When Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was martyred I was depressed for weeks afterwards, and when I'm depressed, I'm awful to be around. I cried when I finally talked about why and I apologized because I didn't know him at all. My wife graciously said that I did know him, and that my grief was understandable. A writer is a reader and readers are writers, it's a conversation. In that sense, I spoke with Nasrallah a lot, and it hurt me a lot when he was assassinated. They say you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with and I am, on average, a dead cat. Like Petrarch or Machiavelli in their studies, I spend more time communing with the dead than communicating with humans. But I was lucky enough to walk the earth with Nasrallah. Now he is among those Petrarch called,

my company of secret friends.
They come to me from every century
And every land, illustrious in speech,
In mind, and in the arts of war and peace.

I knew Nasrallah very well, though I knew him not. He was my friend but now he's dead, so he joins the ranks of those I call friends in history. I thought this was a phrase I picked up from somewhere august, but this is the only example from literature I can find now:

Good enough.

I don't know Petrarch from Adam, but I know both of them through reading. As Petrarch said, “here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings, wherein I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits or at their customs and lives or at their eloquence and genius.”

I didn't know Nasrallah besides a nefarious name before October 7th, but since then, I came to hang on his every word. Nasrallah's speeches deeply explained what was going on, and he did it with eloquence, genius, and humor. He told me many things I didn't know, and challenged me to think differently. Nasrallah always surprised me, and not always in a good way. I waited for his speech on November 3rd, and left disappointed. Why weren't they rushing in immediately? Why wasn't Hezbollah they saving the Palestinian people right now? I didn't realize how long Nasrallah had been at this, and how late I came to the conversation. How long the timeline of Resistance was and had to be, because space belonged to the occupier (time and space are one phenomenon).

So I dug up a book (included below, with all my sources) and walked backwards through time with him, for context. I found that he had been right (and righteous) long before it was obvious. Back when resistance seemed futile, he had been in fighting form. Nasrallah said, “In 1983 the resistance started with 200 mujahidin, and now, in 1992, there are thousands of them… We are counting on the day when the will of the people is manifest to all.” Looking back, I could see his perspective with perspective. And I understood the scope of patience involved. Not months, not years, but generations. And with his death, the ranks move forward but do not stop.

Unlike me, the younger Nasrallah was very much like the older Nasrallah. Allah said, “Among the believers are men who have been true to their covenant with Allah. Some of them have fulfilled their vow, and some are still waiting, and they have not changed in the least” and Nasrallah was one of them. In the land of the three temples, most leader are vassals, but Nasrallah didn't vacillate at all. He was what they call in the streets an OG, an original gangster. A Gangster of God.

I take some comfort, as his people must, that Nasrallah is surely in the ranks of the martyrs now, near to the Prophet. As much as I don't believe it, I believe it. As Nasrallah himself said in 2023, “So our fallen martyrs are not dead. They are alive. Not in the Judgement Day, when all the human beings will be resurrected, no. Those fallen martyrs are now alive in God's paradise. Do not think they are dead. They are alive, only you cannot feel them.”

In a way, I supposed this is what the poet Al Jâdiz meant in the 800s, in a more secular way (by my interpretation). He said, “a book is like a garden that can be carried in a sleeve, a being that speaks on behalf of the dead and acts as an interpreter for the living, a friend who will not go to bed before you yourself have fallen asleep.” The Quran describes paradise as a garden (with rivers flowing underneath), something I always found deeply evocative. But we only know this because of the Quran as a book. As long as people are remembered, recited, and read, they do live on. This is what the very first writers said, as evidenced by the Egyptian poem The Immortality of Writers from circa -1000.

Man decays, his corpse is dust,
All his kin have perished;
But a book makes him remembered
Through the mouth of its reciter.
Better is a book than a well-built house
Than tomb-chapels in the west;
Better than a solid mansion
Than a stela in the temple!

Scribes are a bit biased—men who can't create life must narrate it—but there is some basis in fact. We're still talking about that papyrus, for example, over 3,000 years on, though that writer neglected to leave his name lol. Of course, walking through a magnificent monument or reading a beautifully bound book in a study is a far cry from the modern experience. All of this digital media is like having a miserable video call with a ghost instead of the vivid and peaceful communion as latter-day sages described. As Machiavelli said,

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.

WTF is he talking about four hours? I can't go four minutes without some sort of interruption. Today we are constantly being electrocuted by our gadgets, not to mention the pesky liberation of women and children. But I digress into distractions. I have managed to converse with Nasrallah through his speeches and question his motives through interviews, just as I lace him through this text with you. He lives on though dead. Martyrs, indeed, only become louder when you silence them.

And yet I'll be damned (as I probably am) if it doesn't hurt. I revere The Book but am not a man of The Book. I am a man of books (plural) and thus fundamentally a polytheist. I am also a coward, and thus die many times before my death. So a part of me died with Nasrallah, I feel. He was a part of my thinking, and his death registered as a sharp pain which I maneuver around but cannot escape. It's just another sharp thing I file away with all the other sharp things I don't think about, though I keep bumping into them, unbidden and often. Nasrallah joins the ranks of history and I can find him there forever. But I can't help wishing he was just around.

Nasrallah talked about a moment when “the will of the people is manifest to all,” and he lived to see that, which was a lot. This seemed like poppycock in the 1990s when he said it, that was the end of the history and America had won. The only will was their will to power and at century's end their Manifest Destiny extended across every ocean they touched (it's all one ocean). Polluting through the Mediterranean, America made the holy land unholy and there was nothing you could do about it. The punishment, the torture, the murder, the theft, that was the point. They wanted us to see the suffering, like Christians in the Colosseum. As the Colombian President Gustavo Pedro said, describing what I simply call White Empire, “The European Union, the United Kingdom and above all the United States—they all support dropping bombs on people because they want to teach a lesson to the entirety of humanity. They are telling us: look at our military power. What happens to Palestine can happen to any of you if you dare to make changes without our permission.”

In the 1990s saying NO to this was either a death sentence or the end of your sentences in English at least. The American media repeated the name Nasrallah often enough, but never let him speak for himself. Nasrallah and Hezbollah were just names that sounded Mooslem and we were supposed to hate them along with Rooskies, just because. Nasrallah was deemed a Terrorist™ by the White Empire, which had trademarked the word. Terrorist™, of course is just another shibboleth, a magic word like savage or ‘nigger’ that makes people disappear. In common usage, however, a terrorist is just someone who scares White Empire, a good thing in hindsight. But I couldn't see 20/20 till 2020. For most of my life, Nasrallah was just another bearded baddy I was supposed to hate. If the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, I did.

In truth, Nasrallah was a great man with a great plan. A historical figure heralded by hysterics from a dying Empire. Far from being a mindlessly angry Muslim baddie, Nasrallah was eminently reasonable if you listened to him at any length at all. As he said in 1986 (when I was four, in defense of my ignorance),

We would like to allay the fears of those who think that Hezbollah intends to impose Islamic rule by force, and to tell them that we shall not impose Islam; for us, this is a matter of general principle. We are now intent on removing colonialism from this region, doing away with colonial means of information and culture, and making the people understand Islam as it should be understood; a lot of Muslim political terminology has been distorted by colonial interpretations.

We do not believe in multiple Islamic republics; we do believe, however, in a single Islamic world governed by a central government, because we consider all borders throughout the Muslim world as fake and colonialist, and therefore doomed to disappear.

We do not believe in a nation whose borders are 10,452 square kilometers in Lebanon; our project foresees Lebanon as part of the political map of an Islamic world in which specificities would cease to exist, but in which the rights, freedom, and dignity of minorities within it are guaranteed.

Therefore, in order for this project to be realized, priority should be given to removing Israel from the scene, because it was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world. We are not only against the partition of Lebanon, but also against the partition of the Muslim world; this explains why we see no alternative to fighting Israel, with all means at our disposal, until it ceases to exist. Then we will attend to following [certain] steps.

America makes a big show about Muslim rule being bad despite all of its vassals being Muslim rulers, or military despots. What they're really against is independence, and the Muslim world defining itself on its own terms, which is what Nasrallah stood for. Given the perfidy of other Muslim leaders he carried far too much of this weight on his own, and was ultimately crushed by it. But he had a plan, and he stuck to it. And the plan goes on.

One of the main things Nasrallah taught me was timing. Raised on a Hollywood diet—where scrappy teenagers saved the world at the last minute—I had no concept of the ‘heroic epics’ Hezbollah mentions in its communiqués. As Nasrallah said in 1992—after his predecessor had been assassinated—“We are not unrealistic. We do not pretend that our military capabilities and the numbers of our mujahidin would be enough to regain Jerusalem; none of us have ever made that claim. We do, however, believe that the resistance has to finish the job it started. It is impossible for us to fight the Israeli enemy through traditional and classical methods, but rather [we must fight] through a war of attrition, whereby we drain its energy, weaken it, then one day force it to withdraw.”

By 2023, however, the Resistance was talking about Jerusalem, in all seriousness. Communiqués more and more concluded with ‘on the road to Al Quds’ (Jerusalem). The heroic Hamas operation of October 7th was called the Al Aqsa Flood for a reason. Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is the third temple of Islam and the Resistance more and more talked about setting foot there in freedom. And Nasrallah came so close. As Fotros Resistance said, “A bottle of soil from Al-Aqsa mosque was sent by the people of the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) to be placed next to the pure body of martyr Sayyed Nasrallah, who ascended in order to liberate Al-Quds from the ‘Israeli’ occupation.” That's how close Nasrallah was.

From 200 men in the field in what's called Lebanon, from just one truly independent state in the region (Iran), the Axis of Resistance has grown into a formidable fighting force with global support. Nasrallah was a fighter philosopher, and along with Iran's Qassem Soleimani, he was a military strategist par excellence. On a vastly uneven playing field the Resistance achieved air power without an air force (rockets), naval power without a navy (Yemeni rockets and sheer cojones), and ground power by going underground. Master Sun said, “To excel at defense means hiding oneself away in the deepest recesses of the earth. To excel at offense means striking from the highest reaches of the heavens,” but I don't think he imagined anyone would take him so literally. The Axis of Resistance changed the rules of guerrilla warfare and literally unwrote the book on counter-insurgency. It was a triumph of brainpower over firepower. And yet so many of the brains that dreamed this defiance are gone. Not just Nasrallah, so many martyrs were lost.

When I feel bad about this, which is often, I think of the words of another martyr Sheikh Saleh Al-Arouri of Hamas. He said,

Our heroic martyrs, when they are from the leadership, and from the first ranks [of leadership], they awaken all the ranks of our people to be part of the Resistance. This is the indication of sincerity. When the leaders and the first ranks come forward to martyrdom… We affirm in a categorical and definitive way that our blood and souls are not greater nor dearer than that of any martyr. We are equal. The martyr that precedes us by one day is better than us. Better than us.

This is comfort, I guess, but cold. I look at these men and I wish they didn't have to fight at all, let alone die. But now the world can see the cruel occupation their people live under, and the necessity of self-defense. As Nasrallah said, “We support a military solution because we do not see a better alternative.” There's enough scripture and UN resolution to support this, but now it is written in clear red marker As Nasrallah said, “Experience has shown us that red blood is capable of obliterating red lines, and if the nation chooses to follow this path, Israel and America will find that they are incapable of changing anything in the equation.”

This was a fringe position once, especially after the Oslo Accords. But that was a betrayal and those days are long gone. Now the Resistance is legion, regional, and international. And they have defeated 'Israel' in the field and fought the whole White Empire to a draw across all combined arms. And across the world, the will of the people is certainly manifest to all. But the man, the man who told me so. The man is gone. So yet I mourn.

While it was heartening to see so many million turn out for his funeral, it was also heartbreaking all over again. At the funeral people kept saying Labbaik Ya Nasrallah, which seemed important but I didn't understand. Luckily Nasrallah himself explained it, if the Shia Forums are anything to go by. He said,

We will remain here, and our call will remain for the Americans to understand. The Americans do not know what ‘Labbayk Ya Hussein’ means. ‘Labbayk Ya Hussein’ means to be present on the battlefield, even if you are alone, even if people abandon you, accuse you, and leave you without support. ‘Labbayk Ya Hussein’ means that you, your wealth, and your family—your wife and children—are present in this battle.

‘Labbayk Ya Hussein’ means that a mother sends her son to the battlefield, and when her son is martyred, his head severed and thrown back to her, she takes it home, cleans the dust and blood from it, and says to him: ‘I am pleased with you; may Allah honor you as you have honored me for the Day of Judgment and in front of Fatimah al-Zahra.’ This is the true meaning of ‘Labbayk Ya Hussein.’

As the 'Israelis', reduced to mere delivery-boys for American bombs, flew over Nasrallah's funeral, they showed how little they understand. The dedication of the Resistance is framed as zealotry by the Empire (why do they hate us?) but now the world has seen the predation that the entire region lives under, and the global majority hates America also! But what a lonely fight for Nasrallah to get to this point, what a long time before faith could become acts could become facts on the ground, and what a long, painful, road we are left to walk without him. But another meaning of labbyak (as dimly as I know) is I hear and I follow, and I do. Labbyak ya Nasrallah. I heard you my friend in history. I am at your service, as in your funeral (in spirit), and at the service 0f your spirit hereafter.