Democracy’s Martyrs: Hezbollah, al-Saud and the 'Great Satan'

On the 16th of August 2006, the day after a trembling cease-fire was brokered between Lebanon and Israel, I finally made it to the fraught village of Bint Jbail in the South of Lebanon. I had spent the better part of the week prior attempting to reach Bint Jbail, but my efforts were frustrated by the LAF who refused to allow the cadre of Lebanese and international activists I was with to travel south of Dahhiyya during the war. Many in my group, designated Lebanon Solidarity, felt that Hariri supporters settled with the LAF for more than a little ‘baksheesh’ (tip) so that Hariri’s party might prevail as the only entity providing humanitarian assistance(other than Hezbollah) while the war waged on. Compelled by the disastrous humanitarian situation created by the war, Lebanon Solidarity took note from Hezbollah and worked to design actions to challenge Israel’s aggression against civilian populations. Unlike Hezbollah, Lebanon Solidarity engaged nonviolently, promising to use only the weapons of the pen, the photograph and the media to shame Israel on the international stage. Armed with a list of cities where massacres had taken place in the weeks prior, and acting as grass-roots journalists my friends and I endeavored to document the war crimes that had occurred against civilians. As we brought relief supplies to beleaguered villages south of the Litani River, we also hoped to gather evidence about why the war had occurred and who (outside Hezbollah and the IDF) were the main actors. While in the South, two young Lebanese students, both named Muhammad, acted as our guides, driving at break-neck speeds on mountain roads, and blasting what sounded like recordings of battle songs from the Crusades through their Bose stereo-speakers:


Me: “So Hezbollah has a choir? That’s hot!”
Muhammad (#1): “Ya Farah!”
Me: “Do you think I could stop and pick up a CD when we go back to Beirut?”
Muhammad (#2): “They have t-shirts and flags too. Actually, there is a Kabob restaurant in Shantiyya, next to Dahhiyya, that will give a free lahem (lamb) Kebob to any foreigner who comes there and says ‘Yalla! Yalla! Hassan Nasrallah!”
Me: “I’m a vegetarian.”


On the 21st of July 2006, as the fatigued hilltops of southern Lebanon were still blistering under heavy bombardment from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Condoleeza Rice, in her most noted speech since taking office as Secretary of State, waxed poetic:

“I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante. I think it would be a mistake. What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.”

Back in Beirut, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was taking notes:




The Bush Administration, in assembly with right-wing Christian ‘extremists’, has claimed that the problems of the 21st century stem from the ‘fundamentalist’ ideologies of political Islam. This variety of post 9/11 rhetoric, professed by both Democrats and Republicans, aims at curbing ‘radicalism’ through a ‘Global War on Terror’. In the reality of those most effected by war, the birth pangs ‘Madam Secretary’ refers to with pejorative ease could be imagined contrarily by a simple exchange of prepositions quipped the ‘Global War of Terror’. Typified by conservative ideologues, and pursued by the Bush Administration, the ferment of ‘Islamo-fascism’, political parties like Hezbollah and Hamas as well as nation-states like Iran and Syria, have garnered political significance in their highly publicized fracas with the West. Curiously however, the U.S. has turned a blind eye to states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (themselves seats of the most influential factions of political Islam) claiming they pose no immediate threat to the security of the United States. The U.S. claims that its particular form of government and political philosophy are universally applicable, and constitute the greatest hope for a world of sustainability and peace. There are innumerous interpretive schemes one could presuppose concerning the reasons why sectarian factions on all sides of the Middle East debacle pursue failed policies into perpetuity. Robert Vitalis, in his recent book America’s Kingdom works to “reverse-engineer” what he calls “the myth of American exceptionalism” by exposing one instance of American corporate malfeasance related to the imperialist patronage of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia. Nicolas Noe’s Voice of Hezbollah exposes a similar critique of U.S. policy through the transforming identity of Lebanese political party leader Hassan Nasrallah. What is compelling to notice is how these variegated conceptual frameworks play themselves out on the world’s stage, and generate contested narratives that are claiming their own dead as Democracy’s martyrs.

The Bush administration claims that fundamentalist Islam poses a threat to the security of the U.S. as well as the growing international system of liberal Democracy. The Administration claims that fundamentalist Islam, like other international threats before it (i.e. communism, socialism, etc.) seeks to destroy the political progress made by liberal democracies through the means of terror (a sort of neo-guerilla movement of suicide bombings), and an ideology that is not only anti-American, but anti-Western and retrogressive. The international relations policy of the current U.S. administration (and was the same under Clinton) does not allow for negotiations with governments, organizations and political parties the U.S. defines as ‘supporters of terror’. Which is why it is unlikely one will discover Voice of Hezbollah among the bathroom material on tours of the White House. However, like any average professor could advise in an Intro Political Science course (and even rivals like Finkelstein and Dershowitz could agree on this) both President Bush and his right-hand woman Condoleezza Rice, are doing themselves (and the rest of the U.S. public) a great disservice. The first rule in fighting a war you expect to win is to know your enemy. Through the lens of anthropology, King’s College professor Madawi Al-Rasheed compels an ahistorical, often kitsch and essentialized rut of political discourses to the fore by proposing the archaeology of one of Saudi Arabia’s most hegemonic religio-political movements, Wahhabism (Wahhabiyya). In her study Al-Rasheed invigorates questions that challenge the foreign policy architects of the Bush Administration, while she also provides a conceptual framework on Wahhabiyya that problematizes the traditional classification schemes that political science often perpetrates, particularly when engaged in ‘area studies’. Al-Rasheed explains that orientalist intellectual fawning has largely been content with writing about Saudi and the Wahabiyya in clichés that serve the master narratives of colonial (or if you are American, ‘expansionist’) states. Al-Rasheed’s book intends to disrupt the master narrative by providing the hegemonic discourse of Wahhabiyya, why it developed in the way that it did and exactly how the discourse has bred its own contestation.

Al-Rasheed’s proposal is simple; she would like to trace the origins of Wahhabiyya from its birth in the 18th century through the divisive climate of today’s media-crazed world, gathering explanations for the hegemony of Wahhabiyya under the patronage of Western imperialists, the political prowess of the al-Saud, and the religious revivalism of Najd-based sheiks. However her work, Contesting the Saudi State provides more than a mere road map to the heart of religio-political discourses in modern Saudi Arabia. Al-Rasheed fashions a conceptual framework that problematizes some of the traditional political and religious terminology habituated through media, governments and irresponsible intellectuals. Contesting the Saudi State unequivocally frustrates inclinations to draw social and political meaning through the superficiality of naming. The methodology Al-Rasheed presents in her episodic approach generates an interpretive climate eager to expose the political fragmentation and nuance that lead to “consent and contestation” in the formation of the modern Saudi state. In this way, discourses that claim both primacy and legitimacy, whether they are about American-style democracy, Hezbollah’s Islamicized Lebanon, or Saudi’s Wahhabist majority, lose their potency as tools of political propaganda.

Nicholas Noe is the editor of Voice of Hezbollah a book of speeches by infamous ‘Party of G-d’ leader Hassan Nasrallah. After considering the methodology of Al-Rasheed’s work, the actors and issues Nasrallah presents are illuminated by the complexity of the confessional system under which Lebanon makes sense of its majority minority population. The political flip-flopping Hezbollah perpetrates in Lebanon isn’t unique to its political transformation since it began the1980’s, but is endemic to the sort of politicking engendered in consociationalism. Al-Rasheed’s work explicates on the contestation that occurs within states, that assist in creating situations like the one currently transpiring in Lebanon, where Hezbollah party members are calling for a unity government while vigorously accusing members of other Lebanese political parties (those who happen to disagree with Hezbollah’s tactics) as collaborators with the ‘Great Satan’ (the U.S.) and ‘Little Satan’ (Israel) of the West.

If Al-Rasheed had been in Washington on July 21, 2006 (and were she a war-correspondent journalist) she would certainly have asked Ms. Rice if she truly believed that Hezbollah were really interested and politically invested in a strategy of: a) global domination, and b) if the ‘pangs’ of U.S. policy in Iraq were not birthing liberal democracy but babies of radicalism? Ms. Rice, like any half descent politician, must have studied her Republican predecessors, and in particular Dwight D. Eisenhowser whose January 1961 farewell speech, undoubtably noting French and British strategies of the late 1880’s and 1890’s, prophesized America’s future as a military industrial complex. The ‘ante’ the U.S. government secured while Israel and Lebanon slaughtered each other came in a multi-million dollar package for U.S. based war-profiteering companies who flew the Israeli flag all summer while Ms. Rice refused to call off the fighting in the name of growth. In which case the martyrs of democracy may not be dying in the shantytowns of Southern Lebanon, but may instead die a slow death of obesity gorged by an economic system even liberal democracy cannot overwhelm.

An Ode to Islam

Upon Ali's pillow drew odes from farmers of the Oikumene, who opened silence.
Curious fingers dug and sought the seeds of heaven;
they whose omens split open silence.

Jesus calls Joseph, through color of time,
To coat Potiphar's rhyme,
draw G-d's dream to deign and thread open dawn's silence.

His majesty, the Medhi slumped, bored with waiting.
"My progeny!" Quipped Ibn Abbas, "who is to herald open heaven's silence?"

The whirling dervish, that punch drunken lover!
Tale spinner under wool cover,
Shari'a she does not, the Prophet's prayerful plot,
wishfully interpret open silence.

Today we have Islam's infidel;
they who say he's jihad's Occupation, and Leila's (ba man ast) infidelity.
She whose Intifada espouses no (open) lovers,
and he who built Majnun's settlements (though ilk of monoclonal caste)
- demand, a time to break the silence!

Sa’edi’s Novel Prophet

Iran, like many other societies of the world, has a rich and complex oral tradition. Literary documents spanning millennia have preserved these oral traditions through the medium of writing as far back as court documents of the Achaemenid Empires in the 7th century BCE. Although resources like these are scarce, there remains in modernity an abundance of sources on the rich tradition of story telling, literature and oration, written in both Pharsi and Arabic, from Iran as early as the 8th century. The Iranian short story feels most compelling as a genre commencing from this oral tradition, and if not the creative intellectual progeny of Iran's oral tradition it is certainly a close relative to the ancient practice. In the case of Ghulamhusyn Sa'idi's The Game Is Up there are echoes of narrative style that parallel parable-like techniques often employed in the tradition of oral storytelling. At the same time Sa'edi's story contains themes, characters and situations that appeal to a modern, political allegorical reading which may also shed light on themes of social critical realism and protest that dominated many political discourses within Iran in the years between the 1953 coup and the 1979 Revolution.

In 1951, while Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was still Shah of Iran, a leading parliamentarian, Mohammad Mossadeq, was elected as Iran’s first Prime Minister. Mossadeq is popularly remembered as Iran’s glimpse of democracy after generations of monarchic rule. When Mossadeq was overthrown in a coup d’etat in 1953, sponsored by two of most powerful colonial governments in the Middle East, his short-lived governance proved to be extremely influential not only as it related to politics, but also other intellectual discourses in Iran. The modernization that was ushered in with the reign of Mohammad Pahlavi’s father Reza Shah also generated variegated intellectual reverberations inside Iran with the writings of, for example Mohammad-Ali Foroughi and Sadegh Hedayat, amongst others. By the time of Mossadeq Iranian intellectuals such as Jalal Ali Ahmad and Simin Danishivar were generating highly critical writings, including short stories, of protest to Western hegemony and the culture of imperialism. These intellectual figures and their peers continued to influence literature, politics and aesthetics throughout the period following the reinstallation of the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and even through the ‘Islamic’ Revolution of 1979. The period between 1950 and 1980 engendered discourses of social critique and protest that continue to be highly influential until today.

Gholamhossein Sa'edi is a Tabrizi born Azeri-Iranian writer, dramatist, editor and political activist who often wrote under the pen name of Gowhar Morad. He is from the generation of writers following Ahmad and Danishvar who wrote and protested during the tumultuous eras of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. He was a prolific writer of fiction, and mostly short stories, however his magazine Alefba is probably his most widely regarded and most remembered contribution to literature.

It is in the period of the early 1970’s that Sa’edi wrote and set’s his short story “The Game Is Up.” Although the story is clearly recorded as a written text (or tumar in Pharsi) there are elements of the story that adhere to what is generally regarded as an oral-formulaic style. This style’s antecedents in oral literature, model performance approaches, character and plot constructions as well as allegorical notions that help to illustrate the influences of the oral tradition on written stories. For example, a short story is generally (not exclusively) regarded as fictional narrative prose where the story’s broad sketch is prompted and completed swiftly. In the oral tradition there is usually a teller and an audience. In the case of the short story the use of allegory allows for the audience to have some stake in the creation and meaning of the story. Although most stories in the oral tradition are told in the style of improvisational art form, there are mechanisms an author may employ in the composition of her narrative that may imbue elements of improvisational style.

The Game Is Up opens abruptly. Sa’edi appears to call his audience into his story by opening with conversational style prose and hurling his audience into the middle of the action of the story. Sa’edi commences the action of the plot with stark imagery concerning the story’s setting, a shantytown of homes built from cans and other garbage along a polluted outskirt of Iran’s capital city. Perhaps it is imprudent to assume the author holds political motivations regarding his choice of setting, as an impoverished area has just as much narrative appeal as any other place, the intellectual discourses within Iran, especially in the periods leading up the 1970’s, were dominated by Marxist-Socialist and ‘2nd World’ theory. If Sa’edi’s story is meant to be read as social criticism, and even protest, the setting provides ample room from which to draw ideas on the possible kernels of protest Sa’edi is engaging through his story. For example, the narrator of the story, who is also one of the main characters along with his friend Hasani, uses the first few paragraphs of the story to describe not only the manner in which the huts were constructed one after the other, but also refers to the garbage pits from where he and Hasani collect superfluous items to either keep or sell. Around the garbage pits and on the far side of the shantytown there are large pits, some covered and other uncovered, where many of the adults of the village work. The proximity of the pits to the homes mirrors many similar neighborhoods in a post-industrial urban environment, where impoverished families are pushed to live close to the most polluted parts of the city. This particular point may be a part of the political allegory Sa’edi is pressing his readers to pay attention to, as well as his protest.

Sa’edi then introduces his readers to the main catalyst behind the action of the plot, Hasani’s father, who the narrator describes as a man whose overbearing temper is regularly exercised against Hasani in the form of daily beatings. Research into this particular short story of Sa’edi came back with less than conclusive results (actually I couldn’t find anything on it) thus illusions that may be haggard towards sketching Sa’edi’s particular political rhetoric as it involves Hasani’s relationship to his father may be at best tenuous. However, there are several clues provided in a cursory knowledge of the politics of the pre-Revolutionary era that point to the appalling conditions and economic disparity of the poor in Iranian society. These conditions are often blamed on the inability for even incremental legislative change under the dictatorial Pahlavi regime, as well as the dire economic situation created because of poor financial management and high military spending. The illustration Sa’edi draws of a despotic father who’s constantly and arbitrary beating his son mirrors the sentiments of many of the lower classes in Iranian society under the Shah.

The social and financial policies of the Shah also bred opposition, and have been pointed to as motivations behind the variegated social movements that led to the 1979 Revolution. Sa’edi’s story enters the scope of this history imbued with clandestine irony, as although the story was published in 1973, the faked-death of Hasani in the story, and the religious fervor that inspired and overtook the revolution led to the certain death of Hasani as well as the hope of a generation of Iranian intellectuals and activists like Sa’edi.

Another aspect that one notices in a close reading of Sa’edi’s work is that there seems to be a real emphasis in his narrative style on the movement of the plot through the dialogue between Hasani and the narrator. In many ways the plot follows the dialectical conversation between these two young boys, and disagreements between the two boys are resolved (sometimes well and sometime not so well) through a process of dialogue around opposing assertions. This form of method has, if it is indeed being employed by Sa’edi, has reverberations not only to ancient practices of Socratic method (which was undoubtedly influential in the evolution of oral formulaic theory), but also to Marxist-Hegelian dialectics that inspired social realism and protest.

Sa’edi concludes his story with a dual myopia. The crowd of people that had come to mourn the death of Hasani appears to be engaged in hollow religious rituals and rehearsed representations of mourning. They are so involved in these behaviors that they are unable to hear and believe the narrator’s news of Hasani falling back into a pit. At the same time Hasani, the brave little boy whose plan to relieve himself of the suffering he endures daily, cannot save himself from the other obstacles presented by life, so focused is he on relieving his current (temporary) state.

The realism and social critique, as well as protest and political allegory present in Sa’edi story appear as unresolved conflicts within a context that grows vastly more complicated as the plot builds. As a member of Sa’edi’s audience, the open-ended nature of social realism is appropriate, yet is at the same time deeply disturbing. The consequences of the Islamitization of the Iranian Revolution, and the current state of the political regime and discourses in Iran are equally disturbing. The only solace Sa’edi provides in the thorny state of unresolved conflicts on top of deep historical injustices emerges not as a solace one might expect. In the end Hasani dies a needless death. Yet the questions Sa’edi nudges urge his audience to problematize the questions they are asking themselves, including narratives communities of historical injustice (like the poor) perpetuate about their own exceptionalism. Hasani is not made Sa’edi’s hero, but perhaps he can still be saved.