Redeeming Jerusalem: The Pan-Islamic premise of Hizballah

Hizballah-the “Party of God”-is a movement of Shi’i Muslims who wish to restore Islam to a place of pre-eminence in the political, social, and economic order of the Muslim world. Hizballah began as a movement of social and political protest, arising out of the breakdown of the Lebanese state and the messianic expectations which the Islamic Revolution in Iran stirred among Lebanon’s Shi’is. For the sake of order, it is worth dwelling in brief upon the history of Islamic Iran’s penetration of the Lebanese Shi’i community. The process is rooted in the now-vanished world of the Shi’i academies of Iraq. A generation of young scholars, educated in the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in the 1960s and 1970s, came under the powerful influence of radical theories of Islamic government and economics first formulated by Iraqi Shi’i thinkers. Hizballah’s style sets the scene for any analysis of the substance of its message.