Abdullah Hamiddaddin will be providing a lecture entitle “Whither Yemen” on Thursday, March 31, 2011 at Columbia University in 208 Knox Hall from 12:30-2:00 pm. the discussion will be about how to frame the current struggle in Yemen, the importance of tribal politics, and the overrated threat of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. This is sponsored by Columbia’s Middle East Institute.
For more details, click here:
by Stefan Winter
There is a wealth of literature on Sunni-Shi’a relations relating to many periods and places of Islamic history. I attach a brief list of titles on the Mamluk and Ottoman cases with which I am familiar below.
Beyond that, however, there is probably a good reason why “this confrontation” and “its new relevance in today’s politics” is dealt more with in journalistic analyses than scholarly works. To link all instances of conflict or contact between given Sunni and Shi’a actors throughout Islamic time and space, from Pakistan to Lebanon, from Siffin to Doha, to a single ongoing confrontation, as modern observers often do, is reductionist at best.
Of course there is a fundamental theological dispute between Sunnism and Shiism and there has been no shortage of wars and communal disturbancesthat expressed themselves along sectarian lines. But such events invariably also had political and economic causes that must be investigated in their own specific context, and they should not mask the far more numerous instances when the supposed Sunni-Shii dichotomy explains absolutely nothing of, or is downright contradicted by, political events, from the Ayyubids’ tactical alliances with the Ismailis, to the Ottomans’ commercial relations with the Safavids and recourse to Shii tax farmers, to Iran’s intermittent support of Gülbuddin Hekmatiyar to the posters of Hasan Nasrallah you see all over the (conservative Sunni) suq in Aleppo today. Continue reading Sunni-Shi’a Relations in Mamluk and Ottoman Contexts
Grand Mosque in Bahrain
Tabsir contributor El-Sayed el-Aswad recently published an article entitled “The Perceptibility of the Invisible Cosmology: Religious Rituals and Embodied Spirituality among the Bahraini Shi’a” in Anthropology of the Middle East, Volume 5, Number 2, Winter 2010 , pp. 59-76. The article is available to subscribers of the journal or for purchase. The abstract is cited here:
This article analyses the relationship between the seen and the unseen in the cosmology and practices of Bahraini Shi’a. Rather than contrasting the visible and the invisible, the study delineates the hierarchical relations between them, within a whole or cosmology, as reflected in various discursive and non-discursive actions that are supported by the religious beliefs of Bahraini Shi’a. Issues of the Hidden Imam, concealment, dissimulation and other unseen dimensions of the cosmos are discussed. The article finds that the Shi’a construct the invisible in their social world by using visible ways of creatively enacting their hidden thoughts and beliefs, as represented in their religious discourses, rituals and body symbolism. Their belief in a divine higher power provides a source of emotional, spiritual and socio-political empowerment.
Bayt al-Hilali. Lighted middle floor was Wyatt’s home in Sanaa,Yemen (1970-72); Photo by Peggy Crawford (1988)
Is Yemen Really a Hotbed of Terrorism? “No,†says Author.
Arabian Nights and Daze Evokes a Friendlier Yemen than the Media Presents
Americans today have a negative image of Yemen and its people in the aftermath of media focus on radical Islam and terrorist activities in that country. Susan Clough Wyatt’s Arabian Nights and Daze: Living in Yemen with the Foreign Service provides timely insights into this vulnerable country, its history and culture, and the enormous challenges Yemen faces today. Arabian Nights and Daze has been selected as part of the Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) in Arlington, Virginia.
Journey back to 1970 when Wyatt and her Foreign Service officer husband reopened the U.S. diplomatic mission to the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) after its closure at the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Arriving only eight years after progressive revolutionaries ousted a thousand-year-old dynasty of conservative Shiite Muslim imams, they found the mission in a shambles. Under the protection of the Italian embassy, they built it back in stages prior to full resumption of diplomatic relations with the YAR in 1972. Continue reading Arabian Nights and Daze
by Steve Inskeep, NPR Morning Edition, September 27, 2010
[NPR this morning has a 7 minute segment on this famous Iranian singer; click on the website for samples of his music.]
Mohammed Reza Shajarian may be the most famous singer in all of Iran.
He’s also Iran’s most famous protest singer — even though, strictly speaking, his music doesn’t directly protest the government at all.
Just before they end their fast each day during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, many Iranians or people of Iranian descent around the world listen to a prayer sung by Shajarian.
“It has such power, and the power of it has virtually nothing to do with the words,” says Iranian-American scholar Abbas Milani. When Milani hears Shajarian’s recording of the prayer, it transports him back to his youth in Iran.
“When I still hear it, I get a chill to my bone and think that this is not the voice of a mere mortal — this is the gods speaking to us.”
Iranians heard Shajarian’s voice on the radio for decades — and then, suddenly, the music stopped. Shajarian, protesting a crackdown on voters after last year’s disputed election, asked that the government cease broadcasting his songs. Continue reading Mohammed Reza Shajarian: Protest Through Poetry
Professor Yosef Tobi of Haifa University will be presenting a talk entitled “The Legal Status of the Jews in Muslim Yemen, 897-1948” at Hofstra University on Tuesday, April 27 at 9:35 am in 201 Barnard Hall. This lecture is sponsored by the Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies Program and the program in Jewish Studies at Hofstra. Dr. Tobi is one of the leading experts on the history of Yemenite Jews and has written several important books on the topic, including The Jews of Yemen: Studies in their History and Culture (1999).
For a review of Dr. Tobi’s The Jews of Yemen, click here.
For an article by Dr. Tobi entitled “THE CONTRIBUTION OF YEMENITE
JEWISH WRITINGS TO YEMENITE HISTORY” click here.
[Webshaykh’s Note: The Muslim World has made some of their articles available, perhaps only for a limited time, to non-subscribers. In the latest issue (Volume 99, Issue 1, Pages 1-20, 2009) there is an interesting article by Yahya Michot (“Between Entertainment and Religion: Ibn Taymiyya’s Views on Superstition”). I attach here a brief excerpt from the article.]
One day, Ibn Taymiyya was asked to answer the following questions in a fetwa: “Are there, in this community, virtuous persons whom God keeps absent to people’s eyes? They are only seen by those by who they want to be seen. Even if they are among people, they are, in the state which is theirs, veiled to these people’s eyes. And also, are there, on Mount Lebanon, forty men absent to the eyes of those who look there? Every time one of them dies, they take somebody else among the people, who absents himself with them just as they are absent. All those, the earth hides them. They perform the pilgrimage. They accomplish in an hour distant trips that would normally take a month or a year. There are some among them who fly like birds, speak of hidden things before they happen, eat bones and clay and find this nourishing and sweet, etc.”27 Continue reading Ibn Taymiyya on Snake Oil
Image of the Ayatollah from his Persian website
One of the most vocal opponents of the hardliners in the Islamic Revolution and of the recent election fixing by President Ahmadinejad was the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has died at the age of 87. Reports of the funeral in Qum are based on eyewitnesses, since the government of Iran has forbidden journalists to cover the burial. The New York Times has a lengthy article by Robert Wirth with the following general information:
Ayatollah Montazeri was widely regarded as the most knowledgeable religious scholar in Iran, and that gave his criticisms special potency, analysts say. His religious credentials also prevented the authorities from silencing or jailing him. Last month, he stunned many in Iran and abroad by apologizing for his role in the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran, which he called a mistake. Iran’s leaders celebrate the takeover every year as a foundational event of the Islamic revolution. Continue reading Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri Dies
