Lebanon is a small country, roughly the size of Connecticut, but the venerable southern city of al-Nabatiyya seems a continent away from the fussy lifestyles, the bustling restaurants, and the Hard Rock Cafes of cosmopolitan Beirut. The minute or so drive from Beirut to Nabatiyya is not just a departure from the capital’s sensual delights but a sojourn to a part of the country that lived in the vortex of conflict for more than three decades. Many Beiruti bon vivants are aghast at the prospect of making the southward trek. Yet, for Lebanon’s largest sect, the . million or so Shiite Muslims (about percent of the total population), Nabatiyya is the commercial center in Jabal Amil, the Shiite heartland that extends from the wadis and hills of southern Lebanon to the southern Biqa valley. In fact, every weekend there is what seems a tidal flow of people from the overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim suburbs of Beirut southward as Shiites head to the al-dai ah, “the village,” which is usually taken to mean “going to the countryside” where life is simple, wholesome, and unblemished by urban vices. Except during the bone-chilling, often icy winter in Jabal Amil, when people stay in Beirut and its environs, hundreds of thousands of people move back and forth weekly. From the s to the s, the flow often reversed as the people of the South sought refuge from bombardment and conflict with relatives in the comparative safety of the city. While the precise advent of Shiism in Jabal Amil is in dispute, there is no question that the community predates the introduction of Shiism to Persia (Iran) in the th century. Certainly, Jabal Amil was a center for scholarship at least by the late th century. Indeed, scholars from Jabal Amil (as well as from Iraq and Bahrain) assisted in the installation of Shiite Islam in Safavid Persia (–). This was well before the Persian cities of Mashhad, Shiraz, or Qum emerged as major centers of Shiite scholarship. Jabal Amil has long been eclipsed by al-Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, the two great Iraqi shrine cities, and since the th century by the now famous Persian (Iranian) cities of Shiite learning. Regardless, Jabal Amil continues to be revered by Shiites, especially during Muharram, the first month of the Muslim calendar.