Gunābādiyya

Synopsis: The Third Edition of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam appears in four substantial segments each year, both online and in print. The new scope includes comprehensive coverage of Islam in the twentieth century and of Muslim minorities all over the world. This Part 2013-4 of the Third Edition of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam will contain 67 new articles, reflecting the great diversity of current scholarship in the fields of Islamic Studies

The balance of Ecumenism and Sectarianism. Rethinking religion and foreign policy in Iran

Foreign policy development in the Islamic Republic is often conceived through secularizing homologies of ideology and pragmatism and radicalism and moderation. Policy practice, however, has often welded their crossed terms together religiously. This article seeks to resolve some contradictions in extant models by reconceiving of Iran’s foreign policy since 1979 as a religious system that differentiates contending values hierarchically. It explores policy in three periods representing particular balances of ecumenism and sectarianism: the revolutionary decade (1979–1989), the reformist interlude (1989–2005) and the era of radical reassertion (2005–2013). Rather than being perceived as fundamentally opposed orientations, ecumenism and sectarianism are presented as integrated tendencies of Shiite Islamism

Shiite patterns of post-migration in Europe. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations

This brief reflection treats the reactive relation between the dispersions of (post-)migration and the integralism of religion in selected cases of European Shiism. It reconsiders reports on Twelver Shiism and Shiite Muslims in Europe in order to discern the main institutional and demographic tendencies in Shiites’ European settlement history in Britain, France, and Germany, and to explore such settlement in light of mega-theorizations of European Islam that juxtapose ‘integration’ and ‘separation’. The presentation focuses on Iranians in Britain and argues for the centrality of two complicating variations on the pattern: Integration-Retention (as in the case of blood donation practice) and Separation-Appropriation (as in the case of reformist Islamism in the Ettehādiye Society). Each type stems from heightened Self-Other reflection, triggered by migration and defined more precisely in terms of boundary setting. Such thought is double-scaled for differentiation (d) and reciprocation (r), contrasting jurisprudential treatments ‘there’ (+d/-r) and organizational engagement ‘here’ (-d/+r). Identity formation in European Shiism often involves the rebalancing of these elements

Pair-matched patient-reported quality of life and early oncological control following focal irreversible electroporation versus robot-assisted radical prostatectomy

Purpose: The design, conduct and completion of randomized trials for curative prostate cancer (PCa) treatments are challenging. To evaluate the effect of robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) versus focal irreversible electroporation (IRE) on patient-reported quality of life (QoL) and early oncological control using propensity-scored matching. Methods: Patients with T1c–cT2b significant PCa (hig

The sociology of Shiᶜite Islam

Book synopsis: The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion takes a three-pronged look at this, namely investigating the role of religion in society; unpacking and evaluating the significance of religion in and on human history; and tracing and outlining the social forces and influences that shape religion

Conjectures on Solṭānᶜalīshāh, the Valāyat-nāme and Shiite Sufi authority

Few concepts if any are more central to Shiite Sufism (as to Shiism generally) than valāyat, and the current essay briefly explores its significance in and around an Iranian treatise of the early twentieth-century named the Valāyat-nāme. Three perspectives frame the discussion: the modern theory of friendship generally, Christian mystical and Islamic concepts of Friendship with God, and (Sunni and) Shiite Sufi authority. It is proposed that typical Islamic formulations of Friendship with God are particularised from their mentioned Christian and secular counterparts by the Friend’s conception as an initiatory patron, which provides a basis to Sufi authority. Given that Sufi claims to patronage remain contested in Shiite spheres, where legitimacy is predicated on subordination to the Imamate, ambiguous articulations of hierarchy are crucial to understanding Shiite Sufi authority. The Valāyat-nāme read thus sheds light on the downfall of its author, the Sufi master Solṭānᶜalīshāh (d.1909). The latter’s projection of spiritual authority unravelled on interrelated religious, economic and political grounds, in the context of the Constitutional Revolution in early twentieth-century provincial Khorasan

Dakanī, Riḍā ʿAlī Shāh

Riḍā ʿAlī Shāh Dakanī was the last of the Deccan-based Ṣūfī masters in the modern Niʿmatullāhī salāsil (spiritual ‘chains’), known as an ‘enraptured one’ (majdhūb). His dispatch of his disciple (Maʿṣūm ʿAlī Shāh) on a mission of conversion underlay the revival of the order in Persia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Kate Fleet, Gudrun , Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowso