Download or read book Shi i Reformation in Iran written by Ali Rahnema and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shi 'ism caught the attention of the world as Iran experienced her revolution in 1979 and was subsequently cast in the mold of a monolithic discourse of radical political Islam. The spokespersons of Shi'i Islam, in or out of power, have not been the sole representatives of the faith. Nonconformist and uncompromising, the Shi’i jurist and reformist Shari’at Sangelaji (1891-1944) challenged certain popular Shi’i beliefs and the mainstream clerical establishment, guarding and propagating it. In Shi'i Reformation in Iran, Ali Rahnema offers a fresh understanding of Sangelaji’s reformist discourse from a theological standpoint, and takes readers into the heart of the key religious debates in Iran in the 1940s. Exploring Sangelaji’s life, theological position and disputations, Rahnema demonstrates that far from being change resistant, debates around why and how to reform the faith have long been at the heart of Shi’i Islam. Drawing on the writings and sermons of Sangelaji, as well as interviews with his son, the book provides a detailed and comprehensive introduction to the reformist’s ideas. As such it offers scholars of religion and Middle Eastern politics alike a penetrating insight into the impact that these ideas have had on Shi’ism - an impact which is still felt today.
Download or read book Shi i Reformation in Iran the Life and Theology of Shari at Sangelaji written by Ali Rahnema and published by Lund Humphries Publishers. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shi'i Reformation in Iran, Rahnema offers a fresh understanding of Sangelaji's reformist discourse from a theological standpoint, and takes readers into the heart of the key religious debates in Iran in the 1940s. Drawing on the writings of Sangelaji, as well as interviews with his son, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the reformist's ideas. As such it offers scholars of religion and Middle Eastern politics alike a penetrating insight into the impact that these ideas have had on Shi'ism - an impact which is still felt today.
Download or read book Political Conservatism and Religious Reformation in Iran 1905 1979 written by Amir Yahya Ayatollahi and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a theoretical inquiry on the relation of the body politic with the religious movements in the time between the Constitutional Revolution and the Islamic Revolution in Iran; it illustrates speculative and historical analyses on the relationship of state, religion, and socio-political status in the late Qajar dynasty (1905-1925) and the whole Pahlavi monarchy. Particularly, it examines the applicability of "liberal conservatism" to the era of the last Shah of Iran. The thesis defines the term political conservatism in accord with Edmund Burke's philosophy. It deals next with the definition of religious reformation, the peculiar characteristics of Islam, the Shi'ite political theology, and the contradictory usages of "Islamic reformation" in the literature. The text gives an overview of the two antagonist sides of nationalism. It provides also an analysis of the Islamic Republic as a new political phenomenon in Iranian history and the transformation of all concepts after 1979. Ayatollahi aims to assess the Iranian conservatism, the possibility of conciliation between politics and religion before the collapse of the Pahlavi, and "the conditions of possibility" for any restoration of the monarchy. About the author Amir Yahya Ayatollahi received his Ph.D. from the University of Vechta, Germany. His fields of interest are political philosophy, modern Middle East, Iranian studies, and Shi'ism.
Download or read book Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation written by B.A. Roberson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays that comprise this study eschew stereotypical representations of a politicized Islam in the Mediterranean Region. The contributors consider the reality that lies behind current issues in the area and the role that an embedded Islam has played or may play in the region.
Download or read book Khomeini Iranian Revolution and the Shi ite Faith written by Muḥammad Manẓūr Nuʻmānī and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shi ism in the Twentieth Century and the Islamic Revolution of Iran written by Hasan Onat and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mysticism in Iran written by Ata Anzali and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original study of the transformation of Safavid Persia from a majority Sunni country to a Twelver Shi'i realm "Mysticism" in Iran is an in-depth analysis of significant transformations in the religious landscape of Safavid Iran that led to the marginalization of Sufism and the eventual emergence of 'irfan as an alternative Shi'i model of spirituality. Ata Anzali draws on a treasure-trove of manuscripts from Iranian archives to offer an original study of the transformation of Safavid Persia from a majority Sunni country to a Twelver Shi'i realm. The work straddles social and intellectual history, beginning with an examination of late Safavid social and religious contexts in which Twelver religious scholars launched a successful campaign against Sufism with the tacit approval of the court. This led to the social, political, and economic marginalization of Sufism, which was stigmatized as an illegitimate mode of piety rooted in a Sunni past. Anzali directs the reader's attention to creative and successful attempts by other members of the ulama to incorporate the Sufi tradition into the new Twelver milieu. He argues that the category of 'irfan, or "mysticism," was invented at the end of the Safavid period by mystically minded scholars such as Shah Muhammad Darabi and Qutb al-Din Nayrizi in reference to this domesticated form of Sufism. Key aspects of Sufi thought and practice were revisited in the new environment, which Anzali demonstrates by examining the evolving role of the spiritual master. This traditional Sufi function was reimagined by Shi'i intellectuals to incorporate the guidance of the infallible imams and their deputies, the ulama. Anzali goes on to address the institutionalization of 'irfan in Shi'i madrasas and the role played by prominent religious scholars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in this regard. The book closes with a chapter devoted to fascinating changes in the thought and practice of 'irfan in the twentieth century during the transformative processes of modernity. Focusing on the little-studied figure of Kayvan Qazvini and his writings, Anzali explains how 'irfan was embraced as a rational, science-friendly, nonsectarian, and anticlerical concept by secular Iranian intellectuals.
Download or read book States and Social Revolutions written by Theda Skocpol and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.
Download or read book Revolutionary Iran written by Michael Axworthy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy guides us through recent Iranian history from shortly before the 1979 Islamic revolution through the summer of 2009, when Iranians poured into the streets of Tehran by the hundreds of thousands, demanding free, democratic government. Axworthy explains how that outpouring of support for an end to tyranny in Iran paused and then moved on to other areas in the region like Egypt and Libya, leaving Iran's leadership unchanged. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a defining moment of the modern era. Its success unleashed a wave of Islamist fervor across the Middle East and signaled a sharp decline in the appeal of Western ideologies in the Islamic world. Axworthy takes readers through the major periods in Iranian history over the last thirty years: the overthrow of the old regime and the creation of the new one; the Iran-Iraq war; the reconstruction era following the war; the reformist wave led by Mohammed Khatami; and the present day, in which reactionaries have re-established control. Throughout, he emphasizes that the Iranian revolution was centrally important in modern history because it provided the world with a clear model of development that was not rooted in Western ideologies. Whereas the world's major revolutions of the previous two centuries had been fuelled by Western, secular ideologies, the Iranian Revolution drew its inspiration from Islam. Revolutionary Iran is both richly textured and from one of the leading authorities on the region; combining an expansive scope with the most accessible and definitive account of this epoch in all its humanity.
Download or read book The Emergence of Modern Shi ism written by Zackery M. Heern and published by Oneworld Academic. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a fresh look at the foundations of modern Islam. Scholars often locate the origins of the modern Islamic world in European colonialism or Islamic reactions to European modernity. However, this study focuses on the rise of Islamic movements indigenous to the Middle East, which developed in direct response to the collapse and decentralization of the Islamic gunpowder empires. In other words, the book argues that the Usuli movement as well as Wahhabism and neo-Sufism emerged in reaction to the disintegration and political decentralization of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires. The book specifically highlights the emergence of Usuli Shi‘ism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The long-term impact of the Usuli revival was that Shi‘i clerics gained unprecedented social, political, and economic power in Iran and southern Iraq. Usuli clerics claimed authority to issue binding legal judgments, which, they argue, must be observed by all Shi‘is. By the early nineteenth century, Usulism emerged as a popular, fiercely independent, transnational Islamic movement. The Usuli clerics have often operated at the heart of social and political developments in modern Iraq and Iran and today dominate the politics of the region.
Download or read book Shi a Minorities in the Contemporary World written by Scharbrodt Oliver Scharbrodt and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global migrations flows in the 20th century have seen the emergence of Muslim diaspora and minority communities in Europe, North America and other parts of the world. While there is a growing body of research on Muslim minorities in various regional contexts, the particular experiences of Shi'a Muslim minorities across the globe has only received scant attention.This book offers new comparative perspectives of Shi'a minorities outside of the so-called 'Muslim heartland' (the Middle East, North Africa, Central and South Asia). It includes contributions on Shi'a minority communities in Europe, North and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia that emerged out of migration from the Middle East and South Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries in particular. As a 'minority within a minority', Shi'a Muslims face the double challenge of maintaining as Islamic as well as a particular Shi'a identity in terms of communal activities and practices, public perception and recognition.
Download or read book Women and Politics in Iran Veiling Unveiling and Reveiling written by Hamideh Sedghi and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were urban women veiled in the early 1900s, unveiled from 1936 to 1979, and reveiled after the 1979 revolution? This question forms the basis of Hamideh Sedghi's original and unprecedented contribution to politics and Middle Eastern studies. Using primary and secondary sources, Sedghi offers new knowledge on women's agency in relation to state power. In this rigorous analysis she places contention over women at the centre of the political struggle between secular and religious forces and demonstrates that control over women's identities, sexuality, and labor has been central to the consolidation of state power. Sedghi links politics and culture with economics to present an integrated analysis of the private and public lives of different classes of women and their modes of resistance to state power.
Download or read book Reaching for Power written by Yitzhak Nakash and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the world focuses on the conflict in Iraq, the most important political players in that country today are not the Sunni insurgents. Instead, they are Iraq's Shi'I majority--part of the Middle East's ninety million Shi'I Muslims who hold the key to the future of the region and the relations between Muslim and Western societies. So contends Yitzhak Nakash, one of the world's foremost experts on Shi'ism. With his characteristic verve and style, Nakash traces the role of the Shi'is in the struggle that is raging today among Muslims for the soul of Islam. He shows that in contrast to the growing militancy among Sunni groups since the 1990s, Shi'is have shifted their focus from confrontation to accommodation with the West. Constituting sixty percent of the population of Iraq, they stand squarely at the center of the U.S government's attempt to remake the Middle East and bring democracy to the region. This groundbreaking book addresses the crucial importance of Shi'is to the U.S. endeavor. Yet it also alerts readers to the strong nationalist sentiments of Shi'is, underscoring the difficult challenge that the United States faces in attempting to impose a new order in the Middle East. The book provides a comprehensive historical perspective on Shi'ism, beginning with the emergence of the movement during the seventh century, continuing through its rise as a political force since the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, and leading up to the Iraqi elections of January 2005. Drawing extensively on Arabic sources, this comparative study highlights the reciprocal influences shaping the political development of Shi'is in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Lebanon, as well as the impact of the revival of Shi'ism on the larger Arab world. The narrative concludes with an assessment of the risks and possibilities arising from the assertion of Shi'I power in Iraq and from America's attempt to play an increasingly forceful role in the Middle East. A landmark book and a work of remarkable scholarship, Reaching for Power illuminates the Shi'a resurgence amid the shifting geopolitics of the Middle East.
Download or read book Secularization of Islam in Post Revolutionary Iran written by Mahmoud Pargoo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the trajectory of the secularization of Islam in Iran, this book explains how efforts to Islamize society led, self-destructively, to its secularization. The research engages a range of debates across different fields, emphasizing the political and epistemological instability of the basic categories such as Islam, Sharia, and secularism. The volume is an interdisciplinary study of both the history of Islamic revival and Khomeini’s very specific merger of Islamic law and mysticism. It traces back the process of secularization to the early encounter of Iranian intellectuals with Europeans and adoption of their fundamental framework in an Islamic guise. The process continued until the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, when Khomeini tried to substantively de-secularize Iranian social imaginaries. His attempts were not followed up by his followers, who vigorously reinstated the previous trend, after his death, resulting in a polity that is mostly secular but with Islamic ornaments. Bringing together area studies (Iran), religious studies (Islam), and political theory (secularism), this interdisciplinary volume places findings in a broader narrative that is both specific to Iran and broad enough to engage a global readership.
Download or read book Temptations of Power written by Shadi Hamid and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the "end of history." The Berlin Wall had fallen; liberal democracy had won out. But what of illiberal democracy--the idea that popular majorities, working through the democratic process, might reject gender equality, religious freedoms, and other norms that Western democracies take for granted? Nowhere have such considerations become more relevant than in the Middle East, where the uprisings of 2011 swept the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups to power. In Temptations of Power, Shadi Hamid draws on hundreds of interviews with leaders and activists from across the region to advance a new understanding of how Islamist movements change over time. He puts forward the bold thesis that repression "forced" Islamists to moderate their politics, work in coalitions, de-emphasize Islamic law, and set aside the dream of an Islamic state. Meanwhile, democratic openings in the 1980s--and again during the Arab Spring--pushed Islamists back toward their original conservatism. With the uprisings of 2011, Islamists found themselves in an enviable position, but one for which they were unprepared. Groups like the Brotherhood combine the features of both political parties and religious movements, leading to an inherent tension they have struggled to resolve. However pragmatic they may be, their ultimate goal remains the Islamization of society. When the electorate they represent is conservative as well, they can push their own form of illiberal democracy while insisting they are carrying out the popular will. This can lead to overreach and significant backlash. Yet, while the Egyptian coup and the subsequent crackdown were a devastating blow for the Islamist "project," obituaries of political Islam are premature. As long as the battle over the role of religion in public life continues, Islamist parties in countries as diverse as Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan will remain an important force whether in the ranks of opposition or the halls of power. But what are the key factors driving their evolution? A timely and provocative reassessment, Hamid's account serves as an essential compass for those trying to understand where the region's varied Islamist groups have come from and where they might be headed.
Download or read book Political Conservatism and Religious Reformation in Iran 1905 1979 written by Amir Yahya Ayatollahi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-19 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a theoretical inquiry on the relation of the body politic with the religious movements in the time between the Constitutional Revolution and the Islamic Revolution in Iran; it illustrates speculative and historical analyses on the relationship of state, religion, and socio-political status in the late Qajar dynasty (1905-1925) and the whole Pahlavi monarchy. Particularly, it examines the applicability of “liberal conservatism” to the era of the last Shah of Iran. The thesis defines the term political conservatism in accord with Edmund Burke’s philosophy. It deals next with the definition of religious reformation, the peculiar characteristics of Islam, the Shi'ite political theology, and the contradictory usages of “Islamic reformation” in the literature. The text gives an overview of the two antagonist sides of nationalism. It provides also an analysis of the Islamic Republic as a new political phenomenon in Iranian history and the transformation of all concepts after 1979. Ayatollahi aims to assess the Iranian conservatism, the possibility of conciliation between politics and religion before the collapse of the Pahlavi, and “the conditions of possibility” for any restoration of the monarchy.
Download or read book Innovation in Islam written by Mehran Kamrava and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In a clear and historically incisive argument, Kamrava and the other contributors indicate how the Islamic concept of innovation (Arabic, bid ‘a) is an essentially contested and adaptive concept. Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims have vigorously argued about its meaning and how to apply it. This incisive collection of essays range far beyond the confines of theology and jurisprudence, integrating ideological concerns with the exigencies of mundane ones, as well as crossing the sectarian divide of Sunni and Shia.” —Dale Eickelman, author of Muslim Politics "The economic and political underdevelopment of the Islamic world is commonly attributed to conservatism rooted in Islam. This splendid collection of provocative essays addresses the issue from several different perspectives and in various contexts. Collectively, the essays provide a broad introduction to the topic of innovation in Islam, both through what they teach and what they invite the reader to pursue." —Timur Kuran, author of The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East “Muhammad brought new ideas and practices to the monotheistic tradition, but Muslim scholars interpreting the Qur’an and ahadith sought to squelch ideas that smacked of innovation. Such is the conventional wisdom. But Mehran Kamrava leads a stable of distinguished scholars in demonstrating persuasively that innovation has never ceased to mark the Islamic tradition. Indeed, the greatest modern innovators may be those Islamists who denounce innovation! These powerful essays overwhelm the conventional wisdom.” —Robert D. Lee, author of Religion and Politics in the Middle East: Identity, Ideology, Institutions, and Attitudes
