After the Safavid Empire collapsed in 1722, countless Shi‘i families dispersed from the capital of Isfahan, moving to “Shi‘i” towns in Iraq, Iran, India, and elsewhere. Shi‘i strongholds and the networks that connected them, therefore, crisscrossed national and ethnic “boundaries.” The movement of neo-Usulism, which has been the dominant school of thought in Twelver Shi‘ism since the late eighteenth century, exemplifies the transnational character of modern Shi‘ism. The neo-Usuli movement was founded in southern Iraq by Arab and Persian scholars, some of whom were recent immigrants from Safavid Iran. These scholars cultivated scholarly and financial relationships with Shi‘is in Iraq, Iran, and India, and developed the cities of Najaf and Karbala’ as the preeminent centers of pilgrimage and scholarship for the international Shi‘i community. By the mid-nineteenth century, Qajar rule in Iran attracted some Usuli scholars back to Iran. Although these scholars established or re-established Shi‘i centers of learning in Isfahan and other Iranian cities, the nucleus of the Shi‘i world remained in Najaf. Shi‘i scholars in Iraq influenced Iranian politics from outside its national borders. Additionally, transnational patron-client relationships allowed Shi‘i scholars in Iran and Iraq to maintain their political independence from the Qajars (and Ottomans). The rise of the Shi‘i seminary complex in Qum in the mid-twentieth century bifurcated Arab and Iranian Shi‘ism, which illustrates the increased nationalization, decentralization, and ethnicization of Shi‘ism. My research makes use of Shi‘i biographical dictionaries, the scholarly writings of neo-Usuli scholars, and family histories of the Bihbihani, Bahr al-‘Ulum, and Tabataba’i clerical dynasties. I argue that modern Shi‘ism, illustrated by neo-Usulism, emerged as a transnational movement, primarily connecting southern Iraq and Iran. This is in contradistinction to Islamic movements of the twentieth century that were forged in the context of nationalism and nation-state building. My argument that neo-Usulism is a modern transnational movement challenges the hypothesis put forward by the doyen of world-systems theory, Emmanuel Wallerstein, which suggests that modern social movements are reactions to capitalism, most of which are nationalist, socialist, or both. I contend that Wallerstein’s argument ignores modern religious movements, including neo-Usulism, which was neither socialist nor nationalist. Although Shi‘i clerics have certainly been influenced by the nationalization of the Shi‘i world, they are not bound by their national communities. Prominent Arab and Iranian Ayatollahs, therefore, continue to function in a multiplicity of transnational contexts, as illustrated by their multi-lingual websites and multinational economic ventures.

Iran’s tumultuous twentieth century witnessed the rise of competing conceptions of nationalism. In the period shortly after World War I, Iranian intelligentsia began to criticize European materialism, and to craft a totalizing spiritual conception of Iran’s national culture. Initially, they emphasized elements of pre-Islamic Zoroastrian culture to supplement a race and language-based nationalism. With the revival of Shi‘i thought in the post WWII period, the search for the spiritual content led to a reassertion of Iran’s Islamic, and in particular, Shi‘i heritage, and the creation of a nationalism first and foremost defined by the Shi‘i identity of the nation. While the ethnic nationalism of earlier decades sought to distance Iran from Arab-Islamic civilization, this emerging Shi‘i nationalism construed “the West” as the enemy of Islam bent on dividing the Islamic world. This external Other, however, now had an internal counterpart. The religious intellectuals of this period identified Iranianness with Shi‘ism, and constructed Iran’s Baha’is as the nation’s internal Other intimately connected with the external enemy. Their religiously defined nationalism was linked with the notion of Shi‘ism as a mobilizing political ideology on the one hand, and the process of politicization of anti-Baha’ism on the other. The latter emerged in the late 1930s with the appearance of The Confessions of Dolgoruki, the forged memoirs of the Russian ambassador to Iran; gained momentum with its widespread publication in the 1940s; and culminated with identifying Baha’is as an instrument of western colonialism bent on fracturing Iran and destroying the religious unity of the country. By the beginning of 1960s, Baha’is had become “the hands of colonialism.” This portrayal of an indigenous religious formation as the internal Other played a fundamental role in the process of constructing an Islamist revolutionary identity and refashioning the political role of the Muslim clergy in a rapidly-crystallizing political project that reached a climax with the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Through an in-depth study of the writings and talks of prominent religious intellectuals of the twentieth century Iran such as Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Mehdi Bazargan, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, this paper explores the conception of Shi‘i nationalism in mid-twentieth century Iran and demonstrates its linkage with anti-Baha’ism.

This paper will focus on the strategies employed by traditional Zaydī communities in northern Yemen during the Republican period (1962-2015). It builds on Bernard Haykel’s foundational work on Muhammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834) which documented the political and religious shifts within Zaydism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically, he tracked the marginalization and vilification of traditional Zaydī theological doctrines and legal principles in the period preceding the establishment of the Yemeni Republic (1962). This paper expands the scope and temporal range of Haykel’s argument, drawing on (a) primary sources acquired in the course of fieldwork in Northern Yemen and (b) important recent studies from Gabriele vom Bruck, Ayman Hamidi, and James King (see list below). It offers a theologically nuanced analysis of the myriad factors that have shaped contemporary Zaydī identity. The paper begins with an explanation of the theological views distinctive to Zaydī Shī‘ism. It then discusses the strategies employed by some sectors of the traditional Zaydī elite to accommodate the Republican regime in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This is followed by an examination of the transnational factors that contributed to the strong rejection of such apologetic approaches beginning in the 1990s. The paper concludes by arguing that the Houthis represent a newly resurgent and confident Zaydī community with two goals: (a) to refocus the political activism at the core of Zaydi theology into Republican political structures and (b) to strongly affirm seminal Zaydī theological principles. This agenda resists the state’s demonization of traditional Zaydism but also falls short of advocating the reestablishment the Imāmate. In terms of primary sources, the paper draws on a series of press releases issued by the Houthis (i.e., ‘Abd al-Malik al-Houthi) through their organization (The Believing Youth) including – most importantly – their Intellectual and Cultural Document of February 2012 which spells out their theological views in great detail. The most important secondary sources include: Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam, (Cambridge 2003). Gabriele vom Bruck, Islam, Memory and Morality in Yemen, (Palgrave 2005). Gabriele vom Bruck, “Regimes of Piety Revisited,” Die Welts des Islams 50 (2010): 185-223. Ayman Hamidi, “Inscriptions of Violence in Northern Yemen,” Middle East Studies, 40 (2009): 165-87. James King, “Zaydi Revival in a Hostile Republic,” Arabica 59 (2012): 404-45.

Saddam Hussein’s loss to the U.S.-led coalition in 1990-91 ushered in a new dynamic era of indigenization among the Iraqi Arab Shi‘i community, led by the influential cleric Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Although the Iraqi Shi‘a are often referred to as a collective, a close examination of intra-Shi‘i relations in Iraq since 1991 reveals multiple centers of power, authority and concomitant conflicts. These conflicts occurred between religious leaders based in Najaf and Karbala, populist preachers in Baghdad, religio-political activists, and politicians, among others. All of these actors struggled to define Iraqi Shi‘i communal identity in the face of a regime determined to redefine Iraqi national identity along sectarian lines (as shown convincingly by Dawisha and Baram). This process of sectarian formation played a significant role in a widening gap between different constituencies within the Shi‘i community, and holds relevance as a corrective to monolithic historiographies of the Iraqi Shi‘a as a united community. Visser, Cole, Patel, Rahimi and Khalaji have made meaningful contributions to the study of the Shi‘a of Iraq during the interwar period (1991-2003), but no previous academic study focuses on the ideological and sociological strategies employed by Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (father of Muqtada). Did al-Sadr have a coherent strategy for the establishment of an indigenous Iraqi Arab Shi‘ism? This paper draws upon the primary source writings of al-Sadr in his published legal writings titled Ma Wara al-Fiqh (What is behind Jurisprudence) and Fiqh al-Asha'ir (Tribal Jurisprudence) as well as newly published collections of his Friday sermons given between 1998 and his assassination in 1999. By performing a close reading of al-Sadr’s writings, while cross-referencing archival newspaper material and secondary literature extant in Arabic and English on the Sadrist movement, this paper offers a more nuanced analysis of the factors that have shaped one competing version of Iraqi Shi‘i identity. In doing so, this paper constructs a more complete picture of a community experiencing internal and external dynamic processes of evolution and conflict.