First person by Hussain Abdul-Hussain

Hizbullah may be undermining the Lebanese state. It may even be working in the interests of Syria and Iran. However, among its defects, the most potentially damaging is that Hizbullah threatens the Lebanese Shiite community by seeking to impose its exclusivist version of Shiite history. Shiites have left their imprint on Lebanon's history ever since the Middle Ages, albeit with varying degrees of political involvement. To presume that Lebanese Shiite history only really began when Hizbullah was established is unfair first and foremost to the Shiite community itself.

According to Hizbullah, the successive Sunni rulers of the Middle East have been mistreating Lebanon's Shiites since ancient times. Marginalized and oppressed, the Shiites have always had to keep a low profile, and therefore never conceived of themselves as full partners in Lebanon's nation-building process. Hizbullah believes that Shiite fortunes began looking up during the 1960s, with the arrival in Lebanon of the Iranian-born cleric, Imam Moussa Sadr, who began mobilizing Shiites against their feudal leaders and called for an improvement in the already existing Shiite share in the state and bureaucracy. 

Hizbullah's version of history may be partly true. Shiite deprivation, particularly at the popular level, was an undeniable reality. However, the version also sins by omission. The party often ignores some of the main tropes of Shiite participation in the Lebanese system; fails to mention that the worst aspects of the Shiite predicament were sometimes shared by others; and strives to position itself at the center of the Shiite revival.

Moussa Sadr's efforts led to the creation of the Higher Islamic Shiite Council in 1967. This came only 12 years after a similar Sunni religious body was established, and only five years after the Druze set up their own. The relatively short time lapse between the creation of these three bodies tends to weaken the argument that Shiites were somehow in a league of their own when it came to marginalization. All the major Muslim communities received a representative body within a 12-year timeframe.

In 1974, the Moussa al-Sadr-led Higher Islamic Shiite Council issued a statement that read: "Based on the question of justice as affirmed in the Constitution, the Shiite sect currently occupies 19 grade-one civil service positions, out of the 35 allocated to Shiites." In other words Shiite senior civil servants occupied more than half of their quota at the time, not an unusual phenomenon in Lebanon's bureaucracy and not quite the dispossession that Hizbullah focuses on today. The fact is that most other sects at the time also suffered from Maronite paramountcy in the offices of the state, so that many of them were also in some way "deprived."

Even if Shiites were under-represented at the time of Imam Moussa al-Sadr, during the postwar years, when the Syrians dominated the political scene, Shiites received a share beyond their quota in the bureaucracy, to the extent that a Shiite, Jamil al-Sayyed, took over the traditionally Maronite post of director general of the powerful General Security service. Indeed, in the post-Taif period it is Shiites who appear to have gotten the lion's share of new administrative appointments in the state.

By digging further into Lebanese history, one can see that Shiite feudal lords distributed political influence much like their counterparts in other sects. Even if those leaders looked mostly after their own interests, their behavior was not any different than that of leaders of other communities. During the 1920s, for example, Shiite parliamentarian Yusif al-Zein received a French grant to build a water system in Nabatiyyeh. So useful was the project that it secured Zein's popular leadership for years to come.

Like feudal families from other sects, the leading Shiite families of Assad, Zein, Bazzi, Khalil, Osseiran and Fadl in Southern Lebanon, Hamadeh, Haidar and Murtada in Baalbek, and Beydoun and Sleem in Beirut, once had considerable influence over Lebanese political affairs. The Shiite clans were at times in agreement, and at other times conspired against one another - often by striking alliances with non-Shiite forces.

It is incorrect to say that Shiites were excluded from Lebanese political life. After World War I, fearing that a Sunni Arab government in Damascus might hand the Sunni Solh family of Sidon power at his expense, the Shiite feudal leader Kamel al-Asaad threw his weight behind the scheme of creating a Greater Lebanon under the French Mandate. And before and during Independence, when the Maronite Khoury and Edde families were mobilizing British and French support respectively to win Lebanon's presidency, and while the Solh and Salam families were locked in endless rivalries over the Sunni premiership, the Shiite Hamadehs and Osseirans fought over the speaker of Parliament position.

Some Shiite religious scholars even sought to undermine their feudal leadership by calling for American intervention. For example, Abdul-Hussain Sharafeddin recalled in his memoirs what he told the American King-Crane Commission in July 1919: "I asked for America's help because it is strong and wealthy nation distant from the greed of imperialism."

Yet Shiite history does not seem of much interest to Hizbullah. The party believes that the great jump for Lebanese Shiites, when the community was finally allowed to share power in Beirut, came after 1979, when clerics took over in Tehran. What is at stake in Lebanon today, Hizbullah tells its supporters, is the reversal of that hard-earned Shiite attainment of political justice. The Sunnis are seeking to cork the Shiite genie in its bottle. All talk of restoring Lebanese sovereignty and disarming Hizbullah is a mere cover for such an effort, the party insists.

Within such an interpretative context, Shiite history becomes no more than a tale of victimization and justified revenge. However, a reality that qualifies this interpretation never finds its way into Hizbullah literature. Instead, the party everyday invents populist versions of Shiite history that fit into its political agenda - whether in defining relations between Shiites and other communities or within the Shiite community itself.

For the Shiites' sake, Hizbullah should look more closely at the nuances in Lebanese Shiite communal history. The party must no longer be allowed to monopolize the future of Lebanon's Shiites by continuing to do so their past.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a Lebanese journalist based in Washington. He wrote this

commentary for THE DAILY STAR.