This panel contends that activism in the Shi‘i world during the 20th and 21st centuries has been most successful when drawing upon social and intellectual resources available from within the Shi‘i tradition, and that failing to do so, or intentionally excluding such resources, places activists and regimes at a disadvantage. The panel brings together papers that focus on actors and movements within Shi‘i milieus who, despite their adherence or non-adherence to Shi‘ism, reimagined and reshaped the socio-political order in Iran and the Arab world. Four of the papers discuss the activism of Shi‘i scholars and how their ideologies manifested in the Shi‘i communities of Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. An additional paper examines a communist movement that developed as a competing ideology in Iran leading up to the Islamic revolution, exemplifying a challenge to the Shi‘i establishment in Iran.
Activists in the Shi‘i world focused their attention (and sometimes ire) on both European imperialists and their national governments during the course of the past century. This panel illustrates that Socialist and Islamist ideologies were among the most prominent frameworks employed by activists in their attempts to enhance their socio-political positions in Shi‘i contexts. Their contestation for power and authority exhibited a wide range of modes of activism. Three papers focus on armed revolt against British imperialists, the Ba’thist regime, and the pre-revolutionary Iranian monarchy, while two additional papers shed light on ideological formulations and social activism that lays the groundwork for resistance to pre-existing understandings of Shi‘i religio-political authority and its outworking in their societies.
The research represented in these five papers address the following questions: How aware are religious and political activists of their claims on the public space and does this determine their strategies? To what extent does the pre-existing authority, of clerics and non-clerics, play a role in revolutionary movements and activism? How has activism affected the structures of power and authority in Shi‘i contexts? Is dissent in post-colonial contexts a continuation from colonial times? To answer these and additional questions, the authors of these papers have approached their topics using historical, sociological, and anthropological theoretical lenses to analyze primary source materials that include interviews, government documents, speeches, memoir literature, newspapers, pamphlets, and tracts. In doing so, this panel provides a significant contribution to scholarly understanding of social, political, and ideological activism in the Shi‘i World.
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Dr. Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
This paper addresses the emergence of the Organization of Communist Unity (Sazman-i vahdat-i kumunisti) which formed out of the Popular Front of Iran (Jibhih-yi milli-yi Iran) and its Organizations abroad, and the process by which it came to publicly advocate the principles of armed struggle and internationalist proletarian solidarity. Much like the Cuban Fidel Castro or the Palestinian George Habash, these men and women began as anti-colonial nationalists, who steadily concluded that American imperialism, the world capitalist system and the oppression and exploitation they both perpetuated were inextricably intertwined. The only antidote was held to be revolutionary socialism and the overthrow of the Pahlavi ancien régime.
These individuals were crucially shaped by a foundational trauma, namely the MI6-CIA orchestrated overthrow of the nationalist government of Muhammad Musaddiq, for which they held foreign imperialists and home-grown reactionaries responsible. These events gave rise to the search for a radical explanation and alternative to the authoritarian impasse, which had made civil contestation of the political order well-nigh impossible.
The Organizations of the Popular Front Abroad sought to represent the Popular Front inside Iran, the original umbrella of disparate groupings and political personalities formed in 1949, which pioneered the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 and the Musaddiq government’s defence of the principle of nationalisation to the great chagrin of Britain’s Labour and Conservative governments. Several of these young nationalist students who had been sent abroad to continue their studies during the 1960s found themselves radicalised while residing in the metropole and against the backdrop of the waves of decolonization and resistance to imperial interventionism.
Understanding how Communist Unity emerged out of the Organizations of the National Front Abroad, and its conversion to the cause of armed struggle illuminates several key ideological and political debates of the period. While also demonstrating how Iranian activists’ participation in the Tricontinental Moment converged and coincided with that of other regional and international actors, resulting in novel modalities of political praxis and theorising within the Iranian context. The paper draws upon memoir literature, but more crucially, newspapers, pamphlets and tracts published and disseminated by Vahdat, as well as the Organizations of the National Front of Iran.
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Dr. Babak Rahimi
This paper reexamines Ali Shariati’s “socialist Islam” in his attempt to synthesize socialism and Shia Islam, and adaption of revolutionary Marxist sociology from a performative theoretical perspective. I argue that Shariati’s Socialist Islam was primarily a construct of public speaking as a set of political-theological rhetorical performances at the Hosseinyeh Ershad, Tehran, where he innovatively framed Islam according to set of performative paradigms for a growing audience of urban middle-class in pre-revolutionary Iran. Based on interviews and close reading of his speeches, such “performative paradigms” are defined in terms of affective, embodied and social imaginary practices that heightened a sense of revolutionary action in meta-historic time and space. Reference to figures such as Abu Dhar al-Ghifari, Muhammad Iqbal, Ali ibn Abu Talib, Ibrahim, along with evocation of metaphoric landscapes such as “desert” and use of poetic language in rethinking history and Islam, serve as performative actions that not only discursively re-narrate reality, but also seek to change the reality which is described. Such “change” is ultimately, I argue, about conjuring revolutionary experience marked by, following Hannah Arendt, an “exhilarating awareness of the human capacity of beginning.” The paper is divided into two sections. The first part, mostly historical, looks at Shariati’s political intellectual activities at the Hosseinyeh Ershad, established by Mohammad Homayoon Nasser Minachi and Morteza Motahari, in 1967 in northern Tehran. It considers academic, religious and baazar networks set in Hosseinyeh Ershad as a modernist religious center for the new middle class urbanite Iranians. The second part of the paper is theoretical and examines Shariati’s performative activism as a public speaker. This section is primarily concerned with the question of idealogization of Shia Islam in the Socialist critique of late capitalism, consumerism and liberal democracy, and complex ways ideology become a public act of contentious performance. Finally, the paper demonstrates that a cross-fertilization of Socialist and Islamist ideologies provided innovative frameworks for the construction of alternative worldviews. Such worldviews vied for legitimacy in the form of public performances for mass audiences, and also appealed to wide range of modes of activism.
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Prof. Zackery Heern
This paper addresses Shi‘i activism as it relates to British imperialism in Iraq during and after World War One. Research for this paper is based on the writings of Shi‘i clerics and British officials as well as British government records. Creation narratives of the Iraqi state primarily focus on the activity of British imperialists, which diminishes the role played by Iraqis. Scholars, therefore, have conceptualized the Shi‘i experience in Iraq from perspectives of failure, victimization, and sectarianism. Instead of assuming that British imperialists single-handedly created Iraq, I argue that the strained relationship between British and Shi‘i officials played a decisive role in the formation of the Iraqi state. Shi‘i clerics ultimately rejected direct British rule in an attempt to assert their own authority in the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The calculus of the British government and Shi‘i clerics was dramatically altered as a result of the British mandate, the Shi‘i revolt, and the British counter-revolt. During this process, Shi‘i modes of dissent directed towards Britain included the issuance of anti-colonial fatwas, the formation of nationalist secret societies, public solidarity with Sunnis, and armed revolution supported by charitable giving. British coercive action targeting the Shi‘i community entailed discrediting Shi‘i clerics as treacherous anti-Arab Iranians, cutting off the water supply to Karbala’, and countering the Shi‘i revolt with an aerial bombing campaign.
Anti-British Shi‘i activism and British contempt for Shi‘i clerics pushed Britain to establish patron-client relations with non-Shi‘i sources of power, especially tribal shaykhs and Sunni notables. It is my contention that the British desire to incorporate Kurdish territory into Iraq was partially an attempt to increase the non-Shi‘i population of the country. It was precisely because the Shi‘i community comprised the majority of Iraq’s population (even after Kurdish incorporation) that British officials discarded the idea of holding democratic elections. The political center of Iraq, primarily composed of British-backed Sunni Arabs, disenfranchised the Shi‘i community, which pushed some Shi‘i clerics in Iraq to adopt the less activist position of piously rejecting the political order. The Shi‘i-British divide ultimately resulted in Britain’s hasty departure from Iraq and Shi‘i marginalization in the new state, which radically altered the roles that Shi‘i mujtahids and British officials hoped to play in post-Ottoman Iraq.
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Dr. David Siddhartha Patel
Following the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr in February 1999, Iraqi government security services clashed with mourners and protesters in Baghdad and southern cities. The regime reestablished order within days. A month later, however, Sadrists attempted to launch coordinated uprisings in several cities in an effort to topple the Ba‘ath Party. This failed uprising was followed by a fierce crackdown on the Shiite clergy, a systematic dismantling of Sadrist networks, and a reorganization of Ba‘ath leadership in the South. Sadrists were forced underground, only to suddenly and (to some, surprisingly) reappear after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
This paper examines these little-known uprisings from the perspectives of rebels, Iraqi civilians, and the regime. The author conducted field work in Iraq and interviewed witnesses to the uprisings and Sadrist clerics who planned and participated in them. The paper also examines regime documents from this period available in the archives of the Regional Command of the Ba‘ath Party and other Iraqi government agencies that now are housed at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. Finally, the paper looks at available U.S. government documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act Requests and the few secondary sources in English and Arabic on these events.
The paper explores the extent to which the regime prepared for protests following the assassination as well as how surprised officials were by the coordinated revolt in March. Regime documents shed light on the extent to which Sadrists have embellished the events of 1999 to justify their claims to post-Saddam power and reparations. The paper explains how the uprisings and subsequent crackdown contributed to post-2003 divisions among Sadrists, animosity between Sadrists and Shiite groups in exile at the time (particularly SCIRI/Badr), and the influence of clerics who survived the Baath period, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. It also speaks to ongoing debates about state power and the fragility of the Ba‘ath regime in the late 1990s and, more generally, how authoritarian governments monitor and respond to demonstrations and forms of revolt.
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Mr. Robert J. Riggs
This paper posits that the late Shi‘i clerical activist Shaykh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr of Saudi Arabia represented a culmination of the nexus of regional political competitions, transnational religious knowledge networks, inter-generational tensions in contemporary Shi‘ism, and radical post-revolutionary Shi‘i politics. As both a receptor of these trends and an innovator, Nimr underwent significant transformations in his ideology and activities that ultimately culminated in his 2 January 2016 execution by the Saudi authorities. He spent earlier periods of his life on educational migrations to Iran and Syria, grappling with changing theories on the roles of religious leadership within political regimes and how that connected with International Human Rights principles. In doing so, Nimr located himself within the ever-changing Shi‘i religious and educational pilgrimage networks that triangulate between Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf states. Returning to his homeland in eastern Saudi Arabia, his influence grew in proportion to his advocacy for greater religious freedoms for his Shi‘i compatriots. Nimr underwent a complex process of sectarian identity formation, which played a significant role in a widening gap between himself, his Sunni compatriots, and even different constituencies within the Shi‘i community in Saudi’s Eastern Province. Thus, a more rigorous examination of his life holds relevance as a corrective to monolithic historiographies of the Saudi Shi‘a as a united community. Applying social movement theory and framing him within the processes of Globalization shows the complex intersection of religion and politics within a marginalized religio-political community. In doing so, this paper constructs a more complete picture of a community experiencing internal and external dynamic processes of evolution and conflict. The paper uses primary source material from the speeches and writings of Nimr and secondary literature drawn from the growing body of work by scholars such as Corboz, Matthiesen, and Louer on contemporary Shi‘i socio-political movements and religious authority in the Arab world post-1979 and theoretical literature on social movements and globalization.
