Here is Khaled Fouad Allam’s editorial which appeared in “la Repubblica” on July 24, 2006:
Iran’s Hegemony
by Khaled Fouad Allam
One of the consequences of the ongoing conflict in Lebanon is a power shift between Shiites and Sunnis.
What is happening in Lebanon and the role Hezbollah is playing in it suggest that the unthinkable might be happening. Hezbollah seems in fact poised to succeed in what Khomeini himself failed to do whether in relation to the Palestinian question, which it is successfully turning into a Shia issue, or in terms of its role as the ideological vanguard of Khomeini’s revolution around the world.
In fact, while nationalism played a restraining role in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Shia revolution, Hezbollah threatens to carry the latter to most of the Middle East. The pan-Shia dream that was mothballed in the early nineties for pragmatic reasons is now being realized.
As a result of Hezbollah’s actions and the Iraq crisis, Iran’s Shiites have seen their position grow stronger. In an unprecedented turn of events in the history of the Islamic world, Iraq has suddenly become the second largest Shia country in the world. Ethnic differences between Iranian and Arab Shiites aside, Hezbollah is bringing the two sides together. Khomeini’s revolution is the basis of this convergence, a revolution which, lest we forget, was not born in the Iranian city of Qom but rather in the universities of the Iraqi city of Najaf.
Arab and Iranian Shia revolutionaries in fact share the same leader – Mohammed Bakr Sadr. He is the true father of the doctrine of the ‘government by the Jurisconsults’, in Arabic Wilayat al-Faqih, which was first elaborated in Najaf and is now embodied in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Although Saddam Hussein had him killed in 1982, Sadr’s books are still bestsellers in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s activism has been fueled by this type of political writings. While it is true that in the last few years the self-styled Party of God has turned itself into a political party, albeit one with guns, and had members elected to parliament, it has never lost its transnational character.
Indeed, in modern Islam all religious political movements consider the nation-state a phase to be overcome and replaced by one, great transnational Ummah. For Sunnis this means restoring the caliphate; for Shiites it means setting up a state whose boundaries would go from Iran to Lebanon and include Iraq and Bahrain.
On the one hand, the ongoing conflict in Lebanon runs the risk of encouraging Sunni terrorism like that of al-Qaeda, which, in its public statements, still describes Shiites as heretics and considers their rising political power in Iraq as something illegitimate that must be smashed.
On the other hand, like in the early eighties right after the Iranian revolution, Shiites’ revolutionary activism still has a certain appeal even among Sunnis. For some Sunni ideologues, revolutionary Shiism can provide the model for an Islamic state, a dream that the Muslim Brotherhood has never been able to elaborate theoretically or turn into reality, but which now seems closer than ever.
A Shia-Sunni clash seems therefore a real possibility. All the regimes in place in the Middle East are alarmed by a pan-Shia breakthrough as well as Hezbollah monopolizing the Palestinian question, something which would draw Hamas into its sphere of influence. If twenty years ago Arab nationalism fueled the Palestinian resistance, now radical Shiism is taking the lead and turning it into a regional conflict. Organizationally, Hamas is already a carbon-copy of Hezbollah—its propaganda relaying the same revolutionary mystique. And for both, Israel should not exist.
But what appears most surprising is al-Qaeda’s silence, which speaks volumes about the situation in which it actually finds itself: between a rock and hard place. It failed to anticipate Hezbollah taking on Israel militarily and is now forced to compete against it on the same issue, namely the Palestinian question. With a different military-political strategy and propaganda, Hezbollah has been successful in bringing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back to center stage and draw together various Mideast groups. Over the next few months, it is very likely that opposition between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah will intensify because of the total rejection of Shiism by al-Qaeda’s Salafi Sunnis.
This kind of confrontation could also spill over into Iraq where Muqtada al-Sadr’s militias are not that different from Hezbollah’s.
But the most important fact is that through Iraq, Iran’s position as ‘the’ Mideast regional power has been reinforced despite its tactical decision to play a low profile in the Iraqi conflict.
One reason for that is that in Iraq like in Lebanon radical Arab and Iranian Shiites are reinforcing each other and this has set off alarm bells in all of the region’s capitals.
Another one is that as a centuries-old power relationship collapsed in Baghdad in the spring of 2003, the danger that followed was no longer just one of rattling sabers but rather of something nuclear nightmares are made of.
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Link to the newspaper where Khaled Fouad Allam is an editorial contributor:
> “la Repubblica”
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