REL 234
Shi'ism Ascendant?
Last Offered Fall 2011
Division II
Cross-listed ARAB 234
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This course will be a survey of Islamic history from the Shi’ite perspective or better perspectives. The purpose is to provide a survey of issues in Islamic social and intellectual history from the Shi’ite margin. On that margin, Shi’ism has always been an alliance of the dispossessed and the intellectuals (assuming the latter are not among the former) and functioned in Islam to provide a vocabulary of revolution, a highly developed philosophy of religion, and a pietistic fervor in contrast to which Sunnism emerged. One consequence, intended or not, of recent U.S. actions in the Middle East has been to inflame the Sunni/Shi’ite conflicts and raise fears of Shi’ite ascendancy. But sectarian conflict is, in fact, the exception rather than the rule in Islamic history because Sunnis and Shi’a have in most places been separated or lived relatively peacefully together where they intermixed. This is the fourth time in Islamic history when the specter of an ascendant Shi’ism has occupied the Muslim community. This course will compare the three earlier putative episodes of Shi’ite ascendancy in the eighth (in Iraq), tenth (in Egypt) and sixteenth centuries C.E. (in Iran) and set these in conversation with contemporary developments. We will focus on the role of early Shi’ism as the vocabulary of an alternative vision of the legitimacy of the Islamic state, the ideas of the imamate and martyrdom, the emergence of Isma’ili and Twelver versions of Shi’ism, the conversion of Safavid Iran to Shi’ism, ecumencial efforts in the mid twentieth century, the Iranian revolution of 1979 and after.