March 2221 : Lebanon's Cedar Revolution : an essay on non-violence and justice

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Remembering the infallible imams: narrative and memory in medieval Twelver Shi'ism

As the Twelver Shi'a coalesced into an increasingly distinct community between the 10th and 12th centuries CE, a new type of religious literature emerged. Writers began to collect narratives of the lives and deaths of the twelve infallible imams into single works. This study analyzes these early works, which have served as a template for similar Shi`i compilations written in the centuries since. The goal of this analysis is to shed light on how the historical narratives of a given community emerge in relationship to the ways in which that community construes religious meaning. I focus on five formative Arabic works from this period: [1] Ithbat al-wasiya attributed to al-Mas'udi; (d. 345/956); [2] Kitab al-irshad by al-Mufid (d. 413/1022); [3] Dala'il al-imama attributed to Ibn Jarir (d. early 5th/11th c.); [4] I'lam al-wara' by al-Tabrisi; (d. 548/1154); and [5] Manaqib Al Abi Talib by Ibn Shahrashub (d. 588/1192). As the first study to isolate and analyze collective biographies of the imams, this dissertation discusses unique structural and thematic patterns in these early works that were related to the concerns of the writers' community--patterns that helped produce generic expectations that remain in place to the present day. Grouping these texts into one genre allows us to better discern the religious vision upheld by this literature. My analysis begins with birth narratives, showing how these symbolic and fantastic stories highlight concrete and practical concerns of the writers. Second, I explore the importance of the imams' bodies, which function as sites of both intense devotion and great anxiety. The final two chapters explain the many and varied forms of betrayal suffered by the imams in relationship to the pervasive social grievances that are a subtext to the biographies. The memory of the imams cultivated in this literature and the emotional sensibilities projected through it provide insight into how systems of meaning are constructed. The Shi'i community used this literature to stake religious claims on the cosmic meaning and the eternal relevance of all aspects of the imams' lives, claims that made remembering their stories of critical importance

Trajectories of state formation across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia : Eurasian parallels, connections and divergences

The concept, practice, institution and appearance of ‘the state’ have been hotly debated ever since the emergence of history as a discipline within modern scholarship. The field of medieval Islamic history, however, has remained aloof from most of these debates. Rather it tends to take for granted the particularity of dynastic trajectories within only slow-changing bureaucratic contexts. Trajectories of State Formation promotes a more critical and connected understanding of state formation in the late medieval Sultanates of Cairo and of the Timurid, Turkmen and Ottoman dynasties. Projecting seven case studies onto a broad canvas of European and West-Asian research, this volume presents a trans-dynastic reconstruction, interpretation and illustration of statist trajectories across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia

Armstrong Magazine

Digitized version of bound volume contains issues for 1994-1998.https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/armstrong-magazine/1016/thumbnail.jp

Tragedy of Confusion: The Political Economy of Truth in the modern history of Iran (A novel framework for the analysis of the enigma of socio-economic underdevelopment in the modern history of Iran)

This study entails a theoretical reading of the Iranian modern history and follows an interdisciplinary agenda at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and politics and intends to offer a novel framework for the analysis of socio-economic underdevelopment in Iran in the modern era. A brief review of Iranian modern history from the constitutional revolution, to the oil nationalization movement, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the recent Reformist and Green movements demonstrates that Iranian people travelled full circle. This historical experience of socio-economic underdevelopment revolving around the bitter question of “why are we backward?” and its manifestation in perpetual socio-political instability and violence is the subject matter of this study. Foucault’s conceived relation between the production of truth and production of wealth captures the essence of hypothesis offered in this study. Michel Foucault (1980: 93-4) maintains that “In the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place”. Based on a hybrid methodology combining hermeneutics of understanding and hermeneutics of suspicion, this study proposes that the failure to produce wealth has had particular roots in the failure in the production of truth. At the heart of the proposed theoretical model is the following formula: The Iranian dasein’s confused preference structure culminates in the formation of unstable coalitions which in turn leads to institutional failure, creating a chaotic social order and a turbulent history as experienced by the Iranian nation in the modern era. The following set of interrelated propositions elaborate further on the core formula of the model: Each and every Iranian person and her subjectivity and preference structure is the site of three distinct warring regimes of truth and identity choice sets (identity markers) related to the ancient Persian empire (Persianism), Islam, and modernity. These three historical a priori and regimes of truth act as conditions of possibility for social interactions, and are unities in multiplicities. They, in their perpetual state of tension and conflict, constitute the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and confused dimensions of the prism of the Iranian dasein. The confused preference structure prevents Iranian people from organizing themselves in stable coalitions required for collective action to achieve the desired socio-economic change. The complex interplay between the state of inbetweenness and the state of belatedness makes it impossible to form stable coalitions in any areas of life, work, and language to achieve the desired social transformations, turning Iran into a country of unstable coalitions and alliances in macro, meso and micro levels. This in turn leads to failure in the construction of stable institutions (a social order based on rule of law or any other stable institutional structure becomes impossible) due to perpetual tension between alternative regimes of truth manifested in warring discursive formations, relations of power, and techniques of subjectification and their associated economies of affectivity. This in turn culminates in relations of power in all micro, meso, and macro levels to become discretionary, atomic, and unpredictable, producing perpetual tensions and social violence in almost all sites of social interactions, and generating small and large social earthquakes (crises, movements, and revolutions) as experienced by the Iranian people in their modern history. As such, the society oscillates between the chaotic states of socio-political anarchy emanating from irreconcilable differences between and within social assemblages and their affiliated hybrid forms of regimes of truth in the springs of freedom and repressive states of order in the winters of discontent. Each time, after the experience of chaos, the order is restored based on the emergence of a final arbiter (Iranian leviathan) as the evolved coping strategy for achieving conflict resolution. This highly volatile truth cycle produces the experience of socio-economic backwardness. The explanatory power of the theoretical framework offered in the study exploring the relation between the production of truth, trust and wealth is tested on three strong events of Iranian modern history: the Constitutional Revolution, the Oil-Nationalization Movement and the Islamic Revolution. The significant policy implications of the model are explored