Shi’ism

"Shia Islam is the minority religion in Islam and one which grew out of a dispute over the leadership of the ummah [community of believers]. Ali, Mohammed’s first cousin and son-in-law, is seen by the Shia as having had power taken away from him. He was usurped by the three earlier caliphs, and then when he becomes the legitimate caliph, is murdered. When his own son Hussein made a pitch for the leadership in 680, he too was killed, by the forces of the Umayyad caliph, Yazid. On the basis of that you have a tradition of martyrology where the slain imam is a victim, as Christ is a martyr. A tradition of 12 imams – who are kind of underground leaders – followed. They were attached to their followers during the period of underground organisation against the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. The 12th of these leaders disappears. He doesn’t die but it is believed he is going to come back at the end of time and bring justice and peace. So Shi’ism is very similar to Christian and Jewish eschatology in that one day the messiah will come back. Shi’ism is the major tradition in Iran and one has to recognise that Iranian Shi’ism embraces many of the themes that you find in the old pre-Islamic Zoroastrian tradition, which also has a messianic vision of peace being ultimately restored in a turbulent world by a messianic saviour. There are many books on Shi’ism but this one is the most comprehensive and sophisticated I have encountered. What I like about it is that it doesn’t restrict itself to issues of religion. Dabashi – who is a highly regarded cultural critic at Columbia University and is essentially the successor to Edward Said there – looks at the religious aspects of Shi’ism in the context of a much broader cultural tradition. So while he will write about Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution and its repressive character on one side, he also looks at the extraordinary cultural achievements of Iranian artists and filmmakers on the other. He puts those two together in the context of a bifurcation of the Shia psyche. The other thing that I found rewarding in the book is his acknowledgement of his former teacher and mentor Philip Rieff. Rieff was a very interesting character who is rather forgotten and neglected now, but he was a major Freudian critic in the 1960s. He took Freud to task for his rather dismissive attitude to religion in his book Moses and Monotheism , and talks about the sacred iconography of religion as being fundamental to the human psyche. Dabashi has brilliantly connected all these different elements in a single book. It’s a very powerful piece of writing."