^{Published in The New Republic, March 23, 1992, pp. 16-19.}

Israel did not extend its long arm to claim the life of Sayyid Abbas al-Musawi, the beturbanned Shiite cleric who led the “Party of God” in Lebanon. A brush of the hand sufficed. The Israeli operation depended upon Musawi’s overconfidence. February 16 is always a day of rallies for Hezbollah: on that date in 1984 another Shiite cleric was killed in the town of Jibshit, the movement’s southernmost outpost in Lebanon. Jibshit remained dangerous ground, where Israel’s helicopter-borne commandos abducted still another cleric in 1989. Would Musawi now defy precedent to demonstrate Hezbollah’s presence in the deep south of Lebanon? Would he address a rally in Jibshit itself, right under Israeli binoculars?

He did not disappoint the townspeople of Jibshit—or the Israelis. Unlike Hezbollah’s other clerics, whose limos rarely venture beyond Beirut and Baalbek, Musawi had often skirted Israel’s security zone. During a decade of militant preaching, he had come to feel invulnerable. Now, as Hezbollah’s new leader, he thought nothing of descending to Jibshit to parade the movement’s flag. Musawi even arrived with his wife and one child, as though he were an everyday politician on the hustings. He paid with his life and theirs, when Israeli helicopter gunships destroyed his motorcade as it left the town.

Israel killed Musawi because he commanded an escalating war against what he called “the cancer of Israel.” Yet upon his death he was pigeonholed as a “moderate” by some in a fashionable Western misreading of Islamic fundamentalism. Before this makes of Musawi a wholly mythic figure, it is worth telling his story straight. His remarkable career combined a mastery of theology and weaponry rare even in Hezbollah. More important, it shows how fundamentalist Islam works to thwart peace—or any new order that denies it the satisfaction of perpetual jihad.

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Musawi was born in the town of al-Nabi Sheet in the Bekaa Valley in 1952. Many years would have to pass before the Bekaa earned its preeminence in the global drug market. In those days the valley’s clans of farmers and herders still lived in isolation from the world—and from Islam. Musawi would have seen little proper religion in the backwater of his childhood. But in 1968 he met Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, the spellbinding cleric from Iran who forged a movement to champion the rights of Lebanon’s Shiites. Their conversation, in Beirut’s al-Awza’i neighborhood, determined Musawi’s calling.

The 16-year-old Musawi had heard about the Institute of Islamic Studies in Tyre, which Sadr had helped to establish. Sadr encouraged him to matriculate, so Musawi left for Tyre, then for nearby Burj al-Shamali, where the institute moved during his studies. In 1970 Musawi chose Islam as a career and left for the Shiite shrine city of Najaf in Iraq. In those days Najaf’s great seminaries drew Shiite students from around the world. They congregated in its courtyards and beneath its great domes, immersing themselves in sacred texts, piety, and poverty. Musawi remained there for nine years, reaching the highest stage of formal preparation.

In Najaf he quickly fell under the spell of Shiism’s liberation theologians, who murmured against the Baath regime in Iraq and orchestrated revolution in Iran. An old man named Khomeini also spent those years in Najaf, spinning theories of an Islamic state. When this kind of preaching grew militant, the Iraqi police grew suspicious of foreign Shiites and began to expel them. Musawi, on the brink of completing his formal studies, was also forced out, and he returned to Lebanon in 1978.

An improbable vision fired Musawi on his return: Baalbek, the rude market town of the Bekaa Valley, would replace sublime Najaf as a center for religious study. The notion seemed fantastic, for Shiism survived largely as a superstition among the Bekaa’s clans and tribes. Not a single cleric could be found in most villages of the valley. Yet Musawi did not discourage easily. He helped to found a new school, the Imam al-Mahdi Religious Seminary in Baalbek, which worked to shake the Bekaa from its spiritual slumber.

The great change in Musawi’s life came in 1982. Defying all odds, Khomeini had come to power and promised Islamic revolution for all. He sent Revolutionary Guards, his most zealous emissaries, to remake Lebanon in Iran’s image. Musawi threw open the doors of his seminary to the Guards, who used it as their principal center until they established their own base. Musawi took the very first military course offered by the Guards, and it left an indelible impression upon him—as great as that of his formal studies in theology and law:

I recall one of the sights I can never forget. We were awakened at night by the weeping of the brethren Guards during the night prayers. This is not the greatest school from which one can graduate? I also recall when one of the brethren Guards gave a weapons lesson. Suddenly, after he had given all the explanations, he put the weapon aside and swore an oath saying: ‘All I have explained to you will not help you; only God can help you.’… When I joined the Guards and sat with the brethren in the first course they gave in the Bekaa Valley, I felt I derived immense benefit. I felt I had truly penetrated genuine Islam.

The intense energy that powered this camp soon exploded: its graduates began to detonate themselves next to Islam’s enemies. In October 1983 the most devastating of the suicide bombings leveled the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, claiming 241 lives. As Musawi attested, the school of the Guards “made the Muslim youths love martyrdom. And so we were not surprised at all when, shortly after the arrival of the Guards, a Muslim youth in Lebanon smiled at death while carrying with him 1,200 kilograms of explosives.” The bombings transformed Hezbollah, amplifying the words of its clerics. Their mosques filled with bearded, uplifted faces.

• •

By virtue of his rhetorical and military talents, Musawi was made commander of the Islamic Resistance Movement, the arm of Hezbollah entrusted with spreading a jihad along Israel’s northern border. Musawi stuck close to the front during these years, urging Hezbollah’s fighters ever southward. “Our goal is not the liquidation of Israel’s border zone in Lebanon,” he would tell them. “Our slogan is the liquidation of Israel.” He gained his own renown for two especially deadly bombings: one that killed twelve Israeli soldiers in March 1985, and another that killed eight soldiers in October 1988. Not surprisingly (as he would say), both operations were suicide bombings.

Hezbollah rewarded Musawi in May 1991 when its consultative council appointed him secretary general, the movement’s highest post. The choice represented a shift in Hezbollah’s priorities. With the crushing American victory over Iraq, the Rafsanjani regime saw no further profit in the continued detention of Western hostages by its Lebanese clients. Yet Iran dreaded the new impetus in the Arab-Israeli peace process. It searched for sticks to jam the gears of the peace process—and there was no better stick than Hezbollah. The movement might be too weak to scuttle the process, but it could set one of Israel’s frontiers ablaze if peace went too far.

Musawi was an ideal candidate to supervise the retooling of Hezbollah. He had always left hostage-holding to other clerics and would readily help Iran to free those remaining, whose release allowed Syria to bask in Washington’s favor. But Musawi exacted a price: Syrian acquiescence in Hezbollah’s free movement between its Bekaa Valley bases and southern Lebanon. During Musawi’s tenure as secretary general, the number of attacks against Israel’s security zone increased by a factor of ten over the previous comparable period. Musawi succeeded in translating each freed Western hostage into another dead Israeli; ten Israeli soldiers were killed during his term as leader, and another sixteen were wounded.

Musawi traded American hostages for a clear shot at foiling American policy, now heavily invested in the Arab-Israeli peace process. His attacks against Israel’s security zone constituted a jihad against the very idea of peace. The danger, as he saw it, was not Israel’s military presence in its security zone, but Israel’s willingness to withdraw from the zone altogether—in return for full peace with Lebanon. Hezbollah’s mission has been to deny Israel that peace. If it could kill enough Israelis, perhaps Israel would settle for a combination of U.N. and Lebanese security guarantees—something far less binding and durable than a peace.

Israel’s killing of Musawi and its mini-war against Hezbollah have now cleared the air. Lebanon won’t get back its south by indulging Hezbollah; it will have to sign a peace accord with Israel. Lebanon and Syria will still try to outmaneuver Israel over the south, and may allow Hezbollah a bid for revenge. In the meantime, however, they have gruffly ordered Hezbollah’s fighters back to their bases in the north, ending the movement’s free run of the frontier. And while the final disarming of Hezbollah is not in sight, the plans are coming out of drawers.

Hezbollah, however, is far from finished. Its surviving leaders have discovered the new loophole of Arab politics: democracy. Taking a page from the Algerian fundamentalists, the “Party of God” is now disguising itself as a plain political party. Musawi’s successor (formerly known for his kidnapping zeal) is already speaking smooth talk to Lebanon’s other parties. Hezbollah’s demand is simple: the people of Lebanon should be allowed to decide whether they want an Islamic state. Muslims are a clear majority in Lebanon, and Hezbollah believes it can do as well as any fundamentalist party in turning discontent into ballots for Islam. To Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, the die-hard opponents of an Islamic state, Hezbollah promises a regime of tolerance that has supposedly been the hallmark of Islamic rule since the days of the Prophet.

This plan of sweet reason is really an attempt to abduct the process of internal reconciliation now under way in Lebanon. All the other parties are agreed: Lebanon can only be reconstituted on the basis of (reformed) confessionalism. In a polity composed of Muslims and Christians, government must avoid the tyranny of the majority. Hezbollah’s proposal to put Islam to a vote undermines the fragile accords that offer the best chance for reconciliation in Lebanon. And it endangers further peace talks with Israel.

Lebanon’s secular elites of all sects recognize Hezbollah for what it is. The authoritarian rule of Islamic law on the Iranian model is hardly the basis on which they want to rebuild their once-cosmopolitan world. And they know the idea of Islamic tolerance to be an apologetic myth. But the Muslim masses are up for grabs, and it’s not impossible that Hezbollah might capture their imagination. The call would then go up for “real” democracy—from the same voices that justified abductions and still denounce the West for its vile corruption. Alas, corrupt it is: Hezbollah’s kidnappers-turned-candidates will doubtless win the endorsement of the democracy salesmen of the West, who would eagerly sell Islam the rope to hang the few real moderates left in the East.

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