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| 1 |
ID:
159822
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| Summary/Abstract |
From the early 1970s until 2011, the Syrian shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab flourished as a minor centre of Shiʿi learning. It predominantly served Iraqi Shiʿi refugees, but also temporary visitors from Iran and the Gulf countries. The seminaries viewed it as their responsibility to draw in transient Shiʿa and turn them into students and loyal followers of important marājiʿ al-taqlīd or Shiʿi legal scholars who mainly reside in major centres of Shiʿi learning, such as Najaf, Karbala and Qom. While the seminaries in Sayyida Zaynab aimed at strengthening institutional affiliation among lay Shiʿa, they concurrently aided the questioning of authoritative religious edicts and opinions emanating from Iranian and Iraqi centres of learning and produced local religious authorities. This article examines two spheres in which central authority was challenged in the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab. First, it was contested in seminaries where students and teachers debated legal rulings, and second, in contested public Muharram practices such as self-flagellation processions and the showing and selling of recorded laṭmiyyāt, which are chants performed during ritual mourning gatherings.
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| 2 |
ID:
159817
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In the introduction to this special issue, we make the case for ‘de-centring’ the study of Shiʿi Islam, conceptually, spatially and sociologically. After first noting the essentialization of Shiʿi identity within the contemporary public sphere, we question its spatialization within the modern world of nation-states and area studies, and contrast the physical and human geography of Shiʿi Islam. We then turn to the central theme of religious authority. Much of the study of modern Shiʿi Islam has (legitimately) focused on towering clerical figures and the institution of the marjaʿiyya, the summit of the religious hierarchy. We propose a number of ways in which this focus on the marjaʿiyya might be complicated, through attention to the diversity of forms it takes and the ways in which it is mediated. We point to the need for more bottom-up studies of Shiʿi authority as a complement to the dominant approach of a top-down perspective, as well as greater attention to contexts where the importance of the marjaʿiyya recedes into the background. We also call for further study of the large part of the Shiʿi population to whom the path towards religious authority was long closed off: women.
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| 3 |
ID:
159818
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This contribution discusses two striking twenty-first-century cases of the global spread of Shiʿism beyond the Middle East, with a particular focus on accompanying processes of localization. On the arid Guajira Peninsula shared by Colombia and Venezuela, Teodoro Darnott, a self-declared liberator of an indigenous people, has framed Shiʿism as a revolutionary ideology that helps justify the Wayúu people’s struggle for self-determination. In Cambodia, however, Shiʿism has recently entered a Muslim community in this predominantly Buddhist country on somewhat different terms. Here, its localization involved a re-emphasis on ancient traditions of the local Cham people that trace the spread of Islam among them to Imam ʿAli. It is precisely the vastly different contexts of the two cases that highlight that the localization of Shiʿism has, in these cases at least, paradoxically gone hand in hand with cultural revival and a quest for the preservation of local culture.
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| 4 |
ID:
159819
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| Summary/Abstract |
Lebanon’s Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (d.2010) enjoyed in his later years a high profile as a ‘source of emulation’ (marjaʿ al-taqlīd) for Twelver Shiʿa in Lebanon and beyond. That high profile stemmed in part from his close association with the Shiʿi Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation, and Hizballah in particular, but also from his avowedly ‘open-minded’ (munfatiḥ) and frequently controversial Islamic legal positions. His supporters claimed that his independent, Beirut-based marjaʿiyya could be more relevant to the contemporary, cosmopolitan world than those of the traditional scholarly centres of Najaf and Qom. His detractors, however, challenged the scholarly credentials of a man who had left the seminary (ḥawza) at a relatively young age. In the context of the interest of this special issue in ‘de-centring’ our approaches to Shiʿi Islam, he thus represents a valuable case study of how knowledge and authority can be constituted at the margins by one who seeks to challenge the tradition’s status quo, and in particular the hold of the contemporary ḥawza establishment as represented by the schools of Najaf and Qom. In this article I concentrate on his attempts to legitimize his scholarly authority in particular, vital to his claim to the marjaʿiyya.
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| 5 |
ID:
159820
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| Summary/Abstract |
While there has been much emphasis on new types of media for the dissemination of Islamic ideas, this article focuses on the conventional Friday khuṭba. Lebanese Shaykh al-Zayn was trained in Najaf, Iraq and was sent by Musa al-Sadr to serve the Lebanese diasporic business community in Senegal. Estranged from the religious politics of the homeland and traditional centres of Shiʿi learning, Lebanese in Senegal depended on Shaykh al-Zayn to teach them about Shiʿi Islam. The Islamic Social Institute he built was the first Shiʿi institution in all of West Africa. Shaykh al-Zayn quickly gained a following of both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims, Arabs as well as Africans. This article focuses on the shaykh’s discursive strategies for addressing his unique following. At times his Friday sermons stressed the particularities of Shiʿi Islamic practice, but more often he highlighted a universal Islam in an effort to appeal to Senegal’s Sunni Muslim majority. In analysing khutbas given in 2003 during the beginning of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, we pay particular attention to the Lebanese shaykh’s engagement with global politics and how his messages were translated for a community in West Africa detached from the Middle East.
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| 6 |
ID:
159821
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| Summary/Abstract |
A peculiar characteristic of the Islamic civilization is represented by the Prophet’s family (Ahl al-Bayt), whose history spans over 14 centuries and whose members have played at different times and places an important role in the Muslim world. The Prophet’s kinfolk are collectively known either as sādat (sing. sayyid) or as ashrāf (sing. sharīf). Within this kinfolk, the ‘Alids claim to descend from the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and his cousin ‘Ali. It has been argued that the ‘Alids represent a formidable example of the necessity to re-formulate the two categories of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in accordance with the distinctive features of the Islamic civilization. In this respect, Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti has coined the terms centri dislocati (‘sub-centres’ or ‘centres in the periphery’) and centro deputato (‘designated centre’) to analyse the role of the ʿAlids as key actors in the dialectical dynamics that define the ‘centre’ and in initiating political, religious and cultural movements or changes. This essay argues for the importance of including ‘Alid women in the human geography framework formulated by Scarcia Amoretti. The case study concerns women of a remarkable ʿAlid family of the Shiʿi religious establishment of the Near East, the al-Sadr.
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