The End of Islamic Ideology - Iran

Social Research, Summer, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

It was in an attempt to reach towards this paradox that Ali Shariati, by far the most brilliant ideologue of Islamic Ideology in recent memory, while getting Shi'ism ready for yet another revolutionary posturing, distinguished between two kinds of Shi'ism: The Safavid Shi'ism and the Alavid Shi'ism.(7) What he meant by Safavid Shi'ism was the historical metamorphosis of an aggressive mode of revolutionary resistance into an ideology of repression. And conversely, what he meant by Alavid Shi'ism was the archetypal endurance of revolutionary resistance to tyranny, a global insurrection without frontiers in time or space. Quite intuitively, Shariati identified the successful institutionalization of Shi'ism into a dynastic rule with its moral failure, and its revolutionary posturing as a religion of protest with its political failure. But what Shariati tried, unsuccessfully, to break into the Safavid and Alavid Shi'isms, in oppositional plural, is in fact the intertwined paradox that is Shi'ism itself. There is no breaking up Shi'ism into its constituent oppositional ends without breaking it up altogether, denying it its transformative energy, alternating mechanics. Because Shi'ism was born metaphysically by being denied politically, it always covets the political in order to reclaim itself metaphysically. Shi'ism has had to turn into its own worst enemy in order to justify its own historicity, its own place in the world. If the Sunni majority, the world at large, were the only Other that Shi'ism had to battle to prove and implicate itself, it would have long since been rendered obsolete, redundant, outdated. Shi'ism had to bifurcate itself into a site of insurrectionary revolt and then into its own negation in order to see itself in the speculum of its own defeat, so that it could always-already rise again and remember itself triumphantly. Shi'ism does not forget but dis-remembers itself. And that is the paradox of its history.

This active self-remembrance always bracing itself for a disremembrance punctuates the interface of Shi'ism as a conscience collective and its proclivity to charismatic outbursts. If we put together the classical Durkheimian insight of religion as "a system of actions aimed at making and perpetually remaking the soul of the collectivity and of the individual,"(8) with the equally poignant Weberian insight that "it is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma,"(9) we begin to have a clearer angle on Shi'ism in its historical paradox. As a paradox, Shi'ism rests on its inaugural moment of being born as a refusal to let go of the charismatic moment of Muhammed's prophetic mission.(10) Islam itself was born as a religion of protest, a militant defiance of the self-paralyzed patrimonialism of the Arabian peninsula, a moral mandate against the fragmented Arab tribalism. The death of the prophet for the majority of Muslims meant the systematic routinization of his charismatic authority in a multifocal set of institutions. But for the Shi'i minority the inaugural charismatic moment was to continue in first the figure and then the paradoxical institution of the Imam and the Imamate.(11) The disenfranchised community that was inevitably generated around the opulent center of the early Islamic empires became the fertile ground of Shi'i and proto-Shi'i sentiments and movements. Something of the early charismatic conscience of the early Islam, an agitated memory of its inaugural moment, remained in Shi'ism. As a conscience collective, Shi'ism thus remained persistent on the insurrectionary birth beat of Islam, its defining moment. Throughout its history, Shi'ism has dissipated its conscience collective in moments of historical atrophy and then re-collected that insurrectionary memory in the figure of a charismatic persona, always on the prototype of the Prophet and the historical modulations of the infallible Imams.