The words were Musa al Sadr's. They were words of self-definition and self-defense. The turf in Tyre which was enough for his predecessor was for him only a beginning. As he set out to make his presence felt in Tyre and beyond, he faced the suspicions of this small land. He was a man with an agenda and in a hurry. Tyre could not contain him.
Histories of Phoenician times have made much of Tyre: the ruins on the coast were monuments to better days. The textbooks of the Ministry of Education which exalted Phoenician greatness spoke of Tyre and its trade and its splendor. But it was a ruined and impoverished realm. Official government reports put the population of the city and its surroundings at some seventy thousand inhabitants. Shortly after Musa al Sadr's appearance there, a newly elected member of Parliament, Jafar Sharaf al Din (a relative of Musa al Sadr; a son of Sayyid Abdul Hussein), stood up in Parliament to make a plea for Tyre and to describe the conditions of the coastal city and its surrounding towns and villages:
The district of Tyre has sixty villages, to which God Almighty gave all kinds of beauty. But the rulers have deprived Tyre and the surroundings of their rights. Of these sixty villages only a dozen or so have anything that could be called a school or a paved road. Forty villages are without a school. These sixty villages go thirsty in this age of science and the machine, while a river fthe Litani] passes them by on its way to the sea. All sixty villages lack electricity. Electricity is the fortune of more privileged districts. . . . These sixty villages are deserted, inhabited by old men and women; the young ones have departed to toil in the heat of Africa. Thousands more have come to Beirut, to toil among others of their kind. Tyre itself, the heart of the district, has suffered what no city can suffer. It has bee me a deformed, ruined place. Everything in it falls short of what a civilized place should be. The government should restore to Tyre its splendor.
Yet despite the lamentation of its deputy, Tyre had its advantages for a young aspiring cleric. It was the only Shia coastal city: the other Shia towns were more insular and more unfortunate still. The majority in Tyre were Shia, but there were Christian communities, and a substantial population of Palestinians had lived there since their dispossession in 1948. Tyre was only a few miles from the Israeli border, and all sorts of political currents were to be found in it. The town was a microcosm of the country. The Palestinian community that had settled in Tyre was instrumental in introducing new political concerns, in importing Pan-Arabist ideas and doctrines. At the other end of the political and social spectrum was one of southern Lebanon's "feudal" families, the Khalils, with their age-old ways. The Khalils were known for being particularly rough and hard. The lord of the clan, Kazem, a "tough," had been defeated in the parliamentary election of i960. He had been the darling of the previous regime, that of President Camille Chamoun, which had been pushed aside in the civil war of 1958.
Musa al Sadr courted and worked with the new regime of General Fuad Shihab. The charge made in later years that he was a "vassal of the regime" was both clumsy—and true. During his first decade in the country he worked through establishment politics. Sayyid Musa al Sadr was a reformer; he wanted vocational schools and clinics; he wanted civil service appointments for the Shia; he wanted a bigger share of the national budget for the neglected towns and villages of the south. He was a newcomer, and a stranger. He had to demonstrate his fidelity to the institutions and the welfare of the state. He had to pay homage to Lebanon, to its "special genius," to its "historic mission"; he had to say all those things that the country said about itself. Had he flung himself against the Lebanese state in the 1960s, it would have been a quixotic undertaking. Few brave souls in the Shia community would have followed him, and the effort would have fizzled out. He had to court, and learn the ways of, a new and bizarre place. He worked amid a supremely "realistic" community. The Shia then had so little margin for error; a man leading them had to deliver concrete benefits and services. Something said of old Russian peasantry applied to this population: they tended to believe in whatever worked for them. A man wanting to lead had to show tangible evidence of his gifts and his concern.
Musa al Sadr's outlook and ambitions converged with the general thrust of the Shihab regime. In brief, Shihab's six-year rule (1958- 1964) was Lebanon's first—and last—fling with etatisme. Shihab brought to the presidency the spirit and outlook of an apolitical army commander. He wanted for the country something more than the old politics of warlords and nepotism. He was the first president of Lebanon who realized that the "merchant republic" of ruling oligarchs and feudal chieftains had to come to terms with the dispossessed, that its chaotic life had to be organized in a new way. Lebanon's wild capitalism, Shihab understood, had to incorporate ideas of social responsibility, had to accept taxation. He wanted to increase the power of the state vis-à-vis the warlords.
The organs of the Shihab regime were on the lookout for new men and forces who could be aided and propped up against the old order. Shihab sought a better deal for the Shia and for their neglected parts of the country. He knew that the political balance in Lebanon had to be changed, that his community, the Maronites, had to yield some of its power to the Muslims. But he, too, worked with the existing material—and with the verdict of the civil war of 1958. The rebellion of 1958 was launched by (Sunni) Muslim West Beirut and by the Druze. And these two communities emerged as the beneficiaries of the Shihabist reforms. As Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi sums it up, the reforms in the civil service and the changes intended to aid the Muslims went to the Sunnis and the Druze. The Shihabist reforms ended up with the Shia "losing a large part of their share to Sunnites and Druze"; they remained "the community most poorly represented in the public service, as they had indeed been before.
Still, Shihab made an effort: and this gave the agile cleric in Tyre some space. It was Faud Shihab himself who granted Musa al Sadr Lebanese citizenship. The deed was done, we are told by a well-informed Lebanese politician, with "some hesitation." The custodian of the Lebanese state, a man of Lebanon with an ordered army career behind him, thought of Musa al Sadr as "a man unlike others, a dangerous man."5 This was not because of any tangible information that the general had. It was because of that mystery that trailed the cleric, that clung to him. The Shihab family was deeply Lebanese. Shihabs had ruled Mount Lebanon as its preeminent princely family from 1697 until the early 1840s. Fuad Shihab was through and through a product of a very small space. Musa al Sadr was different: his identity and background could not be so neatly categorized. But the doubts notwithstanding, the citizenship was granted, and some state funds were made available to Musa al Sadr's work in Tyre—principally for a vocational training center that was his pet project during his early years in the country.
It took only six or seven years before Musa al Sadr's reformist themes and his fame—his spark, said one observer—caught on. He emerged on the national scene as a reformer, an enlightened man of religion. He was a spellbinding speaker, a born persuader of men. In a country where some southern men lived and died without ever venturing to the northern coastal city of Tripoli, he was a tireless traveler. Much was made of the fact that he could wake up in Tyre, have lunch in Mount Lebanon, then spend the night in the eastern Bekaa Valley. It was a small country, but its lines were drawn and men, particularly Shia men of religion, rarely ventured beyond their small fragment of it. A man who grew up in Iran must have felt claustrophobia in Lebanon.
Marco Polo Visits Ilkhanid Persia
