The Women of Hezbollah

David Schenker
The New Republic
09 August '10

Since the 1980s, the Shia terrorist group Hezbollah has not been given to blunt public moralizing about the need for women to wear the veil. It originally made no secret of its desire to convert Lebanon into a Shia Islamic state—the organization’s 1985 manifesto called for the establishment of “Islamic government” and the conversion of Christians to Islam—but these efforts proved exceedingly unpopular, given Lebanon’s plurality of Christian and Sunni Muslim citizens. So when its leader, Abas Musawi, was assassinated in 1992, his successor Hassan Nasrallah refrained from offering explicit support for theocracy in Lebanon—and largely backed away from efforts to impose conservative religious traditions on Hezbollah's female constituents. But now, suddenly, the organization is again behaving in a way that evinces deep insecurity about the decorum of Shiite women.

Here's one example. Two months after Israel interdicted the Mavi Marmara, another aid flotilla is preparing to set sail toward the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory of Gaza. This Lebanese fleet, slated to depart in the coming weeks, is led by the Miriam, a vessel manned solely by females. The idea behind this creative and progressive staffing is to raise the negative impact on Israel if it tries to enforce the blockade against a boat full of sympathetic ladies.

Yet it turns out that not all Lebanese women are welcome on the cruise. In June, the Kuwaiti daily As Siyassa reported that the curvaceous Lebanese diva Haifa Wehbe—perhaps the most famous woman in all of Lebanon—tried to sign on, but was rebuffed by Hezbollah. Why? Apparently Hezbollah was concerned that Wehbe’s “immodest” attire would “harm the reputation of all the women participating in the trip.”

The militia's rejection of Wehbe was remarkable. Not only would her presence have raised the profile of the voyage, it would have dramatically increased the public relations cost to Israel if it again mishandled the boarding. Moreover, Wehbe—a Shiite Muslim from Hezbollah’s home turf in south Lebanon—is a strong supporter of the “resistance.” In 2006, she praised the militia for defending Lebanon from Israel; in 2008 she declared that she was “under the command” of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Even more distinctive is the recent campaign that the militia has launched to convince women to don the veil. Females in Dahiya, a Hezbollah-controlled southern suburb of Beirut, haven’t been covering up in sufficient numbers for the resistance, so Hezbollah, via its youth advertising affiliate, the Islamic Cultural Knowledge Association, has launched a massive poster campaign targeting those who have yet to adopt the hijab. The ubiquitous bright orange posters—on overpasses and roadside billboards—all depict a faceless woman wearing the traditional Muslim headscarf, and a series of slogans urging the attire. One of the more popular placards reads, “Your Hijab my sister is more precious than my blood.” Yet another notes that the veil “[p]rotects the position of women.” Still a third describes hijab as the “[f]ortress of chastity,” an adage the sign attributes to the late Iranian theocrat Ayatollah Khomeini.

The campaign is part of a "restorative propaganda effort praising the moral-religious ideal of the [organization's] elapsed beginnings," explains Lokman Slim, a longtime observer of local Shia politics. "It [is] meant to reassure those women who wear the hijab of the righteousness of their choice as much as to tell the ‘loose’ ones—in a friendly way—that they are wrong."

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