Revue des mondes
musulmans et de la
Méditerranée
145 | septembre 2019
Chiismes politiques
PREMIERE PARTIE
Political Shiisms
Introduction
ROBIN BEAUMONT ET ERMINIA CHIARA CALABRESE
Texte intégral
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Among the many scholarly and popular discourses that proliferated with the advent
of the third millennium and which took on new intensity, particularly since 2012, on
the confessional polarization of the Arab world and intensification of transnational
conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam, a certain geohistorical narrative appears to be
emerging at the regional and particularly Middle Eastern level which would
symmetrically oppose the fragmentation of Sunni Islam to the rise of a unified Shiite
power. Where, in Sunni societies political and religious authorities faced with the
multiplication of competing ideological proposals1 would enter a phase of "eclipse"
(Amos, 2010), in Shia society, political Islam led by the Iranian regional hegemon, finds
itself supported by an historical, organized and coherent movement, reflected in the
military victories in Iraq and Syria of the Islamic Republic and partisan movements
considered as extensions of its political militia.
This reading of the new regional order is fully consistent with analyses, produced
after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, of an "awakening" or "Shiite renewal" (Nasr,
2006); After centuries of political minimization, the Shiites of the former Arab
provinces of the Ottoman Empire seized the opportunity to establish themselves as
historical actors on the national and regional scenes, under the guidance of the Iranian
sponsor. Developments provoked by the transformation, beginning in 2012-2013, of a
Syrian revolutionary moment into an internationalized and confessionalized war would
thus constitute an acceleration of this movement of entry into the history of a branch of
Islam which, with a few (notable) historical exceptions, would have been confined in a
"quiescent" attitude toward power. The geopolitical translation of this "awakening"
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would be the construction of an "arc" or "Shiite crescent", extending from Lebanon to
Iran and beyond to Afghanistan and Pakistan, via Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain and
eastern Saudi Arabia (Louër, 2009). In other words, where the Islamic religious
reference would give rise in Sunni societies of the Arab world to all kinds of competing
political practices, to the point of plunging these societies into ideological and political
chaos, Shia political Islam would find itself embodied in a single expression, dominated
and directed by the Iranian power.2 While this type of reading is generally the work of
analysts unfamiliar with the reality of the terrain they evoke, or inclined to approach
the mobilization of Islamist actors solely through the religious factor rather than
through the materiality of their practices, we find only limited research efforts to tone it
down.
Not that the question of relevance or limits for such approaches to regional
confessional polarization has not been the subject of abundant and rich reflections
(Marshal, Zenmi, 2012; Haddad, 2017): they point in particular to the poverty of a grid
of interpretation that would act as a "steamroller" (Picard, 2018) under which
"divergences, rivalries and regional specificities within these human groups" would
disappear (Corm, 2017: 39), i.e. all socio-political realities for which it has been shown
that their explanation could not be reduced to a matter of religious variables (Amel,
1988; Burgat, 2006; Picard, 2006).3 Yet, deconstruction of the supposed homogeneity
of Shia political Islam, for its part, remains largely to be undertaken. This issue of the
REMMM (Review of Muslim and Mediterranean Worlds) intends to question the ways
in which religious reference to Twelver Shiism is mobilized as a political resource in the
Middle East in this first quarter of the 21st century, and in this way, to report on field
work performed as nearly as possible to their subject population, on "political Shiisms"
redeemed in the diversity of their full national and local expression.
We know the difficulties that arise through the use of the category "political Islam"
(or "Islamism"), which "tends to become a catch-all category to designate very diverse
phenomena [...] often including an anxiogenic and dramatic dimension".4 Overly
restrictive when used to refer to a founding principle of an "Islamic State", and too
broad when used to refer to ordinary political ideas or practices arising, one way or
another, from the practice of Islam, it sometimes appears that the expression is less
useful for scientific understanding than it is for political instrumentalization which
obscures the realities it covers. On the other hand, thinking of Political Islam as the
political use of the Islamic reference makes it possible to recognize the multiplicity of
uses to which such a reference can give rise. By political Shiisms, we mean all political
attempts at using the Shia Islam reference. This definition has the advantage of
including a wide range of actors: States, institutions, partisan groups, religious leaders,
armed movements, etc. It also makes it possible to avoid the presumption of causality
for the religious variable in engagement, or more generally, in political action (Lagroye,
2009).
A comparative approach to the
political uses of the Shia religious
reference
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The political practices of actors who invoke Twelver Shia references in their actions
are certainly not unknown to us.5 Beyond work on the conditions under which Shia
political Islam emerged from the Islamist matrix beginning in the 1950s in Iraqi holy
cities (Abdul-Jabar, 2002; Nakash, 1994; Sankari, 2005), the Islamic Republic of Iran
and the Lebanese Hezbollah are the two privileged places for investigation of Shia
political Islam. Yet, while the latter has been the subject of welcome and numerous
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sociological studies,6 researchers working on the former mainly focused on the
revolutionary moment, and then, on the Khomeini theory of wilāyat al-faqīh, its
constitutionalization, its reformulations and the resistance it has aroused, with a bias
for the study of political ideas (Fayyad, 2008; Muqallid, 2012) more than their
incarnation among individuals and social groups. Above all, these two fields are rather
exceptional. Kuwait, Bahrain and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia received
attention on these issues over the second half of the 20th century from only a few
researchers (Louër, 2008; Matthiesen, 2010, 2015) as did Pakistan (Abu Zahab, 2007;
Rieck, 2016). As for Iraq, the advent of a new political era in 2003 admittedly saw the
emergence of an important new literature; however, apart from a few works (for
example Cole and Keddie, 1986; Nakash, 1994, 2006; Rizvi, 2010; Visser, 2006), some
of which place the Shiite political fact within its historical context (notably AbdulJabar, 2003; Luizard, 2009, 2014; Ru'uf, 2000), this literature, at least in the matter of
interest to us, gave rise to large geopolitical frescoes or texts more related to expert
reports than to scientific inquiries. This lack of work in political sociology, and hence of
a truly comparative approach, is due, at least in part, to difficulties of access to sociopolitical environments marked by the violence of authoritarian situations, armed
conflict, or situations "neither at war nor at peace" (Richards, 2005; Linhardt, Moreau
de Bellaing, 2013).
What is a "Shiite" mobilization? How are references to Shia Islam expressed in the
functioning of institutions that claim to be Shia, both in discourse and in the practices
of political actors, activists or simple sympathizers of partisan organizations? How do
"shared dogmatic references" (Lamine, 2018) find themselves reconfigured in times of
crisis, war or violence? The expansion and institutionalization of the Iraqi or Lebanese
Shiite feat of militia, the development of political solidarity between Twelver Shiites
and Shiites from more heterodox currents (in particular Alawism and Zaydism) beyond the mere attempts at doctrinal rapprochement led by clerical elites in the 20th
century - constitute ideological and praxeological reformulations that call for the
construction of new analytical keys capable of "imagining linkages between religion and
politics outside of determinist and essentialist paradigms" (Boëx and Pinto, 2018: 12).
This issue of REMMM does not claim to provide an exhaustive answer to these
questions. It does however, propose to shed light on a few of the political situations
whose protagonists have so far received less attention from the social sciences than
others, in order to identify a number of analytical benchmarks that we would like to see
identified in other fields. We are thus extending an invitation to explore political
Shiisms in their contemporary diversity, by bringing together contributions from
sociologists, anthropologists and political analysts, from various fields studied on a
granular scale: the martyrs' divisions within a Tehran cemetery, a debate broadcast on
Iraqi television between supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr and representatives of the "civil
current", or the report of villagers from southern Lebanon, troubled by the Syrian
conflict, or again, to the Palestinian cause as advocated by Hezbollah, to name only a
few.
Production of a Shia political
imagination through the experience of
violence
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The singularity of the situations discussed in this issue’s articles does not mean that
they follow strictly parallel, linear and distinct historical trajectories. On the contrary,
this issue takes for its genesis the recognition of what might be taken for a space of
resonance between the different situations of these political Shiisms. To consider this
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space, we propose to rely on the way Jean-François Bayart justifies the expression
"Arab world". Rejecting meanings based on supposed cultural, political, linguistic or
religious afinities, Bayart suggests understanding the Arab world as an "historical
space" arising from the transition from an imperial state model to the nation-state
model with the fall of the Ottoman Empire - a "moment of historicity" (Bayart, 2016).
The unity of the societies that make up this "Arab world" would thus be less about an
essence or about shared properties than about the interdependence of the political
spaces (Camau, Geisser, 2003) resulting from this moment of historicity: societies
whose socio-political structures are dependent on those of other societies in the Arab
world, so that when a major event occurs in one society (from the creation of the State
of Israel to the "Arab springs" and the various Gulf wars), it is not simply the foreign
policies of other States that are mobilized or modified (as the case would be for States
outside of this space), but the societies and political regimes themselves that are
affected. We would like to take up this idea again to suggest that "Shia worlds" (Mervin,
2007; Louër, 2008), given the diversity of their own socio-political expressions and
temporalities, find, in the period opened by the degeneration of the war in Syria, the
prolongation of the Iraqi conflict since 2003 and concomitantly with the conflict in
Yemen since 2011 - a historical moment of resonance for these social and political
expressions, and of synchronization for these temporalities.
Our purpose here is not to identify, as Bayart did, a new "historical space" that would
be a Shia space (even if it were drawn in the form of an arc or a crescent). The "Shia
worlds" do not cover a distinct territorial reality. Rather, our purpose is to say that the
Syrian conflict, in its regional implications, may constitute such a "moment", an
historical matrix at the origin of a reconfiguration of this Arab world, or even of other
political spaces. This approach has several advantages. Firstly, it avoids the pitfall of a
top-down analysis that would only take into consideration the level of political
solidarity and alliances. Secondly, it makes it possible to recognize the structuring effect
of these systems of representation, without erasing the asperities and idiosyncrasies of
their national and local expressions, and without making the conflictual dimension of
these representations the necessary point of outcome for the secular confrontation of
two competing religious doctrines (Sfeir, 2013).
We put forward the hypothesis that this alignment of political Shiisms results in the
crystallization of a Shia political imagination: a common symbolic universe, irrigated
by representations drawn from a mythified and patrimonialized history of Shiism; a
universe upon which actors draw in various ways to mobilize in differentiated local
contexts, but a universe which none-the-less constitutes a shared background of ideas,
or, to use the acoustic metaphor, the sounding board where the voices of different
political Shiisms resonate, encouraging the emergence of new forms of solidarity,
belonging and identification: which produces, as Denis-Constant Martin describes it, a
political "we" (Martin, 1994), even beyond the social and doctrinal singularities,
notably between Twelver Shiism and minority Alawi or Zaydism currents (Mervin,
2017). If this very last dimension is not addressed in this dossier, which focuses on
actors in the Twelver Shia tradition, such rapprochement of the various components of
Shia Islam through the constitution of solidarity based on a shared political
imagination seems to us to be a particularly worthy avenue of research to be explored in
the future.
Such imagination feeds on the historical experience of Shia societies, both of social,
political and demographic domination, and awareness of an exit from this state of
domination, now less thought of in terms of the fight against unjust regimes than in
terms of resistance to existential enemies, embodied par excellence by the Islamic
State: this is the purpose of Nicolas Dot-Pouillard's contribution to this issue, which
focuses in particular on questioning, in his reflection on the permeabilities between
Arab lefts and political Shiisms, the transition from a lexicon of the "revolution"
(thawra) to a lexicon of the "resistance" (muqāwama).
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This imagination is, above all, constructed in (and through) a context of extreme
violence, a feature found in all the articles in this dossier: the experience of this war
violence – committed, suffered, or even simply represented – plays a role all the more
central because war can be understood in eschatological terms, such as the reactualization of the battle of Karbala.7 The reification of the "Karbala paradigm"
(Fischer, 1980) in the context of the conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, in which many
foreign Shiite fighters are taking part, is an essential element in the sacralization of the
cause that irrigates this new political imagination. Shiite martyrology is thus widely and
frequently invoked in speeches of mobilization such as the iconographic production of
references to the characters and places of the great Shiite narrative, with which
individuals develop a true "emotional bond" (Thurfjell, 2006), a bond all the stronger
because it refers to shared stories and experiences. Among these references, some
occupy a prominent place: for example, the mausoleum of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria8
(Mervin, 1996; Pinto, 2007) - sister of Imam Hussein whose capture and humiliation
by the Caliph Yazid following the battle of Karbala was one of the rhetorical
instruments used to rally armed Iraqi and Lebanese groups to fight in Syria in 2012 and
2013. From 2012, the slogan "Zaynab will not be captured a second time" flourished on
posters and graphite in the southern suburbs of Beirut; "At your service, O Zaynab" is
chanted by mourning crowds in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran at the funerals of Shia fighters
killed in Syria.
A contemporary reading of the founding moments of Shia Islam, as well as the
erection of its emblematic figures as models to be defended and imitated, are thus
essential elements of the "awareness-raising measures"9 put in place to mobilize and
justify armed struggle. In deploying such devices (commemorations, celebrations,
funerals, audiovisual productions, etc.), the evocation of sacred figures in Shia Islam is
prescriptive in nature, dictating moral codes, behaviours and guidelines. In the present
dossier, Agnès Devictor shows how, from “sacred defence” invoked by Iran during the
war against Iraq (1980-1988) to the war waged against the Islamic State in Syria and
Iraq and named by Tehran "defence of holy places", there is a shift in the Iranian film
representations of the war, and in particular the way in which the reference to Karbala
is used. On two very distant fields, Sepideh Parsapajouh and Khalila Aude Coëffic
explain the ways in which the sacralization of a cause through its symbolic connection
to Karbala and Shiite martyrology is used respectively by the Iranian State and
Lebanese Hezbollah to neutralize its possible dissenting uses; and, conversely, how, in
the face of this institutional sacralization, "ordinary"10 women and men seize the same
references, the same symbolic heritage, in order to promote alternative readings and
memories, sometimes antagonistic.
If this universe of meaning mobilizes the memory of a sacred history, it is also
nourished by an understanding of the contemporary political situation of the different
"Shia worlds". The Shia political imagination is first and foremost a geopolitical
imagination, informed by a certain vision of global and regional power relations, and,
consequently, by the definition of another (the "dā' ishī", the "wahhabī", the "takfīrī",
etc.). Political imagination, however, does not need an effective encounter with this
"other" to be shared: it can perfectly (and, we dare say, even better) function because it
is nourished by discourse on a disembodied and essentialized figure, reduced to a few
physical and psychological traits. This is what Vincent Geisser shows, in a reflection
mirroring the rest of the dossier, which, by focusing on an imaginary world with Shia
political Islam as its object and no longer as a production environment, identifies the
formation of a "Shia-free anti-Shiism" among certain French Sunni Muslims. The
latter, who have rarely ever come into direct contact with Shia Muslims, nevertheless
conceive a set of representations that feed the figure of an "imaginary Shia", and leads
them to define themselves as Sunnis where the question of religious affiliation has
never before given rise to an identity debate.
National contexts, partisan ideologies,
individual beliefs
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Articulation of the political representations of the different "Shia worlds" does not
mean homogenization of the actors of Shia political Islam, any more than it would an
alignment of these societies on a single ideology or on similar political practices of
power or opposition, but the formation of a shared political imagination where national
contexts, party ideologies and individual histories and beliefs are inserted and
articulated. To say that an actor contributes to, or is a part of Shia political Islam says
nothing about his political beliefs, the modes of mobilization he practices or in which
he fits, the modalities of his engagement or his relationship to power. Political Shiism
should not be confused with a single and homogeneous praxis or ideology: it is a
universe of meaning (re)constructed and disseminated today in a context of violence by
a set of actors and channels that contributes to its globalization and the development of
solidarities that consolidate a feeling of belonging; a set of representations on the world
and on the relationship of Shia Muslims to this world, each of whom makes a collective
and/or personal use specific to the situation in which he finds himself, hence the
flexibility of the uses of these sacred figures (Hertz, 1970). In short, a culture, in the
same way that a "political culture" is identified in other partisan organizations,
particularly as they were within the French and Italian Communist Parties, where
identification "was not merely an internalization of norms, values, beliefs and
behaviours, but the result of active work" by partisan organizations (Lazar, 1994: 17)
and, we would add, by their audiences.
Analysis of the make-up of the Shia symbolic heritage is only meaningful if it is
associated with the study of the conditions in which this symbolic heritage is produced,
mobilized, lived and thought out. Such political imagination cannot be understood as
merely the result of the passive reception of an institutional discourse: rather, it is the
product of a joint construction within a partisan organization by committed individuals
(Dubar, 1994: 231; Mischi, 2010: 273), including, on the part of the latter, exercizes in
reinterpretation and the negotiation of meanings proposed "from above"; all operations
that contribute to the constitution of a "structure of meaning" (Passy, Giugni, 2001).
Thus, the ideology of "resistance" (to the Israeli State) developed and disseminated by
Lebanese Hezbollah must be understood to reflect the imagination within which its
supporters now place their action, and a reformulation within the broader framework
of the "existential war"11 that they evoke today to talk about the party's commitment on
the Syrian fronts. In Iraq as in Lebanon, where this dossier’s respective coordinators
work, the eschatological narrative of the war against the Islamic State and the
victorious rewriting of Karbala are consistent, for example, without contradiction, with
the fighter’s imperative concern to defend national borders and sovereignty, his
community and his relatives (Calabrese, 2016 b).
Finally, joint consideration of collective imagination and its effects and formulations
on a finer scale suggests an interest in a broader movement in which the social sciences
are presently engaged, especially considering the sociology of collective action:
rehabilitation of the role of ideas in political and/or armed commitments, by
apprehending them "not as mere discourses on reality but as fully recognized practices
embedded in strategies with practical consequences".12
The role of ideas; That is to say, in fact, the role of beliefs - whether religious or
political. Far from reducing faith and identification with sacred figures to simple
strategies, to a "circumstantial language" or to "a clever trick" (Bromberger, 1980: 118)
by partisan institutions seeking to manufacture "blind consent", we would like to
reaffirm here the sociological importance of taking into account the "existential
dimension of belief, as lived and as practiced" (Lamine, 2010: 103), in order to think of
belief in its materiality and in relation to the social issues in which it is embedded. In
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doing so, we become part of a tradition of research that, while taking seriously the role
of belief in determining action, seeks to articulate the use of the religious referent to the
objective conditions in which it is mobilized - a religious referent understood not only
as a "lexicon" (Burgat, 2006), but also as a vector of meaning.
This approach prevents us from falling into a deadlock of readings that imply a
"blindness" of actors who are supposed to have been deprived of any critical capacity
simply because of the religious nature of their commitment.13 This approach moreover,
dispenses with any consideration of the degree of belief, whether of intensity or
sincerity: indeed, in order to exist and be efficient, a political imagination founded
upon a religious lexicon requires less affinity to a doctrinal corpus from its members
than it does an immanent feeling of social belonging or identification – such feelings
giving rise to all kinds of representations and practices.
From sacralization to secularization ?
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A final point for which the articles gathered in this dossier invite discussion is the
status of the actors involved in constructing such collective imagination. In the social
and political history of Shiism, it is the agents of the religious field, elites of the
marja'īya or mujtahid-s, who, through family ties or through ties established in
training within the ḥawza, have built vast transnational intellectual, economic and
charitable networks (Corboz, 2015; Loüer, 2008; Luizard, 2014; Mervin, 2007). It
seems however, that such historical networks, whose influence in the world reflects
their age, prestige and significant financial resources, are not the main actors of the
historical movement we are trying to present in this dossier. While some of the figures
presented in the articles published here represent a certain religious capital, or place
their political activity under the nominal authority of leading Shiite clerics, it is worth
noting that the most influential actors of these political Shiisms are now for the most
part, laymen:14 identity entrepreneurs from the militia world, but also non-religious
intellectual figures, or even "ordinary" men and women, all of whom participate to
varying degrees, in the construction and dissemination of this collective imagination.
This centrality of non-religious actors in the production of a transnational Shia
symbolic repertoire reflects a historical movement well known in the sociology of
religions, but little explored with regard to Shia Islam: the appropriation – which
proceeds from a double movement of reinterpretation and mobilization – of the
religious resource politicized by actors outside or peripheral to the clerical field. In this
issue, Benedict Robin-D'Cruz shows us how, beyond the ideological and sociological
interrelationships that might reconcile Shia Islamist populism such as Sadrism with the
Iraqi Left, the dialogue between these two political currents (and their 2018 electoral
alliance) is possible only because there had been a reconfiguration of the balance of
power within the Sadrist movement, including a separation between secular and
religious elements. Without it being possible to extend the subject to all Muslim
societies, Vincent Geisser presents the emergence of new producers of political
imagination when he shows that the crystallization of an anti-Shiite sentiment within a
certain French Muslim population is not so much about clerics mobilizing theological
arguments in a doctrinal response to perceived heterodoxy, but as new interpretations
arising among an educated middle class attentive to the discourse of certain
geopolitical analysts and at the same time, active in digital communications spaces.
Such a process is certainly not radically new: firstly, any symbolic reference gives rise
to profane, local and popular, individual and collective reinterpretations; secondly, well
before 2003, Lebanese Hezbollah offered the example of a partisan organization under
Shia political Islam whose political and military leaders did not necessarily come from
religious schools or have significant religious capital. Of the seven members of the
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Hezbollah Advisory Council, the party's supreme body, two are not clerics, just as
former party military leaders Imad Mughniyyeh and Mustafa Badreddine were not.
The current period however, is undoubtedly the first in which this phenomenon takes
on such a regional dimension and becomes an integral part of this shared imagination,
as evidenced, for example, by the centrality, in the production of war propaganda
against the Islamic State, or even in the political iconography of certain movements, of
the figure of Qasem Soleimani, Commander of the extraterritorial forces of the
Guardians of the Iranian revolution. We can thus formulate the hypothesis, in
contemporary political Shiism, of what we might call here, a secularization of political
Shiism, which we will define, in an exploratory way, as a dispossession of religious
specialists of their monopoly not on "salvation goods" (Weber, 1996: 345 sqq.), but on
the production and political mobilization of this symbolic Shiite heritage. In any case,
this is one of the avenues on which this dossier would like to invite further reflection.
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Notes
1 Read for example S. Ghannoushi, "Terrorism and the Crisis of Sunni Islam", The Huffington
Post, 19 October 2015.
2 Read for example A. Tokmajyan, "Hezbollah's Military Intervention in Syria, Political choice
or religious obligation? "Approaching Religion 4 December 2014; M. al-Rabih, "Hezbollah and
Iran in Syria", The Washington Institute for Near East policy, 2017; Z. Knaub, "Why is
Hezbollah in Syria", Small Wars Journals, 2013.
3 For an analysis of the conflict in Syria giving priority to the denominational variable, see
Balanche, 2018.
4 "The Karoui report seen by V. Geisser: ‘The word "Islamism" is no longer necessarily
operational
in
scientific
terms",
interview,
Mizane
Info,
2018,
online:
http://www.mizane.info/rapport-karoui-v-geisser-le-mot-islamisme-nest-plus-forcementoperatoire/.
5 The political expressions of certain minority currents of Shiism have, for their part, been the
subject of important political science work. This is particularly the case for Zaydites in Yemen
(see for example Bonnefoy, 2008; Dorlian, 2013; Brandt, 2017).
6 To name a sampling of recent works in a very rich literature, Abu Rida, 2012; Calabrese,
2016a; Chaib, 2009; Daher, 2014; Mervin, 2008.
7 A founding moment in the history of Shia Islam and, in particular, its martyrology, the Battle
of Karbala was the scene of the death of the central figure of Hussein in 680 and marked the
historic defeat of the Imamat against the Caliphate as a political model for the Muslim
community.
8 An important place of pilgrimage in the Shia world, located in the suburbs of Damascus.
9 By this we mean "all the material supports, the arrangement of objects, the staging, that the
actors studied deploy in order to elicit emotional reactions that predispose those who
experience them to support the defended cause" (Traïni, Siméant, 2009: 13).
10 By this expression, we mean, with Erik Neveu, the "protagonists not consecrated by
instituted memory or media scenes" (Neveu, 2008).
11 To use Chiara Calabrese's expression from her Lebanese Hezbollah respondents, who
describe their involvement in the war in Syria as ḥarb al-wujūd (Calabrese, 2016 b).
12 Read the call for contributions for the conference "Des idées et des partis. Pour une histoire
sociale des idées en milieu partisan", (ideas and parties: toward a social history of ideas in a
partisan context), organized in 2017 as part of the AFSP HiSoPo /Laboratoire Triangle (UMR
5206)/Sciences
Po
Paris:
https://ideespartis2017.sciencesconf.org/data/pages/AAC_Des_idees_et_des_partis_1.pdf
project group.
13 These approaches, with regard to Islamist commitments, have given rise to numerous
critical analyses in recent years (Asad, 2017; Blom, 2011; Lamine, 2018). This idea can also be
found in works on the engagement of French communists. As B. Pudal and C. Pennetier wrote,
"this ‘thesis’ of "blindness" inherent to the power of illusion, is indeed frequently associated
with the idea that the "need" to believe in a better future, of men in general, and militants even
more, combined with their lack of critical thinking, predisposed them to be victims of
communist propaganda" (Pudal, Pennetier, 2017: 27).
14 By layman, we mean, as a certain usage in French requires, a social actor without a statutory
religious function; a usage that makes it useful to distinguish this term from that of "secular",
which refers to laicity as a legal concept of the relationship between public power and religious
fact as it was formulated in France.
<
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Robin Beaumont et Erminia Chiara Calabrese, « Political Shiisms », Revue des mondes
musulmans et de la Méditerranée [En ligne], 145 | septembre 2019, mis en ligne le 24 octobre
2019, consulté le 09 décembre 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/13038 ;
DOI : 10.4000/remmm.13038
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Erminia Chiara Calabrese
CéSor (Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux) / EHESS, Paris, France
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