How do Iranian Shi'a practitioners experience transition toward the status of a double minority in the diaspora? Back home, not only they belong to the majority population, but also, the dominant state discourse is in their favour. But in Canada, they are not only a religious minority in the host society, but they also constitute a relatively small portion of the Muslim community and a small segment of their own national community as well. This study investigates how this transition affects the dynamic of this group. Does the minority status draw them together to collaborate in order to protect their religiosity? Or, on the contrary, does being far from the state regulation of religion give them suitable ground to demonstrate various forms of practicing their faith? With a comparative approach and through eight months of fieldwork in 2016, I studied four active Iranian Shia organizations in Montreal. While activities of these organizations overlap and seem similar in most cases, they are deeply divided on religious interpretation, political orientation, and immigration trajectory. To show how these factors all together forge distinctive approaches, this study sheds light on their interaction with their own national community, other ethnic Shi'a communities, other Muslim communities, host society and finally their country of origin. Two organizations that represent Shi'a clergy (Al-Khoie and Al-Shirazi) share a similar strategy to interact with the host society and other ethnoreligious groups, however, their political views separate them drastically. Two other institutions (Noor and Touhid) which represent a post-revolutionary interpretation of Islam bring national identity into play significantly. Consequently, their connection with other ethnoreligious groups is limited while they are successful in making links with other Iranian cultural clubs in Montreal. What distinguishes these two institutions is their immigration trajectory, relation with origin country and perspective of living in the West. Finally, I conclude these institutions reflect four distinctive perceptions of living as a diasporic Iranian-Shi'a in the West which has roots in the religious scene of Iran. I hypothesize that the Iranian Shi'a community in Montreal could be a miniature model to reveal the complexity of today Iranian religious life.

In 1929, Archpriest Moises Hillar set out to record a comprehensive account of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Buenos Aires. The chronicle narrates the presence of a Syrian-Lebanese community in Argentina and throughout the New World and is dedicated to the Orthodox Administrative Committee and a number of Eastern Orthodox charitable societies. Charitable societies occupy a central place in the book as they had become the representative political bodies available to Syrian-Lebanese Christians in the country. Earlier in the century, Syrian-Lebanese immigrants had successfully rallied for the Ottoman Empire to establish a consulate in the capital city in order to benefit from the empire’s formal political and legal protection. With the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the implosion of its bureaucratic networks abroad, religious and secular leaders from within the Arab Orthodox community had begun to seek new forms of communal organization. The criteria used to create communal institutions like the charitable societies mentioned above would reflect new political realities back home in the Levant and appeal to the commercial and social environment to which they had acculturated in Argentina. This process reflected the gradual normalization of certain models of social welfare and paternalism there between the 1880s and 1920s. The formation of charitable societies within the context of a post-Ottoman world, however, also reflected the religious pluralism of the Levant, which is erroneously attributed to the institutional framework of the so-called millet system there. This paper argues that social welfare and paternalism provided Syrian-Lebanese residents in Buenos Aires the means to politically acculturate via institutions and practices that had been lost with the formal political protection afforded by the now defunct Ottoman consulate. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the charitable societies of the Syrian-Lebanese community in Buenos Aires took on a facade reflective of the nineteenth-century sectarianization of politics in the Levant.

The physical and mental influence of exile on human health has been the subject of numerous debates. Psychoanalysis scholars have described exile ‘as a dissociative state when a self is lost in transit’. From their point of view the most significant impact of the exilic mode is not the impossibility of the physical return, but the inability of remembering different versions of one’s self as a result of spatial and sequential disconnections. Through a psychoanalytical approach to the written exilic experience, I will investigate the textual dimension of the violence inherent in that state of forced dislocation. Through tracing and decoding what I call ‘textual voids,’ I will argue that the experience of exile is formulated most powerfully through the framework of the five senses – sight, touch, taste, smell, sound – and the complex associations and dissociations between the senses, literature, politics, and ideology that characterize the exilic experience. I propose reading strategies that help us to make sense of exile in a new way through understanding the shifting textual pulsations inherent in the physical exilic condition. Through this framework, we can recalibrate ‘exile’ as a deeply sensory experience, not just a political status; a state that is as corporeal as it is cognitive.