Search

As Iraqi forces invaded the Iranian border shortly after the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) participated in the battle along with the debilitated Iranian Army. The IRGC was a young religious-revolutionary institution that lacked the resources that revolutionary armies and militias conventionally rely on. Nevertheless, it survived the battle pressure and even achieved relative military successes in the second year of the war. By examining personal narratives written by Iranian veterans, this article argues that in the void of conventional resources in the first year of the war, the Guards retrieved elements of their Shia background to recognize a religiously inspired charisma in every combatant who would devotedly step up for martyrdom. This shared understanding of the omnipotent charisma was then acknowledged in action—by commanders' deployment of it to impose order and through frequently held Shia rituals on the battlefield. It thereby created an alternative source of cohesion and motivation that led to the IRGC's survival and prepared them for further successful steps by the end of the war's first year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Muḥammad Mahdī Shams al-Dīn's unstudied work, Fasād al-ʿalāqa al-zawjiyya: Wilāyat al-ḥākim al-sharʿī. Shams al-Dīn, who at the time was the head of the Supreme Islamic Shiʿi Council (SISC) and oversaw the religious courts in Lebanon dealing with personal status laws (marriage, divorce, child custody, inheritance laws), witnessed at firsthand women's suffering, loss of rights, and the long court battles when a husband refused to divorce. The injustices committed against women by some men prompted Shams al-Dīn to find a juristic basis for curtailing men's power and for defending women's rights to custody, maintenance, and the deferred bridal gift. In the aforementioned work, Shams al-Dīn examines the scope and limits of the jurist's authority, and whether such authority allows the jurist to execute divorce without the husband's approval. His understanding of the concept of the jurist's authority over the unwilling husband, coupled with his theoretical considerations on marital relations, has wider implications for Lebanese Shiʿi Muslim women and Jaʿfarī religious courts in Lebanon. Despite the profound nature of his reforms, Shams al-Dīn's work is problematic, in that he leaves the husband's unilateral right to divorce (even if provisionally) untouched and falls short of finding the theoretical basis for a contract in which equality between the spouses is built-in (even though it is possible in Shiʿi law). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Adab Al-Kufa is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The peculiarity of Kitāb al-Aškāl wa-l-qarāʾin, the opening section in the printed editions of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Barqī's (d. 274/888 or 280/894) Kitāb al-Maḥāsin, is easily discernable: it is sub-divided into chapters bearing numeric titles, from “The Chapter on Three” to “The Chapter on Ten”. Each of these chapters contains various Imamite or prophetic traditions whose message is related in one way or another to the number mentioned in its title. Attempting to shed additional light on the Shiite hadith literature prior to its canonization during the Buwayhid era (334/945-447/1055), this article examines the relationship between style and content within this numerical framework. Being the earliest extant Shiite example of a numerical treatise, the present paper sets out to trace the author's possible sources of inspiration as well as the work's impact on later generations of Shiite scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the rise of Mahdism within Shi'a political Islam during Ahmadinejad's presidency did not lead to a significant break with previous persuasions. The relevance of Mahdism within the politicised and ideologised Shi'a Islam in Iran has been on the rise since the second half of 20th century. The issue occurred in Shi'a political philosophy and theory prior to the Islamic Revolution in Iran and in the post-revolutionary period, Mahdism became an inherent part of the Islamic political system. The emphasis placed on Mahdism during Ahmadinejad's political career could be also explained by the complex relationships among key political, cultural, economic and religious actors. This article conceptualises Mahdism as a doctrinal catch within the Shi'a political Islam in Iran, focusing on the rise of Mahdism and on the roles key religious leaders played since 1978. In this regard, the role of political philosopher Ali Shariati and theoretician Ayatollah Khomeini are investigated. Revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran is also evaluated in the text though more attention is paid to the issue of Mahdism. Specifically, the article looks at the "timing" of Mahdism during Ahmadinejad's period in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on fieldwork that explores the social, cultural, and embodied organization of Shi'a pilgrimage practices in Shiraz, Iran, specifically the ways in which women interact with the shrine. Pilgrimage (ztyarat)' in Iran is a daily practice that carries an important role in cultural interactions and gives life to the religious experience. While places of pilgrimage usually contain a gendered division, women tend to hold a role of power in (non-Western) conventional dimensions of the religious practice. This is due to the informal nature of shrines, which, unlike other religious settings, offer a deep-seated intimacy and freedom of movement. In a timeline of six weeks, I investigated the culture of the shrine by focusing on three specific shrines and observed the role of women in relation to expressions of power and agency. An integral part of this research has been the exploration of Shi'a Islam as a sensorial experience, specifically the practice of touch to the physical pilgrimage sites as a means of becoming closer to God. How are women's relations with the shrine embodied? What are the various modalities of agency that are operative in these interactions? I have engaged with ethnographic material, which consists of interviews, informal conversations, personal observations and photographs of women and religious spaces. By participating in pilgrimage, and observing the way aestheticized space is created and divided, I have attempted to display the role and power of women in Iranian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses aspects of contemporary Shiah Islam with an emphasis on modern media technology and religious authority embodied in shari'ah, or Islamic, law. The central focus of the article is on the personalization of shari'ah discourse in the digital age and the era that no longer depends on print. The article examines Twelver Shiah jurisprudence utilizing the fieldwork conducted among the Shiah communities in Lebanon. These communities were brought to political consciousness in the 1960s by Musa al-Sadr, an Islamic cleric.

In his article Dr. Reza Hajatpour describes and analyses the development of the Iranian philosophy since the 19th century. He points out two philosophical tendencies inside the Iranian landscape of philosophy of the last 200 years: On the one side progress is regarded as an obstacle for critical discussion about Western philosophy. Therefore, Hajatpour classifies this group as an "imitator within the own traditions." On the other side critical voices refuse the Iranian philosophy and its Shiite tradition because of its backwardness. Thus, the Iranian philosophy has become an "imitator of the modern Western philosophy" as Hajatpour figures out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relationship between religiosity and support for Islamic rule in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Are high levels of religiosity associated with an ideology characterized by clerical rule, supremacy of Islamic law, and state enforcement of Islam? The data come from a random sampling survey conducted in Tehran in August 2003. It covers a range of questions on religiosity, social, and political attitudes, and has a sample of 412 respondents. The analyses show that religiosity is closely affiliated with an ideological understanding of Islam in Tehran. Interestingly, political dissatisfaction does not negatively affect this association. Shi‘ism in Iran has evolved from a “world-shaking” force into a “world-legitimating” force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issues related to the aggressiveness of the Iran's foreign policy. The policy has emerged after the September 11, 2003 terrorist attacks which caused a great concern in Washington and in European capitals and its neighbors. It focuses on the nuclear program that aims to produce nuclear weapons and on the attacks in the U.S., Great Britain, Saudi Arabia and other nearby countries who fear the Shia dominance and deeper sectarian violence in Iraq. The constraints of policy have suggested a number of positive and negative incentives that the U.S. officials can employ to influence the behavior without increasing the need for deterrence or triggering retaliation.

The article presents an essay on the rise of Shia Islam in the Persian Gulf Region. It explores on the three interwoven developments that made the Shia prominent including the strengthening of Iran's geopolitical position, the countries where major parts of the population are followers of Shiat Ali, the decline of the U.S. power in Iraq and the success of Iran to halt its nuclear program. It discusses the four political factors that constrain the Shia crescent including domestic and international politics, nationalism and economics. It elaborates the rejection by the Iraqis of the rule of jurisprudence and the differences emanating from the complicated structure of the marjaiyyat that undermines the spread of Shia culture supporting the Iranian dominance.

This is an article in two parts. The first part discusses current research in psychoactive preparations of ergot in various religious systems with a particular emphasis on Persian, Greek, Jewish and Islamic sources. Certain poems, hadith, and scriptural writings suggest an entheogenic heritage to various ancient sects that exerted and received philosophical and ritual influences over large distances and over time. Particularly, some esoteric Shia and Sufi writings are highly suggestive of a ‘celestial botany’ that employed psychoactive plants for initiatory and ritual purposes. The second part will address current research methods that render ergot alkaloids nontoxic and entheogenic, a most crucial part of the discussion in the absence of a modern bioassay. This is essential, as without a chemical reality to support that such a preparation of entheogenic ergot is possible, all ergot theories concerning mystery traditions would remain largely speculative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the treatment of the Prophet's mount in Shi‘ite tradition. We discuss the different opinions concerning the ass's name, ‘Ufayr or Ya‘fur and present various traditions concerning utterances spoken by it, including utterances addressed to the Prophet, and other cases of human-like behaviour on its part, such as an ability to distinguish Muslims from Jews. We then go on to compare the Prophet's ass to those of other prophets, and find a number of similarities between them, in particular their ability to speak a human language. We also discuss the ass's death, which according to Shi‘ite tradition was by suicide, occasioned by the ass's fear following his master's death that someone else, not a prophet, would use it as a mount. We compare the Prophet's ass to those of Noah, and Solomon's Hoopoe, and show how Shi‘ite tradition has focused on similarities among them and utilized those to support the idea of the Imamate as the Prophet's legacy in Shi‘ite doctrine. We further discuss the preference which Shi‘ite Imams had for asses as against other mounts, a preference based on their wish to follow in the Prophet's footsteps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Imāmī legal theory, the akhbār of the Imams form one of the material sources of law, alongside the Qur'ān and Prophetic hadīths. The akhbār are presented in compendia, assembled by Shi'ite collectors in the fourth and fifth century AH/tenth and eleventh century CE, four of which subsequently came to be regarded as "canonical" in Imāmī law. In this essay, I examine the processes at work in the collation of these "canonical" akhbār collections. These processes, I argue, were influenced by an emerging juristic tradition in Imāmī Shi'ism. As Imāmī thinkers became increasingly concerned with fiqh and the elucidation of the Sharī'a, the collectors developed new techniques of selection, presentation and organisation. The akhbār collections became a material source upon which jurists could draw in their fiqh discussions, rather than the law itself. As an example of the processes at work in the collection and presentation of akhbār, I examine the issue of tayammum, ritual purification by sand rather than water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the evolution of the Shi`ite learned institution in the nineteenth century. Appearance of supreme exemplar or marja`-i taqlid for the whole Shi`ite community; Role of the exemplar in the history of Iran and Iraq; Juridical mechanism that molded the institutionalization of the marja`-i taqlid in the nineteenth century.