Imams and Emirs: State, Religion and Sects in Islam

"Fuad Khuri (1935-2003) was a Lebanese anthropologist. In a way, he wrote the first political sociology of Islam and sectarianism, looking at the importance of sectarian identity in politics, in society and in state formation. He wrote important books about Lebanon and also about Bahrain. One of his first books was about Sunni-Shia relations in Bahrain and state formation. He also did fieldwork in other parts of the Islamic world. This is a very short book but a very clever account of different parts of the Arab world, including Yemen, but also his native Lebanon, the Gulf etc. Again, it’s a bit of an old book now and you can make conceptual criticisms. But as a student it was a very influential book for me. It zooms in on different countries and different religious groups and looks at how they organize themselves politically. Yes, it’s about Alawites, different Christian groups, the Druze, and the Zaydis in Yemen. The reason I chose it is because, conceptually, he took the importance of sectarian identity seriously. There were many scholars and historians who brushed it aside, but he grew up in Lebanon and had to flee during the Lebanese civil war and he took those dynamics seriously. He did fieldwork in Bahrain, where I also did fieldwork. I wrote my PhD on the Shia community in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. His book was one of the only ones that looked at the relationship between politics and sectarian identity. It’s a classic. It does a bit and that’s why I put his book on my list. In his case, Imams and Emirs related more to local rulers with some religious authority, like the Zaydi imams, or the emirs of Mount Lebanon. In my case, the imams and caliphs refer to some of the archetypes of Sunni and Shiite religious and political organization. For Shia, it’s the ‘imamate’ and for Sunnis, it’s the ‘caliphate.’ I’m looking at the political and religious leadership."