Shia Islamism


Shia Islamism is the implementation of Shia Islam in politics. Most study and reporting on Islamism has been focused on Sunni Islamist movements. Shia Islamism, a previously very small ideology, gained in popularity after the Iranian Revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini, whose Shia Islamist policies became known as Khomeinism. Khomeini's form of Islamism was unique not only for being a powerful political movement which successfully came to power, but for having completely swept away the old regime, created a new one with a new constitution, new institutions and a new concept of governance. A historical event, it changed militant Islam from a topic of limited impact and interest, to one that few inside or outside the Muslim world were unaware. However, there are also Shia Islamist movements outside of Khomeinism, such as the Islamic Dawa Party of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and the Sadrist Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Though a minority of the world Muslim community, Twelver Shias form the majority of the population in the countries of Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan, and substantial minorities in Afghanistan, Bahrain, India, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Islamism in general has been defined as a religious revivalist movement for a return to the original texts and the inspiration of the original believers of Islam, but one which requires Islam to be a "political system".

Islamism—definitions, variations

While precise descriptions and definitions of Islamism vary, they include the following:
  • a combination of two pre-existing trends
  • * religious revivalism, which appears periodically in Islam to revive the faith, weakened also periodically by "foreign influence, political opportunism, moral laxity, and the forgetting of sacred texts",
  • * the more recent movement against imperialism/colonialism in the Third World embraced by leftists and nationalists, that in the Muslim world morphed into a more simple anti-Westernism focused on Islam rather than socialism,.
  • "the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life",
  • an Islamic form of "religionized politics" or religious fundamentalism,
  • "the ideology that guides society as a whole and that law must be in conformity with the Islamic sharia".
Ideologies dubbed Islamist may advocate a "revolutionary" strategy of Islamizing society through exercise of state power, or alternately a "reformist" strategy to re-Islamizing society through grassroots social and political activism. Islamists may emphasize the implementation of sharia, pan-Islamic political unity, the creation of Islamic states, and/or the outright removal of non-Muslim influences—particularly of Western or universal economic, military, political, social, or cultural nature—in the Muslim world. In the 21st century, some analysts such as Graham E. Fuller describe it as a form of identity politics, involving "support for identity, authenticity, broader regionalism, revivalism, revitalization of the community."

Islamism and Khomeini

Khomeini's form of Islamism was unique not only for being a powerful political movement which successfully came to power, but for having completely swept away the old regime, created a new one with a new constitution, new institutions and a new concept of governance. A historical event, it changed militant Islam from a topic of limited impact and interest, to one that few inside or outside the Muslim world were unaware.
Describing the Islamic system of Khomeini, the Islamic Revolution or the Islamic Republic and how it differed from traditional non-Islamist Shi'ism, is complicated by the fact that it evolved through several stages, especially before and after taking power.

Traditional and Islamist Shi'ism

Historian Ervand Abrahamian argues that Khomeini's Islamist movement not only created a new form of Shiism, but converted traditional Shi'ism "from a conservative quietist faith" into "a militant political ideology that challenged both the imperial powers and the country's upper class".
Khomeini himself followed traditional Shi'i Islamic attitudes in his writings during the 1940, 50s and 60s, only changing during the late 1960s.
Some major tenants of Twelver Shīʿa Muslim belief are
  • the sorrowful tragedy of the martyrdom of Imam Hussien; how he refused to bow to worldliness and power of the tyrant Mu'awiya I whose malicious servants outnumbered and killed Hussien at Karbala; how his virtue and his suffering in martyrdom inspires and unites Shia community.
  • the return of the Mahdi ; the last of the Imams who never died but has lived for over 1000 years somewhere on Earth in "Occultation"; who prophesies tell us will return some time before Judgement Day to vanquish tyranny and rule Earth in justice and peace.
  • ritual purity; this prohibits physical contact with impure substances such as dogs, pigs, excrement, nonbelievers; and prohibits impurities from entering "mosques, and shrines, and the like".

    Pre-Islamist, traditional Shi'ism

Traditionally, the term Shahid in Shi'ism referred to "the famous Shi'i saints who in obeying God's will, had gone to their deaths", such as the "Five Martyrs".
Prior to the 1970s, this was also the way Khomeini used the term—and not rank and file fighters who "had died for the cause".
Rituals such as the Day of Ashura, lamentation of the death of Hussein, visiting shrines like the Imam Reza shrine in Mashad, were important part of popular Shia piety. Iranian shahs and the Awadh's nawabs often presided over any Ashura observances.
Prior to the spread of Khomeini's book Islamic Government after 1970, it was agreed that only the rule of an Imam, i.e. the Twelfth Imam for the contemporary world), was legitimate or "fully legitimate". While waiting for his return and rule, Shia jurists have tended to stick to one of three approaches to the state, according to at least two historians : cooperated with it, trying to influence policies by becoming active in politics, or most commonly, remaining aloof from it.
For many centuries prior to the spread of Khomeini's book, "no Shii writer ever explicitly contended that monarchies per se were illegitimate or that the senior clergy had the authority to control the state." Clergy
Even the revivalist Shi'i cleric Sheikh Fazlollah Nouri—celebrated in the Islamic Republic for defending Islam and sharia against democracy, and martyred by "agents" of foreign powers because of it—argued against democracy not because it was clerics that Iranians should obey, but because they should obey their monarch and not limit his power with a constitution and parliament. Prior to 1970 Khomeini
In his first political tract, Kashf al-Asrar, written before his embrace of political Islam, Khomeini denounced the first Pahlavi shah, Reza Shah, for many offenses against traditional Islam—"closing down seminaries, expropriating religious endowments, propagating anticlerical sentiments, replacing religious courts with state ones", permitting consumption of alcoholic beverages and the playing of 'sensuous music', forcing men to wear Western style hats, establishing coeducational schools, and banning women's chador hijab, "thereby 'forcing women to go naked into the streets'"; but "explicitly disavowed" advocating the overthrow of the shah and "repeatedly reaffirmed his allegiance to monarchies in general and to 'good monarchs' in particular, for 'bad order was better than no order at all.'"
As "the most vocal antiregime cleric", Khomeini did not call for the overthrow of the shah even after he was deported from Iran by him.
Khomeini also accepted the traditional Shi'i view of society described in Imam Ali's Nahj al-Balagha. Hierarchy in society was natural, "the poor should accept their lot and not envy the rich; and the rich should thank God, avoid conspicuous consumption, and give generously to the poor."
The "Golden Age of Islam" to be looked back on "longingly" according to tradition, was the Mecca of Muhammad and the caliphate of Imam Ali.
Disorder in society was wrong because "bad order was better than no order at all". The term mostazafin, was used in the "Quranic sense" of "'humble' and passive 'meek' believers, especially orphans, widows, and the mentally impaired." Khomeini rarely spoke of them in his pre-1970 writings.

Post 1970 Khomeini

In late 1969, Khomeini's view of society and politics changed dramatically. What prompted this change is unclear as he did not footnote his work or admit to drawing ideas from others, or for that matter even admit he had changed his views.
In his 1970 lectures, Khomeini claimed Muslims "have the sacred duty to oppose all monarchies.... that monarchy was a 'pagan' institution that the 'despotic' Umayyads had adopted from the Roman and Sassanid empires". Khomeini saw Islam as a political system that until the return of the Twelfth Imam, presides over an Islamist state or works for its creation.
Following "in the footsteps" of Ali Shariati, the Tudeh Party, Mojahedin, Hojjat al-Islam Nimatollah Salahi-Najafabadi, by the 1970s Khomeini began to embrace the idea that martyrdom was "not a saintly act, but a revolutionary sacrifice to overthrow a despotic political order".
Some other differences between traditional Shi'i doctrine and that of Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers was on how to wait for the return the reemergence of the hidden Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi. Traditionally the approach was to wait patiently, as he would not return until "the world was overflowing with injustice and tyranny". Turning this belief inside out, Khomeini preached that it would not be injustice and suffering that would hasten his return, but the just rule of the Islamic State, this justice "surpassing" the "Golden Age" of Muhammad and Imam Ali's rule.
Khomeini showed little interest in the rituals of Shia Islam such as the Day of Ashura, never presided over any Ashura observances, nor visited the enormously popular Imam Reza shrine. Foreign Shia hosts in Pakistan and elsewhere were often surprised by the disdain shown for Shia shrines by officials visiting from the Islamic Republic. At least one observer has explained it as a product of the belief of Khomeini and his followers that Islam was first and foremost about Islamic law, and that the revolution itself was of "equal significance" to Battle of Karbala where the Imam Husayn was martyred.