Warriors of God Read Online Free PDF Page A

questionable accuracy when conducted and was certainly out of date eleven years later. The Maronites, the largest sect at the time, gained most of the top political and security posts, including the presidency and the command of the Lebanese army.
    In its early years of independence, Lebanon experienced a services-oriented boom period, profiting from its fortuitous geographic position between the West and the newly emerging oil-rich Gulf. But the nation’s increasing prosperity during this period mainly benefited an oligarchy of powerful political families that monopolized the commercial and financial sectors and dominated the politics of the country. The revenues of the boom were spent mostly in Beirut and parts of Christiandominated Mount Lebanon. The peripheral areas in the north, and the Shia-populated Bekaa Valley and south, were left to stagnate. In 1943, there was not a single hospital in south Lebanon.
    The lure of booming Beirut—where earnings in the 1950s were five times higher than in the peripheral regions—encouraged tens of thousandsof Shias to abandon their farms and villages and seek fresh opportunities in the city. Most of them settled in the southern quarters of Beirut, cramming into dense and unsanitary neighborhoods. Here they labored on building sites, helping construct the new concrete high-rise buildings that were rapidly changing Beirut’s skyline. By 1971, nearly half of Lebanon’s Shias were living in southern Beirut, a “Belt of Misery” that formed a third distinct area of Shia habitation along with the Bekaa and the south.
    The Shias were poorly represented by their powerful landlords, who exerted a feudalistic hold on their subjects by dispensing ad hoc patronage in exchange for unquestioning loyalty at election time.
    Given the lack of political representation and the poor social conditions, the teeming slums of southern Beirut proved a fertile ground for the growth of the leftist pan-Arab ideologies that shook the Middle East in the 1950s. Young Shias, raised in the feudal atmosphere of Jabal Amil and the impoverished Bekaa, found themselves drawn to the secular parties of the left, with their goals of disrupting the existing order and promoting social equality.
“It Was as If He Was Jesus Christ”
    It was into this budding Shia social and political ferment that Musa Sadr arrived in 1959 at the age of thirty-one. Sadr had first visited Lebanon four years earlier as a guest of Sayyed Abdel Hussein Sharafeddine, a relative and the aged mufti of Tyre, the most eminent Shia authority in Lebanon at the time. Sharafeddine, who was much impressed with the tall, charming Iranian, overlooked Sadr’s youth, inexperience, and lack of knowledge of Lebanon to nominate him as his chosen successor.
    Based in Tyre, Sadr quickly integrated himself within the local community, preaching at the Abbas Sharafeddine mosque each Friday and meeting with leading figures in the city.
    â€œAt the beginning, nobody knew who he was,” recalls Abdullah Yazbek, at the time a local businessman who later became an aide to Sadr. “I used to pray with other religious sayyeds, 9 but I thought the messagewas always the same. Then I began praying with Sayyed Sadr, and suddenly I was hearing new things about religion and economics and social reforms, things I had never heard before.”
    Helped by some state funds and access to religious donations, Sadr embarked upon a program of social activism. One of his first acts was to abolish begging in Tyre. He reorganized and expanded a small local charity and founded an institute for Islamic studies and several vocational centers in Tyre. His flagship project in those early years was the Jabal Amil Institute, located in Bourj Shemali, just outside Tyre. The institute continues to run today under the leadership of Sadr’s sister, Rabab. In Beirut, he opened orphanages and a hospital.
    With his Persian-accented Arabic, striking physical