When I was a child, my mother took me to see the pope.
Pope John Paul II came to Lebanon in 1997, and our mother insisted we join the thousands that lined the streets to meet him. It was important to her that we witness this historic day and see the splendor of God’s ordained on earth.
We Shiites are the Catholics of the Muslim world: We love a saint, are big on iconography and are riddled with guilt.
Standing at Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral last Sunday, I thought of that day as another mother stood in front of me, her head bowed, using all her might to hold up her child to the barrier separating us from the procession honoring the man, who seemed to be in the process of being transformed into a saint.
Her navy jacket made her look like a sapphire deposit buried deep in a mountain. Her ruby-tipped hands extended like veins from her body toward her son, and only the flash of the flesh of her hands in the sun gave away her humanity.
It did not matter that she could not see anything. It was only important that he did.
The event had all the makings of your typical Hezbollah procession: botox and bravado, but make it bigger, make it international. It was organized chaos, sometimes as much fashion show as funeral, with the trend du jour on display for those in the know. Designer shades sat atop many a chador. Some of the security were dressed in black leather.
Black-clad women and families lined the sides of the stadium like ravens while young men jostled to get closer to the VIP boxes and enclosures so that they could see and be seen. Most failed. It is a marker of every ceremony, and the guys in charge knew how to fold the unfurled egos with gentle smiles and kind words.
I saw the Irish flag, which I expected due to its own history with colonialism. The Brazilian flag, on the other hand, was a surprise. Hezbollah’s flag was everywhere, obviously, as were those of its allies, although the Lebanese one was a rare sight.
People had come from around the world to say goodbye to Nasrallah five months after he was killed. It was the opening salvo of a dramatic escalation of violence by Israel against Lebanon. The beginning of the end of Hezbollah’s military might.
As we walked to the procession, organizers referred to the crowd as pilgrims. There was talk that Nasrallah’s final resting place would be converted into a shrine.
Even Nasrallah’s enemies came to his funeral.
Fighter planes — the sort too advanced to ever be in the Lebanese army’s arsenal — approached us in a V formation. It was something out of an American action movie: that scene where the good guys burst from a haze of clouds to bomb the place and save the day before the credits roll.
We held our breath. The bombs did not come, only the sound of the jets screaming at the throngs of mourners below. They screamed back. Theirs was louder, more powerful: a cry of defiance and anger.
When the fighter jets split their formation, I hoped they would crash into one another and their occupants ignite, so for a change we were not the ones burning.
In that instant had I been given a gun and told to fight Israel on the border, I would have probably gone despite never holding anything resembling a weapon in my hands. I felt radicalized by the display, repulsed to share a world with people who would do this. There is dignity to death, and they sought to deny Nasrallah that. They failed.
I was never religious, despite my poor mother’s best attempts. I never thought of myself as a Muslim Shiite per se, of the “sons of Ali” as my people are called. Much of our identity is an accident of birth, and I have always wanted to mold my own.
But I heard myself scream at the planes with my people, and “Hayhat minna al-zilah” escaped from my lungs into the world. It is a beautiful phrase, and much like its intended meaning, defies translation. The best I can offer you is “Far be it from us to accept humiliation,” which does the phrase no justice at all.
In its essence, it is an expression of utmost defiance.
It is attributed to Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, and is often seen on banners during Ashura, the 10-day mourning period commemorating the Battle of Karbala, the Shiite origin story.
It is also Hezbollah’s rallying cry, and that day it was also the cry of a thousand ancestors inside me. It joined the chorus of the tens of thousands of people around me rejecting this rude imposition of terror. It was a harmony of faith, a mass meditation against the designs of a common enemy. It was the combined force of the air escaping tens of thousands of lungs and pushing back the fear that Israel had sought to sow in us.
It was nothing I had felt before. Israel’s plan backfired. What seemed to be intended as an act of intimidation rallied the crowd, myself included.
“Do you scare us with death?” the master of ceremonies shouted at the metal beasts after they vacated our skies. “We are the sons of the imam who said for us death is but happiness, and life with the oppressor but darkness.”
It was a valid question. How do you scare a people that professes a desire for death? A people for whom it is a privilege to die?
Death was everywhere that day. We walked together, old friends taking a stroll in a sports stadium on a sunny Sunday in February. Death was the occasion we came to mark; it was seared in the eyes of everyone around us.
Everyone had come to ponder death in a communal ritual of suffering and celebration. We were not only there marking the death of the leaders of the community, but also the death in the community. The loss of fighters, friends, leaders and family. Not just throughout the latest wars, but throughout our bloodied history.
A pile of corpses exists between us and our southern neighbors.
But where there was death, there was also love. Big-bearded militant Arab men screamed out their love language for us all to hear. Some waved goodbye silently. Some wept openly. Others hid their faces and balled their eyes out into their palms. Men from whom I typically expect nothing but violence, vulgarity and vanity showed me their capacity for love.
As Nasrallah’s corpse drove past us, it dawned on me that this is the closest I had ever gotten to him, despite the intimate role he had played in my life. I was mourning a man I had never even seen in person.
Befitting of his seeming status as the Shiites’ newest imam, onlookers threw their prayer beads, scarves and hats at the moving coffin. Its custodians rubbed these items on the casket so that they could receive this newly ordained saint’s blessings and then threw them back at the crowd.
In what struck me as odd, I did not see a single scuffle or fight break out over this issue. An item, once thrown into the procession and wiped on the coffin, was then tossed back in the general direction from where it came.
If a scarf or a hat happened to be caught by someone who was not the owner, the original thrower only had to appear and declare themselves, and the newly acquired relics would be surrendered, no questions asked. There is honesty in death.
Many would kiss the item they had just received. Others burst into tears.
Some threw flowers. When one was thrown back and a piece of its stem broke off, I dove under the crowd and grabbed it for myself as a keepsake of the day and the man it celebrated, a gift to my mother.
Is this what having a religious relic is like? Is that the feeling? I never thought it would be something I would experience.
Call it an infection of mob mentality or partaking in mass delusion brought about by trauma. Call it what you want, and please tell me when you do because I do not have a name for it myself. It was a profoundly spiritual experience, one I will remember for the rest of my life.
Another name would be theatrics. Hezbollah and the “Axis of Resistance” have lost their latest bout with Israel. The leadership is mostly killed, along with thousands of fighters, and the group’s military infrastructure has been destroyed.
The new leadership in Damascus is no friend, and the Party of God is now boxed in in Lebanon, cut off from its allies in Iran and Iraq. Men and arms are lacking while finances seem to be frail.
Hezbollah has nowhere near enough money to reconstruct south Lebanon, and its handouts to its community have appeared meager compared to the challenges they face. Rent is up and inflation is ever present and rising while jobs evaporate.
The community is suffering. The occasion was used to channel that anger and pain elsewhere, away from Hezbollah and toward its enemies. That fighter jet display helped, I think.
Deterrence against Israel, which in my opinion was Hezbollah’s most important achievement, has been shattered. While we mourned Nasrallah, Israel struck in south and east Lebanon. It taunted Hezbollah and released footage of its leader’s killing.
Although its military has withdrawn from most of Lebanon, Israel still raids what it says are Hezbollah targets, violating the ceasefire. The Party of God is yet to respond. It cannot respond. It is enfeebled and weak.
Israel is also insisting that it hold onto five strategic locations, ensuring future military supremacy in a region once seen as Hezbollah’s playground.
The new leadership is seen as uninspiring and boring, the wounds too deep for this untrained doctor to treat. When Naim Qassim, the new Hezbollah chief, spoke during the ceremony, it felt like nobody listened. Most had left, chasing Nasrallah’s corpse wherever it went.
Oh, did I tell you the funeral was also for Hezbollah’s second-in-command Hashem Safieddine, who was killed soon after his cousin Nasrallah?
It flew by me in all the excitement. We were all there for one man, after all. Many, when Nasrallah’s corpse drove past them, followed.
Would they come back if Hezbollah comes calling?
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