Chapter Five: Shi’ism at Large

Abstract

Over the last four chapters I have sought to expose the body politics of the region in critical encounters with its internal dynamics and external factors in a manner that requires a simultaneous attention to domestic and regional force fields, and the way in which we need to understand social uprisings that have now culminated in the formation of an aesthetic reason, which I took the entirety of the last chapter detailing in its multiple dimensions. Now I wish to turn to Shi’ism, as inherently a religion of protest that has its own peculiar dynamics of power and rebellion, and which at once enables and delimits the terms of Iranian politics in transnational and transregional terms. The formation of an aesthetic reason predicated on collective historical experiences has retrieved the repressed intuition of transcendence embedded in Shi’i doctrinal and emotive history. Here I turn back to the larger regional context and attend specifically to the sectarian tone of Sunni–Shi’i rivalries presumed to underline the geopolitics of the region. I wish to make the entirely counterintuitive proposition that orthodox–heterodox contestations throughout Islamic history, prior to Muslim encounter with European colonialism, has in fact been the source of multiple pluralistic cultures among Muslims and it is, as a result, a deliberate distortion by ruling regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia (or any other ruling regime) to cast it otherwise. A full grasp of the historical formation of Shi’ism is therefore quintessential to our understanding of its geostrategic dimensions in our own time.