God Does Not Live in Tehran: Sheikh Ali al-Amin Speaks to Lebanon's Shia
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March 22, 2026 13:30
The Voice That Will Not Be Silenced: Sheikh Ali al-Amin Speaks to Lebanon's Shia
"To the sons of the Shia community: despite the bleeding wounds, the displacement from homes, the forced exile and the destruction - they must demand from those who lead them (Hezballah) answers to the questions of how they brought them, and brought Lebanon as a nation, to this collapse that occurred on their watch and before their very eyes. For without your demands and your objection, the tragedies will repeat themselves.e And without criticism, no reform will be achieved....We appeal to the religious authority in Iraq, and call upon it, to look at the situation that Shia citizens in Lebanon have reached, and to issue its guidance to their political leaderships and parties to adopt the Lebanese state as solely responsible for security and defence — just as the religious authority recently directed the armed parties and organisations in Iraq to return to the Iraqi state. ." — Sheikh Ali al-Amin, March 2026 (November 2024) (see annex for full tranlation ).
A senior Lebanese Shia cleric has told his own community what Hezbollah has spent forty years trying to prevent them from hearing: that the men who sent their sons to die and their families into exile owe them an answer. First issued in 2024, Sheikh Ali al-Amin's statement is circulating again today - and this time, no one can pretend it doesn't land.
In the middle of a war that has displaced over 760,000 Lebanese Shia civilians, one of Lebanon's most senior independent Shia clerics re-circulated a statement that cuts against the grain of everything Hezbollah asks of its community in wartime: not consolation, not solidarity, not patience - but accountability. The words are few. The courage behind them is extraordinary.
Who is Ali al-Amin — and why does he matter
Sheikh Ali al-Amin is not a marginal figure. He is one of Lebanon's most learned Shia jurists, rooted in the Najaf tradition of Ayatollah Khoei and, through that lineage, in the centuries-old Lebanese Shia scholarly heritage of Jabel Amel. He represents the strand of Shia jurisprudence that predates Hezbollah, predates Wilayat al-Faqih, and insists that Lebanese Shia owe their political loyalty to Lebanon - not to Tehran.
His position on Wilayat al-Faqih has never been ambiguous. As far back as the 2010s, he stated publicly and on the record: "The Wali al-Faqih has no authority over Lebanon's Shia. His authority is confined to his own citizens and to the political system they accepted. As for Lebanese Shia, their religious authority resides in Najaf, not in the Islamic Republic." He has consistently argued that Wilayat al-Faqih is a political institution - a governance model chosen by Iranians for Iran - not a universal religious obligation binding on Shia communities elsewhere. In his jurisprudential framing, the Wali al-Faqih's authority over followers abroad is at best spiritual guidance, never political command.
A position unchanged — and now more relevant than ever
Significantly, no statement by al-Amin specifically addressing Mojtaba Khamenei's appointment on 8 March 2026 has surfaced in open sources. He did not congratulate. He did not condemn. He was silent on the succession itself - a pointed silence in a moment when Lebanese Shia institutions, Hezbollah, and the Supreme Islamic Shia Council were issuing declarations of loyalty.
But his silence on Mojtaba is entirely consistent with his long-standing position: he does not recognise any Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic as a valid religious or political authority over Lebanese Shia, and he never has. His position did not need to change with Mojtaba's appointment, because it was never contingent on who held the office. The institution itself, in his view, has no claim on Lebanon.
What did emerge - and what the statement above represents - is something directed not at the new Supreme Leader but at the Lebanese Shia community itself, in the immediate aftermath of a war entered without their consent and at devastating cost to their lives and homes. That is a different and more courageous intervention.
The audacity: challenging Hezbollah on its own ground
To appreciate the boldness of this statement, it is necessary to understand what it asks of you. Al-Amin is not writing from Beirut's intelligentsia circles or from the safety of the diaspora. He is a cleric who has lived under Hezbollah's social and political dominance in southern Lebanon for decades. He has been marginalised, pressured, and treated as an enemy by an organisation that controls the welfare networks, the security apparatus, and the communal identity infrastructure of the very community he is addressing.
Hezbollah's wartime logic - the Karbala frame - demands solidarity, silence, and the subordination of all grievance to the collective struggle. Every Israeli airstrike is meant to reinforce this demand. Hezballah has historically used its and IRGCs intelligence apparatus to visit, interrogate, and intimidate Lebanese Shia who express dissent. In this environment, telling ordinary Shia to demand accountability from their leaders is not a mild editorial opinion. It is a direct challenge to the foundational political theology that makes Hezbollah's authority feel unchallengeable.
Al-Amin is making three claims simultaneously- each one explosive in this context. First, the leaders who took Lebanon into this war owe the community an explanation. Second, that silence and non-questioning will guarantee the repetition of the disaster. Third, that criticism is not betrayal - it is the precondition for reform. This is the language of civic accountability applied to an organisation that has successfully framed any internal dissent as collaboration with the enemy.
Why this moment — and what it means
Al-Amin has made similar arguments before, but always at a lower volume and always suppressed by wartime solidarity pressure. What is different in March 2026 is the convergence of three conditions that have not existed simultaneously before.
The first is the scale of civilian suffering. This is not an abstract political argument - it is addressed to families who are currently homeless, to communities whose entire built environment has been destroyed, and to a generation of southern Lebanese Shia who are experiencing the consequences of a decision made without their input, in obedience to a Supreme Leader in Tehran whose appointment was itself imposed by IRGC pressure over scholarly objection.
The second is the theological opening. Mojtaba Khamenei's appointment—carried out by IRGC coercion, without scholarly consensus, and legitimised by Kayhan's claim that the Hidden Imam personally chose him-constitutes, in classical Shia jurisprudence, the category of ghuluw: theological excess. The silence of Sistani, the boycott of eight Assembly members, and the absence of any independent marja endorsement mean that the religious cover for unconditional loyalty to the new Supreme Leader is thinner than at any point in the Islamic Republic's history. Al-Amin does not need to say any of this explicitly. His community understands it.
The third is the political context. Lebanon's Prime Minister has condemned Hezbollah's re-entry into the war as unauthorised. The Lebanese state has formally banned Hezbollah's military activities. The community is being asked to bear the full cost of a decision that the Lebanese state itself says was illegal. Al-Amin is pointing at this gap — between what the leaders did and what the community deserves — and asking why no one is demanding answers.
The window
Al-Amin is not naive. He knows that Hezbollah will rebuild, that the wartime frame will re-close, and that the space for this kind of public accountability will narrow again once the fighting ends and reconstruction begins on the organisation's terms. The statement is timed for the moment when the question arises: who decided this, and why? — is most painful and most unavoidable. He is trying to plant it in the community's consciousness before the next cycle of solidarity suppresses it again.
Whether it will be heard is another question entirely. But that a senior Shia cleric in Lebanon, in the middle of an active war, told his own community to hold their leaders accountable — publicly, without equivocation — is itself a fact of significance. In a political culture where such voices are systematically silenced, the audacity is the message.
FULL TRANSLATION
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A Letter to Lebanon's Shia — and an Appeal to the Religious Authority in Iraq Sheikh Ali al-Amin | Beirut, 24 November 2024 | Recirculating March 2026
What is required of Lebanon's Shia?
Attention turns today to Lebanon's Shia community in this painful period, just as it turned to them during the July 2006 war. At that time, a set of questions arose about role, belonging, future, and fate - within the homeland and the region. Among those questions, now asked again, is this: what is required of the Shia today?
The answer today is the same as it was then: this question must first be directed at the political leadership of the Shia community - the leadership that has held political and military decision-making power in the south for decades. The general population of Lebanon's Shia had no say in the wars fought on their land and in their homeland.
They had expressed their views and aspirations since the 1970s and 1980s, at many junctures, when southern Lebanon was severed from the Lebanese state and placed under the authority of armed parties and organisations. Despite the pressures exerted on the people of the south during that period, their voices rose in demand for the state project - for the full extension of state authority over southern Lebanon, as in every other Lebanese region.
The Shia community did not choose their political and religious leadership except in the belief that these leaderships were working to realise the project of a single state, in which all Lebanese communities would be organised - including the Shia, who believed in coexistence with other communities, from which emerges the institution of a single state that serves all, and bears sole responsibility for the homeland and the citizen across all domains: political, economic, military, and every other field that states manage for their peoples.
A state of institutions and law is not the reflection of any ideological vision belonging to a sect, a party, or a group- especially in mixed and plural societies such as Lebanon, a country of multiple communities, in which the idea of the state emerges through a social contract between all groups, consecrated as a national covenant that transcends narrow frameworks and one-sided visions. All Lebanese communities, across their different sects and religions, have been committed to this social contract since Lebanon's founding - including the Shia. This remains the basis of Lebanese consensus, and today it is more deeply rooted than ever in the hearts and convictions of the Lebanese, who cling to it as one of Lebanon's constants — a final homeland that does not change no matter how circumstances shift.
This project of the state — solely responsible for the people and the homeland — was an inseparable part of Imam Musa al-Sadr's project, for which the Shia community gave him its support, because it affirmed a national unity whose strength and potential grow through the project of a single state.
That is why, in an era of weapons in the hands of parties and organisations outside the state, he said — in Al-Hawadith magazine, 30 July 1978: "There is no solution for Lebanon except in establishing legitimacy, and there is no legitimacy except by dissolving the mini-states, whatever their form, shape, or function." His project was entirely clear on the Lebanese and Arab belonging of Lebanon's Shia, and their full integration into the project of the single state.
What is required of those who lead the Shia community today is to announce immediately that they adopt the Lebanese state as the sole authority, and to abandon everything that contradicts its sovereignty and prevents it from exercising its full responsibilities across all its territory.
This question turns, secondly, to the members of the Shia community themselves. Despite the bleeding wounds, the displacement from homes, the forced exile, and the destruction - they must demand from those who lead them answers to the questions of how they brought them, and brought Lebanon as a nation, to this collapse that occurred on their watch and before their very eyes. For without your demands and your objections, the tragedies will repeat themselves. And without criticism, no reform will be achieved.
Say to your political leadership: what is required is not occasional reminders of Imam al-Sadr's words and positions. What is required is to announce today the beginning of serious work on his project. For the Imam meant by the words we have quoted from him the return of the south to the embrace of the Lebanese state, which constitutes the sole authority of the country in all matters and domains, and which is the arbiter in resolving disputes and the sole source of decision-making, especially on questions of war and peace.
We appeal to the religious authority in Iraq, and call upon it, to look at the situation that Shia citizens in Lebanon have reached, and to issue its guidance to their political leaderships and parties to adopt the Lebanese state as solely responsible for security and defence — just as the religious authority recently directed the armed parties and organisations in Iraq to return to the Iraqi state.
Through the implementation of such guidance, the project of Imam al-Sadr would be realised -the single state under whose banner all Lebanese would unite - and the foundations would be laid for Lebanon's emergence from its ordeal, and for the establishment of a state solely responsible for the people and the homeland. We would then all move forward together in working toward the goals for our patient people and our steadfast nation, who deserve a safe and flourishing life.
Beirut — Lebanon, 24 November 2024
Source: al-amine.org
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