I have noticed today a curious state of mind among the French: first of all they are still in mourning over this recent war with Germany and all of them, young and old, are sad and melancholy. The women of the people, ladies and gentlemen still wear mourning dress, with few ornaments and of a [...]
Our host picked up the teapot.
“No, no,” said Abdul Haq. “I will pour it.”
“I insist—you are my guest.”
Abdul Haq grabbed the handle; Haji Mumtaz took it back. This was a ritual I had gone through almost every night as I walked across Iran. This village had been part of an empire centered in Persia for [...]
The Islamic revolution is today a spent force in Iran, and the Islamic Republic is a tired dictatorship facing pressures to change…. Iran more than any other society in the Muslim world is a place where fundamentals are under scrutiny and open to questioning and new thinking.
No other country in the Muslim world is so [...]
Sunnis associated growing Shia power with Iran. Sunni leaders, especially those with Ba’thist ties, even accused the Shia point-blank of being tools in a nefarious campaign to subjugate and control Iraq. Hazem Shaalan, who served as defense minister in the interim government of the secular Shia prime minister Iyad Allawi, called Iran Iraq’s enemy number [...]
The Shia universe of discourse is now the site of the entire Muslim world’s most interesting and thorough debates about Islam’s relationship with democracy and economic growth, and indeed about Islam’s situation vis-à-vis modernity. In heavily Shia Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, popular political discourse and debate are far more concerned with modernity and democracy than [...]
The cross-fertilization of ideas between Wahhabism and other brands of Islamic fundamentalism began in the 1960s as part of Saudi Arabia’s strategy of strengthening Islamic identity as a bulwark against secular Arab nationalism.
Thus bonds that had been forged to stop Nasser and the other Arab nationalists could be mobilized to thwart Khomeini. Far from lacking [...]
For a while the Iranian revolution looked as if it would create a Shia “papacy.” The Shia religious establishment had always resembled the Catholic hierarchy. The only difference was that Shiism did not have a pope to enforce doctrine and define the hierarchy, and it was the congregation rather than the hierarchy that decided how [...]
As Shiism spread over time and space it became culturally diverse. This enriched Shia life and thought and added new dimensions to the faith’s historical development that went beyond its roots in the Arab heartland of Islam. The practice of the faith itself adapted to new cultures as its message spread eastward from the Arab [...]
I was home sick on 11 September 2001, and my sister called to tell me to turn on the TV. It took me a longish while to absorb what was happening and to begin reprocessing the events of the decades leading up to that day. My background reading began to expand in new directions, starting [...]
The years 1918–20 represented almost as close to a global apocalypse as the world had ever come. Most of the important monarchies of Europe and Asia, having provided stability for hundreds of years, suddenly ceased to exist. The khanates of Central Asia were distant backwaters, but Lev [Nussimbaum, aka Kurban Said] was deeply struck by [...]
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