In 2002 the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beirut invited Mehdi Chamran to visit Lebanon. Chamran's late brother, Mustafa, was a member of an anti-Pahlavi opposition movement with bases in Lebanon from 1970 to 1979. During his visit, Chamran was to meet several Lebanese Shiءi personalities and to visit Shiءa-run institutions in South Lebanon, including institutions affiliated with the Lebanese Shiءi political party Amal (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya), which is headed by the current speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, in order to speak about his late brother. In fact, many of the Lebanese Shiءa attending the speech had personally known Mustafa. He had, after all, offered military training to many active in Lebanon's first Shiءi militia, which subsequently became the Amal movement. On February 15, at the Nabih Berri Cultural Complex (Mujammaʿ Nabih Berri al-Thaqafi), in Tallat al-Radar, a town near Nabatiyya, in South Lebanon, Chamran began a speech by reading passages from his brother's letters and notes from 1973 that described the political atmosphere in South Lebanon amid Israeli military attacks. Chamran went on to discuss the relationship between the Islamic Revolution and Lebanese Shiءa, emphasizing the theme of closeness and unity. For a moment, as he read these passages, Chamran implied that Iranian and Lebanese Shiءa had been moving back and forth for centuries between their respective countries and hence were what one scholar calls “distant relations.”