Aftermath

It certainly was not the view of several taxi drivers I met. One driver who took me from Bab al-Tabbaneh to downtown Tripoli explained the difference between the March 14 and March 8 coalitions. “The opposition thinks we are agents of America and Israel,” he said, and did not disagree with the notion. “We are with America and Israel, and they are with Iran and Syria.” Abu Ali, a taxi driver who picked me up in Tripoli, complained that politicians were destroying the country. “I have twelve children, and I can’t feed them,” he said, not wondering if perhaps he should have had fewer. “They ask me if I’m with Syria or America. No, sir, I’m with America. They freed us from Syria. I don’t hate Shiites because I’m a Sunni. They destroyed the country. Hizballah is the party of the devil. The Palestinians are pimps. The Palestinians are killing our army.” It seemed to me as though Lebanese Sunnis were becoming the new Maronite Christians, no longer interested in Arab nationalism but only in a narrow Lebanese chauvinism, looking to America for protection and hating the Palestinians to the point of sympathizing with Israel.

The army, long condemned by March 14 politicians, had become a rallying cry for them—so much so that in Marj, a small Sunni town in the Bekaa Valley, I passed under a banner that declared, “The Army is the solution.” It was a sharp contrast to the rallying cry “Islam is the solution,” which one often heard from various popular Islamist movements in the Middle East, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Although Marj had once been a bastion of Arab nationalism, it had also produced 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah. Not far from Marj was the town of Majd al-Anjar, from where at least a dozen men had gone to fight in Iraq. Salafism was introduced to Majd al-Anjar by Zuheir Shawish, a Kurd married to a local woman. Sheikh Adnan al-Umama was backed by Saudi funds and increased Salafi education. He was also on the Future payroll.

Minutes after I drove into town, in early August 2007, the mayor and a local police officer arrived to ask me who I was. I arranged to meet the mukhtar (town headman), who lived across from the Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque.

Graffiti on a wall by the mosque read, “They say it’s a war on terrorism, but it’s a war on Omar,” referring to the Prophet Muhammad’s companion, an important figure to Sunnis. Mukhtar Shaaban al-Ajami had held his position for nine years. A muscular man with a long red beard, he practiced martial arts and bragged about his strength. At forty-six years old, he was a leonine figure. He lived with his wife and four children and had his own farm. He proudly showed off his deep well, sheep, chickens, geese, vegetables, and fruit.

His grandfather had been mukhtar for forty years, in the days of Ottomans and the French. There were twenty thousand residents in the all-Sunni town, he told me. It had never had strong political parties, and parties never had more than ten people. There was almost no immigration from the town, and since 1985 it had become very religious, with everybody over fifteen attending one of the six mosques.

The Syrians had occupied Ajami’s house for ten years, and he had taken part in anti-Syrian military operations. “The Syrians tried to remove Sunnis from their role in the country and raise the status of Shiites,” he said. After the Hariri assassination, Sunnis had grown more extreme. “They made us feel this way. Shiites hate us and want their revenge after a thousand years. They killed Hariri and they don’t want a trial for the killers. Before Hariri died, Sunnis were not so extreme. They made us like this. Everybody supports Saad al-Hariri because of the sectarian conflict. It began when Iran entered Lebanon through Hizballah. Shiites consider themselves oppressed historically, and now it’s the chance for them to achieve what they want. Only Bashar al-Assad is stopping it, because if it starts here it will spread there between Alawites and Sunnis, and Alawites are the minority. Shiites made themselves different, special, always. Go back in history; they are obsessed with Hussein and want revenge. Hizballah is an Iranian party, that’s it—it serves Iranian interests.”

Ajami had encouraged young men to go fight in Iraq in the past, but no longer. “The situation is confusing, and you don’t know who the resistance is,” he said. “Al Qaeda is fighting people, people are fighting each other.” Ajami acknowledged that the March 14 movement, which he supported, was cooperating with the Americans. “The Americans are working for their own interests,” he said. “In Lebanon they are with the Sunnis. Their interests in Iraq are with the Shiites. The Future Movement is looking for protection from Syria, so it is allying with Americans and French.” He insisted that Fatah al-Islam had been a ploy to make Sunnis look like terrorists. “They made Fatah al-Islam terrorists and Shiites resistance. Making Nasrallah the hero is serving the Shiite agenda. Give me half the money they got, and I will form a much better resistance.”

Ajami took me to meet the mufti of the Bekaa Valley, Khalil al-Meis. Meis had been mufti since 1985. He had been famous for his strident sectarian speeches, which many identified as pro-Al Qaeda, until he was co-opted by the Future Movement in the 2005 elections. He too agreed that Sunnis felt targeted following the killing of Hariri. “They killed Hariri and now they are surrounding [Prime Minister] Siniora,” he said. “Siniora represents the Sunni presence in the state, so they are trying to weaken him.” In his view, common among Sunnis, Hizballah was part of Iran, and the group had used its victory over Israel to dominate Lebanon and try “to make Shiites feel less like Arab patriots and make them feel Iranian.” Such accusations had grown increasingly prevalent; even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had called Shiites fifth columnists for Iran. “Sunnis are not allied with America, but the Americans are fighting Iran in Lebanon,” Meis said. “In Iraq America is allied with Shiites. In Afghanistan the Shiites benefited from the Americans. Americans are Americans—but they always look for their interests, with Sunnis here, with Shiites in Iraq.” Saddam had become a symbol for Sunnis because of the way he was executed and the timing, which coincided with the day on which Sunnis celebrated an important holiday. “Saddam is not the Iraqi Saddam anymore,” he said, but a Sunni symbol.

IN JANUARY 2008 the mufti of Mount Lebanon, Sheikh Muhamad Ali Juzu, attacked clerics who wore “black turbans,” meaning Shiite clerics. In April he warned that Hizballah was implementing an “armed invasion” of his majority-Sunni area and called on the government to allow Sunnis to carry weapons so that they could defend themselves.

I drove down to Juzu’s ornate home, on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. It was guarded by a German shepherd and men wearing sandals and the uniform of the Internal Security Forces. Juzu was notorious for his anti-Shiite vitriol. Born in 1927, he had been mufti since 1962. Problems between Sunnis and Shiites were new, he said. He blamed them on Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution and the rise in the 1970s of the Lebanese cleric Imam Musa Sadr and his Amal Movement. “He divided people,” he said of Sadr. “Before, Shiites were in all parties and didn’t have this extreme assabiya [esprit de corps]. After the Iranian Revolution the Iranians began purchasing the loyalty of Sunnis throughout the Muslim world, he insisted. “Here in my area some Sunnis go with Hizballah because they get paid,” he said. “They want Sunnis against Sunnis, like what happened in Nahr al-Barid. It served Shiite interests.”

Juzu repeated the common observation among Sunnis that the Americans had changed the regional balance, empowering Iran and Shiites. “The destruction of Saddam and Iraq helped Iran,” he said, “Now Iran controls Iraq.” Juzu himself was a friend of Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, head of Iraq’s Association of Muslim Scholars. Dhari was among Iraq’s most sectarian Sunni leaders. The resistance organizations he backed had cooperated with Al Qaeda in attacks against Shiites. “Sheikh Harith fights and defends his country and his identity, and is fighting Iran and the Americans,” Juzu explained.

Juzu defended the need for Sunnis in Lebanon to arm themselves. “It’s natural when a man feels he is in danger to protect himself,” he said. “It’s easy to make war in Lebanon. The army would split in two if a civil war happened. If there are two equal poles, it’s good, it will prevent war; if one side has more power, there can be war.” Despite all this, he said, “If there is a war against Israel I am with Hizballah. Anybody who fights Israel—an Iranian, a communist—the Arab people will support him.”

The Sunnis of Lebanon are, of course, very diverse and not at all monolithic in their values or motivations, and the struggle within their community, as well as within Lebanon, is not between radicals and moderates. It can more accurately be described as a competition between haves and have nots. In Lebanon, as elsewhere, the poor have only two choices: to accept their fate or rebel. While rebellion in the 1960s or ’70s might have come under a leftist, secular, Marxist, or nationalist guise, today the language of rebellion is often that of Al Qaeda.

Although Lebanese Maronites—Syriac Eastern Catholics—have a mythology of being victimized by the Syrians, the Sunnis of Tripoli suffered much more when their city was bombarded. The Syrian presence was more pronounced in the north as well. In the 1980s there was a major face-off between Salafis and Syrians in the north. In 2000 Najib Mikati, a Sunni politician competing with Rafiq al-Hariri, began to rehabilitate Sunni Islamists from Tawhid and elsewhere. He even tried to free the prisoners from Dinniyeh, though he failed to do so—this maneuver was left to Saad al-Hariri in 2005. Mikati began his campaign to court Salafis when he feared the Muslim Brotherhood would not support him. It was only in 2004 that the Future Movement approached northern Salafis, and