Lebanese Shia Muslims

Lebanese Shia Muslims, historically and communally known as Matāwila, are Lebanese people who are adherents of Shia Islam in Lebanon, which plays a major role alongside Lebanon's main Sunni, Maronite and Druze sects. Shiite Muslims in Lebanon are synonymous with Twelver Shi'ism and are distinguished from Alawites and Isma'ilis.
Today, Shiite Muslims constitute around 31.2% of the Lebanese population per the CIA's World Factbook. Under the terms of an unwritten agreement known as the National Pact between the various political and religious leaders of Lebanon, Shiites are the only sect eligible for the post of Speaker of Parliament.

History

Origins

Shi'i tradition traces the origins of the community in present-day Lebanon to Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, the prophet Muhammad's companion and a loyal associate of Ali, though modern historians largely dispute this. Information regarding Jabal Amel's population prior to the Muslim conquest is scant and insufficient. It is traditionally thought to have included a substantial tribal segment prior to the Muslim conquest represented by the tribe of Banu 'Āmila. According to Irfan Shahîd, the Banu 'Āmila formed part of the Nabataean foederati of the Romans, whose presence in the region dates back to Biblical times. According to 10th-century historian al-Tabari, they were also affiliates of the Ghassanids who supplied troops to the Byzantines. Galilee, which included a part of Jabal Amel, was inhabited by Christian and Jewish communities in the Byzantine period, divided along west and east respectively. Along the coast, Tyre was predominantly Christianized under the Byzantines with a minor survival of the pagan cult of Melqart up until the early Islamic period.
It seems Tripoli and Sidon were home to Shi'i elements as early as the 8th century. According to Friedman, a Shi'i convoy from Palestine reportedly visited and consulted the fifth Shia Imam Muhammad al-Baqir in Kufa. The Shi'i historian Al-Ya'qubi alluded to the settlement of 'Āmila in Palestine, which Friedman identifies as a Shi'ite tribe at his time. During the early Islamic period, Jabal Amel and the adjacent areas likely hosted several disgruntled groups or communities that were susceptible to Twelver Shia doctrine, and a positive and inviting dialectical relationship between the theological construct of Imamism and its social milieu gave precedence to the Shiite possibility. According to Jaafar al-Muhajir, the beginning of the process can be traced right after the Hasan–Muawiya treaty in 661. Rula Abisaad and Yaron Friedman argue that Banu 'Āmila may have already been Shiites in the seventh century, and thus spread Shi'ism or Shi'i tendencies among the locals. According to William Harris, the 842 revolt in Palestine gave rare exposure to a Shia-minded population on the fringes of Mount Lebanon.
In Mount Lebanon, the Twelver Shiites of Kisrawan were geographically separate from Jabal Amel. According to Harris, it's possible that Shia tribespeople were present early in the Umayyad period or after the 759 Munaytra uprising, and would have been well-established in the area by 960. On the other hand, al-Muhajir argues that the community was established in the aftermath of the First Crusade and the fall of Tripoli in 1109, which triggered the city's depopulation of its Shia inhabitants.

Early Islamic period

In Syria, Aleppo, which figures in the scholastic heritage of Jabal Amel, had become fertile ground for Twelver Shi'ism under the reign of the Hamdanids, and cultural and material interactions between Aleppo and Jabal Amel may have reinforced nascent local development of Twelver Shi'ism in the area prior to Isma'ili Fatimid ascent in Egypt. Before Fatimid Ismaili
da'wa took hold in Syria, cultural exchange between scholars in Jabal Amel and Iraq contributed to a mutual systematic observation of the Ja'fari school, which also continued after Fatimid demise. Among the early examples of 'Amili-Iraqi exchange is an elegy by Tyrian Shi'i poet 'Abd al-Muhsin al-Ṣūri in memory of Twelver theologian al-Shaykh al-Mufid. Sharif al-Murtada, the foremost Imami authority of his time based in Baghdad, composed a number of treatises known as the masā'il in response to legalistic inquiries he received from the ulama of Sidon, Tripoli, and Tiberias. His son-in-law, Abu Ya'la al-Ja'fari, personally corresponded with Shi'i ulama of Sidon as well.
The Hamdanids also patronized Nusayri da'wah, a Twelver group belonging to the ghulat current of Imami Shi'ism, and members of the group were numerous in Jund al-Urdunn at the time of Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi. Followers of the Nusayri dawah were reportedly present in Tyre, Tripoli, Sidon and Beirut along the coast; in the city of Tiberias in the Galilee, and in Banias in the Mt. Hermon-Golan region. Per Stefan Winter, Nusayri communities largely disappeared outside of Syria after the 12th century, and presumably melded into mainstream Imami Shi'ism.
In his book, Palestinian geographer al-Muqaddasī notes that Shi'i Muslims were present in Qadas, Tiberias, Amman and Nablus. Traveling through Tyre and Tripoli in 1047, Nasir Khusraw recorded in his Safarnama that most of the residents of the two cities were Shiite Muslims. According to Ibn al-Arabi of Seville, the Palestinian littoral cities were home to sizable Shi'i communities. During his ten-year residence in Tyre, Ibn Asakir, noted strong opposition to his views from some of the rafida in the city, a pejorative term denoting Shiites.
On the other hand, Tripoli was governed on the Fatimids' behalf by Banu Ammar, a Twelver Shi'i qadi dynasty who invested large sums in turning the city into a famous center for learning, until the fall of Tripoli in 1109. Tripoli became a reputed centre of Imami Shi'i scholarship, producing reputed scholars such as Ibn al-Barraj al-Tarabulsi, a student of Sharif al-Murtada and Shaykh Tusi who was appointed the judge of Tripoli in 1046, and commanded a large Shiite hinterland, where the district name 'Zanniya' still recalls the Alid esotericism of its medieval population.

Mamluk period

became an important centre of Shiite scholarship during the Mamluk period, probably as the result of short-distance immigration from the former Frankish coastal cities which were destroyed by Mamluks, namely Tyre, Sidon and Akka. When the Mamluks established a mamlaka in Safed in 1260s, Shiites in the Safed region either joined neighboring Jabal Amel or converted to Sunni Islam. The towns of Jezzine, Karak Nuh and Machghara emerged as centers of Shiite learning, and Shiite scholars enjoyed protection under Shia chiefs starting from Husam ad-Din Bishara in 1187. One particular scholar from Jezzine, Muhammad ibn Makki, became a widely known Shi'i faqīh who advocated developing religious law through debate with Sunni scholars, and instructed the court of Khorasan's reigning Sarbadar in Twelver Shiism.
Between 1292 and 1305, the Mamluks carried out a series of punitive expeditions against the Shia community in the Kisrawan region in Mount Lebanon east of Beirut, headed by Aqqush al-Afram. According to Mamluk chronicler Badr al-Din al-Ayni, in 1292, the Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil compelled Baydara to take three thousand cavalry up the coast from Egypt, entering Kisrawan from the south. According to al-Ayni, the defenders, whom he called kafarat rawafid, mobilized 10,000 men who lured Mamluk contingents into ambushes. The campaign was a failure, and Baydara was only able to extricate his troops after offering gifts and releasing prisoners. In 1299, Kisrawanis attacked the fleeing Mamluk army, which brought Kisrawan back to Mamluk priority, prompting a swift retribution in 1300.
Following the death of the Ilkhan Ghazan in 1304, the Mamluks assembled the
main Mamluk field army for a third campaign. In July 1305, according to al-Maqrizi, al-Ayni and Druze chronicler Salih ibn Yahya, fifty thousand Mamluk troops marched from Damascus to meet up with another army under the na'ib of Tripoli coming from the north, also summoning their Druze Buhturid allies to the south. The Mamluk pincer movement converged on the Kisrawan rebels and broke their forces at 'Ayn Sawfar, resulting in battles that eventually crushed the Kisrawanis. The Mamluks then devastated villages and cultivation through August 1305 and expelled much of the population, who settled in Southern Lebanon and the Beqaa valley. Estimates of the expelled population vary, with Muhammad Ali Makki estimating likely around 20,000 displaced into the Bekaa valley and Jezzine.

Under Ottoman rule

After the Ottoman conquest circa 1516, various Shiite clans in Jabal Amel, Beqaa Valley and Mount Lebanon, which had been ensconced prior to Ottoman arrival, were co-opted into the Ottoman provincial administration as mukataacıs or as governors of secondary sanjaks with fiscal and police responsibilities over a vast section of the Syrian coastal highlands. The Harfushes of Baalbek received the iltizam concession for the Bekaa as well as a rank in the provincial military hierarchy. In the province of Tripoli, the Hamada clan were charged with multiple tax collection assignments in the hinterland of Mount Lebanon. Further south, the Shiites of Jabal Amel retained their tax farms well into the mid-18th century, greatly benefiting from the foreign demand for dyed cotton and good commercial contacts with the French, and by the 1750s the area provided more tax revenues than Mount Lebanon.
By the late 18th century, traditional Shiite feudatories had largely become redundant and weak, to which the Ottomans enlisted other families. The Shihab dynasty managed to displace the Shia Hamades from Mount Lebanon by the 1760s, exploited Harfush internal quarrels in the Bekaa and enroached on Jabal Amel. The Druze Junblatt lords and Christian peasants bought or pushed out the Shia out of Jezzine and the hills above Sidon, while the significant Shia minority in the Tripoli hills largely departed for the Bekaa valley. In the late 18th century, Jabal Amel became a war zone between Ottoman authorities and rebels in northern Palestine, which continued under Jazzar Pasha and against the Egyptians in 1833–1841. The Shia population, estimated around 38% of Lebanon's population a few centuries prior, slid to no more than 20% by 1840.