Lebanon's Shiites Grapple With New Feeling of Power

"The days of our grandfathers," she called it.

There is a joke heard in Khiam and elsewhere in Lebanon, itself a bitter critique of the days when the community was rural, marginalized and illiterate, dominated by a traditional elite of reactionary clergy and landowners with feudal Ottoman-era titles. Shiite peasants went to the home of a prominent Shiite clan leader and asked him to build a school. He looked at them, confused and a little surprised. His reply: Wasn't it enough that his own son was going to school and getting an education?

The community's fortunes began to change in the 1960s after the arrival of Musa al-Sadr, a cleric born in Qom, Iran, as a religious leader. In time, he bridged gaps between Shiites in the south and the Bekaa Valley, undermined the influence of clans and inculcated the Shiite community's sense of itself. His charisma was so great that young Lebanese clerics began imitating his Iranian-accented Arabic. But in 1978, he disappeared while on an official visit to Libya, never to be heard from again. The Iranian revolution followed a year later, and after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Iran helped found Hezbollah.

Lebanon's civil war forced the Shiite community, like others, to defend itself as a group amid growing anarchy. By the end of the war, it was newly emboldened, its power was bolstered in the government and the community entered the civil service in force. The government sent billions of dollars to the south, tangled in staggering corruption, and money poured back into Lebanon from Shiite expatriates in Africa.

Within the community, Hezbollah grew stronger, as it fought the Israeli occupation that ended in 2000. In the guerrilla war, the group honed its military arm, with elaborate recruitment and the building of an arsenal supplied by Iran and conveyed through Syria. It weathered Israeli offensives in 1993 and 1996.

Today, in power and influence, Hezbollah has eclipsed its rival, the Amal movement of Parliament speaker Nabih Berri. Its social infrastructure of schools, hospitals and orphanages sprawls across the south; it prides itself on incorruptibility. And with its ascent are a culture and language steeped in the resistance to Israel it celebrates, along with an arsenal that, while many Shiites are reluctant to state it publicly, delivers the community confidence.

"Without the weapons, we'd get slapped across the shoulder," said Imad Abu Mehdi, a shop owner in Khiam.

To its followers, Hezbollah's appeal is reflected most powerfully in the personality of Nasrallah, sometimes simply called the sayyid, perhaps the most compelling figure the community has had since Sadr's disappearance nearly 30 years ago.

"Tell them that we are stronger than tiredness, stronger than hunger, stronger than cold, stronger than weariness, stronger than bombardment and, of course, stronger than attacking us with words," Nasrallah said in a fiery speech broadcast to the protest Thursday.

"He was talking golden, the words were precious," said Ali, the matriarch in Khiam.

Ali sat with her sister-in-law, Zeinab Ismail, whose son, Ahmed, was killed in this summer's war with Israel. Ismail fled the conflict for the relative safety of the Bekaa Valley in the north. When she returned, the doors of her home were blown out, its windows shattered. The homes of two sons were destroyed. Ahmed had spent nearly two years in the Israeli-run jail in Khiam in the late 1990s. Red worry beads he fashioned while there are now draped over his portrait, his stern visage glaring down from its perch above the door.

"No one has sacrificed more than the Shiites," Ismail said.