The Scholar’s Turban versus the Warrior’s: The Shifting Basis of Religious and Political Authority in Lebanese Shiʿism

This article examines the conflation of religious and political authority among Lebanese Shiʿa. Over the last few decades, the Lebanese Shiʿi community witnessed a number of major shifts that gave birth to a new reality. Migration to West Africa created new elites of new wealth that supported new political and religious leaders. Families traditionally interested in religious education that produced generations of ulema yielded their place to others. Najaf, the traditional seat of Shiʿi learning for centuries, and also the birthplace of influential reformist movements, suffered terribly under the oppression of the Baʿath Party in Iraq in the 1970s and 80s, which coincided with the Iranian revolution, allowing for the rise of Qum and the influence of the Islamic Republic through it. In the meantime, after the civil war in Lebanon had started in 1975, armed Shiʿi political organization emerged, first AMAL then Hezbollah. The legacy of the latter’s resistance to Israel redefined politics among the Lebanese Shiʿa. Central figures such as Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, and Hasan Nasrallah all emerged through these shifts, changes, and sources of influence; they were shaped by them and interacted with them. The final outcome is a context in which the religious and political are hard to separate, in which traditional scholarly qualifications do not have the weight they once carried, and where media and narratives of war and struggle are definitive.