical Islamist movements such as Hezbollah for the establishment of an Islamic republic in Lebanon modelled after Khomeini’s government in Iran.

Shams al-Din was born in 1936 and spent the first thirty-three years of his life in Najaf, Iraq.36 He completed his studies under the tutelage of several prominent jurists in the hawzah seminaries, and graduated under the supervision of the two eminent marja s, Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim (d.1970) and Sayyid Abu al-Qasim al-Khu’i (d.1992), under whom he studied /z^ and usul al-fiqhP He belonged to a generation of politically- motivated young ulema, who were caught at a historical moment that witnessed the rise of the secular modern state in the postcolonial period of the Levant region. The modernizing programs of these states often encroached on the traditional spaces occupied by the ulema class, as custodians of religious traditions. These ulema felt threatened by both the powerful institutions of the state encroaching on the financial networks of the hawzuh seminaries, and the secular legislations that emasculated their role and jurisdiction. They also found their intellectual legacy and historical institutions of learning and traditional authority to be beset by secular and communist ideologies and parties. These politicized and active young ulema viewed Islam as a system that stretched beyond legal orthopraxis and personal piety to encompass areas of governance, to define the relations of government and religion, and to protect the public interests of Muslim lands. It is in this period that Shams al-Din expressed his eager inclination for an Islamic government. Such a government, he conceived, along many of the younger and politically active ulema, was the proper response to the multitude of threats perceived to besiege the


contemporary Islamic societies.In the Najaf hawzahs, Shams al-Din was active in the milieu of the

most activist young ulema of that period, such as Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (d.1980), the most prominent ideologue and supporter of the Da'wah Party that was founded in 1957-1958. He was also the peer of the Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (d. 2003),38 Mahdi al-Hakim (d.1988), and Muhammad Taqi al-Hakim (d.2002).39 Most noteworthy was his association with Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, who would later move to Lebanon in i960 to become the most prominent Shi'i leader. Musa al-Sadr organized harakat al-mahrumin (the Movement of the Deprived), which later became the AMAL Movement, and founded the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, ISSC, in 1967. Harakat al-mahrumin came to be seen as one of the first expressions of a Shi'i sectarian identity within the context of the sectarian culture that shaped the modern state of Lebanon.

While still a hawzah student in Najaf, Shams al-Din shunned political parties and refrained from joining the Da'wah Islamic Party. He rather supported what he called 'the general Islamic intellectual current in Iraq,’ which grew in the aftermath of the 1958 coup by president 'Abd al-Karim Qasim.40 Shams al-Din chose to channel his opposition to the regime and the rising secular ideologies41 through intellectual writings in support of the general Islamic intellectual current in order to propagate Islamic knowledge against secular ideologies, and to resist the excesses of the incumbent regime.42

In the aftermath of the coup planned by groups of Ba'thists and pan-Arabists in February 1963 in Iraq, ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif came to power, setting in motion major hostilities against various parties and Shi'i interest groups.43 Soon, Shi ‘is were underrepresented in the state apparatus while the Shi'i 'ulama of non-Iraqi origin were harassed and persecuted.44 This situation deteriorated further with the advent of the Ba'thists to power in 1968. Under these hostile conditions for Shi'is in general and the Shi'i ulema and political activists in particular, Shams al-Din left Iraq in 1969 and headed, for the first time, to Lebanon to settle permanently in his ancestral homeland.45 Upon his arrival, he worked closely with Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, who had settled in Lebanon earlier and had been preoccupied with the foundation of the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council. In 1967, under al-Sadr’s persistence, Law 72/(375 legislating the organization of the religious affairs of the Lebanese Shi'i Muslims, was ratified, allowing Shi'i ulema to found a Council whose mandate was

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to administer the religious affairs of Lebanese Shicis and provide them with formal representation.46 Actually, the creation of the ISSC by Musa al-Sadr in 1969 did not garner the consensus of Shi'i ulema. Many were opposed to it, most notably, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah who was close to the Islamist Da'wah Party in Iraq and was close ideologically, during the 1970s, to the young Shi'i revolutionaries who later became the early cadres of Hezbollah in the 1970s. While Musa al-Sadr considered that the ISSC would procure more rights and integration for Lebanese Shi'is in the political system, the young Shici revolutionaries along with Sayyid Fadlallah believed that the Lebanese political system was irreparable,47 and condemned the ISSC as a religious institution affiliated with the state.

Apparently, Shams al-Din was not wholeheartedly willing to join the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, despite his close cooperation with Sayyid Musa al-Sadr. He did not participate in the first election of the Council’s board;48 he feared that joining the Shi'i Council would prevent him from reaching out to young people because he would be limited by institutional affiliations.49 He believed that being free of institutional ties provided him with a large margin of intellectual freedom and movement.50 It is said that he preferred to concentrate his energy on intellectual pursuits and philanthropic work rather than institutional ones.’1 In 1975, Musa al-Sadr sent to him two envoys, Sayyid Muhammad Adi al-Amin and Shaykh Ahmad Isma'il to persuade him to join the Council.52 Al-Sadr’s desire to appoint Shams al-Din as vice president was underlined by the threats to his own position and leadership in Lebanon: he wanted to make sure that the Council would be left in the hands of someone he trusted.53 Musa Al-Sadr is reported to have said to Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali al-Amin: ‘I will perform my duties to the best of my abilities while I am around and I will leave the rest of the work afterwards to Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din.’54 Elections to the board of the Council took place in 1975 while Shams al-Din was on a medical trip to London. When he returned, he found he had been elected as the vice-president of Musa al-Sadr, a position that he accepted,55 and fulfilled until after the disappearance of Musa al-Sadr in 1978, thereafter becoming the de facto leader of the Islamic Shici Council.56 The year of the election, 1975, was also the year in which the civil war in Lebanon began. The abduction of Musa al-Sadr in August 1978, a few months after the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon that took place in March 1978, left Shams al-Din alone


to lead the Shi'i Council and fulfil the duties of the vanished Imam during the most troubled phase of the modern history of Lebanon.57 In 1994, Shams al-Din was elected president of the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council,58 assuming full responsibilities of a Shi'i jurist and religious political leader at a critical juncture in the history of Lebanese Shi'is.

Shams al-Din’s intellectual engagements

The early fruit of his intellectual engagement with forms of Islamic government, in Najaf, was the publication of a book in 1951, entitled Nizam al-Hukm wa al-Idarahft al-lslam (Governmental and Administrative System in Islam) explicating the institutionalization of an Islamic government predicated on Shi'i and Imami premises.59 But as Chibli Mallat notes, this is a position he only embraced before he moved to Lebanon, where, thereafter, he became immersed in the challenges posed by a multi-confessional society, gaining insight into the intricacies of the Lebanese predicament: rivalling confessional groups vying over power. He became also well-versed in the world of Lebanese Shi'is who, since the 1960s and onwards, have been trying to inscribe themselves into a system which excluded them, and have also been struggling to improve the conditions of their disadvantaged position, which they inherited from the era of the French Mandate and the genesis of the Lebanese state. Sabrina Mervin demonstrates how the French mandatory authorities marginalized the Shi'i ulema and co-opted the notables, while noting the tensions that the Shi'is felt toward the new emerging political order. The peripheral areas of the new Grand Liban, including the South, were left undeveloped and ignored.60

When the Islamic revolution of Khomeini succeeded in Iran in 1979, Shams al-Din upheld a favourable position towards the Islamic republic. Chibli Mallat notes that on the eve of this revolution, the Lebanese jurist experienced tensions between loyalty to Lebanese nationalism and an Islamic form of internationalism whose nucleus was Iran.61 However, his growing unease with the ramifications of the thesis of Khomeini’s wilayat al-faqih, once this theory was removed from the theoretical realm and put into practice in the Iranian context, led him to respond with the formulation of another theoretical concept: wilayat al-ummah 'ala nafsiha, which he explained was a political theory for Islamic governance

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that deeply differed from Khomeini’s thesis. Herein, he argued in favour of the separation of powers, in a similar way to the separation found in liberal democracies, and in which shura (the principle of election and consultation) is conceived as the Islamic counterpart of parliamentarian democracy.62 Along this alienation from wilayat al-faqih, and consequent distancing from Hezbollah, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shams al-Din realized that he needed, from now on, to subscribe to a form of Lebanese nationalism. And the previous hesitation he had professed earlier between Lebanese nationalism and Islamic internationalism was ruled out in favour of the former.

Meanwhile, the question of Lebanese sectarianism exerted an extensive influence on Shams al-Din’s thought, culminating in his formulation of the thesis o f ‘majority-based consultative democracy,’63 twenty years after his repatriation in Lebanon. In this short book, the thesis he put forward made the case for a more integrative political system in which Shicis gain more political power. This thesis was drafted in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon and Beirut in 1981 and aimed, as he stated, to provide Lebanon with a national leadership that would be capable of defending the interests of Lebanon and prevent the annexation of the Israel-occupied South Lebanese territories from Israel.

The later developments in Shams al-Din’s thought, especially during the 1990s, witnessed his shift away from all forms of Islamic governments towards arguments in favour of the civil government, raising questions about his commitment to the concept of an Islamic government. The decade of the 1990s consolidated Shams al-Din’s widening critique of wilayat al-faqih, as a juristic construct, and his alienation from the internal choices of Hezbollah and what he saw as the problematic transnational alliance of Hezbollah with Iran, which transcended and problematized the party’s loyalty to Lebanon. He feared the ramifications/repercussions of Khomeini’s conflation of state and wilayat al-faqih, when the guardian- jurist becomes the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The concentration of governmental power in the hands of the guardian-jurist who is also the highest religious authority in Shici Islam would completely erode the Shic i ulema’s role as interpreters and custodians of Islamic law, as well as the autonomy their religious authority enjoyed in being the custodians of Islam’s legal and moral traditions.

If his very early exploration and enthusiasm for an Islamic government has been well documented as a young jurist in Najaf, his later position

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underlines a significant change toward the embrace of a form of government that he called civil (hukumah madaniyyah). By this form of government he meant a government where power would be equally divided between Christians and Muslims, in a way that would keep ‘religion’ from having any direct interference in state affairs.64 Furthermore, governmental institutions, such as the presidency, parliament, the judiciary, and others, would have to be non-religious institutions and the religion of the staff operating them of total irrelevance to the tasks they would be performing.65

This change was impacted by two important processes: first, the local Lebanese context with which he had been grappling since his return to Lebanon, namely the challenges of a multi-confessional society, the injustices of the sectarian system, and the ongoing civil and regional wars of Lebanon. Second, there were the weighing threats he saw in the thesis of wilayat al-faqih following the triumph of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, on the role of jurists, especially the Arabs, and those who did not want to see Iran turn into the exclusive leader of all Shi' is residing beyond its national frontiers. Moreover, the popularity of an ‘Islamic State’ among young Lebanese Shicis made Shams al-Din re-examine the notion and reality of an Islamic government. He advanced two interconnected readings of what a government should be and justified them on the basis of juridical arguments and proofs. On one occasion he declared that there are no explicit injunctions in the shari'ah that governments should be Islamic in nature.66 Elsewhere, he wrote that the provisions of the shari'ah require the mandatory implementation of certain governmental and administrative functions, such as the establishment of a judicial authority and its smooth operation, the implementation of hudud (penalties), the collection of taxes, and the just dispensation of public funds, among others. All of the above functions of the shari'ah are natural institutions of government and an integral part of the management of public life and political society. The administrative functions commanded by the shari'ah, therefore, are organic functions of any government, whether Islamic or not.67 The conclusion to be drawn from these two positions is that Shams al-Din found that it is mandatory, according to the shari'ah, to ensure the proper functions of government and not to neglect these under any circumstances. However, it is not mandatory to form an Islamic state where these functions are implemented. Any state with an efficient institutional apparatus can fulfil the necessary governmental

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functions. This explains how it was possible juridically for him to develop his thought from the embrace of an Islamic government to a civil form of government without compromising his earlier juridical positions. It took decades of intellectual and political engagement for Shams al-Din to express his explicit support for a civil government in the mid-1990s. But this cognizance was not totally novel to his thought. As early as his work with Musa al-Sadr in the frame of the ISSC, both scholars had discussed serious proposals for the Lebanese crisis that did not involve any theoretical engagement with the notion of an Islamic government for Lebanon.

ISSC and Shams al-Din s proposals fo r the settlement o f Lebanon’s conflict

The period of collaboration between Musa al-Sadr and Shams al-Din under the umbrella of the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, ISSC, during the 1970s, witnessed deep engagement with the challenges besieging Lebanon, especially the vulnerability of South Lebanon in the face of the Israeli attacks against its territories and the growing Palestinian force based in South Lebanon as of 1978, the outbreak of the civil war of 1975, and the position of Shi'i citizens in the discriminatory Lebanese sectarian political order. This period shaped the gradual transformation of Shams al-Dm’s interests from pan-Islamism to more ‘localized’ engagement with the predicament of Lebanon, especially South Lebanon.

Under these circumstances, when Shams al-Din was serving as the vice-president of Musa al-Sadr, at the head of the ISSC, both scholars worked to formulate a vision of a reformed sectarian system that would provide Shi'i citizens with equal rights with members of other sects and ensure their further integration in a system that thus far had marginalized them. In this line, they promulgated reform plans for the sectarian system and settlement proposals for the burgeoning Lebanese crisis in 1975, without open opposition to the system or endeavours to eradicate it, as many leftists, including many Shi'is, had called for.

Indeed, the ISSC was actively involved in the main national initiatives that were formulated at the beginning of the civil war to end it, the most important of which was the document put forward by President Sulayman Franjiyah entitled ‘The Constitutional Document’

A Shi‘i Religious Perspective on Lebanese Sectarianism Farah Kawtharani

(al-Wathiqah al-Dusturiyyah).68 The ISSC also issued two documents that reflected its understanding of the roots of the conflict and the reforms it suggested. The first document of the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council (Waraqat al-Majlis al-Islami al-Shi'i al-A'la) was issued on 27 November 1975 by Musa al-Sadr, Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, and Hussein al-Husseini, the speaker of the parliament between 1984 and 1992, a co-founder of the barakat al-mahrumin with al-Sadr, and later the main architect of the Ta’if Agreement in 1989. The document urged fundamental reforms of the Lebanese system to preserve the unity of Lebanon and end the military clashes that had started in 1975. It was a pioneering step towards an Islamic recognition of the ultimate sovereignty and independence of Lebanon. It was later to be included in the ‘Document of Islamic Principles of 1983,’ which spoke for all the Islamic religious authorities, namely, the Sunnis and the Druze.69

This document stressed social issues as the main catalyst for the outbreak of violence. It deplored the economic marginalization that peripheral and rural areas of Lebanon suffered. Government institutions were simply absent in many of these regions, especially South Lebanon where it seemed, as the document asserted, the state had renounced its sovereignty. The failure of the state to provide basic welfare services to its rural regions, often populated by Shi'is, was combined with an aggravated level of power abuses, clientelism, and administrative corruption. The solutions to the administrative and social mismanagement, the document proposed, were the abolition of political sectarianism, and introduction of political reform.70 The mechanism to reform the sectarian basis of power distribution would be to abrogate Article 95 of the Constitution, which stipulated a sectarian distribution of public employment. Instead, the Shi'i Council document proposed to use merit as the sole criterion for employment.71 The document also proposed reshuffling the functions and prerogatives of the presidential, legislative, and executive powers.72 Foremost was the demand to increase the number of parliament seats to 120 while equally distributing the seats between Muslims and Christians.73 It postulated the election of the prime minister by the legislative authority rather than his appointment by the president, and the instauration of the executive authority solely in the cabinet, excluding the president of the republic,74 in order to balance the powers of the president and the prime minister. In addition, the document offered an array of proposals for social reforms that would reduce the severe economic discrepancies

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among social classes and geographical regions, and improve the living conditions of the population.

The second document, issued by the Shi'i Council on 11 May 1977, and specifically produced by Musa al-Sadr and Shams al-Din, put forth an unprecedented affirmation by an Islamic authority.75 For the first time, an Islamic authority, Musa al-Sadr, affirmed the recognition of the sovereignty and independence of Lebanon as the final homeland for its people (Lubnan watan niha'i li-abna ihi)Jb The document spurred the surprise of Muslims more than that of Christians: this affirmation of Lebanon as a final homeland was a bold step on the part of an Islamic leadership, considering the debates on Lebanon’s political identity and the polarization between Christian Libanism and Muslim pan-Arabism.77 The document of the Islamic Shi'i Council of 1977 emerged from the preparations for President Franjiyah’s Constitutional Document (al-Wathiqah al-Dusturiyyah) of 1976.78

The affirmation ‘Lebanon is the final homeland for its inhabitants,’ without insisting on reform as a prior condition, signalled a formal acceptance of the status quo by the highest Shi'i clerical leadership in Lebanon and indicated that Musa al-Sadr and Shams al-Din implicitly accepted sectarianism. Max Weiss stated that Musa al-Sadr, at the head of the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, perceived a positive aspect in sectarianism, in which members of each sect strove to empower and ‘reform the affairs of their people.’ Musa al-Sadr was deemed in favour o f ‘just sectarianism,’ (al-ta'ifiyyah al-'adilah), which was founded by the founders of the National Pact.79 Moreover, Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr observes that al-Sadr was contradictory on the issue of sectarianism. On the one hand he approved of the Maronites’ monopoly over the presidency, while on the other, he criticized sectarianism, urging its abolition, and yet he also called for a state of believers that was neither sectarian nor secular.80 The intended functions of these contradictions were to integrate Shi' is in the narratives of Lebanese nationalism while breaking the exclusive hegemony of the Christian narrative.81 Al-Sadr’s discourse tied in well with Michel Chiha’s emphasis on co-existence among sectarian groups, which represented the core of what Lebanon stood for.82

This readiness by al-Sadr and Shams al-Din to accommodate the sectarian system cannot be understood without contextualizing it within the radical transformations that shaped the Shi'i intelligentsia

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and the Shi'i youth, who saw themselves propelled toward revolutionary and secular ideologies in support of the Palestinian cause and leftist antisectarianism and anti-religiousness. These ideological transformations of the Shic is must have threatened the clerical authority of the politically active Shi'i ulema. The 1970s and 1960s were two decades that witnessed an immense expansion of the leftist movement among the Shi'is. The leftist organizations had immense success in recruiting Shi'i youth and acquiring the support of the educated revolutionary young Shi'is who were strongly disillusioned with the sectarian Lebanese system, the socioeconomic disparities that it sustained, and its conservative stance on the Palestinian question and resistance. Both al-Sadr and Shams al-Din were dismayed to see so many disenfranchised Shi'i youth join the leftist movement, which seemed to offer a stronger and more assertive platform to voice their social and economic grievances. The leftist and secular moods of a large part of the Shi'i youth jeopardized the institutions of Musa al-Sadr, and weakened his clerical leadership as well as his social base. One of the few options for al-Sadr to strengthen his leadership was to recognize the sectarian system as a modus vivendi and to work within its.framework in order to bargain for more rights for Shi'is.

Such acquiescence to sectarianism pointed to a goal to bargain for more rights for Shi'is from within the system, instead of opposing it radically and calling for its abolition as Shi'i leftist parties did. Al-Sadr reached this decision despite his theoretical and principled disapproval of sectarianism, and his awareness of the disparities and marginalization it created for many groups, including the Shi'is. He may have aimed to pressure the sectarian system from within in order to extract more offices and more resources for Shi'is, thus integrating them in a system that thus far had disenfranchised them economically and politically, and wrote them off from its national narratives. He may have also speculated that inscribing Shi'is within the sectarian system, by acquiring some rights from within, also helped to enlarge his own Shi'i base of support.

For Shams al-Din, this accommodation to the sectarian division of power lasted only until the mid-1980s, a few years after the disappearance of Musa al-Sadr in 1978. Due to the exacerbation of the civil war and the threats the Israeli invasion posed to the integrity of Lebanon’s territories, Shams al-Din became much more critical of the sectarian system, calling for structural modifications and its replacement with a political program he called the ‘majority-based consultative democracy’ (nizam

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al-dimuqratiyyah al-'adadiyyah al-qa’imah ‘ala mabda’ al-shura) which he outlined in his 1984 book, al-Malamih al-‘Ammah al-Yawm li-Lubnan f i al-Nizam al-Ta’ifi al-Hali wa Nizam al-Dimuqratiyyah al-Adadiyyah al-Qa’imah ‘ala Mabda’ al-ShuraN In this programme, he channelled the grievances of Shi'is, rejecting de jure Lebanese sectarian arrangements on the grounds that they established and normalized systematic structures of inequality among citizens, excluding every possibility of fair representation.

As he elucidated in this book, the problem was rooted in the implications of the Libanist narratives portraying Lebanon as the national haven for the Maronites in Greater Syria,84 and defining Mount Lebanon, the main homeland of the Maronites, as the heartland of the new republic, with the rest of the regions being mere annexations to the core.8’ He argued that these narratives - justifying the prevalent centrality of the Maronites to the emergent nation - contradicted the constitutional principle that explicitly states equality in citizenship rights and privileges among Lebanese citizens.86 By placing the Maronite sect, to the exclusion of all other sects, at the core of what forms the Lebanese national identity, these narratives made it impossible for all Lebanese citizens to enjoy equal status and privilege of citizenship.87 Maronites, moreover, enjoyed a discursive hegemony in which their historical narrative became the official one, stifling other narratives. They also enjoyed political hegemony over the rest of the religious sects, reserving to themselves the key positions in the state apparatus at the expense of the members of other sects. The same goes for the discursive centrality by Mount Lebanon as the core of the national identity of the new republic because the rest of the territories served merely to ensure the economic viability of the new state. Thus, Shams al-Din maintained, it is impossible to guarantee equality in a sectarian system, because this system, by definition, establishes inequality in the hierarchical sectarian distribution of powers.88

To rectify the structural inequalities embedded in sectarianism, his thesis o f‘majority-based consultative democracy’ proposed the following reforms:89 any citizen, regardless of his sectarian affiliation, would be entitled to run for the presidency of the republic, as well other main power offices.90 Moreover, the president of the republic would be elected directly by people through national elections. The prime minister would be elected directly by the parliament and appoints members of his


cabinet himself. It is clear that these demands underlined a need for the empowerment of Muslims who were marginalized under the incumbent system of sectarianism dominated by Maronites, by redistributing power in favour of Muslims. For example, the demand for an expansion of the authority of the cabinet and its head, the prime minister, would lead to changes that would empower Muslims further and redistribute the privileges of Christians in the state apparatus.

Perhaps the most relevant factor behind Shams al-Din’s adamant denunciation of sectarianism, specifically at that time, was the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the response of the Maronite leadership. It was under these critical circumstances - an existential fear for the survival of Lebanon as a unified state and for the integrity of its territories, and concern for the security of the inhabitants of South Lebanon, mostly Shicis, from expulsion and large-scale destruction - that Shams al-Din formulated his refutation of the sectarian system of Lebanon on the basis that it privileged a Maronite leadership that could not be trusted on sovereign and national issues. He was alarmed to see the rapprochement of certain right-wing Maronite leaders with Israeli occupying forces, mostly Bashir Gemayel, elected as the president of Lebanon in 1982 and assassinated in the same year, who collaborated with the Israeli occupying forces. Moreover, the Maronite Monastic Organization (al-rahbaniyyah al-maruniyyah), a faction of the right-wing coalition of forces, known as ‘the Lebanese Front,’ had adopted a most radical position in demanding in 1983 a ‘Christian State’ in Lebanon, which involved a return to the boundaries of Mount Lebanon under the arrangement of the mutasarrifiyyah in 1862, cutting out the cities of Sidon, Tripoli, and the Biqa‘ province. In addition to this territorial rearrangement, the Maronite organization insisted on normalization with Israel through a peace treaty that would ally the two countries, and insisting on rejecting an Arab identity for Lebanon.91 These proposals for the division of Lebanon posed immense threats to Shicis living in South Lebanon, who would have faced the possibility of losing their land if ever the Israeli invasion of Lebanon succeeded in evicting them from their territory and annexing it to Israel permanently.

Collaboration with Israeli officials, in Shams al-Din’s view, amounted to treason to Lebanon, to the principle of coexistence among sects, and to the victims of this invasion. In contrast to the divisive territorial propositions of the ‘Lebanese Front,’ he offered an alternative: his thesis

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of ‘majority-based consultative democracy.’ He argued that loyalty to Lebanon could only lie in popular resistance against Israeli occupation, with his political program as the only real means of such resistance.92 He argued that his thesis aimed at providing a national leadership able to repel Israeli aggressions and draft a national policy that protected the interests of Lebanon, especially South Lebanon, from annexation by Israel. This thesis came in the context of a peace treaty with Israel ratified on 17 May 1983, but abrogated in March 1984, and which would have greatly undermined Lebanon’s sovereignty,93 and absolved Israel of its war crimes on Lebanese soil.

His political thesis, majority-based consultative democracy, was tied to his call for ‘popular civil resistance’ (al-muqawamah al-sha biyyah al-madaniyyah), against Israeli occupation, which he made a year earlier in the summer of 1983. The cornerstone of which was to use all popular civil and military methods to abort Israeli occupation schemes.94 For Shams al-Din, resistance was a form of defensive jihad that used all means to defend the land, including civil means in the form of steadfastness and refusal to leave the land.95 He declared that resisting Israeli projects in Lebanon was a moral and religious duty.96 He warned against the dangers that this invasion entailed for the sovereignty of Lebanon and the South in particular, pointing out that Israel’s strategy was to cut it off and annex it to Israel, evicting the population, in anticipation of the division of Lebanon into minuscule sectarian cantons.97 He urged the people of the South to refuse to evacuate the area, encouraging its inhabitants to endure living under the most severe conditions.98

Shams al-Din’s rejection of the sectarian system, in the highlighted historical phase of the mid-1980s, did not, however, outlast the crises of the 1980s. In 1989, the Lebanese war was brought to an end under the auspices of the Ta’if Agreement. Shams al-Din was one of the supporters of this agreement, believing that it offered the best solution available to the conflict. Endorsement of the Ta’if Agreement entailed important changes in his approach to sectarianism, including the exploration of ways to accommodate the existing sectarian system. So in this way, Shams al-Din was revisiting the spirit of the proposals he had formulated with Musa al-Sadr. The agreement’s reforms echoed many treaties formulated during the war that Shams al-Din had approved and helped create, such as the two documents of the ISSC, and Franjiyah’s Constitutional Document.

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The Ta’if AgreementThe Ta’if Agreement was concluded under two important contradictory- forces: uniform international support and mistrust by the local political elite." While it failed to satisfy the full demands of any of the warring factions in Lebanon, it garnered the minimal consent of the major Lebanese factions, as well as the unprecedented unanimous support of the international community and the League of the Arab States.

Scholars who have studied the Ta’if Agreement concur that it did not introduce a blueprint for the de-sectarianization of politics in Lebanon, but it did recommend de-sectarianization as a long-term goal. In practice, however, the Ta’if Agreement has further institutionalized and reinforced sectarianism, albeit with modifications that ensured a more equitable sectarian representation.100 It largely reinstated the spirit of the National Pact, mostly in its focus on sectarian compromise and inter-communal co-existence and cooperation.101 The agreement did, nevertheless, introduce constitutional change. While it maintained sectarian politics, it reshuffled the power balance among Christians and Muslims in such a way as to introduce a component of communal balance,102 creating a more equitable distribution of power within the sectarian power-sharing formula.103 It changed the proportion of Christian and Muslim representation in the Chamber of Deputies from the 6:5 ratio that favoured Christians by one seat to a fifty-fifty representation of Christians and Muslims.104 Another important constitutional reform was the rearrangement of power distribution among the three key governmental positions, or the tripartite major power offices (al-ri'asat al-thalath). The powers of the presidency of the republic were reduced, while the powers of the prime minister and the speaker of the parliament were augmented. The Ta’if Agreement granted the speaker of the parliament a four-year instead of a one-year term.105 In general, many of the powers of the President were transferred to the prime minister’s cabinet.106

The implementation of the Ta’if Agreement suffered some important flaws. Constitutional institutions were not consolidated, but the country witnessed more sectarian alignments and rivalries, reaching unprecedented levels.107 For example, applicants for public positions still needed to disclose their sectarian affiliation, as well as obtain the approval of the leader(s) of the sect in question. Though these practices were already well-established before the breakout of the war, they were

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applied to an even greater degree after the Ta’if Agreement, striking deep roots. Since public appointments were regulated by a rigid pre-determined quota distribution, mostly supervised by the political representatives of each sect, the system raised institutional obstacles against merit-based employment as well.108

Moreover, Ta’if institutionalized a government by troika - the Maronite president of the republic, the Sunni cabinet premier, and the Shi'i house speaker - through the redefinition of constitutional powers among the three most prominent governmental positions, whose output has since been characterized by more inefficiency and corruption than the previous decades.109 Each head of the troika acted as the representative of his own confessional group,110 contesting the other in a bid for more power and more resources. In the post-Ta’if period, policy-making of the political elite members was influenced by the tutelage of the Syrian regime.111 Moreover, in the post-Ta’if Agreement period, the debates of the pan-Arabist and Libanist discourses over Lebanese political identity declined and the dominant political agenda shifted towards sectarian divisions of power in the government structure.112

Therefore, in view of extremist theses for the political system of Lebanon, whether the establishment of an Islamic state or the creation of a Christian federal state, Shams al-Din realized that the protection of South Lebanon, the integrity of Lebanon as a nation-state, and the termination of the devastating violence of the civil war could only be achieved through accepting the sectarian status quo, embracing the Ta’if reforms - despite serious malpractices in their implementation - cooperation with state officials, and forging inter-sectarian alliances.

Shams al-Din on the Ta’i f agreement, institutional reform, and sectarian power-sharing

Several reasons may have stood behind this development in Shams al-Din’s accommodation with sectarianism. Three important shifts in Lebanese politics and one important shift among the Shi'i population have occurred in the period between the 1980s and 1990s. First, the alarming economic crisis and collapse of civil cohesion following inter-sectarian and intra-sectarian violence and massacres must have influenced Shams al-Din to accept the TaTf Agreement. Second, the

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threats of partition, specifically the annexation of South Lebanon to Israel, although still present in the 1990s, were no longer as pronounced as they were in the mid-1980s. For the first time since the foundation of Lebanon, Lebanese officials including the two presidents of the republic, Elias Hrawi (1989-1998) and Emile Lahoud (1998-2007), and the prime minister Rafic Hariri (1992-1998 and 2000-2004), lent their full support to the resistance movement against the Israeli occupation, giving it the official legitimacy and backing that had been lacking prior to the Ta’if Agreement. The support may have been solely verbal, without any tangible military reinforcements, and produced under the hegemony of the Syrian regime over Lebanese politics and its imposition of an agenda that matched its own regional interests, but for the first time, support for the military resistance against Israeli occupation became integrated in the official discourse of the state.113

Third, in the years between 1988 and 1990, Shi'i-populated areas in South Lebanon and Beirut were devastated by violent clashes between the AMAL Movement and its new rival, Hezbollah. The conflict between the two Shi'i armed parties wreaked havoc on the Shi'i population in what came to be known as ‘the wars of the enemy brothers.’ All these factors contributed to make Shams al-Din perceive that rapprochement with the Lebanese political system provided guarantees for the protection of South Lebanon and its Shi'i population.

Moreover, the reduced political powers of Christians under the Ta’if arrangements in post-war Lebanon114 made Shams al-Din refrain from criticizing right-wing Christian leaders. He became convinced, in the light of the power shifts and war losses, that Lebanon could only achieve legitimate, balanced, and functional governance with the full and equal participation of both Christians and Muslims.115 He even went to the extent of urging Muslims to extend guarantees to Christians regarding coexistence, cooperation and mutual reliance and dependence.116

However, most importantly, Shams al-Din was driven to accept the Ta’if Agreement under the impact of the crucial transformations that had shaped the Shi'i population, especially Shi'i youth. The Shi'i scene in Lebanon was very enthusiastic about the victory of Imam Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. Moreover, many radical Shi'i groups came to the forefront after the Israeli invasion of 1982 and its chaotic aftermath, pushing the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council to the periphery. The most notable and powerful of these groups was the pro-Khomeini

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Hezbollah,117 which, under full Iranian sponsorship, soon took roots in Lebanon during the mid-1980s.118 Hezbollah became a visible player in Lebanon in the early 1990s and continued to grow considerably. The growth of Hezbollah’s popularity signalled the rise of an enormous rival to the Shici AMAL Movement119 and the Shici Council. The rivalry between the Shi'i Council and Hezbollah underlined ideological and strategic differences over the representation of Lebanese Shi'is. By the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Shams al-Din was experiencing ideological and political disagreements with the leadership of Hezbollah; differences in their respective perceptions of solutions and settlements for Lebanon were rising to the surface.120 While Hezbollah from 1982 to 1992 rejected the Lebanese system in its Open Letter in 1985 on the grounds that it is a corrupt Westernized co-opted political system that is irreparable and therefore should be replaced by an Islamic revolution,121 Shams al-Din was preoccupied with developing solutions and reform proposals to the political crisis within the institutional framework of the Lebanese political system, as was expressed in the documents issued by the Islamic Shici Supreme Council and his own thesis - ‘majority-based consultative democracy.’

Shams al-Din’s alienation from Hezbollah indicated his refusal to subordinate his political program to the authority of the Iranian leadership. He saw the dangers that the pro-Iran Shi‘i Islamist parties had for Shi'is by isolating them from their societies and causing other Muslims to perceive them suspiciously both in Lebanon and other Arab countries.122 Distancing himself from Hezbollah also resonated deeply with his doctrinal positions on the thesis of wilayat al-faqih, in which he refuted the absolute authority that al-wali al-faqih (the guardian jurist) arrogated to himself in the name of the Shi'i imamate doctrine.123 In fact, Shams al-Din had been the disciple of the Iraqi marja‘ Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim who never showed any sympathies for Imam Ruhollah Khomeini’s political ideas. Al-Hakim’s disciples in Najaf note that he had refrained from supporting Khomeini in the wake of the revolution.124 Shams al-Din was significantly concerned about the ramification of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran on Shi'is globally, especially Arab Shi'is, because it tied them to the strategic interests of Iran and subjugated them to the political authority of the guardian-jurist who is simultaneously the head of a foreign state. He therefore never expressed his fully-fledged support.12’ He only professed for Khomeini

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principled appreciation, as a visionary Islamic scholar who founded an Islamic political order, notwithstanding the Shici juristic disagreements over his thesis of wilayat al-faqih.126

Moreover, Shams al-Din had to confront a massive threat to his religious leadership posited by the expansion of Hezbollah that was closely tied ideologically and financially to the new Islamic leadership of Iran. The more Hezbollah recruited youthful supporters, the more Shams al-Din’s role as religious authority was threatened and undermined. Indeed, the hawzah Ma'had al-Shahid al-Awwal, founded and supervised by Shams al-Din, had to close down in 1996 because of shrinking enrolment, while the Hezbollah hawzahs were attracting the majority of seminary students.127 The expansion of Hezbollah also threatened Shams al-Din’s position at the head of the Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, as the legitimacy of representing Shi'is was tilting in favour of Hezbollah, at least on the popular level, if not the official one.

Therefore, when Shams al-Din leaned towards forging inter-sectarian alliances and adopted a fully national Lebanese discourse that stressed the legitimacy of the political institutions of the country, and favoured cooperation with the Sunni Muslim and Christian political elites and government officials such as prime minister Rafik Hariri, he had two goals: these alliances consolidated his commitment for inter-communal co-existence, as articulated by Musa al-Sadr, and protected his position and ISSC from the opposition of Hezbollah. The support that the Shi'i Council received from the state was crucial to protect this institution and grant it a public voice. It also allowed Shams al-Din to balance off the rise of Hezbollah.

An additional benefit incurred by Shams al-Din out of the cooperation with government officials was the guarantee that the state would preserve religious courts and obstruct the creation of civil courts for personal status matters, a concern that was crucial from Shams al-Din as a jurist who feared that secular laws adjudicated on family and personal status matters at the expense of Islamic law.128 The creation of civil courts was one of the most important demands voiced by leftist thinkers and activists in the 1970s, many of whom were Shi'is.

Finally, despite his endorsement of the Ta’if provisions, Shams al-Din did not embrace the agreement wholeheartedly, qualifying it as ‘the agreement of necessity and need.’129 He still entertained reservations about the sectarian power-sharing arrangements of Ta’if. His acceptance of the

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agreement was therefore conditioned by the necessity to introduce in the future reforms that mitigated the intensity of sectarian divisions.130 At this stage, he sustained two simultaneous discourses: he refused to forfeit his theoretical rebuttal of sectarianism, but working from a realpolitik position, he also claimed that it is commendable to suspend public discussion of sectarianism, and to postpone the project of its abolition to an unspecified date in the future. This position developed in the context of the post-Ta’if period which witnessed further consolidation of sectarianism, and in which, talk of de-sectarianization, among Lebanese politicians in power, was a weapon with which sects threatened each other with the cancelation of their sectarian allocations and privileges due to demographic considerations, or the realities of political power.

So in his stance on sectarianism, Shams al-Din suggested, while acceding to the continuity of the thesis of sectarianism, for lack of finding a better one, that it be rationalized and overseen, and that criteria be introduced to ensure more just and equitable representation through mechanisms of constraint, because sectarianism posited several threats to the continued existence of the Lebanese polity.'31 Coexistence with sectarianism conferred some benefits. It granted the Shi'i Council official legitimacy and the support of the state institutions, thus carving a political status for Shams al-Din and the Shi'i institution that he presided over. Moreover, his alignment with the state provided him with leverage with which to resist the leftist campaign to institute secular courts for personal matters and family law. Therefore, Shams al-Din made a pragmatic choice to accept the status quo, for which he was able to construct a political and doctrinal justification. The political justification was couched in terms of the collective interest of Shi'i citizens in the Arab world, which recommended that they cooperate with the state rather than to collectively and openly challenge it.

Conclusion

In the wake of the peace settlement of the Ta’if Agreement, particularly in the early 1990s, important developments characterized Shams al-Din’s understanding of the question of sectarianism. His earlier severe criticism of the sectarian system, formulated in his program of ‘majority-based consultative democracy’ that called for the reduction of the privileges of

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the Maronites was mitigated significantly. Revisiting these earlier stances, he publicly endorsed the Ta’if Agreement, stating that the sectarian power-sharing arrangements instituted by the latter, but whose roots date back to the National Pact, are conclusive and definite and form a consensual constitutional basis for Lebanon. His endorsement of the Ta’if Agreement was essentially a defacto approval of the sectarian system, since many of its principal provisions explicitly reinforced sectarian practices.

The clauses of the Ta’if Agreement echoed the amendments proposed in the document of the Shi'i Council in 1977, the proposals of the Constitutional Document (al-Wathiqah al-Dusturiyyah) of president Sulayman Franjiyah, the provisions of the Ten Islamic Principles issued in 1983, and even a few proposals contained in Shams al-Din’s program of ‘majority-based consultative democracy.’ All these documents and treaties were attempts at forging a unified nation out of Lebanese Muslims and Christians, while exacting concessions from both groups. But unlike all these documents, the Ta’if Agreement, perhaps because of the unanimous international and Arab support it received, was the first and only agreement that was accepted, albeit reluctantly, by mainstream Christian leaders, represented by the majority of the Christian deputies in the parliament. Hence, it was the first time that the gist of the reforms proposed by Shams al-Din and Musa al-Sadr for the settlement of the Lebanese conflict found a minimum consensus among Muslim and Christian authorities and were enshrined as part of the Lebanese constitution.

I argued that the shift towards the approval of the Ta’if Agreement occurred for the following reasons: Shams al-Din witnessed ideological alienation from Hezbollah, which also contested him over the representation of Lebanese Shi'is and over the leadership and role of the Islamic Shici Supreme Council. Moreover, he was critical of Khomeini’s wilayat al-faqih and was ideologically alienated from the Iranian leadership during the 1990s. In addition to this, the devastation and futility of the Lebanese war as well as the extremist theses that it produced to divide Lebanese territories were all factors that led Shams al-Din to accept the Ta’if Agreement. In this vein, he recommended accepting the sectarian status quo as it was, while maintaining the theoretical belief that sectarianism still posited threats to the success of the Lebanese polity and its national unity.

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Notes' Following recurrent outbursts of violence between Maronites and the Druze in

Mount Lebanon, the Ottoman authorities, along with the intervention of European powers, instituted an administrative arrangement called the mutasarrifiyyah (Reglement Organique). The governor of Mount Lebanon under the mutasarrifiyyah, appointed by the Ottomans but approved by the Europeans, had to be Christian. The distribution of seats in the council of the mutasarrifiyyah also favoured Christians by allocating the largest number to representatives of Christian sects: four seats were granted to the Maronites, two to the Catholics, and two to the Greek Orthodox. On the Muslim side, one seat went to the Sunnis, one to the Shi'is, and three to the Druze. See Georges Corm, Le Liban Contemporain: Histoire et Societe (Paris, La Decouverte, 2003), 82.

2 Kamal Salibi, H House of Many Mansions (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), 69.3 Ibid., 69.4 Ibid., 92.5 Ussama Makdisi, The Culture o f Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in

Nineteenth Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 63-82.

6 Georges Corm, Contribution d L’Etude des Societes Multiconfessionnelles: Effets Socio- Juridiques et Politiques du Pluralisme Religieux (Paris: Librairie Generale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1971), 277.

7 Edmond Rabbath, La Formation Historique du Liban Politique et Constitutionnel (Beyrouth: Librarie Orientale, 1973), 116.

8 Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi'ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Harvard University Press, 2010), 159-161.

9 Georges Corm, Le Liban Contemporain: Histoire et Societe (Paris: La Decouverte, 2003), 91.

10 Ibid.11 The foundation of Grand Liban involved the annexation of surrounding territories

to the core of Mount Lebanon, the mutasarifiyyah, to make the new state economically viable. These territories were populated by a large Muslim population whose inclusion in Grand Liban reduced the proportion of the Christian population. To make up for the reduction in the number of the Christian population, the National Pact gave a 6 to 5 ratio of parliamentary representation in favour of Christians as guarantees of political representation.

12 Kamal Salibi, A House o f Many Mansions, 186.13 Georges Corm, Contribution a L’Etude des Societes Multiconfessionnelles, 277.14 Georges Corm, Le Liban Contemporain: Histoire et Societe, 90.15 Nassif Nassar, Nahw Mujtama Jadid: Muqaddimat Asasiyyah f i Naqd al-Mujtama'

al-Ta’ifi (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘a, 1970), 117.16 Ibid.17 Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions, 32.18 Ibid.

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19 Ibid., 185.20 Ibid., 28.21 Ibid., 163.22 Shi'i leftist intellectuals have criticized the assumptions put forward by the

Libanist right-wing narratives. The radical thinker Mahdi 'Amil challenged the Chihian representation of Lebanese pluralism and the sectarian logic it justifies. According to ‘Amil, the state is not a neutral entity which can arbitrate among the sects during incidents of conflict, as Chiha otherwise argued. The state itself is invested in sectarianism. It is a hegemonic apparatus for the bourgeoisie and can only confirm the hegemony of one sect over others. See Michelle Hartmann and Alessandro Olsaretti, ‘The First Boat and the First Oar: Inventions of Lebanon in the Writing of Michel Chiha’, in Radical History Review LXXXVI (2003), 36-65.

23 Kais Firro, ‘Lebanese Nationalism versus Arabism: From Bulus Nujaym to Michel Chiha’, in Middle Eastern Studies XL, no. 5 (2004), 1-27, especially 18-23.

24 Kamal Salibi,y4 House of Many Mansions, 206.25 For the socio-political conditions of Lebanese Shi‘is at the formation of the

Lebanese republic, see Majed Halawi, A Lebanon Defied: Musa al-Sadr and the Shi'a Community (Boulder, Colorado & Oxford: Westview Press, 1992); Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa al-Sadr and the Shi'a of Lebanon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987); Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shi'a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin: Texas University Press, 1987); Sabrina Mervin, Un Reformisme Chiite (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 332-412.

26 Tamara Chalabi, The Shi'is of Jabal 'Amil and the New Lebanon: Community and Nation-State, 1918-1943 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 104.

27 Waddah Shararah, al-Ummah al-Qaliqah: al-'Amiliyyun wa al-'Asabiyyahal-'Amiliyyah 'ala ‘Atabat al-Dawlah al-Lubnaniyyah (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1996), 255.

28 Ibid., 172-173; Tamara Chalabi, The Shi'is of Jabal ‘Amil, 108-109.29 Waddah Shararah, al-Ummah al-Qaliqah, 251.30 Tamara Chalabi, The Shi'is of Jabal 'Amil, 10431 Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon (New

Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006), 74.32 Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shiite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the

Making of National Identities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).33 Ibid., 20.34 Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi'ism, and the Making of Modern

Lebanon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3.33 Ibid., 5.36 Anonymous, al-Imam al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din: al-'Alim

al-Mujahid wa al-Faqih al-Mujaddid: Sirah wa Mu'alafat (Beirut: Karaki Press, 2004), 7-8.37 Ibid., 9.38 He became later the head of SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution

in Iraq). See Juan Cole, The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq (Leiden: Amsterdam

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University Press, 2006) [ISIM paper], 8.39 Anonymous, al-Imam al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 10.4° Ibid., 13.41 Farah Musa, al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din hayn Wahj al-Islam wa Jalid

al-Madhahib (Beirut: Dar al-Hadi, 1993), 40.42 Ibid., 42.43 Falah Jabar, The Shi'iteMovement in Iraq (London: Saqi Books, 2003), 132.44 Ibid., 133.45 Farah Musa, al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 44.46 Ibid., 46.47 Jamal Sanlcari, Fadlallah: The Making of a Radical Shi'ite Leader (London: Saqi,

2005), 143.48 Farah Musa, al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 47.49 Ibid.70 Ibid., jo.51 Ibid., 49.52 Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali al-Amin confided in an interview that Musa al-Sadr had

this time insisted on Shams al-Din’s membership, insinuating that he would not appreciate refusal on the part of Shams al-Din to join the Council board and to accept his appointment as the latter’s vice-president. See Farah Musa, al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 49.

53 Ibid., 49.54 Ibid., 49.55 In fact, Shams al-Din reluctantly accepted his election to this position, acquiescing

only in order to avoid antagonizing Musa al-Sadr. He assumed the responsibility that al-Sadr was delegating to him in consideration of the critical circumstances that made al-Sadr entrust him with the supervision of this Council. See Farah Musa, al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 51.

56 Farah Musa, al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 49.57 Anonymous, al-Imam al-Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 14.58 From 1978 to 1994, Shams al-Din fulfilled the duties of the president of the

Council while retaining the title of vice-president. The delay in his election as the president of the Council was caused mainly by the estrangement that existed between him and Nabih Berri: the chairman of the AMAL movement after the disappearance of Musa al-Sadr, the speaker of the parliament since 1992, and a close ally of the Syrian regime, all prerogatives that allowed him to wield major powers in post-war Lebanon.

59 Chibli Mallat, Shi'i Thought from the South o f Lebanon (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1988), 40.

60 Sabrina Mervin, Un Reformisme Shi'ite, 362-380.61 Chibli Mallat, Shi'i Thought from the South o f Lebanon, 26.62 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, Nizam al-Hukm wa al-Idarahfi a-Islam, 7th ed.

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(Beirut: al-Mu’assasah al-Dawliyyah lil-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 2000), 410.63 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, al-Malamih al-'Ammah al-Yawm li-Lubnan f i

al-Nizam al-Ta'ifi al-Hali wa Nizam al-Dimuqratiyyah al-'Adadiyyah al-Qa'imah 'ala Mabda’ al-Shura (Beirut: Special edition published by the personal bureau ofMuhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, 1985).

64 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, Lubnan al-Kayan wa al-Dawr (Beirut: The Supreme Islamic Shi'i Council Publications), 114-115.

65 Ibid., 96.66 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, Fi al-Ijtima' al-Siyasi al-Islami (Beirut:

al-Mu’assasah al-Dawliyyah lil-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 1999), 14, 77-86.67 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, ‘Hiwar Hawl al-Shura wa al-Dimuqratiyyah’, in

Minbar al-Hiwar XXXIV (1994), 13-15.68 President Sulayman Franjiyah’s Constitutional Document, issued on 14 February

1976, was a blueprint for an array of reforms that aimed at assuaging the social divisions and sectarian tensions that the system had engendered and which had intensified since the outbreak of the war. It confirmed the distribution of the three main power offices (those of the republic, the cabinet of ministers and the parliament) among the Maronites, Sunnis, and Shi‘is respectively, calling for the preservation of this ‘custom’ of power distribution. It proposed a fifty-fifty representation of Christians and Muslims in the parliament, the expansion of the authority of the prime minister vis-a-vis the presidency of the republic, and the abolition of sectarian-based public employment with the exception of the chief positions. The document also aimed at reforming the weaknesses of the National Pact by replacing the two ‘negations’ implicit in its foundation: ‘renunciation of European tutelage and relinquishment of Arab unity,’ by two affirmations: affirmation of the Arab identity of Lebanon and affirmation of full and national allegiance to the Lebanese state. This document aimed at reforming the sectarian system, without abolishing it, by confining sectarian power distribution only to the highest echelons of government, while mitigating the severe socioeconomic cleavages. See Imad Younes, Silsilat al-Watha’iq al-Asasiyyah lil-Azmah al-Lubnaniyyab 1973... IV (Beirut: copyright reserved to the author, 1985), 233-234.

69 ‘Abd al-Ra’uf Sinnu, Harb Lubnan 1990-1973: Tafakkuk al-Dawla wa Tasaddu' al-Mujtama I (Beirut: Arab Scientific Publishers, 2008), 600.

70 Imad Younes, Silsilat al-Watha'iq al-Asasiyyah li al-Azma al-Lubnaniyyah, 227.71 Ibid., 229.72 Ibid., 228.73 Ibid, 227.74 Ibid., 228.75 Shams al-Din, Lubnan al-Kayan wa al-Dawr., 27.76 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, Lubnan al-Kayan wa al-Mana (Beirut: Imam

Shamsuddin Foundation for Dialogue, 2005), 39-41. See also Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, Lubnan al-Kayan wa al-Dawr, 27-30; Hani Fahs, al-lmaman al-Sadr wa Shams al-Din: Dhakirah li-Ghaddina (Beirut: Dar al-Mada, 2008), 331-340.

77 Shams al-Din, Lubnan: al-Kayan wa al-Dawr, 28.

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78 Ibid., 27.79 Weiss, In the Shadow o f Sectarianism, j.80 Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shiite Lebanon, 2681 Ibid., 27.82 Ibid., 28.83 Shams al-Din, al-Malamih al-'Ammah.84 Ibid., 5.83 Ibid., 6.86 Ibid., 8.87 Ibid., 16.88 Ibid., 41.89 Ibid., 30.90 Ibid., 47.91 ‘Abd al-Ra’uf Sinnu, Harb Lubnan 1^0-i^yy, 593.92 Shams al-Din, al-Malamih al ‘Ammah, 45.93 Augustus Norton, Amal and the Shi'a, 96.94 Saoud al-Mawla, ‘al-‘Unf al-Musallah wa al-Harakat al-Islamiyyah al-Mu‘asirah’,

in Shahadat wa Qira’at f i Jihad al-Imam al-Rahil wa Ijtihadihi (Beirut: Imam M. M. Shamsuddin Foundtion for Dialogue, 2004), 12.

95 Rola El-Husseini, ‘Resistance, Jihad, and Martyrdom in Contemporary Shi‘a Discourse1, in Middle East Journal LXII, no.3 (summer 2008), 399-414, 403.

96 Ibid., 405.97 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, Mawaqif wa Ta'ammulat f i Qadaya al-Fikr wa

al-Siyasah (Beirut: Dar al-Zahra, 1985), 100.98 Ibid., 106.99 Sa'id Salman, Lubnan wa al-Ta’i f (Beirut: Azal-Wikalat al-Matbu‘at al-Lubna-

niyyah), 3.100 Michael Hudson, ‘Lebanon After Ta’if: Another Reform Opportunity Lost?’, in

Arab Studies Quarterly XXI (1999), 33.101 Augustus Richard Norton, ‘Lebanon After Ta’if: Is the Civil War Over?’, in Middle

EastJournalXLSf, no. 5 (1991), 461.102 Michael Hudson, ‘Lebanon After Ta’if: Another Reform Opportunity Lost?’, 35.103 Hassan Krayem, ‘The Lebanese Civil War and the Ta’if Agreement’, in Conflict

Resolution in the Arab World: Selected Essays, ed. Paul Salem (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1997). <http://ddc.aub.edu.lb/projects/pspa/conflict-resolution.html>. Accessed April 2014.

104 Rola El-Husseini, Pax Syriana: Elie Politics in Postwar Lebanon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 14.

105 Augustus Norton, ‘Lebanon After Ta’if: Is Civil War Over?’, 462.106 Ibid., 463.

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107 Nawwaf Salam, Ab'ad min al-Ta'ifi Maqalat f i al-Dawlah wa al-Islah (Beirut: Dar al-Jadid, 1998), 20.

108 Ibid., 47.109 Michael Hudson, ‘Lebanon After Ta’if: Another Reform Opportunity Lost?’, 31.110 Marie-Joelle Zahar, ‘Power-Sharing in Lebanon: Foreign Protectors, Domestic Peace,

and Democratic Failure’, in Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy After Civil Wars, ed. Philip Roeder (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005), 233.

111 Rola El-Husseini, Pax Syriana, 14-15.112 Ibid., 204-205.113 Karim Muruwwah, Nahw Jumhuriyyah Thalithah (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2001),

chapter 1.114 Michael Hudson, ‘Lebanon After Ta’if: Another Reform Opportunity Lost?’, 30-33.115 Shams al-Din, Lubnan: al-Kayan wa al-Dawr, 17.116 Ibid., 73.117 Augustus Norton, Amal and the Shi'a, 100.118 Houchang Chehabi, Tran and Lebanon in the Revolutionary Decade’, in Distant

Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Hundred Years, ed. Houchang Chehabi (Oxford: The Centre for Lebanese Studies and I. B. Tauris, 2006), 201-230.

119 Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 72.

120 Hassan Mneimneh, ‘The Arab Reception of Vilayat-e-Faqih’, in Current Trends in Islamist Ideologies VIII (2008), 39-51.

121 Talal Atrissi, ‘Tajrubat Musharakat Hizb Allah al-Siyasiyyah fi Lubnan bayn Wilayat al-Faqih wa Wilayat al-Ummah ‘ala Nafsiha’ in al-Islamiyyun wa Nizam al-Hukm al-Dimuqrati: Itijahat wa Tajarub (Beirut-Doha: Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2013), 575; Augustus Norton, Hezbollah, 40.

122 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, al-Wasayah (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2002), 29.123 Shams al-Din’s legal critique of Khomeini’s Wilayat al-Faqih thesis was mostly

expressed in his book Nizam al-Hukm wa al-Idarah f i al-Islam (Beirut: al-Mu’assasah al-Dawliyyah li al-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 2000), 319-510. Also see Talal Atrissi, ‘Tajrubat Musharakat Hizb Allah al-Siyasiyyah fi Lubnan bayn Wilayat al-Faqih wa Wilayat al-Ummah ‘ala Nafsiha’, 563.

124 ‘Adil Ra’uf, al-Amal al-Islami f i al-'Iraq: Bayn al-Marja'iyyah wa al-Hizbiyyah (Damascus & Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Traqi li al-ITam wa al-Dirasat, 2005), 40.

I2; In his book al-Ummah, wa al-Dawlah, wa al-Harakah al-lslamiyyah (Beirut: Islamic Shi'i Supreme Council, 1994), Shams al-Din shows support to the Islamic revolution as a reflection of Muslim nations exercising sovereign agency and opting for a local form of government as opposed to imposed western forms of government. However, elsewhere in his writings, he states that the government of wilayat alfaqih in Iran should exercise its sovereignty only over the citizens of Iran and not over all Shi'is around the world. See Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, Nizam al-Hukm wa al-Idarah f i al-Islam (Beirut: al-Mu’assasah al-Dawliyyah li al-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 2000).

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126 Shams al-Din, al-Ummah, wa al-Dawlah, wa al-Harakah al-Islamiyyah, 11-15.127 Rula Jurdi Abisaab, ‘The Cleric as Organic Intellectual: Revolutionary Shi’ism in

the Lebanese Hawzas, in Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years, ed. Houchang Chehabi (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies and I. B. Tauris, 2006), 243.

128 Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, al-'Almaniyyah: Tahlil wa Naqdlial-'Almaniyyah Muhtawan wa Tarikhan (Beirut: Dar al-Tawjih al-Islami, 1980), 192.

129 Shams al-Din, Lubnan al-Kayan wa al-Dawr, 32130 Ibid., 30-31.131 Shams al-Din, Lubnan al-Kayan wa al-Ma'na, 97.

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