Bashir Saade

The gruesome videos circulated on most media platforms by the organization that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) have prompted a heated debate about the “Islamicity” of the organization that centered on how serious IS actors were regarding getting their “interpretations” right. If any act of interpretation or of understanding of “religion” has been transformed by the various technological and ideological developments of the last two centuries, I will argue here that Salafi thinking (of which IS articulations are but one aspect), understanding of a mythical past, and imagining of history outside a “lived” tradition, marries itself conveniently with the way the latest audiovisual technology manifests itself to an audience, especially in consecrating a culture of speed and “eventual” rupture. This relationship leads to a “collapse of meaning” while leaving room for an overflow of “graphicness.” The article will draw parallels between these practices and those of recent TV shows such as Game of Thrones, especially in reimagining a “medieval era” that serves as a schema for addressing contemporary concerns.

The Lebanese political organization Hizbullah has developed its own style of commemorating ʿāshūrāʾ, the Shiʿi period of mourning in remembrance of the Battle of Karbalāʾ. Previous scholarship has analyzed Hizbullah's ʿāshūrāʾ with prevailing conceptual bina-ries such as politics/religion, reason/tradition, or reason/emotion. This article challenges such binaries by looking at the series of speeches given by Hizbullah's secretary general, Ḥasan Naṣrallāh, during the annual ʿāshūrāʾ rituals. Naṣrallāh's oratory skills, and most importantly the careful structuring of the ten-day mourning event, show clearly that the production of reasoned arguments through speech involves the cultivation of intense emotions and states of consciousness. These are conducive not only to collective action and identity formation but also to ethical practices.

In this article, I argue that using a specific technology of remembering their dead, Hizbullah affiliated intellectuals constructed an elaborate conception of both history and time that gave ideological coherence to the “Islamic Resistance” project. I show that early writings of the formative period of the 1980s were instrumental in producing ideological templates that were replicated throughout time up until today. Through a set of ritualistic practices, Hizbullah related intellectuals archived anything related to martyrs and other human legacies, a process that fed into an ever present, and at times anticipated, history of the Resistance. The Islamic Resistance gained significance each time a constantly renewed sense of history or the past was periodically actualized. This is because writings of history involved a transmission of ethics that martyrs witness and testify of as they haunt the living. This phenomenon sheds light on processes of national imaginaries and aspects of political Islam.

Music traditions form in separate corners of the world. They occasionally meet, and ideas are exchanged. These meetings do not happen at one point in time; they take decades and centuries to unfold, slowly transforming the received traditions. A tradition can be thought of as a “way of doing” or “expressing” that has become a habit, a language. But whereas a particular language is incomprehensible to the foreign listener, music bridges the rigidities of words and talks to the intelligence of the heart. Music lends a favor to the tradition that longs to show to others its levels of perfection.

Elvire Corboz delineates the different challenges faced by two key Najafi Shi'i clerical families in the face of modern transformations. Corboz's rich analysis paints a subtle picture of the gradual transnationalization of Shi'i religious authority as, from one generation to the other, the families of al-Hakim and al-Khu'i addressed issues of religious continuity and development. It is Corboz's main claim that the modern period, with the establishment of the nation state and its secular laws and the rise of a new elite, has forced the Shi'i clerical establishment of Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, to spread their influence outside their respective localities. By tracing the legacy of successive generations of 'ulema in al-Hakim and al-Khu'i's families and their respective associated organizations, Corboz paints a vivid picture of the complex making of authority in Shi'i Islam, as its clerical establishment witnessed a transfer from being dependent on the financial largesse of a landed aristocracy to new elites and modern state structures. Corboz's endeavor is a timely reminder that religious continuity involves more than the transmission of a set of doctrines or a discursive practice, to refer to Talal Asad's notion, but rather an intricate process of interpersonal networking, lobbying a whole set of influential people, institutions, intermarriages, tribal relations, and the formation of more formal organizations that, for the first time in the history of this community, led to the transnationalization and semi-institutionalization of authority, through an interplay of " traditional " processes and more modern, even western, NGO-like formations. In effect, one common conception of the transformation is to look at the history of the Shi'i clerical establishment as entering a difficult time in the modern era, where the latter is threatened by all of these institutional, legal, and ideological changes and innovations. Yet, Corboz shows that these daunting challenges—for example fleeing the persecution of the Baath regime in Iraq—paved the way to opportunities for clerical authority to expand and assume a different " transnational " role. Authority is a crucial question in the Shi'i Twelver tradition because practicing religion involves as a prerequisite following a " source of emulation " (marja' taqlīd). As Corboz explains, there is no set criteria in order to become a marja', a source of emulation in religious, worshiping, and other juridical matters. Instead, the marja'iyya is based on a series of informal variables, such as descent from the prophet's family (being a sayyed), probity of character, scholarly excellence (which not only depends on ijtihad and publications, but also on popularity through teaching such that students lobby for him). This interplay of nasab