Arabs, Lebanese Shia

The Lebanese Shia are the Twelver Shia Muslims of Lebanon, about a third of its citizens. Their heartlands are Jabal Amel, the hills of the south between the Litani river and the Israeli border, and the northern Bekaa valley around Baalbek and Hermel; since the 1960s their largest concentration has been Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, and old Shia villages also stand among Maronite neighbours in the Jbeil and Kesrouan highlands. The old name Matawila (Metwali) is still heard. Jabal Amel was a centre of Shia learning whose scholars, such as al-Karaki and Baha'uddin al-Amili, served the Safavid court in Iran.

Under Ottoman rule and then in a state built by Maronites and Sunnis they were the poorest and least represented community, tobacco farmers and sharecroppers in the south and clansmen in the Bekaa. Their share of the population grew from about 17% in 1921 to about a third by the late 1980s. Their own Ja'fari courts were recognised in 1926, and the 1943 National Pact reserved the Speaker of Parliament for a Shia. From the 1960s many moved to Beirut, about 40% of Jabal Amel's Shia by 1975, and the cleric Musa al-Sadr's Movement of the Deprived (1974), its militia Amal and then Hezbollah (from 1982) made them the most cohesive political bloc in the country. Not all back Hezbollah: in a 2024 survey 39% of Shia felt closest to it and 37% to no party.

They speak Levantine Arabic in two main varieties, South Lebanese of Jabal Amel and that of the Bekaa. The Sunni, Christian and Druze Lebanese, with whom they share the language, are separate peoples with their own religious courts, villages and quarters, parties and little intermarriage. Shia emigrants, numerous in West Africa, the United States, Australia, Germany and the Gulf, are counted with Lebanese emigrants of every faith (arab-lebanese-general).

Lebanese Shia share Levantine Arabic, Lebanese cuisine and much of the country's culture with their neighbours, but their social life has its own centres. Village life in the south revolves around extended families, the mosque and the husseiniyya, a hall for mourning gatherings, religious lectures and charity; weddings bring dabke dancing and zajal sung poetry, and the funerals of those killed in war are public events, with 'martyr' posters lining the roads. In Baalbek-Hermel the clans (Jaafar, Zeaiter, Shammas, Hamadeh, Nasreddine, Mokdad, Dandash) keep tribal honour codes, blood-money settlements and their own mediators. Women are highly visible in education, charity and politics; the black chador is common in Dahiyeh, while many southern women of the emigrant-linked middle class dress in Western style. Generations of emigration tie most southern families to relatives in West Africa, the Gulf, the Americas and Australia, and remittances are a mainstay of many households.

Lebanese Shia are Twelvers of the Ja'fari school, with their own personal-status courts. Each believer follows a senior cleric (marja): most in Hezbollah's milieu follow Iran's Ali Khamenei, others Ali al-Sistani of Najaf or the late Beirut cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. The ten days of Ashura, mourning the death of Imam Husayn at Karbala, are the largest public observance, with nightly majalis (mourning gatherings), latmiya chest-beating laments, black banners and passion plays. Hezbollah turned Ashura into mass rallies and bans the bloody tatbir (forehead-cutting) at its ceremonies, but the rite survives in Nabatieh. Shrines such as Sayyida Khawla in Baalbek draw pilgrims. A few hundred Ismailis live among them. Many Shia families, above all in Beirut and the emigrant-linked middle class, are secular or leftist and Shia by identity more than by practice.

The full Bible is available in Arabic, with the JESUS Film, audio recordings and Christian satellite and online programmes in Levantine Arabic. Lebanon's churches, Bible societies and Christian broadcasters work openly and Christian villages lie close to the Shia districts of the south and the Bekaa, but there is almost no church inside Shia areas and evangelicals are a tiny fraction of the community. A Shia who becomes a Christian risks rejection by family and loss of inheritance, so most believers of Shia background keep a low profile. During the displacements of 2024 and 2026 churches, Christian schools and evangelical ministries sheltered and fed Shia families, the widest contact between the two communities in decades, and some displaced Shia came to faith.