Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T15:50:53.219Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Territorializing Piety: Genealogy, Transnationalism, and Shi‘ite Politics in Modern Lebanon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2009

Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr
Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr
Affiliation:
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Genealogies—representations of kinship and narratives of origin—are in the transnational Shi‘ite world intimately connected to politics of piety, the production of nationalism, and struggles over authority. In this essay, I am concerned with certain inflections in the links between genealogy and piety that make these terms central to contests over notions of territoriality in contemporary Shi‘ite politics. Nationalism replaces the sovereignty of God with the exclusive sovereignty of a “people” over a clearly demarcated territory, but religious language, identifications, and imagery often play prominent roles in how the imagined community of the nation is fashioned and delimited. Here I will show how, mediated through genealogy, religious leaders and pious movements with transnational ties produce religious authority, and create links to territory, to assert themselves as exemplary cultural citizens.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 533 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abisaab, Malek and Jurdi-Abisaab, Rula. N.d. Placing Hizbullah Islamists in Lebanon's History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Ajyal al-Mustafa, . 2002. Article title unavailable. June (21): 16–18. Beirut.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Cole, Juan. 2002. Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi‘ite Islam. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Colley, Linda. 1992. Britishness and Otherness: An Argument. Journal of British Studies 31: 309–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deeb, Lara. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2007. Creole Publics: Language, Cultural Citizenship, and the Spread of the Nation in Mauritius. Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, 4: 968–96.Google Scholar
El-Aswad, el-Sayed. 2006. Spiritual Genealogy: Sufism and Saintly Places in the Nile Delta. International Journal of Middle East Studies 38, 4: 501–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fahs, Hani. 1996. Al-Shi‘a wa-al-dawla fi Lubnan: Malamih fi ru'ya al-dhakira. Beirut: Dar al-Andalus.Google Scholar
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gharbieh, Hussein. 2007. Hizbullah and the Legacy of Imam Musa al-Sadr. In, Monsutti, Alessandro, Naef, Silvia, and Sabahi, Farian, eds., The other Shiites: From the Mediterranean to Central Asia. Bern: Peter Lang, 59–80.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Ho, Engseng. 2006. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iranian Cultural Center. 2002. Untitled, unpublished MS prepared by ICC employees for internal use, which includes transcriptions of Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Hashemi's speeches.Google Scholar
Juergensmeyer, Mark. 1994. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Jurdi-Abisaab, Rula. 1999. Shi‘ite Beginnings and Scholastic Tradition in Jabal ‘Amil in Lebanon. The Muslim World 89: 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jurdi-Abisaab, Rula. 2004. Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Kamalian, Muhsin and Kermani, ‘Ali Akbar Ranjbar. 1999. Izzat-i shia. Qom: Daftar-i Tabliqat-i Islami.Google Scholar
Khan, Aisha. 2001. Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as a Master Symbol. Cultural Anthropology 16, 3: 271–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurani, Muhammad. 1993. Al-juzur al-tarikhiyya lil muqawama al-islamiyya fi jabal ‘amil. Beirut: Dar al-Wasilat.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Malkii, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandaville, Peter. 2007. Global Political Islam. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Messick, Brinkley. 1996. The Calligraphic State. Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Munasinghe, Viranjini. 2002. Nationalism in Hybrid Spaces: The Production of Impurity out of Purity. American Ethnologist 29, 3: 663–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noe, Nicholas, ed. 2007. We Will Consider Any Hand that Tries to Seize Our Weapons as an Israeli Hand. In Voice of Hezbollah, The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. London: Verso, 2007, 345–46.Google Scholar
Omid-i Inqilab, . 1982. Article title unavailable. 14 Aug. (39): 18–19. Tehran.Google Scholar
Roy, Oliver. 2004. Globalized Islam: The Search for the New Ummah. London: Hurst and Company.Google Scholar
Sankari, Jamal. 2005. Fadlallah: The Making of a Radical Shi‘ite Leader. London: Saqi Books.Google Scholar
Schielke, Samuli. N.d. Being Good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, Fragmentation and the Moral Self in the Lives of Young Egyptians. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Shaery-Eisenlohr, Roschanack. 2007. Post-Revolutionary Iran and Shi‘i Lebanon: Contested Histories of Shi‘i Transnationalism. International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, 2: 271–89.Google Scholar
Shaery-Eisenlohr, Roschanack. 2008. Shi‘ite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shin, Gi-Wook. 2006. Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shryock, Andrew. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van der Veer, Peter. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Max. 2007. Institutionalizing Sectarianism: Law, Religious Culture, and the Remaking of Shi‘i Lebanon, 1920–1947. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.Google Scholar