Introduction

Introduction A visitor entering the foyer of the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Centre in New York, with its crystal chandelier and frieze of gilded verses from the Qur’an, will also certainly notice the framed portrait of an ageing, white-bearded, black-turbaned Shi‘i cleric. During the research conducted for this book, I have encountered the same picture many times in many places: the library of a theological college in the Iranian seminaries of Mashhad, an orphanage in Beirut, a small religious school in Bangkok, the prayer room of a community centre in Paris, the website of a charitable association operating in India and the cover page of an Arabic magazine published in London. The face of Grand Ayatullah Abu al-Qasim al-Khu’i adorns the walls of places he never went to. From his classroom in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, his teachings influenced millions of Shi‘i followers across the world. An eminent scholar, spiritual leader and philanthropist, his legacy traverses time and borders. Any considered assessment of Shi‘i Islam requires looking with a transnational lens beyond the national framework. For centuries, religious networks defined by common affinities have been sustained across localities by the movement of peoples, the exchange of ideas and communal practices. The ‘ulama’ (sing. ‘alim; religious scholar) have come to represent the quintessential transnational actor and their continued visibility in the worldwide geography of Shi‘ism is the focus of this book. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, clerics from today’s Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq settled in Persia at the invitation of Safavid rulers who were converting the country from Sunnism to Shi‘ism.1 Scholarly migration also reinforced the development of major centres of learning in the Iraqi and Iranian shrine cities where the most prominent religious scholars have offered guidance to believers worldwide. It was in the Iraqi seminaries of Najaf that the Persian Muhammad Husayn al-Na‘ini designed his influential treatise in support of constitutionalism at the height of Iran’s first revolution (1906–11) and that, decades later, the Iraqi Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr produced writings which inspired a new constitution for the Islamic Republic established after the country’s second revolution (1978–9). Moreover, significantly, the ‘Shi‘i 1 CORBOZ 9780748691449 PRINT.indd 1 09/12/2014 16:54 Andy Jarvis:Users:AndysiMac:Public:ANDY'S IMAC JOBS:14798 - EUP - CORBOZ:CORBOZ 9780748691449 PRINT Guardians of Shi‘ism International’2 – the community of foreign students and scholars populat- ing the seminaries – had among its ranks the leaders-to-be of the myriad Shi‘i Islamist groups which emerged in the Arab world and South Asia from the early 1960s onwards. This book explores the political sociology of transnational clerical leadership in Twelver Shi‘ism. It seeks to decipher the analytical meaning of transnational linkages rather than simply describe how they manifest themselves. Accordingly, the central question is: How do Shi‘i ‘ulama’ establish and maintain their authority across borders? Clerical authority has several layers: religious, economic, social and political. Far from immutable, it is constituted, projected, negotiated and reformulated through the interactions of clerics with the communities and states located within their geographical reach. Based on an interpretative history of two prominent families of religious scholars, al-Hakim and al-Khu’i, this book identifies the main dynamics of these interactions across Iraq, Iran, other Middle Eastern countries, South Asia, South-East Asia and the West. This multi-sited approach aims to stress the mutually reinforcing importance of the local and the transnational for the construction and maintenance of Shi‘i clerical authority. Two matters of concern for the study of Muslim societies and politics will be addressed here. First, this book is a reflection of the enduring centrality of the ‘ulama’ to contemporary affairs. The literature on modern Sunni Islam brought the religious scholars ‘back in’ only recently, dem- onstrating that their role in colonial and post-colonial societies has not been, as previously assumed, on the decline.3 Shi‘i ‘ulama’ did not suffer from scholarly neglect for as long as their Sunni counterparts. Following the coming to power of Ruhullah Khomeini (d. 1989) in Iran, studies on state–clergy relations from Safavid times to the twentieth century were a posteriori attempts to make sense of the watershed events of 1979, though different conclusions were reached with regard to the confronta- tional nature of the religious leadership.4 Initially a scholarship on Iranian Shi‘ism, its geographical scope was eventually broadened to consider the participation of the ‘ulama’ in Iraqi political affairs during the late Ottoman and the mandate periods,5 their contribution to a Shi‘i reform- ism in pre-independence Lebanon6 and their leadership of Arab and South Asian political movements. Accounts explaining how religious scholars establish, maintain and reformulate their status at the top of the Shi‘i community remain scarce, however, especially if compared to the many questions one could ask about their centrality. We owe our best understanding of the internal organisation of the community of learning to Meir Litvak’s study of 2 CORBOZ 9780748691449 PRINT.indd 2 09/12/2014 16:54 Introduction the Iraqi seminaries in the long nineteenth century.7 It was also at that time that the marja‘iyya was developing to become a sort of centralised system of transnational religious authority. In a work that could not be brought to completion, Linda Walbridge delved into the working of the contemporary marja‘iyya, shedding precious light on the more or less traditional ways through which key Iranian and Iraqi figures of the latter half of the twentieth century have exercised it.8 In the so-called periphery, the clerics of Lebanon have found the preference of scholars who have explained the making of these religious, cultural and political leaders in relation to the Lebanese context.9 The complementing works proposed by Juan Cole and Justin Jones have focused on clerical Shi‘ism away to the east. The ‘ulama’ were able to grow as a hiero- cracy within the Shi‘i State of Awadh (1722–1856) in today’s northern India,10 while they later showed a remarkable capacity to rework their religious and communal leadership in response to great change under colonial rule.11 A noticeable feature of the Shi‘i community of scholars, which has often been observed but rarely studied, is the prevalence of clerical families in its ranks, both at the lower and upper levels.12 A meso-level unit of analysis, such families are a useful object of study to back with empirical evidence any assessment of the internal and external dynamics that underpin clerical authority in Shi‘ism. Moreover, the diverse life trajectories of their many members and their networks provide material to analyse, in a single work, different clerical leadership patterns. In exploring the multifaceted roles played by the al-Hakim and al-Khu’i families, this book seeks to explain the sociological working of the traditional marja‘iyya, political groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Second, addressing the question of clerical leadership from a clear transnational perspective can contribute to the debate swirling around the meanings of cross-border Shi‘i linkages for the future of the Middle East. In December 2004, King ‘Abdullah of Jordan famously expressed anxiety, soon to be echoed by Sunni ruling elites in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, at the existence of a ‘Shi‘i crescent’ (al-hilal al-shi‘i) stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.13 The coming to power of the Shi‘a after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the political and military victories of Hizbullah, the meddling of Damascus in Lebanese affairs, and Iran’s ambitions for regional hegemony, let alone nuclear power, could only threaten the stability of the region. Starting in 2011, the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in Shi‘i-majority but Sunni-ruled Bahrain led to a revival of the crescent paradigm. 3 CORBOZ 9780748691449 PRINT.indd 3 09/12/2014 16:54 Andy Jarvis:Users:AndysiMac:Public:ANDY'S IMAC JOBS:14798 - EUP - CORBOZ:CORBOZ 9780748691449 PRINT Guardians of Shi‘ism The influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the cause of much of this alarm at transnational Shi‘ism. Yet, the literature usefully demonstrates that it should not be overstated. Iran’s failure to export its revolution was already evident at the end of the revolutionary decade.14 From the 1990s, moreover, transnational Islamist movements underwent a process of domestication, at least in the Gulf region.15 In Lebanon, where Iran’s multifaceted relations to the Shi‘a can be traced back five hundred years,16 cross-border linkages with the Islamic Republic also contributed to the production of Shi‘i Lebanese nationalisms.17 Hizbullah itself became Lebanonised in parallel with its continued Iranian patronage.18 In general terms, not only do Shi‘i communities have their own historical specifici- ties,19 but the diverse nature of their transnational connections indicates that a uniform Iranian model does not exist.20 This book takes a similar line to this literature as it, too, aims to com- prehend interactions across the Shi‘i world in their depth and complexity. Instead of taking one or several national Shi‘i communities as its unit of analysis, however, it follows the trajectories of transnational clerical actors across different communities and states. In so doing, it pays particu- lar attention to the dialectical relationship of the local and transnational nature of the networks under study. This approach allows for an original consideration of the dynamics through which, to paraphrase Madawi al- Rasheed, the transnational is localised and, simultaneously, the local is transnationalised.21 A critique of overly universalistic views of transnational religious phenomena, this book demonstrates the potential tension, yet compatibility and mutually reinforcing effect, between both facets of Shi‘ism.

Load more