Yafa Shanneik’s The Art of Resistance in Islam: The Performance of Politics among Shi’i Women in the Middle East and Beyond is a groundbreaking study that crosses disciplines, methodologies, and geographies to demonstrate how Shi’i Muslim women’s innovative approach to religiosity destabilizes the hegemony of gender norms in their communities and power structurers of the international nation-state system. Based on fieldwork and interviews with Shi’i women in London, Dublin, Kuwait, and Bahrain, Shanneik traces meaningful relations within a rarely accessed Shi’i community that follows the cleric Mohammad al-Shirazi (1928–2001). This community is generally known as the Shirazis. Shanneik’s subtle and insightful theoretical critique in the introduction is reminiscent of, but eloquently glides past, Saba Mahmood’s theoretical contribution offered nearly two decades ago (see Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, 2005), which many feminist scholars have since attempted to surpass with limited success.
Most studies of resistance among Muslims focus on men and center on the nation-state. This book’s approach takes place in the context of the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (see Shamiran Mako and Valentine Moghadam, After the Arab Uprisings, 2021) and elsewhere (e.g., see Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch, Raga Makawi, and Alex De Waal, Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy, 2022), including the September 2022 protests in Iran (Shirin Saeidi, Women and the Islamic Republic, 2022) that are led not only by women. Both revolutions and counterrevolutions in the twenty-first century are also transnational in character and demonstrate the limits of the nation-state container, its citizenship regime, and subsequent fantasies of sovereignty (Colin Beck et al., On Revolutions, 2022). Although several scholars from different disciplinary perspectives have developed moral arguments on the problematic nature of the modern nation-state and its mechanisms of control such as citizenship, Shanneik illustrates how we can see that the effort to overcome these structures is already underway if we analyze resistance with creative methodological approaches. This study’s interdisciplinary contribution is of interest to anyone grappling with the intersection between resistance, the international hierarchical system, ideology, and gender.
Theoretically sophisticated yet accessible to nonspecialists, Shanneik builds on Saba Mahmood’s agenda-setting work by reengaging with theorists who influenced Mahmood’s conceptualization of agency. In the introduction, Shanneik astutely unpacks the originality of Mahmood’s thesis according to which a nonbinary understanding of agency has the capacity to entail both resistance to the status quo and the embodiment of it. Shanneik then sketches the philosophical works that influenced Mahmood’s thinking and reconsiders the theoretical contributions of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. She reconstructs the ways in which these theorists approach the consolidation of power, subject formation, and agency in their thinking. In doing so, she offers scholars of religion, gender, and politics an exceptionally compelling argument on the force of Muslim women’s resistive power beyond Mahmood’s field-defining book. Although for Mahmood the body is either “a medium for or a sign of the self,” Shanneik argues that “the body in performative practices is regarded as both a sign of the self and a medium for collective gender self-realization” (pp. 17–18).
The new Shi’i ritual practice, which the Shirazi women in Shanneik’s study engage in, is one where the performative body crosses individual and collective boundaries to connect to “the transcendental articulated through gendered terms but operating within existing internal and external power structures” (pp. 12–13). These bodily performances include walking on hot coals, self-hitting (latam), and self-flagellation (tatbir)—practices that have traditionally been regarded as male dominated. As Shanneik explains in chapter 1, these innovative bodily performances fall within a historical context of discrimination and sidelining of Shi’i populations in the Gulf. Against this transnational backdrop, such embodied activities both undergird and encompass resistive politics in the Shi’i European diaspora. Furthering the emphasis on the centrality of historical contingencies to Shi’i women’s resistive approaches, chapter 2 argues that the Shi’i women whom Shanneik met during her research reinterpret Shi’i history to address the immediate forms of gender and political discrimination they have experienced. This chapter challenges mainstream feminist studies of the Middle East that shape our understanding of women’s role in politics by shifting attention to the past and tracing from it a linear trajectory into the current moment. Following this approach, some analysts even make predictions about the future. Shanneik instead shows how the real-time lived experiences of people in their everyday life shape their engagement with history—even highly protected religious history—in unpredictable ways. The sensory experiences gained from Shi’i rituals, such as those involving food spread on the ground in honor of specific Shi’i figures (sufra), connect women to history, their bodies working as a medium that defies the limits of time and space. In this way, Shanneik’s approach unlocks layers of the transcendental, born of imaginative possibilities that are rarely associated with international politics or the international hierarchical system of governance.
The book’s central claim—namely, that these new forms of religious practice among Shi’i women galvanize a type of politics geared toward gender justice among Shi’i Muslims globally—may be controversial for readers. I am nevertheless convinced by this line of argumentation. That being said, with respect to gender equality some may wonder what equality between women is when religiosity and exceptionalism continue to undergird women’s bids for gender justice. The different sensory-oriented enactments that Shanneik explores in her study—from tashabih (passion plays) in chapter 3 and aestheticization of politics with tatbir in chapter 4 to Fatima’s apparitions in chapter 5 and the politicizing of language in poetry and art in chapter 6 —all rest on the notion that religious authenticity is both a superior virtue and one that can be embodied by some better than others. In other words, this worldview, like many others, also reproduces a citizenry hierarchy that does not jibe with the pursuit of freedom. It poses questions about the outcome of revolutionary cultural practices such as the ones that Shanneik discusses in her study.
One area for future studies to delve into is how technology and social media are often used by states to manipulate these sensory and cultural approaches to resistance among activists, including Shi’i women. This line of inquiry has been explored in other works (e.g., see Marc Owen Jones, “Propaganda, Fake News and Fake Trends,” International Journal of Communication, 13, 2019). The use of “social media and other digital platforms” by Shanneik’s interlocutors was an important factor in her study but ultimately not the main focus of the second half of the book (e.g., Shirazi women identified as “netizens,” p. 60). Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, scholars have drawn significant attention to the ways in which states intervene in social media activism with the aim of demobilization. As such, it is important to see how European and Middle Eastern states have reacted to this new gendered activism among Shi’i Muslims and what this means for the real-time potency of such activist enactments.
Shanneik’s pathbreaking study not only shows how organized activism among Muslim women transforms their sense of self, the communities, and nation-states in which they live but also has powerful ramifications for the international system and the future of the nation-state. The book demonstrates that citizens deemed as “undesirable” by states can no longer be exiled and forgotten. This is because the bodies of women are crucial to the geopolitics of the Middle East and beyond (e.g., see Nicola Pratt, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, 2020). Indeed, the borders of states and their militaristic capabilities, which uphold state sovereignty, cannot prevent change or the evolution of citizenship within or without specific boundaries. One major question that remains, however, is how states and transnational forces engage in an invisible battle to give life to counterrevolutions and redirect or absorb innovative forms of activism, such as the ones that Shanneik documents, to consolidate their power.
