Profile
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, charismatic fighting Shiite leader
Born in 1960 in a very poor neighbourhood of Beirut, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is setting the Muslim world on fire. Whether they be Sunnis or Shiites the admirers of the man, whose last name signifies «victory of God», are to be found in all the countries where Islam is a communitarian religion, i.e. in the Near-East, South-East-Asia, Indian subcontinent or even Africa. Fawned upon by the people, he has been accused of adventurism by the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian governments. The sheikh has found the way to challenge an enemy whose arsenal and allies are dissuasive.
Young Hassan developed an interest in religion through the books he read. He was brought up in Kortina, a Beirut suburb, by an unreligious father who was a grocer and by a mother whose soft features hid a strong temperament. In 1975, he fled to Tyr as the civil war broke out. Aged sixteen he went to Nadjaf in Iraq to undertake religious studies. There he met Abbas Moussaoui who became his mentor and friend. Nasrallah left in 1978 when confronted with the mounting repression engaged in by the regime against religious and Shiite minorities. Back in the Lebanon he joined Amal, a political and paramilitary organization representing Shia Muslims in the Lebanon, but left it in 1982 when Israel invaded his country. At that time he helped found Hezbollah, inspired by Islamism and close to ayatollah Khomeini's ideas. He left for Qom, but returned in 1989 because of the fratricide wars led by Hezbollah and Amal against each other. After Moussaoui was murdered in 1982, Nasrallah was elected as Secretary General of the party.
Hezbollah's charismatic leader – who thanks Allah for granting him a personality that allows him to influence those who listen to him – calls for an Islamic state only to the extent that it represents a goal to strive for, which he says cannot be artificially imposed. He accuses groups such as Al Qaeda of adulterating Islam. According to him peaceful cohabitation between Christians and Muslims in one country is possible. On the other hand, he calls for the destruction of what he calls the "Zionist entity" and holds radical speeches against it.
Most of his fame arose from the Israel-Lebanon conflict, six years after his party's harassment campaigns helped speed up the Israeli withdrawal. In the two wars of 2000 and 2006, he used tactics based on the avoidance of head-on murderous battles (he lost his son Hadi during one of those in 1997), preferring well-timed one-off actions with devastating results. This low intensity war of attrition led to the Israeli withdrawal from the Lebanon in 2000. In the same way, Nasrallah held the Israeli an army in check with his militia in 2006. The thirty-four-day war turned to the advantage of «the party of God», leaving many Lebanese dead, certainly, but inflicting damage considered excessive to Israel.
-- Marguerite Cornu,
Research Assistant trainee at CERMAM
Translated into English by Marguerite Cornu
Permanent link to this entry (permalink)
- Origin CERMAM
- http://www.cermam.org/en/logs/portrait/sheikh_hassan_nasrallah_charis/
- Publié le 12 December 2006