My sectarian identity is not a voluntary choice. By virtue of birth, it is an inherited trait. I am therefore a “Shiite being,” born this way without choosing it, in a geography I did not choose either.
“Shiism” still hangs as an identifying marker next to my name in the civil registry. I can claim that I have never been tempted to declare myself innocent of it, and I probably never will. Yet it remains, like other sectarian identities in Lebanon, a deadly identity.
I am a being compelled to be Shiite. But I have never found anything that draws me toward political Shiism and its armed forces. I have reserved for myself a position opposed to it, one that has never made me feel like a stranger or alienated. Over time, I have accumulated a steady estrangement toward it. Nor have I ever experienced an existential anxiety about distancing myself from it. My mind has sufficed for me, along with a circle of friends capable of navigating the political differences between us.
As a Shiite being, I have increasingly shed much of “Shiism” and its religious creed. Yet this shedding does not claim a complete severance from its earliest residues in my consciousness. Rather, it has built a thick intellectual barrier between myself and both the inherited and contemporary religious legacies that have spread within it, often as a contrived accommodation with politics and in its service.
For four decades now, it has seemed that political Shiism, unlike other sectarian formations, refuses to emerge from distant history. Instead, it deliberately recycles it, claiming that the revival of its rituals is a form of vengeance for the past. In this way, the “Shiite” becomes an exceptional being within the discourse of political Shiism, one enamored with revenge and with wars, whether those unfolding in the present or those buried deep in the past. It is as though political Shiism lives within a recurring tragedy that begins in Kufa and has yet to end in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
I am a Shiite who hates war. I almost suffocate in it. And the war now targets an identity I acquired by instinct, one that brushed my consciousness during a religious adolescence that briefly fascinated me. Yet what these wars have accumulated, and their sheer absurdity, leave me yearning to abandon them.
I am a Shiite. And now the war tightens around a body that deceives me with its supposed unity. As I spell out its daily events, I almost imagine it as scattered limbs, each fragment claiming ownership over me.
I am a Shiite, and I now carry what everyone genetically tied to it carries. There is no difference between my compulsion toward it and their voluntary attachment to it. This is the tragedy, and we are its spectacle, giving it its name with a clamor that requires no linguistic exaggeration.
It is the tragedy that shatters the lens of any camera trying to document it. A tragedy recorded instead through collective eyes of displacement, collective killing, and collective misery. A tragedy bound to an identity that war, and war alone, elevates to the rank of catastrophe. In it, both its protectors and its enemies intersect, while geography intensifies it.
Is geography a curse? No, not always. Nor is it a destiny imposed on us by a heavenly god. It is a destiny made by people like us, who turn geography into a stage for ambitions that ultimately transcend it. And its fuel is nothing but “Shiites,” easily reduced to ashes, sometimes through nationalist fervor and at other times through religious zeal. As if we were facing a society of firewood, despite its claims to a brittle “iron” strength that wars have repeatedly shattered.
In its modern history, “Shiism” continues to appear in the consciousness of its followers as a narrative of declared death. Yet this is a death whose fatality Shiism does not mourn; rather, it moves toward it willingly, often inspired by forces from outside, in pursuit of an idea whose time limits are usually short. That idea is called “martyrdom.” Some of its seekers have already died. Others are still waiting.
Waiting, beyond being a doctrinal concept in Shiite belief, has become in contemporary Shiism an indicator of a refusal to break free from that bloody equation between war and “martyrdom.” It is precisely this equation that repeatedly leads to collective tragedy.
Some “Shiite” somewhere wants to die. And here are the “Shiites” who must pay the price for his death. As for the reasons behind it, they can each time be traced back to deadly ideologies that have also turned “Shiism” itself into a deadly identity.
I am a Shiite searching for a lifeline. Is it enough to curse the geography that led to my alienation, even as I know it is not the cause in itself?
I look at my “Shiism” as a field of constant investment, sometimes by the men of the keffiyeh, and at other times by the Ayatollahs on earth. The “Shiite” identity has become exclusively controlled by those seeking death, those waiting for it, and by a Wali al-Faqih whose bloody authority I still hope one day to escape.
I am a Shiite, just a breath or two away from renouncing even the childish fascination I once had with Shiite tales. My paternal grandmother used to teach me their rituals with a calm that bears no resemblance to today’s Shiism, one that does not summon war and blood to intensify its deadly identity.
I am a Shiite, and my wager is that this war might become the moment of liberation for the Shiites from those who kill them, toward an identity that would be a belated act of fidelity to my grandmother’s Shiism.
