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Sayyida zaynab in the state of exception: shiʿi sainthood as “qualified life” in contemporary syria
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In this paper, the authors examine the Syrian refugee camp cum shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab and analyze questions of religious authority, ritual practice, and pious devotion to SayyIDA Zayeb.Abstract:
According to Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception” is established by the sovereign's decision to suspend the law, and the archetypical state of exception is the Nazi concentration camp. At the same time, Agamben notes that boundaries have become blurred since then, such that even spaces like refugee camps can be thought of as states of exception because they are both inside and outside the law. This article draws on the notion of the state of exception in order to examine the Syrian refugee camp cum shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab as well as to analyze questions of religious authority, ritual practice, and pious devotion to Sayyida Zaynab. Though Sayyida Zaynab and many of her Twelver Shiʿi devotees resemble Agamben's figure of homo sacer, who marked the origin of the state of exception, they also defy Agamben's theory that humans necessarily become animal-like, leading nothing more than “bare lives” (or zoē) in states of exception.read more
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Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
TL;DR: Mahmood as discussed by the authors explores the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt.
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Layers of religious and political iconoclasm under the Islamic State: symbolic sectarianism and pre-monotheistic iconoclasm
TL;DR: The authors examined the heritage destruction undertaken by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria and argued that heritage destruction perpetrated by the IS are not only situated within a carefully articulated theological framework and key to the creation of a new and ideologically pure Islamic State, but also constituted by several complex layers of religious and political iconoclasm.
Relocating the Centers of Shīʿī Islam: Religious Authority, Sectarianism, and the Limits of the Transnational in Colonial India and Pakistan
Abstract: This dissertation rethinks the common center-periphery perspective which frames the Middle East as the seat of authoritative religious reasoning vis-à-vis a marginal South Asian Islam. Drawing on 15 months of archival research and interviews conducted in Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, and the United Kingdom, I demonstrate how Shīʿī and Sunnī religious scholars (ʿulamā) in colonial India and Pakistan negotiate a complex web of closeness and distance that connects them to eminent Muslim jurists residing in the Arab lands and Iran. The project attempts to move beyond scholarly paradigms that investigate the transnational travel of ideas in terms of either resistance and rejection, on the one hand, or wholesale adoption, on the other. Rather, I show how local South Asian scholars occupy a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of modern and contemporary Islamic thought. Relying on unexplored sources in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, the dissertation examines these dynamics through the lenses of sectarianism, reform, and religious authority. It demonstrates how Indian Shīʿīs in the 1940s were haunted by the specter of Pakistan as a potentially exclusively Sunnī state. These substantial cleavages resurfaced in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Khomeini's model of the Rule of the Jurisprudent led sectarian Deobandīs to frame Shīʿīs as detrimental to their vision of creating a model Sunnī Islamic polity which was supposed to fulfil the promise of Pakistan. In the context of internal Shīʿī debates, I pay close attention to modernist challenges to Lucknow's Shīʿī clerical establishment in the late colonial period. Building on this conflict, I discuss how both reformist ʿulamā and their
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Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies
Neve Gordon,Moriel Ram +1 more
TL;DR: This paper examined the effect of ethnic cleansing on settler colonial geographies and found that complete ethnic cleansing produces a refined form of settler colonialism similar to the colonial regime in Rhodesia before the settlers lost power and is impossible to normalize due to a series of contradictions stemming from the presence of the "indigenous other".
Journal ArticleDOI
Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf
TL;DR: Transnational Shia politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf, Laurence Louer, London: Hurst, 2008, ISBN 978-1-85065-911-2, x'+'326pp.
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Book
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the logic of sovereignty and the paradox of sovereignty in the form of the human sacer and the notion of potentiality and potentiality-and-law.
BookDOI
Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity
TL;DR: Asad as discussed by the authors explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of the secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East, and concludes that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational.
Book
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
TL;DR: Schmitt as mentioned in this paper argued that the essence of sovereignty lies in the absolute authority to decide when the normal conditions presupposed by the legal order obtain, and that every legal order ultimately rests not upon norms, but rather on the decisions of the sovereign.
Book
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
TL;DR: In this article, the subject of freedom is discussed and the topography of the Piety Movement is described. And the authors present a glossary of commonly used Arabic terms for Arabic terms.