An Enchanted Modern
PRINCETON STUDIES IN MUSLIM POLITICS
Dale F. Eickelman and Augustus Richard Norton, EDITORS
Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo
Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics
Bruce B. Lawrence, Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran
Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change
Michael G. Peletz, Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia
Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun, Islam, and Urban Violence in Pakistan
Laetitia Bucaille, Growing up Palestinian: Israeli Occupation and the Intifada Generation
Robert W. Hefner, editor, Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization
Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon
An Enchanted Modern
gender and public piety in shi`i lebanon
Lara Deeb
p r i n c e t o n u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
p r i n c e t o n a n d o x f o r d
Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press
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Deeb, Lara, 1974–An enchanted modern : gender and public piety in Shi‘i Lebanon / Lara Deeb.
p. cm.—(Princeton studies in Muslim politics)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-691-12420-5 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-691-12421-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Shiites—Lebanon—Beirut. 2. Islam and politics—Lebanon—Beirut. 3. Womenin Islam—Lebanon—Beirut. I. Title. II. Series.BP192.7.L4D44 2006305.48'69782'0956925—dc22 2005048753
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Language xi
Part One: Encounters, Approaches, Spaces, Moments
IntroductionPious and/as/is Modern 3
Chapter OneAl-Dahiyya: Sight, Sound, Season 42
Chapter TwoFrom Marginalization to Institutionalization 67
Part Two: Living an Enchanted Modern
Chapter ThreeThe Visibility of Religion in Daily Life 99
Chapter FourAshura: Authentication and Sacrifice 129
Chapter FiveCommunity Commitment 165
Chapter SixPublic Piety as Women’s Jihād 204
Chapter SevenThe Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps 220
Glossary 233
References 235
Index 251
Acknowledgments
This book is the culmination of a voyage that forms only part of mylifelong relationship with Lebanon. I am greatly indebted in myriad waysto the many people who have helped and supported me along the way,and grateful for the various forms of institutional support from whichthis project has benefited.
The field research for this project was made possible by a Social Sci-ence Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, aNational Science Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a grant fromEmory University’s Internationalization Fund, and a P.E.O. InternationalScholar Award. The Center for Behavioral Research at the AmericanUniversity of Beirut (AUB), under Samir Khalaf, provided an academichome in Beirut. This version of the manuscript was written during a yearat the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
Many organizations in the southern suburbs of Beirut kindly facili-tated my research, including al-Mabarrat Charitable Association, theMartyrs’ Association, the Islamic Charitable Emdad Committee, theImam al-Sadr Foundation, the Consulting Center for Studies and Docu-mentation, and the media relations office of Hizbullah. I owe an especialdebt of gratitude to the Social Advancement Association for includingme in their activities and embracing me as a volunteer with them.
My field research experience was greatly enhanced by conversationswith Mona Harb, Diane Riskedahl, Rola Husseini, Randa Serhan, andmany colleagues at AUB; Diane’s always good-humored comradeship infieldwork; e-mail discussions with fellow fieldworking Emory studentsDaniel Lende and Donna Murdock; Hussein Nabulsi’s consistent will-ingness to answer yet another question; and Hajjeh Umm Muhammad’swarm hospitality and delicious malfouf. Lebanon would have been amuch colder place without my extended family, who provided refuge,entertainment, and company whenever I needed a break. My family andfriends outside the southern suburbs supported me in my research en-deavors even as they doubted my sanity, and often provided unwittingfodder for thought and contrast.
I am most grateful to the teachers I have been privileged to work with,and who have shaped and supported this project from its inception.Donald Donham read draft upon draft, in various forms over the pastseveral years. His astute guidance, inspiring scholarship, provocativequestions, and unfailing encouragement pushed my thinking throughout
this project, and continue to do so today. Corinne Kratz patiently readand provided insightful feedback on far too many drafts and stream-of-consciousness e-mails from the field. Bruce Knauft’s reflections remindedme to keep broader contexts in mind. Suad Joseph and Debra Spitulnikprovided incisive interventions for several chapters. My teachers andfriends Kristen Brustad and Mahmoud al-Batal were a constant sourceof support, quelling my language anxieties and providing a home in At-lanta on several occasions.
Colleagues and friends in various academic locales have provided help-ful comments and thoughts on pieces of this book or its arguments in oneform or another. I especially thank Tom Boellstorff, Houchang Chehabi,Inderpal Grewal, Mary Alice Haddad, Sondra Hale, Robert Hefner,Mary Hegland, Carla Jones, Mark LeVine, Henry Munson, NadineNaber, Conor O’Dwyer, Armando Salvatore, Chris Stone, SherrillStroschein, Jenny White, Patricia Wood, and Sherifa Zuhur for theirinsights. I have benefited from close readings of the entire manuscriptby Donna Murdock, whose academic camaraderie has kept me sane foryears, and, in the eleventh hour, by Esra Özyürek, with whom I only wishmy conversation had begun sooner. I also thank reviewers Nadje al-Aliand A. Richard Norton. I am especially indebted to Richard for his en-couragement throughout this process and his astute readings of Lebanesepolitics. Audiences at a number of academic venues including the AAAand MESA meetings, and AUB, Emory, Harvard, University of Califor-nia–Irvine, and Boston University have asked questions that promptednew ideas.
My new colleagues at UC Irvine—especially Inderpal Grewal, KavitaPhilip, and Jennifer Terry—have provided the sort of mentoring throughthe process of finalizing a manuscript that a junior faculty member canonly hope for. I greatly appreciate the interest and support of Fred Appelat Princeton University Press, as well as Jennifer Nippins’s patience anddiligence.
I also feel grateful for the many friends and colleagues who have been aconstant source of encouragement and motivation, and with whom con-versations have often inspired me to think through knotty issues, particu-larly Katie Carson, Leila Farsakh, Maysoun Freij, Elaine Hagopian,Yamila Hussein, Amira Jarmakani, Gloria and Haitham Khoury, MichelleMavissakalian, Dorothy McLaughlin, Nadine Naber, Wendy Pearlman,Gayatri Reddy, Nadine Samara, Sarah Saxer, Nadya Sbaiti, Rebecca Selig-man, Lucia Volk, and Zeina Zaatari.
My deepest gratitude is reserved for my parents, for initiating my in-terest in Lebanon and always supporting all my endeavors; my brotherHadi, for inspiring me every single day with his courage and for thosemoments of incredible clarity and hilarious fun; my partner, Qutayba
viii • Acknowledgments
Abdullatif, for being the sunshine that sustains me, standing by methroughout this project, and always pushing me to say what I mean; andfor the people in al-Dahiyya who shared such an important part of theirlives with me, especially the women volunteers who taught me, laughedwith me, and moved me with their faith and steadfastness. Above all mythanks go to my “sister,” “Aziza,” and her family, who, despite clichés,truly gave me a home away from home. It is to her that I dedicate thisbook.
Acknowledgments • ix
Note on Language
Quotations from both written and spoken sources are transliteratedusing a simplified version of the International Journal of Middle EastStudies (IJMES) system. All translations are my own. Speakers usedModern Standard Arabic, Lebanese dialect, English, and French. Intransliterating dialect, a few modifications, based on Brustad (2000),were necessary in order to preserve its phonemic differences (e.g., tāmarbūta is indicated by /eh/ in colloquial, rather than /a/). For the sakeof simplicity for the nonspecialist, I indicate which form of Arabic wasspoken only where necessary. Also for the sake of simplicity, commonlyused Arabic plurals are indicated by adding s (e.g., h.ijābs, jam‘iyyas), ex-cept in those cases where that would involve the doubling of an s, inwhich case the broken plural is indicated (e.g., majālis rather than ma-jliss). Proper nouns and terms with common English spellings are pre-served as such (e.g., Nasrallah).
P A R T O N E
Encounters, Approaches,Spaces, Moments
I.1. An orphan sign in front of a mosque in al-Dahiyya.
1 “Hajjeh” is a term of address for women who have completed the h.ajj, the femalecounterpart to “Hajj.” Both “Hajjeh” and “Hajj” are also used as generic terms of respect-ful address for elders. All interlocutor names are pseudonyms. I have also altered incidentaldetails of people’s lives to protect their identities. In cases where people will still be identifi-able to others in the community, I have discussed that situation with them.
2 Pious Shi‘is have been staunchly anti–al Qaeda and anti-Taliban since long before 9/11and continue to distance themselves from those groups’ understandings of Islam and theworld.
3 To maintain consistency, I use “Shi‘i” as an adjective, “Shi‘is” as a plural (e.g., “42Shi‘is”) and “Shi‘a” as a collective noun (e.g., “the Lebanese Shi‘a”).
4 The bulk of my research was conducted between October 1999 and August 2001, withseveral shorter visits in 1998, 2002, and 2004.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Pious and/as/is Modern
Hajjeh Umm Zein shook her hand at the television and said emphati-cally, “I can’t believe this! What is this backwardness?!”1 Her daughterand I were sitting across the living room, talking about a charity eventwe had recently attended. “What, Mama?” “Look at this! Where in Is-lam does it tell them to waste their time on something empty/useless(shı– fa–d. ı–) like this? This is not Islam!” We turned toward the muted tele-vision. An image of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan destroying twolarge statues of the Buddha filled the screen, the CNN logo at the bot-tom. I picked up the remote and raised the volume to hear and translatethe accompanying commentary, which was expressing the dismay of theworld, and especially the West, at this act of destruction. The Talibanwere described as Islamic fundamentalists, a characterization with whichmy companions took issue in a particular way. As they explained to me,the CNN reporter was correct to label them “extremists” (mutat.arrif ı–n),but was wrong to associate them with Islam, because “this backward-ness is not true Islam.”2
These two women are pious Shi‘i Muslims who live in the southernsuburbs of Beirut,3 an area known as al-Dahiyya, where I conductedfield research for twenty-two months between 1999 and 2001.4 They areloosely associated with Hizbullah (literally, Party of God), a LebaneseShi‘i Islamic political party. In the eyes of many North Americans andin the U.S. media, my friends in al-Dahiyya fell into the same generalcategory as the Taliban: religious fundamentalists who are staunchlyantimodern. This characterization reflects two of the assumptions I aim
4 • Introduction
5 Here I mean the “born-again” Christianity that Susan Harding (2000) characterizes asChristian fundamentalists’ return from exile into public life in the United States, also re-ferred to as “neo-evangelicalism.”
6 See also Moallem 2002, and, in relation to gender, Ahmed 1992. This is not a new oth-ering; Edward Said described its basis in Orientalism. In today’s allegedly postcolonialworld, the Middle East stands out as still undergoing colonization and imperialism in vari-ous forms, with their accompanying processes of othering. See for example, Shafir’s discus-sion of Israel as a settler-colony built on various models of European colonization (1989).
7 Hence my choice of “An Enchanted Modern” rather than “Enchanted Modern” forthis book’s title.
8 Note that I use “pious Shi‘i Muslims” or “pious Shi‘is” as a gloss to indicate the par-ticular community where I worked, a community that is itself bounded by specific ideasabout piety.
9 Despite the awkward nature of the term, I use “modern-ness” rather than modernityfor two reasons. First, because the latter has come to carry larger epochal meanings fromwhich I wish to distance my discussion, and, second, because I want to emphasize that by“modern-ness” I mean the state of being modern as “modern” is understood in a particu-lar context.
10 Clearly, the notion of a singular essentialized “Western modernity” is problematic.When I use “Western modernity,” unless otherwise explained, I am indicating my inter-locutors’ usage as they position “the West” as an essentialized “other” analytic category.
to dislodge in the chapters that follow: that Islamism is static and mono-lithic, and that Islam and modernity are incompatible.
The contemporary moment is one during which public religiositieshave emerged across the globe: Christian fundamentalists in the UnitedStates,5 liberation theologies in Latin America, Hindu fundamentalismsin India, and ultraorthodox Judaism in Israel are but a few of the moreprominent non-Islamic examples. Such publicly engaged religiositieshave contributed to the collapse of the notion that religion and moder-nity are incompatible. Yet that notion persists in relation to Islam andwas exacerbated after the events of September 11, 2001 and their after-math. Various formations of “political Islam” or “Islamism” have cometo represent the quintessential other, the antimodern antithesis to a sup-posedly secular West.6 Yet many public Islams are part of this contempo-rary moment, when it has become eminently possible to imagine variousmodernities (including Christian ones within the United States) as en-chanted in the Weberian sense, and as compatible with and potentiallyeven dependent on pieties.7 The pages that follow explore the multipleintersections between ideas and practices of modernity and of piety in aShi‘i Muslim community in al-Dahiyya.
My goals in this book are twofold. First, I aim to unravel the com-plexity around how pious Shi‘i Muslims understand “being modern”8
and how they engage with and deploy various discourses and ideasabout modern-ness.9 These include discourses that they associate with asingular Western modernity,10 as well as those rooted in their own em-phasis on pious or enchanted ways of being modern. Two major points
Pious and/as/is Modern • 5
11 Anticolonial nationalisms have often used women’s behavior to construct collectiveidentities that were both modern and culturally authentic. See Chatterjee 1993; Abu-Lughod 1998b.
12 I use the term “Islamist” to describe Hizbullah only where it either reflects a translationof “Isla–miyyı–n” or fits Jenny White’s definition of Islamists as “Muslims who, rather thanaccept an inherited Muslim tradition, have developed their own self-conscious vision ofIslam, which is then brought to bear on social and political events within a particular na-tional context” (2002: 23). I understand this definition to mean Muslims who deploy an“Islamic politics” rather than a “political Islam.” The latter is predicated on Islam becom-ing political, while the former describes a particular politics as informed by Islam in some,relatively explicit, way. In Hizbullah’s case, it is politics that took on the adjective “Islamic.”
of confrontation emerge: the opposition between secularity and religios-ity and the struggle to define gender roles and ideal womanhood. Ratherthan points of challenge or rejection, these are points of ambivalence andnegotiation, though always in the context of the power of Western dis-courses and the political stakes of being modern in the contemporaryworld.
As we will see, the core of this enchanted modern is a dual emphasison both material and spiritual progress as necessary to modern-ness.Spiritual progress in particular is viewed by pious Shi‘is as the necessarycomponent in providing a viable alternative to the perceived emptinessof modernity as manifested in the West. I suggest that when religiosity isincorporated into modern-ness in this way, the stakes of being piouschange. The dualistic notion of progress and the global political contextin which it has emerged have consequences for faith and morality on thepersonal level, on people’s quotidian expressions and experiences ofpiety. These consequences are related to the notion of spiritual progressas a move “forward,” away from “tradition” and into a new kind of re-ligiosity, one that involves conscious and conscientious commitment.
This brings me to my second goal: to explore the new forms of piety—especially publicly performed piety—that have taken root in this com-munity over the past three decades, and the ways that the normativiza-tion of public piety affects people’s—especially women’s—lives. It isperhaps no surprise that it is women who claim center stage in this pro-cess, as women’s practices and morality have often been constructed asnecessary to collective identities.11 In al-Dahiyya, women’s public pietyhas been incorporated as both necessary to and evidence of the en-chanted modern. For this reason, as I depict the daily and seasonal dy-namics of public piety, I am especially concerned with the ways that en-gagement with the question of how to be modern has significant effectsfor understandings and expressions of women’s piety.
We need ethnography in order to understand the local dynamics ofwhat has been variously called “Islamization,” “Islamic fundamental-ism,” “Islamism,” and so on.12 Much has been made of these terms and
6 • Introduction
13 The literature is vast; I list here only a few key examples: Ahmed 1992, El Guindi1999, MacLeod 1991, Göle 1996, Hale 1996, Zuhur 1992.
14 A notable exception is White 2002.
movements with regard to their effects on national and internationalpolitics. This literature is broad in scope, covering large swaths of timeand space, and official political and religious discourses. With the glar-ing exception of work on women and especially the veil,13 less attentionhas been given to the everyday, to the different ways that new under-standings of Islam are a part of people’s lives, and to changes in the wayspeople pray, interact, mourn, and give—the ways that they practice andperform piety.14 By maintaining an ethnographic focus on the ways no-tions of modern-ness and piety are lived, debated, and shaped by “every-day Islamists,” I hope to demonstrate the complexity of those engage-ments and underscore the inseparability of religion and politics in thelives of pious Muslims. By looking at these complex daily enmeshmentsof piety and politics, we will see that Islam is not in the service of poli-tics, nor are politics determined solely by Islam. Only by holding both inview—undoing their separation into discrete categories (a separationcharacteristic of secular notions of the modern)—can we come to a morecomplete understanding of the pious modern.
The chapters that follow constitute an ethnography of a pious Shi‘icommunity in Beirut, and the discourses, practices, and understandingsthat underpin daily entanglements of piety and modernity. In chapter 1, Idepict al-Dahiyya, the area of Beirut where the urban heart of the Shi‘ipious modern lies, in order to excavate the visual, aural, and seasonaltransformation of this public space into one of piety. Through this intro-duction to al-Dahiyya we see the ways the pious modern saturates thearea, evidence of its visibility on the national stage. I then step back inchapter 2, and provide some crucial history and background, especiallyconcerning the institutionalization of the Lebanese Shi‘i Islamic move-ment over the past three decades. We will see how religion emerged as amobilizing factor for Lebanese Shi‘is in response to the failures of theleft, the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the Israeli inva-sions and occupation of Lebanon.
The focus of chapter 3 is how religious practices and discourses—inparticular those of what I term “authenticated” Islam—permeate dailylife in ways that are considered new. I consider embodied and discursiveforms of piety, as they emerge as both public markers of personal faithand markers of the spiritual progress of the community. In chapter 4 Itake a closer look at one religious season, known as Ashura—the annualcommemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, grandson of theProphet Muhammad and one of the most important figures in Shi‘ism.
Pious and/as/is Modern • 7
The transformation that has occurred in Ashura and the commemora-tion’s importance as a contemporary narrative framework for livingpublic piety provides a case study through which to explore the shift toauthenticated Islam in all its complexity.
In chapter 5, I take up women’s volunteerism as the vehicle throughwhich women’s piety is most clearly brought into the public realm.Women’s community service activities are discussed as crucial to bothmaterial and spiritual progress. I also consider the ways that piety andpolitics, as well as humanitarian sentiment and historical models likethose of Ashura, merge to motivate women’s public participation. Chap-ter 6 builds on this discussion with an emphasis on the ways gender isimplicated in public piety and the pious modern. I explore how publicpiety is cast as women’s jiha–d and the implications of its imperative onwomen’s lives, as well as the relationship between women’s visibility andideas about modern-ness. Generational differences and the concomitantgaps in public piety are the subject of the final chapter, which concludeswith a revisiting of the pious modern ideal in the contemporary context.
In the remainder of this introduction, I provide the setting for thechapters that follow—not in terms of the spatial or temporal terrain, butin terms of a conceptual geography, the methodological, theoretical andpositional grounds on which this book rests. It goes without saying thatreaders bring different backgrounds and desires to texts. While this bookcan be read as a depiction of life in an Islamist community, it is the con-ceptual deployments around the notion of being pious and modern thatmost interest me. Indeed, it is those deployments that constitute theboundaries of the community itself.
A “Community” Bound(ed) by Piety
One of the complexities of urban fieldwork is that the research popula-tion is often defined in nongeographical and rather imprecise ways. TheShi‘i pious modern is not a community clearly bounded by space. My in-terlocutors could generally be described based on residence or work inal-Dahiyya; however, that characterization erases the diversity of thatarea of Beirut. “Al-Dahiyya” also encompasses many neighborhoods inthe southern suburbs of Beirut, and my research was especially concen-trated in four of them. As such, it is not accurate or useful to character-ize this study as one of “al-Dahiyya” as such.
Other Lebanese often refer to pious Shi‘i Muslims—or all Shi‘i Mus-lims for that matter—as a “community.” In the latter case, this denotes asectarian group in the country, while in the former it frequently involvesinaccurate generalizations about the political party Hizbullah as repre-
8 • Introduction
15 As such, this account should not be read as representative of all Lebanese Shi‘is but asa particular imagination of community—to extrapolate from Benedict Anderson (1983)—where the “community” is based upon a relatively simultaneous performance of publicpiety.
sentative of all pious Lebanese Shi‘i Muslims. Although some of the peo-ple I spoke with over the course of my research were members of theparty and/or volunteered in party-affiliated organizations, this gloss ismisleading. Many had no direct relationship to the party whatsoever.Rather, their imaginations of themselves as a community (and their ex-clusions of others) were based upon their shared religious, social, andpolitical values, which I gather under the rubric of “public piety.”15 Pub-lic piety is the public practice of faith based upon an interpretation of Is-lam that I term “authenticated Islam.” This notion of “authentication”is built on my interlocutors’ sense of a shift that has occurred in their re-ligious understandings and practices, a shift that is a key aspect of howthey conceptualize social change and the dynamics of Shi‘i identity in thecontemporary world.
As we will see, the values of public piety include understanding andpracticing Islam “correctly”; sacrificing one’s time, money, and life tohelp others; and supporting the Resistance against Israeli occupation.Underlying all these values is a strong belief in the necessity of both spir-itual and material progress. The primacy of this notion of progress, of acontinued effort toward change from what existed before, suggests thatrather than “community,” the term “movement” might be more appro-priate. Yet neither “Shi‘i Islamic community” nor “Shi‘i Islamic move-ment” quite captures either the diversity or the porosity of this group ofpeople.
Most people referred to their self-identified community of pious Shi‘iMuslims simply as “our community”—using the Arabic term mujtama‘.From the root [ j – m – ‘ ], mujtama‘ carries numerous connotations, rang-ing from “a gathering place” to “the whole of human society.” In piousShi‘i usage, it captured the meanings of both “community” and “soci-ety”—Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In a sense, the inseparability ofthe two in their speech speaks to their refusal of the assumption thatmodernization leads to an impersonal society and their embrace of amodern that prioritizes face-to-face human relationships.
The phrase “our community” shifted meaning according to context. Avolunteer bemoaning Shi‘i poverty might use “our community” to referto Lebanese Shi‘is in general, calling upon their collective history of mar-ginalization in the country. Or she might be referring specifically to thepoor in al-Dahiyya. Another conversation might find her talking aboutthe latest Resistance operation in the south, using “community” to mean
Pious and/as/is Modern • 9
16 Here I do not mean type of faith or identity, but simply the existence of religious faith.
Resistance supporters. On yet another occasion, perhaps discussing thegreater understanding she has attained regarding a religious principle,the volunteer might use “our community” to denote the community ofthe Shi‘i pious modern. It is this last sense that best describes my inter-locutors as a group.
I use “the community” as the people I spoke with did, clarifying thephrase’s meaning in context. When discussing elements linked to theShi‘i Islamic movement as a process of transformation, I refer to it assuch. Most frequently, I refer to the people I worked with as pious Shi‘isor pious Shi‘i Muslims. My usage of all these phrases is contingent uponthe understanding that these are glosses that do not necessarily encom-pass all pious Shi‘i Muslims in Lebanon nor all aspects of the Shi‘i Is-lamic movement. Indeed, as my discussion unfolds, it will become clearthat how pious a person is or appears to be plays a major role in whethershe is perceived to fall within the bounds of the Shi‘i pious modern com-munity, or whether she is instead included in a broader notion of “ourcommunity” based solely on Shi‘i sectarian identity.
The Betwixt and Between of Faith and Identity in Lebanon
No doubt some of those I spoke with will not agree with all that I havewritten here, whether because I do not limit myself to sources of infor-mation they agree are “proper,” or because of what ultimately is themost difficult divide between us, faith.16 I made an effort to answer hon-estly my Shi‘i friends’ direct questions about my religious identity andpractice—or lack thereof—but at the same time, I avoided the subject asmuch as possible. I do not know what many of them thought of me inthat regard. My impression is that people I spent a significant amount oftime with assumed a certain level of faith on my part, an assumption thatstemmed from their belief that good will and faith must naturally accom-pany one another. Very few ever tried to convert me, and those who didgenerally went about it by drawing on elements shared by Christianityand Islam, while emphasizing the “correct” versions, something that indi-cated to me their assumptions about my beliefs.
After the majlis [ritual mourning gathering] ended, our hostess came and saidwith a slight smile, “Lara, Hajjeh——wants to meet you,” so I went and satnext to her on the sofa. With no introduction, she launched into a lecture,speaking loudly enough for the women around us to hear: “Ya h.abı–btı–, allyou need to do is accept that God is one, a whole, and that Jesus is a prophet,
10 • Introduction
17 These are not the same thing. Religion is used in Lebanon, as in many other places, asa marker of identity and various social distinctions.
18 I usually follow the secularist “rule” of responding with the generic “Beirut” in an at-tempt to circumvent—or at least register my resistance to—the question. However, duringfield research I answered these queries openly. The difficulty here was that those who em-braced Shi‘ism as both faith and identity often assumed I harbored similar sentiments. Peo-ple I did not know very well threw comments about “good Christians” or commonalitiesbetween Christianity and Islam into various discussions. As my relationships developed,this tendency wore off.
19 The hyphen in “Arab-American” represents a negation of both identities, an impossi-ble oxymoronic combination. Over time, the hyphenation collapsed and people acceptedthat I was both. As with any identity, this presented both advantages and disadvantages forresearch. As Abu-Lughod describes (1986), there were aspects of my life that I felt especiallyunable to share in al-Dahiyya because of my Lebanese identity. On the other hand, my ex-tended family in Beirut provided me with a level of respectability that I doubt would haveexisted otherwise. I also faced situations where people expected me to know more than Idid, especially about local politics. In this regard my family’s Christian background provedhelpful, as people took care to explain religious matters without assuming that I had anyprior knowledge.
a very important prophet, but not the son of God. Because how can any per-son be God’s son? Think about it, it is not rational! Jesus was a great prophet,and when they tried to kill him, God saved him. The Qur’an tells us this, Godsaved him and he continued preaching for several years before he died. Butthat is not what is important. What is important is that you admit that it isimpossible for God to have a son because God is one and whole. And the holyspirit, what you [plural] call the holy spirit, we call that Gabriel, who came toMary and told her in advance about Jesus’ birth. Accept this and you will be aMuslim, and then you will put on the h.ija
–b [headscarf], because always, whensomeone becomes a Muslim later in life, they want to wear the h.ija
–b quicklybecause they are choosing the faith, so they are more committed to it than ourgirls are.” Caught off guard, I listened steadily, saying “insha’allah” [a non-committal “God willing”] once in a while. At the last sentence, Aziza walkedinto the room, looking apologetic. Her aunt had gone to find her when I firstsat down. Aziza grabbed my hand and said that I was needed in the kitchen,as the Hajjeh concluded: “You might even wear the h.ija
–b before Aziza does.”Clearly suppressing a smile, Aziza whispered, “now Lara, just say insha’allah,”which I obediently did before she spirited me away. (from my fieldnotes)
It is difficult to be an atheist in Lebanon, or rather, it is impossible torefuse a religious identity.17 Everyone I met immediately tried to place meinto a category. In Lebanon, the question, “Where are you from?” is anot-so-subtle way of trying to identify a person’s sect.18
—You are American?—I have American citizenship, but I was born in Lebanon.19
—Your Arabic is “heavy.”
Pious and/as/is Modern • 11
20 Armenians are stereotyped as mixing up gendered grammatical constructions whenthey speak Arabic. This stereotype was often invoked by others to explain my tendency tomake this sort of grammatical mistake. I adopted the explanation, as it infused humor intomy initial meetings with people.
21 And there are many Shi‘is who do not support or identify with Hizbullah, but wholive in Hizbullah-dominant areas quietly, without registering their dissent, whether becauseof social pressures or the institutional hegemony of the party in their neighborhoods. Theseperspectives are beyond the boundaries of this project.
22 Shi‘is believe that Muhammad left the leadership of the Muslim community to hisson-in-law Ali and his descendents, called Imams. Capitalized “Imam” should be distin-guished from lowercase “imam,” the prayer leader at a mosque.
—Yes, I was raised in the United States and have lived there most of my life.And my mother is Armenian.20
—[Laughs] Yeah. . . . So you are more American than Lebanese. Where inLebanon are you from?
—My father is from Hamat, and my mother is from Aanjar.—Right, you said she was Armenian. Where exactly is Hamat? Somewhere in
the north?—Yes, it’s north of Beirut, just past the tunnel near Batroun.—So you’re Christian?—My father’s family is Orthodox Christian.
In general, I found that sectarian identity had been solidified for manyLebanese as a result of the civil war, including for many Shi‘is I met. Yetfelt and perceived sectarian divisions were fluid and contextual. A Shi‘ifriend told me that while living in Europe he felt more comfortable withLebanese of all religions than with Muslims from other Arab countries,and quite atypically, a Christian Lebanese woman told her daughter thatit would be better to marry a Lebanese Muslim than a foreign Christian.
I want to emphasize that this is not a study of “the Shi‘a in Lebanon,”but rather, of a particular “community” defined by forms of piety thatreflect a specific Shi‘i identity. There are many people in Beirut andLebanon who identify as Shi‘i but not with this movement,21 and thereare many who are labeled Shi‘i Muslim as I was labeled Orthodox Chris-tian, but who do not embrace that term with regard to faith and/or iden-tity. As anywhere else, the dynamics of identity are complex—an apt ex-ample is an acquaintance of mine who insists on being identified as a“secular Shi‘i” because he wants to “annoy the religious and identifywith the underdog.” This sense of “the Shi‘a” as “underdog” in Lebanonreverberates throughout this book, and is reflected in public piety, as thereclaiming and reconstruction of a stigmatized identity.
There is a h. adı–th from Imam Ali,22 peace be upon him, that says that youshould be considerate of the person next to you, he may be your brother byblood, and if he’s not your brother by blood then he may be your brother in
12 • Introduction
Islam, and if he’s not your brother in Islam, he is your brother in humanity.These are the three ties. This should be our identity. (a pious Shi‘i volunteer)
In many ways I was not an anomaly in al-Dahiyya. Many Lebanesefamilies have members who emigrate, whether permanently or for shortperiods of time. I spoke with people who had lived in Michigan, Mo-rocco, Florida, France, Senegal, Quebec, Italy, Saudi Arabia, or the IvoryCoast, among other places. Many had family in North America, Europe,West Africa, or the Gulf. Moreover, the identities and identifications ofLebanon and Lebanese themselves, including pious Shi‘is, shift radicallyby context, moment, and interaction, rendering categories like West,East, modern, nonmodern, Arab, and not Arab highly contingent. Therewas a sense that people felt perpetually betwixt and between.
The notion that identities and subjectivities are fluid and contextuallydefined is not an unusual one. Yet in Lebanon at this particular historicalmoment, identity seemed particularly complex and particularly fascinat-ing, to Lebanese and non-Lebanese alike. On one lazy Beirut afternoon,an anthropologist friend and I were drinking coffee, watching passersbyand enjoying the break from that constant sense that comes withparticipant-observation of having to be recording everything. We wereboth feeling a bit worn down by Beirut, by the constant hum andmalaise that gripped the city on August afternoons. But we were alsoboth feeling a bit obsessed with the city. She noted how typical our ob-session seemed. And we tried to identify what it was about Beirut at thisparticular conjuncture that made all these people we knew—and notonly researchers—want to write about it. What we kept coming back towas this inability to place anyone or anything, a slipperiness of meaningand content.
“In Lebanon, there needs to be a sense of belonging to the nation, and wehave to at the same time, accept the mosaic, that all members need to coexistbut that we will never be a unity.” (a pious Shi‘i woman, speaking in English)
Another friend of mine called this the “Lebanese identity crisis.” Be-yond the contradictions of identity experienced and expressed by manyLebanese, her choice of phrase points in two directions. First, it capturesthe perplexities of “Lebanese national culture,” whatever that may be.The most colorful example that comes to mind is the dance troupe Cara-calla, characterized by many as “Lebanese folklore.” I attended one oftheir performances during the summer of 2002. The performance de-fined “hybridity,” layering myriad styles, colors, and melodies intobright movement, the dabkeh dance fused with modern jazz moves, anamalgamation of “culture” far removed from contemporary political re-
Pious and/as/is Modern • 13
23 See Stone (2002) on the ways this sort of amalgamation was constructed by theRahbani family as “national culture” for certain segments of the population in pre-warLebanon.
24 The anti-Syria demonstrations following the assassination of Prime Minister RafiqHariri on February 14, 2005 have been cast by some, both in Lebanon and in the interna-tional media, as “nationalist” in character. This characterization ignores continuing deeppolitical divisions within the country. As this book goes to press, it remains to be seen whatshape Lebanon’s future after the withdrawal of the Syrian military will take, and whetherthe purported “unity” of the anti-Syrian opposition can hold together around other issues.
25 In her discussion of stereotypical views of Okiek in Kenya versus in the United States,Kratz (2002) cautions against collapsing different layers of stereotypes. Like the Okiek,Shi‘i Lebanese face double stereotypes (in Lebanon and in the United States). However, be-cause Lebanese stereotypes are based on Western ideologies, Shi‘is are similarly labeled inboth contexts. The difference is that in Lebanon people are more likely to differentiate be-tween Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims, with some Sunni Muslims also viewing Shi‘is as nonmod-ern. In the United States, that distinction is collapsed, so that all Muslims are collectivelycategorized.
alities.23 To a certain extent, it is the lacunae left by the lack of a unifiedLebanese national identity that have cultivated the exaggerations ofcommunal identity that are performed daily through dress, language,and behavior . . . and public piety.
Second, “Lebanese identity crisis” reflects Lebanon’s candidacy for therole of a state without a nation. Its recent civil war ended with a tiredfizzle rather than a solution. Many of the cleavages and resentments thatsparked the conflict remain, suppressed by an almost willful amnesia.There are few national rallying cries, though there was a cautious levelof national support for the Resistance between the 1996 Israeli bom-bardment of a United Nations’ shelter where over a hundred civilianshad gathered for protection and liberation in 2000.24 In general, how-ever, reified identity categories (e.g., us/them, modern/nonmodern, andWestern/non-Western) and their erasures are at work in the relationshipsamong various Lebanese communities.
These are linked to structural inequalities, both current and histori-cal. For most people I spoke with, this history was one of Shi‘i politi-cal and economic marginalization in the Lebanese nation-state. Thatmarginalization—along with the visible piety of my Shi‘i interlocutors—contributes to assumptions within Lebanon about “the Shi‘a” as “non-modern.” Lebanese I knew whom pious Shi‘is would label “Western-ized”—those whose speech contained more English or French thanArabic, whose style involved form-fitting clothing and plastic surgery,and whose consumption habits easily rivaled Manhattan’s Upper EastSide—viewed the headscarves, somber colors, and rituals of my piousShi‘i friends as representative of their “backwardness.”25 Both these labels
14 • Introduction
26 See Kratz 2002.27 Again, it is crucial to note that the “other” group includes Shi‘i Lebanese who did not
fit into the pious modern. See Volk’s (2001) dissertation about the identity-negotiations ofelite Lebanese youth.
28 By historicist, following Chakrabarty, I mean the taking of the history of the West asdeterminant for the rest of the world. “Historicism thus posited historical time as a mea-sure of the cultural distance that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West(Chakrabarty 2000a: 7).
29 A partial list includes Donham 1999, Larkin 1997, Knauft 2002a, Rofel 1999,Gaonkar 2001, Piot 1999. Rabinow (1989) prefigures much of this work.
30 See Knauft 2002b, Rofel 2002, Donham 2002, Kelly 2002, and Mitchell 2000a.Much of this criticism has revolved around the slipperiness of the concept “modernity” it-self, with some favoring a return to adjectival form (Donham 2002) and others focusing onclarification of use (Friedman 2002, Spitulnik 2002).
involve comparative evaluations—as stereotypes always do26 —withboth sides viewing themselves as superior based on a particular set ofcriteria. My focus is on unraveling the second image in order to undothis opposition.27 Like other Lebanese, pious Shi‘is did indeed feelcaught in the “betwixt and between”—deploying multiple discourses ofmodern-ness and particular sorts of piety in negotiating it. Throughthese negotiations, the pious modern has taken root.
Unraveling “Modern-ness”
There exists a value-laden and historicist assumption in many Westernacademic and media discourses that views the West as the universal ex-ample for all that is modern.28 The often cited characteristics of this uni-versalizing ideal range from technological advance, consumerism, andlate capitalism, to secularization and disenchantment, to the prioritiza-tion of individualized subjectivities. The West is positioned at the centerof a universal modernity that radiates or seeps outward to the rest of theworld, where its various characteristics are adopted with some localamendment. This assumption has been critiqued by a burgeoning pluralmodernities literature which either suggests that alternative modernitieshave emerged in “other” places or highlights local appropriations ofmodernity, variously defined.29 The alternative modernities frameworkhas itself been critiqued both for implying the existence of a singular(Western) modernity to which “other” modernities are alternatives andfor making “modernity” so relative a concept as to erase structural in-equalities in the world.30
In part as a result of these debates, the terms “modern” and “moder-nity”—in singular and plural forms—have become academic buzzwordsof late, to the extent that it can be argued that for reasons of imprecision
Pious and/as/is Modern • 15
31 This approach allows us to, as Mitchell suggests, “acknowledge the singularity anduniversalism of the project of modernity . . . and, at the same time, attend to a necessaryfeature of this universalism that repeatedly makes its realization incomplete,” the “neces-sary feature” being the “role of the ‘constitutive outside’ ” (2000a: xiii, emphasis added).
32 Examples include Abu-Lughod 1998a, Adelkhah 2000, al-Azmeh 1993, Bowen 1993,Eickelman 2000, Eickelman and Piscatori 1996, Ghannam 2002, Göle 1996 and 2000,Hefner 2000, Höfert and Salvatore 2000a, Mitchell 2000b, Peletz 2002, Rahman 1982,Salvatore 1997 and 2001, Tibi 1995, Watts 1996.
33 Among the notable exceptions to this are Abu-Lughod 1998a, Adelkhah 2000 andGhannam 2002.
34 See Abu-Lughod (1998b) and Brenner (1996) for key interventions, on which I build,that instead view Islamists as “striving to construct an alternative modernity” (Abu-Lughod 1998b: 4).
35 Differences among these arguments often emerge from differences in the definitions ofthis universalizing modernity. In the first case (e.g., Göle 2000), modernity includes valuesof secularization, future-orientation, and sometimes democracy, while Islamists are definedas looking to an idealized past. Self-labeled “moderate Muslim” scholars often share thisperspective concerning Islamism but work to demonstrate the compatibility of other Islams
and overuse, it is time to bury them. Yet their prevalence is not only amatter of academic fashion. For many of our interlocutors around theworld, including pious Shi‘is in Lebanon, being “modern” is a deeplysalient issue, and as such, there is a strong case for continued engage-ment with it, especially at the level of ethnographic complexity. We needto explore not only local understandings of being modern, but also howthese understandings are employed and deployed in various contextsand to what effects, and how these uses relate to dominant global andtransnational discourses about modern-ness, including western ones. Atthe same time, it is important to remember that people can and do drawon many different discourses about being modern simultaneously. Thetensions among different understandings of modern-ness exemplify someof the power relations of the contemporary world. For this reason,rather than pluralizing the concept as such, I find it more useful to recog-nize the plurality of experience, interpretation, and understanding of thisnotion, however unwieldy, with which our informants grapple, withinfields of power, on a daily basis.31
Despite a plethora of literature about Islamism and modernit(ies),32
less has been written about how Islamists and pious Muslims themselvesgrapple with what it means to be modern, without assuming the natureof the links between modern-ness and the West.33 Instead, much of thiswork has held Islamism to be either a cultural resistance to a Westernmodernity, or only selectively modern.34 Both these perspectives gener-ally work from that historicist understanding of modernity as based inthe West, with Islamists either written outside that universalizing projector allowed within its technological, but not its cultural, spaces.35
16 • Introduction
with modernity (e.g., Rahman 1982, al-Azmeh 1993). In the second case (e.g., Adelkhah2000, Ghannam 2002) the focus is instead on bureaucratization, objectification of knowl-edge, and technological development.
36 See Spitulnik (2002) for a strong argument for the importance of looking carefully atthe local linguistic forms we use to identify local understandings of what is modern, andfor an excellent model for doing so.
While it would be possible to view pious Shi‘is as selecting particularaspects of a universalizing Western modernity while rejecting others, thisis not the approach I want to take. Nor do I find it useful to view Islamas a strategy for coping with or resisting Westernization or as some-how inherently incompatible with modern-ness. I do not believe that thequestions of whether or not people are modern are the most productiveones to ask, either for our understandings of those communities or forour understandings of “modern.” Instead, I focus on how people under-stand the terms of debate, how they approach the question of beingmodern, what they desire for themselves and their community—withoutassuming the universality of desires or that “progress” has a singulartrajectory.
By taking this approach and bringing the questions generated by theplural modernities debates into this conversation, I suggest that ratherthan ask whether or not Islamists are modern, it is more productive toask how and why they draw on different discourses and assessmentsabout modern-ness in various ways. In this sense, the ethnographic objectof this book is located in these conceptual frameworks and deployments.As the modern unravels, it becomes about comparison, boundaries be-tween groups, relations of power, identity, similitude, and difference.
Distillations: “Civilized” and “Progress”
Pious Shi‘is engaged with, employed, and deployed multiple discoursesand ideas about modern-ness. In Arabic, “modern” is often translatedas ‘asrı–, which emphasizes being contemporary, or as h.adı–th, which em-phasizes being new. My interlocutors used neither of these terms.36 In-stead they spoke of al-h.ad. a–ra (civilization); of things being mutaqad-dum (progressed/advanced) versus mutakhalluf (backward); of how lifewas ’abl (before) as opposed to al-yawm (today/now) and of tatawwur(development), taqaddum (progress), and tamaddun (urbanization).Some used the adjective moderne with a French intonation. Here aresome examples:
1. In response to a televised report showing a Shi‘i ritual practice that in-volves self-flagellation, a pious Shi‘i woman exclaimed with a flick of her
Pious and/as/is Modern • 17
37 Definition around a comparison is also the case for the concept “tradition.” See, forexample, Kratz 1993.
hand: “shufti kı–f nizil id-dam? shu– hat-takhalluf!” [Did you see how theblood was falling? What is this backwardness!]
2. When I asked the same woman if the practice still took place in her neigh-borhood, she shook her head and replied: “la’, al-yawm ma ba’ f ı– ‘indnahash-shaghli” [No, today we no longer have this thing].
3. Speaking of the neighborhood in al-Dahiyya where she worked, a volun-teer said: “eh tab‘an, shufna tatawwur ktı–r bil-manta’a, bas ba‘d fı– takhal-luf ” [Yeah, of course we have seen a lot of development in the area, butthere is still backwardness].
4. On a tour of a facility that included a computer classroom, an administra-tor said, “badnan farjı–kı– eddeh ‘indna l-h.ad.a
–ra” [We want to show youhow much Civilization we have].
5. In a conversation about how the West views her community, a youngwoman said, using three languages: “ ‘indna h.ad. a–ra, we are moderne [Fr.]”[We have a civilization, we are modern].
6. While describing her life story, an older woman explained: “abl, ka–nuylabsu l-binit escharpe [Fr.] bala fahm, hayk, ka–n aj-jaw taqlı–dı–” [Before,they used to dress a girl in a scarf without understanding, just like that; theatmosphere was traditional].
Obviously all these terms are polyvalent in meaning, shifting withcontext and speaker, but what holds constant is a sense of comparison.A person, community, place, or thing is always modern as compared tosome other thing, an other that is defined in the comparison as not mod-ern or less modern.37 This sense of comparison can be distilled into twogeneral concepts that emerge from these terms and statements: the ideaof progressive change over time, and the value-judgment inherent in be-ing viewed as “civilized.” These concepts are the crux of what remainsstable throughout pious Shi‘i deployments of various notions of the“modern.”
Beginning with the latter, in examples 4 and 5 above, the speakersused the term h.ad. a–ra (civilization) to indicate their modern-ness. Forboth of them, “civilization” is a quality, not a Culture (i.e., not “theAztec civilization”). In this context, “we have Civilization” or “we havea civilization” means “we are civilized” as opposed to barbaric or back-ward. “Civilized” underscores the value-judgment aspects of the com-parison. Both these statements were made in contexts of direct compari-son with the West. “Civilized” here is highlighting not only a generalizedsense of value judgment, but pious Muslims’ awareness of and responseto Western stereotypes of them as backward or barbaric.
18 • Introduction
38 See Koselleck’s discussion (1985) of the necessity to modernity of a shift in under-standings of time that includes the differentiation of past and present and a new emphasison historical change and progress.
The two uses of h. ad. a–ra also differ slightly, highlighting the speakers’ de-ployments of two different discourses about modern-ness. Speaker 4 usesthe definite form of the word, al-, indicating “Civilization” as a quality hercommunity shares with other civilized peoples based upon some universalstandard, in this case, computer technology. On the other hand, Speaker 5uses the indefinite form, “a civilization,” indicating the possibility of mul-tiple civilizations that may all be considered modern. Their engagementswith these different understandings of modern-ness typifies the multipleuses and employments of the concept within the pious Shi‘i community.
The second general concept important to understanding pious Shi‘is’engagements with “modern” is a sense of comparison within Lebanonlinked to progressive change over time.38 This comparison was some-times historical and local, suggesting progress in one’s own communityand the contrast between a backward and/or traditional past and a mod-ern (or more modern) present, as in examples 2, 3, and 6. Other timesthe comparison was spatial, positing a difference between two areas orgroups in Lebanon, as in example 1. Yet even these spatial comparisonsrelated to a notion of progress—in that the area or group cast as back-ward had been left behind the one that progressed. Underlying some ofthese spatial comparisons is the notion of tamaddun, or urbanization,and leaving behind village traditions.
As I have argued, it is vital to keep in mind that for pious Shi‘is,progress was two-pronged: material and spiritual. Material progress,highlighted in example 3, is essentially modernization in the sense oftechnology, education, health care, and economic and infrastructural de-velopment. Included here are computers, new roads, and microwaveovens, as well as—less unanimously—a ready supply of Pepsi and the lat-est fashions from Paris. On the other hand, spiritual progress, indicatedin examples 2 and 6, is manifested by increased public piety, as well asthrough a process of “authenticating” Islam described further below.Material and spiritual progress were viewed as parallel, as they involvedrawing on different discourses about modern-ness. They are not neces-sarily dependent on one another, but also, as we will see, not always soclearly divided. Thinking about modern-ness as ultimately dependent ona notion of progress opens up the concept to include a wider range of thetypes of changes that people experience or understand as progress, includ-ing religious or spiritual change. For example, rather than view Islamistsas necessarily engaged in a struggle with modernity, we can instead viewspiritual progress as a potential aspect of the modern.
Pious and/as/is Modern • 19
39 See Karp (2002) for a discussion of the implicit moralizing within developmentdiscourses.
40 Another, less common, comparison cast Lebanese as more “modern” than Arabsfrom the Gulf States. Lebanon is a tourist destination for many wealthy Gulf Arabs, whoare often pointed to as the quintessential example of how money does not necessarily makeone “modern,” and ridiculed for everything from their dress to their immense SUVs totheir gender relations. Some pious Shi‘is who had returned from the h.ajj complained aboutthe “backwardness” of Wahabi Islam, especially regarding issues like sex segregation inrestaurants.
Progress and the value judgment “civilized” are closely related. Noone ever expressed to me doubts that progress was good. Those who hadnot yet progressed were not modern/civilized.39 Being modern was ex-plained by notions of authenticity, organization, education, cleanliness,hygiene, social consciousness, and piety, whereas not being modern orbeing backward was linked to tradition, chaos, ignorance, dirtiness, andincomplete morality. It is the value judgments attached to these sets ofcharacteristics that place them on an axis of progress. At its most basic,modern meant “better than.” And this “better than” depended on par-ticular knowledge and awareness—enlightenment, but with a criticallylowercase e.
So what is it that pious Shi‘is are leaving behind with progress? Betterthan what? Progress from what? What/where is the noncivilized, thebackward, located? Clearly for my interlocutors, based on the two-pronged notion of progress, both material underdevelopment and spiri-tual ignorance were being left behind. They located aspects of the nega-tive side of the comparison—backwardness—in both the near past andthe contemporary “West.”40 First, as we will see in chapter 2, LebaneseShi‘is were generally marginalized politically and economically withinthe nation-state for most of its history. Material progress began laterthan in other Lebanese communities, and pious Shi‘is continued to referto the need to catch up in that regard. They also pointed to contempo-rary underdevelopment within al-Dahiyya and other predominately Shi‘iareas, emphasizing the need for “modernization.”
The near past is also one of the locations of spiritual backwardness,often discussed as “ignorance” (jahl) or “tradition” (taql ı–d). Althoughpious Shi‘is most often deployed “modern/civilized” in response to na-tional and international judgments and stereotypes about the Shi‘a asbackward, they also employed the notion to distinguish themselves frompractices associated with their own recent past, practices they labeled“traditional.” The distinction was similarly utilized to set themselvesapart from other Lebanese Shi‘is who maintained those traditional prac-tices. It is in these spaces that modern/civilized and modern/progresscame together. People’s efforts to develop themselves spiritually and to
20 • Introduction
41 The root of the word taqlı–d means “to imitate.”42 Another possible term here would be “verification,” which denotes being factual.
However, verification does not encompass the other meanings I want to encapsulate in“authenticate.”
contribute to what they conceptualized as their community’s spiritualprogress involved the “authentication” of Islam.
“Authentication,” Moving Away from “Tradition”
The contemporary extent of public piety among Shi‘i Muslims was a rel-atively recent phenomenon in the eyes of many, tied to their notions ofprogress along a value-laden axis. They viewed it as new and different—different from what they often referred to enigmatically as “before” or“how we were” and different from what they called al-taqa–lı–d (tradi-tions). Their ways of practicing Islam and being in the world were set inclear opposition to the ways of their grandparents.41 In lieu of practicesand beliefs cast as traditional, they espoused what I refer to as “authenti-cated” Islam, expressed in public piety.
Pious Shi‘is did not use the Arabic term asa–la for “authenticity” or asl ı–
for “authentic.” Instead they described a process of establishing the trueor correct meaning, understanding, or method of various religious andsocial practices and beliefs (al-ma‘na– al-h.aqı–qı– or al-fahm al-h.aqı–qı–), aprocess I call “authentication.” Authentication is dependent on textualstudy and historical inquiry, as well as on a particular notion of rational-ity. It is a process similar to “objectification” as discussed by Dale Eickel-man and James Piscatori (1996). They explain objectification as “aheightened self-consciousness” or “the systematization and explicitnessof religious tradition” (39). This self-consciousness is defined as a processinvolving a conscious community engagement with basic questions aboutreligion and its importance to one’s life and behavior, facilitated by directaccess to texts and, therefore, religious knowledge and interpretation.
I prefer the term authentication for two reasons. First, I think it bettercaptures the nuances of “truth” important in this community. “Authen-tication” and its root “authentic” convey truth based upon accuracy oftextual interpretation and historical research.42 They also connote asense of being genuine, the truth in character that, along with accuracy,is important to pious Shi‘is. Authentication is therefore a process bywhich those interpretations of Islam that are considered most trustworthyand legitimate are revealed. There are two other shades of truth suggestedby the root “authentic” that are relevant here. One is the idea of culturalauthenticity—of being true to one’s community and faith. Pious Shi‘isviewed the authentication of Islam as related to their cultural authenticity
Pious and/as/is Modern • 21
43 Cf. Mahmood’s critique of the concept, along somewhat different lines (2005: 53–57).44 I also want to emphasize that I use “authenticated” to describe discourses and prac-
tices viewed in this way by my interlocutors; I am not advocating for one Islamic forma-tion over another.
45 Asad notes that the former term, “orthodox,” is generally associated with “the scrip-turalist, puritanical faith of the towns,” while the latter refers to “the saint-worshipping,ritualistic religion of the countryside” (1986: 6). More recent manifestations of this prob-lematic division often position urban Islamists in opposition to rural tradition, or men’stext-based religion in opposition to women’s practice-based or folk religion.
46 Asad’s use of “tradition” is as follows: “A tradition consists essentially of discoursesthat seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given prac-tice that, precisely because it is established, has a history” (1986: 14). See Fischer andAbedi’s (1990) discussion of debates in Shi‘ism as a cogent example of Islam understood asa discursive tradition.
both to one another and communally within Lebanon. Another is thenotion of personal authenticity, truth to oneself. I find that this idea res-onates with pious Shi‘is’ insistence on using one’s mind (‘aql) to arriveat true meaning. Personal authenticity—in the sense of sincerity ofintention—also hints at the notion that ideally, a person’s public andpersonal piety should correspond.
Second, I find that the term “authentication” allows for greater dis-cursive and historical fluidity than “objectification,” and allows me todistance conceptualizations of this framework from the notion of a mo-ment in a universal process at which Islam is understood as having re-cently arrived.43 When I use “authenticated” to describe certain prac-tices, I do so with the understanding that it refers to a constant processand never an end result.44 In this sense, authentication captures the“ideal typical” nature of the Shi‘i pious modern. Furthermore, after Ta-lal Asad’s (1986) critique of anthropology’s approach to Islam, I hopethat my insistence on the processual nature of authentication will under-score that I understand my interlocutors’ contrasts between “orthodox”(read: modern) and “nonorthodox” (read: traditional) Islam to be bothconstructed and contextual.45 Asad’s notion of Islam as a “discursive tra-dition” creates a space where it is possible to consider its authenticationwithout assuming the absolute opposition of this process to existingforms of religious practice and discourse.46 Essentially, Asad’s formula-tion reminds us that the “tradition” that is often opposed to “authenti-cated” is also historical. Practicing Muslims—those who are reading reli-gious texts or discussing the tenets of religious practice in their dailyconversations, as well as those who are not—are engaged in practicesand discourses that have a history, and have been variously interpreted,debated, and authorized throughout that history. Contemporary authen-tication is a continuation of these discourses and practices in a particularform. Processes of conscious community engagement with religious ques-
22 • Introduction
47 This resonates with the similar processes by which nation-states mark their beginningswith a moment of rupture, giving a before-after form to temporality, see Çinar 2001.
48 Similar self-consciousness regarding religion’s role in daily life is frequently noted indiscussions of the “Islamic awakening” or “Islamic revival,” particularly with reference toEgypt. The “Islamic awakening” (al-sahwa al-isla–miyya) is the term used in Egypt, and hasbeen brought into literature on Islamic movements. See Salvatore 1997: 189–216.
49 Another common manifestation of authentication is referral to or implementation ofsharı–‘a, usually glossed as “Islamic law.” See Salvatore’s (1997) argument that sharı–‘a be-came a medium of social normativity after the rise of the public sphere, again linkingauthentication/objectification to notions of modern communication. In Lebanon, sharı–‘a ismost relevant for family/personal status law, the only area that falls outside the jurisdictionof state civil law. However, despite the particulars of its regulatory authority in relationshipto the Lebanese state, many people were concerned with living in accordance with sharı–‘a,crucially understood here as a mode of moral normativity rather than as “law.”
50 A parallel can be seen here with the Calvinist notion that morality is inherent in work-ing toward progress. See Walzer 1965.
51 See Weber 1963.
tions and concepts are no doubt affected and altered by communicationtechnologies and educational opportunities, but they are not entirelynew processes.
Having said that, I want to note that many people I spoke with ex-pressed experiencing a disruption in the way they practice, understand,and talk about Islam: a disruption related to recent changes in access toparticipation in the authentication process. For this reason I think it im-portant to highlight the contemporary moment’s distinction, as it im-pinges on pious Shi‘i Muslims’ daily lives. The relative abruptness of thisdisruption, and the concomitant political, social, and economic changesthat have occurred in the Lebanese Shi‘i community only served to rein-force people’s sense of a clear-cut difference between “now” and“then”—a difference that they often juxtaposed with the contrasts “au-thenticated” versus “traditional,” and “modern” versus “backward.”47
Pious Shi‘is frequently contrasted their self-conscious efforts to incor-porate specifically authenticated forms of Islam into their lives with whatone woman called “‘ib’ al-taqa–lı–d,” “the burden of traditions.”48 We willsee this contrast in myriad arenas, including the visual and seasonalrhythms of al-Dahiyya, religious practice and discourse, community ser-vice, and gender roles.49 Authenticated forms of Islam are intimatelybound with the idea of spiritual progress, and as such, are understood bypious Shi‘is as both necessary to and evidence of their modern-ness.50
The concept of rationality is important to this relationship betweenauthentication and modern-ness. One way of looking at this is by draw-ing parallels with Weberian rationalization. This works if the latter isunderstood broadly as a process of religious change involving the self-conscious and logical standardization of religious beliefs or practices.51
Pious and/as/is Modern • 23
52 Cf. Adelkhah (2000) for a similar discussion of rationalized religious practices in Iran.53 This notion has a long history, but it was reemphasized to varying extents by many
thinkers associated with the Islamic Revolution in Iran (e.g., Shari‘ati, Motahhari,Khomeini). See Adelkhah’s discussion (2000).
54 Compare Eickelman and Piscatori (1996), who emphasize objectification’s dependenceon mass education and literacy, communication technologies, and publishing. In keepingwith this, Rosiny found over 130 Islamist Shi‘i publishing houses in Lebanon, establishedmainly during the past three decades (2000).
55 To a certain extent, this is a matter of level, or the position of any one moment of un-derstanding along the “chain of authentication”—a sequence of attestations to authenticity(see Irvine 1989: 257–58).
The relatively recent emphasis of pious Shi‘is on religious and charitableinstitutions and large public ritual gatherings—like those described inthe pages that follow—are one example of such systematization of reli-gion.52 While in the Weberian analysis this rationalization accompaniedsecularization and eventually led to disenchantment, in the Shi‘i piousmodern rationalization is instead implicated in the tensions between per-sonal and public piety.
Another sense of rationality is emphasized in the Shi‘i pious modernvia the notion of al-‘aql, “reason, understanding, mind.” People often ex-plained to me that it was necessary to use one’s ‘aql to think about anyreligious knowledge or practice and make sure that it made “sense.”53
While rationality has long been a method of religious interpretation onthe part of mujtahids (those who have attained a certain high level of reli-gious training and can thereby interpret religious texts), the notion thatordinary people with no specialized religious training can and shouldread and think for themselves about religious texts is relatively new. PiousShi‘is emphasized that authenticated Islam was a particularly “modern”form by virtue of its reliance on accuracy of interpretation, rationality,and personal knowledge-seeking.54 Yet there also exists a tension in theShi‘i pious modern between the imperative to use one’s ‘aql to understandreligion and the practice of relying on a religious scholar (one’s marji‘ al-taqlı–d) for authoritative interpretation.55 This tension is not resolved, butas we will see, it is implicated in the importance of public piety.
A Fraught Relationship
In addition to the near past of the Lebanese Shi‘a, the other location forspiritual backwardness—here in the sense of ignorance, immorality, and“emptiness” rather than tradition—is the contemporary “West.” “TheWest” (al-gharb) and “western” (gharbı–) are polyvalent terms as well. Inthe context of spiritual ignorance or immorality, “the West” generallyreferred to the United States and Europe as well as Lebanese who were
24 • Introduction
56 Whereas some, like evangelist Franklin Graham, emphasize a binary division betweenIslam and the West based on a Christianity-Islam divide, for my interlocutors it was secu-larism (which they understood to mean the absence of religious values in daily life) and notChristianity that was the problem. I often heard comments along the lines of “if onlyChristians would apply their faith to their lives . . .”
57 This theme often emerged in conversations with people who had lived in NorthAmerica and found the comparative lack of warm relationships with neighbors and col-leagues disturbing.
58 A similar inversion can be seen in Turkish Islamists’ accusations of “backwardness”directed toward secularists (Özyürek n.d., 234).
59 Here I find apt Kelly’s use of “a grotesque” (2002) to describe U.S. power since WorldWar II. See also Shalom (2001).
60 Such criticism was not limited to my interlocutors. A recent Lebanese rap’s refrain en-joins youth to “h. aj til‘ab(h)a amerka–neh!” (stop acting American!).
seen as westernized.56 However, most people were more specific, empha-sizing that it was particular values and characteristics that they attrib-uted to the West that were the problem—including atheism, violence,capitalism, consumerism, materialism, sexual promiscuity, the objectifi-cation of women, an emphasis on the individual to the detriment of so-cial relations,57 and the collapse of the family. By including the West inthe backwardness that must be left behind through progress, pious Shi‘isinverted western valuations of the Islamic world as nonmodern.58
Despite their moral censure, Shi‘i Lebanese were unable to escape theWest in ways that complicated their relationships to certain notions ofthe modern. Western power, in its various forms, infused the major are-nas of encounter. The “West” was palpable in their lives; felt on a dailybasis through media, material goods, and military actions, as well as viafamily and friends who lived in North America and Europe. While inmuch of the postcolonial literature Europe is taken as the center of theWest, for many Lebanese, this place was reserved for the United Statesinstead. No doubt this is related to multiple factors, including the mili-tary presence of the United States in the Middle East, directly in Iraq orindirectly through Israel (which is viewed by many Lebanese as a U.S.proxy in the region); U.S. involvement during the Lebanese civil war;and U.S. cultural imperialism and economic power. The very real conse-quences of U.S. policy in the Middle East on human lives form a subtextof this book, because they are the backdrop within and against which pi-ous Shi‘is, like many other people around the globe, live.59
The meaning of “the West” was further complicated by history, poli-tics, and differences of style within Lebanon. On the one hand, piousShi‘is contrasted themselves with westernized or “Americanized”Lebanese, a label they used to explain moral laxity as well as whatwas perceived as blind emulation of U.S. culture and materialism.60 Onthe other hand, they did not define themselves as “eastern.” “Eastern”
Pious and/as/is Modern • 25
61 Boycotts of various U.S. chain restaurants take place periodically throughoutLebanon, and many people have replaced their Marlboros with Gitanes.
62 On Japan as an alternative model, see also Abu-Lughod (1998b: 15).63 In the Foucauldian sense (1978).64 As a result of distillation through media and politics, pious Shi‘is generally encoun-
tered western ideas about modern-ness in essentialized form. To indicate this, I subsumewhat is in fact a more complex field of ideas about modern-ness under the label “dominantwestern discourses” (dominant here meaning both common and backed by power).
meant traditional, a part of what was being left behind as the commu-nity progressed. Nor did they always identify as Arab, sometimes es-chewing the term as too closely linked to Saudi Arabia and the GulfStates.
Pious Shi‘i Muslims’ fraught relationship to the West was also con-founded by consumer desires for western products, capitalist businesspractices, and technology. Yet in none of these areas was desire unam-bivalent. Active opposition to U.S. cultural imperialism coexisted un-comfortably with lifestyle practices and desires that belied that opposi-tion.61 Technology posed the most difficult dilemma, though attemptswere made to find ways of embracing material modernization based onnonwestern models, by emphasizing the examples of Japan and Iran asalternatives.62
But the aspect of people’s relationships to the West that most concernsme is in the discursive realm. Pious Shi‘is consciously engaged discoursesabout being modern that were understood as western, including percep-tions about Muslims and Lebanese Shi‘is more specifically (read: Hizbul-lah). Despite academic disagreement on the actual unity, singularity, anddefinition of western modernit(ies), there is no escaping the global domi-nance of these ideas and judgments about what is modern. They em-anate from various media and are backed by political, economic, andmilitary power. This is what I mean by western discursive power.63 Asmodern needs its other, discursive power is relational, and, as Foucaultwrote, “resistances . . . can only exist in the strategic field of power rela-tions” (1978: 96). The dominant western standards of measure formodern-ness could not be ignored, not only because of imbalances ofpower, but also because those standards permeated the often contradic-tory ways pious Shi‘is themselves thought about being modern.64 Theyworked within and against dominant western discourses by self-consciously acknowledging their terms as they challenged, accepted, orambivalently tolerated them. The pious modern would not exist in thesame way without these processes.
In the end, rather than arguing that it is possible to be both Islamic/Islamist and modern, pious Shi‘is asserted that their form of Islam ismodern. Furthermore, this meant both that Islam is modern/civilized
26 • Introduction
65 This is similar to Ruth Benedict’s discussion of Japanese beliefs in the superiority oftheir “faith in spirit” over the United States’ “faith in things” (1946).
66 See, for example, Antoun and Hegland (1987), Bowen (1993), Brenner (1996),Casanova (1994), Hefner (1998), Dorraj (1999), Eickelman (2000), Eickelman and Pisca-tori (1996), Meyer (1999).
67 In the Weberian sense (1958). Also relevant is Holmes’s (1989) discussion of the dis-enchantment of life in rural Italy via both capitalist hyperbureaucratization and theCatholic Inquisition’s intellectualization of local religious belief.
68 Hegland argues that religious “resurgence” during the Islamic Revolution in Iran wasnot about a “return” to Islam but rather was about “a transformation in Shi‘ism” (1987:196). While her overall argument is more instrumentalist than I believe makes sense inLebanon, there are notable similarities. Also compare Brenner 1996.
and modern/progressive, as well as superior in certain ways to the emptymodernity of the West.65
It is critical not to ignore the economic, discursive, and military powerbehind western notions of the modern and the effects of that power onpeople’s deployments of various and sometimes contradictory conceptsof the modern. Indeed, it is in the spaces of contradiction and ambiva-lence where we see the workings of power on multiple levels. As LisaRofel put it, “The stakes in confronting modernity are about politics, inall the fullness of that term” (2002: 175).
Entangled Ambivalences and Deployments
Writing specifically about gender and modernity in the Middle East, LilaAbu-Lughod argues for refusing “to be dragged into the binary opposi-tion between East and West in which so many [arguments] are mired,” by“fearlessly examining the processes of entanglement” of these constructedpoles (1998b: 16). To that end, I turn now to the ways pious Shi‘i employ-ments of discourses about modern-ness were both oppositional and en-tangled, particularly around the areas of secularization and gender roles.
An Enchanted Modern
By now, the assumption that modernity and secularism—or more accu-rately, modernization and secularization—go hand in hand has beenthoroughly critiqued,66 as well as established by the emergent publicfaces of religiosities around the globe. In keeping with this, my interlocu-tors imagined modern-ness without disenchantment.67 Yet Islamismscontinue to be positioned as nonmodern, often in relation to ideas abouttemporality and rationality.
One argument often made about Islamists is that they are antimodernbecause they strive to return to the ideal society of the Prophet’s era.This was not the case for pious Shi‘is.68 While they did look to models in
Pious and/as/is Modern • 27
the past, they were just that: models for moral behavior that are applica-ble to the contemporary world. Just as a person might look to Gandhi orSusan B. Anthony as a role model, emulating positive characteristics as-sociated with their characters, a pious Shi‘i woman might look to theProphet’s granddaughter Zaynab.
Another area where Islamic and secular notions of temporality collideis in belief in Judgment Day. As Koselleck (1985) elucidates with regardto the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the religious wars around refor-mation were believed to be part of a process of hastening the end of theworld and the second coming of Christ. Similarly, in the 1980s Americanevangelist Jerry Falwell called upon millenarianism and the idea thatthere was little time left before Judgment Day to mobilize born-againChristians into social action.69 Pious Shi‘is shared the belief that there is adefinite end point to history, and believed that the Hidden Imam wouldreturn on Judgment Day. However, they did not act to bring about thatend. Nor was Judgment Day something they viewed as “just around thecorner” or something that filled their existence with a constant sense ofexpectation. Rather, pious Shi‘is simultaneously believed in a known endand understood the space between the present and that known end as anunknown and unpredictable future, with much room for progress.
The authentication process upon which the pious modern is predicatedalso emphasizes historical accuracy and the use of rationality.70 Whilesimilarities to Enlightenment notions of rationality exist, al-‘aql ispremised on faith, that is, it is not a question of whether there is a God ora God-given order; rather rationality is used to ascertain the nature ofthat God-given order. It is a matter of starting from different founda-tional assumptions, though the types of reasoning that follow are compa-rable. So for example, the details of religious-historical events could bequestioned while remaining within the framework of faith. In addition,as we will see, authentication has also accompanied a process of bureau-cratization and institutionalization akin to Weberian rationalization.
This notion of a nonsecular modern rests upon a particular under-standing of science within Islam, one of compatibility and even necessity.Seeking knowledge—including scientific knowledge—is an obligation,provided that the seeker’s intent lies within the bounds of Islamic moral-ity. The notion of having a moral “intent” works to separate scientificknowledge from values associated with the West. Science and Islam areespecially compatible in cases where scientific knowledge can be used for
69 See Harding 2000: 243.70 This and other themes are clearly related to various Islamic modernisms whose dis-
courses have permeated Islamic interpretation since the nineteenth century. See Chehabi(1990) on Shi‘i modernism in Iran, and Mervin (2000) on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Shi‘i reformers in Lebanon.
28 • Introduction
the community’s greater good. An example of this can be taken from Ay-atollah Khomeini, whose jurisprudence is a model for many pious Shi‘is.Khomeini used “secondary apparent rules”—a method of jurisprudencefor the application of religion to the contemporary world—to overturnprevious religious injunctions forbidding the use of Muslim cadavers foranatomy study, because “the use of human bodies for scientific purposesis serving the cause of Islam by helping to train better Muslim doctors”(described in Rajaee 1993: 119).
Prominent Lebanese Shi‘i ‘ulama have also supported science. Sayyid71
Musa al-Sadr—who many credit with mobilizing the Lebanese Shi‘a—wrote in an Islamic journal that “the truth is that science has committedno sin save the discovery of the truth” (cited in Rajaee 1993: 115).72
Here we are very far indeed from scenes like the Scopes Trial in Ten-nessee, with its fundamentalist Christian attack on science.73
As Höfert and Salvatore have noted:
There are routes other than the Protestant Ethic paradigm by which religioustraditions might produce comparable achievements in terms of economic, bu-reaucratic, and even scientific rationalities. There are, for example, otherviews of community, other concepts of rights and obligations, virtues andvices, other models of personality, and, in particular there are views and no-tions where we do not necessarily observe a disenchantment in the Weberiansense.” (2000b: 16, my emphasis)
Scientific rationalism has not replaced religious belief. Rather, the twoare able to coexist in an enchanted modern.
It could be argued that disenchantment is a particularly Christian orWestern phenomenon.74 However, parts of the Christian West are alsoemphatically not secular and not disenchanted. Lest we forget, theUnited States’ self-identified born-again Christian president declared thathis presidency was predestined by God.75 Even before the second Bush
71 “Sayyid” is the title for a descendent of the Prophet. Many Shi‘i religious scholarscome from sayyid families. They are distinguished from shaykhs—religious scholars whoare not sayyids—by the color of their turbans: sayyids’ are black and shaykhs’ white.
72 Ajami (1986) and Halawi (1992) also discuss al-Sadr’s ideas about science.73 See Marsden 1980; Harding 2000.74 This is Woodward’s view (2002). He argues that Christianity and Islam are funda-
mentally different in their textual bases, characterizing problems in Christianity’s relation-ship to modernity as cosmological, and Islam’s as sociological. In contrast, see Meyer(1999). In her discussion about Peki Ewe African Christians’ appropriations of aspects ofmission Christianity she notes, “Modernity and enchantment should certainly not be con-ceptualized in terms of an opposition in which the latter is represented as a sign of ‘back-wardness’ ” (216).
75 See Jackson Lears, “How a War Became a Crusade,” New York Times, March 11,2003.
Pious and/as/is Modern • 29
administration took power pious Shi‘is were aware that the UnitedStates was not an entirely secular place. They sometimes asked me aboutChristian fundamentalism, wondering why it was so important to theWest for the Islamic world to secularize when clearly middle Americahad not. Their framing of this question is indicative of the oppositionalnature of their deployment of a nonsecular modern; an opposition wasnot only set up against an essentialized (and idealized) secularized west-ern modernity, but, more importantly, against prescriptive western dis-courses about the Islamic world’s status and nature. This dualism alsounderlies the second area of contention, that of gender roles.76
A Gendered Modern
When I began this project, I did not intend to focus primarily on the livesof women. This changed for two reasons. On a practical level, I had ac-cess to much more of women’s lives than men’s, though much of myparticipant-observation took place in mixed-sex environments. Moreimportantly, the status and image of Muslim women was one of themost consistently arising and contentious issues that emerged during myfield research, in people’s passionate and often unsolicited responses towestern discourses about Muslim women. Women’s lives are critical be-cause of both local and international concern, as well as local concernabout international concern. And gender is a basic component of dis-courses about being modern, “one of the central modalities throughwhich modernity is imagined and desired” (Rofel 1999: 20).77
The tendencies of both European colonizers and local elites to use thestatus of women as a measure of the level of modern-ness (in the relatedsenses of modern/civilized and modern/progressive) has been noted byscholars with regard to the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere.78
76 A partial list of recent work focused specifically on Islamist women includes Abu-Lughod 1998a, Afshar 1998, El Guindi 1999, Göle 1996 and 2000, Haddad and Esposito1998, Hale 1996, Hammami 1997, Hegland 1998a, Holt 1999, Kamalkhani 1998, Mah-mood 2005, Mir-Hosseini 1999, White 2002. I especially want to note el-Bizri’s (1996)study of Lebanese Shi‘i Islamist (she uses “Isla–miyyı–n”) women activists, based upon inter-views with ten, mostly elite, women. Many of the issues I discuss also emerge in her inter-views. However, she argues that these women are caught between tradition and modernity,where modernity is a western concept that includes ideals of “women’s liberation.”
77 Although Rofel (1999) writes with reference to the very different relationship of west-ern feminists to China, this statement also holds for the Shi‘i pious modern. The relation-ship of “the woman question” to understandings of modernity in the Middle East has along history, especially prominent at the turn of the twentieth century; see Abu-Lughod1998a/b.
78 See Ahmed 1992, Bernal 1997, Chatterjee 1993, Chakrabarty 2000b, Göle 1996,Abu-Lughod 1998a, and Haddad and Esposito 1998.
30 • Introduction
This pattern remains prominent in current U.S. media discourses aboutMuslim women.79 Nadia Hijab has noted that by the 1970s, “the statusof women seemed to have become the major indicator of a country’smodernity” (1988: 7, my emphasis). Similarly, one woman I spoke withobserved that “all these Westerners come to interview us because theyare looking to see if Islam is modern, and ‘how the women are treated’or ‘what the women do’ has become the sign of which cultures aremodern.”
Measuring modern-ness by the “status of women” assumes a univer-sal standard of measure, one that is based upon a particular liberalwestern feminist notion of emancipation and liberation.80 That in turnis based upon the notion that modern selves are individualized selves.81
Stereotypes about Muslim women as backward are partially groundedin these universalizing notions. The women (and some of the men) withwhom I spoke about these issues confronted such stereotypes and re-lated assumptions about the modern-ness of their community by put-ting forth an alternative model for an ideal modern woman, one basedin public piety. This ideal entails demonstrating knowledge and practiceof authenticated Islam, being dedicated to self-improvement, and par-ticipating actively in the public life and betterment of the community.Rather than an individualized self, this modern self is embedded in so-cial relationships. In addition to the “emancipated woman,” who isimagined as selfishly abandoning her family and community, or as de-manding an irrational absolute equality (understood to mean identical-ity) with men, this pious modern woman is set in opposition to twoother ideal types in Lebanon: the “traditional” person, who practicesreligion improperly or without true comprehension and who believesthat her only role is a domestic one; and the “empty modern” and“westernized” person, who is selfish, materialistic, and obsessed withher appearance and social status.
As these various “types” show, the pious modern alternative is notcast in absolute opposition to liberal feminist discourses about modernwomen but, as Abu-Lughod has argued (1998b), is rather entangledwith them. First, with regard to individualism, while on the one hand,a pious embedded self challenges the idea of autonomous individuality,it also emphasizes self-improvement and self-discipline. This potential
79 For excellent discussions of this and its effects, see Abu-Lughod 2002 and Hirschkindand Mahmood 2002.
80 See Saba Mahmood’s (1998, 2001, 2005) critique of the assumption that “liberation”according to such a model is a universal desire for women.
81 Clearly this is problematic and contested within the West as well, especially throughfeminist scholarship; however, my focus here is on the transnational dimensions of this dis-course.
Pious and/as/is Modern • 31
82 Joseph posits relational selves as a concept useful for approaching a similar dilemmain literature on selfhood in the Arab world, which posits Arab selves as both highly indi-vidualized and highly collective (see Joseph 1999a).
83 Chatterjee (1993) discusses this as a response to colonial attempts to “modernize”women, Najmabadi (1998) with regard to the Islamic Revolution in Iran and responses tocultural imperialism, and Wardlow (2002) as a response to and part of a local appropria-tion of modernity.
84 Lebanese history further complicates the relationship between western and piousmodern discourses about women’s public participation. Khater (2001) demonstrates thatthe domestic ideal for women was a western model of modern middle-class womanhoodthat “came” to Lebanon via returnee emigrants in the early twentieth century. At the time,Lebanese feminists and others used the model of “traditional” women’s labor outside thehome to combat this newly isolating domesticity.
contradiction is ameliorated by invoking communal end goals: self-improvement should lead a person to truly desire to contribute to hercommunity while also better enabling her to do so effectively.
Suad Joseph’s concept of “relationality” provides a cogent frameworkfor understanding this dual emphasis.82 Relational selves are in betweenindividualized and collective, both embedded in social relations andpossessing agentive potential. “It is productive to view persons in Arabsocieties as embedded in relational matrices that shape their sense of selfbut do not deny them their distinctive initiative and agency” (Joseph1999a: 11). For pious Shi‘is, these relational matrices not only shapetheir senses of self, but are crucial to their understandings of communitycommitment as necessary to morality. At the same time, these matriceshave been reconfigured to a certain degree, so that the community of thepious—both peers and institutions—has become more imbricated in self-hood, in addition to (and sometimes more than) “traditional” extendedfamily relationalities.
The moral imperative of community commitment—and indeed, thatof public piety more generally—is in many ways particular to women.While at first glance this is comparable to those situations where womenwere cast as the preservers of tradition in opposition to a masculinemodern,83 it also inverts that model. Both the burden of cultural authen-ticity and the markers of public piety fell more heavily on the shouldersof women than men, and had specific ramifications for women’s lives.Yet issues of responsibility for domestic work and women’s participationin the public were actively debated, and solutions posited to facilitatewomen’s work outside the domestic sphere. In this regard, the piousmodern ideal uses a notion of modern womanhood that seems similar towestern notions of “liberation.” However, despite desiring women’sgreater participation in the public arena, as we will see, my interlocu-tors’ underlying motives for that participation differed. Additionally,their role models for activist women were located in Islamic history.84
32 • Introduction
The following passage provides a taste of these issues, which will be fur-ther unpacked in later chapters of this book.
I asked a group of three Hizbullah-affiliated volunteers—Hajjeh Umm Muham-mad, an outspoken woman in her late forties with five children who is cur-rently taking university-level courses in the hopes of someday obtaining herdegree; Zahra, a talkative younger newlywed in her early twenties; and Rula,a shy woman, also in her early twenties, who lived at home with her parentsand siblings85—who their role models were. They immediately replied in uni-son “Sayyida Zaynab, peace be upon her.” Zahra then explained, “WhatSayyida Zaynab did, that was jiha–d. Just as her brother, her husband, her sonall fought for God, she also fought for God, she fought with everything shehad.” Rula added quietly, “She gave her spirit and she gave her self.” Noddingemphatically, Umm Muhammad said, “I also want to add Sayyida Khadija,peace be upon her. Because she sacrificed her money and everything she had tohelp spread Islam. She gave her efforts and her resources.” “She was the firstone,” added Rula, as Zahra spoke again, “And there is Mother Theresa, Iconsider her an important role model for us. She was a person who stood out,in her work and in her life. Even when her health was bad, when she was sick,she continued to fight (tja–hid).” There was a pause, then Hajjeh UmmMuhammad: “You realize we are mentioning only women, of course there arethe Prophet and the Imams, but here we are mentioning women. Some peoplewill say we are being extremists in mentioning only women. But I feel that sis-ters are closer to what we work for. I am not saying this only because I am awoman, but because I truly feel that there is an actualization of potential forwomen here, in this work for our community. I feel actualized, I find my po-tential and my personality, and my existence through this work. And I feelthat only sisters can really be models for us in that way.”86
An Entangled Modern
My interlocutors’ positing of the pious modern in contrast to notions ofmodern-ness as involving secularization and women’s “emancipation”was a knotty process. “The modern occurs only by performing the distinc-tion between the modern and the nonmodern . . . each performance open-ing the possibility of what is figured as nonmodern contaminating themodern, displacing it, or disrupting its authority” (Mitchell 2000b: 26).Even as they addressed Western stereotypes of Islamic communities andwomen as nonmodern, they recreated the same modern/nonmodern
85 Many unmarried people in Lebanon, male and female, reside with their parents untilmarriage.
86 This is a reconstruction of an interview using a translated transcript.
binary among Lebanese Shi‘is. Again, “modern” must always have itsother. For pious Shi‘is, that other was most often represented by the un-educated poor in al-Dahiyya and by those who practiced what they la-beled “traditional” Islam. Both categories of people were bemoaned as“backward” and in need of progress—in both the material and spiritualsenses.
Constructing the pious modern was also an ambivalent process. Per-haps the most fraught manifestation of this ambivalence lay in the con-tradictory deployments of multiple discourses about modern-ness simul-taneously. While pious Shi‘is made an effort to undermine westernstandards for defining modern-ness, at the same time, they used thosesame western standards to claim value as equally modern/civilized as theWest. People took care to point to their “modern” things and practices,including internet cafés, school science labs, women who worked outsidethe home, childrearing practices, and the availability of Kellogg’s andKraft products. The West, along with other communities in Lebanon,was perceived as a compelling audience, one which I was asked to teachthat “the Shi‘a are modern.” In this context, “modern” meant modernaccording to those dominant western standards. For example, in the pi-ous modern, women working outside the home represented women im-proving themselves while contributing to the greater good of the com-munity, in keeping with authenticated Islam. Yet when someone pointedto these women in order to demonstrate modern-ness to me, a paradigmshift occurred and they—just for that moment—represented womenwho were “liberated” from family and community obligations. Incom-patible desires came together here—the desire to undermine dominantwestern discourses about being modern and the desire to be modern (orto be seen as modern)—according to those same discourses.
This was further complicated by an underlying—and historicist—discourse that said “we are still trying to catch up,” in the modern/mate-rial progress sense. To paraphrase Chakrabarty’s observation regardingthird-world nationalisms and their modernizing ideologies, pious Shi‘isin Lebanon have been complicit to a certain extent in equating a particu-lar West with modernity (2000a: 43).
In the end, despite its messiness, the attempt to redefine the terms ofdiscourse around being modern was really an attempt to posit a way ofbeing that is neither West nor East, and that is both “modern” and “au-thentic.” As a result, over the past twenty years, the community of theShi‘i pious modern has emerged and been institutionalized, in conjunc-tion with the Shi‘i Islamic mobilization in Lebanon. This has involvedtwo parallel notions of progress: progress as increased modernization andprogress as “increased” piety. Increased piety means piety that is moredeeply felt, more clearly understood according to specific interpretations,
Pious and/as/is Modern • 33
34 • Introduction
and crucially, more visible. As both evidence and method of spiritualprogress, public piety is the key to the pious modern.
Public Piety, VISIBLE Piety
Visibility as a term provides a sense of tangibility, conveying the con-creteness of piety, while also highlighting the often overlooked depend-ence of the anthropologist on what is visible or made visible to her.87 Be-yond issues of translation and interpretation, this reminds us that toempathize with the experience of piety without shared faith is difficult.
Visibility also speaks to multiple layers of what is recent or new forthe Shi‘i pious modern. Here I refer to the many elements that willemerge in the following chapters: the new visibility of religion and ofpublicly performed piety, the increased visibility of women in publicspaces and work, the visibility of new forms of ritual commemoration,and the visibility of pious Shi‘is as a collectivity both within Lebanon andon the international stage. The most foundational of these elements—inthat it impinges on all of the others—is public piety, a phrase whichbrings together the notion of piety meant to be seen with that of pietythat is inextricably linked to the public good.88
“Public piety” is my own phrase, which I use to describe the expres-sion of the pious Shi‘i concept of iltiza–m (commitment). Iltiza–m rangesin meaning from obligations that are contractual to those that are linkedto a personal sense of duty. Pious Shi‘is’ usage of the term included muchof this range, though it is closer to the latter, internalized sense. Iltiza–m’sspectrum reflects the complexity of a human being’s relationship withGod, a relationship that is both contractual, in the sense that a person isGod’s agent on earth, and emotional, located in the nexus of faith andsubmission to God. There are many ways to express iltiza–m; a socially in-clined person might distribute food to the poor, a politically inclined per-son might collect donations for Hizbullah Resistance fighters, and a reli-giously inclined person might pray and fast regularly. Ideally, these threestrands merge in a person, forming the perfect braid of the humanitarian,
87 I choose to use the term “visible” to connote perceptible, tangible, or evident, becauseI feel that—although other senses are crucial to processes of learning and encounter (forboth the anthropologist and anyone)—sight is privileged in many ways. It is the sense mostprivileged in stereotyping, in identifying stigmas, in grouping people together, and, re-cently, it has taken a central role in cultural analysis. See Jay (1996) on the “pictorialturn.”
88 In this sense, this book can be read in part as an ethnography of an Islamicized pub-lic sphere, though elucidating public piety’s imbrications with public spheres in theHabermasian sense is not its project. For that sort of analysis, see L. Deeb 2005.
Pious and/as/is Modern • 35
the political, and the religious that is iltiza–m and that is expressedthrough public piety.
This image of a tightly wound braid requires further nuance, becausea braid implies cords that are theoretically separable, and these three ele-ments are so inextricably intertwined as to be one thing. The concept of“religion” as a separate and unified category of analysis did not makesense in my interlocutors’ world, nor does divorcing the concepts of “hu-manitarian” or “social” and “political” from it.89 Yet at the same time,pious Shi‘is used the adjectives “religious” (dı–nı–/iyya), “humanitarian”(insa–nı–/iyya), “social” (ijtima–‘ı–/iyya), and “political” (siya–sı–/iyya), say-ing things like “my motives for this are religious” or “our work here isnot political.” It would be more accurate to say that the social, the reli-gious, and the political are at once a tight braid and an integrated notionof iltiza–m. I try to maintain this flexibility, treating iltiza–m as single statethat includes this triad of elements while also drawing upon the threeseparate categories where it is most useful—both because those I spokewith did so and, perhaps more importantly, because even problematiccategories are sometimes necessary to think with.
Visibility is crucial to public piety on both the personal and communallevels. There have been other moments where religiosity has undergoneprofound change, linked to making religion visible in new public ways.In Weber’s reading of Protestantism, visibility linked success in thisworld to success in the next, making public the interiority of one’s rela-tionship to God. The context was a moment of uncertainty of faith dueto rationalization. In Susan Harding’s reading of Jerry Falwell’s born-again Christianity, a moment of uncertainty where religion had lostground to a hegemonic secularism in the United States led to a recoup-ment for religiosity through a visible engagement with the public sphere.For the Shi‘i pious modern, a moment of uncertainty similar in ways toboth of these has contributed to the public piety imperative.
This moment emerges from a collage of factors. First, there exists anuncertainty tied to the changes authentication brings to experiences offaith. As more people are enjoined to use their rationality to understandthe authenticated meanings of religious texts and practices—a charge thatcoexists in a tense and contradictory relationship to the role of particularmujtahids in authoritatively interpreting religious texts—an instability ofknowledge results. Authentication means that belief and knowledge areconstantly being questioned in the community, and that “correct” beliefand knowledge are highly valued. Yet authenticated belief and under-
89 See Asad (1993) for elucidation of how religion itself has become a category of analy-sis by processes rooted in western understandings of the relationship between Christianityand the modern world. See also Salvatore 1997.
36 • Introduction
standing is an internal state, invisible unless made visible through publicpiety.
On a personal level, piety that is made visible, brought from the per-sonal realm to the public, establishes a person’s morality and member-ship in the Shi‘i pious modern through both its active performance andits existence as evidence. It was signaled by pious Shi‘is in various ways,including their dress, their activities, and the topics they chose to dis-cuss. Especially for women, making piety visible has become an impera-tive, as public piety has become part of the normative model of moralityin their community. To paraphrase Salvatore (1997: 48– 49), Islam hasbecome an umbrella category for a discourse that is able to convert atranscendent order into a set of socially immanent norms, at the sametime as it connotes a personal commitment to a transcendent God. A par-allel can be seen here to the Calvinist Saints during the English Refor-mation, for whom industry and diligence “revealed their saintliness”(Walzer 1965: 211).
Juxtaposed to this, Shi‘i experiences of political-economic marginal-ization, civil and international conflict, and the betwixt and between ofidentity in Lebanon provide another layer of uncertainty. This is accom-panied by the dominance of western notions about modern-ness in thecontemporary world. On a communal level, the visual imprint of publicpiety is part of the process of defining the pious modern—as both a com-munity and a concept—foregrounding religion as an alternative to theWest. Within Lebanon, public piety is linked to a general performance ofreligious identity, most obviously seen in what jewelry is worn, whichclothing is chosen, or how a scarf is pinned. The sorts of holiday lightsand decorations that adorn streets in different neighborhoods fulfill thesame function on a different scale. For Shi‘i Lebanese in particular, thisinvolved embracing and reclaiming what was once—and still is to a cer-tain extent—a stigmatized identity. There are many markers of identityin Lebanon, including dress, mannerisms, and regional accent. SomeLebanese even claim that they can identify people by sect based solely on“looks.” That aside, there are particularly visible markers based in pub-lic piety associated with being Shi‘i Muslim, especially, for women, wear-ing a h.ija
–b.In part, visibility is forced by a sense that Lebanon is caught in that
“betwixt and between” identity crisis. The uncertainty inherent in thenotion of “Lebanese-ness” is manifest in the continual performance ofidentities on a national stage—as various groups announce their pres-ence and sometimes try to impose that presence as more dominant thanothers. Like uncertainty, this sense of being betwixt and between existedon both the personal and the communal levels, and contributed to the
importance of public piety to the Shi‘i pious modern. Before turning tothe manifestations of public piety and the ways it has changed the stakesof being a religious person, I turn briefly to some of the dynamics of myfield research, as they illuminate and impinge on these issues.
Building Rapport, Finding Bearings
My fieldwork experience was facilitated by a woman I met at a Ramadanfood distribution center run by a local jam‘iyya (community welfare or-ganization). She was volunteering there, and I had just been invited tojoin them. When we first met, Aziza, as I call her here, was in her latetwenties, a college graduate from a well-respected family in al-Dahiyya.
Our first conversations focused on our work, both at the center andoutside. Once she and some of the other volunteers understood the na-ture of my project, they kept up a steady stream of explanation aboutthe center’s activities and the details of their faith. Topics for these shortimpromptu lessons ranged from Ramadan to charitable donations tohow one should choose a marji‘. My fourth day at the center, Aziza tookme aside, and encouraged me to ask her anything I wanted without hesi-tation. I promptly took her up on this and asked her why, especiallygiven that the day before she had explained the rationale behind theh.ija
–b to me, she herself did not wear a headscarf. Smiling, she replied,“You know, Lara, I pray, and I fast, and I know God, and I know thatthe right thing to do is wear the h.ija
–b, but I don’t want to, not yet.Maybe someday God willing, but not now.”
Aziza became both a close friend and a discreet facilitator, subtly di-recting conversations, accompanying me to exhibits, meetings, gather-ings and events, and defending me unfailingly whenever my presencewas questioned. Until I assured her that I did not mind, she tried to pro-tect me from questions regarding my own identity and faith, as well asfrom conversion attempts and marriage proposals. Above all, Aziza andI had fun, whether climbing an Israeli tank in the south the day afterLiberation or sitting on her balcony drinking coffee and smoking sweetflavored tobacco in an argı–leh. Our conversations were never one-sided,and she asked me almost as many questions about myself and my viewsas I asked her. I never recorded a formal interview with her, but her pres-ence and her experiences as a pious woman who does not perform pietyin a “complete” way inform my project both explicitly and implicitly.
As often seems to characterize anthropologists’ closest relationships inthe field, in many ways Aziza was not a typical member of her commu-nity. She did not wear the h.ija
–b, but moved in circles where most women
Pious and/as/is Modern • 37
38 • Introduction
did. She was pious in faith and practice, but felt strongly that certain as-pects of her faith were intensely personal and not subject to communityjudgment. Her education, friendships outside al-Dahiyya, and role of re-sponsibility in her household afforded her a mobility not necessarilyshared by other Lebanese women her age. At the same time, Aziza wasfrom a large and politically prominent extended family, with all the sup-port and obligations that entailed.
I met many of the people in these pages through Aziza, and her pres-ence smoothed my meetings with several others. Her general attitudewas that anywhere she was welcome, I should be welcome. This wasparticularly crucial during the first six months of research, before I hadsecured official research permission from Hizbullah’s media relations of-fice. For example, she took me with her to a Hizbullah Women’s Com-mittee seminar on community participation one afternoon. Upon our ar-rival, it became clear that this was an “invitation-only” event, but wewere welcomed nonetheless. While I cannot be certain, I suspect that hadI been alone, the response would have differed.
Aside from those I met through Aziza and her family, most people I spoke with were volunteers or employees at one of four jam‘iyyas in al-Dahiyya. The jam‘iyya that became my primary field site is the SocialAdvancement Association, an independent women’s organization. In ad-dition to regular visits to their office and volunteers’ homes, I worked attheir food distribution center during two Ramadans; tutored two girls;attended and assisted with exhibitions, ift.a
–rs, fund-raisers, and otherevents; participated in a month-long training seminar for volunteers; andinterviewed volunteers and employees at the jam‘iyya. The otherjam‘iyyas are larger umbrella organizations with educational and healthinstitutions located all over Lebanon. One, al-Mabarrat Association, isaffiliated with renowned marji‘ Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlullah,while the other two, the Islamic Charity Emdad Committee and theMartyrs’ Association,90 are both affiliated with Hizbullah.
My experience at the Hizbullah Women’s Committee seminar taughtme that my presence at party-affiliated jam‘iyyas required following a hi-erarchy of communication and working through Hizbullah’s media rela-tions office. Their facilitation proved to be a mixed blessing. On the onehand, I was able to almost instantly make appointments that would havetaken weeks and repeated phone calls to make on my own. On the otherhand, having to go through the media office limited my access in partic-ular ways and added an official quality to some interviews that I would
90 The Arabic “mu’assasat al-shahı–d” can be translated literally as either the “Martyr”Association or the “Martyr’s” Association. However, I use “Martyrs’ Association” in or-der to highlight the notion that the association is for martyrs and their families.
Pious and/as/is Modern • 39
91 Nevertheless, I present the perspectives of Hizbullah volunteers and administratorswith the understanding that they represent—to a certain extent—the party’s “ideal type.”There was a uniformity of perspective expressed by party members that cannot be attrib-uted solely to limitations on my access. Yet it is also important to realize that the “officialparty line” is not necessarily so clean-cut. Alternative perspectives emerged in informalconversations, demonstrating that Hizbullah is not a simple entity and that there is dis-agreement and debate over various issues within the party.
have preferred to avoid. This was balanced a bit by my “unofficial” con-versations with party supporters whom I met through Aziza.91
It is perhaps worth emphasizing that the political climate in which I did field research differed dramatically from that during which I wrotethis book. At the turn of the twentieth century, although “Islamic funda-mentalism” was a commonly heard catch-phrase on the evening news,eyes were not often turned towards Lebanon. Before I left the UnitedStates to begin fieldwork, the most common question I heard was “Howare they going to respond to you as an American?”
A group I was part of that was trying to implement a park project in the areahad a meeting at one of the local organizations to seek their very hesitant co-operation. To break the ice, our spokesperson went around the room intro-ducing us. When he got to me he said, “This is Lara Deeb, she is a researcherfrom the American University of Beirut and another university in America.She is going to help us with our project, and (with a wink) we don’t know, shemight be spying on us.” The ice was broken with laughter.
I began this project during what turned out to be the last eight monthsof the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and a sense of constant surveillancepermeated the neighborhoods where my interlocutors lived. I heard ru-mors of Hizbullah cameras lining major roads in the area, strict instruc-tions never to carry a visible camera with me while walking around, andstories about spies and collaborators. One story was about how an Is-raeli had pretended to be the deaf friend of a Lebanese collaborator,eventually mapping out the location of the residence of an importantHizbullah figure who had been kidnapped from his village by an Israelihelicopter. In most cases, initial suspicions about me wore off quicklyand, as my contacts grew to include people at local jam‘iyyas and mem-bers of the party, ceased to be an issue for most people I met.
The tour of the organization over, we returned to his office to discuss when Icould return and begin interviewing. One of the women I had just met stuckher head in the door and said, “It’s very good that you are writing this, be-cause you are not Shi‘i and there is a greater chance that people will listen to ascholar like you who is coming from outside. You will be able to teach theAmericans about us, and show them that we are not terrorists.”
40 • Introduction
More difficult were the conversations in which women would tell mehow glad they were to be talking to me, because I was going to be ableto explain to “the West” or to “Americans” that they were not terrorists,that they were “just defending their children” and fighting to liberateLebanese soil from an occupying army. That was not the difficult part.What was paralyzing was that many people went on to express the hopethat somehow my research was going to help change U.S. policy in theMiddle East. Having completed most of the research upon which thisbook rests, I moved back to the United States in August 2001. Politicalconsiderations during field research soon gave way to different onesduring the writing process. In the late nineties, I recall hearing Hizbullahdescribed as “guerrilla fighters” rather than “terrorists” in U.S. news re-ports.92 Today, they have been promoted by U.S. officials to the “A-team”of terrorists,93 the U.S. juggernaut occupies Iraq, Palestinians are threat-ened with “transfer,”94 and threats of violence pervade the entire region;in this context, my Shi‘i friends’ hopes have haunted the writing of thisbook.
Another expectation I encountered is typified by a colleague inLebanon who urged me to seek out the places where what he called “thefaçade of faith” did not hold up, the places where water fell through thesieve, in order to explain how faith is “really” a political-economic strat-egy. My response is that I am working from the premise that faith is nota façade, not just a mystifying thing that we need to look past in order tounderstand what is “really” going on. Instead faith is what is going on, itis a very real thing in and of itself, located in practices, discourses, innerand outer states, relationships, and effects in the world. This is notunique to the Middle East or Islam. One only needs to drive through the“Bible Belt” in the southeastern United States to realize that faith is a veryreal part of the lives of many U.S. Christians. The question my colleaguehinted at, about how much of faith is “true” and how much instrumen-tal, false consciousness, whatever term we choose, is not a question I cananswer, nor one that I think it is necessary to answer in order to shedlight on the relationships between faith, social and political action, andpositionality in the contemporary world. Rather, in Chakrabarty’swords, “I . . . think from the assumption that the question of being hu-man involves the question of being with gods and spirits” (2000a: 16).
To this end, I place my faith in ethnography, in looking at the daily
92 See “Israel launches attack against Hezbollah guerrilla bases,” CNN.com, Novem-ber 28, 1998, www.cnn.com / WORLD/meast/9811/28/mideast.01/.
93 “Hezbollah Becomes Potent Anti-U.S. Force,” New York Times, December 24, 2002.94 “Transfer” is a euphemism for the forcible removal of Palestinians from the West
Bank and Gaza, a “solution” popular among some in the right-wing Israeli leadership. SeeAvnery (2003).
Pious and/as/is Modern • 41
practices of faith, the mundane expressions of piety in acts of charityand sacrifice, and how ritual commemorations in various forms provideparadigms and concepts that can be applied to contemporary life. Thechapters that follow depict an enchanted and modern Shi‘i communitywhere the issues sketched here—issues of what it means to be modern,traditional, pious, western, authentic, and moral—intersect in powerfulways, both discursively and in the real effects that they have on people’slives in the context of their faith, community, nation, and world. It is aportrait of one possible relationship—involving multiple intersectionsand imaginations—between piety and modernity.
1 Although the southern suburb is not Beirut’s only suburb, popular usage has desig-nated it “the suburb,” while other outlying areas of the city are referred to by name (e.g.,Borj Hammoud).
2 I take the term “textures” from Tacchi’s discussion of radio’s creation of a “texturedsoundscape” (1998: 26).
C H A P T E R O N E
Al-Dahiyya: Sight, Sound, Season
Residents and outsiders alike refer to the southern suburbs of Beirutas “al-Dahiyya”—a word that simply means “the suburb” in Arabic,1
but that connotes “the Shi‘i ghetto” to many in other parts of the city.More a conglomeration of multiple municipalities and neighborhoodsthan a single suburb, al-Dahiyya is bounded by the city to the north,Beirut International Airport to the south, the Mediterranean on the westside, and an agricultural area to the east. It used to be that due to this lo-cation al-Dahiyya was unavoidable. To get from the rest of Beirut to theairport or anywhere south of the city, you had to drive through it. Untilrecently, outsiders passing through caught glimpses of the area from theold airport road or from the coastal highway that leads south to Saida(Sidon) and Sour (Tyre). Today new highways, built to bypass al-Dahiyya, connect Beirut to the airport and to the south, allowing visitorsand Lebanese alike to avoid acknowledging its presence.
The residents of this often ignored or maligned area of Beirut whowere my interlocutors often referred to al-bı–’a, the milieu, of al-Dahiyyaas a critical factor in their religious, social, and political understandings,identities, and practices. The visual, aural, and temporal textures2 of thismilieu are the focus of this chapter, and frame the spaces of those thatfollow. These textures layer religion and politics into public space, andare pointed to as evidence of the spiritual progress of the community andof its recent visibility in Lebanon.
To focus is to allow the surrounding context to blur into white. Beforepermitting Beirut to fade like this, a few paragraphs are necessary tocapture this city that—despite its betrayals and violences—is fiercelyclaimed as home by Lebanese of all persuasions.
Al-Dahiyya • 43
Al-Dahiyya IN Beirut
Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several timesit decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the firstClarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, comparedto which the city’s present state can only cause more sighs atevery fading of the stars. . . . Populations and customs havechanged several times; the name, the site, and the objectshardest to break remain. Each new Clarice, compact as a livingbody with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, whatremains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Beirut is a balance of constant stimuli and contagious ennui. The for-mer assaults your senses and drains your energy, the latter emerges in theomnipresent hopelessness and a slow rhythm of bare motion. There is noway to capture the essence of Beirut: the romance, the dirt, the reality. Itis a word the international media have turned into an epithet for de-struction and that Lebanese expatriates have turned into the whimsy of agolden past. Much has been written about Beirut,3 its deaths, and resur-rections, but this is not the place for me to recap that. Instead I simplyhighlight three aspects of the city that begin to give a sense of itsrhythms: size, resilience, and traffic.
Lebanon, at a mere 10,400 square kilometers (roughly seven-tenthsthe size of Connecticut), is tiny relative to most countries in the world.Barring horrible traffic, you can drive its length along the coast in fourhours, and its width in less than two. Centrally located Beirut is accessi-ble from anywhere in the country. This smallness of scale creates a den-sity of activity and relationships that intensifies and localizes experi-ences. At the same time, the fact that places are within easy reach of oneanother amplifies the impact of the immense psychological and ideologi-cal distances that divide them. Many residents of areas of Beirut I trav-eled between daily had never set foot in the “other” neighborhoods sim-ply because they were “other.”4 Samir Khalaf, among others, hasdiscussed this retrenching of sectarian identities in space:5
3 A small selection: for history of Greater Beirut, particularly the southern areas, seeKhuri 1975; for history, urban planning, postwar reconstruction see Khalaf 1993a, 1993b,1998, 2002; Harb el-Kak 1996, 1998, 2000; and Rowe and Sarkis 1998; for a memoirportrait of the city see Makdisi 1990.
4 The civil war amplified the sectarianization of space in Lebanon. Prior to the war, thereexisted many intersectarian social networks, especially among women (Joseph 1983).
5 See also Khalaf 1993b, 1998, and 2001; Faour 1991; and Sennett 1993.
44 • Chapter One
This compulsion to huddle in compact, homogenous enclosures further“balkanized” Lebanon’s social geography. There is a curious and painfulirony here. Despite the many differences that divide the Lebanese, they are allin a sense homogenized by fear, grief, and trauma. (Khalaf 2002: 247)
The smallness of Beirut and Lebanon also emerges in the threads thatconnect people, strung throughout the fabric of the country. Six degreesof separation are rare; two or three far more common. There is littleanonymity; even corporate institutions like banks treat their customersto coffee and conversation with business.
Beirut is also a city of unbelievable resilience. Surviving years of war isthe city’s greatest testament to this. I witnessed a much smaller exampleon the morning of February 8, 2000. The night before I had awakenedto the sounds of Israeli planes breaking the sound barrier and bombinginfrastructure around Lebanon. They destroyed three power plants,leaving fires you could see burning from balconies in the city. Despitethis, early the next morning a friend of mine picked me up for a meetingin al-Dahiyya. The only discernable differences during that day andthose that followed were the dark circles underneath people’s eyes, theextra sweaters worn to guard against the cold in places that would havebeen heated with electricity, the flashlights carried to light the way upstairwells when elevators were not running, the simmering anger invoices discussing the events, and the constant whir of generators thathad sprung up overnight. After a few days of darkness, electricity wasrerouted and rationed throughout the country, generally on a six-houron-and-off cycle.
Resilience is accompanied by adaptability and a coexistence with acertain level of chaos. This is represented in the illogic of traffic, some-thing visitors and residents alike often find frustrating. One-way streetsswitched direction every block or two; traffic lights sometimes workedand sometimes didn’t, and were sometimes assumed to be merely sugges-tions; there were few marked lanes and many bottlenecks; and appropri-ate distance between vehicles was measured by the proximity of yourneighbor’s car skimming yours.
Chaotic traffic, resilience, and compactness are notions that could de-scribe almost any area of Beirut. Yet Lebanese who do not live in al-Dahiyya often assume these general characteristics to be especially trueof al-Dahiyya. I had a hard time convincing many Lebanese, especiallybut not only those who were not Shi‘i, to accompany me to al-Dahiyya,and sometimes even to give me a ride to an organization or an acquain-tance’s house in the area. This reluctance sometimes stemmed fromfears and false assumptions about what it meant to be in an area
Al-Dahiyya • 45
6 For an excellent discussion of the complexities of “al-Dahiyya” and its neighborhoods,see Harb el-Kak 1996, 1998, 2000.
7 See Harb el-Kak 1998. This was approximately one-third of Beirut’s total population.8 “Illegal” is a complex label in this context, often having to do with building codes and
laws, in addition to real estate ownership.
controlled by Hizbullah. For others, however, it was simply an unwilling-ness to navigate the narrow roads, dead ends, and one-way streets thatinevitably led to a headlock situation where one driver was forced todrive backwards the way she came, hoping there would be no other traf-fic behind her. A similar reluctance was expressed by many I knew in al-Dahiyya with regard to other areas of Beirut, particularly Ashrafiyye, themostly Maronite Christian suburb to the east. Again, for some, it was ahesitation based in fear and stereotypes, while for others it was the sameunwillingness to navigate the gridlock of an unfamiliar part of the city.
The responses I encountered when I first broached the subject of my re-search with residents of other parts of Beirut were typical of this. Timeand again eyes grew wide, and “You’re going to do what?” was followedby a more cautionary “You will have to be careful.” Later responses in-cluded a note of admiration, disbelief, or simply, “You’re crazy.” This wasnot confined to Lebanese who were not Shi‘i; if anything, wealthy Shi‘iswho did not live in al-Dahiyya responded the most stridently. To nonresi-dents, mention of al-Dahiyya often elicits such responses of discomfort,ranging from caution mingled with curiosity to outright trepidation: re-sponses built on stereotypical associations of “al-Dahiyya” with poverty,illegal construction, refugees, armed Hizbullah security guards and secretcameras, and “the Shi‘i ghetto.” Such stereotypes obscure al-Dahiyya’scomplexity. Before moving on, it is necessary to address this complexity inorder to undo some of these common assumptions.6
Assumptions Undone
Al-Dahiyya Is Not Uniform
Al-Dahiyya encompasses several municipalities and a number of verydense neighborhoods, with a combined population of approximately fivehundred thousand people in an area of sixteen square kilometers.7 MonaHarb el-Kak divides al-Dahiyya into eastern and western zones, with theformer made up primarily of older villages that were incorporated intothe urban fabric of the city and a few illegal sectors along the edges,8 andthe latter consisting of a combination of dense illegal sectors and lessurbanized areas (1998, 2000). Within these multiple municipalities andneighborhoods, there is immense variation with regard to class, length of
46 • Chapter One
1.1. A typical street in al-Dahiyya.
Al-Dahiyya • 47
9 Lack of recent censuses made it difficult to assess levels of religious diversity in al-Dahiyya, though there were some Christian families residing there.
10 Harakat Amal is the other major Shi‘i political party in Lebanon. It did not have amajor presence in the neighborhoods where I worked.
11 See Khuri 1975.
residency in the area, and political leanings, as well as some religious di-versity.9
One of the characteristics of stereotypes is that they homogenize. As areal space, al-Dahiyya was not uniform; it was not only “poor,” “illegal,”or “Hizbullah.” The region signified by the term included areas whereHarakat Amal10 was the principal political party rather than Hizbullah,and there existed older legal residential districts as well as newly built il-legal neighborhoods, some lingering Christian residents, “original” resi-dents mingled in among more recent arrivals displaced by the wars, andan emerging Shi‘i “middle class” living in constant contact with itspoorer neighbors. During my field research, the ra’ı–s baladiyya (mayor)of one municipality, Haret Hrayk, was a Maronite Christian who workedin close cooperation with Hizbullah. And on some streets, elaboratehomes and the latest model BMWs indicated wealthy residents, as didthe shops selling European fashions that existed alongside internet cafés,vegetable stands, and corner markets.
Al-Dahiyya Has a History
Stereotypes also belie the fact that this area has not always been predom-inately Shi‘i or (sub)urban. Thirty years ago, much of it was semirural,its population a mix of Shi‘i Muslims and Maronite Christians. A quar-ter century and a civil war later, this had become the second mostdensely populated area of the country, exceeded only by the Palestinianrefugee camps, and it was predominately Shi‘i Muslim.
Prior to the end of World War I and the subsequent French mandate inLebanon, al-Dahiyya was rural and several of its current municipalitieswere villages. By 1970, one of these villages, Chiyah, had become twosuburbs with a population of thirty thousand people and four thousandmore households than had existed forty years earlier.11 Much of thisgrowth was due to the wave of rural to urban migration that occurredthroughout Lebanon in the 1950s and ’60s, though the southern areas ofBeirut were mostly settled by Shi‘is from the south and the Beqaa.
Writing in 1975, Fuad Khuri described the suburbs thus:
A glance at the suburbs gives the impression that nothing is placed where it issupposed to be. The observer is immediately struck by the lack of planning,
48 • Chapter One
12 See Harb el-Kak 1998. Faour (1991) notes that by 1988 the population of al-Dahiyyawas mostly Shi‘i Muslim.
zoning, a center to the town, straight streets, and standardized buildings.Apartment buildings of various sizes and indistinct style blotch the horizon.They are often separated by one-floor houses with concrete pillars on the roofto suggest that the unfinished part of the building will be completed soon; orby small, neglected orange or olive orchards; or by well-cultivated vegetablegardens. Goats and sheep are often seen roaming around the twisted streets,looking for garbage to feed on. Chickens are more frequently heard and areseen caged in small poultry runs in gardens, beside houses, or on house-top.(1975: 37)
Soon after, the remnants of village life vanished with the arrival of thou-sands of Shi‘i refugees from the northeastern suburbs of Beirut, thesouth, and the Beqaa during the years of war. Refugees continued topour into al-Dahiyya, as it grew southward and westward, throughoutthe violence, and especially in 1978, 1982, and 1993, as villagers fromthe south and the Beqaa fled Israeli invasions and bombardments.
These consecutive surges in migration altered the sectarian makeup ofthe suburbs. The original village of Chiyah had a Maronite Christianmajority and a Shi‘i Muslim minority, a ratio that was gradually re-versed over the next few decades through both Shi‘i migration to thearea and Maronite emigration to South America (Khuri 1975). Beforethe wars began, there was still a slight Maronite majority in the southernsuburbs. By the late 1990s, approximately 70–80 percent of the popula-tion was made up of Shi‘is who were displaced during the wars.12
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when you enter al-Dahiyya from many other areas of Beirut, there is generally no clearmarker of division, but there is a palpable change. Your senses clearly in-dicate that you have entered an area that is dominated by a particularmix of politics and piety. The recent demographic changes that have oc-curred in al-Dahiyya marked a new visibility for many Shi‘i Muslims asa presence in Lebanon, and especially in Beirut, inscribed on publicspace and time. In what follows, I render the temporal, visual, and auraltextures of al-Dahiyya that contribute to the sense of community cohe-sion held by those located within the pious modern.
Although most of my interlocutors resided in al-Dahiyya and it wastheir shared values that dominated public space in the area, al-Dahiyyawas not coterminous with Shi‘i “Islamism” or piety in Lebanon. On theone hand, while urban Lebanese Shi‘i Islamism was concentrated in thissuburb, its roots and reach extended throughout the country, and espe-cially into the south and the Beqaa Valley. On the other hand, there
Al-Dahiyya • 49
13 I use “hegemonic” here to highlight the relationship between cultural dominance ofthese particular images and the political dominance of Hizbullah in these neighborhoods,and to note the relationship between this particular milieu and the social order of the piousmodern.
14 While martyrdom was originally linked to “witnessing,” in the contemporary mean-ing to be martyred is to be killed for a belief or principle. In the United States the term isused more narrowly to mean to be killed for one’s religious beliefs. In Lebanon, one canalso be martyred for one’s nation. Indeed, all political parties and militias in Lebanon use“martyr” to indicate members who died during the civil war (AbuKhalil 1991). The con-cept of national martyrs is equally important in the United States though the term itself israrely used. I use “martyred” rather than “killed” in order to convey my interlocutors’ em-phasis on the sacrifice made by those killed for religion and/or nation.
15 See Houston’s discussion of Islamicized public space as a space connoting “empiricalpresentations of an imagined social order even as they constitute it” but whose meaningscan also be subverted by different consumptions of those same spaces (2001: 82).
existed within al-Dahiyya other political perspectives, religious beliefsand identities, and lifestyles. Yet my focus lies with those who bothclaimed a particular religious identity based in authenticated Islam andwere active participants in shaping their social landscape in accordancewith that religious identity.
As I move to describing what pious Shi‘is called al-bı–’a (the milieu), Iwant to emphasize that the forms I discuss are those that were bothubiquitous and hegemonic,13 both at first glance to an outsider and tothe particular public of the pious modern. So, for example, in describingthe plethora of signs that papered al-Dahiyya’s streets, I focus on imagesof orphans, religious leaders, and Resistance martyrs.14 There were alsopictures of other political figures and candidates, especially around elec-tion times. And there were other sorts of images—building names, signsadvertising commodities and services—but these were not what wereperceived to set the cityscape apart from other areas of Beirut. Nor werethese images the ones people pointed out to me when describing the pos-itive changes that had occurred around them over the past few decades.As Susan Ossman notes, understanding the meanings of particular por-traits and their place in the hierarchy of images that dot the urban land-scape “depends on a personal and collective narrative” that leads to spe-cific interpretations (1994: 144). The dominant collective narrative thatframed images of orphans, religious leaders, and Resistance martyrs isthat which unfolds throughout this book.
Additionally, the rapid growth, shifts in population, and surges inbuilding that have come to characterize al-Dahiyya were experienced bymany residents as the making of an area of Beirut that was explicitlyShi‘i—essentially as the creation of a place for the religious-political-social movement they were working to forge.15 For them, the various tex-tures of al-Dahiyya’s milieu that I describe in this chapter were significant
50 • Chapter One
because they represented the rooting of the uprooted, and because theywere evidence of the “rise” of “the Shi‘a” as a critical community inLebanon. As we will see in the next chapter, many experienced this asmovement from a position of deprivation and marginalization relative toother groups in Lebanon, to one of visibility and influence within thecity and nation-state. I now turn to the details of this visibility.
Textures of al-Dahiyya
Sight
The first time I entered al-Dahiyya, I went by taxi. My luck was with methat day, as my driver was both loquacious and from one of the neigh-borhoods that would eventually become part of my field site. After I ex-plained that I would be working with the jam‘iyya (social welfare organ-ization) where I had an appointment that day, he began to point outlandmarks to help me get my bearings. As we turned off the old airportroad, we joined a slow stream of traffic, with men pushing vegetablecarts wandering between the cars, and pedestrians crossing at will.Servı–ces—ubiquitous shared taxis that are always old Mercedeses—heldup the flow, and young men on motorbikes whizzed loudly aroundweaving closely between cars. The buildings looked taller, something Iimmediately attributed to less regulated construction, and there seemedto be a lot of billboards with pictures of children on them. Similar pic-tures dotted many of the electrical poles, alongside posters of Nasrallah,another sayyid who looked a lot like him to me, and Khomeini. Whenthe driver saw me looking at a huge canvas painting of Khomeini thatleaned against the side of a building, he gestured to it and said simply,“qa’idna” (our leader).
Several months later, I was driving myself around al-Dahiyya with rel-ative ease, though I still dreaded parking and frequently had to ask fordirections. I had learned that that other sayyid who had looked a lot likeNasrallah was in fact Sayyid Abbas al-Musawi, the previous SecretaryGeneral of Hizbullah who had been assassinated by Israel along with hiswife and five-year-old son. And I now knew that those children’s faceswere the faces of need, of orphans representing the many charitable or-ganizations that worked in the area.
I had also learned that, contrary to what some people from otherBeirut neighborhoods had indicated, in certain ways al-Dahiyya lookeda lot like many other regions of the city. Some of the buildings were in-deed taller and more closely spaced, and that did have to do with unreg-ulated building. But this was not unique to al-Dahiyya. Nor was the highlevel of pedestrian traffic in the streets unique to this particular part of
Al-Dahiyya • 51
16 ‘Aba–ya is the Arabic term for the full-length loose black outer garment worn bywomen in Iran (where it is called a chador) and some Shi‘i women in Iraq.
17 Kratz identifies three—often overlapping—genres of portraiture common to theUnited States, Africa and Europe: personal, governmental, and journalistic (2002: 119).In the Middle Eastern context we might add political or public portraiture to that taxon-omy. Berger lists three types of public photography: scientific, political, and media/communicative (Berger and Mohr 1982: 98). The portraits I discuss here are both politi-cal and communicative—part of a mass media of images that inscribe a political commu-nity and identity.
Beirut, although the especially high population density was probablyreflected here to a certain extent. Yet in other ways, there was somethingthat set al-Dahiyya apart. This was the presence of a particular politicsof piety, a sense of publicly displayed and claimed piety: what my friendsat the American University of Beirut glossed as “Hizbullah” but whatwas in fact far more complicated than a political party.
This public piety appeared in the higher prevalence of women whowore Islamic dress and the h.ija
–b than in perhaps any other part ofthe country, and certainly in the numbers of women in Iranian style‘aba–yas.16 It was also manifested in the ease with which I and otherwomen could walk through the streets. Al-Dahiyya was the only area ofBeirut where I was never subject to a single catcall. The only commentever made to me by a strange man was a singular occasion when some-one said “Allah yahdı–kı–” (May God give you guidance), apparently inreference to my modest but unveiled appearance, something that my (atthe time) new Shi‘i acquaintances found quite amusing. Another areawhere public piety appeared was in the pervasiveness of certain images:portraits of orphans, religious leaders, and martyrs.17
As I noted above, these were not the only signs in al-Dahiyya. Bill-boards and posters advertising products were also common, as were po-litical signs during elections. These specific portraits also existed in otherareas of Beirut, especially during jam‘iyya Ramadan fund-raising cam-paigns or when Hizbullah and Harakat Amal were competing for visualdominance in a neighborhood or at a prominent intersection. But unlikein other areas of the city, these particular portraits were commonplacein al-Dahiyya, accepted by many as a natural and comfortable part ofthe cityscape. Some residents of other areas responded negatively to theexplicit presence of Shi‘i public piety in their neighborhoods as an en-croachment. For example, when one woman saw the poster of a Resis-tance martyr plastered on a wall near her home she said, “See, al-Dahiyyais creeping up on us.”
In contrast, within al-Dahiyya, a person would sometimes point to aposter of a martyr while describing her solidarity with the Resistance,or to a portrait of a religious figure while explaining “how far the
52 • Chapter One
1.2. Image of an orphan.
18 This mirrors at least one of the intentions behind the display of these portraits. AsMona Harb related to me, when she asked a Hizbullah representative why they put up pic-tures of martyrs, he answered that it was so that when you entered the area, “You wouldknow where you are” (personal communication).
community had come.” For many, the iconographic salience of orphans,martyrs, and religious leaders lay in the ways these images claimed anddefined the space of al-Dahiyya as belonging to their community.18
Through these visual signifiers, al-Dahiyya was claimed as a place for theShi‘i Islamic movement and a place within which (a particular) pietywould be nurtured. At the same time, the presence of these particularportrait images exemplified the freedom pious Shi‘is felt within al-Dahiyya to claim this piety publicly. As will be discussed later, many feltstrongly that they were part of a communal group that had always beendispossessed in the Lebanese polity. The images that filled al-Dahiyyawere evidence to them of the progress their community had made withinthe nation-state. Increased piety—visible spiritual progress—was linkedto political success.
Images of orphans, martyrs, and religious leaders were read differ-ently by those who felt a part of the Shi‘i Islamic pious modern than by
Al-Dahiyya • 53
19 During Ramadan 2004, this was highlighted in Martyrs’ Association billboards juxta-posing images of orphans with an image of Nasrallah.
20 See Wedeen’s discussion of what she calls “the Asad cult” in Syria (1999). See alsoÖzyürek (n.d.) on images of Ataturk in Turkey.
21 As described in Ossman 1994.
those who did not. Outsiders sometimes saw photographs of orphans aschildren being used for fund-raising purposes. Depending on one’s poli-tical leanings, portraits of sayyids and shaykhs might be read as frighten-ing evidence of an insistence on an Islamic state, or as a distressingreminder of the failures of the secular left, or as elements in an internaliconographic war among Shi‘i political parties. Responses to the render-ings of martyrs often seemed to vary with the political climate and latestevents; in the months leading up to and following Israeli withdrawalin 2000, they were regarded by many as national heroes who liberatedthe south.
Obviously these meanings and valences change when the spectatoridentifies with the images and their collective narrative. In the case of or-phans, the differences relate to a different set of values through whichimages are interpreted. So within the community, the power of orphansin fund-raising did not stem merely from their embodied innocence aschildren, but also from the shared assumptions of viewers that orphanswere the children of Resistance martyrs.19 On the other hand, in manyways the salience of portraits of religious leaders emerges from a set ofmeanings shared with other communities in Lebanon. Here what differsis not understandings of what images represent, but responses to thoserepresentations.
Portraits of sayyids and shaykhs are not solely religious images, ratherthey are part of the plastering of public surfaces with the images ofprominent political figures that is common to all of Lebanon and muchof the Middle East. In Jordan, posters and large paintings of the lateKing Husayn and the current King Abdullah fill public space. In Syriaone finds omnipresent images of late President Hafez al-Asad and hissuccessor and son, President Bashar.20 Similarly in Morocco images ofthe king are mandatory in all public buildings and often appear in homesand offices as well.21 The lack of one dominant political persona inLebanon, the lack of a singular face confronting spectators at every turn,reflects the sectarian political system in the country and underscores theusage of portrait images as weapons in a continuous turf war. Theprominence of particular leaders declares political loyalties and producesthe effect of territorial claims that may, whether intentionally or not, in-fluence the fears and resegregation of Lebanon’s various communities. In
54 • Chapter One
1.3. Image of martyred Shaykh Raghib Harb.
al-Dahiyya, the dominant faces were those of Hizbullah political leaders,with competition in some areas from Harakat Amal.
The political, rather than religious, significance of these images is rein-forced by who was not represented among them, namely SayyidMuhammad Husayn Fadlullah. Those who were represented were all re-ligious leaders who had clear political roles: Ayatollah Khomeini and hissuccessor Ayatollah Khamenei; Secretary General of Hizbullah SayyidHasan Nasrallah; his martyred predecessor Sayyid Abbas al-Musawi;Shaykh Raghib Harb, another martyred Hizbullah leader; Sayyid Musaal-Sadr, the original mobilizer of the Lebanese Shi‘a; and even ShaykhSubhi Tufayli, whose movement split from Hizbullah during an internalconflict in the early 1990s. But there were no posters of Fadlullah hang-ing from electrical poles or balconies. Many of his followers had framed
Al-Dahiyya • 55
22 During the civil war, especially in the late 1980s, these battles over territory werefought in street-by-street violence throughout al-Dahiyya.
photographs of him in their offices or homes, but this was a personalstatement of religious allegiance and admiration, rather than part of thepolitical iconography of the area. Indeed, when I asked people why Fad-lullah’s picture was not prominently displayed, given his clear importanceas perhaps the most influential Shi‘i religious leader in Lebanon, the re-sponse occasionally indicated that it would be somehow polluting to hisrole in the religious realm to treat him as a political leader, especially ashe has staunchly refused to affiliate with any one political party, callinginstead for unity among all believers and coexistence among allLebanese.
A similar negative association was expressed to me by a close relativeof Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, perhaps the religious leader most frequently pic-tured in posters and paintings in the country:
He said that it really upsets him, “the whole thing with the pictures,” and tearswelled up in his eyes. He continued, saying that he has thought about this alot and that it is clear to him that these pictures are being used for politicalgoals, to help people win elections, because they always put a picture of Berri[Amal’s political leader], of the exact same size, next to al-Sadr’s image. Hethen added that he thinks some people just put the pictures up everywhere outof ignorance, because they loved [al-Sadr] and think this is a good way toshow it: “It’s an ignorant expression of love.”
This man resented both the political uses to which al-Sadr was being putand what he perceived as the misplacing of admiration in political pos-tering. Indeed, al-Sadr is perhaps one of the most contested faces in al-Dahiyya. The turf wars expressed through these portraits are oftenstrongest among political parties affiliated with the same sect. In al-Dahiyya, as well as some other areas of Beirut and Lebanon, the politicaland territorial battles between Hizbullah and rival party Harakat Amalhave been played out in images since the end of the civil war.22 Amal hasalways claimed al-Sadr, yet Hizbullah also utilizes his image, as theyclaim descent from the same origins. Each party believes itself the trueheir to al-Sadr’s movement and political goals. Few other crossover asso-ciations take place, although I did see at least one painting of Khomeiniwith Amal symbols around it.
Turf wars also emerge in less sanctioned images. In a few streets in al-Dahiyya, small spray-painted stencil images of renegade Shaykh SubhiTufayli covered the cement walls of buildings. This was not official pos-tering associated with a party, but an expression of loyalty to the shaykhand his movement by area residents. Again, it is the political leadership
56 • Chapter One
of the shaykh that is emphasized through his representation, rather thanhis religious position.
Like pictures of religious leaders, portraits of martyrs work to indicatepolitical loyalties and claim territorial space. Yet these images also carrya duality that emerges from their memorializing aspect. This duality isrelated to “the tension between personal identity and social identity, in-dividual and type, a tension integral to portraiture” (Kratz 2002: 119).In contrast to the sayyid pictures, images of martyrs are invested withan intensity of personal meaning. As photographs of individual martyrs,these images work as expressions of grief; they play a role in memori-alizing particular loss. Even though martyr images were displayed pub-licly, on streetlights and electrical poles, the smallness of al-Dahiyya andthe few degrees of separation among members of the community guar-anteed that some of those who passed the photographs on a daily basiswould know one of the martyrs or his family, or at least be familiar with
1.4. Image of a martyr; it reads “The martyred fighter [so-and-so].”
Al-Dahiyya • 57
23 See Ruby 1995.24 This tension is also related to the temporal disruption created when any photograph is
taken and later looked at, the gap in time between its taking and viewing (Berger andMohr 1982). Kratz notes that this temporal difference links a portrait to the life changesthat have taken place since its capture (2002: 119). With regard to martyr portraits, this ef-fect is intensified because the image “seems to confirm, prophetically, the later discontinu-ity created by the absence or death” (Berger and Mohr 1982: 87).
them. Just as there was little anonymity in life, there was even less indeath.
But just as martyr photographs are individualized and localized, at thesame time they facilitate mourning on the community level, and promoteand declare community solidarity and political loyalties. Any display ofmartyr photographs in al-Dahiyya contained an element of homogeniza-tion of form. Take, for example, the signs placed by Hizbullah’s mediaand art department on electrical poles and streetlights along many of themain streets (illustration 1.5). Each sign showed the head and shouldersof a martyr against a bright pastel background, with the yellow Hizbul-lah flag flanked by pink at the top and blue at the bottom. Written inwhite along the blue at the lower edge was the name of the martyr, witha caption “The martyred fighter so-and-so” or “The martyred brotherso-and-so.” These signs followed you down many of these roads, differ-ent faces gracing streetlight after streetlight. Or are they different? Theuniformity of the signs has the effect of rendering the martyrs themselvesfaceless, like indistinguishable masks. They become both metonymicpieces of a collective and the whole itself—each in itself representative ofthe Resistance, and simultaneously each part of the inseparable wholethat is the Resistance, along with all who have sacrificed for it, past,present or future. In martyr portraits, this duality links to the binaryfunction of memorial photography: to remember death and to rememberthe life that has ended.23 Public portraits of martyrs did exactly this: theymemorialized the deaths of individuals while representing solidarity withthe community epitomized by the lives that were sacrificed.24
The duality inherent in the tension between the personal and the col-lective in martyr photographs is present to a lesser degree in images ofreligious leaders and orphans. It is the duality common to all photo-graphs that Roland Barthes describes in his contrast between the punc-tum and the studium, the two aspects of looking at a photograph, theformer a private emotional experience and the latter based in culturallymediated and shared experience and meaning. “To recognize the studiumis inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter intoharmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always tounderstand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which
58 • Chapter One
25 See Berger 1980.26 In contrast, Sandeen (1995) argues that “The Family of Man” contained a political
narrative based in an antinuclear stance and constructed around a politics of human com-monality that emerged from the historical moment in which the exhibition was constructed.
studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and con-sumers” (Barthes 1981: 27). In relation to portrait images in al-Dahiyya,the studium captured the intentions of the displayer as well as the pho-tographer, and the communal solidarities expressed and provoked by theact of displaying these particular images. The punctum, in contrast, dis-turbed (punctuated) the studium: “it is this element which rises from thescene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (26). It emergedfrom the personal relationships a member of the community may havehad with a martyr, an orphan (whether the one pictured or not), or asayyid or shaykh, one’s own feelings of faith, doubt, oppression, or soli-darity.
In this regard, these portraits fall into a space between private and pub-lic photographs, between the affective and the collective. This distinctionis linked to the relationship between the context in which the images aretaken and the context in which they are read.25 For personal photo-graphs, these contexts are generally similar, so their meaning remains in-tact in ways that are not possible for public photographs that “offerinformation severed from all living experience” (Berger 1980: 55). Dislo-cation between the contexts of creation and consumption allow publicphotographs to be used chaotically, by anyone who provides narrativecontext. But narrative context itself can bridge this gap, as in the 1955photographic exhibition “The Family of Man” where images fromaround the world were presented as though part of “a universal family al-bum” (961).26 In that case, the globe rather than the family became thecontext for the “family” photo. Similarly, in al-Dahiyya, the Shi‘i Islamicmovement and the community of the pious modern stood in for “family.”
One did not have to have a personal relationship with a martyr, reli-gious leader, or orphan to understand his image as part of one’s “fam-ily.” The smallness of social scale that heightened the chances that onewould actually have such a personal relationship served to intensify asense of community solidarity, but that sense was there nonetheless. Atthe same time these portrait images were public: displayed in such a wayas to provide an iconography of community, incorporated into a narra-tive of collective identity, one in which leaders, ideal participants, andthose in need were all represented.
Like images anywhere, martyr, religious leader, and orphan portraitsin al-Dahiyya did not possess inherent meanings. Nor were meaningssolely determined by the production and display of these images, which
Al-Dahiyya • 59
frequently was controlled by jam‘iyyas, political parties, and other insti-tutions. Instead, the meanings carried by these photographs and paintingswere situated in a wider social and narrative framework. In al-Dahiyya,the particular iconography associated with the Shi‘i Islamic movementdominated the visual landscape, facilitated by the hegemonic characterof its narrative framework in the area. It emerged from a complex con-text that included social welfare and political institutions, the residentsof al-Dahiyya, Lebanese national polity and public(s), and the global or-der. Spectators played a crucial role in this process. Through the mean-ings they brought to the images around them—whether personal mourn-ing, solidarity, a sense of belonging in a place, or something else—piousShi‘is were participating in the creation and maintenance of the contextwithin which the images carried meaning: the framework of the piousmodern. I now turn to another key element in its manifestation, movingfrom the visual to the aural.
Sound
Along with images, the cityscape of al-Dahiyya is textured with sound.This soundscape had regular features. Most prominent, after the din ofthe streets, were sacred sounds, again reinforcing the sense of publicpiety that characterized this area of the capital. Perhaps the most con-stant feature of the soundscape were the regular calls to prayer, theadha–n, projected five times a day over loudspeakers from each of themany mosques in the area. One effect of the adha–n is to sacralize space.In al-Dahiyya, this transformation was acknowledged through gesture:even if she was not going to pray at the time, a person would often shifther posture, uncrossing crossed legs, and straightening her back, andwould touch her hand to her head quickly when the adha–n began.
The adha–n also marked time in al-Dahiyya. Rather than, “I’ll meetyou there after lunch,” or “I’ll meet you at 12:30,” I was often told, “I’llmeet you there right after the noon prayer.” The significance of theadha–n to the daily rhythms of life was highlighted for me when we setour clocks back an hour in the fall for daylight savings time. I had no-ticed, as I always do, darkness creeping in earlier, but for Aziza thechange was even more striking: “I can’t believe it’s only 11:35 a.m. butit’s already al-dhuhr (time for the noon prayer)!” she exclaimed uponhearing the call to prayer. The sound of the adha–n is what divided morn-ing from afternoon and afternoon from evening. Because the adha–n is setby the path of the sun, and not the clock, daylight savings had the jar-ring effect of abruptly bringing afternoon an hour earlier, shifting the di-visions of the day. For Aziza, afternoon began shortly after 11:35 a.m.that day.
60 • Chapter One
27 On the adha–n as a marker of spatial boundaries and community identity, see Khan(2001) on colonial India, and Lee (1999) on Singapore.
28 This is not to say that people necessarily find “other” religious sounds upsetting;rather, on a few occasions I caught older Christian residents of Beirut humming along withthe adha–n.
29 Cassettes of sermons, especially Fadlullah’s, are readily available at stores throughoutal-Dahiyya. The importance of religious cassettes in Islamic movements has been discussedby Eickelman and Anderson 1999b, Hirschkind 2001, Larkin 2000, and Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994.
In addition to marking space and time in al-Dahiyya, adha–n inLebanon marks sectarian space and identity.27 There are areas of Beirutwhere it has always been typical to hear churchbells and adha–n sharingthe soundscape,28 but most neighborhoods of al-Dahiyya did not fit thisdescription. Moreover, in Lebanon, the details of the adha–n declare thesect of the mosque. Shi‘i mosques are distinguishable by an added linebearing witness that Ali is the walı– (deputy) of God.
Other related sounds do not mark daily time, but are instead weekly,like the sermons, Qur’anic recitations, and noontime prayers that em-anated from many mosques on Fridays. This mosque-based soundscapealso included seasonal elements, discussed further below. Also importantare occasional manifestations of sound that can be read by residents,such as the Qur’anic recitations that took place when someone had died.On several occasions I would be visiting someone in al-Dahiyya whenthe recitation slipping in the window prompted her to wonder aloudwho in the area had passed away. Ears would then strain to hear the an-nouncement that would follow, informing the community of who haddied and when the burial would take place.
Sound in al-Dahiyya marked time, transmitted religious and commu-nity knowledge, and engendered or facilitated emotion. Most crucially,elements of the soundscape underscored the indissolubility of religionfrom everyday life, linking the mundane to the sacred. These sacredsounds were everyday sounds, part and parcel of the spaces where peo-ple live.
In the contemporary moment, the mosque is not the only source forpietistic sound in al-Dahiyya. It has been joined by cassette tapes of ser-mons and Qur’anic recitation,29 as well as two major radio stations anda television station. The radio stations—al-Basha–’ir (the Messenger orHerald) affiliated with Fadlullah, and al-Nu–r (the Light) affiliated withHizbullah—broadcast a variety of programming, the former primarilyreligious and social, and the latter a mix of religion, politics and currentevents/news updates. The television station, Al-Mana–r (the Lighthouse),is affiliated with Hizbullah, and also has a wide variety of programming,ranging from news updates and in-depth current events discussions,
Al-Dahiyya • 61
30 For more on this history see Ayoub 1978, Jafri 1979, Momen 1985, and Pinault 1992.31 “Ashura” (from the Arabic root meaning “ten”) technically denotes the tenth of
Muharram, the day on which the battle took place, but Lebanese Shi‘is use “Ashura” to re-fer to the entire ten-day commemoration period.
interviews, and debates, to children’s shows and fictional serials, oftenbased on religio-historical events.
All these media pause their programming in order to sound the call toprayer, and to broadcast Friday sermons and prayers. Many commentedon the importance of these media, emphasizing their contribution to thereligious milieu as well as their educational value. Religious radio and tele-vision were also contrasted positively with past practices of playing nonre-ligious music, like the classic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, in publicspaces like shops. There was a sense that these particular media repre-sented progress for al-Dahiyya: a sense related to the feeling that thesemedia provided an outlet, a voice, for the pious modern in Lebanon.
Neither the soundscape nor the visual cityscape were uniformthroughout the year in al-Dahiyya. It is to the cycle of seasons and therelated shifts in texture that this chapter now turns.
Season
The standard visual and aural textures of al-Dahiyya were supplementedby seasonal additions, following the ritual cycle of the Hijri, or Islamiccalendar. The first month of the year is Muharram. For Sunni Muslims, 1Muharram is celebrated as the beginning of the New Year. Yet for Shi‘iMuslims, the year begins in tragedy. The first ten days of Muharram arecommemorated as days of hardship for the Shi‘i leader Imam Husayn andhis followers, leading to their martyrdom on 10 Muharram.
Imam Husayn was the grandson of the Prophet, the son of his daugh-ter Sayyida Fatima and his cousin and son-in-law Imam Ali. In 680 CE,Husayn was killed in battle by an army sent by the Caliph, Yazid, on theplain of Karbala, now in Iraq. This was perhaps the most major of a se-ries of conflicts over succession to the leadership of the Islamic commu-nity that divided Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims. A group of Shi‘is in Kufa, alsoin Iraq, had called upon Husayn to lead them in revolt against Yazid. Heagreed and set out on the first of Muharram, taking with him armedguards and his family. They were intercepted and besieged at Karbala.The battle began on the tenth of Muharram, and by the end, all the menexcept one of the Imam’s sons had been killed and the women and chil-dren taken captive.30 The entire ten-day period that culminates in thecommemoration of the battle and martyrdom on the tenth of Muharramis referred to metonymically in Lebanon as “Ashura.”31
62 • Chapter One
32 Named after and built in honor of Husayn, h. usayniyyas are buildings used primarilyfor mourning gatherings, but also for other religious, family, political, and communityevents.
For Shi‘i Muslims, Ashura ushers in a season of mourning and dark-ness. The details of Ashura commemorations and their meanings are dis-cussed in depth in chapter 4, but for now it is important to note the gen-eral atmosphere of solemnity that pervaded al-Dahiyya during Ashuraand for several weeks following it. People generally dressed in somberclothing—black, perhaps navy after the tenth of the month. Celebra-tions, such as weddings or birthday parties, were frowned upon. Ritualmourning gatherings were held throughout the season, continuing forforty days after the day of the martyrdom, and many in al-Dahiyya con-sidered the second month of the calendar, Safar, to be a time of year assober, if not more sober, than Muharram itself.
The religious seasons in al-Dahiyya were reflected in the imagery andsoundscape of the area. During this period of solemnity, it was commonto hear the lamentative strains of at least one majlis ‘aza (mourninggathering, plural, maja–lis) radiating from a mosque, husayniyya,32 streetcorner, or private home. The recent use of microphones in privately heldmaja–lis has increased this in the past decade. Many pious individuals lis-tened to tapes of maja–lis or nudbas, which are like dirges, mourningsongs commemorating the events around the martyrdom. Radio andtelevision programming on the Fadlullah and Hizbullah frequencies alsoreflected this mood, broadcasting nudbas or educational programmingabout the life of Husayn and the meanings of Ashura.
The standard portrait imagery was supplemented with black bannershung from buildings and balconies, strung across roads, and attached tostreetlights and electrical poles. Written on these banners were textscommemorating Husayn’s martyrdom: sayings of the Prophet, versesfrom the Qur’an, or quotes from Khomeini and other important figures,all of which highlight Ashura’s importance to the contemporary era.While some of these carried no political insignia, and were erected bymosques or religious organizations, others were clearly linked to territo-riality and political affiliation. In 2000, two black bridgelike structuresspanned a highway south of Beirut a short distance apart, one clearlymarked with Amal signs and the other Hizbullah. In Hizbullah territory,the standard yellow flags of the party are usually replaced by red andblack ones.
After the season of mourning, the rest of the year is one of neutralitymarked with joy. Some people insisted that Shi‘i Muslims exist in per-petual shadow, in a state of constant sadness. However, they were
Al-Dahiyya • 63
1.5. Ashura banner; it reads “Hussein’s choice is our choice, Khamenei is ourleader, and the Resistance is our Karbala.”
rare individuals whose piety approached asceticism. Two other majorcommemorative times mark the Hijri calendar: Ramadan and the h.ajj,both of which are shared by Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims alike. Before turn-ing to them, however, I want to touch upon the smaller celebratory mo-ments, the mawlids. During the last week of the month Safar one year, Iwas at a jam‘iyya while some volunteers were planning a fund-raiser.They had wanted to hold this event for some time, but were waiting for“mawsim al-mawa–lid,” the season of mawlids (birth celebrations), asone woman put it, to do so. When I asked why, she responded: “Just as
64 • Chapter One
33 There is debate as to whether laylat al-qadr is always on 27 Ramadan or on anotherof the odd-numbered days during the month’s final ten days.
God gave us Ashura which is a sad occasion, he gave us the mawlid, thehappy occasion of the Prophet’s birth.”
A mawlid commemorates the Prophet Muhammad’s birth (in Rabi I)in a celebratory event that often includes professional religious singing inhis honor. Shi‘i Muslims also hold mawlids to mark other occasions, likethe birthdays of Imam Husayn (in Rabi II), Imam Ali (in Rajab), andImam al-Mahdi, the twelfth Imam (in Shaban). The fund-raiser this par-ticular jam‘iyya was planning was to coincide with the anniversary ofImam Ali’s marriage to Sayyida Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, one ofthe numerous annual commemorative dates that are noted in al-Dahiyya. Mawlids generally did not affect the public sound or cityscapein al-Dahiyya, because they were usually held as private gatherings.
The next major moment in the religious calendar is the month of Ra-madan, the ninth month of the year and one whose importance is em-phasized by all Muslims. Ramadan is the month in which the Qur’anwas revealed to Muhammad. The night on which this is believed to haveoccurred, the twenty-seventh of the month, is commemorated as laylatal-qadr with special prayers.33 For all Muslims, observing Ramadan in-volves prayer and fasting—meaning abstaining from food, drink, smok-ing, and sex—between sunrise and sunset throughout the month. At sun-set, the fast breaking meal, or ift.a
–r, has become a lavish undertaking formany, though this has been criticized by those who fear that Ramadan islosing its religious significance. The end of Ramadan is celebrated as Eidal-Fitr, also called Eid al-Saghir (the minor holiday).
Because Ramadan is a month of reflection and generosity, manyjam‘iyyas conducted their primary fund-raising activities during thistime. Some held large banquet ift.a
–rs, placing an envelope underneatheach plate for donations. Others placed advertisements asking for dona-tions, and reminding pious individuals of their religious duty to help theless fortunate. Ramadan fund-raising made use of a wide variety of me-dia, and contributed to the particular textures associated with themonth. This is the season during which the orphan as icon took centerstage. Billboards and signs showing forlorn yet happy orphans sproutedup all around al-Dahiyya as well as other parts of Beirut, often accompa-nied by a verse from the Qur’an or a h. adı–th enjoining passersby to re-member the orphans during the month of generosity, or reminding themthat those who help orphans will secure their place in heaven. The radiowaves were not immune to this either, as various jam‘iyyas placed adsthat combined children singing with requests for donations.
The other seasonal markers that appeared with Ramadan were
Al-Dahiyya • 65
34 H. amla literally means “campaign,” but the term is used for the groups that travel to-gether on the h.ajj.
celebratory lights and decorations reminiscent of Christmas in the sub-urban United States. Strings with colorful lanterns, lightbulbs, and paperdecorations hung across intersections in al-Dahiyya, and neon lights, in-cluding some of the Hizbullah symbol, lined many roads. In 1999 and2000, the coincidence of Ramadan and Christmas prompted the trim-ming of Hamra Street—a major road outside al-Dahiyya in Ras Beirut—with neon blue and pink signs alternating “Ramad. an karı–m” with“Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year.” Those same years, Hizbul-lah constructed a large nativity scene in an al-Dahiyya neighborhood.
The two months following Ramadan are relatively quiet, as peopleresume their normal schedules. Around this time a flurry of bannersbegan to appear, advertising different h.ajj organizers, called h.amla–t.34
The h.ajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca required for Muslims who are able togo once in their lifetime—takes place during the first ten days of the lastmonth, Dhu al-Hijjah. At the end of the pilgrimage is Eid al-Adha (theholiday of sacrifice), also called Eid al-Kabı–r (the major holiday), duringwhich families slaughter a sheep or other animal and distribute the meatto the poor, in commemoration of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice hisson Ishmael at God’s command and God’s mercy in substituting a lambfor Ishmael. During these festivities, which like most holidays includefeasting and visiting, the houses of people on the h.ajj were decoratedwith streamers, often extending across the street or over balconies. Dri-ving through al-Dahiyya, one could easily identify many of the house-holds who had a member on the h.ajj. When family members returned,dressed in white to signify their completion of this sacred duty, they werewelcomed by celebratory crowds at the airport. Visiting then com-menced for weeks, as friends, family and acquaintances came to greetthe new Hajj or Hajjeh, who had brought tokens of the voyage to dis-tribute, including prayer beads, Qur’ans, jewelry, and may al-zumzum(water from the sacred Zumzum well in Saudi Arabia).
For Sunni Muslims, this Eid and the close of the h.ajj season marks thelast major moment in the Hijri calendar until the new year a couple ofweeks later. Shi‘i Muslims, however, mark one more day, the eighteenthof Dhu al-Hijja, or Eid al-Ghadir, on which they quietly acknowledgethe moment Muhammad made Ali his successor. From that point, thecalendar begins its shift from the seasons of joy to the season of mourn-ing, as Muharram and Ashura approach once again and black returns toshroud al-Dahiyya.
The creation and claiming of a place for the Shi‘i Islamic movementand its constituents in al-Dahiyya, a place where the milieu is established
66 • Chapter One
in part through the various textures of piety and politics described in thischapter, is crucial to the totality of progress. Yet places and communitiesare not claimed or created through texture alone, but also through ashared sense of history and shared practices and meanings. The latter arethe subject of the bulk of what follows, but first, it is necessary to back-track a bit, to provide some of that shared sense of history. To that end, Inow turn to a brief summary of some of the basic tenets of Shi‘ism andthe history and institutionalization of the Shi‘i community and Shi‘i Is-lamic movement in Lebanon.
1 See also Khalaf (2001) on Lebanese “collective amnesia” and Henderson (2003) on thelack of civil war memorials. I use “(un)civil wars” to highlight (a) the international aspectsof Lebanon’s wars, and (b) that no war is civil.
2 There are many understandings of what the wars were “about,” including political-economic marginalization along sectarian lines, and conflicts over the Palestinian resis-tance’s presence in Lebanon. For an excellent account of the war see Fisk 1990. See alsoCobban 1985, Picard 1996, Salibi 1988, Hanf 1993, O’Ballance 1998, Hiro 1993, andKhalaf 2001 and 2002. Sayigh (1994) describes the Palestinian perspective, and Khazen(2000) and Salibi (1976) focus on failures of the Lebanese state up to 1975.
C H A P T E R T W O
From Marginalization to Institutionalization
History always constitutes the relation between a present andits past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystificationof the past.
—John Berger, Ways of Seeing
The textures depicted in the previous chapter are relatively new toBeirut, just as the community of the Shi‘i pious modern is relatively newto the Lebanese national scene. In order to understand where all thiscame from, it is necessary to glance through recent Shi‘i Lebanese his-tory, culminating in the institutionalization of the Shi‘i Islamic move-ment. The public visibility of religiosity, and, more importantly, the ac-companying changes in understandings of what it means to be a piousperson, are rooted in a historical trajectory that took Lebanese Shi‘isfrom a marginalized position to one of institutionalized influence. Thistrajectory also allows us a glimpse of what pious Shi‘is sought to leavebehind via progress.
All history is fraught and contested, but the events of the past thirty orso years in Lebanon seem particularly precarious. Taking the work ofremembering beyond the mystification Berger points to in the epigraphabove, Lebanon suffers from a case of national amnesia, a willful andperhaps psychologically necessary burial of much of the past severaldecades—specifically of the (un)civil wars.1 Not that reams haven’t beenwritten about “the events,” as people still refer to them, al-ah.da–th. Foot-notes will point to sources,2 but with the caveat that history writing isoften subject to the same tensions and divisions that plagued the nationinto violence. Many historians are deeply embedded in the history they
68 • Chapter Two
3 For an eloquent critique of the possibility of writing histories of the wars see Raad’s vi-sual essay (1999).
4 Named after the place it was signed: Ta’if, Saudi Arabia.
seek to elucidate.3 All history is suspect. There is no agreement on aLebanese national history textbook.
To describe the (un)civil wars in a sentence: what began as an alterca-tion between a few armed groups in Lebanon quickly exploded into a se-ries of wars spanning a decade and a half, and involving, over the courseof its ebb and flow, over twenty-five Lebanese militias; Palestinian libera-tion groups; the state armies of Israel and Syria; troops from the UnitedStates, France, Italy, and Iran; and agents from Iraq, Libya, and whoknows where else. In a word: hell.
Just when one thinks that the war is over, that, for better or worse, one hasunderstood what it was all about, that one knows, to borrow the vulgarLebanese phrase, on which stake one has been impaled; just as one gets one’spolitical bearings after emerging from the bomb shelter in the latest battle,and, looking around, blaming this or that faction for its arrogance, shortsight-edness, cruelty, and treacherous alliance with this or that foreign power; justthen the whole picture changes again. A new battle erupts, and new politicalrealities appear. It is like looking through a kaleidoscope: Shake it, and a de-sign appears; shake it again, and an altogether different one replaces it. Shiftshappen so often that one wonders if they will ever end, or, if they do, if onewill recognize the end, having long ago despaired of reaching it. (Makdisi1990: 30)
Below, I sketch only those events directly related to my interlocutors’lives and the chapters that follow. Although the Lebanese wars techni-cally ended with the Ta’if Accord in 1989,4 it is the gash in history/mem-ory that forms the background for these details of community forma-tion. Much of the trajectory of Lebanese Shi‘i mobilization is tied upwith the war years, their events, actors, and catalysts. And while formost of the country the experience of war ended in 1990 when opposi-tional General Aoun was ousted, for many Shi‘is in al-Dahiyya, alongwith those living under Israeli occupation, war did not end until Israelitroops left Lebanese soil in May 2000, after initially invading the coun-try in 1978. The rapid sketch I provide here is not sharp; I intentionallyallow edges that are ragged to overlap, gaps to claim their space. I drawon secondary source materials and on interviews, depending on the lat-ter more heavily as I move toward the specifics of the pious Shi‘i com-munity. As such, this is a history that reflects my interlocutors’ concernsand understandings. On the way I take the opportunity to explain basic
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 69
5 For discussion of the origins, history, development, and doctrines of Shi‘ism, I pointthe reader especially to Momen 1985 and Halm 1997.
6 See Momen 1985, Richard 1995, Abdul-Jabar 2002 on this issue. This is important tothe notion of wila–yat al-faqı–h—see note 41 later in this chapter.
7 “Marji‘ al-taql ı–d” literally means “source of emulation.” See Moussavi 1985, Momen1985, Halm 1997, and Abdul-Jabar 2002 on the marji‘iyya (the term for the institution ofthis practice).
tenets particular to Shi‘ism that are important to understanding thishistory.5
On the Margins
Origins and the Marji‘iyya
From the initial division between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam, the latter has—with few exceptions, most recently the Islamic Republic of Iran—existedon the margins of political power and the larger Muslim community. Thatinitial split was at first political, based in conflict over succession to theProphet Muhammad after his death. Simply put, a small group of Mus-lims believed that Muhammad had chosen his cousin and son-in-law Alito succeed him, and that community leadership should be hereditary—through Imams descended from the Prophet through his daughter Fa-tima and Ali. When the Prophet died in 632 CE, another group choseone of his companions, Abu Bakr, to lead the community as Caliph.Those Muslims who supported Ali instead were known as shı–‘at ‘Ali—aphrase meaning “the partisans of Ali” from which the name “Shi‘a” isderived. Ali eventually became the fourth Caliph as recognized by SunniMuslims, while remaining the first Imam to Shi‘i Muslims.
Over time, this initial division—solidified by the continued assassina-tions and martyrdoms of many Shi‘i Imams, most prominently Husayn—led to doctrinal differences with Sunni schools of Islam. During this pro-cess, several groups split from the main body of Shi‘ism, including theIsma’ilis and the Zaydis. The majority of Shi‘is today, including those inLebanon, follow what is known as “Twelver” (ithna-‘ashari) Shi‘ism.This designation refers to their belief that the twelfth and last Imam,Muhammad al-Mahdi, is in occultation—that is, he has been hiddenfrom humanity until his reappearance just before Judgment Day. Thisposes a problem with regard to Shi‘i spiritual and political leadership,the details of which are beyond this study.6 For our purposes, what is im-portant is that each Shi‘i Muslim looks to one established religiousscholar—known as a marji‘ al-taqlı–d (henceforth marji‘)—as the Imam’sdeputy, and emulates him with regard to religious practices.7
70 • Chapter Two
8 “Ayatollah” literally means “sign of God.” “Grand Ayatollah” is a relatively newterm, originating as recently as sixty years ago in an inflation of titles by followers of com-peting religious scholars (Houchang Chehabi, personal communication, May 5, 2004). SeeMomen (1985: 205–6) for more on clerical rankings.
9 This ties the marji‘iyya to control of large sums of money. Khums is a Shi‘i tithe of one-fifth of the increase in one’s income minus living expenses annually.
10 “The door” is open because human beings—other than the infallibles (Muhammad,Fatima, and the twelve Imams)—are fallible. God gave humans the faculty of reason (‘aql)to be used to understand God’s will, but human fallibility means that no person’s interpre-tation can ever be absolute.
A cleric who has attained the status of marji‘ is at the apex of the hier-archy of theological rank, and is often called ayatullah al-‘uzma, orGrand Ayatollah, by his followers.8 In addition to religious interpreta-tion, a marji‘ is responsible for collecting and distributing religioustaxes, khums and zaka–t.9 At times in history there has been one marji‘for all Shi‘is, while at other times there are several, and each individualmay choose whom to emulate. Hajjeh Umm Ali explained her relation-ship to her marji‘ to me:
Look, like you now when you do research, you want to review the sources,it’s the same thing. I’m not going to take information from anywhere, no, Iwant to go to the marji‘ [source]. The marji‘ interprets. His work is to under-stand the h. adı–th, the Qur’an. The good thing is that we have the door of in-terpretation [ba–b al-ijtiha–d] open, so you can continue to develop, you keepreading, the world is progressing, religion didn’t come to restrict you, to say,really, Lara, this is this and that’s it. Of course, there is something absolute,you have been given a line, ya‘ni, prayer, fasting, etc., but there are issues, so-cial issues, worshiping issues, that aren’t set, so these are about interpretation.So on those issues, each believer looks to his own interpreter [mujtahid ] forunderstanding. . . . If there was going to be only one opinion, there wouldn’tbe a need for something called interpretation. Khalas [that’s it], one personspeaks and all else are silenced, there is no progress in the world, but becausethe door is open, you read and I read, you understand and I understand, andso on, each does what makes him comfortable . . .
Of the many points included in Hajjeh Umm Ali’s explanation, I wantto reiterate and link two: the notion that in Shi‘ism, the door of interpre-tation is open (ba–b al-ijtiha–d maftu–h. ),10 and the idea that the existence ofmultiple marji‘s is good for progress. The phrase “the door of interpreta-tion is open,” came up almost every time anyone—regardless of sect—explained the difference between Shi‘i and Sunni Islam to me. The wordijtiha–d literally means “exertion,” from the same root as jiha–d, whichdenotes “effort.” In our context, ijtiha–d, which I gloss as “interpreta-tion” is the process qualified religious scholars, called mujtahids, use to
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 71
11 This tension is amplified by the fact that both authentication and the marji‘iyya aredependent on similar facilitating processes. For example, in Lebanon, marji‘ authority wasgenerally irrelevant, especially in rural areas, until communication technology and literacyfacilitated access to their interpretations in the 1960s.
12 Fadlullah has written, “I rule on the purity (taharah) of every human being, regardlessof whether he is a non-believer or a Muslim, for there is no impure (najis) person in hisessence” (1998: 218). This view is crucial to his support of sectarian coexistence inLebanon.
13 Debate exists about the permissibility of emulating a deceased marji‘. Fadlullah holdsthat it is only permissible if a person began following that marji‘ while he was still alive.
make judgments about issues pertaining to religious law and practice.What Hajjeh Umm Ali and others who used this phrase meant was thatreligious law was constantly open to reinterpretation by mujtahids, al-lowing for greater flexibility in applying it to the contemporary world.Her last sentence opens the door even wider, to include all literate peopleas potential interpreters. This both points to the uncertainty generatedby the tension between authentication’s emphasis on individual rational-ity and the marji‘iyya as an institution,11 and signals that Hajjeh UmmAli follows Fadlullah, as she highlights his distinctive emphasis on indi-vidual interpretation.
Differences among interpretations allow for debate and the continualdevelopment of doctrine, a sign of progress. One example is the issue ofKhomeini ruling in favor of using cadavers for medical study noted inthe introduction. Another example arose when I wanted to go to themosque with Aziza. Some mujtahids have judged that non-Muslims maynot enter mosques, which would have presented a problem in my case.Aziza, however, followed Fadlullah as her marji‘, so she called his officeto ask about his view. It ended up being acceptable for me to accompanyher.12
Like many pious Shi‘is, both Hajjeh Umm Ali and Aziza followed Fad-lullah, whose status as marji‘ is relatively recent and somewhat con-tested. Many Lebanese Shi‘is followed Khomeini until his death in 1989,while others emulated Khu’i, who was perhaps the marji‘ with thewidest influence in recent years, until his death in 1992. Fadlullah hadbeen one of Khu’i’s wakı–ls (deputies) in Lebanon since 1976, and onlyafter his death took on the role of marji‘. He is the most prominent muj-tahid in Lebanon today, and is also internationally renowned, with fol-lowers throughout the world, especially in the Arab Gulf states. Todaythere are also several prominent marji‘s in Iran and Iraq, includingKhamenei and Ruhani in Iran and Sistani in Iraq. Most pious Shi‘is Iknew followed either Fadlullah or Khamenei (Nasrallah is one of hisdeputies), with a few choosing Sistani, and some continuing to emulateKhomeini or Khu’i postmortem instead.13 Many of these religious figures
72 • Chapter Two
14 See Abisaab (1999) for an early history of the Shi‘a in what is today Lebanon.15 For more about Shi‘i experience under Ottoman rule see Cole 2002.16 Maktabi (1999) argues that even the 1932 census was highly politicized and under-
taken so as to ensure a Christian majority in order to establish “a Christian nation.” Picard(1997) notes that many Shi‘is in the Beqaa were not counted by this census.
17 Today there are eighteen recognized groups.18 The ratio of Christians to Muslims in Parliament was 6:5. Christian seats were prima-
rily allocated to Maronites. Sunni Muslims received eleven of the twenty-five Muslim seatsand the Druze four.
have played important roles in the movement of Lebanese Shi‘is out ofthe margins, a history to which I now turn.
Shi‘a in Lebanon
Twelver Shi‘is have resided in areas that are today part of Lebanon sincethe ninth century, primarily in the south, in a region called Jabal ‘Amil,14
and in the Beqaa Valley, with another small community north of Beirutnear Jbeil. Under Sunni Ottoman rule, because Shi‘ism was considered a“delinquent” sect, they were often persecuted.15 Some people I spokewith noted that their ancestors had practiced taqiyya, or religious dis-simulation, permissible in situations of danger.
In 1920, the French mandate established the existing borders of theLebanese nation-state, by combining the Christian-majority Ottomanprovince of Mount Lebanon with surrounding areas, including the Be-qaa Valley and the south. According to the 1932 census,16 the last censusever taken in Lebanon, Shi‘i Muslims were 17 percent of the population,making them the third largest minority in a nation with no clear major-ity and sixteen recognized religious groups.17 A decade later, an unwrit-ten National Pact was established among the major communities inLebanon, especially the Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians. Amongother things, the Pact laid the groundwork for a confessional politicalsystem, distributing government positions according to the 1932 cen-sus’s proportions. As such, Shi‘i Muslims received ten seats in the fifty-five member Parliament.18 Additionally, the Pact stipulated that the cabi-net would be divided equally between Christians and Muslims, withequal numbers of Maronite and Sunni members, a move that ensuredShi‘i underrepresentation. Finally, with independence in 1943, it was un-derstood that the President would always be Maronite, the Prime Minis-ter always Sunni, and the relatively powerless speaker of Parliament,Shi‘i.
The confessional nature of this system was structurally stagnant.Throughout later decades, it would fail to take into consideration popu-lation changes, exacerbating Shi‘i underrepresentation. Furthermore, the
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 73
19 See Joseph 1975, 1978, 1997b.20 Picard (1997) notes that in 1948, Shi‘is made up 70–85 percent of the population of
the rural south and Beqaa, and only 3.5 percent of the population of Beirut.21 See Ajami 1986, Cobban 1985, Picard 1997, Norton 1987.22 See Picard 1997 and Halawi 1992 on these economic shifts.23 By 1973, only 40 percent of Shi‘is remained rural, and Shi‘is constituted 29 percent of
Beirut’s population (Picard 1997).24 Lebanon’s location, geography, probusiness government policies, and banking secrecy
laws facilitated this, along with the closures of Haifa and the Suez Canal due to the Arab-Israeli conflicts.
institutionalization of sectarianism in Lebanon was accompanied by amore subtle process by which the category of sect became increasinglynecessary to the groups themselves. A sectarian political leadership sup-ported the establishment of sectarian social institutions (e.g., schools,hospitals) rather than common ones, so that sect became a means of ac-cessing resources.19 Here underrepresentation contributed directly topoverty as government funds were routed into other communities. Ag-gravating this was the fact that Shi‘i seats in Parliament were usuallyfilled by feudal landowners and other elites—men detached from the re-alities of life in rural Shi‘i regions of the country.
Postindependence economic and structural development in Lebanonwas concentrated mainly in Beirut. The Maronites and urban Sunni weretied into a network of western capital inaccessible to the relatively iso-lated Shi‘a, who were by far the most rural of Lebanon’s communities.20
Living conditions in Shi‘i villages did not approach the standards of therest of the nation. For example, at independence, the Southern Lebanondistrict—consisting of three hundred mostly Shi‘i villages—contained nohospitals and no irrigation schemes. Poverty and illiteracy were thenorm among the Shi‘i peasantry.21
After a brief civil war in 1958, the new president, Shihab, began aprogram of nationwide development and “modernization”—known asShihabism—seeking to raise the standards of the rural infrastructure tothose of Beirut. At that time, transportation routes were built tying vil-lages into the road network, and schools were established in rural areas.The new government also began hiring more Shi‘is in military and civilservice positions and introduced “export-based agro-capitalism,” whichreplaced earlier economic bases with cash crops like tobacco.22 Thesenew policies and infrastructures prompted a mass migration of ruralShi‘is to Beirut.23 Many of these migrants settled in a ring of suburbsaround the capital, known as the “misery belt” (Khuri 1975).
By this time Beirut had become the undisputed center of the financialnetwork linking the industrial world with the oil-producing nations ofthe Gulf.24 But the rapid urbanization that came with incorporation into
74 • Chapter Two
25 See Diab 1999 and Kubursi 1993.26 See Halawi 1992.27 In addition, by the mid-fifties, many Shi‘is had emigrated to West Africa, including
Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana. They maintained ties toLebanon and had a high rate of return, contributing to an even broader network of con-nection.
the capitalist world economy further exacerbated economic, social andregional disparities within Lebanon.25 Again it was the rural and recentlyurbanizing Shi‘is who suffered disproportionately. If Beirut in the 1960sand ’70s was the Paris of the Middle East—as is commonly quipped byreminiscing expats—then Shi‘i villages were in Limousin and urbanShi‘is lived in Vitry sur Seine.
Much of this newly urban population consisted of young Shi‘i menseeking their fortunes in Beirut. Upon arrival in the city, these youngmen often found themselves trapped in wage-labor at a level substan-tially below that of their educations. Some worked in factories, althoughmany remained unemployed or self-employed as peddlers, because theservice sector was saturated by the mid-sixties.26 In addition to produc-ing a discontented youth, the new accessibility of Beirut exposed bla-tantly the uneven distribution of resources across sectarian groups. Are-nas for intersectarian competition for resources, employment, andservices were created.
Unequal modernization and an ever-growing sense of disenfranchise-ment were factors that would contribute to the eventual political mobi-lization of the Shi‘a. In addition, Beirut was a space of contact for Shi‘isfrom different regions of Lebanon. Equally important, the road net-works facilitated constant movement between village and city. Migrantsreturned to their villages to marry, visit family, and vote. Rather than anurbanized population, what emerged was a connected population.27
The initial mobilization of the Shi‘a was not along sectarian lines. Asthe state became tangible in the city, political parties on both ends of thespectrum competed for Shi‘i loyalties. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Shi‘ismade up much of the rank-and-file membership of the Lebanese Com-munist Party and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. They also parti-cipated in the early days of the Palestinian liberation movement inLebanon, though that connection did not last long. This environment—combining political awareness and discontent with the desire for mod-ernization—provided the ground for a Shi‘i sectarian mobilization.
This sectarian mobilization, described in the next section, is often castas instrumental, a response solely to poverty and disenfranchisementwithin the Lebanese state. Because the system is sectarian, Shi‘i clericalleadership and especially that of Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, discussed below,are viewed as cleverly giving the Shi‘a what everyone else already had: a
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 75
28 As presented in Ajami 1986.
sectarian political movement.28 While this is no doubt part of the pic-ture, this perspective does not give either faith or political contingencyenough credit, nor does it take into consideration differences within themovement. On the one hand, as we will see, the years of Shi‘i mobiliza-tion were years of intense political and military strife in Lebanon, duringwhich Israel, a power backed by the West, invaded the country twice.On the other hand, the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran provedthat Islam was a powerful worldview able to act as a counternarrative toideas about western modernity. The Shi‘i mobilization did not merely re-spond to frustrated desires, it restructured desire to include the spiritualalong with the material.
For many pious Shi‘is, hindsight has cast their history of dispossessionand marginalization as a moment of perceived spiritual ignorance. Evi-dence of spiritual backwardness was found in the membership of Shi‘iyouth in secular parties, the corruption of village clergy and their sup-port for the elite landowning class, and the ways that particular religiouspractices and rituals were carried out. The framework of progress out ofspiritual backwardness provides the link through which global politicshave consequences for how people understand themselves as moral on amicro-level.
Both spiritual and material backwardness were to be left behindthrough mobilization. As it developed over time, this mobilization be-came a Shi‘i Islamic movement. Its aims were shifting and multiple, butbroadly speaking included political representation, education toward au-thenticated Islam, and improved education, health care, and other socialservices, especially in the absence of government-supported public ser-vices. In the next section, I describe the political development of thismovement. I touch upon the accompanying details of religious reformonly briefly, as they are the primary focus of the following chapters.
Leaving the Margins: Mobilizations around Religion
A Personal Perspective on Change: Hajjeh Khadija Hammoud
When I first began community work [al-‘amal al-ijtima–‘ı–], I wasn’t muh. aj-jaba [veiled], but then I became muh. ajjaba and committed [multazima]. I be-came committed to the path of Islam from its beginning, perhaps twenty yearsago. It has been a long path.
The truth is, it was a difficult situation; there was a big struggle betweendifferent political movements [tayya–r]. There was a communist side, and a
76 • Chapter Two
capitalist side, and then the Islamic side began to appear. In the beginning wewere mostly members of secular groups, and very attached to the things thatsome people consider descriptive of modernity/civilization [h. ad. a–ra], like shortclothing and sports. Also education, because at that time girls didn’t havetheir educational rights. So these political movements opened our horizonsand taught us that we should learn. Even though if we go back further, thetruth is that it is Islam that gave us the right to education, before anyone else.Islam gave rights to women before any other movement, whether communistor capitalist.
So we were, you know, the generation of the sixties; we thought women’sliberation was progress. Our parents were of a generation that was very con-servative and had many traditions that they wanted to preserve, and we werea generation that came to change these traditions. But when I arrived at apoint where I was in school, obtaining my education, and I was dressing theway I wanted, casually, short skirts and tank tops, with the fashion, once I ob-tained those things and realized those freedoms, then what? I began, perhapsbecause I wanted to be free so strongly, I began to feel that I was missingsomething, that I had a spiritual emptiness. This spiritual emptiness wassomething I needed to fill, so I began to think about that and to read theQur’an. Even though we used to consider this something that just sat at home.We had a Qur’an just sitting on the side; no one used to read it. And it beganto bother me, that I was stuck between the issues that I worked for and the re-ligious motivations I had that pushed me towards God. I lived in the midst ofa very intense struggle, and then I came to the Qur’an and tried to learn howto pray.
And at the time there were religious leaders who were beginning to work inour area, so I said, OK, I’ll go and see what this one says. His name wasSayyid Faisal al-Amin, he’s dead now. He had a very modern style [style ktı–rmoderne (Fr.)], a style that made sense to us, and in truth he was able to toler-ate us. He used to answer all my questions openly, but he used to tell me that Iwas very difficult, and I was, just because I would ask him every possible ques-tion. But he tried to answer all of our questions, because we believe in Islamthat there are answers to all questions, just that some of them may not existfor us right now, but in the end we will have the answers to all questions. Andwe appreciated this, especially those of us who had the revolutionary spirit.
It was at this point that my true work began, with a group of women whobuilt the Cultural Committee. We were all young women, sixteen, seventeen,eighteen years old. I was still in secondary school. There were only three of uswho were muh. ajjaba in secondary school. We three were of the same mindset,we all had been very sporty [sport (Fr.)], and modern [moderne (Fr.)], andthen we all became committed. And everyone was surprised when we put onthe h.ija
–b, because our mindsets were very liberated. But we believed that itwas through our commitment that we truly became liberated from all limita-
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 77
29 See Ajami 1986, Halawi 1992, and especially Norton 1987.30 The links between south Lebanon, especially Jabal ‘Amil, and Iran, especially Qom,
reach back to the Safavid Empire.31 Many Shi‘is initially supported Fatah, the military wing of what became the PLO. But
in the 1970s, when Israeli retaliations began to affect Shi‘i villages, many turned againstthe Palestinians. The first Shi‘i militia, Amal, was initially trained by Fatah (Norton 1987)but this relationship disintegrated into violence during the 1980s “Camp Wars.”
tions. We then had freedom, freedom in that we were able to respect othersand be respected, freedom of behavior because we knew that we were actingthe right way, in ways that wouldn’t hurt others. And thanks be to God allthree of us were fighters from the beginning of our movement.
We also did very well in school, especially in things like math and science,things that they used to say “those Muslims, of course they can’t learn that,they are stupid, they won’t accomplish anything.” We even had a mathematicsteacher—she was a Communist party organizer—she used to debate us. Wehad many discussions with her, and thanks be to God, even though she wasmuch older than us, we were able to debate with her. Even though she didn’tshare our convictions, we respected her very much. Because she was defendingher path and that is her right; we respect the opinions of others. And then shealso began to respect us; after our discussions, she realized that we weren’tcommitted just like that, but that our commitment to our religion was fromunderstanding and awareness, and not merely a blind traditional thing.
And thanks be to God there truly has been change, change from traditions,and the deep ignorance that we had had as Muslims, towards the freedom oftruth, and the knowledge of our religion, and the application of this truth inour lives, our work, our interactions, in addition to our worship of God.
Beginnings: The Movement of the Deprived and Hizb al-Da‘wa
The man most often credited by scholars with uniting many LebaneseShi‘is into a separate nonsecular political movement of their own isSayyid Musa al-Sadr.29 He was an Iranian Shi‘i cleric with Lebanese fam-ily ties who came to Lebanon in 1959 to replace the late clerical leader inthe southern Lebanese city of Tyre.30 A charismatic orator, al-Sadr chal-lenged the leftist parties for the loyalty of Shi‘i youth, offering in theirstead an infusion of religion into the political world. Halawi puts it thus:“[Sayyid Musa] was ready to defend the faith . . . to revitalize Islam andcounterpose it to radical ideologies as an appropriate vehicle for change”(1992: 114). He was instrumental in establishing the Supreme IslamicShi‘i Council—a body created to articulate Shi‘i needs to the state—in1969. In 1970, he led the first general Shi‘i strike in Lebanon, calling onthe government to assist those displaced by Israeli attacks in the south.31
Four years later, al-Sadr established h.arakat al-mah.ru–mı–n—the Movement
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32 “Amal” means “hope” in Arabic and is also an acronym for afwa–j al-muqa–wama al-lubna–niyya (the Lebanese Resistance Brigades).
33 Musa al-Sadr’s success in uniting the Shi‘a under a sectarian banner has been vari-ously evaluated, with some (Ajami 1986) attributing him greater success than others (Nor-ton 1987).
34 Also among them were the late Shaykh Muhammad Mehdi Shamseddin (head of theSupreme Shi‘i Council during my field research), Shaykh Subhi Tufayli (former Hizbullahleader, removed from the party during a dispute in 1998), and the martyred Sayyid Abbasal-Musawi (Secretary General of Hizbullah until Israel assassinated him in 1992). WhileShamseddin had ties to the state and was acknowledged by my interlocutors as an impor-tant Islamic thinker, most of them found him either obtuse or politically suspect.
35 See al-Ruhaimi 2002.36 AbuKhalil (1991) observes that Fadlullah and al-Sadr were working from different
perspectives as early as the 1960s.
of the Deprived, a political movement dedicated to attaining rights forthe deprived, which essentially meant the Shi‘a. When war began the nextyear, a militia branch was founded: Amal.32 However, at this point themovement was still small and many Shi‘i youth fought with secular partymilitias during the first few years of war (1975–76).33
Yet despite academic focus on al-Sadr’s role, and despite an almostuniversal acknowledgment of his importance to Shi‘i mobilization, whenthey explained their movement’s history many pious Shi‘is did not attrib-ute sole credit to him. While they noted that they all “stood on his foun-dation,” and often claimed to be his “true heirs,” they also described an-other stream of Shi‘i political, social, and religious activism that hadbegun to take shape in Lebanon in the 1960s and ’70s.
While al-Sadr’s roots were in Iran, many other activist Shi‘i religiousleaders came from Iraq, and especially the religious schools (hawzas) ofNajaf. Among them were Fadlullah and Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, who isthe current Secretary General of Hizbullah.34 Najaf was the center ofh.izb al-da‘wa al-isla–miyya, (literally, the Party of the Islamic Call), whichhad a branch in Lebanon at this time. Hizb al-Da‘wa is an Iraqi Shi‘i Is-lamist party established in the late 1950s.35
At the beginning of the wars in 1976, the eastern suburb of Beirut—Nab‘a—where many Shi‘is lived and where Fadlullah worked, fell to thePhalangists (a Maronite Christian militia) and the Shi‘i population fledto al-Dahiyya. With them went Fadlullah, who, in keeping with theideals of Najaf, began teaching and establishing social institutions in thearea. He emerged in the early 1980s as one of the key figures in the Is-lamist Shi‘i community. Some of my Shi‘i friends were active in theLebanese Union of Muslim Students (ittih.a
–d al-lubna–nı– li-al-t.ulla–b al-muslimı–n) which had been established as early as 1973 by Najaf-trainedclerics. One of them compared Musa al-Sadr with Hizb al-Da‘wa:36
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 79
37 See Yahya 1993.38 See Norton 1987.39 For more on the failures of the Lebanese left, see AbuKhalil 1988. Other contributing
factors include a general mistrust of atheism and the end of the Nasser era.40 Much has been written about the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its reformulations of
Shi‘ism. See Aghaie 2001, Cole and Keddie 1986, Halm 1997, Hegland 1983 and 1987,Fischer 1980, Keddie 1995, Rajaee 1993, Yousefi 1995.
Hizb al-Da‘wa was the more religious of the two. The party thought that thebest way to contest power [in Iraq] was to withdraw from it and to build andgrow and develop in secret. This heritage [irth] came to Lebanon with them.This is still before the war, they believed that they could build Shi‘i power byworking quietly through culture and education. The main premise was thatthe first step towards political work in Lebanon was cultural work. SayyidMusa [al-Sadr] came from a different world; it wasn’t religious in this way. Hecame from Iran, and began the work of raising the Shi‘a up from their posi-tion, but from within the system, dealing directly with politics.
The basic place where these two paths differed was in their approach topolitics: one worked from outside the system and the other from within.Al-Sadr was intent on establishing institutions that would provide Shi‘iLebanese with the sort of government leverage that other sects inLebanon had (e.g., the Shi‘i Islamic High Council). Yet despite these dif-ferences, they agreed on the importance of Shi‘i mobilization in combat-ting Shi‘i marginalization.
A Catalytic Moment: Al-Sadr Disappears, Israel Invades, the Left Fails,and Iran Succeeds
Between 1978 and 1982 a number of events propelled the nascent Shi‘imobilization forward and further divorced it from the leftist parties: twoIsraeli invasions of Lebanon, the unexplained disappearance of Musa al-Sadr, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In 1978, while on a visit toLibya, al-Sadr mysteriously disappeared, catapulting him directly intothe narrative of the Hidden Twelfth Imam, and initiating a surge in hispopularity. Suddenly, al-Sadr’s face was postered all over the south, theBeqaa, and parts of Beirut. That same year, Israel invaded southLebanon, displacing 250,000 people.37 The initial consequence of thesetwo events was Amal’s revitalization, as it grew and entered the fray ofwar.38 Another factor here was Shi‘i perceptions that the Lebanese lefthad failed, both in securing greater rights for the poor and in protectingthe south.39 Then came Iran.40
Now honestly, I can tell you, before the victory of the Iranian revolution noneof this meant anything to us. We didn’t know that it needed to. (Rasha)
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41 Meaning “guidance of the jurisprudent,” this is the basis of the Islamic state in Iran:spiritual and political authority reside in the same institution, headed by a cleric who is theHidden Imam’s representative on earth.
Now, you really began to see iltiza–m after the victory of the Islamic Revolutionin Iran. It revived the principles of the Holy Qur’an, saying that our religion ismodern/civilized [h. ad. a–rı–] and it advances through all eras, all times. (Dalal)
It [the Islamic Revolution] demonstrated that it was possible for a people toovercome and be victorious, that it was possible for a people to challenge op-pressors. And people saw that this worked, and that the Iranians were able tosuccessfully overthrow the biggest imperial power in the world. No onethought it was possible to overthrow the strongest empire in the world withjust a group of simple everyday modest people. A person living in a small poorsimple room was able to change society and the world. And where did thiscome from? It wouldn’t be possible for a person to do this if he didn’t have thepower that comes from Islam. (Hajjeh Khadija)
The interview over, I switched off the tape recorder. As I began to thank him,Hajj Qasim interrupted, tapping an index finger forcefully on the framed pho-tograph of Khomeini that sat on his desk. “You want to know where all thiscame from? This,” he said, “This is it.” (fieldnotes, June 22, 2000)
The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran is one of those events that rever-berated around the world. Those reverberations were particularly loudin Lebanon. Without fail, pious Shi‘is pointed to the revolution as one ofthose historical moments people hold in awe, and as the ultimate locusof their inspiration. By embracing revolution directly and calling on thenotion of wila–yat al-faqı–h,41 Khomeini’s path differed from those of bothMusa al-Sadr and Hizb al-Da‘wa, setting a new sort of example for themobilizing Shi‘is. It also provided an alternative counternarrative to theWest from that espoused by the political left, at precisely the momentwhen the Lebanese left lost the faith of many of its Shi‘i constituents.Not only did the Islamism that emerged from Iran speak to historical re-demption and the rise of the oppressed, but it did so successfully. Thissuccess proved that the best path to progress was one that included thespiritual along with the material.
The last ingredient in this cauldron of events was the second Israeli in-vasion of Lebanon in June 1982, during which another 450,000 peoplewere displaced. This time Israeli troops marched north and laid siege toWest Beirut. Tens of thousands of Lebanese were killed and injured dur-ing the invasion and siege, many of them Shi‘i Muslims. It was duringthis time that the Sabra and Shatila massacres took place. Between Sep-tember 16 and 18, 1982, under the protection of the Israeli military andthen Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a Lebanese Phalangist militia
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 81
2.1. Larger-than-life Khomeini.
unit entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, and raped,killed, and maimed thousands of civilian refugees.42 Approximately onequarter of those refugees were Shi‘i Lebanese who had fled the violencein the south. Further fuel was provided in October 1983, when an Israeli
42 There is some debate as to whether it was a Phalangist or Lebanese Forces militia. Ca-sualty figures range from 800 to 3,500, and are most likely in the vicinity of 2,000. Severalhundred people also “disappeared.” The 1983 Israeli Kahan Commission Report attrib-uted “personal responsibility” for the massacres to Sharon (Harik 2004). For reports and
82 • Chapter Two
documentation of these massacres, see Fisk 1990, Kapeliouk 1982, Siegel 2001, the reportsof the Kahan Commission 1983 and the MacBride Commission 1983. See also Harik2004: 35–36 and 64–65.
43 This was related to a shift in Amal’s leadership after al-Sadr disappeared; since 1980 ithas been led by Nabih Berri, who angered many by participating in U.S.-brokered negotia-tions in 1982. Today, Amal remains one of the two major Shi‘i political parties in Lebanon,with strength in parts of the south and a few al-Dahiyya neighborhoods—and Berri isSpeaker of the Lebanese Parliament.
44 There is a plethora of literature detailing Hizbullah’s origins, history, relations withIran and Syria, and military and political activities. See especially AbuKhalil 1991, M. Deeb 1988, Hamzeh 2000a and 2000b, Harik 2004, Norton 1999 and 2000, Jaber1997, and Saad-Ghorayeb 2002.
45 See Mallat 1988: 28.
occupation force convoy disrupted the Ashura commemorations inNabatieh, leading to violence in which two Shi‘i Muslims were killedand a number injured. The second Israeli invasion was perhaps the mostessential catalyst in the eventual formation—from many of the existingstrands of Shi‘i mobilization—of Hizbullah.
Hizbullah
Following the events of 1982, many prominent members of Amal left theorganization.43 Many of them, along with Nasrallah, went on to form theleadership of Hizbullah. A number of small Islam-based resistance groupsemerged in the south, the Beqaa, and al-Dahiyya. By this time, there werealso Iranian revolutionary guards in the Beqaa, beginning to train Shi‘ifighters. Over time, these groups, which included many of Fadlullah’sfollowers, former Amal members, Islamic Amal (a splinter group), theLebanese Union of Muslim Students, Hizb al-Da‘wa, and a group calledthe “Committee Supporting the Islamic Revolution” that had existed since1979, among others, coalesced into a single organization: Hizbullah.44
With the Iranian revolution, support for Hizb al-Da‘wa and its meth-ods had faded in Lebanon, and many of its members were absorbed intoHizbullah, but the popularity of Fadlullah did not fade and only grewwith time. In much of the literature and media, Fadlullah is inaccuratelycharacterized as “the spiritual leader” of Hizbullah. In keeping with hisbelief that a mujtahid should not be affiliated with any single politicalparty, Fadlullah has always held that Islamic work should occur throughmultiple institutions and has always denied having any official role in theparty.45 Yet as a major scholar and eventually marji‘, and as one of themost prominent figures in the Lebanese Shi‘i community, Fadlullah’steachings and sermons have influenced many Hizbullah members. Thisrelationship will be further explored below.
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46 In a February 1985 “Open Letter” or manifesto.47 See Norton 1999 and 2000. Harb el-Kak (2001) notes that subtle political conflict be-
tween the parties continues, with Hizbullah holding more grassroots support and Amalmore governmental legitimacy.
48 While attacks on civilians and the taking of civilian hostages—no matter who the re-sponsible parties—are clearly acts of terrorism, the bombing of the Marines was an attackon a military force that had engaged in battle in Lebanon, and can be seen as an act of war.
49 See Blanford (2003) and Harik (2004: 65) on the lack of direct evidence linkingHizbullah to these attacks.
50 Aside from the United States, only Israel and Canada list Hizbullah as a “terrorist or-ganization;” Canada’s listing came under legal pressure from pro-Israel groups in 2002.
Although its foundations were laid throughout the late 1970s and es-pecially between 1979 and 1982, Hizbullah did not formally declare it-self until 1985.46 Its military branch at first consisted of small indepen-dent groups of resistance fighters in the south, with no clear leadership.By 1984, clashes over political and territorial power between a more or-ganized Hizbullah and Amal had begun, and in 1985, Hizbullah an-nounced its Islamic Resistance (al-muqa–wama al-isla–miyya), which even-tually came to dominate the resistance movement in the south. The menI spoke with who were among the early resistance fighters always ex-pressed their surprise and appreciation at how the organization hadgrown to a large political party with multiple branches and institutions.They often noted with pride, “I have been on this path from the begin-ning. I am of them.”
In 1988, tensions between Hizbullah and Amal escalated to all-outwarfare, in the south as well as in Beirut. In al-Dahiyya, this often meantstreet-by-street fighting, which some people described as turf battles.This intra-Shi‘i fighting ended with a Syria- and Iran-brokered agree-ment in 1989.47 Today, influence among Shi‘i Muslims remains split,though in al-Dahiyya, Hizbullah’s presence is the stronger one.
In the United States, Hizbullah is generally associated with the 1983bombings of the U.S. embassy, Marine barracks,48 and French MNFheadquarters in Beirut, as well as with the 1985 hijacking of a TWAflight to Beirut. They are also cited by the U.S. State Department in con-nection to the kidnappings of westerners in Lebanon and to the hostagecrisis that led to the Iran-Contra affair, as well as to two bomb attacksagainst Israeli targets in Argentina in the early 1990s. However, Hizbul-lah’s involvement in these attacks remains unclear.49 These associationsare the purported reason for the party’s listing on the U.S. State Depart-ment’s list of terrorist organizations, and for the current characterizationof Hizbullah as on the “A-list” of terrorism.50 Yet, as Norton (1999 and2000) and others have argued, “Hizballah may not simply be dismissedas an extremist or terrorist group” (1999: 2).
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51 Among these were al-sira–ya al-lubna–niya lil-muqa–wama, a multi-confessional groupaffiliated with (funded, armed, and trained by) the party.
52 Hizbullah also established a weekly newspaper (al-‘Ahd/al-Intiqa–d) in 1984, al-Nu–rradio station in 1988, and al-Mana–r television in 1989.
53 Faour (1991) estimated Muslims to be 65 percent in 1988. Nasr (1993) estimatedChristians at 35 to 38 percent.
54 Reasons cited for this shift include the end of the Lebanese wars and the reestablish-ment of the state, the end of the cold war and Syria’s integration into the internationalcommunity, the possibility of imagining an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and changesunderway in Iran (Picard 1997, Norton 2000, Hamzeh 2000a).
There are two reasons for this. First, Hizbullah’s military activity hasbeen committed and confined to one major (and legal) goal: ending theIsraeli occupation of southern Lebanon. In 1985, Israel withdrew frommost of Lebanon, but continued to occupy the southern zone of thecountry, controlling approximately 10 percent of Lebanon using both Is-raeli soldiers and a proxy Lebanese militia, the Southern Lebanese Army(SLA). Hizbullah’s Islamic Resistance, along with other resistance con-tingents,51 fought that occupation until it won the liberation of the southin May 2000. Secondly, as we will see, Hizbullah has developed into alegitimate Lebanese political party and an umbrella organization formyriad social welfare institutions.52
Hizbullah since Ta’if: A Legitimate Political Party
The Lebanese wars came to a spluttering and unresolved end with thesigning of the Ta’if Accords in 1989. Basically all Ta’if did was reassertthe balance of religious interests in Lebanon. The National Pact arrange-ments were shifted slightly so that Parliament would now be dividedequally among Christians and Muslims, and some of the President’spowers were moved to the Prime Minister. This did not reflect actualpopulation shifts, as by then Lebanon was estimated to be around 60 to70 percent Muslim.53 Furthermore, while actual numbers for differentgroups in Lebanon are highly contested—because high political stakesride on them—there is general agreement that by the end of the wars,Shi‘is made up at least one-third of the national population, makingthem the largest confessional community and the one that gained theleast at Ta’if.
Nevertheless, when the first postwar elections were held in Lebanonin 1992, Hizbullah decided to participate and work within the existingLebanese political system.54 In that first election, Hizbullah won eightseats, giving them the largest single bloc in the 128-member Parlia-ment, and its allies won an additional four seats. From that point on,
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 85
55 For more on Hizbullah parliamentary politics from 1992 to 1996, see el-Bizri 1999.For more on the 1998 municipal elections, see Hamzeh 2000a and Harik 2004: 95–110.Harik (1996) and Norton (1999) note that Hizbullah’s diverse constituency includes secu-lar and middle-class people. This acceptance of the party as a legitimate and major playerin Lebanese politics was confirmed by its role in the discussions and dialogues that tookplace during the mobilizations against the Syrian presence in Lebanon in spring 2005.
56 See Hamzeh (2001) for a discussion of clientelism in Lebanon.57 See Norton (2000) for a detailed discussion of the development of Hizbullah’s Islamic
Resistance.58 See the UN Report on this incident, dated May 1, 1996. It states that, contrary to
Israeli claims, “it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the re-sult of gross technical and/or procedural errors.”
59 For more on support of Hizbullah and the Resistance, see Jaber (1997: 196–200) andHarik (2004: 73–79).
60 See Norton 2000. He notes “unilateral withdrawal was a default strategy” for Israel,which would have preferred withdrawal to take place in conjunction with an Israeli-Syrianagreement (31).
Hizbullah developed a reputation—among Muslims and Christiansalike—for being a reputable political party on both the national andlocal levels.55 This reputation is especially important in Lebanon,where governmental corruption is assumed, clientelism is the norm,56
political positions are often inherited, and, in terms of its members’personal wealth, the Parliament is the wealthiest legislative body in theworld.
While Hizbullah’s parliamentary politics were generally respected as le-gitimate, even by those who disagreed with their positions, levels of na-tional support for its Islamic Resistance in the south fluctuated over theyears.57 Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure—includingthe destruction of power plants in Beirut in 1996, 1999, and 2000—generally contributed to increases in national support for the Resistance.This was especially true after Israel bombed a UN bunker where civilianshad taken refuge in Qana on April 18, 1996, killing over one hundredpeople.58 During my field research, most Lebanese with whom I spoke,including many Christians, expressed their support for the Resistance,and I sometimes saw Hizbullah collecting donations in unexpected areasof Beirut.59
The occupation of south Lebanon was costly for Israel. Israeli primeminister Ehud Barak made withdrawal a campaign promise, and laterannounced that it would take place by July 2000. A month and a halfbefore this deadline, in the wake of the collapse of potential talks withSyria and SLA desertions,60 a chaotic withdrawal from Lebanon ensued,taking many by surprise. At three a.m. on May 24, 2000, the last Israelisoldier stepped off Lebanese soil and locked the gate at the Fatima border
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61 SLA members either fled or surrendered; most of the latter were given short jail sen-tences. See Norton 2000 and 2002, and L. Deeb 2000.
62 Syria’s military forces did not withdraw from Lebanon until the spring of 2005.
crossing behind him. Many predicted that lawlessness, sectarian vio-lence, and chaos would fill the void left by the Israeli occupation forcesand the Southern Lebanese Army (SLA), which rapidly collapsed in Is-rael’s wake. Those predictions proved false.61
From my fieldnotes, Thursday, May 25, 2000:
Today is the first annual “Day of Liberation and Resistance in Lebanon.” Thepast few days have been a whirlwind. The war in Lebanon is over. Never mindthat most people refer to the end of the war as having been in 1990. Nevermind that there are still Syrian military checkpoints scattered around thecountry.62 For those in and from the south and the Western Beqaa, and forthose who supported the Resistance, the war ended yesterday.
A few days ago, on Sunday evening, Israeli troops began to leave outpostsin Lebanon. The news really hit on Monday, as residents of newly freed vil-lages called their relatives in Beirut and reports started coming up on Al-Mana–r [Hizbullah TV station]. Suddenly it seemed like all of al-Dahiyyastarted flooding south. There was literally a wave of people pushing the SLAfarther and farther back; like dominos, Israel would pull back, the SLA behindthem, and this human wave following—except that you couldn’t really tellwhere the impetus to motion was coming from. Everyone has been glued toAl-Mana–r since. Today al-Dahiyya is relatively quiet, as people have gonesouth, to be reunited with family they haven’t seen in twenty-two years, tourformer Israeli and SLA sites, or just share in the general atmosphere ofcelebration.
Aziza, her mother, and I got in the car yesterday to go see for ourselves. Allalong the way we passed deserted Israeli tanks, adorned with Hizbullah flagsand piles of young boys climbing all over them. Hizbullah security was direct-ing traffic. We eventually made it to Khiam and were among the first people toenter the notorious Khiam Prison. Less than twenty-four hours earlier thetownspeople had stormed the prison and freed the 145 prisoners. The roomswere exactly as they had been when the prisoners left: tiny, dark, a horriblestench. A book one prisoner had been reading lay on the bed, blankets, cloth-ing, cans of food. Writing on the walls of the cells. A former prisoner who hadbeen released some years earlier was guiding journalists and the curiousthrough the detention rooms, describing in painful detail the torture methodsused in each. In one room you could see the electrical wires attached to a chairwhere they were tortured. There was still an Israeli flag in a pile at the en-trance; a group of young boys began ripping it up.
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2.2. View of the south, looking out from Khiam Prison.
63 Israel claims the area belongs to Syria, not Lebanon. Hizbullah has continued to oper-ate within the Shebaa Farms. For more on this dispute and its “rules of engagement,” seeNorton 2002, Alagha 2001, Saad-Ghorayeb 2002, Roumani 2004, Sobelman 2004, andBlanford 2003.
Despite withdrawal, a territorial dispute continues over a fifteen-square-mile border region called the Shebaa Farms that remains under Israelioccupation. The eventual outcome depends in great part on Syria andeventual Syrian-Israeli negotiations.63 Yet even if Hizbullah someday dis-arms their military branch, the political party and the vast social-welfarenetwork associated with it will continue to work for its constituents inLebanon.
That social network is one element in a more general institutionaliza-tion that emerged from Shi‘i Islamic trends in Lebanon. Institutionbuilding was a key step in bringing Shi‘i Lebanese out of the margins.These institutions provided and continue to provide structures withinwhich pious Shi‘is work toward material and spiritual progress.
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64 See Norton (2002) and Kubursi (1993) on the postwar economy. Per capita incomewent from $1,800 in 1974 to less than $250 in 1989 (Kubursi 1993). Severe inflation sentthe value of a U.S. dollar in Lebanese lira rocketing from the single digits to 2,000 in thespan of a few years. Today the lira is fixed at 1,507 to US $1, and both currencies are usedinterchangeably.
65 See also Joseph 1975 and Yahya 1993.66 el Khazen (2000) lists social service associations by sect in 1965 and 1977–78. In
1965, there were 13 Shi‘i organizations, as compared to 28 Maronite, 42 Greek Orthodox,and 26 Sunni. In 1977–78, there were 38 Shi‘i organizations, as compared to 70 Maronite,44 Greek Orthodox, and 66 Sunni (67). These differences are magnified by differentialpopulations (e.g., there were many more Orthodox institutions per capita).
67 Amal was led by Nabih Berri and Shamseddin inherited leadership of the Shi‘i HighCouncil. Musa al-Sadr’s sister, Sayyida Rabab al-Sadr Charafeddin, took over the ZahraComplex and established the Imam al-Sadr Foundation in 1984.
Islamic Institutionalizations
Islamic Social Welfare Organizations
Like politics, most social welfare organizations, or jam‘iyyas, in Leba-non are sectarian in orientation. Among the consequences of the warswere economic stagnancy, government corruption, and a widening gapbetween the ever-shrinking middle class and the ever-expanding poor.64
Shi‘i areas of Beirut must also cope with massive displacements from thesouth and the Beqaa. In this economic climate, sectarian clientelism hasbecome a necessary survival tool. “Lebanon may have its charms, butthe government has no social conscience and provides no safety net forthe poor. One turns to the family and a variety of sectarian charities forassistance” (Norton 2002: 44).65
Prior to the war, as noted above, one of the consequences of Shi‘i mar-ginalization was a lack of resources being funneled into Shi‘i areas. Be-fore the 1960s, there were only a few scattered Shi‘i organizations, in-cluding the “Charity and Benevolence Society” established in the southby Musa al-Sadr’s father-in-law in 1948.66 Beginning in 1963, al-Sadradded to this organization, building institutions in Beirut as well as inTyre. Two of the major ones were the Imam al-Khu’i Orphanage inBeirut, founded in conjunction with Fadlullah and Shamseddin, and theZahra Cultural and Vocational Complex for orphan girls in the south.
Following al-Sadr’s disappearance, his irth, or inheritance, was divi-ded among the major players in the Shi‘i Islamic movement. In that di-vision,67 the Imam al-Khu’i Orphanage came to Fadlullah. From thatstarting point, he established al-Mabarrat Charitable Association(jam‘iyyat al-mabarra–t al-khayriyya, henceforth, al-Mabarrat) in 1978.In 1987, Fadlullah began actively expanding al-Mabarrat into the largeumbrella association it is today. Much of the money for this expansion
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 89
has come from wealthy Shi‘is who followed Khu’i and/or follow Fadlul-lah as their marji‘, especially in the Gulf States. For example, the Bah-man Hospital, which opened in al-Dahiyya just before I arrived in thefield, was built with a donation of US $60 million by its Kuwaiti name-sake.
Al-Mabarrat has grown into one of the most respected charitable as-sociations in Lebanon. Its institutions span the country and include atleast fourteen schools and six orphanages, as well as hospitals, culturalcenters, and institutions for the blind, deaf, and physically disabled. In2000, the jam‘iyya supported over 3,250 orphans and thirteen thousandstudents. In addition to one-time major donations, other funds comefrom Ramadan fund-raising events that sometimes include over fiftythousand guests and amass over two million dollars in one evening,khums paid to Fadlullah by his followers, and orphan sponsorships.There are also a series of businesses from which the organization profits,including gas stations, a publishing house, a copying store, a factory forhalal foods, and a computer company. Of all the jam‘iyyas whose em-ployees or volunteers I interviewed, al-Mabarrat was the one least de-pendent on volunteer labor.
I made several visits to an al-Mabarrat school in al-Dahiyya. On oneoccasion, the principal gave me, and another Lebanese education profes-sional whom we both knew well, a tour. Here is an excerpt from mynotes from that day:
The school seemed huge. They currently have around 2,300 students (full ca-pacity is 2,700), mostly in the first primary section. The principal told us thatshe essentially had to build the entire school system from scratch, from writ-ing a mission statement to establishing a registration office to picking out uni-forms and blinds. She dealt with every little detail. The school was built withkhums given by two wealthy men—a Lebanese guy living in Africa and aKuwaiti. It basically runs at cost, with fees at US $1,000 a year. Public schoolsin Lebanon cost US $133 and are generally, especially in al-Dahiyya, under-staffed, underequipped, and extremely crowded. Other private schools gener-ally cost between six and twelve thousand dollars. This school runs bothFrench and English sections and teaches the Lebanese national curriculumplus religion classes. We saw new computer labs for all ages, well-equippedscience labs, play areas, a working child-sized kitchen, exercise rooms, and awood-paneled room for Qur’anic recitation. Jeanne [the educator] said after-wards that she was both surprised by and impressed with the quality of thefacilities, and that they surpassed many of the schools she had seen in thecountry.
In addition to al-Mabarrat, Fadlullah opened another jam‘iyya in1983, called maktab al-khadama–t al-ijtima–‘iyya, the Social Services
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68 See Adelkhah on social organizations in Iran (2000: 53).
Office. This organization was founded to address social needs andpoverty more holistically and to distribute religious taxes. The jam‘iyyasfounded and guided by Fadlullah are among the largest in al-Dahiyya.The other major group of large-scale Shi‘i Islamic jam‘iyyas in the areaare those affiliated with Hizbullah. These include the Islamic CharityEmdad Committee (ICEC), the Martyrs’ Association, Jiha–d al-Bina–’ De-velopment Organization, the Hizbullah Women’s Committee, the Asso-ciation for the Wounded, and the Islamic Health Committee. I focusedon the first two of these.
An ICEC administrator who has been with the organization since itsbeginnings shared its story with me. In 1986, a group of young peopledecided to confront the poverty in the area. So they began to collect foodand money from businesses and distribute it to the poor. Soon after-wards, representatives from an organization in Iran came to al-Dahiyyato establish a sister association.68 The two groups agreed to work to-gether, and founded the Lebanese ICEC in 1987. The fledgling jam‘iyyaset two criteria for the families it would assist: the provider/father of thefamily had to be unable to provide and the family could not be coveredby any other Hizbullah jam‘iyya. This included families where the fatherwas deceased (but not a Resistance martyr), in prison (again, not in Is-rael or in the south), physically disabled (but not injured fighting withthe Resistance), or absent. They chose to support the orphaned childrenof these men—today numbering over four thousand—by helping theirmothers or extended families raise them at home with monthly supportand supplemental nutritional, educational, housing, and health assis-tance.
In 2000, the ICEC budget came mainly from donations, religioustaxes, Ramadan fund-raisers, almost three thousand full sponsorshipsfor orphans, and the ubiquitous collection boxes that are scattered allover Lebanon. The jam‘iyya is heavily dependent on volunteer labor,with only around ninety employees but over three hundred and fifty vol-unteers. It includes five financially self-sufficient schools, a school forchildren who have Down’s Syndrome, and a summer camp.
The basic difference between the ICEC and the Martyrs’ Associationis their constituencies. The families of those men who are specifically notcovered by the ICEC—namely the martyrs, prisoners, and injured of theIslamic Resistance—are supported by jam‘iyyas specific to those cases.The Lebanese Martyrs’ Association was established in 1982 by Khome-ini as a sister organization of the Iranian Martyrs’ Foundation. With sixhundred volunteers and even more employees, the jam‘iyya tries to fillthe “provider” role for martyrs’ families. Again, they provide financial,
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69 For example, tickets to one breakfast fund-raiser were $35 and many women madeadditional donations.
housing, educational, health, and nutritional support, as well as employ-ment assistance for widows and orphans, and youth activities like scoutsand camps. The Martyrs’ Association also runs a primary school and amajor hospital in al-Dahiyya, whose services are free to the families ofmartyrs and detainees, and low cost to others.
In addition to those affiliated with Hizbullah and Fadlullah, there area number of small jam‘iyyas throughout al-Dahiyya, including family-based organizations, charitable groups, and women’s groups. I spent agood deal of time volunteering with one of these organizations, the SAA,a small Islamic women’s charitable association. While I was in Beirut,they had approximately seventy-five official members, perhaps a third ofwhom were active volunteers. Their activities included a campaign toend child labor by providing public school fees, a Ramadan food distri-bution center, and general aid for about 250 families in al-Dahiyya. Theyalso ran a low-cost daycare that facilitated women’s employment, sum-mer camps, and an exercise facility for girls and young women. Dona-tions provided the bulk of their budget, though they also held fund-raising events.69
Like the resistance fighters who were with the initial mobilization thateventually became Hizbullah, many women volunteers began their workduring the war, before there was an institutional structure to facilitate it.One of them, Suha, explained this to me:
Let me tell you something. We, a long time ago, we began through the h. us-ayniyya [Shi‘i ritual gathering hall]. You would see what people trapped in theshelters needed: cleaning stuff, medicines, food, drink, supplies. You would bein charge of a shelter, and there were no kitchens in them so everything hap-pened in the h.usayniyya. Or sometimes in a school, or in our homes. Now, no.Now you feel that there has been a lot of development in this work: now themartyrs have a center, orphans have a center, there are many different jam‘iyyas,each one is by itself. There is now a system. Before, there was work and giving,but now there is a division of labor: each one has a particular role and takes onthat role. The work has been organized, there is a system, there are institutionsand organizations, there is now a secretary, a treasurer. Before you had to doevery little thing with your own hands. Now, no. Now there is a computer,there is technology, so that you are able in far less time to accomplish thingsthat took you days and nights to do before. You see?
The transformation Suha describes epitomizes the institutionalizationand bureaucratization of the Shi‘i Islamic movement in Lebanon. Fromsmall origins, multiple threads, and charismatic leaders emerged a number
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of institutional—social and political—structures that facilitated, encour-aged, and oriented the social, political, and religious trajectories of themovement. While there were and are differences and divisions withinthe movement, shared values provide a common framework for workon the ground. The four jam‘iyyas within which most of my interlocu-tors worked or volunteered—the SAA, ICEC, Martyrs’ Association, andal-Mabarrat—all shared a basic Islamic outlook and dedication to thepoor, orphaned, and otherwise needy in their community. In general, re-lationships among them were excellent, and they actively cooperatedwith one another in assessing need and providing for poor families. Sofor example, the same family might receive aid from multiple institu-tions: Fadlullah’s Social Services Office might provide them with amonthly food ration, the ICEC might assist with the medical costs, theSAA might pay the public school tuitions for two of the family’s fourchildren, and the other two children might live at an al-Mabarrat or-phanage and attend school there. Yet despite this cooperation, differ-ences among the various branches of the Shi‘i Islamic movement couldbe seen in some of the relationships among them and their volunteers. Inclosing this chapter, I want to touch upon some of these differences andthe attitudes of the various branches of the movement toward one an-other, in order to highlight and remind us of the variation within themovement and among pious Shi‘is.
Dynamics of the Shi‘i Islamic Movement Today
In al-Dahiyya, the Shi‘i Islamic movement at the turn of the twenty-firstcentury was centered around and in between Fadlullah and Hizbullah.Others in Lebanon may instead cite Amal, or the Imam al-Sadr Founda-tion in the south as the “true” inheritors of the movement. People Ispoke with generally viewed the Sadr Foundation as more Lebanese “oldschool” (meaning built around personal relationships with elites) thanthe al-Dahiyya-centered jam‘iyyas of Fadlullah and Hizbullah. For theirpart, people affiliated with the Sadr Foundation said they felt thatHizbullah was not dedicated to working within the Lebanese polity.They spoke more positively of Fadlullah, and to my surprise several peo-ple told me that they followed him as their marji‘. This may reflect theshift in Fadlullah’s position that occurred throughout the 1990s, awayfrom a position calling for revolution and toward one that emphasizescommunication, coexistence and cooperation among religious groups inLebanon, a position closer to that of al-Sadr.
This respect for Fadlullah is also reflective of the general attitude to-ward him in Lebanon. Everyone I spoke with in the country—Christiansand Muslims alike—spoke highly of Fadlullah as a religious leader who
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70 See Messick (1996) on fatwas’ relatively recent relationship to daily life issues.71 Pious Shi‘is referred to Fadlullah as “Sayyid Muhammad Husayn,” indicating both re-
spect and familiarity.
was rational, clear-thinking, and dedicated to modernizing his commu-nity. For example, an Orthodox Christian man raved about him to me,explaining that he was the reason the Shi‘a were modern (he said “mod-ern” in English) today. He went on to give me examples of some of Fad-lullah’s “modern” interpretations that he had read about in the newspa-per, including one about how technology can be used to establish whenthe lunar month will begin and therefore set the Islamic calendar in ad-vance.
Many Shi‘is who were not particularly devout also spoke highly ofFadlullah, more than one indicating that “if” she were going to be reli-gious (mutadayyina), he was the person whom she would choose as hermarji‘. I asked one friend who had expressed this view why that was,and she explained that it was because Fadlullah was the most “open-minded” marji‘, and that she especially liked the way “he realizes thatthe Shi‘a have to modernize along with the rest of the world” so hebrings science and religion together and also makes religion more logi-cal, “you know, so all that religious stuff actually makes sense.”
I also asked a shaykh at Fadlullah’s marji‘iyya office about his popu-larity. He explained that the fatwas Fadlullah issues are based on thepractical reality in which people live, and that is why many people fol-low him.70 The shaykh then brought up another marji‘, the late SayyidMuhsin al-Hakim, who said, “If I have followers who have a problemfrom the sharı–‘a and I can solve that problem, why shouldn’t I, as longas I am following the sharı–‘a?” Fadlullah follows this principle, in theshaykh’s words, “If something can be changed to better fit today’slifestyle but still be within the proper interpretation of the sharı–‘a thenthat is a good thing. The Sayyid is realistic; he works with reality.”
Among the pious who follow Fadlullah, his emphasis on al-‘aql andusing one’s mind is often the primary reason they cited as to why theychoose him as their marji‘. One woman who became committed to Islamduring the war credited this emphasis: “Sayyid Muhammad Husaynsaid,71 ‘Think! Challenge what you hear, don’t take it for granted, don’tlet anyone lead you except your mind!’ And I remember one time whenhe said, ‘I don’t want followers, I want partners.’ He likes and encour-ages people to ask questions, to debate him on ideas.” The ideas aboutpersonal interpretation expressed by Hajjeh Umm Ali earlier in thischapter also reflect this emphasis, and underscore Fadlullah’s especialappeal to the educated. In this sense, Fadlullah adds weight to the pub-lic piety imperative. Multiple possibilities for interpretation mean that
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72 See Rosiny 2001.73 After Khomeini and Khu’i died, Fadlullah did not recognize Khamenei as marji‘, but
instead looked to Sistani, who has been critical of the Iranian regime, until Fadlullah even-tually began to establish himself as a marji‘. These dynamics are related to Iranian politicsas well as struggles around the marji‘iyya.
uniformity of belief cannot be taken for granted, making an externaldemonstration of piety necessary to the community.
Fadlullah’s followers also appreciated his reformist views on Shi‘i reli-gious history and on gender. In interpreting religious history, he aims to-ward “questioning metaphysical beliefs by rational reasoning and over-coming the provocative aspects of Shia dogmas” (Rosiny 2001). Thelatter is important in the context of sectarian coexistence in Lebanon.With regard to gender, as we will see, Fadlullah emphasizes the necessityof women participating actively in their community. He has also statedthat women may become mujtahidas and even marji‘s.72 For all thesereasons, in many ways Fadlullah epitomizes the Shi‘i pious modern.
Fadlullah and Hizbullah each have a sphere of followers/supporters inal-Dahiyya, with those spheres overlapping partially. While Hizbullahofficially follows Khamenei as the party’s marji‘, individual members arefree to choose any marji‘ they want, and many I spoke with chose Fad-lullah. At the same time, there are limits to the overlap. While many ofFadlullah’s followers supported Hizbullah politically, not all did. Politi-cal allegiance and religious emulation are two separate issues that mayor may not overlap for any single person.
At various moments over the past decade, there have been differinglevels of tension between Fadlullah’s and Hizbullah’s spheres.73 Mostpeople understood these differences to be centered around a disagree-ment over the concept of wila–yat al-faqı–h (guidance of the jurisprudent).In Fadlullah’s view, the notion of a single and united spiritual and politi-cal authority (which is the essence of wila–yat al-faqı–h) is impossible untilthe Hidden Imam’s return. Hizbullah, on the other hand, supports andlooks to the institution of wila–yat al-faqı–h for ultimate guidance in bothspiritual and political matters. These differences were usually down-played, hearkening back to the space Shi‘ism provided for differences ofinterpretation. And in practice, most of Fadlullah’s followers supportedHizbullah’s political goals even if they did not agree with all the party’stenets, and most party members held Fadlullah in high esteem.
In the end, the ultimate goal of the Shi‘i Islamic movement describedin this chapter—in all its strains—is progress, in both the senses outlinedin the introduction: spiritual and material. Each of the jam‘iyyas toemerge from that movement—whether associated with Fadlullah,Hizbullah, or neither—is dedicated to developing their community mate-
Marginalization and Institutionalization • 95
rially and spiritually, and dedicated to the enchanted modern. Their exis-tence as institutions itself speaks to how far from the margins their com-munity has come.
Through these institutions, it becomes apparent that the Shi‘i mobiliza-tion via religion has had consequences for faith and morality on the per-sonal level. Institutionalization both facilitates public expressions of pietyand the infusion of religious discourses into a broader public arena andinsists on them. The methods and discourses of the jam‘iyyas—especiallyas they promote the values of public piety in their volunteers and the con-stituents they support—will be taken up in the second part of this book.First, I begin part 2 with a discussion of public piety and religion on thatpersonal level—in the practices and discourses of daily life.
P A R T T W O
Living an Enchanted Modern
3.1. Young girls participating in an authenticated Ashura ması–ra (chapter 4).
C H A P T E R T H R E E
The Visibility of Religion in Daily Life
visible: 1) capable of being seen; perceptible; 2) noticeable,apparent, open, conspicuous
—Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary
One afternoon in May, I stopped in to see my friend Aziza. She led methrough the formal living room onto the balcony, where I was met by themingling aromas of coffee and apple-flavored tobacco, faint hints ofroasting meat and exhaust from the street far below, and occasionalwhiffs of gardenia brought from the balcony’s other end by the breeze.Three other women were seated there, enjoying the spring weather. I hadmet them all over the past six months, either through Aziza, or at one ofthe jam‘iyyas. Ghada, a neighbor in her late teens, often sought refugefrom her housework and young siblings on Aziza’s balcony. I had metNoor, a distant cousin of Aziza’s who was studying at a local university,at a jam‘iyya, and only recently made the connection between her andmy friend. Sanaa’ was from another jam‘iyya; she was slightly older, aloquacious divorced woman in her early thirties. As I greeted them,Noor teased, “Ah, Aziza, you invited your friend so you’d outnumberus!” (shu– ‘azı–za, jibti rfi’tik litku–nu aktar minna!).
I must have appeared as puzzled as I felt, because Noor then looked atme and gestured at the scarves covering her and Ghada’s heads. Shewore a long beige skirt with a matching long jacket. Her scarf, printed inpastel hues of rose and blue, was pinned at the side of her head, fallingacross her shoulders so that only her face was visible. Ghada wore anankle-length flowing navy blue dress, with a navy and white paisleyscarf. Her scarf was pinned underneath her chin, also showing only herface, and periodically, she ran an absentminded hand along her hairline,tucking in stray hairs that had slipped out from under it. My entrance, injeans and a short-sleeved shirt, hair pulled back in a barrette—alongwith Aziza’s casual lime-green sundress and dark curls, and Sanaa’sstretchy red capri pants and t-shirt, her dark blonde hair loose down herback and her face done in the fashion-plate make-up typical of Beirut:lip-liner, mascara, the works—had created a situation that was relativelyunusual for this neighborhood where muh.ajjaba women usually out-numbered non-muh.ajjabas.
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Aziza never responded to Noor’s comment, as she had hurried insideto bring another coffee cup for me. When she returned, bearing not onlythe cup, but another argı–leh and a carefully balanced platter of sourgreen plums, strawberries, fresh green almonds, and a small plate of salt,she said, “Yalla, why did you change the subject? Lara doesn’t mind.”Turning to me, she added, “Noor was telling us about this Druze guy inher class.” Noor concluded the story I had interrupted, and slowly I gathered that she had just spoken to this person for the first time, anddiscovered that he knew nothing about his religion. “Every time I meet aperson who is Druze I ask him, but they never know.” “Yeah, becauseit’s forbidden to know until you turn forty.” “It’s a huge problem; howcan you wait that long?” “And what if you don’t live to be forty? A per-son must know his religion; it is necessary. That’s how God made us, toknow our religion.”
“Yes, but we can’t say that people in our community know their reli-gion either.” This was Sanaa’ speaking, and the other three immediatelyretorted: “What do you mean?” “Look around you, you can see howmuch better things are here than they used to be!” And Aziza: “Yeah,I’m not muh.ajjaba, but I pray and I fast and I know my religion! (bs.alliw bs.u
–m w ba‘rif dı–nı–!)” “Yes, but you know what I’m talking about, likeall those people who think the point of Ramadan is to fast all day sothey can gorge themselves at night, and then they throw away the left-overs! They don’t feed the poor, they’re rude, they don’t understand itstrue meaning, but they think they are being good Muslims just becausethey fast,” and gesturing rapidly to the world beyond the balcony,Sanaa’ concluded, “99 percent of Lebanese are like this!” Ghada andAziza immediately disagreed with the extent of it, but concurred that,“Unfortunately, there are still people who don’t understand the truemeaning of religion.” But Noor remained unconvinced: “I don’t thinkthat is such a big problem here these days, but what is a problem is thesepeople who will drink [alcohol] during the year, and then duringRamadan suddenly they stop.” It was Sanaa’s turn to take issue: “What’swrong with that? Ramadan is supposed to be the month people makethe most effort, because God knows that people are too weak to behavecorrectly all year.” Ghada interjected, “You know during the time ofthe Prophet, people fasted for eleven months of the year. Because Godknew that humans were too weak to commit to that, it was reversed.”“Yes,” contributed Aziza, “and I learned last Ramadan that the Sayyid[Fadlullah] says that it’s wrong (h.ara–m) to give a drunk person, or a per-son who drinks, food during Ramadan.” Taking advantage of a slightlull in the conversation, I asked Noor, “Why do you think that this is aproblem?” Shaking her head slightly, she replied, “It shouldn’t matter,Ramadan or not, they shouldn’t drink; today they shouldn’t drink and
Religion in Daily Life • 101
1 In this case, my presence as a “Christian” may have influenced the particular topic, butthat does not detract from my point that religious issues are a constant element in dailyconversation.
2 Rather than the visibility of religion, the visibility of Islam might be a more accuratephrase. “Religion” as a category used to translate the Arabic word “dı–n” is problematic(see Asad 1993 and Salvatore 1997). Islam is better described as a mode of being in theworld. At the same time, the authentication process contributes to the construction ofIslam as “a religion,” and my interlocutors spoke of Islam as “a religion” in English as wellas Arabic.
tomorrow they shouldn’t drink. But there are some people who thinkthat it becomes ‘OK’ as long as they behave properly during Ramadan.”
• • •
The conversation that May afternoon was typical. There had beenmoments over the past months when I suspected that shifts in conversa-tion to topics around the tenets or practice of religion happened for mybenefit, as a non-Muslim Arab-American researcher in the community.And indeed, on occasion someone would express her hope that throughmy research I would come to an understanding of Islam that would leadnaturally to my conversion. But later that week, as I reflected back onthat afternoon and on the previous months of conversation I had sharedwith these, and other pious Shi‘i women and men, I realized that I oftenwalked into discussions of religion already in progress. Certainly therewere times when something particular was explained to me specifically,as when Aziza once turned to me in the middle of dinner and out ofnowhere asked, “Lara, do you understand the difference between thingsthat are pure (ta–hir) and things that are impure/dirty (nijis)?” But just asoften, perhaps more often, people would explain details of belief orpractice to one another, or debate the most correct way to interpret anevent or injunction, as happened at a breakfast gathering I attendedwhere the guests talked at length about what happened to Jesus after theattempt to kill him failed (they agreed that his body had been switchedwith another while he was on the cross, but could not come to anyagreement beyond that point).1
Conversations like the one described above repeated themselves timeand time again—similar not only in content, but more importantly, intheir demonstration of the constant and very natural presence of religionin daily life.2 In anticipating field research, I knew religion would be acrucial aspect of peoples’ lives, but I was unprepared for its thick tangibil-ity. Religion simply permeated everything. It was a palpable, yet unobtru-sive, presence in streets, on balconies, in cafés, kitchens and jam‘iyyas, atwomen’s morning visits and men’s evening conversations, and with
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3 This is not unique to Islam. For example, Christianity structures and imbues daily lifein many communities in the United States.
families sitting around the television at night. It was visible in the waypeople spoke, in their greetings, negotiations, and farewells. “How areyou today?”—“Thanks be to God” (kı–fik al-yawm?—al-h.amdullah).“Will we see you later this evening?”—“God willing” (han shu–fkun il-layleh?—inshallah). References to the interpretations of marji‘s and toholy texts—the Qur’an, h.adı–th, and sayings of the Imams—dottedspeech, particularly during moments of argument or explanation. It wasvisible in daily conversation. Lunchtime gossip about a man cheating onhis wife might lead to a discussion of in what ways he was and was notviolating the sharı–‘a. Rumors of who had recently become muh.ajjaba andwhat difficulties she was having with her h.ija
–b might be spoken softlyduring exercise walks along the unfinished highway that bisected theneighborhood. And more, religion was visible in people’s habits and mo-tions, in the discreet flow of women through the streets, in the posturesbodies fell easily into during prayer, in nicotine addicts’ automatic cessa-tion of smoking during the Ramadan fast, in the weeping that swelled andsubsided during Ashura commemorations. Religion as visible, manifest,concrete, and inseparable from daily life is the subject of this chapter.3
Over time I came to learn that many people I spoke with viewed theform that this indissolubility of religion from daily life took as some-thing new and different. Public piety and the continuing authenticationof Islam were considered among the accomplishments of the Shi‘i Islamicmovement, a manifestation of spiritual progress and the pious modern.A clear break was perceived between the past “then” and the current“now” with regard to religious practice and understanding. “Then,” noone fasted properly, no one understood why the h.ija
–b was important, noone knew why it was important to pray, no one understood that Islamteaches that women have an active role to play in the community, no oneknew the true meaning of religious concepts or practices. It was all “onlytradition.” Religious practices done as a part of one’s heritage did not“count” as truly pious acts; instead piety was to stem from an under-standing of the “correct” interpretation of Islam.
This chapter focuses on the contemporary visibility of personal ex-pressions and acts of iltiza–m according to that “correct” authenticatedIslam. These personal practices of piety take public forms and carry pub-lic meaning in two senses. They are read by other devout Shi‘is, often asmarkers of a person’s morality, signaling membership in the communityof the pious modern. They are also read by others (those who are not pi-ous, not Shi‘i, and/or not Lebanese), usually as demonstrations of thenew national and international political presence of the Lebanese Shi‘a.
I consider both embodied and discursive practices of piety in what fol-lows. While on the one hand, I hope to convey a sense of the visibility ofreligion and the perceived newness of authenticated Islam, on the otherhand, I also wish to trouble that sensibility, by pointing to contestationsover the details, definitions, and delimitations of both personal and pub-lic religiosities. To that end, this chapter concludes with a discussion ofthe ways that “correct” religious knowledge is accessed, obtained, andconstructed through communication. But first, I turn to embodied piety.
Embodied Piety
Just as religion was inscribed in the spaces and sounds of al-Dahiyya, itwas inscribed on the bodies of the devout. Bodies form a canvas onwhich personal piety can be transformed into a subtle public demonstra-tion of faith and/or a louder demonstration of collective identity.
Many people in the community believed that piety should infuse one’sentire life. In their view, each person has “an account” (h.isa
–b) with Godthat would gain and lose points and be tallied upon death, determiningthe course of one’s afterlife. Of course, the extent to which this beliefwas applied in a believer’s life varied widely: there were those who livedalmost ascetically, devoting their lives to the fulfillment of religious du-ties, while others “just” completed what they considered to be the neces-sary minimum—prayer, fasting, alms-giving, and the avoidance of majorsin. However, for most people, fulfilling these “minimum” requirementswas not sufficient according to the “correct” understanding of authenti-cated Islam. To foreshadow chapter 5, this understanding incorporatessocial and community relationships in key ways not satisfied by the “fivepillars” or by the sorts of embodied piety discussed here.
Embodied piety appeared in many ways in al-Dahiyya, but three ar-eas stood out most strikingly on a daily basis. The most visible of these,in both my fieldwork and current scholarship on Islam, was dress. Butbefore turning to dress, and its major signifier, the headscarf, I want todiscuss two other practices that signaled iltiza–m. The first, prayer, is oneof the duties of an individual Muslim, and the second, not shakinghands with members of the opposite sex, is a marker used to indicatereligiosity.
Prayer
Prayer (s.ala–t) is one of the most basic requirements for a practicingMuslim—so essential that I only met two people who professed to be be-lievers yet would admit to not praying. Muslim prayers have a formal
Religion in Daily Life • 103
104 • Chapter Three
4 Other small differences between Shi‘i and Sunni prayer include variations in preprayerablutions, in the position of the arms, and in the small clay tablet to which Shi‘is touchtheir foreheads instead of the ground.
5 These excerpts in question-answer form are taken from Fadlullah’s published collec-tions of jurisprudence.
structure: phrases must be pronounced correctly, movements are uni-form. There are five obligatory prayer times—early morning, noon, af-ternoon, sunset, and evening—that include seventeen prostrations. Shi‘iMuslims may choose to combine the noon and afternoon prayers andthe sunset and evening prayers, completing their daily prayer in threesets, rather than five.4 Girls’ obligation to pray begins at age nine, andboys at age ten, though many children begin emulating their parents atmuch younger ages, and are praised for doing so. From that age on,prayers that are missed must be made up at a later time, though theirvalue is believed to lessen. A woman who begins to pray at age forty hasthirty-one years of outstanding prayer to complete.
If a person dies before completing all her prayer, her eldest son maypray the remainder for her, or, alternately, someone may be paid a set feeto do so (this works for fasting as well). After the death of one man whohad never prayed, his family hired someone to pray for him. At the timeI spoke to them, it had cost them over four thousand dollars. When I asked why they had done this, the man’s nephew explained that thepayment of prayer on behalf of the deceased’s soul would alleviate hisguilt before God to a certain extent. A niece immediately disagreed withthis, interjecting that no matter what the circumstance, a person cannot“get out of” prayer, “even if he does good deeds and lives a good life, itdoesn’t matter, it doesn’t help, nothing can replace prayer, nothing!”
Issue #275: I work in an area that is not our area, and I cannot pray, so I doso in the evening. And if I leave this job and work in our area, I will notreceive the same salary, and I need this salary. What is the solution?
Answer: It is necessary to find / plan a way to pray at the correct time, and itis not permissible to keep this job, in this situation, if it is possible foryou to live with less, especially if it is possible to find other work. Wa manyatawakal ‘ala– alla–h fa huwa h. asbuhu [God provides for those who de-pend on God]. (Fadlullah 1996b: 109)5
The importance of prayer was frequently highlighted in interviews andconversations, no matter what the topic. For example, on a tour of a lo-cal school, my guide noted that prayer “is a practice that maintains con-stant communication with God.” A volunteer at a Hizbullah jam‘iyyadescribed the “key to the movement” as prayer, “because prayer is the
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6 See Mahmood (2005: 122–34) on prayer as a means to cultivating a pious self.7 This does not mean that Islam prioritizes orthopraxy over orthodoxy. See Asad
1986: 15.8 Knowing that others are praying simultaneously extends a transnational imagined reli-
gious community in a parallel to Anderson’s (1983) argument about national communities.
basis, every time a person prays that is five minutes he spends with God,five minutes where that person sees God instead of the world.”
In these instances, prayer’s importance hinges on the development andmaintenance of a person’s relationship with God; prayer is the practiceof spending time with God. Not only does prayer stem from iltiza–m, butit also leads to it. Talal Asad has argued that medieval Christian monksconstructed virtuous selves through daily monastic practices (1993: 143).Similarly, prayer, with its regularity and ritual qualities, contributed tothe manifestation of iltiza–m in practicing Muslims in al-Dahiyya.6 Asone woman told me, “No religion in the world can ensure iltiza–m theway Islam is able to, because it is practical, it is inherent in the details ofhow things work.”7
In addition, prayer holds public importance. People do not pray onlyat the mosque and in their homes, but may pray wherever they happento be at the time. As a result, prayer is a highly visible practice. In thejam‘iyyas, groups of volunteers often prayed together, laying out a car-pet in a quiet room, and during visits it was common for someone toleave the room to pray. Before Nasrallah’s victory speech in Bint Jbeilafter Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, many people prayed thenoon prayer on the ground before entering the stadium where the eventwas held. And during the annual Ashura procession in al-Dahiyya, hun-dreds of thousands of Lebanese Shi‘is prayed the noon prayers on thestreet behind Nasrallah.
The power of prayer as a group ritual was most apparent in these pub-lic settings, but whether one prayed alone or in a group, there was al-ways a sense of engaging in an activity that indicated and fostered mem-bership in a community of believers.8 Group prayer incorporates personsinto a single undifferentiated body of belief, utterance, motion and in-tent. As Maliha, a young volunteer, put it: “Why is prayer in a group?Because you find everyone, poor, rich, educated, uneducated, all arestanding in a single line praying together. They’ve forgotten the wholeworld and are thinking only of God, so you find that this world nolonger has these problems; the rich sit next to the poor.”
Furthermore, praying in a public setting effectively demonstrated one’siltiza–m to others. Put simply, seeing a person pray, especially if they in-terrupted a social visit or their work in order to pray at the proper time,
106 • Chapter Three
9 See Soares (2002) for an interesting discussion of the social capital of prayer as a pub-lic sign of piety in Mali—where the marks purportedly left by prayer stand in for the act it-self, as opposed to al-Dahiyya, where it is the visible act that carries public meaning.
10 Take for example, CNN’s coverage of commemorations of Imam Husayn’s fortiethmemorial, just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Interpretations ranged from hailing the free-dom of religion the commemorations represented to apprehensively speculating that theyindicated an organizing Shi‘i resistance to U.S. occupation.
said a lot about that person’s piety. In al-Dahiyya, where piety washighly valued, public prayer carried social capital.9 This does not meanthat those who prayed in public had ulterior motives beyond commun-ion with God, but rather that whatever one’s motives, public prayer wasread by others. Additionally, because prayer was believed to contributeto iltiza–m, it demonstrated one’s desire to attain piety. In contexts likethe jam‘iyyas, where praying might go unnoticed, not praying was a res-onating act that could generate comment from one’s sister volunteers.Yet, again anticipating chapter 5, I want to emphasize that prayer wasnot considered “enough” by the devout. Prayer had to be accompanied byother aspects of comportment, as discussed here, and most importantly,by social responsibility.
Finally, public prayer also conveys meaning to those who are not partof the Shi‘i pious modern. Especially during mass events like the Ashuragatherings, the force of hundreds of thousands of men and women pray-ing together was harnessed effectively as a display of political strength,within the Lebanese polity and internationally. Hizbullah’s (and others’)Ashura commemorations were televised and understood by non-Shi‘iLebanese in ways that varied by political climate and the perspective ofthe viewer. Just before the liberation of the south, for example, manyLebanese viewed Hizbullah favorably, a view which extended to thecommemorations. Some, however, saw instead the 1980s Hizbullah andreacted to the televised mass prayer with shudders.10 As a key aspect ofpublic piety, prayer contributes to multiple levels of visibility of andwithin the Shi‘i pious modern.
(Not) Handshaking
Unlike prayer, the second practice that I consider is not a basic religiousduty. Rather, it is an act of restraint, one that signals modest comport-ment in interactions with members of the opposite sex: refraining fromshaking hands in greeting. As in the United States, physical contact dur-ing greetings is taken for granted by most Lebanese. Depending on thelevel of familiarity, persons greeting one another will shake hands, indi-cating unfamiliarity, or embrace lightly, kissing alternate cheeks two or
Religion in Daily Life • 107
11 A woman’s spouse, father, father-in-law, uncles, sons, and nephews are mah. ram toher, as are a man’s spouse, mother, mother-in-law, aunts, daughters, and nieces to him.Everyone else, essentially anyone a person could legally marry, are h. ara–m to her or him.
12 See for example, Fadlullah 1997: 162–64.13 This alternate form of greeting represents a new way in which unrelated people may
enter the public and recognize one another as participants in its activities and discourses.
three times. When an unrelated man and woman greet, they often do notkiss, but shake hands lightly instead.
Yet devout Muslims refrained from any physical contact with mem-bers of the opposite sex other than those who are mah.ram, meaning any-one other than one’s spouse or close relatives.11 Handshaking itself isspecifically discussed by many Shi‘i mujtahids, and there is generalagreement that unrelated women and men should not shake hands be-cause sexual feelings, no matter how slight, could potentially arise dur-ing skin-on-skin contact.12 Rather than shake hands, pious Muslims ei-ther nodded while saying hello, or, especially in more formal situations,placed their right hand on their chest.13 While whether or not a personshakes hands with members of the opposite sex may seem trivial, hand-shaking (or not) has taken on meaning in al-Dahiyya, beyond the in-evitably awkward situations that result when one person extends a handonly to realize that it is inappropriate. In fact, handshaking was used bysome as a gloss to indicate iltiza–m. This was particularly true for men, asthey did not have the headscarf as a blatant signifier of religiosity. Everyso often, while someone was describing another person, she would say,“he doesn’t shake” (huwi ma– bisallim). I once asked Noor why that wasimportant, and she replied simply, “because that means he is religious.”
As is often true of unspoken social “rules,” the unexpected power of(not) handshaking was most frequently seen in two situations: when oneperson in an interaction was assumed to be unfamiliar with the “rule” orwhen the “rule” was violated. In the first instance, for example, when adevout Muslim met a non-Muslim for the first time, care was taken toexplain why a hand was not extended, both in order to teach appropri-ate behavior and to ensure that the outsider would not take offense atwhat might be perceived as rudeness. In situations in al-Dahiyya whereone or both individuals did not know how the other would react, thosewho would normally shake hands often hesitated, waiting to gauge theother’s response, or simply made the safer assumption of religiosity. Itwas generally assumed (correctly) that women who were muh.ajjabadid not shake hands with unrelated men, and women who were notmuh.ajjaba did. This formula did not always work, however, as therewere non-muh.ajjaba women who refrained from handshaking, or did so
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14 Fitna is understood to be caused by extramarital sexual relationships. Rather unusu-ally, my interlocutors placed responsibility for avoiding fitna on both women and men.
selectively depending on who else was present. For example, one of mynon- muh.ajjaba friends shook hands with men unless one of her particu-larly pious uncles was present. Women who did shake hands with menoften had a difficult time gauging when it was appropriate. As Azizareplied when I asked her how I was supposed to know what to do whenmeeting people, “You just have to know.” She then went on to list anumber of men she knew who had stopped shaking hands with womenat seemingly random moments over the past few years.
Issue #979: Is it allowed to shake the hands of women in European countrieswhen there is an interest-related/business relationship [mas.lah. a awmas.a–lih. ] with them? Especially when they do not understand the reasonsfor not shaking their hands and are extending their hands to be shaken?And when there could be embarrassment or confusion if one does notshake hands?
Answer: It is not allowed except in cases of extreme embarrassment thatcould lead to material or spiritual damage [al-d. arar], or to unbearableconfusion in relation to general social norms. Note also that one shouldnot go to places that might require this of him except in cases of necessity.(Fadlullah 1996b: 414)
During my first few months in al-Dahiyya, men who did not shake myhand upon meeting me often provided lengthy explanations of how theycould not shake hands with women because of the danger of “electric-ity” and the chaos (fitna) in society that would therefore ensue.14 Manyof my women friends encouraged me not to shake hands with men, be-cause “while shaking your hand they might touch it too much, or haveother intentions or thoughts in their mind.” Others related feeling thatthey had to explain their refusal to shake hands in order to prevent misun-derstandings. Hajjeh Khadija Hammoud recounted an awkward momentat a reception with a prominent diplomat who was a close acquaintanceof her family:
We were at a reception for Mr. ——, he was about to leave the country for an-other post, and he came, and in front of everyone he said that he wanted totell me something that had been bothering him from the beginning. So I saidto him, “Go ahead, I’m listening.” And in front of everyone, you know howthey are, all these elite capitalists, he said, “Everyone shakes my hand exceptfor the wife of Ali Hammoud [her husband], why is that?” So I said to him,“Look, I respect you and I appreciate you. Everyone else greets you with theirhand, which is something material. I am greeting you with my heart. Would
Religion in Daily Life • 109
you prefer the meaningful and spiritual greeting or do you want the materialone?”
The second and more prominent situation in which the meaning andimportance of (not) handshaking emerged was whenever this “rule” wasviolated, whether intentionally or not. Unintentional violations weresimply instances where people accidentally brushed up against one an-other, perhaps if two people were trying to open a door at the same time.This generally resulted in a slight jumping back, blushing, an apologymuttered under the breath. The intentional violations I witnessed andexperienced were rare but pointed moments. On one occasion, I was afew minutes early for an interview with a school principal, and wasshown into his office while he saw a student. Before the student entered,the principal explained that this was a minor discipline case, a girl in herearly teens who had been caught in the schoolyard without her h.ija
–b.When the student entered the office the principal stood and extended hishand to her. She immediately jumped back with a shocked look on herface, indicating that she did not shake hands with members of the oppo-site sex. He then explained to her that he had just treated her like awoman who was not muh.ajjaba, because that was what he assumed shewanted to be. His point made, the student indicated that she understoodand promised not to remove her h.ija
–b again.My position as a non-Muslim, albeit one who dressed modestly,
seemed to provoke intentional violations as well. On several occasions,men at jam‘iyyas who did not shake hands with women extended theirhands to me in greeting, but only when no one else was present. WhenI told Aziza this, she was horrified, and instructed me to place my handon my chest in greeting when this happened. Soon after, one of thesemen joked “shu–, sirtı– mtdayyini?” (what, you’ve become religious?).When I explained that I felt more comfortable not shaking hands, he ex-pressed dismay that “we’ve affected you” and said that he had hoped mypresence would provoke more openness in the organization, especiallyaround “these silly rules” like not shaking hands.
These men were considered pious in the community. They prayed andfasted, and several of them had been on the h.ajj. Moreover, they hadchosen employment in jam‘iyyas, often over more lucrative career possi-bilities. This intentional violation did not necessarily reflect a lack ofpiety. Rather, it highlighted disagreement over whether handshakingshould be a measure of piety in the first place, and underscored the vari-ation in definitions and understandings of piety itself, even among thosewho identified with the Shi‘i pious modern.
Contestation came from outside the community as well. Refrainingfrom shaking hands with those of the opposite sex was interpreted by
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15 According to most Shi‘i mujtahids, handshaking between sexes is permissible if thereis no skin-to-skin contact.
some devout Shi‘is outside al-Dahiyya as an inappropriate delineation ofreligiosity. This was illustrated most clearly when I visited the Imam al-Sadr Foundation in south Lebanon. Almost everyone there shook myhand, even when I automatically lifted mine to my chest instead. My sur-prise when a well-known religious scholar extended his hand to me ingreeting was so apparent that another woman in the room chuckled,“Oh yes, he shakes.” She herself was muh.ajjaba, but she pulled thesleeve of her sweater over her hand like a glove, in order to shake hishand.15 Later, when I asked the scholar why he shook hands with women,he responded, “There are those who think that religiosity (tadayyun)shows in these little things, that if you regulate everything, you will builda religious society, but I am not one of those people.”
In both cases, contestation over (not) shaking hands is related to dis-agreements over how to be modern. Handshaking was viewed by manyas a western practice. For some, it represented the moral decay of theWest—especially with regard to sexuality—and was therefore some-thing to be eliminated from daily practice as part of the Shi‘i Islamicmovement’s two-pronged model of progress. The less common view inal-Dahiyya was that handshaking is an act that should instead be em-braced as part of that progress. Those who held the latter view sawhandshaking as an issue around which religious interpretation should fa-cilitate the participation of pious Shi‘is in the contemporary world. Thefinal area of embodied piety to which I now turn is perhaps the mostcontested arena—transnationally—of Muslim gender politics: veiling.
Veiling
Not all women—nor even all pious women—in al-Dahiyya wore Islamicdress, and variations in dress and style existed among those who did.The term muh.ajjaba shares its root with that used to denote the mostcommon form of Islamic dress: the h.ija
–b. The h.ija–b is a headscarf, worn
so as to cover a woman’s head, hair, and neck, sometimes falling overher shoulders. There are myriad ways to pin a h.ija
–b; some styles are as-sociated with particular political parties, age groups, or trends. SomeShi‘i women tucked their h.ija
–bs into their collars; others tied them undertheir chins, tossing the ends over their shoulders, and many who were af-filiated with Hizbullah pulled one side under their chin to just belowtheir other ear, pinning it there so that the remaining fabric hung downloosely in front. A woman’s h.ija
–b could be silk, cotton, or synthetic, andfabrics spoke to socioeconomic class. Colors and prints varied; older and
Religion in Daily Life • 111
16 For a thorough explication of the veil’s history, contexts, and meanings, see El Guindi1999.
“more pious” women tended towards muted, simpler, and darkershades, while the fashion conscious matched their h.ija
–bs to their outfits.A h. ija
–b could be worn over jeans or pants and a loose shirt, or over asuit with a long jacket. Most commonly, women wore long, loose-fitting solid-colored dresses or tailored overcoats in beiges, navy, orblacks, known as libs shar‘ı– (sharı–‘a or Islamic dress). For some people,only a woman who wore full Islamic dress with her h.ija
–b was properlymuh.ajjaba, and the term muh.ajjaba itself was then used as a gloss forone who did. While Islamic dress went further to erase class lines, again,wealth (or its display) was indicated by fabric quality and accessoriessuch as purses, shoes, bracelets, and rings. Some members of Hizbullah,as well as women related to religious scholars through blood or mar-riage, wore an ‘aba–ya over their clothing and h.ija
–b when out in public.This is a black wrap that covers a woman from head to toe, revealingonly her face, hands, and feet and concealing her form. It was extremelyrare for a woman in al-Dahiyya to cover her face. The few who did worea thin not-quite-opaque piece of black cloth called a fı–sh over theirfaces, along with gloves.
Once a woman becomes muh.ajjaba, ideally she should remain sothroughout her life, though there were some who began wearing theh.ija
–b at a young age and later removed it. As with (not) shaking hands, amuh.ajjaba woman wears her h.ija
–b in front of all men who are h.ara–m toher, that is, men other than her spouse, father, father-in-law, uncles, sons,and nephews.
Freedom [al-h. urriyya] in Islam means that a person has control of himself[yamluk nafsahu] and his movements, within the domain of the legal limits[al-h. udu–d al-shar‘iyya] that God requires him to respect. Thus the h. ija–b towhich women commit does not eliminate their freedom. I do not think thatthe addition of a piece or two, or a meter or two, of clothing could changethe issue of freedom, for freedom is defined by the freedom of women in work/activity [al-‘amal], and this is not incompatible with the h. ija–b. (Fadlullah1997: 137)
Women’s dress is perhaps the most visible embodied expression ofpiety in al-Dahiyya, as well as in the Muslim world more generally.The veil is also one of the most common symbols used in the West togloss the “oppression” or, alternately, the “resistance,” of Arab or Mus-lim women.16 Recently, especial attention has been paid to the “re-veiling”of young, educated, urban women. This “re-veiling” is generally dis-cussed as either a symptom of Islamism or as an instrument of political
112 • Chapter Three
17 These arguments tend to fall into two categories. The first is exemplified by MacLeod’s(1991) argument that veiling represents “accommodating protest,” a means by whichwomen can work outside the home while maintaining their respectability (see also Zuhur1992). The second posits veiling as a strategy of resistance to colonial and neocolonial re-pression, sometimes involving coercion from nationalist movements. The most common ex-amples are Iran and Palestine (e.g., Hammami 1997, Hegland 1987, Sullivan 1998).
18 Notable exceptions include Brenner 1996, El-Guindi 1999, Kamalkhani 1998, andMahmood 2005.
19 Instrumentalist arguments regarding why women veil are frequently made in referenceto Egypt.
resistance.17 Strikingly, it is rare to see piety included in these discussionsof veiling.18 Instead, women are often assumed to veil for one of threereasons: because they have no choice or have known nothing else (e.g., itis law or it is “tradition”), because they are making a political statement(e.g., during the Iranian revolution), or because it facilitates movementin public spaces (e.g., it is easier for family/society to accept a womanworking if she is veiled). The dominant assumption seems to be that ifgiven the option, women would naturally choose not to veil. Yet how-ever true these assumptions and arguments may be for some women insome contexts,19 they neglect and negate the critical factor of faith. Inother words, they neglect to take piety seriously.
Today at the SAA’s volunteer training seminar, our instructor told us that theh. ija–b feeds the poor by saving money, it kills the beauty competition thatmany women get caught up in and spend money on, and it creates a cleanersociety because people spend the time they would spend sinning helping oth-ers instead. Immediately one of the younger girls sitting across the table fromme responded under her breath, “Yeah, but now they compete over scarves[escharpes (Fr.)]. The instructor heard her and answered, “This is becausepeople are lying in their religion.” (fieldnotes, July 6, 2000)
The question of why many pious Shi‘i women veil is one whose answerthreads throughout this book. I do not intend to prioritize piety above allelse exclusively, but I want to incorporate piety into a broader under-standing of what both Islamic dress and iltiza–m more generally mean topracticing Shi‘is in al-Dahiyya. The increase in veiling that has occurredin al-Dahiyya since the 1980s has coincided with the Shi‘i mobilizationdetailed in the last chapter and paralleled its trajectory. It is important toreiterate, however, that this mobilization has had consequences for howfaith plays out in people’s lives, and no less with regard to dress.
It is also important to note that pious women’s dress has taken onpublic meaning beyond the community of the pious modern in wayssimilar to prayer, marking the public arena as Islamic. This view was
Religion in Daily Life • 113
20 See also el-Bizri 1996. An explication of Shi‘i religious reasoning on the veil is outsidethe scope of this project. Fadlullah’s interpretations are well explicated in Fadlullah 1997.Iranian mujtahid Murtaza Mutahhari was also cited by my interlocutors. See Mutahharin.d. and Jam‘iyyat al-ma‘a–rif al-isla–miyya al-thaqa–fiyya 2001.
21 Being muh. ajjaba may actually hinder a woman’s chances of employment outside al-Dahiyya. Within the area many businesses do hire muh. ajjaba women; Islamic organiza-tions often hire them exclusively.
especially prevalent among outsiders to this community, who often com-mented to me about the visible increase in numbers of muh.ajjaba womenin public spaces. Muh.ajjaba women were often assumed to represent“the Shi‘a” or “Hizbullah”—whether the speaker viewed their visibilityas an encroachment, a threat, or simply a change in the political dynam-ics of the country. The headscarf also figured into the stereotyping ofShi‘is as backward and nonmodern, reflecting the discourses that linkmodern-ness with secularism discussed in the introduction. I will returnto this broader visibility and its relationship to the pious modern inchapter 6, and focus here on the meanings the h.ija
–b carries with regardto piety.
The relationship between piety and the headscarf is neither always nornecessarily straightforward. Most practicing Muslim women and menagreed that the proper practice was for women to veil, and, when askedwhy, provided a relatively standard religious argument, stating that it isa woman’s responsibility to “hide her charms” so as to preserve order insociety and so that she will be treated with respect and not as a sexualobject. These arguments were sometimes presented by non-muh.ajjabawomen, who would then explain that they were not yet fully convincedof their own arguments, and hoped that God would someday bring themto a point of conviction so that they too would put on the h.ija
–b.Devout Shi‘i women in Lebanon wore Islamic dress for a wide range
of reasons involving combinations of piety, personal experiences, instru-mentality, social pressures, and politics.20 Women’s increased veiling hasbeen accompanied by a similar increase in women’s public participation.However, rather than ordering these emphases and arguing that womenveil in order to facilitate their participation, I would argue that in thiscase, veiling and public participation have been simultaneously empha-sized as two facets of spiritual progress through authenticated Islam.21
As Aziza retorted when I commented that it was interesting that a localwoman preacher’s sermons had changed over the past ten years to in-clude both the importance of the h.ija
–b and the importance of women’srole outside the home, “shu– (what?) It’s completely natural that the twogo together.”
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22 This stereotype emerges in jokes about Lebanese women and in “observations” aboutthe “real” work of Lebanese female television personalities who travel to Arab Gulf states.
23 This is from the Qur’an, the full verse reads: “O wives of the Prophet! You are notlike any other women. If you keep your duty, then be not soft in speech lest he whoseheart is diseased should be moved with desire, but speak in an honorable manner.” (Al-Ahza–b 32).
Women who advocated Islamic dress linked piety and practicality inother ways as well. On one occasion, Hajjeh Zahra expounded:
Why have women been so manipulated by the media? It’s exploitation, thisobjectification, they are being used to sell things to men, to dirty people!When is a woman more dignified, when she wears the h. ija–b or this alterna-tive? If we have no rules, then my son can come and say that he is free to be adrug addict and I can say nothing to him. Whenever I feel at all restricted, I re-member the alternative for women, and I remember that God loves us, andthat he can see these things more clearly that we can, so he puts these restric-tions to protect us from ourselves. Because there is abuse of women! Womenare measured by their bodies or appearances, beauty, and sex, having to sellthemselves. If this is the price we pay for being feminine, the h. ija–b is needed.Because I wear the h. ija–b, I know that whenever I am accepted it is because I am capable. There is no other factor, I know that I am accepted for my abili-ties. I have more self-acceptance this way, more self-worth. In the h. ija–b, whena woman is accepted, it is because of her merit. This is why I can speak mymind in any situation, because I know that because of my h. ija–b, I am seen as aperson, not a female.
Hajjeh Zahra’s positing of the h.ija–b as a solution to the objectification of
women—an argument I heard frequently—is particularly interesting inthe Lebanese context. Lebanese women are generally stereotyped in theMiddle East as being beautiful, resilient, and promiscuous.22 Lebanon isalso notorious for high rates of cosmetic surgery—especially nose jobs,breast enhancements, and collagen lip injections.
[Question]: What is the pragmatic representation of the correct/true/authen-tic [h. aqı–qı–] h. ija–b in Islam?
[Answer]: The true h. ija–b is represented first of all by a woman veiling/covering[satr] all parts of her body except her face and palms, and not going outwhile displaying her charms [‘adam al-khuru–j mutabarija]. So the h. ija–bhas a material aspect manifest in the covering of the body, and alsoa symbolic aspect represented by a woman entering society as a humanbeing, without trying to attract attention. In this way it is possible forthe h. ija–b to be manifest in speech: “then be not soft in speech, lest he inwhose heart is a disease” (Al-Ahza–b 32)23 and in all other behaviors.(Fadlullah 1997: 32)
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While no one I spoke with argued against the h.ija–b in principle, the is-
sue of whether it should be required in public buildings other thanmosques was hotly contested. Many people understood the logic of ask-ing non-muh.ajjaba women to wear a h.ija
–b when entering Islamic schools,so as to maintain a proper example for the students. However, strongdisagreement existed over the Martyrs’ Association’s policy requiringwomen to wear a h.ija
–b inside Al-Rassoul al-‘Azam Hospital. This dis-agreement hinged on the belief that veiling was only meaningful whendone through free and conscious choice. This begins to explain the per-spective of those pious non-muh.ajjaba women who characterized them-selves as not yet “convinced” (muqtani‘a) of their own arguments forveiling. In contrast to the argument described above linking the act ofprayer to the cultivation of iltiza–m, this view contends that iltiza–m mustcome first with regard to the h.ija
–b.The prioritization of iltiza–m in this case is linked to the powerful visi-
bility of the h.ija–b as a symbol of a woman’s morality. One of the issues
that arose in these debates concerns whether the h.ija–b necessarily repre-
sents an inner state of true piety. This is illustrated by a conversationthat took place one evening as I was relaxing in a café with a group offriends that spanned Lebanese diversity. One friend remarked that shewished she had asked her cousin to join us, and was immediately told byanother that it would have been inappropriate, because the cousin wasmuh.ajjaba and therefore should not be in a place that served alcohol andplayed popular Arabic music. I countered: “Why would it matter, aslong as she doesn’t drink?” The friend who had objected explained thata muh.ajjaba woman must live according to proper religious morals andnot even enter a place that challenges that morality, because the h.ija
–b is“not just a piece of cloth,” but something that carries responsibility. Inher view, the h.ija
–b represents a choice to uphold morality, and a publicdeclaration of that choice.
I heard this notion of the h.ija–b as both material and moral again and
again in lectures and sermons, as well as in arguments against enforcedveiling. To paraphrase a sermon given by Fadlullah’s son, Sayyid AliFadlullah, the h.ija
–b is not merely a cover for one’s head and hair, but forone’s heart and morals and life as well. People who argue that iltiza–mmust come first note that without iltiza–m, a woman’s h.ija
–b loses mean-ing. However, the notion that a woman must be “convinced” (muq-tani‘a) and “committed” (multazima) before she adopts the headscarfwas contested, and furthermore, social pressures and norms affected thepossibilities for choice in the matter. This debate is related to the impor-tance of the headscarf as a public marker of piety, the emphasis placedon understanding the reasons for the h.ija
–b, and the sense that such un-derstanding was a relatively recent phenomenon.
“Then” versus “Now”: A Processual Interlude
Over and over again, people would say to me, “Lara, twenty years agoyou would not see muh.ajjaba women like this,” or, “Lara, twenty yearsago people did not pray like this.” The perceived changes in religiouspractice and understanding from “then” to “now” are changes from“tradition” that was cast as unaware and rote to a purposeful andknowledgeable Islam. This transformation paralleled the trajectory ofthe Shi‘i mobilization outlined in the last chapter, and similarly, the 1979revolution in Iran and Khomeini’s rise to international prominenceplayed a major role in catalyzing reforms in religious practice. Occasion-ally, a woman who remembered the revolution would declare proudly,“I was one of the first in the community to h.ajjab” (adopt the h.ija
–b).Rasha was one such woman:
Rasha: I was eight years old when I decided to wear the h. ija–b, and my entirefamily except my sister was against it. At the time, I was a student at aCatholic school. Each morning I would leave the house, put my scarf onto walk in the street, then remove it when I arrived at school. And thatwas OK, because the school was all girls and nuns, except for once aweek when a priest came to lead mass. On those days, I used to hide un-der my desk so that he would not see me.
Lara: How did you know that was what you wanted to do?Rasha: I learned from a friend, she was also eight, she convinced me about
the h. ija–b. We were in scouts together, and we used to go to the mosquetogether on Fridays.
The vanguard of religious reform, particularly those who were women,often faced parental disapproval or objections to their newly conceptual-ized and implemented religious practice.
Others instead faced what they considered their family’s “ignorance.”Dalal fell into the latter group. When I asked her if she had been raisedin a religious family, her rather wry response clearly delineated herunderstanding of the difference between being “religious” and being“traditional”:
No, I became aware of religion on my own. My family was traditional[taqlı–diyya]; it was all tradition, they practiced religion as tradition, but not be-cause of awareness [wa–‘ı–] or knowledge [‘ilm]. I am from a traditionalLebanese family, in the traditions [taqa–lı–d] and the customs [‘ada–t] and eventhe religious observances. They inherit them; it is heritage [tura–th], but it hasnothing to do with awareness or having studied and understood authentic/truereligion.
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24 The best definition of al-taqwa– I heard was Hajjeh Umm Hadi’s, as she paraphrasedImam Ali: “It’s not seeing anything without seeing God before it and after it and in thething itself. This is al-taqwa–, this absorption, this fusion.”
In the “now” of contemporary al-Dahiyya, for many pious Shi‘is,“tradition” has been replaced with “authenticated” practice rooted inknowledge and understanding. Yet despite the prevalence of the embod-ied practices of piety depicted above—viewed as evidence of spiritualprogress in the decades following the Shi‘i Islamic mobilization—fewpeople articulated a sense that they or their community were “religious”(mutadayyin/a). As one woman told me: “We still need more change, weneed more consciousness.”
Even for those who seemed devout, “becoming religious” was a con-tinual process that required constant effort. I first realized this when itwas pointed out to me that I was taking the term “religious” for granted.I had casually said to an acquaintance, “You consider yourself religious,don’t you?” and he replied that actually, no, he didn’t, but rather that heconsiders himself a “practicing Muslim.” When I asked why, he ex-plained that to consider himself religious implied much more than he felthe could live up to, and that it carried too much responsibility. Therewere “things that religious people had to do,” like not sitting at a tablewith someone who is drinking alcohol, things he felt not yet able to do.
I decided to take my question to someone who I knew did those“things that religious people had to do” so one morning, over coffee andcookies, I asked Hajjeh Khadija if she considered herself religious. I hadknown her for almost a year at the time, and knew that she worked andvolunteered at Islamic schools, prayed regularly, fasted during Ramadan,and held Ashura gatherings at her home. Furthermore, she was someonewho was clearly respected as devout by others. Hajjeh Khadija’s initialresponse was simply “inshallah (God willing) someday I will be reli-gious.” At that point we were interrupted by a neighbor needing a favor,so later I asked her again: “Hajjeh, I don’t understand why you saidinshallah you will be religious; you pray, you fast, you volunteer, youknow so much about the Qur’an, you do all the things religious peopleare supposed to do, don’t you?” Smiling mysteriously, she replied:
Layki habı–btı–, I say inshallah I will be religious. I must never stop climbing theladder of faith, you know it is a ladder, and at the top, the last thing, there iswhat we call taqwa– [absolute faith and piety],24 and that is something we mustall walk towards. You know, habı–btı–, we have fundamentals of religion that aperson should practice: faith in God, in Judgment Day, in God’s Prophet.These are the basics for someone to be a Muslim. And of course there are the
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25 In Egypt a similar concern with self-cultivation is encouraged by sermons andwomen’s mosque lessons (Abu-Lughod 2000, Mahmood 2005).
practices of prayer, fasting, zaka–t [religious taxes]. And, il-h. amdillah [thanksbe to God], I try also to apply/manifest the other things, the things we callmu‘amala–t [mutual reciprocal social relations] and fiqh [religious jurispru-dence]. On the level of fiqh, we should try to understand as much as we can,for example, with regard to issues like purity, things like that, personal things,and to apply those things. And with regard to mu‘amala–t, a person tries to livecorrectly, and inshallah I will be able to.
As Hajjeh Khadija noted, “becoming religious” involved more thanfaith in the fundaments of religion, and more than the fulfillment of prac-tices like prayer and fasting. It included both social relations and religiousunderstanding and knowledge. The latter was both necessary in order topractice Islam correctly and an essential part of authenticated Islam in itsown right. The importance of religious understanding also had to do withpious Shi‘i notions of what it means to be a modern person. One aspectof a pious modern self is cultivated piety—the piety of a person who usesher rational capacities to understand and practice authenticated Islam inan effort at continual self-betterment.25 Such a person stood in sharp con-trast to the traditional person who might veil or pray without under-standing correctly why she did so, or who might do so improperly.
There were numerous routes by which the pious could gain religiousunderstanding and knowledge, all of which shared the key element ofcommunication. Beyond “becoming religious” on a personal level, dis-courses about religious practices and meanings are crucial to the con-struction of what is considered authenticated Islam. Indeed, the processof authentication itself occurs in large part through processes of commu-nication and community discourses. As such, this chapter now turns toits final focus: a consideration of the ways pious Shi‘is constructed,learned, and practiced authenticated Islam through discursive piety.
Discursive Piety
Religion permeated most talk in al-Dahiyya, in part because Lebanesespeech conventions include liberal doses of phrases like al-hamdullah,insha’allah, allah ra–d, twakila’allah (thanks be to God, God willing, Godwilling, depend on God). For example, insha’allah is often used as an all-purpose answer to questions, and can range in meaning from “yes,” to“maybe,” to “we’ll see,” to “probably not,” to “no way,” depending ontone and context. Devout people also recited verses from the Qur’an or
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26 Devout Christians and missionaries quote the Bible profusely in similar ways.27 I take this notion from Spitulnik’s separation of language use that is pragmatic—
“performing or signifying a social identity”—from that which is denotative—“referring toa local concept” (2002: 194).
28 In al-Dahiyya, new Islamic schools and publishing houses have no doubt contributedto the abilities of younger generation pious Muslims to participate in religious debates.
29 Here again I follow Spitulnik in her use of capitalized “Discourse” to mean a body ofknowledge that is “organized, legitimated, stabilized, experienced, and even contested inlarge part through concrete events and patterns of speaking—that is, discourse writ small”(2002: 197).
sayings of the Prophet or Imams, using quotations like proverbs, to illus-trate or underscore a point.26 While the phrases and interjections werenot necessarily associated with religiosity, quotations generally indexedat least a certain level of familiarity with religious texts. They are speechacts that carry the pragmatic function of indicating piety.27 Indeed,prayer itself, in addition to being an act of embodied piety, is also one ofdiscursive piety. Rather than these speech acts, however, what I want tofocus on in this section is the inclusion of religion as a topic of conversa-tion in daily talk.
Piety was not only embodied in acts like praying, veiling, and Qur’anicquotation, it was also talked about. It was both a factor in what wasbeing discussed by the pious, and in how they spoke about various mat-ters. The visibility of religion and of religiosity in al-Dahiyya was in-scribed in these discourses. They ranged from daily talk about how tobe properly pious to debates about the correct meaning of religiousrituals or events, and engrossed not only religious leaders, but impor-tantly, the wider community of devout Muslims.28 Religious talk worksboth pragmatically, establishing the speaker’s piety via her stated con-cern for or expertise in understanding authenticated Islam, and metadis-cursively, as discourse about the Discourse (in the Foucauldian sense) ofpiety.29
Debating Authenticated Islam in Daily Talk
Performing religious practices correctly entails knowing how to do so. Inal-Dahiyya, such knowledge had multiple sources, often glossed as “theIslamic milieu” (al-bı–’a al-isla–miyya or al-jaw al-isla–mı–). For some, thisconcept included the notion of fit.ra, or innate disposition, so that a per-son born Muslim was believed to instinctively know aspects of her reli-gion. Fit.ra alone was not thought sufficient, however, as those aspectsmight still need to be awakened. More commonly, al-bı–’a encompassedthe atmosphere of the home, family, and perhaps school as well. Asmany put it: kil shakhs ibn bı–’tu (every person is a child of his milieu).
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30 For each day of fasting that is missed, a person may pay a set amount, believed to beenough to feed sixty poor people, or give a set amount of a staple food (e.g., wheat) to thepoor.
31 Her argument was that temporary liaisons occur in both Shi‘i and Sunni contexts, butthat only Shi‘ism provided a religious contract that protected women and any resultingchildren. For more on temporary marriage in Shi‘ism, see Haeri (1989).
Aziza’s response when I asked her how she knew so much detail abouther religion was typical:
Sitting and listening, all my life, I learned. There are always conversationsabout different situations. And all my life I’ve been listening. Whenever I don’tunderstand something, I ask about it. Maybe not right then, but it sits in mymind and I think about it and later I will ask about it. The same way that youare always asking questions that come into your mind, I do the same thing. AndI always keep on asking until I am convinced [muqtani‘a] of the answer, untilthe right answer is in my mind [colloquially, ba–lı–] and I am convinced of it.
And indeed, during the time I spent in al-Dahiyya, the details of reli-gious practice were frequently a part of daily conversation. While thiswas sometimes directly related to my presence, just as often I found my-self walking into these conversations, or merely witnessing them as theyoccurred around me, the participants seemingly oblivious of my igno-rance of the topic being discussed. This was the case one fall afternoonwhile I was visiting with Hajjeh Umm Zein (a relative of Aziza’s), hercousin Hajjeh Widad, and two other women I had just met. The coolweather had us sitting inside, wondering when the electricity would re-turn so that we could turn on the heater in the room. Ramadan was ap-proaching, and the conversation turned to how little time remained tocomplete one’s fasting from the year before if a person had not yet doneso. This made sense to me, as I knew that during menstruation a womandoes not fast, yet she is expected to fast the days she missed before thefollowing Ramadan. Hajjeh Widad noted disapprovingly that she ex-pected that her daughter would be fasting extra days after Ramadan hadpassed instead. One of the younger women with us replied curiously,“Isn’t it true that if you don’t complete your fast before Ramadan youmust either pay or give wheat to the poor?”30 Hajjeh Widad clarified,“Yes, but you also can fast three days for every one that you missed in-stead.” This was further corrected by Hajjeh Umm Zein, “Yes, but don’tforget that it is three days added to each day you missed, so it becomesfour instead of one.”
Another afternoon Aziza was trying to convince me that Shi‘i interpre-tations were far more sensible than their Sunni counterparts. She had be-gun with the practicality of temporary marriage (mut‘a) contracts,31 andwith differences in divorce (Shi‘is must have a judge certify a divorce). At
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this point, the doorbell rang, and we were joined by Hajjeh Widad and ateenaged relative of Aziza’s, who had met on the stairs. After the stan-dard inquiries about health and family, we picked up the conversation.“Did you tell her about traveling during Ramadan?” the youngerwoman asked. Aziza shook her head, “I’m not sure about that, you ex-plain it.” “For us, if you travel outside Beirut and leave before the nooncall to prayer, you don’t fast that day, and you don’t have to do it later.”Aziza: “But if you leave after the noon prayer?” “Then you have to fast.But the Sunni don’t have these rules to make things like travel morepractical.”
Daily religious talk was not limited to the details of correct practice.Nor were women only the recipients of religious knowledge. Debatesduring women’s social gatherings often took up the meaning of events,texts, and beliefs. Through these discussions, religious knowledge andmeaning was sometimes reinforced and sometimes reinterpreted. Theseprocesses—involving women producing religious discourses that bothreflect and impinge on their iltiza–m—are an important component of theongoing authentication of Islam.
After the majlis [mourning gathering] ended and most of the guests had left,we sat outside in the courtyard eating grapes and sweets and drinking coffee.Only about eight of us remained, including our hostesses (Randa, HajjehUmm Muhammad, and Noha), myself, Hajjeh Umm Zein, Noor, and twoothers whose names I didn’t catch. At one point, someone passed around abowl of apples, and just then Randa’s husband entered the courtyard to askher a question. As he left a moment later, she offered him an apple and, chuck-ling, he made a comment about Hawa [Eve] tempting Adam. Randa com-mented that it had all been Adam’s fault anyway, since he was the one whoinsisted on covering up with a leaf after eating the apple. That led into a dis-cussion about how there had been no taha–ra [purity] or naja–sa [impurity] inthe garden of Eden, so Adam and Hawa hadn’t had to cover themselves.Someone asked, “But then how did sex happen? Did they enjoy it?” Morelaughter. This then led somehow to a more serious side conversation aboutMariam’s [the Virgin Mary’s] pregnancy, and how everyone had cast her outand accused her of adultery, but God told her to come and sit under a datetree, and whenever she was hungry, dates fell down to her and provided herwith all the nutrition she needed. Hajjeh Umm Muhammad was narratingthis, with some of the others interjecting comments here and there. (fieldnotes,April 11, 2000)
This shifting conversation was not directed at anyone specifically,though no doubt Hajjeh Umm Muhammad felt that some of the womenpresent were not familiar enough with the details of this religious his-tory. Beyond demonstrating how religious knowledge was reinforced,
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the conversation highlights the presence and prevalence of religious is-sues in people’s minds. Associations with religious events and texts aroseeasily as asides in conversations that seemed to begin in unrelated ways.Everything could be brought to religion at some point, and often was.
Some of these conversations took the form of vehement debates. Oneof the most commonly debated topics revolved around superstition andthe involvement of jinn (spirits) in the human world. Women exchangedstories about experiences with the evil eye and with being “writtenon”—a euphemism for being cursed by another—and argued about thetruth of such stories, and about what religious texts say about them. Atone gathering, Hajjeh Umm Hadi asserted strongly that she believed injinn because of a personal experience. A post-childbirth illness had lefther bedridden for several weeks, until a wise older woman visited her.The older woman told Hajjeh Umm Hadi that there was a jinn involved,and began to read the Qur’an and speak under her breath until she even-tually began speaking in a male voice, presumably that of the jinn. Shethen fell silent and a small piece of paper dropped from the ceiling. Writ-ten on the paper was a message saying that the jinn had left Hajjeh UmmHadi. She immediately recovered and began going about her normaldaily activities.
Hajjeh Umm Hadi’s audience was divided on both how believablesuch occurrences were and on whether it was religiously acceptable toseek remedies for them. Quotations from the Qur’an and h.adı–th flewback and forth across the room. Some women argued that there are peo-ple who work with mala–k al-jinn (good spirits) whose role it is tocounter the jinn (bad spirits). Others argued that it was all nonsense, andthat it was illogical (ghayr ‘aqlı–) to believe in jinn and improper to seeksuperstitious remedies for nonexistent curses. Most of the latter did con-cede that remedies that included only verses from the Qur’an were ac-ceptable, if only because holy words could do no harm.
This debate about jinn and curses is an example of the visibility of re-ligion in the everyday lives of pious Shi‘is, and also of their participationin the continual process of authenticating Islam. In other words, it is anexample of women’s participation in the metadiscourse on piety. Thisparticipation subverts two stereotypes about women’s religious knowl-edge and practice: that women’s belief is “folk” as opposed to men’s “or-thodox” belief and that women’s religion is “practice-based” as opposedto men’s “text-based” religion. In these debates about jinn, it waswomen who were arguing clearly on both sides, and drawing on reli-gious texts in order to form their arguments. Those women who werecritical of belief in curses were advocating for authenticated Islam.
Another common topic of discussion was the history surrounding the
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32 A round bread baked with a layer of reconstituted dried yogurt, meat, and spices.
commemoration of Ashura. This is one of the most prominent para-digms in Shi‘ism. Yet it also is a history whose interpretation and mean-ing has changed over the past few decades, and continues to be debatedtoday. Pious Shi‘is were expected to know the history of Ashura in de-tail, and frequently shared new information they learned through ser-mons, readings, conversations, and commemorations with one another.Ashura was so important that asking a question that revealed ignoranceabout the history often led to a response of surprise and disapproval.Rather than an indication of piety, in this case seeking basic knowledgewas seen as a sign of ignorance.
A detailed case study of the transformation of Ashura into its authen-ticated form is the subject of the next chapter, but I want to give a briefexample here, in order to underscore the prevalence of discussion ofAshura, and the importance placed on understanding religious history.Several weeks after Ashura had ended in 2001, as I was sitting withAziza and her mother in their kitchen, drinking tea and eating mana’ı–shkishik,32 her mother began to tell me the story of what happened toImam Husayn’s head. She related that after Husayn’s martyrdom, Yazid(the corrupt caliph who had him killed) was parading about the Arabworld with the head, bragging about his feat. “And then a good Christ-ian man bought Husayn’s head from Yazid and gave it a proper burial.”At this Aziza chimed in, reminding her mother that despite this being the“traditionally” told version of events, there was no agreement nor anyproper evidence as to where Husayn’s head is buried. She then related adifferent story that she had heard at a majlis a few weeks before. In thisversion, Husayn’s head was thrown onto the grounds of a monastery inSyria, where it began to speak. It identified itself as Husayn’s head andreminded the monastery priest of the sufferings of Christ, prompting thepriest to convert to Islam and then give the head a proper burial. WhileAziza told her story, her cousin walked in to get a glass of water, andstood listening to her. When she finished, he added that he had asked hisuncle—a man reputed to know a great deal about religious matters—about this, and he had confirmed that Husayn’s head had been buried inSyria by a priest, but had doubted that the head spoke. The cousin thenadded another layer of detail about how the head came to the monasteryin the first place.
For my companions, each addition to this conversation brought thestory of what happened to the Imam’s head closer to credible evidence.Aziza’s mother’s version was the “traditional” story she had alwaysknown. This was corrected by Aziza and replaced with a more detailed
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33 I would speculate that this is related to Hizbullah’s emphasis on religious education,as well as to these women’s more pronounced tendencies towards evangelism.
version, one learned at a recent majlis. Authentication culminated in hercousin’s confirming and disputing various details based on the knowl-edge of his uncle, a person accepted by all three as an authority on suchmatters. In part, it was through conversations like these that particulardiscourses were authenticated, and canonized into a dominant discursiveform.
Such conversations reinscribed the importance of correct knowledge,demonstrated the piety of the speakers, provided an informal spacewhere questions could be asked and points clarified, and conveyed cru-cial information to younger people or those who have recently becomecommitted. Yet for many who sought religious knowledge, daily conver-sations with their peers were not enough. This was particularly, thoughnot exclusively, true for older women, those who espoused religiouscommitment in spite of their traditional families, and for women whovolunteered at one of the Hizbullah jam‘iyyas.33 These women empha-sized that actively seeking correct knowledge is an important part ofpiety itself. To obtain greater religious understanding they turned to awide range of sources offering official discourses on authenticated Islamand piety.
Actively Seeking Knowledge through Authoritative Discourses
Learning is also religious work. Islam encourages us to learnabout our religion. It’s a duty [wa–jib]. It is necessary to learn,it’s not just something that is looked upon favorably[mustah. abb]. Education and learning is a duty for all Muslims.
—A Volunteer at the ICEC
A volunteer at the Martyrs’ Association expanded upon this thought,emphasizing that seeking knowledge was not only important to one’sown piety, but was crucial for educating others in authenticated Islam:
Islam encourages us to learn; the Prophet said to seek knowledge throughoutone’s life. We also have a h. adith: “al-mu’min al-qawı– khayrun min al-mu’minal-da‘ı–f ” [the strong believer is better than the weak believer]. The strong oneisn’t strong in physique, he is strong in competence and evidence. If I believein something, I should have the ability to convince others of it. Because “la–
khayran bi-dı–n la– ‘ilman fı–hi” [there is no good in religion that has no knowl-edge]. If I believe in Islam and I am not conversant in it, in social situations,for example if my neighbor asks me why I am committed to the h. ija–b, if I don’t
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have a verse to support my h. ija–b, I will appear weak in front of her. Or,“Why are you committed to community work [al-‘amal al-ijtima–‘ı–]?” If I don’t have a verse or a h. adı–th to demonstrate the necessity of social work Iwon’t be able to teach you about its importance. The strong believer is strongin evidence.
There existed numerous means by which religious knowledge could beobtained and answers to questions about particular tenets or practicessought. In general, what was sought was a correct understanding of theinterpretations of one’s marji‘ on a specific issue. In other words, peoplelooked to religious discourses that were sanctioned as official and thatcarried a certain authority. To access these discourses and find out howher marji‘ interprets a particular issue, a person might turn to books, ser-mons, radio, television, websites, and/or the telephone.
One of the women who worked at the jam‘iyya had recently had surgery, andwas confined to her bed at home. She called in several times today, asking an-other volunteer to call the office of Sayyid Khamenei, her marji‘, in order tofind out for her how she should pray, given that she couldn’t get out of bed.The volunteer did so immediately, and called her back with a complex answerdetailing exactly how she should place a pillow in front of herself, how sheshould sit and lean, and in what direction she should look as she said eachpart of the prayer. (fieldnotes, February 21, 2001)
Each marji‘ has numerous books elucidating his interpretations andanswering common questions, as well as expositions on particular top-ics. For example, as of June 2001, Fadlullah had published over sixty-five volumes. The best-selling ones are his books of jurisprudence (kutubal-fiqhiyya), followed by his books on youth and women. There are alsomarji‘ offices in al-Dahiyya where people could go or telephone to askquestions. Fadlullah held open hours during which people could meetwith him. Many of his followers expressed appreciation for his accessi-bility, with regard to the time he spent with them, the organization of hisoffice, and the clarity of his language in sermons and writings:
Lara: So how do you know what your marji‘ says?Hajjeh Umm Ali: From everywhere. There are writings. There is a book for
each marji‘. Now, what I am able to understand from it, I understand,and when I don’t understand, I ask those who have knowledge. Anyshaykh close to the Sayyid, or the Sayyid himself, will explain it to me.It’s not a complicated thing. Especially these days, on the Internet youcan press a key and get the information. It is no longer like in the begin-ning with the marji‘ sitting who knows where and you needing whoknows what to reach him. We even call him on the telephone with ourquestions.
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34 Several scholars have noted the role of modern media technology (e.g., cassettes, radio,television, and the Internet) in facilitating access to religious discourses (see, for example,Eickelman and Anderson 1999a, Larkin 2000).
35 Fadlullah’s website—www.bayynat.org—includes the texts (and some audio) of hisFriday sermons and other lectures, interviews, and seminars; his views and rulings on vari-ous issues; a biography; and a link through which people may e-mail him questions.
Most women began their search for information about a specific topicby reading what their marji‘ had written on it. Some favored thismethod, noting that reading also extended their religious knowledgemore generally, and citing Fadlullah’s own emphasis on the importanceof textual study and interpretation for all, men and women. Others, whodid not read much or at all, preferred to ask directly, either by phoningor going to their marji‘s office. With regard to issues other than the de-tails of religious practice, people often sought multiple interpretations,and then formed their own conclusions. This is one way that the tensionbetween personal interpretation and asking an authority was resolved.
Sermons, radio, and television programming provided additionalsources of authoritative religious knowledge, from a variety of perspec-tives.34 Many people listened to the Friday sermon of at least one sayyidor shaykh, if not at a mosque, then on the radio or later via cassette.They also listened to the Hizbullah- and Fadlullah-affiliated radio sta-tions and watched Al-Mana–r, Hizbullah’s television station. Program-ming on all three stations included numerous shows about religious mat-ters, especially programs where listeners/viewers could call in to havequestions answered by a religious scholar. For example, many womenlistened to the radio call-in program hosted by Fadlullah’s son, SayyidAli, at 9:00 a.m. each morning on al-Basha–’ir.
Some women attended classes at mosques, h.usayniyyas, or the localhawza (religious school). Lessons were taught about religious texts, andin fiqh, as well as in various life skills, such as child rearing. Finally, asnoted by Hajjeh Umm Ali above, Shi‘is who live outside Lebanon canaccess information through the Internet and other media.35 In addition,the radio stations and Al-Mana–r are accessible through the Internet andAl-Mana–r is available via satellite.
Today I went to the Internet office of Sayyid Muhammad Husayn [Fadlullah],run by his son Najib, and met with him [Najib] and the web programmer.Najib told me that the website has been up since June 1997, and that they arecurrently receiving between 1.5 and 2 million hits a month. According to theirrecords, between mid-1997 and the first four months of 2001, the Sayyid re-ceived 2,118 questions via e-mail, 421 via fax, and 424 by mail. An exponen-tial increase over time is also apparent, as the questions from the second halfof 1997 filled one binder, those from 1998 filled three, those from 1999 filled
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36 E-mails had also been received from almost every other Arab and European countryas well as Iran, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Canada, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, thePhilippines, and Brazil, among others.
37 Other topics included food and drink; the lives of the Prophet, his family, and theImams; Qur’anic interpretation; music and dancing; sexual relations; marital difficulties;lotteries and gambling; finances; pregnancy; purity and impurity; and traveling.
four, and those from 2000 filled eight. The most e-mails had been receivedfrom Bahrain, followed closely by the United States, with Lebanon coming inthird.36 The web programmer noted that the most popular question topics areabout the marji‘iyya and issues of taqlı–d, khums, work issues (like whether youcan sell pork in a restaurant to non-Muslims—it turns out this one is compli-cated because you can sell pork, but it is h. ara–m to buy pork, so you can’t actu-ally get pork to sell), cigarette smoking (the Sayyid recently completely prohib-ited smoking as h. ara–m), temporary marriages (a newer trend), and Ashura.37
When an e-mail question is received, the programmer translates it into Arabicif necessary and passes it on to a shaykh. The shaykh handwrites an answer onthe paper, and passes that onto the Sayyid. The Sayyid reads and revises the an-swer and sends it back to the programmer, who types it up and sends the finaltyped version back to the Sayyid. He looks it over and if he approves, hestamps the paper. The answer is then e-mailed to the person who asked thequestion, and the stamped paper filed. This process used to take an average ofseventeen days; it now takes an average of four. (fieldnotes, June 18, 2001)
Whether by asking questions, reading books, listening to sermons, orattending classes, many devout Shi‘is placed great importance on ac-tively seeking religious knowledge through authoritative or official dis-courses. The continual process of “becoming religious” depended on thisknowledge, which they applied in their practices of embodied piety, anddrew upon in their conversations and debates. Demonstrating an under-standing of authenticated Islam was an essential part of making one’sown piety visible while underscoring and facilitating the spiritual progressof the community of the pious modern as a whole.
• • •
To be visible does not only connote being able to be seen in the sense ofexisting, but also, crucially, it involves standing out from the surround-ings enough to be seen, not blending too much, not losing too muchtexture. In my interlocutors’ world, religion was on the one hand om-nipresent, common, and normalized, and on the other, it was conspicuous.This quality of conspicuousness stemmed from the recent processes ofauthentication and change that took place with the institutionalizationof the Shi‘i Islamic movement in Lebanon.
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Pious Muslims were constantly engaged in defining, reinforcing, andprioritizing certain religious discourses and practices over others, con-stantly distancing themselves from those considered traditional. Theseprocesses of authentication have contributed to shifts in the atmosphereof al-Dahiyya over the past several decades, from a traditional milieu toan “Islamic” one. In the latter, value is not placed on the completion ofreligious practices merely as an end in itself, but rather on the comple-tion of religious practices as the end result of correct religious under-standing. Beyond fulfilling one’s religious obligations correctly, it is alsoimportant to seek the knowledge necessary to obtain this correct under-standing, and to contribute to the authentication process itself.
Piety hinged on both embodied and discursive religiosity; it was consti-tuted by and stemmed from both words and actions. Those who culti-vated both contributed to their own spiritual progress and to that of thepious modern more generally. Through their words and actions, authenti-cated Islam has taken root. In this way, piety is not only personal, it spillsout from individuals into the public realm, bringing others to share au-thenticated interpretations of Islam and erecting the boundaries of whatthe devout often called “our community.” Piety also served as a publicmarker of morality, a marker that imbued a person with moral status inthat community. And public piety carried meaning outside the circles ofthe devout in the national and international political arenas as well. Per-haps the most visible annual moment of public piety—important both forreasons of personal faith and for its political interpretations—takes placeduring Ashura. Ashura provides a perfect case through which to considermore closely the processes of authentication, the relationship betweenpersonal and public piety, and the Shi‘i Islamic movement’s notions of thepious modern. It is to this ritual commemoration of the martyrdom ofImam Husayn that this book now turns.
C H A P T E R F O U R
Ashura: Authentication and Sacrifice
Min‘ı–sh bil-h.uzn [We live in sadness].—Rasha, a pious Shi‘i volunteer
All that we have accomplished is from Karbala.—Khomeini
If you look at the history of the Shi‘a in the modern era, noheroes were born except in the h. usayniyyas and the mosques.No one struck back at Israel except the children of theh. usayniyyas and mosques. They learned about the spirit ofHusayn and they said, if Husayn did so much, why don’t we dothis little to free our land?
—Hajj Muhammad
As Hajjeh Rula began to narrate the final moments Husayn spent withhis eldest son, Ali al-Akbar, sobs rose heavily around us, filling the roomwith palpable grief. Her voice cracked as she lamented poetry into hermicrophone, describing how Husayn looked upon his son, who had cometo him for his blessing before riding into battle, with the knowledgethat the next time he saw Ali, the latter would be a corpse. This mourn-ful parting was followed by an all-too-vivid description of the son’sdeath, his body mutilated by the enemy’s swords, Hajjeh Rula repeat-ing the details of swords cutting flesh over and over, weaving in fore-shadowings of Husayn’s death that was soon to follow, bringing theweeping in the room to a crescendo. Then she paused. After waiting amoment for the sobs to subside, she began to lecture, explaining veryclearly what the Qur’an, h.adı–th, and h.adı–th of Imam Ali teach aboutlove and responsibility in parent-child relationships. Another pause,and the tears returned to their place in her voice. Returning to her po-etic narration, she depicted the love of Ali’s parents, Husayn and Layla,for their son, and then devoted the final piece of her lamentation to Za-ynab. Zaynab, the aunt who looked upon Ali al-Akbar’s devastatedcorpse with all the horrific grief of a mother looking upon her martyredson, a grief far too real for many in the room (fieldnotes, April 10,2000/Muharram 5).
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1 Fischer (1980) calls this the “Karbala paradigm.” Discussions of Shi‘ism often focuson Muharram/Ashura. Iran has been a major focus (Chelkowski 1979b, Fischer 1980,Good and Good 1988, Hegland 1983 and 1987, Loeffler 1988, Thaiss 1972); followed bySouth Asia (Hegland 1998a and 1998b, Pinault 1992 and 2001, Schubel 1993), Lebanon(Mazzaoui 1979, Norton and Safa 2000, Peters 1956, Riskallah 1997, Sharara 1968), Iraq(Fernea and Fernea 1972, Fernea 1965, Waugh 1977), and North America (Schubel 1991).
2 Drama—especially that associated with specific calendrical dates with salient historicalvalue—is important in mobilizing collective identities at specific moments (Donham n.d.,Tambiah 1996). Historical tragedy also contributes to collective identity—for example, theArmenian genocide has been a focal point for Armenian ethnic identity in diaspora.
• • •
Ashura—the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn—isfrequently taken as an essential cultural paradigm for Shi‘ism, by bothscholars and Shi‘i Muslims themselves, including my interlocutors.1 It isthe commemoration of both a battle of righteousness against corruptionand evil and a key moment in Shi‘i history—a moment so powerful thatsubsequent moments were characterized by an “overriding paradigm ofpersecution, exclusion, and suffering” (Pinault 1992: 56). To recap,Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson and the third Shi‘i Imam, was calledupon by residents of Kufa to lead a revolt against Caliph Yazid’s corruptregime. He and his party were intercepted at Karbala. Several days lateron the tenth of Muharram, a battle began, during which Husayn and allhis men were killed. The survivors—women, children, and Husayn’s onlysurviving son, who was too ill to fight—were captured and paraded toYazid in Damascus. Among them was Sayyida Zaynab, Husayn’s sister,who led the group in captivity.
As a cultural paradigm, Ashura is heavily dependent on and consti-tutive of public piety. The shared narratives, practices, and meaningsassociated with its commemoration have been a focal point of the au-thentication process and are crucial to the construction of the Shi‘i pi-ous modern.2 As such, Ashura provides an apt example through whichto explore the transformations precipitated by the Lebanese Shi‘i Is-lamic mobilization and institutionalization. We will see that a key ele-ment in this shift involves the reinterpretation of Zaynab’s behavior atKarbala, a reinterpretation bearing consequences for Lebanese Shi‘iwomen.
In this chapter, I first consider the changes that have occurred in thedetails and meanings of the commemoration itself as an illustration ofthe authentication process. I then move to a discussion of the waysAshura has become a critical presence in al-Dahiyya, the ideal modelsfor public piety that are provided by Husayn and Zaynab, and how
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3 Some people held maja–lis for three days after the tenth, and others observed a forty-day mourning period. Nakash (1993) identifies five major Muharram rituals in Shi‘ism: themaja–lis, ması–ras, and lat.am I discuss, along with pilgrimage to Karbala and passion plays.The earliest documented ması–ras took place during Persian Buyid rule in Baghdad in thetenth century (Chelkowski 1979b: 3). For history of Muharram rituals, see Ayoub 1978,Nakash 1993, and Halm 1997.
4 The practice of self-injurious lat.am was brought to south Lebanon from Iran in theearly twentieth or late nineteenth century (Ende 1978; Hasan al-Amin, personal communi-cation). It is thought that this practice originated with Shi‘i converts in the Caucasus, per-haps reflecting the incorporation of Christian elements (see Nakash 1993).
5 The prevalence of weeping among men and women alike contrasts with Abu-Lughod’s(1993b) observations about gender differences in lamentation among the (Sunni) AwladAli Bedouin.
6 Ende (1978) notes that others put forth similar views around the same time. SeeMervin (2000) on these various arguments for reform.
those ideals and the Ashura paradigm are lived by pious Shi‘i men andwomen today.
Commemorations Transformed
Commemorating Ashura in Lebanon involves holding and attendingboth private and public maja–lis, or mourning gatherings in which thehistory of the martyrdom is retold, and tenth-day ması–ras, or lamenta-tion processions, during which men often perform lat.am, a ritualizedstriking of one’s body in grief.3 Both the structure and meaning of Ashuraand these lamentation events have always been historically fluid, incor-porating different elements in different locales and reflecting the chang-ing political and social status of Lebanese Shi‘is. However, a particularlydramatic transformation has accompanied the institutionalization of theShi‘i Islamic movement.
Ashura commemorations similar to contemporary commemorationsthat my interlocutors label “traditional” (taqlı–dı–) have occurred in ruralLebanon and in what is today al-Dahiyya since at least the early twenti-eth century.4 As we will see, several elements characterize these tradi-tional commemorations, including lat.am that draws blood and a focuson grief (expressed in weeping by both sexes)5 and regret, rather thanactivism. According to Ende (1978), the earliest written evidence of aclerical effort to reform these practices—especially self-injurious lat.am—dates from the late 1920s. At that time Sayyid Muhsin al-Amin, a reli-gious scholar from Jabal ‘Amil (south Lebanon) who lived in Damascus,criticized self-injurious lat.am as unlawful.6 This set off a controversialand virulent debate between al-Amin and the few scholars who agreed
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7 Ende (1978) suggests that sayyid families were invested in maintaining Ashura com-memorations as they were because they reinforced the peasantry’s allegiance to them andalso brought in crowds (and money) from surrounding areas.
8 It is difficult to ascertain who participated in these commemorations. Nonparticipantsincluded non-Shi‘i Lebanese, though political leaders sometimes attended maja–lis held byelites, and Peters (1956) suggests Christian participation in a village in the 1950s. Nonpar-ticipants also included nonpracticing Shi‘is. Khuri (1975) relates how al-Hajj Khansa—amigrant from the Beqaa—established the first h. usayniyya in al-Dahiyya and began holdinglarge public Ashura commemorations there in 1939. This provoked opposition from localresidents (some of whom were also Shi‘is) who feared the commemorations would damagetheir relationships with other sectarian communities, especially Sunni Muslims (1975:183–86).
9 Ajami quotes Musa al-Sadr as saying, “The revolution did not die in the sands of Ker-bala; it flowed into the life stream of the Islamic world, and passed from generation to gen-eration, even to our day. It is a deposit placed in our hands so that we may profit from it,that we draw out of it a new source of reform, a new position, a new movement, a newrevolution, to repel the darkness, to stop tyranny, and to pulverize evil” (Ajami 1986:143). This is particularly interesting as Musa al-Sadr is descended from two of the majorsayyid families of Jabal ‘Amil (al-Sadr and Sharafeddin).
with him, and the major sayyid families of Jabal ‘Amil who formed a re-ligious and landowning elite. In the end, the elite sayyid families suc-ceeded in rallying most of the uneducated villagers against al-Amin’scalls for reform.7
The important point here for our purposes is that while the lawfulnessof self-injurious lat.am became a major debate among Shi‘i religiousscholars in Jabal ‘Amil, Damascus, and Najaf in the 1920s, the issue didnot garner popular interest at that time. Decades later, as Shi‘i Muslimsbegan to move to Beirut, they brought traditional forms of commemora-tion with them. The urban visibility of Ashura grew in tandem withthese population shifts. Traditional commemorations were viewed bymany nonparticipants as a frightening display of Shi‘i “backwardness,”and cited as one of the differences marking the marginalized Shi‘is as lessmodern and developed than other Lebanese.8
Despite the earlier attempts at reform and the stigmatization of thecommemorations in the urban milieu, it was not until the 1980s thatstrong opposition to traditional forms of Ashura appeared among Shi‘iswho were not religious scholars. The first signs of this came in 1974, justafter Musa al-Sadr founded the “Movement of the Deprived.” Nortonnotes that “Under Imam Musa’s considerable influence, religious com-memorations became vehicles for building communal solidarity and po-litical consciousness” (1987: 41).9 However, while al-Sadr was amongthe first to link contemporary Shi‘i mobilization in Lebanon with Ashura,large-scale transformation of its rituals with regard to both practice andmeaning did not take root for another decade.
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10 See Aghaie 2001, Hegland 1983 and 1987, Keddie 1995, and Fischer 1980.11 For another description of Ashura in Nabatieh, see Norton and Safa 2000.
Around that time, after the catalyzations of the movement discussedin chapter 2, Shi‘i opposition to traditional commemorations increased.This opposition reflected trends in Iran, where reformist and Islamic in-tellectuals had promoted Ashura discourses linking the commemorationsto an alternative and revolutionary Shi‘ism, in contrast to a politicallyquietist one.10
Crucially, this time the debates were not confined to the clerical lead-ership. Debate among religious scholars is not enough to create actualchanges in practice of the scale seen in Ashura commemorations over thepast few decades. Such transformation requires the active participationof a wider community. Literacy, education, and urbanization, as well aspolitical mobilization against both injustice within Lebanon and Israeliaggression, facilitated the mass participation of Shi‘is in discussionsabout the reforms and in their practical implementation, resulting in ashift from what pious Shi‘is called traditional forms to authenticatedones. In many ways it is this mass participation that exemplifies the con-tinual process of authentication.
The shift from traditional to authenticated Ashura is especially appar-ent with regard to three areas: the ması–ras, the maja–lis, and most cru-cially, the meaning attributed to the events of Muharram. The impor-tance of Ashura has not changed; rather, the transformation involves thedetails of commemorative practices and a reordering of their two pri-mary emphases, with the soteriological that dominates traditional com-memorations sharing primary ground with the revolutionary in authen-ticated ones.
Ması–ras
a traditional MASI–RA: 10 muharram in nabatieh (2000)
Each year on the tenth of Muharram, people pour into the southernLebanese town of Nabatieh; some to participate in the Ashura passionplay and traditional mourning ması–ras, others to watch what has be-come a spectacle, drawing tourists and journalists from Beirut and otherparts of the country.11
The sunrise call to prayer woke us early. Soon after, the shaykh’s voice ex-ploded into every corner of town. Facilitated by loudspeakers, he began theday’s lamentation. By 7:30 a.m. we could hear the crowd beginning to gatheroutside. All I could see from the balcony was a sea of black—spectators wait-ing for the day’s events to begin. They had carefully left the road framing the
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12 “Hitting h. aydar” is the colloquial term for this particular form of lat.am. “H. aydar” isanother name for Imam Ali.
13 Several people insisted that one should not begin to “hit h. aydar” until Imam Husaynhas been martyred in the play, but as far as I could tell, very few people waited.
14 I heard reports of up to twenty thousand participants a year in Nabatieh alone. It isthis scene that has contributed to the sensationalization of Ashura in Nabatieh, exemplifiedin the opening sentence of a Lebanese English-language newspaper’s article: “The Shiites ofNabatieh commemorated the 10th day of Ashura in traditionally gruesome fashionWednesday, with thousands of chanting, blood-soaked mourners thronging the townsquare” (Blanford 2001).
town center clear for groups of mourners to pass. People claimed spots on bal-conies, ledges, and rooftops, and a group of young men climbed the mosqueat the corner of the square. Those whose homes overlook the center openedtheir doors to guests, serving coffee and food throughout the day.
The sea of black was dotted here and there with white and red—the menwho were “hitting h. aydar.”12 They began in the early hours of the morningand continued through the end of the reenactment.13 A group of between sixand twenty men or boys would move quickly along the road, blood flowingfrom self-inflicted wounds on their heads and staining their white shirts orbare chests draped with white cloth (representing shrouds) a bright red.Throughout the morning, group after group passed beneath the balcony, al-most at a jog. Their chants were punctuated by the sounds of their hands hit-ting their heads and the stomps of their feet. One or two sometimes held therazor blades or knives that had been used to cut a small incision at each man’shairline (though I was told that these cuts were usually made by a townbutcher or barber). As each hit his wound in rhythm with the group, theirblood flowed down their faces and chests.
Each group chanted “Haydar,” “Ali,” “Husayn,” or “With spirit, withblood, we support you, Oh Husayn” in unison. They stuck close together,sometimes holding on to one another. Friends or relatives sometimes walkedalongside them, restraining those who lost themselves in their fervor and be-gan to injure themselves too much. In each group there were a few who stag-gered a little, or were held up by a friend or paramedic as they continued tohit their bleeding heads. Red Cross or Islamic Health Committee paramedicscarrying stretchers flanked the mourners, both to contain them and to care forthose who passed out.14
The majority of those “hitting h. aydar” were youth, though there were boysas young as ten or twelve and older men as well. Younger boys seemed to beout earlier in the day, before the sun became too hot and the crowd too large.Some fathers carried their young sons—some who looked as young as two orthree years old—on their shoulders, the children hitting their uncut headsalong with the others in the group. A few men had cut their sons’ heads lightlyand were helping them to gently tap the cuts so a little blood would flow.
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15 Those “hitting h. aydar” are not the only attraction. The day’s main event is a passionplay reenacting the battle during the majlis narration. Because this reenactment is specificto Nabatieh and outside my comparative framework, I do not go into detail here.
16 Tensions were often high between Hizbullah and Amal during Ashura, occasionallyresulting in violence. Those performing traditional lat.am sometimes wear Amal symbols.My local hosts in Nabatieh in 2000 expressed frustration at how “Ashura has been takenout of our hands; it has been made so political.” That year the reenactment went overtimeand Hizbullah began its ması–ra before it ended, blocking the actors from exiting the field.Since 2003, political symbols and parties have been banned from the Nabatieh commemo-rations, which are now organized by an independent local association.
17 Khomeini frowned upon the practice before his death in 1989, and Khamenei offi-cially condemned it in a 1994 fatwa (Chehabi 1997; Pinault 2001).
18 Each year just before Ashura religious and community leaders reiterate their opposi-tion to traditional lat.am. But there also remain many who support the practice.
None of the children were crying. I was told that these were usually childrenwho had been ill, and whose parents had vowed that they would “hit h. aydar”if God helped them recover.
By the time the reenactment began,15 everywhere, including the balconywhere I stood, was packed with spectators and mourners. . . . Even during thereenactment, every so often a group “hitting h. aydar” or, more rarely, a cardraped in Hizbullah flags with an elegy blaring from its speakers, passed by.16
By noon there were streams of blood in the street, and groups of men andboys walking around with their faces and chests soaked red and bandageswrapped around their foreheads.
The most obvious change that has occurred in ması–ras concerns thestyle of lat.am that men perform. As the Shi‘i Islamic movement grew inpopularity, the shedding of blood during lat.am was criticized as un-Islamic because it involves purposely injuring oneself. This echoed thecriticisms put forth by al-Amin in the 1920s, and interestingly, al-Amin’swork was republished in Beirut in the early 1970s (Ende 1978). A fewpeople I spoke with knew about those writings, and referred to them as“finally” being implemented. Eventually, following the lead of Iran,17
Lebanese Shi‘i clerics issued fatwas condemning the practice, andHizbullah banned it outright in the mid-1990s.18
This was accompanied by calls for those who feel the need to shedtheir blood during Ashura to do so for the community good, by insteaddonating blood to local bloodbanks. Indeed, the Islamic Health Com-mittee’s offices in al-Dahiyya reported receiving so many blood dona-tions during Ashura in recent years that they had a large surplus eachyear immediately after the commemoration. In Nabatieh itself, Hizbul-lah began setting up a blood donation center on the tenth of Muharramin 1998, attracting over five hundred donors in 2000.
Part of the opposition to traditional lat.am may represent a response to
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4.1. Traditional lat.am in Nabatieh.
stereotypes linking Ashura to Shi‘i “backwardness.” Such stereotypespersist today: when I returned to my office at the American University ofBeirut after attending Ashura in Nabatieh, several people expressedshock that I had gone, and one woman bemoaned the television broad-casting of traditional Ashura, saying, “Look what a horrible picture thisgives of Lebanon; now we’ll all be associated with such barbarism.”Similarly, many pious Shi‘is in al-Dahiyya were astounded that I would
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4.2. Traditional lat.am in Nabatieh.
want to attend the event in Nabatieh, often expressing their disgust at“kull h.a-dam” (all that blood).
A sharp contrast to traditional ması–ras and lat.am is presented byHizbullah’s ması–ras, that take place each year in several areas ofLebanon, including al-Dahiyya, Nabatieh, and Baalbek in the Beqaa.
an authenticated MASI–RA: 10 muharram in al-dahiyya (2001)
Each year on the tenth of Muharram, people pour out of their homesinto the streets of al-Dahiyya to attend maja–lis and participate in theAshura ması–ra. They gather at public tents that are set up across roadsand parking lots, and at mosques and h.usayniyyas.
When Aziza and I finally made it through the crowd and arrived at the over-flowing tent a few blocks from her home, it was nearly 9 a.m., about an hourinto the majlis. People sat on every available inch of curb and ground, listen-ing attentively to the narration being broadcast from the tent’s speakers. Wefound a spot under the overpass near the women’s entrance to the tent . . .
There were children everywhere, babies in strollers and kids runningaround or trying to wipe away their mothers’ tears. They too were dressed inblack, some with t-shirts or headbands that said “oh Husayn” or “oh Abbas.”
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19 Some who disapproved of self-injurious lat.am only used “lat.am” to refer to the au-thenticated form described here, in order to further distinguish between forms. They calledself-injurious lat.am “hitting h. aydar.” The verb root nadab (to mourn or lament) was alsosometimes used for either form, with context indicating the specific act it connotes (e.g.,lat.am versus singing an elegy).
20 This style of lat.am is a hybrid of faster-paced Iranian and slower Iraqi styles, andseems to have become the dominant form for Hizbullah as well as Fadlullah’s followerssince the mid-1990s. Different styles are encountered by pilgrims at Shi‘i shrines, mostcommonly at Sayyida Zaynab’s shrine in Damascus.
21 If a child is ill, a woman may vow to march with him if her supplications for hishealth are answered.
Many little girls—including a friend’s five-year-old daughter—wore h. ija–bs or‘aba–yas even if they were too young to normally wear them. When the majlisended, everyone walked towards the upper road to join the ması–ra. Thanks toour Hizbullah press passes, Aziza and I were able to skirt crowd control andtake a shortcut down to the highway so that we could watch the entire ması–rafrom the beginning.
The ması–ra was highly organized. It began with four huge portraits ofKhomeini, Khamenei, Nasrallah, and Musa al-Sadr. These were followed bymany groups of boys, scouts, youth, and men, organized by increasing age.They were either dressed uniformly as scouts or entirely in black, “Husayn”written on their colored arm- or headbands. Each group marched in three neatrows behind a microphone-bearing leader, who initiated nudbas [elegies] andchants, and ensured that everyone performed lat.am in perfect unison. Thislat.am did not involve blood.19 Instead, those performing it swung both armsdownwards, then up, then out away from their bodies, and finally in to striketheir chests with their hands.20 It was done to a four-count rhythm so that onevery fourth beat the sound of hands striking chests resonated loudly, provid-ing a percussive accompaniment. The organized groups were followed by alarge group of men marching in solidarity, some hitting their chests lightly, andby a group of shaykhs and sayyids, surrounded by security, walking quietly.
Then the women’s part of the ması–ra began, with colored panels of Ashurascenes. These were followed by female scouts and students, again in orderlyrows organized by age, all dressed in full ‘aba–yas. The girls chanted in responseto a leader or sang nudbas but did not perform lat.am. One group wore fishs—full face veils—and were chained together, representing the women who weretaken captive by Yazid’s men. Some marchers carried photographs of youngResistance martyrs, assumed to be their relatives. Again, the organized womenwere followed by a large group of female supporters walking en masse, notnecessarily wearing ‘aba–yas but all muh. ajjaba. Many pushed young children incarriages.21
As the ması–ra arrived at the field designated as its end point, men went toone side and women to the other. Nasrallah spoke, then everyone prayed to-gether behind him . . .
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4.3. Scouts in the Hizbullah ması–ra.
22 See Özyürek’s discussion of Turkish state-organized parades as demonstrations ofpower (n.d.)
23 In Nabatieh in 2000, I counted six women “hitting h. aydar.” My hosts were as sur-prised as I was to see this, and speculated that these women had participated to fulfill vowsthey had made.
24 Given the strict gender segregation in many Shi‘i communities during religious rituals(e.g., Fernea 1965, Fernea and Fernea 1972, Hegland 1998a and 1998b, Pinault 2001,Torab 1996), it is worth making the small point that the less strict gendering of Lebanese so-ciety is reflected in Lebanese Shi‘i ritual. While maja–lis were either held separately or withdivided seating, men and women mixed relatively freely outside while watching ması–ras.
25 The classic examples of women’s mobilization as part of broader national or religiousmovements are Iran and Algeria. See also Peteet (1991) on the Palestinian national resistance.
While the most striking and commonly discussed difference betweenthese two ması–ras is the style of lat.am, two other crucial differences arethe level of organization and the role of women. First, authenticatedması–ras were highly ordered, and worked to demonstrate Hizbullah’sstrength while also demonstrating the organizational capacities of thepious modern.22 Second, while women were generally spectators in tra-ditional ması–ras,23 watching from curbs, balconies and rooftops,24 inauthenticated ması–ras, they were no longer relegated to an observationalrole. In typical fashion,25 the Shi‘i Islamic mobilization called upon
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4.4. A girl in the ması–ra carrying a martyr’s photograph.
women to participate actively and publicly in Ashura commemorations.As we will see, this paralleled a greater emphasis on women’s participa-tion more generally. Both the new style of lat.am and women’s visibilityin the ması–ras were viewed by many pious Shi‘is as indications of bothprogress and authenticity. I will return to this point below, after a com-parison of the maja–lis.
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4.5. Young women representing the captives. Their face veils (rare in Lebanon)indicate that they are representing women of the Prophet’s family.
26 Majlis is used to refer to both maja–lis ‘aza (mourning gatherings) and to the text thatis read/recited during them.
27 The word qa–ri’ can be translated as “recitor” (especially of religious texts) or“reader.” Most recitors had a text to which they referred, often a notebook filled withhandwritten notes, but they seemed to move fluidly between reading and recitation.
Maja–lis
During a majlis,26 no matter where it fell along the traditional-authenticated spectrum, a recitor (qa–ri’)27 narrated a part of the eventsof the first ten days of Muharram in a lamentation style reminiscent of aliturgy, detailing graphically the suffering and martyrdom of the Imamand those with him. Some recitors included a sermon explaining lessonsto be learned from Ashura. The affect of the audience paralleled theseshifts in tone, the lamentation evoking intense crying that quieted topensive concentration during the sermon.
While all maja–lis included the lamentative narration of the masa–’ib,the tragic events of Karbala, recitors that were considered “traditional”dwelled on the details of suffering, in order to elicit maximum emotion-ality from the audience. Many also embellished the dialogue among
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4.6. Women supporters marching en masse.
28 Advocates of authentication commonly used the opposition “backward” (mutakhal-lif) versus “cultured” (muthaqqaf) to structure contrasts between traditional and authenti-cated commemorations. Another common framework was “then” versus “now” (despitethe existence of a spectrum of Ashura practices today).
Husayn, Zaynab, and others with them. The ultimate goal for tradi-tional recitors was to move people to cry as much as possible for themartyrs and captives. Mourning for ’ahl al-bayt (the Prophet’s family)was believed to have salvatory effects, as those who shed true tears ontheir behalf may appeal to them for intercession in the afterlife. Ashaykh at Fadlullah’s office criticized this emphasis on mourning:
Our problem is that many recitors do not go to school to learn to recite. . . .Anyone with a good voice can decide, “I want to become a recitor.” There isno organization to forbid incorrect recitations. There are some who are verytraditional and backward and others who are cultured.28 The backward onesread only to make people cry, but the cultured ones teach lessons in theirrecitations.
As the shaykh implies, authenticated maja–lis were characterized bylonger sermons and a more restrained lamentation. Eliciting an emotional
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response became a secondary goal. These maja–lis were primarily in-tended to teach religious, social, and political lessons, and to elucidatethe authenticated meanings of Ashura and link it to the present. Recitorswho strove for authenticity were concerned with historical accuracy andavoided including exaggerations that they saw as being “merely” toheighten emotions. Pious Shi‘is often described these changes—particu-larly the promotion of “scientific” (‘ilmı–), textually based, and therefore“accurate” (s.ah. ı–h. ), histories over exaggerations viewed as “myth”—asevidence of spiritual progress.
From the perspective of a recitor:
Today, now, there is more awareness. Before, crying was the purpose, peoplecried about Imam Husayn, but they did not know him. The kind, sad voice re-minded them of things, and they would cry, but they would not understandwhy the revolution happened. Of course, there is an emotional side to therecitations. . . . This is necessary because it is human nature that if one is sadfor someone he loves, he will sacrifice for him more readily. . . . But ImamHusayn did not want us to cry.
Emotion remains important for this recitor, yet emotion is given contem-porary purpose in its revision from an end to a means.
Those who have attended maja–lis over the past three decades articu-lated the shift as well, noting that today’s maja–lis are “more accepted byour minds.” Dalal explained:
They recite the same story about Husayn. But the lecture differs. It depends onthe audience and the recitor and the topic and his own relationship to Ashura.But they are better than before, because they are being tied into our daily lives,this linking of the past to the present and the future, this is better. Before weused to just go and listen to the story. Now, we are not just going to cry forImam Husayn, we are going to learn from his school. The lecture is impor-tant, it is clarifying why you are crying, and why Imam Husayn was martyred.
The following juxtaposition of two women’s maja–lis provides a morenuanced depiction of these differences. The maja–lis share a basic struc-ture: The recitor opens the majlis with a quiet group recitation of su–ratal-fa–tih.a, the Qur’an’s opening verses. Along with the salutations thatmay follow, this establishes a sacred context and brings participants intoa contemplative mindset. The recitor may then insert a nudba (elegy),though these are usually left to the end. The lamentative narration fol-lows, interrupted by a sermon of varying length. At the end, the recitorusually leads at least one nudba, with those who know the words singingalong. If held in a private home, the majlis may be dedicated to the host-ess’s family. Finally, maja–lis often conclude with everyone standing and
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reciting ziya–rat al-h.usayn, a supplicatory prayer to the Imam. Hospital-ity always follows privately held maja–lis. Coffee and sweets are routinelyoffered, though some women serve their guests a light lunch.
a traditional women’s MAJLIS: 7 muharram 1422 ah/2001 ce
This majlis took place in a h.usayniyya, a building dedicated to Shi‘icommemorations. It was large enough to hold around 150 people, withchairs arranged in rows and benches lining the walls. A podium at oneend was draped in black, and black banners hung along the walls withsalutations printed on them, including “al-sala–mu ‘alaykum ya– sayyid al-shuhada–’ ” (peace be upon you, lord of martyrs). When the room wasfull, Hajjeh Fatima walked to the podium, turned on the microphone,and began:
After we recited su–rat al-fa–tih. a, Hajjeh Fatima broke into a series of saluta-tions: “al-sala–mu ‘alaykum ya– h. usayn, al-sala–mu ‘alaykum ya– . . . [etc.],” in-cluding Husayn’s children, friends, brother Abbas, and finally, with especialemphasis and emotion entering her voice, Zaynab. After a short nudba, shesegued into her narration, focusing on Husayn and Zaynab’s half-brother Ab-bas. She first related how Zaynab had chosen Abbas as her ka–fil [supporter].After about ten minutes, Hajjeh Fatima paused, took a few deep breaths, andthen gave a short ten-minute lecture about how Abbas’s character demon-strates the qualities of a good Muslim. She then returned to the lamentation,and, this time using mostly Iraqi poetry, vividly described Abbas’s death. Shedescribed the children’s thirst and cries, and Abbas’s decision to bring themwater from the Euphrates. How, on his first attempt, he was wounded and thewater spilt. And how, despite his wounds, he tried again, but was killed, hishands cut off, leaving bloody stumps. How his handless corpse returned to thecamp draped over his horse, and how Zaynab cried out, “What were you do-ing leaving us like that? How can you leave us, you who are responsible forus?” And most of all, how Zaynab cried.
This was the longest lamentation I have heard so far. The instant Hajjeh Fa-tima’s voice broke into lament, the women listening began to weep loudly. Theemotion in the room was overwhelming; sobs filled the air. Some women criedout or spoke under their breath as they wept. These were mostly olderwomen, though this entire audience seemed older than others. Even Aziza,who usually sat calmly and cried silently at maja–lis, had pulled her knees toher chest and wrapped herself around them, her body shaking as she wept.Hajjeh Fatima threw her head back as she lamented, tears streaming down herface, her voice rising and breaking as she cried out the words, sometimesscreaming into the microphone “ya– Zaynab” or “ya– Husayn.” At one pointshe stopped articulating altogether, buried her head in her arms on thepodium, and wept for several minutes. Eventually, someone took her some
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29 This phrase is an element of prayer—used here as a salutation or salvo of benedictionthat assists in the shift to a sacred framework. It is also commonly invoked at intervals dur-ing sermons or speeches given by religious/political leaders.
water, and she slowly lifted her head and resumed her lamentation where shehad left off.
When the lamentation ended, everyone dried their eyes and slowly begansinging two nudbas, joining in at the choruses if they didn’t know all thewords: ramz al-‘ata–’, ru–h. al-shuhada–’, lı–-man bakayt huwa al-h. usayn f ı– kar-bala–’ [symbol of giving, spirit of martyrs, I cried for Husayn at Karbala] anddammı– mu– ’aghla– min dammak ya– h. usayn, jismı– mu– ’aghla– min jismak ya– h. us-ayn [my blood is not more precious than yours, oh Husayn, my body is notmore precious than yours, oh Husayn]. Many women struck their chests withtheir hands keeping a slow percussive accompaniment to the nudbas. One lit-tle girl was hitting her chest so hard she left a red welt. A woman sitting nearme noticed this favorably, saying it was obvious how moved the little girl was.At the conclusion of the nudba, several young women brought coffee andra–ha and bascot [biscuits with a sweet resembling “Turkish delight,” eaten“for Husayn’s soul”].
an authenticated women’s MAJLIS: 11 muharram 1422 ah/2001 ce
The following majlis was held at a private home. Chairs filled the for-mal living room in three concentric circles, spilling into the hallway andonto an adjacent balcony. About forty women attended, ranging fromgreat-grandmothers to young brides. Soon after we arrived, one of ourhostesses distributed tissues to everyone present. On that cue, Layla, theyoung recitor, picked up her microphone and began in a clear voice,leading the recitation of su–rat al-fa–tih.a, then “s.alli ‘ala– muh.ammad waa–li muh.ammad” thrice.29 She then spoke a few sentences about Ashura’simportance, segueing into her recitation:
Layla’s tone shifted as she began to detail the masa–’ib, but she remained clearrelative to others I’ve heard and used only Lebanese dialect. Her focus was theyoung women, especially Zaynab, after the battle: how they coped with thedeaths and how they were paraded through the desert as prisoners, eventhough they were ’ahl al-bayt. As soon as her voice made the shift to lamenta-tion, several older women in the room began to weep loudly. Others buriedtheir faces in their tissues; a few just lowered their heads, tears streamingsilently from their eyes.
After around ten minutes, Layla abruptly broke her lamentation and re-turned to her speaking voice. The sobs in the room subsided, backs werestraightened, heads lifted, and tears wiped. Layla then began a long lectureabout Yazid’s corruption and Zaynab’s strength in confronting him with hiscrimes. She then turned to the h. adı–th “h. usayn minni wa ’ana– min h. usayn”
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30 Crowds at different authenticated maja–lis differed as well: for example, Fadlullahmaja–lis tended to attract slightly older and more intellectually oriented people, whileHizbullah maja–lis appealed to younger and more “revolutionary” attendees—in onewoman’s words “intifa–d.a akthar” (more “intifada”). This also related to the more overtpolitics of Hizbullah maja–lis, as well as the difficulty older women had sitting on theground for hours—Hizbullah maja–lis were long and so crowded that it was impossible tostretch one’s legs once seated. Since I left Beirut, Hizbullah has built a new auditoriumwhere maja–lis are now held.
[Husayn is from/of me and I am from/of Husayn], explaining that this meantthat anyone who loves Husayn is in turn loved by the Prophet and by God.
Layla’s voice then began to shake again and she returned to her narration.The audience immediately resumed weeping, as Layla detailed Zaynab’s en-trance into the prison of Yazid’s palace. Another prisoner inquired, “How are’ahl al-bayt?” and Zaynab responded that they were dead, but continued in astrong voice, “I, I am of ’ahl al-bayt, I am Zaynab, granddaughter of theProphet Muhammad, sister of Imam Husayn, ’ana– Zaynab!” This affirmationbrought the weeping to a crescendo, after which Layla quietly ended herrecitation. Faces were dried and tissues discarded as she blessed the housewhere we had gathered.
Then she instructed us to stand, face the direction of Husayn’s tomb, andrecite ziya–rat al-h. usayn. Layla then introduced a nudba, reciting its chorustwice so everyone could sing along. That marked the end, and Umm Ali’sdaughters were waiting with trays of coffee, rice pudding, fresh fruit juice,macaroons, and dates. Most women socialized before beginning to leave,commenting quietly on Layla’s voice. One older woman noted that it wasn’tvery moving, to which her daughter responded, “Yes, but she was veryclear.”
The first discernable difference between these maja–lis is that of genera-tion. Attendees at traditional maja–lis tended to be older, though privatelyheld maja–lis often had a wider age spectrum as women invited relatives,friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Public maja–lis varied: in contrast tothe h.usayniyya described here, the nightly Hizbullah majlis in al-Dahiyya tended to attract younger women.30
Additionally, the responses of participants often varied by generation,with older women prone to more intense emotionality. In part this re-flects differing attitudes towards Ashura, with authenticated maja–lis ap-pealing to younger and more educated women. Some of the youngerwomen I spoke with questioned older women’s tears: “Some of them justgo to cry, but they don’t know why they are supposed to be crying. It’sjust tradition and habit. They go from majlis to majlis all day long cry-ing. The recitor begins, you begin to cry; this is how it is for them. Andworse, some of them are crying about ones they have lost, not Imam
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31 In about half the maja–lis I attended, at least one older woman would shriek or faint,bringing quick attention from others, who attempted to comfort her. This was explainedby saying the majlis “ghat ‘a– ’alb[h]a–” (it hit her heart). Some people assumed she had lostsomeone in the Resistance or wars.
Husayn.” When I asked her how one should participate, she explained,“You should think about what the recitor is saying, and understand it,and then it will affect you and you will cry for the right reasons, becauseyou understand the true meaning of it.” Contrast an older woman’s re-sponse: “During the majlis, I feel as though I am with them, in the samesituation; in every moment, in every suffering, it’s an internal feeling.”I will return to the different experiences of temporality expressed herebelow.
The age difference between recitors is also significant along atraditional-authenticated spectrum. In addition to emphasizing the di-dactic elements, younger recitors were more likely to have formal train-ing. For example, while both Hajjeh Fatima and Layla explained thatthey recite in order to express their love for ’ahl al-bayt, Hajjeh Fatimabegan reciting after seeing them in her dreams, while Layla beganthrough her seminary studies.
Related to the difference in didactic emphasis is a common tension be-tween clarity (wud.u
–h.) and tenderness/compassion (h.ana–n) in recitations.Traditional recitors were generally praised for their ability to move peo-ple with the tone of their voices, sacrificing clarity for emotionality. Forthis reason, they sometimes used Iraqi poetry during their lamentations.Listeners may not have understood every word, but the style, tone, andsymbolism alone were moving, as Iraqi was often characterized as the di-alect of compassion and longing and the Iraqi tradition of Karbala po-etry as richer than the Lebanese. In contrast, recitors who were con-cerned that their audiences understand every word of the recitation andits lessons preferred to use only the Lebanese dialect to ensure compre-hensibility.
In both these maja–lis, indeed, in all maja–lis, powerful emotion is gen-erated, but its extent and intensity varies. Women take emotional cuesfrom the recitor though ultimately, the differences are individual ones.Generally, participants in authenticated maja–lis were inclined to moretempered expressions of sorrow.31 These differences were reflected in therelative time recitors spent on the lamentation versus the sermon, and inthe affect of the recitor herself. Every recitor I saw was clearly engagedemotionally in her recitation, yet older recitors often seemed to enter atrancelike state, where their grief emanated from them to wrap itselfaround the other participants. The narrations themselves also vary; eachrecitor chooses the poetry she will include, and traditional ones often
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32 Another interesting shift is that Zaynab is emphasized more than Fatima, who is oftenconsidered the paramount female model of piety in Shi‘ism. This prioritization was partic-ular to my interlocutors and not to the religious leadership. Fadlullah, for example, em-phasizes both women as models for women’s participation in the community’s religious,political, and social life. See Rosiny (2001) for Fadlullah’s views on Fatima. See also Pin-ault on representations of Zaynab as “defiant in defeat” (1998: 82–83).
included bloodier descriptions of death and prolonged dramatic dia-logue. As noted above, ultimately it is the order in which the two goalsof maja–lis are prioritized that differs; one emphasizing mourning for ’ahlal-bayt and its soteriological effects, and the other focusing on lessons tobe learnt from their example and applied to life today. These life applica-tions will be taken up in a moment, but first I turn briefly to the moststriking difference in majlis content: the reinterpretation of Zaynab’s be-havior at Karbala.
reinterpreting sayyida zaynab
For many women the root of Ashura’s lesson—as emphasized in au-thenticated maja–lis—lay in the reinterpretation of Zaynab’s behaviorduring and following the battle:
Before they would present Sayyida Zaynab as crying, screaming, wailing, but,no, Zaynab set the stage . . . for revolution against tyranny. She didn’t mournHusayn but thought how to save the rest and how to keep his message going.She was imprisoned, and yet she stood up with all confidence and spoke herpoint of view instead of feeling defeated. This changed our lives, we are nowashamed to feel weak, or to feel sorrow. Whenever we are faced with a prob-lem, we remember the words, and feel shamed if we complain. No, we insteadfeel strong and deal with it and move on. (Hajjeh Umm Hadi)
Traditional narrations often portrayed Zaynab as buried in grief, pullingat her hair and shedding copious tears over the dead and dying. Advo-cates of authenticated maja–lis criticized these portrayals for their exag-gerated emphasis on her tears. “Before, they would describe Sayyida Za-ynab as crying and tearing her clothing. Now, the shaykhs, of course theones who know, said that this is incorrect, and isn’t mentioned at all. Infact, it’s the opposite, she was in control of herself and wasn’t affectedemotionally in this way” (Suha).
Through authentication, representations that had depicted Zaynabas a plaintive mourner were transformed to renderings that accentuatedher courage, strength, and resilience.32 Zaynab became the person who“stood up in the face of the oppressor” and “told him that she was thevictor.” Her role as the Shi‘i leader in captivity, and afterwards untilZayn al-‘Abidin took his place as Imam, is highlighted in these accounts.
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33 See Aghaie 2001, Ayoub 1978, Pinault 1992 and 2001, and Schubel 1993 on the re-demptive and intercessory importance of mourning the Karbala events.
34 See Nakash 1993.
It is Zaynab who carries the history of Ashura forward to future genera-tions of Shi‘i Muslims. As Hajjeh Umm Hadi’s shifting tenses above indi-cate, as she described history’s direct effect on contemporary lives, thisreinterpretation has had major ramifications for the participation of pi-ous women in the public arena. We have already seen these effects inwomen’s visibility in authenticated Ashura ması–ras. Other effects—onwomen’s participation in public discourse as well as in communityservice—will be taken up further below and in the following chapters.Suha’s statement above also reveals the role of authoritative textual andhistorical interpretation in the authentication process: “the shaykhs, ofcourse, the ones who know . . . said that this . . . isn’t mentioned at all.”Religious scholars reinterpreted the Ashura history to promote an ac-tivist stance in the present, shifting the dominant meaning of Ashurafrom mourning to revolution.
Meaning: From Mourning to Revolution
As can be inferred from these descriptions of maja–lis and ması–ras, griefand regret dominated “traditional” Ashura commemorations. Tearsshed for ’ahl al-bayt are mustah.abb, or religiously commendable. Bothevoking these tears and shedding them are acts believed to impart ’ajr(divine reward), potentially increasing one’s chances of enteringheaven.33 Blood spilled in memory of Karbala is similarly an embodi-ment of grief and an empathetic expression of solidarity with the Imam’spain and sorrow. Yet it can also express regret or remorse. Some peoplewho defended self-injurious lat.am explained that it demonstrated theirregret for not being at Karbala with the Imam—a reference to thoseShi‘is who originally asked Husayn to lead their revolution but thenfailed to arrive in time to either protect him or die with him. This canalso represent a generalized remorse for all the times in one’s life whenone did not live up to Husayn’s example.
In the context of pre-1970s Lebanon, when Shi‘i Muslims were theleast politically organized group in the country, all of these meanings canbe seen as stemming from Shi‘i political quietism. Even al-Amin’s earlyreform efforts did not criticize weeping, and in fact encouraged it as fos-tering Shi‘i identity and promoting salvation.34 The emphasis duringAshura was on personal and embodied religious experiences of mourn-ing, as well as on the reinforcement of community identity built aroundshared sorrow and suffering rather than political activism. While at first
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35 Contrast Hegland’s (1987) observation that in the community where she did researchin Iran self-injurious flagellation was revived during the revolution as a form of politicalresistance.
36 See also Fadlullah’s sermons and lectures, available in Arabic and sometimes Englishvia www.bayynat.org.
glance the association of blood with quietism may seem contradictory, inthis instance, violence is directed at the self, not outwards, implying apersonal expression of grief, an internal struggle with regret, and the po-tential for individual salvation, rather than collective political or socialaction.35
It is less clear whether traditional commemorations since the Shi‘i mo-bilization connote a similar quietism—certainly for some participantsthey did, while for others tears and blood demonstrated their readinessfor self-sacrifice for the community. In Nabatieh in 2000, many of thepeople watching and weeping around me commented that the display ofself-injurious lat.am demonstrated their youths’ readiness to defend thecommunity and resist the Israeli occupation.
Yet from the perspective of those who advocated for “authenticated”meanings and practices, blood and too many tears are un-Islamic andpassive: “Too much crying leads to personalities who cry. The Shi‘a willtake on crying as a cultural trait, and this is wrong. Emotions are neces-sary, but they should be understood as a way to learn Husayn’s lesson.The heart should be used to reach the head, not as an end point in and ofitself” (a shaykh). This is a reflection of Fadlullah’s views on the matter.His campaign to reform Ashura—as explicated by this shaykh—involvesseveral issues: First, he emphasizes choosing “appropriate” (meaning ed-ucated and “cultured” [muthaqqaf ]) recitors and appropriate (meaninglogical and unexaggerated) material for maja–lis. He also suggests incor-porating alternate forms into commemoration, such as plays and art. Ba-sic to Fadlullah’s reforms is the discouragement of shawa–’ib (defects orimpurities) in Ashura, especially self-injurious lat.am. The final element—one that few religious leaders espouse—is criticism of the act of crying it-self, as reflected in the shaykh’s statement above.
Fadlullah’s perspective is located toward the far end of the authentica-tion spectrum and was seen as too extreme by some.36 Hizbullah mem-bers, who often cited Nasrallah’s viewpoint in contrast, sometimes criti-cized Fadlullah for overintellectualizing Ashura and placing too muchemphasis on knowledge, understanding, and application: “It’s not just aphilosophy, it’s not just knowledge, it’s not just a phenomenon, it is afeeling, an emotion, the embodiment (tajsı–d) of meaning. It’s not justmind (‘aql) it is also emotion (‘a–tif). People have to feel with Husayn.”But Fadlullah’s critics also noted that the difference was one of relative
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37 Fischer describes this process for the Iranian revolution, which he characterizes as“the ultimate passion play of the Karbala paradigm” (1980: 183). That success and whatHegland (1983) calls the “ ‘Imam Husain as Example’ framework” fueled this reinterpre-tation in Lebanon. See also Aghaie 2001, Momen 1985, Mottahedeh 1985, Peters 1956,and Thaiss 1972 on the political meanings of Ashura in various contexts. See Shryock1997 and Gilsenan 1996 on the practical uses of historical narratives in other Middle East-ern contexts.
38 Here “revolution” or thawra (it is used in both languages) refers to rebelling againsta situation of oppression, and attempting to reorder the world in order to make it a betterplace. This meaning differs subtly from the post–French Revolution notion of “revolu-tion” as “an attempt rationally to design a new political order” (Donham 1999: 1; seealso Koselleck 1985). Yet there are also links to this second notion—especially via Iran,and no doubt related to Shari‘ati and others who were influenced by Marxism. See alsoAbuKhalil’s cogent comparison of Hizbullah with Leninist groups; he writes that Hizbul-lah is “an Islamic adaptation to the era of Leninist revolutionary organizations” (1991:394).
emphasis, that Hizbullah also valued knowledge and understandingmore than those who espoused traditional commemorative forms. Intheir view, however, they sought a balance between mind and emotion.As we will see below, this may relate to the very practical links betweenAshura and Hizbullah’s Islamic Resistance.
Accompanying the discouragement of traditional practices and em-phases was a redirection of Ashura’s message outwards, away from per-sonal meaning. This is not to say that notions of ’ajr and salvation havebeen stripped from Ashura, but rather that the primary tone of the com-memorations has been altered. Indeed, those who champion authentica-tion insisted that ’ajr comes from attending or holding maja–lis and fromremembrance, but not from the act of crying itself. The affective and thecollective coexist in all Ashura commemorations—the former located inprivate emotional experiences of piety, and the latter bridging shared ex-periences and meanings—but their proportion and ordering are being re-arranged.
In the context of war and deprivation, as Lebanese Shi‘is mobilized so-cially and militarily, the message of revolution in the events of Muhar-ram was highlighted.37 The energy and emotive power contained in thecommemorations was redirected and focused onto a shared set of goals.Emphasizing historical accuracy and evidence was crucial to this pro-cess: when myth was stripped away, the “authentic” historical record re-vealed that Husayn’s martyrdom took place in a context of revolution.
As understood in al-Dahiyya, this revolution was a moral one.38 ManyShi‘is do not believe that Husayn went to Karbala intending to over-throw Yazid’s regime, but rather, that he went with foreknowledge of hisown death. His victory is rooted in this conscious self-sacrifice. As ayoung volunteer at the SAA explained to me: “Gandhi used to say, ‘I
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learned from Husayn how to be oppressed and be victorious.’ It’s truethat Imam Husayn was oppressed and was killed, yet he was victorious.After he was killed, people became aware by way of his death. His deathwas wisdom for people. After he died, people learned, they saw thetruth.”
The revolution’s fundamental lesson was that one must always standup to one’s oppressor, because only through resistance is freedom possi-ble. This lesson was explained to me again and again, often in terms thatexploded spatial and temporal boundaries. In the words of a recitor:
In every era there is an oppressor and an oppressed. And this history alwaysrepeats itself, throughout all eras. Ashura reminds us of this, so we will neverforget that there is a Yazid and a Husayn in every time, in every nation, inevery government, and people should always have the spirit of revolutionagainst oppression, in all its faces, no matter what its identity. . . . Oppressiondoesn’t have a specific identity; it is general, it exists all over the world, in allconfessions, in all religions. People should have this spirit of revolutionagainst oppression because time repeats itself, history repeats itself, and inevery age there is injustice.
Every single pious Shi‘i Muslim with whom I spoke emphasized the uni-versality and importance of this message. “Ab‘a–d karbala–’ ta–rı–khiyya”(the dimensions of Karbala are historical), one Hizbullah member saidpassionately, “Without Karbala there would be no revolution! Karbala isfor all the world, what Husayn did was stand against oppression!”
This shift in Ashura’s meaning from the soteriological to the revolu-tionary suggests a parallel shift in understandings of time. TraditionalAshura commemorations involve reexperiencing the battle each year, asthough one were there with the Imam; in a sense, time is captured at thisessential and essentializing moment in Shi‘i history. In contrast, authenti-cated commemorations’ emphasis on the revolutionary implies lineartemporal change, lessons to be learned from history but applied towardsthe future, reflecting a commitment to progress. Yet temporality also re-veals a peculiarity of the spiritual aspect of the two-pronged notion ofprogress. While pious Shi‘is advocated working towards revolutionarychange in the near future, they also believed that the far future is not un-known, and will eventually bring the return of Hidden Imam on Judg-ment Day. In this case, as discussed in the introduction, secular lineartime has its limits.
A Juxtaposition of Moderns
Pious Shi‘is viewed authenticated Ashura meanings and practices as dis-tinctly modern. To some, this may seem paradoxical, because it insists
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39 Conflicts over what constitutes authentic or “real” tradition frequently involve theuse, sometimes counterintuitively, of discourses of modernity by one or more of the partiesinvolved. Cf. Donham’s discussion of the initial interpretation of the Ethiopian Marxistrevolution in Maale as a vindication of tradition (1999: 59–81).
40 See Pinault 2001. Similar notions may have partly motivated al-Amin in the 1920s.Ende (1978) notes that his critique included reference to mockery and criticism from otherreligious communities.
that religion can be modern.39 Yet this concern dissipates when we recallthat it is the dominance of particular discourses of the modern itself thatpious Shi‘is called into question. By linking specific religious interpreta-tions to modern-ness, they constructed an alternate discourse throughwhich “modern” is defined. Within this alternate discourse—the dis-course of the pious modern—authenticated Ashura represents spiritualprogress.
Rather than a paradox, what we have here is an illustration of thecomplexity surrounding notions of modern-ness. By constructing the pi-ous modern in part through a constructed distinction between “tradi-tional” and “authenticated” forms, pious Shi‘is reified a new binary.What is now categorized as traditional is set “behind” what is under-stood to be authentic, creating forward movement, or spiritual progress.Adding to this complexity are the ways people deployed multiple dis-courses of the modern simultaneously in order to highlight their commu-nity’s progress. The key elements that differentiate authenticated fromtraditional commemorations—condemning self-injurious lat.am, remov-ing myth and exaggeration from maja–lis, de-emphasizing Zaynab’s tears,and prioritizing revolutionary meaning over soteriological—were estab-lished as modern within multiple frameworks. On the one hand, theywere cited to emphasize an enchanted modern: Historical and textual ac-curacy leads to greater religious understanding, which leads to spiritualprogress. Revolutionary meaning leads to communal solidarity and ac-tivism. And Zaynab—pious, caring, strong, and outspoken—is a rolemodel for women in the Shi‘i Islamic movement.
Yet on the other hand, the modern-ness of these same elements wasclaimed through a definitional framework that was understood to bewestern. Attempts were made to establish the community as equallymodern/civilized as the West according to local perceptions of westernstandards of judgment. The global field of power relations impingedupon the reformulation of Ashura commemorations. For example, whenKhamenei issued his 1994 fatwa condemning self-injurious lat.am, he didnot cite only the un-Islamic nature of the practice, but also the negativeimage of Islam that rituals involving blood project both within and out-side the Islamic community.40 This speaks directly to stereotypes among
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41 The importance of temporal continuity to identity cross-culturally is discussed byKratz (1993). She notes that what may be perceived by the external observer as change intradition is understood by Okiek as continuity in the process of change in tradition. Cer-tain arenas may be simultaneously domains of continuity and change depending on one’spoint of observation. With regard to Ashura, I would posit that Lebanese Shi‘is held thenotions of continuity and change in mind simultaneously, switching between them depend-ing on how broad a notion of history was being discussed.
non-Shi‘i Lebanese associating traditional lat.am with “backwardness”and “barbarism.”
For most of my interlocutors most of the time, however, the authenti-cation of Ashura commemorations represented their progress awayfrom both the “backwardness” they saw in tradition and the immoral-ity they saw in the West. Authenticated Ashura was the continuation ofthe community through tradition,41 but in a new form, a form perceivedby its adherents as more coherent and apropos to the contemporaryworld.
In the second part of this chapter, I discuss the relationship betweenauthenticated forms of Ashura and public piety. I first consider the emer-gence of Ashura in public spaces and the role of public discourses in theauthentication process. Then I conclude with a discussion of how au-thenticated Ashura, with its emphasis on activism, provides role modelsfor pious men and women in martyrdom and community service, respec-tively.
Living Authenticated Ashura
The slogans of Karbala are the slogans of life in its entirety. . . .Living Ashura is standing against oppression. Such a standshould fill our hearts and minds each time we face theoppressors and arrogant powers, whether in Muslim countriesor in the whole world. It is not living in a tragedy of tears andhitting ourselves with swords or chains . . . for swords shouldbe raised against the enemy as we were taught by the Imam(pbuh).
— Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlullah, sermon commemorating Imam Husayn, 2003
Ashura in Public Spaces and Discourses
Authenticated forms of Ashura commemoration were the standard in al-Dahiyya, especially among those who followed Fadlullah and/or sup-ported Hizbullah. Concomitant with the transformations of practice and
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42 Hizbullah held their first public majlis in 1993 at a jam‘iyya, later moving it to the“tent.”
43 Based on the announcements in Al-‘Ahd.
meaning discussed above, the relationship between Ashura and publicspace has changed. This is especially apparent with regard to majālis.While maja–lis continued to be held in homes, loudspeakers and micro-phones guaranteed that they would be heard throughout buildings,streets, and neighborhoods. Public maja–lis themselves are not new—asevidenced by the long history of Nabatieh’s annual commemorations,and the maja–lis held in the al-Khansa’ family h.usayniyya in al-Dahiyyasince the 1930s. Yet the numbers of both private and public maja–lis—and the levels of attendance at them—have increased dramatically.
In addition to public maja–lis at mosques, h.usayniyyas, and more re-cently, jam‘iyyas, since the mid-1990s maja–lis have been held in tentsconstructed by Hizbullah and Amal in parking lots and other emptyspaces around Beirut. Most prominent among them is the main Hizbul-lah “tent” in al-Dahiyya, from which the party televised maja–lis from1995 until a new hall was constructed in 2002,42 and where Nasrallahspoke on alternate nights. In 2000 and 2001, construction of this“tent”—really a huge enclosed structure that incorporated a major roadand adjacent lots—started over a week before Muharram. Securityguards lined the roofs of nearby buildings and patrolled adjoining streetsand alleyways. The maja–lis began on the eve of 1 Muharram, and as thetenth of the month approached, the growing crowd of approximatelyten thousand attendees a night spilled beyond the tent onto curbs andsidewalks. Additionally, no less than fifty-one Hizbullah-sponsoredmaja–lis were held in Beirut alone in 2001.43 While it is difficult to esti-mate attendance at these maja–lis, major Lebanese newspapers agree that“several hundred thousand” people participated in the 2000 and 2001ması–ras, while Al-Mana–r television estimated two hundred thousandmarchers in 2001.
The visual environment was markedly altered during Ashura as well,as described in chapter 1. The black banners hanging over streets read“Husayn is from/of me and I am from/of Husayn” (h.usayn minnı– wa’ana– min h.usayn); “Every day is Ashura, every place is Karbala”; “Allthat we have is from Karbala”; “The Resistance is our Karbala andKhamenei is our leader.” An aura of mourning was palpable; peoplespoke quietly, laughter was frowned upon in the jam‘iyyas. Many madean effort to dress in black or other somber colors; indeed, the preponder-ance of black everywhere strikingly distinguished al-Dahiyya from therest of Beirut during Muharram. This was considered a positive develop-ment because it expressed respect for Husayn through “public sadness.”
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44 As Eickelman and Anderson discuss, these media become more participatory as theasymmetries between producers and consumers are reduced, and “the boundaries betweenpublic and private communication that once seemed clear become blurred” (1999b: 4).Here, blurring occurred as telephone calls brought conversations that were once privatelyheld into the public arena via radio.
45 While some of these conversations no doubt were prompted by the necessity of assur-ing that the anthropologist present recorded the “correct” version of the Imam’s martyr-dom, as indeed I was urged to do, heated conversations during which I was not presentwere frequently related to me after the fact, and on several occasions I joined discussions ofmaja–lis details already in progress.
Ashura’s expansion indicates a broader public exposure to and partic-ipation in the articulation and use of authenticated Ashura discourses aswell as in the production of authenticity itself. One aspect of this in-volves new religious and political mass media. While these media pro-vide wider access to the officially produced discourses of sayyids andshaykhs, they also afford wider participation in the production ofAshura discourses, through a plethora of call-in radio shows for bothadults and children and television ranging from Karbala-inspired serialsto documentaries about Ashura-inspired poetry. One radio program ad-dressed to children posed questions about the Ashura history, for exam-ple, “How many people went with Imam Husayn to Karbala?” Childrenthen called in and received prizes for correct answers.44
Ashura discourses are also constructed through informal conversa-tions—the daily talk among pious women and men discussed in the pre-vious chapter. Quite a few of these conversations—principally duringand immediately after Ashura—contributed to the authentication of par-ticular Ashura narratives. For women in particular, participation inthe authentication process was in keeping with Zaynab’s reformulatedrole at Karbala—as the bearer of the message of revolution to others.Whether over coffee in a neighbor’s kitchen, or en route to or from a ma-jlis, women often debated the historical accuracy of details of the eventsof Karbala.45 For example, Aziza and her neighbor once discussed atlength whether it could be corroborated that Husayn had given hisyoung daughter Ruqayya a cup before his death, telling her that it wouldturn black inside if he were killed. Some of these conversations weresparked by skepticism toward a specific recitor, others triggered by dis-cord between the version of an episode recited in a majlis just attendedand the version broadcast over the radio in the car on the way home.
Women’s debates about the authenticity of particular narratives and de-tails also reflect the tension that exists between “traditional” and “authen-ticated,” and the constant reformulations and renegotiations that ensue.This was demonstrated in a conversation I had with three women at Az-iza’s one afternoon during Ashura about changes in a local h.usayniyya’s
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46 For a detailed description of an Iranian version of the majlis (and “wedding”) ofQasim, see Humayuni 1979.
presentation of the majlis about Husayn’s nephew Qasim. The conversa-tion began with Aziza relating how the h.usayniyya had stopped includ-ing Qasim’s wedding in the majlis devoted to him for a period of twoyears, because it had been found to be “inaccurate.” During those twoyears, two members of the family that owned the h.usayniyya had died,leading their relatives superstitiously to reinstate the wedding. At thispoint I announced that I had no idea what Aziza was talking about by‘urs qa–sim (Qasim’s wedding), provoking a long and contested explana-tion that continued through the next afternoon when Rasha took measide to insist that the details she had provided were the most accurate.
In sum, Qasim was betrothed to Husayn’s daughter.46 “Before,” in tra-ditional maja–lis, just before Qasim’s martyrdom is narrated, their wed-ding was enacted, and flowers and sweets passed around the h.usayniyya.The juxtaposition of the wedding with death, not only Qasim’s death al-most immediately afterwards, but also that of the bride’s brother Ali al-Akbar just before, served to significantly heighten emotionality. However,Hajjeh Umm Zein asserted that reformers had criticized the weddingreenactment on the grounds that it is illogical that the marriage wouldhave actually taken place during such sadness and war. Aziza correctedthis, explaining that no one believed the marriage actually happened atall, but that because Qasim died while engaged, during Ashura peoplewould enact a wedding for him, as a tribute to what should have cometo pass but did not. Then Rasha chimed in, saying that this had alsobeen criticized by some advocates of authentication, who think that thewedding enactments constitute a false addition to the narrative, and assuch should be avoided. She eventually concluded: “bas na–s baddun l-‘urs, li’annu– hay at-taqlı–d, fa-ba‘dun byamlu– bil-h.usayniyyeh” (but peo-ple want the wedding, because this is the tradition, so they still do it atthe h.usayniyya).
In their long debate, the three women’s constant corrections of one an-other confirmed the continual process by which authenticated Ashuranarratives are being shaped. Researching and understanding the most ac-curate history of Karbala was not a task left only to religious scholars,but was one in which lay persons participated actively. Here we againsee the difference between contemporary authentication and al-Amin’sreform efforts in the 1920s. Crucially, the current authentication ofAshura meanings and commemorations was included by many people aspart of the revolution itself. In the words of one woman:
Those who killed Imam Husayn were victorious in battle. He died, didn’t he?And the women suffered? But if we look over history, he was victorious. Who
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47 Fischer notes the emphasis, within the Karbala paradigm, on the Prophet’s family asmodels for behavior (1980: 13).
48 Another highly relevant parallel is made with the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. Inhis speech on the fortieth-day commemoration of Husayn’s martyrdom in 2003, Nasrallahstated, “Why are these millions going to Karbala? To be inspired by Hussein’s spirit of rev-olution to fight injustice” (quoted in the Daily Star, April 23, 2003).
is mentioned? It is rare that history will mention those who killed him. ButImam Husayn is the hero. And this is increasing. Why? Because the under-standing is being more deeply rooted. For example, in some places they readthe majlis in a way that we call backward, reactionary, we don’t accept this.We are trying to develop it to truly manifest the truth of Ashura and maintainit as a historically understood event, a liberatory event, an event about thecontinuity of humanity.
This participation in the authentication process is one way in whichnot only revolutionary activism, but public piety (as discursive piety) canalso be manifested. Public piety is additionally linked to Ashura throughthe translation of the message and values taught in the commemorationsinto models for contemporary daily life.47 The Karbala paradigm “pro-vides models for living and a mnemonic for thinking about how to live”(Fischer 1980: 21). While traditional forms of commemoration involveembodying emotion in blood and tears, authenticated forms involve em-bodiment through realized activism. In Ashura “the world as lived andthe world as imagined are fused together” (Nakash 1993: 162). The finalsection of this chapter explores that fusion.
Sacrificing Blood, Sacrificing Sweat
The most obvious parallels between Ashura and currently lived experi-ence for many pious Shi‘is were with the Islamic Resistance. Indeed, thebattle of Karbala was explicitly linked to contemporary instances of in-justice and oppression in Lebanon, especially the Israeli occupation.48
This association was unequivocally articulated in one woman’s descrip-tion of her experience of the moment when Hizbullah leader Sayyid Ab-bas al-Musawi and his wife and five-year-old son were martyred in1992:
I was in the south, and it was a beautiful day, cold and sunny, like today. Myson was a baby, and they told me it was good to walk him in the sunshine, soI went outside to walk with him. Then I saw a plane. It was normal in thatarea; the Israelis flew over us many times a day, and they were bombing regu-larly. But this plane flew out towards the coast, and, I don’t know why, orwhat was different about it, but suddenly, suddenly, it occurred to me that this
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plane was from Yazid! That this was Yazid, and Yazid didn’t care about chil-dren; he killed Sayyida Zaynab’s young child without caring. And when thisoccurred to me, I held my son close and ran back into the house quickly withhim. I felt so scared for him, as though this plane was going to kill my son.And later that day I learned that that same plane, the plane that I had seen,was the plane that killed Sayyid Abbas and his son.
Just as Yazid was equated with Israel—an association underscored in1983 when the Israeli army disrupted the Ashura commemorations inNabatieh—the Islamic Resistance was equated with Husayn. Hizbullahnurtured these associations directly. For example, at the end of a playabout the captives of Karbala—performed by students at a Hizbullahschool and sponsored by the party’s Women’s Committee—segmentswere shown from Al-Mana–r television. Aside from clips of the ması–raand Nasrallah’s speeches, there were scenes of Resistance operations,with a booming voice-over: “This is our Karbala, this is our Husayn, welive on, Karbala lives on in the Lebanese Resistance.”
A Hizbullah jam‘iyya administrator tied the authentication process toLiberation:
Every year there is progress. This is the greatness of Imam Husayn and his rev-olution. One thousand and four hundred years ago, imagine that, and todaysomeone says “Imam Husayn” and begins to cry. This is the spirit. It needssomeone to embody it. There are those who say “I have my faith in myheart.” Faith in the heart is not enough; faith is in the heart and in work. Feel-ings without work are not enough. In the end, embodiment is in work. This isthe revolution of Imam Husayn. Truly, who thought that the Islamic Resis-tance would be victorious? The day the Zionists left, they didn’t leave bythemselves, and they didn’t leave voluntarily, they withdrew defeated. Whothought that would happen?
Those who were not in Hizbullah also linked Ashura and the Resis-tance. One man related an anecdote about his response to a radio jour-nalist:
In that way, a skeptic, he asked me, “What did Husayn do?” I was silent for awhile, I said, let’s finish our coffee first. And I said to him after we finished ourcoffee, “If I tell you on the air what I know about Husayn, it will take hours,and if I go and do some more research and then tell you, it will take threemonths. But you are asking what Husayn did?” I said, “He made Jabal Safiand the Western Beqaa, he is sitting up there.” And he shut up.
The two places this man mentions—Jabal Safi and the Western Beqaa—were Israeli outposts in Lebanon that were retaken by the Resistance. Allthe parallels drawn between the battle of Karbala and the Resistance
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4.7. Ashura banner; it reads “Historical Karbala changes theface of history today.”
blur Husayn with the Resistance fighters. In this context, Imam Husaynwas the ideal role model for pious Shi‘i men. In Lebanon since the early1980s, that has clearly translated to participation in the Resistance. Thisparticipation may be either military or supportive—working in ajam‘iyya, rebuilding homes destroyed in Israeli attacks, or teaching in ahawza, just to cite a few examples—depending on one’s age, abilities,and disposition.
My field research did not include participation-observation of Resistance
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49 Al-Mana–r also broadcasted video of Resistance military operations. These videos arereplete with video noise and a black-and-white grittiness that serves to underscore the“truth and reality” of the images. When I asked a Hizbullah representative why they video-taped their operations, he said that it was to counter Israeli claims that denied the effects ofthe Resistance on their outposts.
50 This department was filled with binders holding martyrs’ last statements, letters, es-says, journal entries, philosophical writings, and poetry. Most of the documents werehandwritten, some were typed, and a few had been published. One martyr had written aplay.
activities and none of my interlocutors—to my knowledge—were cur-rently fighters with the Resistance. The perspective I am able to providehere is rather that of the wider community in al-Dahiyya. Pious Shi‘isheld martyrs and their families in the highest esteem and frequently cred-ited them with making the greatest possible sacrifice for the freedom andintegrity of their community. Martyrs’ names were announced andknown. They were memorialized in the photographs that line the streets,in newspapers, and on radio and television. Every day Hizbullah’s radiostation listed those who died on that day in past years. Al-Mana–r televi-sion interviewed martyrs’ families—who always spoke of their pride andfaith—and broadcast video messages taped by martyrs before death.49
Exhibits displayed writings and other “martyr artifacts” (atha–r al-shuhada–’), which are being collected by a special department at the Mar-tyrs’ Association until a museum is built to house them.50
None of this is very different from the esteem in which members of theU.S. armed forces are held when they give their lives for their country.The names and photographs of soldiers killed in action are broadcast onlocal television, and their families are sometimes interviewed, also speak-ing of them with pride and frequently with faith. Local memorials areheld, as well as national ceremonies in Washington, DC. On March 17,2003, in a speech about the imminent invasion of Iraq, President GeorgeW. Bush stated, “War has no certainty except the certainty of sacrifice.”Because the wars fought by the United States take place in far awayplaces, and because of the scale of the United States more generally, it iseasy to forget how personal that sacrifice is. In al-Dahiyya, and Lebanonmore generally, the places seen on television are familiar and the facesare often recognized.
Two small differences that could be suggested are the definitions of thecommunities, and the motivations underlying soldiers’ sacrifices. In thefirst case, it could be argued that the community the U.S. armed forcesserves is a nation-state, while that of the Islamic Resistance shouldinstead be defined on either a local or transnational level. However, theultimate goal of the Resistance has been the liberation of an occupied
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51 See Munson (2003) on nationalism and Islamic movements.52 Martyrdom operations, ‘amaliya–t istishha–diyya, are military operations where a
fighter’s death is a planned aspect of the operation, what the U.S. media often refers to as“suicide attacks.” Another possible translation is “self-sacrifice operations.”
53 See AbuKhalil 1991.54 Lebanese women martyrs were from secular parties. Recently, Fadlullah has stated, in
reference to the Palestinian struggle, that there are situations in which women can carryout martyrdom operations.
nation-state, and especially in recent years it has cast itself—and beencast by the Lebanese state—as a national resistance movement.51
The other potential difference, and the one emphasized most often bythe U.S. media, involves the underlying motivations for self-sacrifice andthe notion of going willingly to one’s death. This is not the place for adetailed comparison of soldiers who die in wars and those who die inmartyrdom operations,52 so I limit myself to two brief points. First, onlytwelve Resistance martyrs died in martyrdom operations. Most were“killed in action” as are members of military forces anywhere. Second,the issue of motivation is complex. For fighters with the Islamic Resis-tance, Husayn’s model provided inspiration—because he went to hisdeath knowingly, unafraid, and with faith that his death was part of agreater victory. Pious Shi‘i men who chose to sacrifice themselves in mar-tyrdom operations are understood as having had absolute faith in thevalue of their deaths and in the afterlife. I do not know about faith in theU.S. armed forces, though I imagine that it varies widely. However, it isimportant to note that within Lebanon, Islamic Resistance fighters arenot the only people who have undertaken martyrdom operations. As weare seeing in Palestine today, resistance fighters with secular organiza-tions also sacrifice themselves for their nation. In Lebanon, martyrdomoperations against Israeli Occupation Force targets were carried out byPalestinian resistance groups, the Syrian Social National Party, theLebanese Communist Party, the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, and the Pro-gressive Socialist Party, in addition to Hizbullah and Amal.53
While some martyrs in both the Lebanese—and as highlighted in re-cent news reports—the Palestinian resistances have been women, thetranslation of Husayn’s martyrdom into a model for military participa-tion was directed exclusively at men.54 This is not to say that Husayn didnot also provide a model for women with regard to general self-sacrificefor one’s community. However, for women, the paragon of piety andsacrifice that emerges from Ashura was embodied instead in Sayyida Za-ynab.
In the reformulation of Zaynab’s behavior at Karbala describedabove, three characteristics are emphasized: her strength of mind, her
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55 For more on women’s role as mothers of martyrs, see Peteet (1991) on Palestinianwomen and Kamalkhani (1998) on Iranian women.
compassion and dedication to others, and her courage to speak. The firstof these was especially important to women’s expected role as the moth-ers, wives, or sisters of martyrs. Women who had lost loved ones to theoccupation frequently pointed to Zaynab’s ability to endure similar loss.They explained that they coped with their grief by emulating Zaynab’sequanimity during and after Karbala. They compared their losses tohers, and in so doing, expressed feeling that they had lost little in com-parison: “We didn’t lose everyone, like Sayyida Zaynab did. We have tosay, if she could go on, why can’t we? And we at least have role models;there is acknowledgment in society for the mothers of martyrs, theSayyida had none of that.”
Being the mother—or the wife or sister—of a martyr was valuedamong pious Shi‘is, and many whose family members had been mar-tyred carried their loss as an honor:
I am the wife of a martyr. He left me two children and I am responsible forthem. When he was martyred, my son was one year and two months old andmy daughter five days old. And of course sometimes it’s difficult; of course,life is difficult, but I say to myself, once in a while, thanks be to God that Godhonored me by allowing me to be a martyr’s wife and to raise a martyr’s chil-dren, and to carry the message of Imam Husayn and Sayyida Zaynab. (a vol-unteer)
Although Zaynab’s model provided strength for women who had lostloved ones, this was not the area in which her positive qualities weremost frequently stressed. Significantly, the model of Zaynab—particu-larly her compassion and outspokenness—was understood to be a modelfor public activism, an important addition to the relatively passive roleof “mother of a martyr” often delegated to women in nationalist and re-ligious struggles.55 One arena where this new emphasis can be seen is inthe Ashura commemorations. As described above, women participatedactively in authenticated ması–ras. They also contributed to the authenti-cation process itself through daily conversations and debates aboutAshura. The significance of this shift for gender activism and roles, andits relationship to notions of the pious modern, will be taken up furtherin chapter 6.
First, however, I want to turn to the primary vehicle through which pi-ous Shi‘i women live Ashura in their daily lives: community service. Thereinterpretation of Zaynab as able to act despite her grief and the tur-moil of her surroundings played an important role in inspiring hundreds
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of women in al-Dahiyya to volunteer their time and energy—a sacrificeof sweat—for the welfare of their community. As we will see, volunteer-ing in a jam‘iyya has been incorporated as a crucial aspect of public pietyfor Shi‘i women. The next chapter takes up women’s Islamic communityservice activities, and the ideas behind their activism. Essential amongthem, as this volunteer reminds us, is Ashura:
In the maja–lis we become renewed, we are reminded. Society might be asleep,in deep sleep, and this school, these lessons enter them, and wake them up,say, “Get up, help others. Get up and see the corruption, get up and see theoppression, be mindful of your society, take care of it, become aware of it, ofyourself, of other people, of your nation. See where your country is, it is occu-pied! See how the people of the south are suffering, how people from all sectsare fleeing, are being bombed, their homes are being destroyed. What is goingto be your position on this?” This is the school. This is Ashura.
C H A P T E R F I V E
Community Commitment
In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most MercifulHave you seen the one who denies Religion [dı–n]?That is the one who refuses the orphan,And urges not the feeding of the poor,So woe unto those who pray (hypocritically)Those who delay their prayer,Those who do good deeds only to be seen,And prevent al-ma–‘u–n [small kindnesses].
—Su–rat al-Ma–‘u–n, The Qur’an
November 30, 2000The traffic was insane today, though Aziza assures me this is typical of Ra-madan. By the time I arrived at the Center, it was already 11 a.m. HajjehHuda, Dalal, and Aziza were in the front distribution area, going over paper-work, and the women in the back “kitchen”—mostly poor women helpingout for modest pay or to take food home to their families—had already beguncooking today’s meal. As I waved hello, a delivery truck pulled up, full ofboxes of vegetables being donated by a local grocer, so Aziza and I joined inunloading and sorting the boxes in the kitchen. When we finished, I walkedaround to the front and greeted Hajjeh Huda and Dalal, as well as Alia, Haj-jeh Rim, and Noor, who had arrived in the meantime. While Hajjeh Huda,Dalal, and Alia continued organizing paperwork, going over carefullyrecorded donation records, and discussing next week’s meals, the rest of us di-vided bags of bread and sweets as they were delivered, and distributed saladgreens and vegetables into plastic bags that held family-sized portions. Spiritswere high today—not always a given when everyone has been fasting since be-fore sunrise—and we chatted and joked as we worked, taking short breaksnow and then. During one break, a wealthy woman walked in carrying sev-eral bags of wheat. We didn’t notice her at first, until Hajjeh Huda called out,“Aziza, Lara, yalla, take the stuff from Madame!”
Gradually other volunteers joined us, each woman calling out a greeting asshe jumped into whatever task was being done at that moment. A few newvolunteers came, including Hajjeh Mariam and her niece, who had visited theCenter for the first time yesterday. Hajjeh Huda always made a point ofgreeting new faces, introducing them around, and helping them find a place
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where they could easily join the work. As always, time flew by, and by thetime the prep work was done, it was only a couple hours before ift.a
–r. Dalalhad set up the donations table at the front entrance, and a steady stream ofdonors was keeping her busy. One woman, probably a first-time donor, wasgiven a quick tour by Alia. A small group of very well-dressed women gath-ered near the donation table, chatting and watching the activity aroundthem. Some were less active members of the jam‘iyya, and others I had notseen before—but I assumed (correctly) from their inactivity and dress thatthey were donors or potential donors. A short while later, someone had or-ganized these women into a circle, and given them big bags of peas to shellfor the next day’s meal, cleverly transforming them from spectators to partic-ipants in the project.
Meanwhile, across the Center, women (and a few men) from poorfamilies were filling the waiting room. They registered their names with
5.1. Cooking at the Ramadan Center.
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1 On a person’s initial visit, her name and address were recorded, and she was askedquestions about her status, financial situation, and number of people in her household.During Ramadan that year she received food every third day. After Ramadan, volunteersvisited the household to assess its situation, at which point the family might become a“regularly assisted” family.
Alia,1 who was seated at the table that formed the “wall” between thepartitioned-off waiting area and the front room. Periodically, voices wouldrise, and Hajjeh Huda would call for patience. Today she had brought abag of “worry beads” that she passed out when tempers seemed short. Later,she brought bags of fresh beans and peas to the waiting room and hadwomen there shell them to pass the time cooperatively and productively aswell.
Eventually, a women from the kitchen told us that the food—today a beefand vegetable stew with rice—was ready. This is when things got hectic. Wequickly formed an assembly line, some ladling food from the huge pots whereit had been cooked into plastic containers, others sealing the containers andbringing them to the front. Several children ran back and forth transportingthe containers, adding an element of chaos. In the front, four of us began fill-ing h. us.as (literally, shares), larger plastic bags that held full meals. Into eachh. us.a went stew and rice, bread, sweets, salad vegetables, and a two-liter bottleof soda. We took the h. us.as either to the distribution table where Hajjeh Hudastood with Noor, or to the Center’s entrance, where a few drivers would comeand pick up h. us.as to be distributed to families unable to make the trip. As theh. us.as were filled, Alia began calling people from the waiting room to the dis-tribution table, where Hajjeh Huda and Noor handed them their ift.a
–r meal.Hajjeh Huda knew many of the families, so she often modified the h. us.aslightly, adding extra food for larger ones, or sweets for those with manychildren.
There were a few moments when rising voices filled the Center, indicatingthat order had been broken. Frantically running around filling h. us.as, our onlyhint at this was these voices, Hajjeh Huda’s above all, as she somehow man-aged to calm everyone’s—by this time, very hungry—nerves and remedy what-ever situation had arisen. Today one of these moments occurred when a groupof waiting people rushed Alia all at once. At another moment a woman begancomplaining loudly at her bag’s contents, provoking Dalal to scold her for be-ing ungrateful. In the midst of the distribution process, another donation ar-rived (there is always a lot of food on Thursdays, because it’s the eve of Fri-day): ten huge boxes of lahm b‘ajin. We quickly began packaging it and takingit to Hajjeh Huda, who added it to the h. us.as. Finally, just about twentyminutes before the call to prayer that would mark the end of the day’s fast, allthe food was distributed and the waiting room empty. Noor gave the fewremaining bags of lahm b‘ajin to a Syrian laborer who had been standing
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2 The options that could be checked on the envelope included tabarru‘a–t (regular charitydonation) and huqu–q shar‘iyya-khums (religious tax). The latter category was then dividedinto: ima–m (Imam’s share, given directly to the poor) and sa–da (sayyids’ share, given viathe care of a sayyid). The jam‘iyya had permission from several major marji‘s to collectkhums.
around for much of the afternoon, obviously hoping for a handout. Thewomen working in the kitchen had long since finished washing the pots andsetting up for the next day, and had taken their h. us.as and headed home forift.a
–r.On most days the volunteers would have done the same, rushing home
amidst the traffic, which grew more chaotic as the call to prayer approached.Today, however, was the annual fund-raising ift.a
–r for the jam‘iyya. Instead ofhurrying home, we all changed into nicer shoes and piled into cars to bravethe bumper-to-bumper route to the nearby hotel where the ift.a
–r was to beheld. We arrived just as the call to prayer resounded, and made our way to thedownstairs ballroom. The President of the jam‘iyya, along with Hajjeh Hudaand Hajjeh Rim, greeted guests at the entrance. We quickly found seats at atable in the nearly full room. There were around three hundred women there,about 75 percent of them muh. ajjaba.
As we ate, the jam‘iyya’s president walked to the podium on the small stageat one end of the hall, flanked by the Lebanese and jam‘iyya flags. After a fewwords of welcome, she spoke about the necessity of community service in “de-veloping” and “raising the level” of society, and about the importance of thesegoals. She thanked the jam‘iyya’s volunteers for their time and the ift.a
–r guestsin advance for their donations. She noted that Ramadan is a time when peopleshould translate unity in fasting to unity in supporting the community. Thepublic relations officer then described some of the jam‘iyya’s activities, show-ing a short video. She also made a point of noting the other local jam‘iyyasthat were represented at the ift.a
–r, highlighting the cooperation among them.Then a twelve-year-old girl the jam‘iyya supports made a short and movingspeech. In well-rehearsed formal Arabic she explained that she was an orphanand wouldn’t be able to attend school if it were not for the jam‘iyya.
Underneath each plate was a envelope for donations, with spaces to writeyour name, address, amount donated, and donation type.2 Volunteers walkedamong the tables throughout the evening, collecting envelopes and givingdonors receipts and thank you cards. When the meal was over and the platescleared, the male waiters and cameramen who were recording the event leftthe room, and a group of mawlid singers entered (they do not sing beforemen). The mawlid brought an amazing celebratory energy to the room, withwomen mingling with friends and family, dancing, and clapping along to therhythms.
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3 I use the terms “volunteerism” and “volunteer” as a translation of my interlocutors’terms tatawu‘ and mutatawi‘a. In the Shi‘i pious modern, volunteering encompassed workdone for the common good for which one is not compensated monetarily. Jam‘iyya em-ployees who worked extra hours without compensation were considered “half-volunteers.” The fact that one gained nonmonetary reward did not lesson volunteerism’sstatus in this community, and the fact that volunteering was not necessarily “voluntary”—in the sense of being an act of absolute free will outside the constraints of social norms—did not affect these understandings.
This was a typical day in the lives of volunteers during Ramadan.While the Center was only active during Ramadan, this jam‘iyya wasbusy throughout the year. Preparations for the Center were continuous.Between Ramadan 1999 and 2000, food donations and plans weremade, the Center was advertised in order to attract both donors and vol-unteers, the annual ift.a
–r was planned and invitations delivered, wallswere built to partition the space in the Center more effectively, thesewalls were wallpapered and the Center given a general aesthetic make-over, and numerous faxes were sent and phone calls made, all to ensurethat the Center would be able to provide for at least the same number offamilies as it had the year before, if not more. In 2000, the Center’s flyersstated that it provided one thousand ift.a
–r meals a day, based on its 1999activity. By the end of Ramadan 2000, the Center was providing ift.a
–r forover 250 families, with an average of seven members, increasing thenumber of people fed daily to at least 1,500.
Neither the Center, nor any of the other activities and projects of thisand other jam‘iyyas in the area would be possible without the time andenergy of volunteers.3 Volunteerism constitutes a critical thread in thesocial weft of the pious modern. More than humanitarian charity work,it is a necessary part of piety.
As Hajjeh Khadija explained in chapter 3, faith was understood as aladder one must continually struggle to climb, in order to arrive attaqwa–, a state of absolute faith and piety. In the conceptualization ofmany pious Shi‘is, one of the fundamental rungs on this ladder wasmu‘amala–t, or mutual reciprocal social relations. As the vehicle throughwhich personal piety was most clearly brought into the public realm,community service was an important component of these social rela-tions, a component that encapsulated both the personal morality and thepublic expression that together constituted iltiza–m. One woman put itthus:
Religion has two aspects. There are things with two sides, between a personand God, and there are things with three sides, between a person, God, andothers in society. It is this worship that is required of us. This means a
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4 The following quotation is from Su–rat Al-Ma–‘u–n [The Small Kindnesses], verses 4–7.See this chapter’s epigraph.
believer’s prayers are not acceptable if he does not fulfill his worship in servingothers. The basis for this is in the Qur’an:4 fa-waylu lil-mus.allı–n ’alladhı–nahum‘an s.ala–tihim sahu–n, meaning, those who aren’t interested in their prayer; al-ladhı–nahum yur’a–’u–n, meaning, they do things just for others to see them, notfor God; wa yamna‘u–n al-ma–‘u–n, meaning, those who prevent happiness forothers. God will judge them, even if they pray. Waylu lil mus.alı–n tells us thatthey pray, but they aren’t interested in their prayers. It’s not enough to pray,you have to be engaged in your prayer, and you should help others. So this isworship, worship isn’t just prayer, it is those who bring these together, prayersand service to others, it is they who are living correctly.
Just as with religious practices, discourses, and commemorations,community service underwent a transformation with the Shi‘i Islamicmovement: during my field research there were an unprecedented num-ber of women volunteering in jam‘iyyas throughout al-Dahiyya. Whenvolunteers who remember the 1960s and ’70s described their histories ofservice, they often began with a phrase like, “Before, there was nothinghere, not a single jam‘iyya, nothing” (’abl, ma ka–n fı– shı– ho–n, walajam‘iyya, wala shı–). Their memories of volunteering before the institu-tionalization of the Islamic movement are testimonies to individual inge-nuity and dedication, rather than organizational structure.
The establishment of networks of jam‘iyyas accompanied the Shi‘imobilization. For many, these jam‘iyyas represented material progressand were crucial to Shi‘i “catching up” to other groups in the country.As Hajjeh Khadija noted: “The local jam‘iyyas are a very modern idea(fikra ktı–r moderne [Fr.]), a very necessary one, and they should havebeen established long ago. But the important thing is that we have ar-rived here now. They [the jam‘iyyas] have a very essential role insociety. . . . There is finally a framework through which we are able tohelp people.” When Hajjeh Khadija uses “modern” here in reference tothe need for Lebanese Shi‘is to “catch-up” to others, she deploys amodernization-oriented discourse of progress based on material develop-ment, a discourse shared by both western and pious Shi‘i ideas about be-ing modern.
The technological modern-ness of the jam‘iyyas was something peoplespent considerable time communicating to me. My first visits tojam‘iyyas always involved tours of computer facilities, statistics offices,archival record departments, medicinal storerooms, classroomsequipped as state-of-the-art science labs—technology in all its forms. My
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guides always linked religion and modernization, almost as though re-sponding to unstated accusations that the two were incompatible. Anadministrator at a Martyrs’ Association hospital told me:
We are trying to reflect Islam and apply it. This hospital is an attempt but ourresources are limited. But as they say, to light a candle is better than to cursein darkness. Hopefully we are able to do something small here, to provide abit of good medical treatment. I say good medical treatment because quality isvery important to us; customer service, marketing, well-trained employees,that is what we are working on, ways to better satisfy the sick. We are hiringeducated people, many of them American University of Beirut graduates, andyes, they work here because they are believers but we do not hire people be-cause they are believers, we hire them because they are specialized. There isanother saying about this, “tie your camel before you go to God.” [He handedme a brochure about the hospital’s technological equipment.] Look at this,you see that we also buy the latest equipment, the latest technology, but weuse it in the proper path to serve people.
This statement asserts the compatibility of Islam with technology, as wellas some of the other qualities associated with western modernity, like ed-ucation and marketing. Yet as this man alludes, material progress wasnot considered sufficient.
Hajjeh Khadija’s use of “modern” above also deploys the pious mod-ern discourse of spiritual progress, as the jam‘iyyas were believed to be aspiritually developed institutional framework for helping others. In-creases in community service were linked to the authentication processand to its emphasis on participation and community betterment.
There are some people who live traditionally; they are still affected greatly bytheir parents. There are others who have learned about religion and live fromreligious motivations, the opposite of traditional motivations. You also havepeople who take these religious motives that are also the motives of civiliza-tion/modernity [al-h. ad. a–ra] and the motives of development [tat.awwur], andthey try to make things better. So they want their country to develop, to nolonger have the problems of poverty, of child labor, so they begin to give im-portance to community work . . .
Here Maliha clearly articulates the connection between spiritual and ma-terial progress. “Authenticated” religious motives are the motives of civ-ilization and development that lead to the pious modern. One of the keypurposes of the jam‘iyyas was to incorporate the poor into this commu-nity. To that end, as we will see, volunteers’ activities focused on boththe material and spiritual “development” of the poor, as well as on theirown spiritual betterment.
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5 Fund-raising activities included selling crafts (silk flower arrangements, baskets, can-dles) and going door-to-door collecting small change. At least one jam‘iyya held all-inclusivepilgrimage trips to Iran as fund-raising events, charging slightly more than cost, so that eachtraveler was both visiting Shi‘i holy sites and contributing to a jam‘iyya—effectively accom-plishing two pious acts simultaneously.
In the first part of this chapter, I sketch the activities of jam‘iyyas andtheir volunteers, and highlight some of their underlying notions aboutpoverty and progress, as they relate to authentication and the piousmodern. Here we see that their religiosity was clearly understood as con-nected to the contemporary world. In the second part I turn to the vol-unteers themselves, to give a sense of what it was that motivated thesewomen to contribute so much of their time and energy to those less for-tunate, returning finally to the model provided by Sayyida Zaynab.Community service in al-Dahiyya was gendered in particular ways thatwill emerge in the subtext of this chapter—that gendering will be takenup directly in chapter 6.
Tackling Poverty and “Backwardness”
Human Links between Poverty and Bureaucracy
Volunteers played an integral role in the day-to-day work, organization,and, to varying extents, administration of many jam‘iyyas in al-Dahiyya.They planned and carried out special events, including fund-raisers,5
trips for poor families, summer camps for orphans, and Ramadan activi-ties like the food distribution center described above. Larger jam‘iyyasthat included schools, orphanages and hospitals counted volunteersamong the staff of those institutions. Many of the paid employees ofjam‘iyyas noted that they considered themselves “part-time volunteers,”as they often worked many more hours than were covered by theirwages.
From among these myriad tasks and responsibilities, the area that isperhaps the most dependent on volunteer labor is that of direct welfareprovision to poor families. This is also the task that best exemplifiesmany of the qualities of community service that are particular to theShi‘i pious modern. While exact methods varied by jam‘iyya scale andscope, many jam‘iyyas in al-Dahiyya, including the SAA, ICEC, andMartyrs’ Association, depended on volunteers to assess families’ needsand provide them with assistance. In short, volunteers provided whatwas viewed as the necessary human link between poor families and thebureaucracy of aid.
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6 7.9 percent of households in al-Dahiyya were female-headed (personal communica-tion, Sayyid Abd-el-Halim Fadlullah, the Consulting Center for Studies and Documenta-tion [CCSD]). These numbers were almost certainly underreported.
7 Accessing accurate statistics about poverty (or anything else) by region in Lebanon wasessentially impossible. The Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs completed a survey in 1996,but unfortunately the Beirut suburbs were considered as a whole, lumping wealthy andpoor neighborhoods together. The UNDP’s 1997 Profile of Sustainable Human Develop-ment in Lebanon summarized the living conditions of the urban poor as overcrowded,with an average living space of less than ten square meters per person (the internationallyaccepted norm is fourteen), with a scarcity of green space, the accumulation of garbagenear homes, a lack of sewer systems or the intermixing of sewerage with water distributionnetworks, and poorly maintained buildings, some of which were damaged during the war.
8 The first figure was cited to me at the CCSD. Mona Fawaz reports the second set of fig-ures, also from the CCSD (1998: 14).
9 While there clearly were high levels of poverty in al-Dahiyya, it is debatable as towhether it was the poorest region in Lebanon, and it was certainly not the only poor area.
tackling poverty
During the (un)civil wars and Israeli invasions and occupation, al-Dahiyya absorbed numerous Shi‘i refugees from the south and fromother regions of Beirut. The suburb is also home to many who were in-jured and/or disabled during the violence, as well as a relatively high per-centage of female-headed households.6 These factors, coupled with thedysfunctional Lebanese economy, have contributed to high rates of ur-ban poverty in al-Dahiyya, along with its accompanying symptoms.7 Av-erage annual household income in the area was estimated in 1999 at US$430, while another report from 1997 cites US $410 as the per capita in-come, as compared with Lebanon’s average of US $2,970.8
We have a family with seven children. The husband works. He makes 500,000lira [$333] a month. The rent is 250,000 [$167]. The school bus is 100,000[$67]. We pay the children’s school registration. But we have to just hope thatthey can continue living like this. How is that possible? No one helps them,because they are not orphans. And the father works, but how much can hissalary do with seven children? The mother works too, but she is sick. Andthere are so few organizations to help these people. And there are so so manyof them. (Hajjeh Huda)
Volunteers were highly cognizant of al-Dahiyya as materially “behind”the rest of Lebanon, and understood their work as part of the perpetual“catching up” confronting Lebanese Shi‘is. This sense of collective Shi‘ideprivation resonated with their notion of Shi‘i history as one of perse-cution and oppression. It was also fueled by the sheer visibility ofpoverty itself. There was little economic segregation in al-Dahiyya; poorand wealthy resided in the same buildings and belonged to the same ex-tended families.9
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10 Hizbullah is often accused of creating a “state within a state” in al-Dahiyya by as-suming responsibilities perceived to belong to the central government (e.g., garbage col-lection). The party’s response is that when the government provides in its place, it willcease its services. Indeed, when garbage collection was subcontracted to the Sukleen com-pany, Hizbullah lessened its services, though according to Harik (2004), it still carriesthree hundred tons of garbage out of the area daily.
All this was exacerbated by Lebanon’s general lack of government ser-vices and failing economy—factors many Lebanese take for granted asforming the backdrop for life’s struggles. In some al-Dahiyya neighbor-hoods, this included lack of clean water and electricity, as well as prob-lems such as unemployment, overpopulation, and unsafe buildings.Jam‘iyyas were conscious that they were working to fill these lacunae,and volunteers frequently complained, “If there were only a govern-ment” (iza bas ka–n f ı– dawleh), much of the poverty and systemic and in-frastructural disrepair would be alleviated.10
To tackle urban poverty, some jam‘iyyas maintained programs thatprovided basic needs for families, including staple foods (e.g., flour,sugar, rice), clothing and shoes, and essential household items like blan-kets, gas for the stove, and perhaps a refrigerator. These programs oftenprovided health assistance as well, by subsidizing medication costs andworking with local doctors to provide low-cost medical attention. Aboveall, education was prioritized. For example, while I was in Beirut, theSAA instituted an ongoing campaign to end child labor by providingpublic school fees.
“visiting” as method
The key to all these welfare provision programs is the personal contactbetween volunteers and poor families. When a family came to ajam‘iyya’s attention—whether through the initiative of a family memberor a volunteer—the jam‘iyya first assessed the family’s “situation”(wad.a‘). At the SAA, for example, two volunteers would visit the family,recording their observations and interviewing the woman of the house-hold, using a standard survey. They also talked with neighbors and/orrelatives to cross-check and verify information. The information gath-ered was used to determine whether and what sort of aid the familyqualified to receive. Similar processes were standard at all the jam‘iyyas Ivisited.
After a jam‘iyya “adopted” a family, regular visits continued. Gener-ally, volunteers were assigned specific families, which then becametheir responsibility. During visits, they distributed money, food, andclothing; monitored economic, social, and health changes; facilitated ac-cess to health care or employment (often using personal networks); and
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11 No doubt the intensity of these relationships was perceived differently by and had dif-ferent effects on the recipient families; however, in this study I focus solely on the perspec-tive of the volunteers.
conducted taw‘iyya, a combination of education and consciousness-raising, further discussed below. In essence, they functioned as liaisonsbetween these families and the material and cultural resources managedand distributed by the jam‘iyyas.
Through this continual contact, volunteers frequently built intensepersonal relationships with “their” families: “In our work here, you enterinto households, you get involved with people, you live their lives andtheir hardships. Other work is outside the home, at centers for refugeesor in schools. Here at the ICEC, we work directly with families, we visitthem continuously. We feel that this work has more spirit (ru–h. ) throughour interaction with them.”
As a volunteer began to feel that she was a part of the families she as-sisted, the emotional distance between them shrank, to the extent thatvolunteers sometimes began to cry when describing the situation of oneof “their” families or while negotiating extra jam‘iyya resources for aparticular case. The intensity of these ties emerged in their use of thepossessive to refer to these relationships: “I have four small orphans,” “Ihave seven families.” While on the one hand, these emotional ties facili-tated compassionate service provision, on the other, taken to an extreme,such compassion could interfere with a volunteer’s personal life.11 In acommunity where anonymity was a scarce luxury, women from poorfamilies sometimes began to reciprocate visits in order to ask volunteersfor aid. When jam‘iyya resources were not available or when a family in-evitably needed more, volunteers found themselves giving more andmore of their time and money. Hajjeh Umm Muhammad at the ICECconfided that she had twenty families who visited her at her home,“They come to me for everything, for any problem. If a woman is sickand needs to go to the hospital, I take her. If she needs to take a child tothe hospital, she leaves her other children with me.”
During a volunteers’ training seminar at the SAA, Dalal cautioned usto monitor our emotional reactions:
You have to be careful to not allow this work to take over your lives. You can-not just put your hand in your pocket each time someone asks and hand outmoney. It is better, in the long run, to study the case and try to help in a waythat solves the larger situation, and in a way that does not affect your entirelife. Hajjeh [Huda] has people at her door at 6 a.m. on most mornings. Thatshould not have to happen.
Yet Dalal was not advocating anonymous relationships between volunteers
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or jam‘iyyas and families, she was simply advising women to set limits tothe personal relationships they cultivated with “their” families. On an-other occasion, she expressed her fear that face-to-face service provisionwas fading in the area, because the growing numbers of poor whoneeded assistance precluded the formation of relationships with everyfamily. In her words: “This is unfortunate, because I am afraid it will sig-nify a lessening in concern for human dignity.”
“a more human and islamic” approach
The tension between a belief in the importance of human relationshipsand the need to maintain boundaries between volunteers and the poor isrelated to a larger tension that exists between spiritual and materialprogress in relation to community service. A concern for the preserva-tion of human dignity—what one administrator called “the struggle tomaintain a more human and Islamic” approach to community welfare inthe face of a burgeoning bureaucracy—moved many jam‘iyyas to en-courage the cultivation of these direct personal relationships betweenvolunteers and recipient families. When volunteers talked about enteringfamilies’ homes as though they belonged, they were drawing on under-standings of kin relationships. Because they represented the family’sprovider, volunteers were parental, even paternal figures. There were,however, limits to this analogous relationship, as Dalal noted above, inthe limits on demands that poor families could acceptably place on vol-unteers.
Kinship was also the idiom through which relationships among volun-teers and employees within jam‘iyyas worked, with women referred toas “sisters” and men as “brothers.” These terms indexed their commonfaith and goals, while also establishing an environment where interac-tions between women and men could take place “appropriately.” Thiskinship framework highlighted the difference between the impersonalbureaucracy—pictured as consisting of isolated individualized selves—that pious Shi‘is associated with western notions of the modern, andtheir own emphasis on modern selves as embedded in social relation-ships. This distinction was important to jam‘iyyas, though it also in-volved a continuous struggle.
Larger jam‘iyyas in particular were constantly negotiating the tensionbetween face-to-face relationships and an anonymous public. On the onehand, jam‘iyyas highlighted their extensive bureaucratic structures as ev-idence of their “modern” efficiency and organization, deploying westerndiscourses of modernization. On a practical level, larger organizationalstructures also allowed jam‘iyyas to help more people. Yet on the otherhand, beliefs about the “human” nature of “authentically Islamic” char-ity emphasized social relations over bureaucracy. Providing assistance
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12 While for obvious political reasons these jam‘iyyas did not have any direct financiallinks to the U.S.-dominated INGO funding system, they maintained multiple transnationalties to resources, both within and outside the Muslim world.
through face-to-face relationships allowed jam‘iyyas to nurture histori-cal links to notions of social welfare rooted in Islam, even as their largerstructures and networks reflected their positions in the professionalizingworld of international NGOs.12 In this sense, kinlike emotional ties be-tween volunteers and recipient families provided the link that made itpossible for jam‘iyyas to position themselves—and be understood byothers—as working within authentication, in keeping with the piousmodern.
The tense space where these multiple notions of the modern were de-ployed, pitting authentication against efficiency, came to a head in thewidespread debates among jam‘iyyas over how to best serve the largenumbers of orphans in al-Dahiyya and Lebanon. Pious Shi‘is defined anychild who had lost a parent as an orphan, although most orphans inLebanon had lost their fathers. Even in those cases where an orphan hasneither mother nor other extended family, adoption is not permissible inIslam. What was at issue in the community was whether it was more ap-propriate to establish orphanage-like institutions and boarding schoolsor to support orphans in their mothers’ or relatives’ homes throughorphan-sponsorship programs.
Most jam‘iyyas in al-Dahiyya preferred to support orphans in theirhome environments. Al-Mabarrat was the sole exception to this, withover three thousand orphans residing in their orphanages. Yet even al-Mabarrat’s orphans were not fully detached from their families; theywent home on weekends and holidays and during summer, essentiallywhenever school was not in session.
Strong feelings existed on both sides of this debate. Some volunteersfelt that in order to support orphans according to authenticated Islam, itwas necessary to keep them with their mothers whenever possible. TheICEC was supporting over four thousand orphans in their homesthrough orphan-sponsorship. This was the result of a conscious decision,made when the jam‘iyya was founded, not to establish orphanages, so asto uphold the sharı–‘a.
The other perspective was articulated by Hajjeh Khadija, whoworked, along with her husband, at an al-Mabarrat orphanage. Advo-cates of orphanages repeatedly said that poor orphans often could not beappropriately raised by their relatives, and that volunteers visitinghouseholds was not enough to break the cycle of poverty. As HajjehKhadija put it, “The worst thing is what these children return home to onthe weekends; their mothers are poor but they are often also ignorant,
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13 Some people used tabaqa—often translated as “class”—to indicate these categories.
and it is a terrible combination.” She explained that al-Mabarrat heldfrequent workshops for mothers about hygiene, health and other issues,but that it was not enough. Rather than take on the task of reformingwhole families, they attempted to break the “poverty cycle” with thenew generation.
This concern with systemic poverty, and with the relationship betweenpoverty and ignorance, was typical among volunteers. In the next sec-tion, I explore these issues, along with their importance to local under-standings of development and progress. In these ideas about poverty, wewill see another dimension of the uneasy and ever-negotiated relation-ship between the spiritual and the material in the realm of communityservice.
Developing the Poor
defining status
In order to understand how volunteers viewed the families they as-sisted, it is first necessary to sketch an outline of social hierarchies in al-Dahiyya, as understood by pious Shi‘is. Volunteers tended to identifythemselves and one another as vaguely “middle class” though theyrarely spoke about anyone in class terms, using ‘a–dı–, “normal” or “ordi-nary,” instead. My attempts to unravel what “ordinary” meant wereusually met with puzzlement. On the surface, people made judgmentsbased on others’ homes—how fashionable their wallpaper, how newtheir curtains, how ornate their décor—and clothing (again with regardto fashion and fabric). Generally speaking, from the perspective of vol-unteers, there were three broad socioeconomic categories in their com-munity.13
There were the wealthy, a very small category of people who eitherhad “old money,” dating from before the wars, or—as was usually as-sumed—were from among the Lebanese nouveaux riches who hadmade their fortunes since the 1960s through work and investment in theGulf States, North America, or West Africa or through various black-market wartime economic activities. Wealthy women tended to patron-ize particular jam‘iyyas with their financial contributions—religioustaxes (huqu–q shar‘iyya) and charity donations—but rarely joined in theon-the-ground work. Many jam‘iyyas cultivated relationships withwealthy donors through visits and fund-raisers, like the ift.a
–r in the open-ing of this chapter.
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14 Harris notes the “increased economic weight” of Shi‘is in Lebanon, much of which isdue to “entrepreneurial endeavors in West Africa, North America, and the Gulf oil states”(1997: 120).
Later in the evening, a neighbor joined us, along with a visitor she was enter-taining. The visitor, a local woman who lived in Dubai, was clearly verywealthy, literally “dripping with jewels.” As we continued chatting about ourwork at the Center, she complained that because she lives in the Gulf, “all thejam‘iyyas have forgotten me”—alluding to how she had not received any ift.a
–rinvitations that year. She was immediately invited to the jam‘iyya’s upcomingfund-raiser, and urged to come and tour the Center. (fieldnotes, December 10,2000)
Then there were the “ordinary”—that middle category into whichevery volunteer I asked placed herself. The Lebanese middle-class hasbeen shrinking steadily in recent decades, as war and economy have pre-cipitated the emigration of educated professionals and young people. Itis arguable, however, that Shi‘i Lebanese are an exception to this, astheir relatively late urbanization, coupled with investments in WestAfrica, has contributed to an urban Shi‘i “middle” or “professional”class that did not exist in the same way several decades ago.14 In al-Dahiyya, this catchall group included those with college or professionaldegrees, especially in younger generations, and those who owned localbusinesses. These families were able to afford at least one car, thoughthese ranged from an old Toyota to a new 500 series BMW; they refur-nished their multi-room, but not lavish, apartments periodically, thoughthey might travel to Syria to find cheaper deals on fabrics; their childrenattended universities, again ranging from the public Lebanese Universityto the very expensive American University of Beirut; and, crucially, theymade up the vast majority of jam‘iyya volunteers, some of whom weredistinguishable from the wealthy only by the lack of prominent designerlabels on their silk scarves.
Here it is crucial to note that, particularly among the pious, modestywas highly valued. As a result, many volunteers, especially those whowere motivated by religious duty, lived modestly and were generous withtheir wealth. Even if others classified a woman as wealthy, she may nothave identified as such, working instead to set herself apart from theLebanese elite, and especially from the attitudes and values ascribed tothem, including materialism, superficiality, and “wasting time.”
While I chatted with Alia at the SAA today, two other volunteers left lookingunusually dressed up. Alia rolled her eyes, “They’re going to do a [fund-raising] ‘visit’ [ziya–ra] with a woman who just went on the h. ajj for the first
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15 Here I follow Weber’s (1946) understanding of status as involving “social estimationof honor” and the specifics of a person’s lifestyle.
16 See also White’s (2002) discussion of a new Islamist elite in Turkey.
time. You know, she’ll be in the spirit of giving.” I asked her why she wasn’tgoing with them. “Oof, I’ve been trying to stop doing that work, I hate thatpart of society; they are so empty, and they only talk about each other, orabout their appearances—it’s all about appearances. Even though I used tolive in that society, I would never want to again, I couldn’t do it. I much prefervisiting the poor families; even if they don’t have a place for me to sit, I feelmuch more comfortable with them.”
For volunteers, status had to do with much more than wealth,15 acomplexity underscored by their tendency to describe themselves as “or-dinary.” Piety, neighborhood of residence, family reputation, and politi-cal position all converged with socioeconomic situation to form under-standings of status. A woman’s social status could differ from that of herhusband if her family was the more prominent one. In trying to graspthese differences, I once asked two volunteers to compare two otherwomen we all knew. Both were actively involved in jam‘iyyas on an ad-ministrative and financial level. One was clearly wealthier than the other,and displayed her wealth more blatantly in her dress and manner. Yetboth people I had cornered attributed higher status to the other woman,citing her reputation as pious and “from a good family,” as well as herhusband’s political status.
Public piety—a visible commitment to “authenticated” Islam—wasperhaps the most important element in social status in the community.16
The way this association has contributed to new social norms for piousShi‘i women will be taken up further in the next chapter. Here I want toconsider how the relationship between public piety and status impingedon volunteers’ attitudes toward the poor families they assisted. Volun-teers generally considered themselves more pious than the poor. But theybelieved that there exists a causal relationship between spiritual ignorance(and ignorance in general) and poverty. To develop the community—andto fulfill the ultimate goal of bringing the poor into the pious modern—one had to focus on both the material and the spiritual, as equally neces-sary to progress.
TAKHALLUF WA TAW‘IYYA, backwardness and consciousness-raising
The third category—the poor, or the m‘at.ar (unfortunate)—includedanyone who needed or might need the assistance of the jam‘iyyas. Thiswas perceived to be the majority of the population, those living day-to-day, month-to-month. These were households where the men, if they
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17 In summer 2001, someone donated a bright multiroom apartment to this familythrough a jam‘iyya.
were alive and present, were un- or underemployed, as well as women-headed households, elderly couples whose children could not supportthem, and those that had been hit especially hard by the economic reces-sion.
Later, I walked over to the Abbas’s house to meet eleven-year-old Hadya, whoI begin tutoring next week, and her mother, whose husband left just after theyoungest of their four children was born. They live in a small room on theground floor of a building where the mother is the janitor/caretaker. The roomwas dark, and the electricity in the building was off. A couch filled one wall,closets lined a second, and a table and two broken televisions a third. Thefourth wall held the door and the entrance to a tiny kitchenette/bathroom.Hard to believe that five people live in this tiny space during weekends, andthree during the week, when the youngest two children board at an al-Mabarrat orphanage.17 (fieldnotes, March 11, 2000)
The Abbas family was reputed in the jam‘iyyas to be among the“good” poor families. The mother was known for her honesty, and fortaking only what her children needed, and she and her daughters wereall muh.ajjaba and assumed to be relatively pious. This was not the casefor all poor families, some of which were seen as “working the system.”
Amaney: Do you remember that family who removed all their furniture so wewould think they were very poor? I cannot believe it but it happens.That’s why we always ask the neighbors.
Alia: It all comes from takhalluf, this is why we need to do taw‘iyya, so thesefamilies don’t become dependent on us. This is a problem. We try to helpthem find work, but some women won’t work outside the home; they saytheir husbands don’t let them.
Amaney: All the lying the families sometimes do, it’s a sickness in them, fromthe poverty. But it helps us harden our hearts.
Alia: But there are also people who have so much honor, they won’t ask forhelp. If you offer them something, they will say that there is someone elsewho needs it more. These people make you want to help them evenmore.
Amaney: Yes, like the Abbas family, they are one of the poorest families wehave, and the mother is one of the most honest people I have ever seen.
Alia: You know, she came to the office once and asked for money to buy amedicinal shot for her daughter, and when Dalal asked her how much itcost, she said 3,000 lira, so Dalal gave her a 5,000, and she said, “I’m
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18 This is a reversal of both the notion in Weber’s discussion of the Protestant ethic thatmaterial prosperity indicates spiritual status, and the assumptions of development theory(discussed in Karp 2002) that underdevelopment is caused by moral “qualities.”
sorry but I don’t have the 2,000 with me to give you change.” She didn’twant to take more money than she needed, though God knows she couldhave used the change to buy bread.
Alia and Amaney’s conversation highlights two key concepts in volun-teers’ approach to poverty: takhalluf, or “backwardness” and taw‘iyya,or consciousness-raising education. Similar conversations were commonat jam‘iyyas, as volunteers exchanged anecdotes over cups of strong cof-fee. At first listen, their tales seemed to highlight the worst of humanqualities, and the often humorous means to which people resorted in or-der to manipulate jam‘iyyas for personal gain. Yet in every venting ses-sion, a voice eventually chimed in to defend the poor: “But it’s not every-one, not even the majority.” Volunteers appreciated the pride and honorthey witnessed in some of “their” families. They remembered whichpoor women contributed time to jam‘iyya activities. And they noticedwho wore the h.ija
–b or otherwise indicated her piety.Honesty, pride, and piety are moral qualities; poor people who
demonstrated them were viewed as having moved beyond their materialconditions. This link between ignorance—spiritual or otherwise—andpoverty is not about affluence indicating or contributing to piety. Rather,it is about knowledge, and an assumption that poverty limits one’s ac-cess to accurate religious and other knowledge and education. In thisway, poverty was believed to result in ignorance (jahl), which then led totakhalluf.18
Poverty is giving birth to ignorance. Imam Ali, peace be upon him, said, “lawka–n al-fuqr rajulan, faqataltuhu bisayfı–” [if poverty were a man, I would killhim with my sword]. Because poverty is behind all problems, it is the root ofilliteracy, ignorance, stealing, crime, depravity. Because a poor person, whenhe goes from day to day like this, no matter what values he has, despite him-self, he will be forced to go against those values, he will walk on the road thatleads to evil. . . . I think if these people we help did not have this assistance,perhaps one of them would become a criminal, who knows? We fill his stom-ach so that he will be able to think, to learn, to feel that he is able to be a hu-man being. So he will be able to grow up and see himself as a useful memberof society. (Hajjeh Khadija)
The underlying premise of much of the jam‘iyyas’ work was that com-munity progress required “developing” the poor. Sighs of “oof, shu– ha-takhalluf” (oh, what is this backwardness) reflected volunteers’ tendency
Community Commitment • 183
to view poor Shi‘is as representative of how “we Shi‘is are not as mod-ern” as others. More than an internalization of stereotypes and condi-tions, here stereotypes are displaced onto particular segments of Shi‘i so-ciety, so that the (linked) material and spiritual backwardness of thepoor was “holding the Shi‘a back.” By developing the poor, volunteerscould work toward the collective progress of Shi‘i Lebanese, includingthemselves.
A seemingly all-encompassing range of social problems fell under therubric of “takhalluf.” Illiteracy, ignorance about hygiene, and pettycrime were due to and evidence of “takhalluf.” A man who abandonedhis wife and eight children without any financial support represented“takhalluf.” And a woman who left her chicken pox–infected daughterat an orphanage’s door in the freezing cold because her new husbandhad threatened to kill the child to protect his own children from the ill-ness demonstrated (a double dose of) “takhalluf.”
One of the largest problems the jam‘iyyas faced was that of inadver-tently creating takhalluf in the form of dependency, in other words, ofcreating a situation where poor people became entirely dependent onjam‘iyyas for support. As one administrator put it, with a sigh: “If theirtoilet floods, they come here.” Or, “If a man knows we will care for hischildren, he will be more likely to leave them.” This concern with depen-dency distinguished the jam‘iyya model of community service from thatof “traditional” Islamic charity. Underlying charity is a notion that thepoor are a permanent part of society who should be supported by thewealthy. In the pious modern conceptualization of community service,the poor hinder community progress and therefore must be “devel-oped.” Dependency means failure, of both development and progress.
To avoid such failure, the jam‘iyyas consciously fostered indepen-dence, by trying to find ways for people to eventually support them-selves. They sought employment for at least one member of each family,ran day-care centers to facilitate women’s work, and provided small“business” loans to help women enter the informal economy.
Most of all, however, the jam‘iyyas confronted takhalluf in all its formsthrough taw‘iyya. The Arabic root for taw‘iyya is wa/‘a/ya, a root with arange of meaning that includes containing, remembering, knowing, cau-tioning, heeding, and being aware, awake, or conscious. A verbal nounfrom this root, taw‘iyya is the act of calling attention to something, warn-ing someone, or making someone conscious of something—essentially,the act of causing consciousness. Volunteers used the term liberally, insome contexts “education” is the perfect translation, while in others“consciousness-raising” is more appropriate. For the sake of simplicity, Iuse the term mainly in Arabic, allowing context to establish its positionalong the spectrum of its meaning.
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19 Al-Ahd/Al-Intiqa–d, March 29, 2002.20 Indeed, in order to become part of the pious modern, poor people’s sense of person-
hood had to change—paralleling Karp’s (2002) observation that in order to become devel-oped, poor people must become “new kinds of persons” (2002: 90).
The ultimate goal of taw‘iyya was to cultivate people who weremuthaqqaf, which literally means “educated” or “cultured.” Muthaqqafdoes not necessarily have religious overtones, and is sometimes trans-lated as “intellectual”—with a distinct leaning toward philosophy overthe arts. However, in the context of the Shi‘i pious modern, to bemuthaqqaf carried a particularly Islamic flavor. Consider the variety ofofferings on the pages of the “Culture” (thaqa–fa) section of Hizbullah’sweekly newspaper: The August 3, 2001 issue includes a critique of thegovernment for the lack of electricity during the summer heat, an analy-sis of the treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Arab cinema, an articleon a prominent community figure, and an excerpt from Khomeini’s bookPatience. In an issue published during Ashura, these pages include threepieces about different aspects of Ashura’s history and meaning, ashaykh’s obituary, and an article analyzing al-taqwa–.19
For pious Shi‘is, to be muthaqqaf was to be literate, well-spoken, andwell-mannered, with clear knowledge of “authenticated” Islam, prefer-ably implemented in practice. In volunteers’ usage, it was also to be so-cially aware and responsible. In a seminar at a jam‘iyya, a respected lo-cal principal with a Ph.D. in sociology lectured on the importance ofalways being critical of the social environment in order to constantlycontribute to its progress and improvement. He argued that this criticalability improves as a person becomes more muthaqqaf. Being muthaqqafmeant contributing to the pious modern.
Volunteers were well aware that creating people who were muthaqqafis a goal with many steps.20 Taw‘iyya encompassed myriad topics rang-ing from “proper” religious practice to how to identify tuberculosis.Jam‘iyyas held workshops for “their” families, through which they pro-vided what one volunteer called “modern/new/recent theories on how toraise children and on health and social topics” (nazariyya–t hadı–tha ‘ankı–f yirabbu– il-awla–d w ‘an mawadi‘ s.ah. iyyeh w ijtima–‘iyyeh). As it aimedtoward progress, taw‘iyya drew on multiple notions of modern-ness in-cluding “authenticated” religious and contemporary scientific bodies ofknowledge.
The “visiting method” was particularly conducive to effective taw‘iyya,especially as people often could not or would not attend workshops reg-ularly. By constantly visiting families, volunteers were able to graduallyintroduce new ideas into households, and track perceived improvements.Volunteers also incorporated taw‘iyya into special events held for poorfamilies, mawlids, trips, and organized entertainment.
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With the spiritual a necessary element of progress, some taw‘iyya wasexplicitly religious. While most jam‘iyyas assisted women regardless ofwhether or not they were muh.ajjaba, volunteers often included educa-tion about the h.ija
–b in their taw‘iyya.
I have two orphans, one is thirteen and one fifteen; they used to dress like you,pants and a sweater. So I kept after them, telling them about shar‘ı– clothes andhow neat they look, and how much easier they are to wear, and how they aremore comfortable. And just the other day I went, and they asked to wearshar‘ı– clothes. Their mother has been trying to convince them of this for Idon’t know how long, “please wear shar‘ı–, please wear shar‘ı–” and theyweren’t convinced, but maybe because it was from me, and they see me as afriend, they were convinced. (Tamara, from the ICEC)
Volunteers viewed the close relationships they cultivated with poor fam-ilies as important for facilitating taw‘iyya. At the most basic level, theyconducted taw‘iyya by example: “If you do something right in front ofthem, they begin to want to do that. If you do something wrong, thenthey will copy that instead.”
Because volunteers were seen as role models, they themselves had to bemuthaqqaf. Taw‘iyya was not only considered necessary for the poor, butit was considered fundamental training for volunteers as well. I oftenheard an experienced volunteer say, “In order to do taw‘iyya for others, aperson should first do taw‘iyya for herself.” Care was taken by jam‘iyyasto ensure that their volunteers were well trained and equipped to carryout their work objectively and compassionately. Taw‘iyya for volunteersincluded training that was “modern” in multiple valences, in order toprepare them for the two-pronged approach to building progress. At afour-week training seminar for volunteers at the SAA in which I partici-pated, sessions were held on a range of topics including how to identifyserious illnesses, children’s rights, interviewing methods and skills forneeds assessment, report writing, and religious values and teachings.
Lessons on Islam served not only to ensure that volunteers taughtpoor women authenticated Islam correctly, but also to ensure that theyunderstood the relationship between Islam and community service.Dealing with takhalluf all day long frequently taxed volunteers’ pa-tience. The ability to maintain one’s patience, and to serve others withcompassion and without being patronizing was understood to be a giftfrom God, a capacity that could—and should—be developed as part ofone’s personal spiritual progress.
Self-confidence and public-speaking skills are other such capacities.Speaking about a sister volunteer, one woman noted: “This work helpsyou to be more courageous. When Hajjeh Suad first joined us, she wasshy and limited in her interactions with people. But slowly, she adaptedand learned, and now she talks more and blushes less. She has much
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21 Taw‘iyya is dependent on a notion of self that is responsible to God and to others; seeBrenner’s discussion of a new Islamic “awareness” where women’s “new subjectivity” wasone that required bearing responsibility for one’s actions before God (1996: 684).
22 This is essentially one of the main ideas of Su–rat al-Ma–‘u–n.
more courage than she had at first.” Through taw‘iyya, participation incommunity service work developed volunteers’ own capacities as indi-viduals, “strengthening” their “personalities and consciousness.” Yetthis self-development was about more than personal growth. Here wesee the primacy of the idea that a pious modern self is socially embeddedand relational, where self-development is not a private act, but onewhere “serving others” is its ultimate purpose.21
Finally, taw‘iyya ensured that women were volunteering for the rightreasons. Hajjeh Amal, a highly respected instructor who many looked toas a model of piety, brought our classroom at the SAA training seminarto a sudden hush one afternoon when she asserted that it was possibleprayer might not be accepted by God. She then explained that in orderfor prayer to be acceptable (maqbu–la) to God, a person must also applythe authentic principles of religion in her life by helping others “in theservice of God.” The handout she had prepared for the session read:
Al-multazimu–n bi-l-t.uqu–s al-dı–niyya al-ta–rikı–n li-khidmat al-na–s ’imma– ghayrmultafitı–n li-h. aqı–qat al-dı–n wa-’imma– mukadhdhibı–n bihi f ı– qara–rat an-fusihim.[People who are committed to religious practices/rituals but neglect to serveothers are either not attentive to the truth of religion or are denying it in theirdecisions.]22
The second part of this chapter is devoted to unpacking this “authentic”reason for serving others and exploring some of the “other” reasonswomen highlighted when talking about their community service activi-ties. Along the way, we will meet a few of the volunteers and hear someof their stories.
Serving the Community, Serving God
Beginnings
Women of all ages participated actively in community service; mothersbrought their daughters to jam‘iyyas, and friends brought their neigh-bors. At the SAA, for example, grandmothers in their fifties joinedyounger mothers and single, widowed, or divorced women of all ages.The only lacunae were full-time university students and those with sev-eral young children.
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23 Recruitment through existing social networks worked in part through pressures ofmoral obligation, as will be discussed in the next chapter. But it also, importantly, guaran-teed that a woman would know with whom she would be associating, ensuring physicaland social “safety” (cf. White 1996).
24 My interviews with Hajjeh Zahra took place in a mix of English and Arabic. Al-though she was among the most educated of my interlocutors, the sentiments and experi-ences she described were echoed by many volunteers of her generation.
Women’s community service histories varied by generation. Manyolder volunteers, like Hajjeh Umm Ali, in her fifties, expressed feelinga longstanding affinity for volunteering, that it was in their “nature” andstemmed from their “love for giving.” Their volunteering often predatedthe jam‘iyyas, and involved taking initiative, whether on their own orwith others. Slightly younger women, particularly those who identifiedwith the vanguard of Lebanese Shi‘i mobilization—like Hajjeh UmmHadi and Hajjeh Khadija, both in their mid-forties—frequently tracedtheir participation to Islamic activist university groups. They often beganvolunteering as they became religiously committed, as an extension oftheir iltiza–m. Those in their late teens and early twenties (like Noor andMaliha) had the opportunity to attend the new Islamic schools in thearea, which facilitated their volunteerism through school projects, forexample, Ramadan food drives similar to Thanksgiving food drives inU.S. high schools. These young women were raised in a radically differ-ent environment, one where jam‘iyyas were prevalent and provided myr-iad opportunities for community service. Their generation is also thefirst to come to adulthood after the Lebanese wars.
No matter when a woman began volunteering, she was usually intro-duced to a jam‘iyya through other volunteers, usually friends or relativeswho brought her along to a fund-raiser or activity, like the Ramadan Cen-ter described at the opening of this chapter. A high school teacher whowas active in one jam‘iyya inspired several of her students to join. Fewwomen were recruited by acquaintances or women they did not know.23
No matter what the initial inspiration, once a volunteer began to engageactively in community work, it usually became an integral part of her lifeand identity. Her commitment to her work was reinforced by a constantand graphic confrontation with the immediacy of poverty in al-Dahiyya.
Hajjeh Zahra’s story epitomizes many of the various motivations andfactors prompting women’s community service activities.
hajjeh zahra’s story
I began community service in secondary school in the late seventies. We had acommunity service club at school, and we were able to use and develop manyof our own ideas for service through it.24
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One of these club activities involved working with Save the Childrenin a rural village in the Beqaa Valley. Students implemented educa-tional programs, painted public buildings, and planned activities for vil-lage children. This clearly made an indelible impression on HajjehZahra, as it was the first time she had encountered such poverty andisolation:
I remember one time, we took a film to the kids, and there was in this film ascene of the sea, and the children asked “What’s that? What’s that?” That wasthe first time in my life that I realized that not everyone knows the sea. I wasso so surprised, and shocked really! I kept saying to myself, is it possible thatthere are people who don’t know the sea?
Soon after, war and the first Israeli invasion catalyzed Hajjeh Zahra,and solidified her commitment to service:
This sense that I wanted to help people, that I had to do something, it reallybegan to be strong with the civil war. When the war started, we were living upon the mountain above Beirut; it was a very strategic location, from there wecould see everywhere. So from up there I watched Beirut burn and burn andburn. It was a shock to just see Beirut burning without being able to do any-thing. I remember that I just wished that I could put it all in my heart, but Iwas too young, I was not allowed to do anything at that time.
The [Israeli] invasion of 1978 was a huge shock for me. My family is fromthe south originally, though we are now all from Beirut; my grandfathermoved to Beirut. But when people in my family die, they are buried in thesouth. We go home to the south at death. We go there a lot.
With the invasion, hundreds of Lebanese and some Palestinians came toBeirut. And one of the buildings where the refugees were was at my school,because there were no boarders then because of the situation, so we convincedthe administration to open the building for refugees. And we worked withthem.
Eventually the refugees were removed from the school, but HajjehZahra continued to work with them through the Red Cross andUNICEF, teaching literacy and vaccinating children:
Wherever I was needed, I would do anything as long as it helped people. Myparents did not like to let me go very far on my own; you know, it was war-time, but I went anyway, and they didn’t really know where I was much of thetime. They knew that I was active, but they didn’t know how much or how farI went.
After graduating from high school, Hajjeh Zahra attended the Ameri-can University of Beirut (AUB). Her volunteerism shifted to accommodate
Community Commitment • 189
25 This is Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlullah’s brother.
her studies. On campus, she worked on students rights issues. When Is-rael invaded again in 1982, placing Beirut under siege, many who couldfled the city. But Hajjeh Zahra remained:
The situation was unbelievable, terrible, and there were so few of us helping.We had to provide food and water for so many families. People were eatingthings it is unthinkable to eat. The AUB hospital was the only one functioningduring the siege, and it was understaffed, so even with no medical training Iwould go and help there also.
Because she remained in Beirut, Hajjeh Zahra became an eyewitnessto the death and horror of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp mas-sacres. She was in one of the first Red Cross convoys to enter the campsin the aftermath. For two weeks she buried bodies, treated the wounded,translated survivor testimonies, and filed missing person reports for thehundreds who had been “disappeared.”
Afterwards, the strain prompted her to focus solely on her studies andwork for several years. It was during this time that she joined the newlyorganizing Islamic movement on campus. She became religiously com-mitted and chose to wear the h.ija
–b, a decision which set her apart fromher less religious family.
Then in 1987 I decided to go on the h. ajj, and there I met the general managerof al-Mabarrat, but I didn’t know who he was at the time. He [SayyidMuhammad Baqir Fadlullah]25 was the guide for my group, and we spoke alot, and I was very, very impressed by him. Very, very impressed with his hu-manity and how muthaqqaf he was, he was so full of information. I said tomyself, “How is it that someone so religious has these manners, everythingabout him is so cultured, yet he is so religious.”
At the end of the h.ajj, they exchanged cards, and she learned that hewas both with al-Mabarrat and a chemistry professor at LebaneseUniversity. She was even more impressed by what she perceived as aduality in harmony within him, the coexistence of education withpiety.
One month later I received a phone call from him, and he invited me to cometo al-Mabarrat; it was only the orphanage in Khaldeh then. So two or three ofus went and we said, this will be our project. So we began volunteering. Thefirst thing we did was establish the same activity program that I had started inmy high school program with the orphans. Eventually this led to the establish-ment of a women’s committee for al-Mabarrat.
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Later, in 1991, the director of al-Mabarrat contacted HajjehZahra again, this time asking her to help them open a school, a movethat would entail leaving a lucrative career for a field she knew littleabout.
And I said, “I know nothing about schools.” And then they told me, “SayyidMuhammad Husayn wants this.” And the Sayyid himself told me that my ex-perience and personality would help me. So I decided to try it for a year, andthen if I was going to stay, I would go and get my master’s degree in educationand do this properly.
When I interviewed her, Hajjeh Zahra had an M.A. in education fromAUB and was the principal of an al-Mabarrat school, one of the largestand most successful Islamic schools in al-Dahiyya.
I realized that the Sayyid had a point; taklı–f ila–hi [a responsibility given byGod], you know, if God gives you a gift, you have the responsibility to use it,and to use it well, to not let it be wasted. I really feel now that it was my fatesomehow to go to h. ajj when I met Sayyid Muhammad Bakir. I never wouldhave been here doing this otherwise; it all came from that fateful meeting. Heis the person who really convinced me to quit my work. He said, “They don’tneed you; you won’t be a social change agent there,” which might not be a bigdeal for everyone, but for me, for a person who feels God’s existence andknows life as eternal, it is a big deal. I know that I will always exist, but just ina different state. Knowing this makes you think differently, to have differentcriteria for life, to live differently and make decisions on a different scale, be-cause you know those decisions are with you forever, and affect more thanthis state right now. It was a very hard decision to leave a prestigious, well-salaried job where I worked only a few hours a day, to quit that to go towhere? An unknown, a mystery, a different atmosphere, a different socialenvironment.
When I later asked her what kept her going through her long days, shereplied:
I have a sense of commitment towards al-‘amal al-sa–lih. [good works], becauseif a person believes in constant existence, you have to prepare for eternity. Totell you the truth, there are many other options for good work, options withless stress, but here there is need, and the Sayyid says, “When God gives youa skill, a potential, that is a trust [ama–na], and he will ask you later howyou have used that trust. Can you tell God that you wasted part of it? Doyou think that we come to this life to be more relaxed? To take the easy way?”I really think that the suffering in life is nice, if there were never pain, wewould never feel the blessing of not being in pain.
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A brief pause and then Hajjeh Zahra continued:
Now you’re going to ask me what everyone asks me, “Don’t you regret itnow?” And my answer is always the same, for seconds sometimes it occurs tome that I would have chosen to be a volunteer, not an essential responsibleagent in this project. But it is always a fleeting thought, and then I rememberthe good will our God has toward us. I remember the great people in our cul-ture and religion, like Sayyid Muhammad Husayn, our examples.
A Perfect Braid: Humanitarianism, Piety, and Politics
Hajjeh Zahra’s testimony above epitomizes the entanglement of the ma-jor threads that constitute both religious and community iltiza–m, in-cluding humanitarian impulses, political sensibility, and religious faith.She also hints at the social importance of iltiza–m for women’s senses ofself. In what follows, I take up in detail volunteers’ most common ex-planations for their commitment to community—reasons woventhrough by these threads so tightly that it is impossible to clearly sepa-rate them, reasons that illuminate the artificiality of that separation.Eventually, this fusion brings us back to Sayyida Zaynab as the idealrole model for pious Shi‘i women. She represents a woman who is pi-ous, political, caring, and self-confident, one in whom the braid is indis-soluble and complete.
“MIN IL-INSA–NIYYEH . . .”—“from humanity . . .”
Al-insa–niyya mas’u–liyya min Allah [Humanity is a responsibilityfrom God].
—a volunteer
Perhaps the most obvious impulse motivating women to devote longhours to community service—one mentioned at least as often as faith—issimply humanitarianism. Characterized as having a “love of giving” intheir nature, the words and actions of some women seemed to overflowwith generosity and compassion. Hajjeh Umm Ali exemplified this, asshe sacrificed time, energy, health, and sleep for her work with al-Mabarrat: “If someone doesn’t care for others, he cannot be a humanbeing. Bith. issi insa–niyytik btikbar misha–n ha-shughil, bith. issi innik insa–nmisha–n[h]u. You feel your humanity grows because of this work; youfeel that you are a person because of it.”
Humanitarian sentiment was fueled by a sense of collective Shi‘i dep-rivation, itself in turn fed by the sheer transparency of need. This was
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26 See Makdisi (1997) for a critique of the rebuilding of downtown Beirut.
dramatically magnified for those who had lived through the violence ofLebanon’s recent history. As one woman put it, “We saw the worst ofhumanity around us, so we had to do better.” Lebanese writer Jean SaidMakdisi described daily life during the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut:
Queues formed wherever the motors were running and the water beingpumped; long winding queues of men, women, and children patiently stand-ing in line carrying a colorful assortment of blue, green, orange, red, yellowplastic containers. This artesian well water was not good for drinking, butmany people drank it anyway. As the siege went on and the supply of butanegas ran out, people could not even boil it—the refugees who had no stovescould not boil it in any case. The major problem with the well water, however,was that it was salty. As the supply of safe drinking water in West Beirutended, we began to hear of babies dying because of the consumption of salt.(1990: 175)
To give voice to the countless potent and haunting testimonies of pain,terror, and resilience that remain from the wars, choking, hovering un-der the surface of the newly poured concrete that has paved a “rebuilt”Beirut, is another project in itself. Here I limit myself—knowing that thisdoes not do their stories justice—to noting the links between the experi-ence of war and the desire to help others.
During the war, it was horrible, horrible, but we continued to work. I wouldtake my children to the basement during the bombings. But I couldn’t sit stillwith them like the others, drinking coffee, playing cards to pass time. When Isat like that I felt like I was dying. So whenever there was a break in the situa-tion outside, I would go out and see what I could do to help. We would dis-tribute drinking water to people. And whenever I found some food I would di-vide it into small portions and distribute it.
This woman, Hajjeh Huda, saw her brother killed during one of thesewater-delivery excursions. Similar stories—that highlighted both the nar-rator’s desire to help and her loss—abounded among the women Iworked with.
The postwar situation in Lebanon is also appalling, with perpetualeconomic downslide, a continuing refugee crisis, and infrastructuralrestoration that has been narrowly focused on Beirut’s downtown cen-ter.26 Today, at every turn in al-Dahiyya (as in much of Lebanon) one isconfronted with poverty. While explaining why they do what they do,volunteers frequently gestured out a window to the neighborhoodaround them. One young woman pointed at a crumbling buildingacross the street, fresh laundry hanging from the windows: “This is the
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reality we are living in our country. It is my duty as a human being tohelp.”
The specificity of this reality—or at least the sense of its specificity—was frequently noted by residents of al-Dahiyya. During an exhibit ofcommunity service organizations from all over the country that I at-tended with Amaney and Alia, Amaney exclaimed, “It’s unbelievablehow many of these jam‘iyyas are from our area!” I wondered aloud whythat should be, given that much of Lebanon staggered under the currenteconomic crisis. Alia jumped in, “Because we live among them, we seethe problems with our eyes, all the time. Other jam‘iyyas are in rich ar-eas; even in West Beirut they don’t see this much poverty. They don’t livenext door to it.”
Most, though not all, volunteers in jam‘iyyas in al-Dahiyya lived inthe area. Yet until they began volunteering, many were unaware of theseverity of need that existed, in some cases, just next door. “When I firstvisited a poor family, I was shocked. I was shocked.” As she describedthis home, tears welled in this volunteer’s eyes and voice, “The housewas in a building—what a building!—it was all broken, and the house,all of it, all of it, was perhaps the size of this hallway and a very smallbathroom.” Gesturing to the hallway behind us, which was perhaps fivefeet wide and ten or twelve feet long, she continued:
There was no electricity, and we had to use lighters to see! Her [the woman ofthe household] husband had left; no one knows where he is. And she hadmany children, all outside playing in the street, in the dirt, because there wasno place else for them. My heart broke, do you know this feeling? My heartbroke. And this picture of this small, dark, dirty home and this woman tryingto feed her children all by herself, it remains with me always. When I am tiredand I want to say khalas, let me stop, it comes to my mind and allows me tokeep working.
Even those to whom the nature of poverty was not unfamiliar weredeeply affected by the situations of poor families, and carried their sto-ries with them beyond the jam‘iyya walls. The “voices” of the poor, theyrelayed their stories to those who preferred not to hear.
“QURBATAN ALLAH . . .”—“to be closer to god . . .”
Humanitarianism was inextricably linked, for many volunteers, topiety. The quotation that is the epigraph to the last section continues:“Humanity is a responsibility. God gave to humans so that we couldgive. In this way, volunteer work is not new work, it’s not based in theMinistry of Social Affairs, or in some organization. It is based uponhumanity; from the moment humanity was created, humanitarianismbegan.”
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The tangibility and omnipresence of religion in daily life extend towomen’s volunteerism. Fulfilling one’s practical religious obligations,namely, praying and fasting, was not considered “enough” to be a piousperson. Approaching al-taqwa–, that final rung on the ladder of piety,also entailed contributing to the community. Yet this was not a unidirec-tional relationship. Community service itself transformed volunteers,bringing them closer to al-taqwa–. This bidirectional relationship be-tween the religious and community aspects of iltiza–m was often articu-lated as qurbatan Allah (becoming closer to God). One expresses anddemonstrates piety by volunteering, an act pleasing to God, and at thesame time, volunteering itself contributes to piety, increasing one’s desireto work even harder in order to further please God.
Some women explained this process of becoming more pious asizdiwa–j, “coupling” or “pairing” with God. The intensity of this experi-ence for volunteers cannot be underestimated. As Hajjeh Huda told me,“We leave ourselves, we are no longer separate from this work or fromGod; we have entered a state of constant izdiwa–j with it.” Others drewon the notion of nourishment, explaining that rather than bringing ma-terial gain, their work nourished their souls and selves spiritually, and indoing so, brought them pleasure.
After volunteers detailed for me the long hours they devoted tojam‘iyya work in addition to their household duties, I often asked in-credulously, “Where do you get all this energy?” Without fail, their re-sponses were either that they simply never felt tired, or that with tired-ness came liza (pleasure), a “volunteer’s high,” or as one woman phrasedit, “This work is morphine.” The pleasure volunteering brought womencycled back into the dialectical relationship between piety and commu-nity service: “Say I’m not able to walk. The first day I walk a little, andthen the second day a little more, and eventually it is possible. It is thesame thing for this work. And you feel happy inside, and then you cancontinue without feeling tired. You feel joy! It’s all from the principle ofbecoming closer to God” (Hajjeh Umm Ali).
I had the fortune to meet and work with Hajjeh Umm Ali and severalother volunteers who were respected by their peers as women whoworked for the sake of qurbatan Allah and had attained izdiwa–j withGod. Like the Catholic Mother Theresa, these women simply radiatedthe luminous serenity that often accompanies absolute faith. Each ofthem credited volunteering with giving her the push she needed to takea step further up the ladder of piety. Their serenity was also related totheir certainty about al-a–khira, the afterlife. The afterlife was a com-mon unstated assumption in conversations with the devout. As one per-son explained, quoting a h.adı–th, “The afterlife is the promise of all
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27 Another phrasing of this notion is taka–ful al-‘a–m.
good things that will come in return for hardship and living correctlynow. ‘Idha qa–mat al-qiya–ma wa fı– ah.adikum faskha fayaghrusha’ (IfJudgment Day is coming and you have a seedling in your hand, plantit).”
As noted in chapter 3, many pious Shi‘is believed that each person hasan “account” (h.isa
–b) with God. This “account” will be calculated onJudgment Day, determining whether a person will spend eternity inheaven or hell. Community service in this life adds ’ajr to the account.’Ajr is divine recompense, like afterlife credits or “brownie points” thatone can accumulate with God. (One volunteer used the image of a piggy-bank to explain this to me.) The more one serves others, the more ‘ajrshe collects, and the more certain her fate.
Implicated in these notions is the idea that all that is good is a giftfrom God. The way a person utilizes these gifts is crucial:
If you need to redo your salon, redo everyone’s salon. Yes, the devil will say toyou, “But I worked hard for this money,” but God will respond, “But whogave you the ability and opportunity and health to work?” (Hajjeh Huda)
The devout believed that a great debt was owed to God for absolutelyeverything. Above, Hajjeh Zahra explained this debt as a responsibilityhumans carry, using the concepts taklı–f ila–hi and ama–na. In her use oftakl ı–f ila–hi, she conveys the idea of something that is both commandedby God, a duty, and granted by God, a responsibility. Ama–na refers to aGod-given trust or charge, a potential given with the understanding thatone is accountable for how it is used.
Volunteering is one way pious women could fulfill their taklı–f ila–hi.Taklı–f ila–hi joins with the concept taka–ful ijtima–‘i (mutual social respon-sibility) in community service. Volunteers consistently used the latterphrase, taka–ful ijtima–‘i,27 to convey the crux of their inspiration. Thisconcept expresses acceptance of taklı–f ila–hi specifically for the socialwelfare of the world—in the often cited Qur’anic phrasing, a human be-ing is “God’s deputy on earth” (khalı–fat alla–h fi’l-’ard).
These concepts underscore the inseparability of humanitarian senti-ment and religious faith, an inseparability foregrounded in the authenti-cation process, as it consistently relates the world to the hereafter: “Ithink about heaven, but I work in the world. I live in fusion with thetwo. If I smile to another person, I make that person more comfortable,which is good in the world, and at the same time, I gain ’ajr for the af-terlife. This is the beauty of it. You accomplish both at the same time” (avolunteer).
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For some volunteers, this relationship was a causal one, with humani-tarianism inevitably stemming from religiosity. This was the subject ofone session during the SAA volunteer training seminar. Hajjeh Amaltaught us that humanitarianism is an innate part of humans’ fit.ra, ornatural disposition. As children grow, their fit.ra is corrupted by theworld, and their natural tendency to do good is lost. She then empha-sized that one of the most important Islamic goals of community serviceis “tanmiyyat al-masha–‘ir al-insa–niyya” (the development of humanitar-ian feelings) in the volunteers themselves. One’s commitment to the com-munity should arise from one primary source: religion. Humanitariansentiment would then follow as natural tendencies were recouped fromworldly corruption via faith. In Hajjeh Amal’s words:
Faith begins with belief in God and extends to the relationship with Creation.These are in essence the same thing. Belief in God and humanitarianism arethe same thing. You cannot divide them; you must have both. To truly be reli-gious, a person must have this relationship with Creation. A person who doesnot have humanitarianism is no different from one who does not believe inGod. Because both serve only their own interests. One’s work must serveGod’s interests, which are the interests of others.
For Hajjeh Amal, the necessity of community service to piety was soclearly crucial that on another occasion she suggested that helping otherscould replace prayer in one’s afterlife account, while prayer was not suf-ficient to replace helping others. This statement was met with doubt, andshe quickly went on to assert, “But of course this does not mean that wedo not pray; we need to pray in order to keep our motivations strong.”Here again we see a dialectical relationship between piety and commu-nity service.
This relationship was also implicated in the ways pious Shi‘is distin-guished themselves from others in Lebanon. Volunteers saw their oppo-site in what they considered the nonpious Lebanese elite who had nosocial commitment, those who seemed to spend their wealth frivo-lously, blind to the growing poverty in their country. One womanlamented:
Here in Lebanon, you would say the economic situation is bad, but then yougo to restaurants and you find them full. There is money in the country, butit’s in private hands, and it’s spent haphazardly. The problem is that thosewho have money don’t care that there are people who sleep without food.They live in luxury, they come and go, and they say, “No, there isn’t anyonehungry.”
A common response to such a lament was to insist that if only thewealthy would “find” or “remember” their religion, whatever religion,
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28An interesting contrast to the notion that social apathy is a result of nonreligiosity isthe idea I heard among a few nonreligious Lebanese friends that apathy was the only alter-native to sectarianism in Lebanon, the only way to just “be a citizen.”
29According to Bukhari’s collection of h. adı–th, when the Prophet stated this, he then heldhis forefinger and middle finger close together, indicating closeness.
and apply it correctly to life, they would lose their apathy and povertywould be alleviated.28
“for the orphans”—“LIL-AYTA–M”
To live with these kids makes you cry. We have one [volunteer]who works with us; she told me that the kids were invited to arestaurant. A small seven-year-old girl who has three brothersin al-Mabarrat. After they ate, the girl said to her, “What areyou going to do with this chicken?” So she [the volunteer] said,“What habı–btı–, what do you want with it?” And the girl said,“Can’t we take it home for our mom to eat?” So she packed itand took it to her mother.
—Hajjeh Umm Ali
The world/afterlife fusion informs the way many volunteers cited “theorphans” as their fundamental motivation. References to orphansabounded in their daily talk, in their explanatory narratives about com-munity service, and in the brochures and on the billboards of variousjam‘iyyas. During the most exhausting hours at the Ramadan Center,someone would often sigh, “Yalla, it’s for the orphans.” Brochures andbillboards displayed images of poor orphans, along with a relevantQur’anic verse or h.adı–th, for example, “’ana– wa ka–fil al-yatı–m fi-l-janna” (I [the Prophet] and the orphan’s sponsor/supporter will be inheaven [together]).29
Despite this discursive and pictorial emphasis, not all jam‘iyyas in al-Dahiyya focused on orphans. Al-Mabarrat and the Martyrs’ Associa-tion are mandated to assist orphans in particular, but the ICEC and SAAare dedicated to the poor more generally. Some volunteers were criticalof local emphasis on helping orphans above all others and the resultingresource allocations. Hajjeh Huda noted, “Here, an orphan has a pass-port that gets him help from everyone. But the poor do not.” Anotherwoman described “cases” where the father was present but the family’ssituation was far worse than that of some orphans. She typically sent or-phan cases to organizations like al-Mabarrat in an effort to free re-sources for other poor people.
I asked an administrator at a non-orphan-specific jam‘iyya why theyused orphan images on their publications and he replied, “We have tried
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30 The loss of one’s mother represented loss of tenderness.31 Numbers provided by the CCSD.
to convince people that while there are verses about helping orphans,there are also verses that discuss the importance of helping the poor, orthe handicapped. But we can sit and talk for two hours and it will seemlike they understand, and then, at the end, they say, ‘I want to sponsoran orphan.’ It is very difficult.” The image of the orphan was clearly apowerful one, salient for donors and many volunteers. There are severalreasons for this, beginning with the obvious point that orphans are chil-dren. The first consequence of their youth is that they are automaticallymore innocent than adults. Orphans cannot be held responsible for theirsituation, “What is their guilt/fault? (shu– zambun?) What’s the fault ofthe child?”
Not only can children not be blamed for their condition, but childrenhad nothing to do with the wars. They never shot at anybody. In addi-tion, it is indisputable that orphans need assistance. Many volunteerswho used the phrase “for the orphans” felt that orphans were the mostneedy, because they had lost their father, who represented material sup-port.30 Orphans’ need is also linked to ideas about the relationship ofpoverty to takhalluf. People assumed that orphans whose needs were notmet were more likely to become criminals or “deviants.”
The salience of the orphan as a metonym for the poor extends beyondhis status as child. Orphans are allotted a special role in Islamic texts.For many pious Shi‘is, part of being a good Muslim involved caringspecifically for orphans. The emphasis the Prophet placed on orphans inhis statements has been explained by the prevalence of war in his era.War meant the existence of widows and orphans who needed commu-nity support.
The contemporary moment in al-Dahiyya is similarly one of war wid-ows and orphans. Shi‘i Muslims bore the brunt of both the Israeli occu-pation and the Resistance against it. Indeed, one of the key elements in-volved in the iconographic salience of the orphan is the assumption thatorphans are the children of Resistance martyrs. A counselor at the Mar-tyrs’ Association, where all the orphans supported actually are martyrs’children, noted that nationalist-political feelings partly inform supportof their jam‘iyya: “These children aren’t just orphans, they are orphansof martyrs, and martyrs are heroes. Their fathers died fighting Israel, theenemy of the people, the land, the nation. Many people volunteer herebecause they have been inspired by the martyrs’ self-sacrifice.”
In fact, most of the orphans in al-Dahiyya were not the children ofmartyrs. Only around one-sixth of the approximately 9,500 orphans inthe area (up to age twenty-one) were martyrs’ children.31 Despite this,
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people assumed a link between orphans and martyrs. Understandings oforphan images were to a certain extent dependent on a reading of thoseimages as representing children who are poor and fatherless becausetheir fathers made the ultimate sacrifice for the community. The imageof the orphan moves from icon to symbol, from fatherless child to Is-lamic Resistance. For this reason, a volunteer’s explanation that she ex-hausts herself daily “for the orphans” suggests an amalgamation thatbrings the political into the mix, along with the religious and humani-tarian.
“because it is our responsibility to support the resistance and our martyrs”
[T]here was a private gathering a few months ago for the wivesof Hizbullah fighters with Sayyid Hasan [Nasrallah]. And hesaid something, and I think if his words were hung in each ofour homes, we would understand how large this responsibilityis. He said, “Right now we are in a state of war.” Israel was stilloccupying then. He said, “We have 1,280 martyrs. OnJudgment Day each martyr will come carrying his blood on hissleeve, “I gave you my blood and sacrificed myself and left mychildren secure with you. Have you taken care of them?” Whatis going to be our response?” The blood of the martyrs is ahuge responsibility that remains with us for tens and hundredsof years. It is a responsibility we have, not just to their children,but to their message.
—a volunteer
Despite the liberation of most of Lebanon in May 2000, the emphasison volunteering as participation in the Resistance had not subsided byJuly 2001. No doubt continuing disputes over the border, spurts of vio-lence, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine contributed to this, as didthe fact that people were simply inspired by the Resistance victory. Mostcommunity service work suggested a degree of support for the Resis-tance, but Resistance politics were most directly expressed in the workof the Martyrs’ Association. Its volunteers and employees differentiatedtheir jam‘iyya from others, emphasizing that they were not providingcharity. Rather, they considered their services “the least they could do”in supporting martyrs’ families:
We do not provide assistance out of good will for the poor or average or-phans. The people we help do not thank us; we do not accept thanks fromthem. No, it is the other way around. It is our responsibility to help them.They have given the most it is possible to give. We are their providers, since
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they have given the lives of their providers to the community. We are gratefulto them, not the other way around.
Some volunteers came to the Association out of admiration for or asense of indebtedness to martyrs, or because working with this particu-lar jam‘iyya was a direct form of participation in the Resistance. Otherswere themselves the widows or relatives of martyrs, women who hadbenefited from the Association and were now devoted to helping othersin their situation:
In 1981, Israel killed my father. We were five, and we were young. Our familycame under the care of the people who later became the Martyrs’ Association.At that time in Beirut, you had to stand for three, four hours to buy a loaf ofbread. During this time of deprivation and destruction and war, these volun-teers came to our home and secured everything for us. So my relationship withthe Martyrs’ Association is one of love. It took the place, to a certain extent,of my missing father. Do you know what it means to not have a father duringwar? Facing this, never mind doctrine [‘aqı–da], and never mind iltiza–m, if ajam‘iyya raised you, of course you will feel indebted to it. We saw how thebrothers and sisters were sacrificing their time to help us. They planted withinus a love of giving. I grew up, and in ’94 I joined the Martyrs’ Association toreflect what they provided back on other families.
Many volunteers, like others in al-Dahiyya, had direct personal experi-ences of loss and hardship. Some lost loved ones in Israeli bombard-ments or to the Resistance. Others saw their homes destroyed and theirfamilies divided. They felt, or saw those close to them feel, the strains ofpoverty. This was not limited to Hizbullah-affiliated volunteers, but waswidespread, as one woman from the SAA put it, “We have all lived suf-fering; we are all in this together.”
In the end, for many volunteers, commitment to their communitystemmed from a sense that there was something wrong with the situa-tion in which they lived, something that could be altered for the better.Whether this was most emphatically articulated as political oppression,poverty, or the ills of the human world as opposed to the blessings ofheaven, all three were laced into most of their narratives.
We know that the situation is wrong. Not a small illness, that allows a personto say that there is no need to leave the house and tire, and to go sit in a caféor on the beach instead. No, our feeling is that there is very strong injustice,and that we are oppressed.
Here, Hajjeh Umm Hadi layers references to the multifarious hardshipsShi‘i Lebanese have experienced. By using the language of oppressionand injustice, she links current reality to the revolution of Imam Husayn,
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evoking a paradigmatic history of Shi‘i marginalization and resistance.This history resonates in many of the role models that volunteers lookedto for inspiration, and as major influences on their iltiza–m.
Models of Morality
The figures emulated by most volunteers all embody that fused triadiccore that is iltiza–m. As they confronted poverty and war through em-bracing taka–ful ijtima–‘i, most volunteers sought role models for theirwork in religious history. However, a few women looked to communityleaders instead or in addition. These leaders were sometimes olderwomen who had dedicated much of their lives to jam‘iyyas and whowere known for their piety (like Hajjeh Umm Ali). Religious clerics,specifically marji‘s, were also local sources of inspiration. Many in al-Dahiyya looked to Fadlullah in this capacity, describing him as their rolemodel on earth, a father figure, and a trusted advisor. Others, particu-larly older women who were among the earliest Shi‘i activists, citedMusa al-Sadr or his sister as exemplary models, while younger volun-teers sometimes mentioned Nasrallah. In addition to these local models,a few people mentioned examples associated with Christianity, namely,Jesus and Mother Theresa.
However, the two major sources of inspiration for the vast majority ofvolunteers were located at the intersections of religion and history: Aya-tollah Khomeini and ’ahl al-bayt (the family of the Prophet). The latterrepresent the first example, the infallibles, and the former is creditedwith revitalizing a connection with them.
Studying his [Khomeini’s] life and his lectures, and how he interacted with hischildren, and with those close to him, it is amazing; he is a leader. Every actionhe did had a goal, everything he did was done exactly correctly. He truly rep-resented the role of ’ahl al-bayt on the ground. . . . And it’s true that he’s notpure the way they are, but he was a human being who showed us that if wewalk on their path, this is what is possible. (a volunteer)
The Islamic Revolution in Iran solidified the link between the historyand values of ’ahl al-bayt, and contemporary battles against oppressionand injustice. Yet volunteers did not read Khomeini’s emphasis on emu-lating ’ahl al-bayt as requiring—as is commonly assumed about Islamicmovements—a return to life as it was during the time of the Prophet. In-stead, they understood his lesson as teaching that the principles of ’ahlal-bayt can and should be interpreted in order to fit the contemporaryworld.
In keeping with this, the Prophet and ’ahl al-bayt were important ex-amples for volunteers. Sometimes ’ahl al-bayt were treated as a unified
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32 See Friedl (1997) for a discussion of both Fatima and Zaynab as role models forwomen in Iran. She notes that Zaynab was particularly emphasized during the Iran-Iraqwar. It will be interesting to see whether the emphasis in Lebanon shifts in the years fol-lowing Israeli withdrawal, away from Zaynab’s direct activism toward Fatima’s more stoicmodel.
whole: “We can’t choose from among them! ’ahl al-bayt are ’ahl al-bayt!” Other times, people described specific instances of generosity.This story told by Hajjeh Umm Ja‘far was a common one:
Imam Ali, peace be upon him, and Sayyida Fatima al-Zahra, peace be uponher, they had three cases [hala–t] that came to them, and they would cut thefood from their own mouths to give to them. For three days they would de-prive themselves of food, in order to give first to the orphan, then the secondday to the miskı–n [poor], and then the third day to the ’ası–r, a person who hasno means and no one.
Yet even more than ’ahl al-bayt and the Prophet, volunteers looked,almost without exception, to historical female figures in Islam as rolemodels for devotion, strength, and iltiza–m. Some mentioned SayyidaKhadija, the Prophet’s first wife and the first believer, noting that she hadsacrificed her substantial self-earned material resources entirely for thesake of Islam. Others looked to Sayyida Fatima al-Zahra’, for herknowledge of Islam, her abilities in teaching others, and her generosity.But by far the most common role model for pious Shi‘i women wasSayyida Zaynab.32
In the last chapter, we saw how the interpretation of Zaynab’s behav-ior at Karbala changed with the authentication process. It was this newactivist Zaynab that volunteers emulated. They compared their contri-butions to society with hers, observing that they had given relatively lit-tle, and citing her as one of the most salient examples for their activeparticipation toward their community’s welfare.
Sayyida Zaynab, after the Imam’s martyrdom, she raised all the orphans. Shestood by their side, and lessened their pain, even though Imam Husayn washer brother. It was her brother, and her nephews, and her children who weremartyred. And she was solid in her opinions and strong in her emotions. Shewas able to handle all the suffering she experienced, and all the problems andpain, and at the same time she could help others. She has taught us that nomatter what we experience, it will never be as much as what she bore. She isthe model for our work. From her we learn to help others. (Dalal)
Sayyida Zaynab represents a woman in whom piety, humanitarian senti-ment, and political awareness fuse into a perfect braid. She also epitomizesthe strength and activism volunteers seek to emulate. These qualities of
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strength and activism bleed out of the realm of community service intoother aspects of their lives, and especially into their understandings ofgender relations in the Shi‘i pious modern. In the next chapter, the gen-dered aspects of public piety, community service, and the pious modernare brought center stage, as our discussion turns to women’s jiha–d.
C H A P T E R S I X
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d
“This is women’s jiha–d.” I heard that sentence over and over again, asvolunteers described their community service work. The phrase“women’s jiha–d” also applies to public piety more generally. This chap-ter is organized around unpacking that phrase and relationship, whiletaking a closer look at how public piety and its practices impinged on pi-ous Shi‘i women’s lives.
Although the practices of and ideas about piety based in “authenti-cated” Islam that have been detailed thus far involve and affect piousShi‘is regardless of gender, they hold especial importance for women. Nodoubt this importance is partly constructed, the result of both the reali-ties of field research in a highly gendered community and what onewoman called “a western obsession with our women.” Yet it is also anemic salience, stemming from the relationship between authenticationand the greater participation of women in public life. “Women’s jiha–d”captures the multifarious valences of that emic salience.
The word jiha–d has been much maligned, used either to conjure fearor inspire violence. As pious Shi‘is used it, the term meant simply a“struggle.” Although it was used to refer to the Resistance, it wasalso used to describe personal struggles within oneself and struggles likethat against poverty. “Women’s jiha–d” describes the way that the workof authenticated Islam is the particular responsibility of pious Shi‘iwomen with regard to the markers of piety they carried and their cen-trality in signifying modern-ness. Jiha–d here is both a privilege and aduty.
I begin this chapter by examining the emergence of public piety as a“new” social norm with particular ramifications for women and interro-gating the specifics of that newness. Public piety marked women mostvisibly in the pious modern via their volunteerism, their h.ija
–bs, and theprominence of Zaynab as a model. I then turn to the relationship be-tween public piety and women’s struggles over their public participation,their “gender jiha–d.” Finally, the chapter concludes by considering theimplications of how women’s public piety was also crucial to the com-munity’s global visibility.
A Normative Moral System with a “New” Social Norm
The reinterpreted Sayyida Zaynab provided a model of ideal comport-ment for pious Shi‘i women and set a standard of moral behavior towhich many aspired. These aspirations were manifested in daily and sea-sonal religious practices and in engagement with the construction of au-thenticated religious discourses. As we will see below, community servicehas also recently been incorporated as an equally crucial element in thisnormative moral system. The Zaynab model—essentially a model forpublic piety—has been emphasized to such an extent that it has had theeffect of fostering elevated social expectations for women. These expec-tations were conveyed by family members and close friends, as well asacquaintances, neighbors, and strangers at institutions like schools andjam‘iyyas. Many women seemed more obviously pious than their hus-bands, and related pleading with them to fast during Ramadan or re-minding them to pray.
Self-expectations were by far the heaviest to bear. Women often com-pared their actions to what they imagined Zaynab would have done intheir place.
Whenever I am faced with a problem, I ask myself, am I going to act like Za-ynab or not? If someone knocks at my door am I going to help him or not?Am I going to feel with others or not, am I going to give even more of myselfor not, am I going to have the courage to face oppression or not? (HajjehUmm Ali)
Not only did this chronic comparison lead to idealized self-expectations,but it fostered pressure on other women to hold themselves to the samestandard. In several jam‘iyya meetings, a senior sister exhorted others tothink about “What Zaynab would have done”—both when volunteersseemed disheartened by their never-ending work and when cooperationamong them seemed to falter.
Social pressures were strongest around the most publicly visible as-pects of piety—Islamic dress and volunteerism. With regard to the latter,volunteers conveyed expectations regarding participation in communityservice to their relatives, friends, peers, and neighbors in conversationsabout jam‘iyya activities as well as outright attempts at recruitment. Re-lationships were cultivated with new volunteers, and expectations werereinforced through jam‘iyya workshops and training seminars. Advo-cates of community service explained volunteering as a “rational”choice, clearly connected to iltiza–m, and drew on Qur’anic verses andh.adı–th such as “He who sleeps full while his neighbor is hungry is not a
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d • 205
believer.”1 These quotations were included in conversations, inscribedon plaques adorning jam‘iyya and household walls, and printed promi-nently on jam‘iyyas’ brochures, billboards, and invitations.
The jam‘iyyas also contributed to the maintenance of dress norms,by either insisting or more subtly indicating that volunteers shouldbe muh.ajjaba. One jam‘iyya that welcomed both muh.ajjaba and non-muh.ajjaba volunteers restricted full membership and internal votingrights to the former. Defending this, Hajjeh Hala, a member of thejam‘iyya’s administration, asserted that their members must demonstrate“good Islamic values,” and therefore are required to be Muslim andmuh.ajjaba. On several occasions non-muh.ajjaba volunteers argued thatthe h.ija
–b cannot attest to a woman’s character, contending that it wasquite possible for a non-muh.ajjaba woman to be more pious than onewho conforms to Islamic dress. While in principle Hajjeh Hala and otheradministrators agreed with this point, they always countered that it wascrucial for the jam‘iyya to present “an Islamic appearance,” noting“people are already talking because they see non-muh.ajjaba womenworking with us.” This final phrase indicates the extent to which notonly individual women, but also jam‘iyyas themselves are subject tojudgment within the normative moral order of public piety. The reputa-tion of the jam‘iyya was partly dependent on the reputations of its mem-bers, resulting in pressure on its volunteers to discipline themselveswithin the bounds of morally acceptable behavior.
Slightly more subtle social pressures around dress took the form ofcomments, teasing, pointed storytelling, or praise of how beautiful awoman would look in a h.ija
–b. For example, one young woman’s mother,unfazed by her daughter’s grimace, frequently related the story of howshe (the daughter) had once worn a h.ija
–b for a school play, emphasizinghow lovely she had looked in the scarf.
In this context, public piety was understood as an externally visible in-dication of a woman’s morality. Though rare, there were situationswhere this had serious ramifications for women’s lives. One woman be-gan both volunteering with an Islamic jam‘iyya and wearing the h.ija
–b inorder to appease her in-laws after her husband’s death, because shefeared that if she did not publicly demonstrate her morality, they mightnot trust her to raise her children.2 Unmarried women were particularlysusceptible to pressure from potential spouses or self-appointed match-makers, as many pious young men—or their families—desired visibly pi-ous wives.
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1 Man ba–t shab‘a–nan wa ja–ruhu jaw‘a–n fa-laysa bi-muslim.2 According to sharı–‘a, her husband’s family would have the right to claim custody of
the children after age seven for boys and nine for girls.
Community Service as a “New” Norm
The inclusion of community service within this normative moral frame-work is a relatively new phenomenon, and links the authentication pro-cess with its ideas about progress to women’s public participation in newways. Active volunteers were seen to embody the very qualities in Za-ynab that are desired—emotional strength, outspokenness, and dedica-tion to others. Although volunteering is only one possible way of emu-lating Zaynab, it has become the most commonly accepted and expectedway. Taking this to an extreme, some women expressed the unorthodoxconviction that community service is a religious “duty” on par withprayer, “Just as prayer and fasting are obligatory for us, now this workis too.” In this community, in order to be seen as a “good” middle-classMuslim woman—barring exempting circumstances—a woman was ex-pected to participate in at least some of the activities of at least onejam‘iyya in addition to fulfilling her other religious obligations. In thissense, community service added a “new” element to the social norm ofpublic piety in al-Dahiyya.
Here I qualify “new” with quotation marks because it is necessary tointerrogate what exactly it is that was new about pious women’s volun-teerism. As we have seen, in explaining why they volunteer, women fre-quently drew upon concepts like taka–ful ijtima–‘ı– (mutual social responsi-bility). This is not a new concept; rather, it locates the roots ofcommunity service in a longstanding Islamic moral discourse aboutcharity. Similarly, women’s emulation of Zaynab connects their contem-porary activities to the historical and religious past.
Yet in al-Dahiyya, volunteerism has been institutionalized into abroader public arena in ways that are new. Prior to the institutionaliza-tion of the Shi‘i Islamic movement, pious people remembered the poorduring Ramadan, and often donated food and goods, in addition to pay-ing their khums and zaka–t. Yet these charitable acts were not necessarilyvisible. There were people known for their generosity, but the possibilityof censorship of those who did not contribute did not exist in the sameway. The institutionalization of taka–ful ijtima–‘ı– in the jam‘iyyas madegiving time, as well as money, an explicitly public—and highly visible—act. As such, it became available to be commented on, praised, and en-couraged by others.
This visibility has also thrust community service into a broader move-ment to promote the continual material and spiritual progress of thecommunity. Women’s participation was considered necessary to and in-dicative of this progress, raising the stakes of that participation signifi-cantly. This link between women’s volunteerism and the pious modernnot only constructed volunteering as a powerful normative marker of
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d • 207
morality, but also emphasized women’s public activity as a necessarycomponent of their piety within the framework of authenticated Islam.
In striving to be pious according to this ideal, women faced what theycast as “traditional” ideas about their proper roles, ideas that needed tobe left behind for the sake of both progress and piety. The next sectionsof this chapter look first to the ways that women’s public participationvia community service work fit within these traditional ideas, then to theplaces where it came into conflict with them, and finally, to the ways thatpious Shi‘i women confronted these points of conflict.
Women’s Work
General consensus in al-Dahiyya held that voluntary community servicewas valuable and important work for women in particular.3 This is re-lated to the felicitous convergence of beliefs about women’s “natural”nurturing proclivities with the structure and method of community workitself. Women were believed to have empathetic and emotional capacitiesthat made them inherently suited to community work. To a certain ex-tent, this perceived compatibility obtains from the “visiting method.”Most of the tasks involved in providing aid were domestically oriented.Furthermore, in a community where a woman’s—and her family’s—rep-utation would be severely compromised if she were to receive unaccom-panied male visitors in her home, household visits were impossible formale volunteers. This was compounded by the fact that many of thehouseholds assisted by jam‘iyyas were female-headed.
An additional factor is that many women wanted to contribute invaluable ways to the Resistance, and desired access to a “door” toheaven like that provided by martyrdom. Yet military service was theonly type of work for which most people believed women innately un-suited.4 Volunteering represented an appropriate way for women to re-sist Israeli occupation without carrying weapons.
Community service’s status as women’s work was reflected in thespaces of the jam‘iyyas themselves, spaces considered appropriate for pi-ous Shi‘i women, and that did not threaten the moral and social order ofthe community. They were also spaces where women felt comfortable,
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3 Most volunteers were women (e.g., only 20 of 340 ICEC volunteers were men), thoughmany jam‘iyya employees were men. Jam‘iyya administrators acknowledged that this gen-dered division of labor was problematic but argued that it was difficult to hire womenwhen so many men were unemployed, because in Lebanon it is men who are generally heldresponsible for financially supporting households.
4 Arguments exist for women’s military participation in specific situations, especially re-lated to self-defense. See chap. 4, n. 54.
especially with regard to their relationships with other volunteers andemployees.
Hajjeh Suad: We like to come and sit here; it’s our second home.Hajjeh Umm Muhammad: Even interactions with the brothers don’t feel un-
comfortable or strange. Here you feel like you are living within a family,with people who care about you. You feel like you are interacting withyour son, your brother, your father.
The kinship idioms women used to describe their relationships withother volunteers and employees reproduce the Lebanese “kin con-tract”—“the ideal of family love organized within a patriarchal structureof rights and responsibilities” (Joseph 2000: 116). A dual notion of kinas representing both care and control appears in the idea that jam‘iyyasare appropriate spaces for women because of the presence of their“brothers” and older “sisters.”5 Volunteers also entered poor house-holds as older sisters/mothers who both support and control their“younger” relatives. In infusing these relationships with the kinship id-iom, the pious modern reinforces a relational self, yet one that is viewedas different and better than the “traditional” relational self. “Tradi-tional” people were seen as overly embedded in extended family net-works to the detriment of the community. Although family is still impor-tant, the new ideal is a self in relation to both kin and community, withthe greater good of the latter holding priority.
The spaces, relationships, and activities of the jam‘iyyas both facili-tated and circumscribed women’s public participation by emphasizing itscompatibility with a status quo that emphasized women’s domestic na-ture, relationships, and responsibilities. However, despite this perceivedcompatibility, many pious women had to struggle in order to participatepublicly, often engaging in a skilled balancing act.
Balancing the Double/Triple Shift
While some women volunteered sporadically, or exclusively during Ra-madan, others took community service as seriously as employment. Be-tween community service and taw‘iyya for self-improvement, a volunteer’sday was easily filled. Yet volunteering was undertaken in addition tohousehold work, and sometimes employment. Pious women consciously
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d • 209
5 Here volunteers used kinship idioms to describe relationships within the jam‘iyyas.Suad Joseph argues that kin are the basis of political networks and citizenship models inLebanon (1997c and 2000). See Joseph also on the valences of caring and control inbrother-sister relationships (1994 and 1999b).
chose to take on a double or triple shift in order to contribute to theircommunity’s public welfare.6
All the women I worked with prioritized household responsibilities,sometimes asserting strongly that women who could not keep theirhouseholds “in order” should not be involved in community service.This notion emerges from Lebanese patriarchal norms that cut across re-ligion and class.7 It also points to a tension among the various argumentspious Shi‘i women make about their public and domestic roles.
Doesn’t Islam’s emphasis, in jurisprudence and legislation [al-’ah.ka–m w-al-tashrı–‘a–t], on women’s femininity lead us to the conclusion that women’s essen-tial Islamic role is that of caretaker of the home/family [murabiyyat al-manzil]?
. . . Does Islam force a woman to be a homemaker before and after mar-riage? No person has the right, whether her father, mother, brother, or any rel-ative, to obligate a woman by the sharı–‘a to work in her parents’ home beforemarriage, for housework is not required [mafru–d. an] of a woman, just as a fa-ther or mother cannot obligate a male child to do housework.
Yes, she has this (role), if she chooses it voluntarily, from a sense of respon-sibility towards the home that raised her.
And when a young woman becomes a wife, housework remains a voluntarymatter, she chooses to do it or not, for the marriage contract does not obligateher from the perspective of the sharı–‘a to do housework, or even to raise thechildren, unless the two spouses included fulfilling that work as a special stip-ulation in the marriage contract. (Fadlullah 1997: 59–60)
Most volunteers felt that with proper “organization,” women shouldbe able to complete their housework and still have plenty of time to de-vote to others. Such organization required seemingly inexhaustible re-serves of energy. Many women woke up extraordinarily early. Othersstayed up late cooking. Hajjeh Umm Ali spent full days at al-Mabarrat,spent late afternoons and evenings with her children, grandchildren, andhusband, then remained awake long after they slept, completing herhousework as well as additional work for the jam‘iyya: “I calculate myenergy. I am able to stay up late making food. I am able to iron at night.But I don’t feel tired. My energy comes from God.” Faith contributed tothe tirelessness of many volunteers, as energy and efficiency were viewedas gifts from God.
These capabilities were sources of pride. Hajjeh Umm Muhammadcommented, “By 7:30 [a.m.] I will have turned the gas off underneath
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6 Some of those who took on a triple shift were employed by jam‘iyyas, while othersworked at businesses, banks, and schools.
7 For discussion of patriarchal social norms in Lebanon see Joseph (1990, 1994, 1999a,2000).
my food.” Another woman responded, drily, “Truth is, she doesn’t havea man in the house.” As this comment indicates, for most women, hus-bands presented a far greater difficulty, at least in theory, than house-work. General opinion held that when a man remarried, whether he di-vorced his first wife or not, it was often because he felt neglected.“Sometimes if a woman isn’t putting her home first, of course her hus-band will take another wife.” This followed a conversation where aneighbor told me and a friend about a very active volunteer whose hus-band had recently taken a second wife. My friend’s initial response was,“I don’t think the Hajjeh even noticed much.”
More commonly, difficulties with husbands were hinted at throughcomments appreciating and noting those men who were supportive oftheir wives’ public work. As Hajjeh Huda shared:
I am lucky that my husband supports what I do. Like during Ramadan, I go tothe Center from morning until after ift.a
–r. Some men would throw a fit, butmy husband supports me. Some men just don’t want their wives leaving thehouse. That’s wrong; he should support her to go help others. When a mancannot do community work because he is busy working to feed his family, heshould encourage his wife to help. He is then helping by making it easier forher to contribute.
A recent trend at some jam‘iyyas was for young volunteers to stipulatethat they be able to continue volunteering after marriage before agreeingto an engagement. Tamara had done this: “I set the condition that I con-tinue volunteering. My husband adapted. Now he tells me, ‘If I am notdoing my duty, what you do should cover both of us.’ ” Both HajjehHuda and Tamara hint at another point, one often used in women’s ar-guments for the importance of their volunteerism: that by facilitating hisspouse’s good works, a man is doing good himself—because facilitatinggood work is good work. I will return to this point below.
When I interviewed her, Tamara was several months pregnant, and ex-pressed her intention to continue volunteering after the baby was born.Her mother had already agreed to care for the child during the day. Formany women, children presented an added responsibility. Young chil-dren were often jealous of their mothers’ volunteerism, particularly ifthey worked with orphans. The burden of teaching them to accept herabsence from home fell squarely on a woman’s shoulders. Hajjeh UmmAli explained proudly that she had taught her children that there wereother children out there with no mothers who needed her, so that theytoo now “cared for the orphans.” However, most women prioritizedtheir own children, and tried to limit their jam‘iyya time when the chil-dren were young. For their part, the jam‘iyyas facilitated volunteers’family commitments by providing childcare.
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In addition to the balancing acts volunteers performed, they were sub-ject to gossip and criticism from others if it was believed that their homeswere being the least bit neglected. Sometimes this criticism came from“sisters”—“superwomen” who had little patience for the “less organ-ized.” Hajjeh Umm Ali was particularly strident in her criticisms, insist-ing: “You cannot give if there is loss in the home. The sacrifices should bepersonal, not placed on your family. So do less visiting, have fewer coffeeswith friends, limit your fun time. You have to work on yourself so thatyou can give without your home suffering.” Here Hajjeh Umm Ali im-plies that through “working on yourself” women should be able to suc-cessfully manage the balancing act. The ability to do so, often throughpersonal sacrifices, was believed to reflect upon a woman’s piety.
Volunteers also confronted criticism and gossip from the larger com-munity, and noted that this is a difficulty plaguing all women in Lebanonwho wish to work in any capacity outside their homes. In the specificcontext of volunteerism, however, they detected a note of hypocrisy insuch disapproval: “On the one hand, people are impressed if we tellthem we are helping poor families. But then when they see you leavingyour house, they turn around and begin talking behind your back, say-ing that you are neglecting your family.” Such criticism stems fromdeeply rooted social norms that relegate “good” women to the domesticsphere. These norms, characterized by pious Shi‘is either as “traditional”(taqlı–dı–) or sometimes “eastern” (sharqı–), were understood as “inher-ited,” and were to give way to new norms rooted in authenticated Is-lamic practice and discourse.8 I now turn to the ways that pious womenfacilitated and actively worked toward this transformation through their“gender jiha–d.”
Gender JIHA–D
Gender jiha–d is the work that ultimately made it possible for women toundertake the “women’s jiha–d” of public piety.9 In order to fully enactpublic piety, women had to participate in the public arena, most obvi-
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8 These dichotomies are both constructed and changing, for example, the idea thatwomen should be relegated to the domicile stems from early-twentieth-century middle-class notions of modernity (Khater 2001).
9 Abugideiri presents a useful definition of “gender jiha–d” as “a struggle for gender par-ity in Muslim society in the name of divine justice” (2001: 89). Another term that has beenused in Muslim contexts in lieu of “feminist” is “gender activist” (Badran 1994 and 2002).I do not use “feminist” to refer to my interlocutors for three reasons: (1) They consciouslydifferentiated between equality (masa–wa) and equity (‘ada–la), understanding the former tobe feminism’s struggle and to mean that men and women were identical in substance and
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d • 213
ously through their community service activities, but also through par-ticipation in Ashura commemorations and engagement with changingreligious discourses in the authentication process. As such, public partic-ipation was crucial to both their piety and the spiritual and materialprogress of the community as a whole—as understood emically, and asunderstood in relation to the importance of women’s status to westernideas about what is modern.
On the one hand, pious women’s presence in the public transformedunderstandings and definitions of that public, and reflected the porosityof public/private divisions.10 On the other hand, women volunteers livedin a milieu where women’s prolific public participation was a relativelynew phenomenon. It was also, as we began to see above, not without itscritics. As I weighed the different perspectives I heard regarding women’spublic work with volunteers’ experiences, I began to ask how volunteersthemselves understood the multiple and contradictory social prescrip-tions within which they worked, and how they responded to gender-based restrictions and exclusions, and to their critics.
Pious Shi‘i women were especially aware of exclusions based on qual-ities that were assumed to be, or defined as, distinctly masculine.11
These qualities included the ability to cooperate, to be organized, andto think rationally. While expounding on the importance of the SAA asa women-only jam‘iyya one afternoon, Hajjeh Amal observed, “Menthink that women can’t have a jam‘iyya that works, because they thinkthat when women gather we just gossip or fight.” Assumptions that
spirit, an equation they felt was both impossible and undesirable. They instead argued forequity—equivalent but not identical rights, and promoted interpretations emphasizingwhat Leila Ahmed (1992) calls the “ethical egalitarianism” of Islam. (2) The ultimate mo-tivations underlying many of their stances were on behalf of piety, not on behalf ofwomen’s rights. (3) Much of what is connoted by “Islamic feminism” today is scholar-research based, predicated on textual reinterpretation. Most pious Shi‘i women were notdirectly engaged in such pursuits, although they deployed religious texts in their argu-ments. For more on Shi‘i Islam and feminism see Afshar 1998, Böttcher 2001, Mir-Hosseini 1999, Moghadam 2002.
10 Voluntary associations are usually located in the public sphere, and, because of an as-sumed gendered public/private divide, particularly in studies of the Middle East/NorthAfrica, associated with men (Joseph 1997a). Pious Shi‘i women’s volunteerism troublesthis through both the movement of women into public spaces and the incorporation ofdomestic-type activities into public welfare and work. See critiques of the rigidity, ahis-toricity, and gendering of the public/private distinction by Abu-Lughod 1998c, Ayubi1995, Hale 1996, Hatem 1994, Joseph 1983 and 1997b, Nelson 1974, Reiter 1975, andSingerman 1995. See also L. Deeb 2005 and Göle 1997 on the role of women’s visibility inMuslim public spheres.
11 See Nancy Fraser’s discussion of how the public sphere may be constituted in part bya gendered exclusion stemming from its definition through distinctly “masculine” discur-sive protocols (1999).
women are not able to cooperate “democratically and rationally” alsocontributed to the gendered division of labor within jam‘iyyas, as wellas to a general dearth of women in leadership positions in al-Dahiyya.12
Another way that women’s public activity was sometimes derided bymen was through stereotypes about women’s idleness. A male jam‘iyyaadministrator once grumbled to me that all-women jam‘iyyas promoted“the s.ubh. iyya model” of community work, a reference to the morningcoffee visits associated with “idle” middle- and upper-class women inLebanon.
In combating such assumptions and limitations, the women I workedwith embraced gender jiha–d, actively confronting sexism and patriarchywithin their community. They did so by bringing together a number ofstrategies that combined to form a model for gender roles and relation-ships based upon “authenticated” Islam, a model that includes women’spublic participation as a constituent aspect.
First, volunteers highlighted a distinction between themselves andthe stereotype of “s.ubh.iyya” women, labeling the latter “traditional”(taqlı–dı–). They underscored this difference by calling upon authenticatedIslam’s emphasis on self-improvement and societal contribution, andtheir role in promoting community progress. Hajjeh Khadija character-ized “women whose time is consumed by s.ubh.iyyas and housework” as“moving backward” and “non-useful people.”
A second aspect of gender jiha–d is manifest in jam‘iyyas’ role in edu-cating poor women and volunteers alike toward more capable publicparticipation. Beyond this, women drew on the existence of all-womenjam‘iyyas itself as evidence of their capacities to organize in order to pro-ductively contribute to society. Hajjeh Amal underscored the role ofthese jam‘iyyas, challenging the assumed masculinity of the qualitiesnecessary for public participation: “[T]hrough the work of women’sjam‘iyyas, we provide an example of how women can work demo-cratically and rationally, with elections and a strong organizationalstructure. And we work to change this image that men have of women inour society.” In addition to demonstration through example, some piouswomen proposed explicitly conducting taw‘iyya with pious Shi‘i men.They explained that this taw‘iyya should teach men about authenticatedinterpretations of Islam, so that they would, in keeping with those inter-pretations, facilitate their wives’ public activities. Again, by helping theirwives “do good,” men themselves would be doing good.
This issue arose at a seminar on women’s public participation held by
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12 There were of course exceptions to this, including the director of an al-Mabarratschool and the Chief of Staff at a Martyrs’ Association hospital.
Hizbullah’s Women’s Committee. Someone asked whether communityservice—broadly defined to include such things as holding politicaloffice—was a right or a responsibility. In response, Noha, the seminar’sleader, cited Khomeini to argue that it was both, but especially a respon-sibility. She then explained that the problem was that “the ground isn’tprepared yet” because there were multiple obstacles preventing womenfrom fulfilling this responsibility, including women’s own ignorance, alack of community support, and most crucially, men, who had to bemade aware of the realities and importance of women’s work and role.Another woman added that men’s taw‘iyya should also emphasize men’srole in the home; teaching men to share housework and childcare withtheir wives.
How is it possible to say that it is acceptable and possible for a woman towork outside the home, given men’s general disinclination to help their wiveswith housework, considering it shameful [mu‘ı–b]?
The source of saying that a man working inside the home is shameful is asocial culture of backwardness, not Islam. Islam has no relationship to thisview, as evidenced by the story of Imam Ali (peace be upon him) with Sayyida[Fatima] al-Zahra’ (pbuh). We read that Sayyida al-Zahra’ and Imam Ali(pbuh) met with the Prophet to divide the work between them, because eachwas burdened with responsibilities. So the Prophet delegated to al-Zahra’preparing flour and bread, and he delegated to Ali sweeping the house andgathering firewood. This demonstrates that a man sharing housework is notshameful for him. (Fadlullah 1997: 79)
Pious women believed that through taw‘iyya, men would eventuallycome to understand gender roles and relations from the perspective ofauthenticated Islam, which, as noted in this passage from Fadlullah, in-cludes sharing housework. This model stands in contrast to ideas aboutthe domestic responsibilities that volunteers, as women, must fulfill, andrepresents a key arena in which pious women struggled to facilitate theirpublic participation. To a certain extent, it is in their emphasis on teach-ing men to share domestic responsibilities that Shi‘i women presentedthe most striking challenge to “traditional” gender roles.13
Part of this taw‘iyya with men involved teaching authenticated inter-pretations of religious texts. Throughout the Women’s Committee dis-cussion, Noha and others made constant textual references, drawingmainly on Khomeini’s writings and sermons. Their consensus was thatKhomeini saw women’s contributions outside the home as important,
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d • 215
13 The Sudanese Islamist women discussed by Hale (2001) provide an interesting con-trast here.
but that when men read his texts, they “refuse” to see that, reading intohim only what they want to read.14
More commonly, women drew upon Fadlullah’s progressive perspec-tives on gender and other issues. Fadlullah was especially a source forarguments about women’s abilities to interpret religious texts and de-bate them with men—essentially, for women’s rights and capacities toparticipate in the authentication process.15 Böttcher quotes a shaykhwho follows Fadlallah as saying, “Women have to master theology andShi‘i law and interpret it independently. . . . [T]hey can make Islamictheology from women for women” (2001: 5). By consciously drawingon textually based argument, pious women troubled its definition asmasculine and asserted that they are equitable participants in public dis-course. Like women’s participation in debates about religious practices,this subverted ideas about women’s religious knowledge as unlearnedand “traditional.”
The theme of men’s misinterpretation of texts—whether intentionalor merely ignorant—was a common one. Many pious women stoodfirmly behind the notion that when Islam was interpreted, understood,and applied correctly many of the problems women faced because ofpatriarchy would dissipate.16 To this end, gender jiha–d also deployedmodels of strong women in Islamic history.17 By doing this, womenwere, perhaps unconsciously, invoking a long history of gender activismor feminism in Lebanon. In the 1920s, Lebanese and Syrian womenlooked to Muslim models—including A’isha, the Prophet’s wife who ledtroops into battle, and Khadija, the Prophet’s wife who was also a self-reliant businesswoman—while demanding full citizenship rights.18
These are models common to Sunni Islam. For pious Shi‘i women, asnoted in the last chapter, it was Sayyida Fatima and, as evidenced by her
216 • Chapter Six
14 Many Iranian feminists would disagree with my interlocutors’ interpretations ofKhomeini as beneficial for women. For example, Afshar (1996) argues that much of theprogress made by Iranian women since the Revolution has been since Khomeini’s death.
15 In 1978, Fadlullah established the first Shi‘i theological seminary for women inLebanon, and recently, a small Islamic women’s community college was founded in al-Dahiyya under his patronage (Böttcher 2001).
16 This is the core tenet of gender jiha–d. On its relationship to Islamic feminist textualreinterpretations, see Mir-Hosseini 1999, Wadud 2000, and Barlas 2002. The gender in-equities subsumed under “traditional” culture also included issues ranging from discrimi-nation in education and employment to domestic violence to honor crimes to coercion inmarriage. In a sermon given on the occasion of both Ashura and International Women’sDay, Fadlullah tackled many of these issues as stemming from incorrect understandings ofIslam.
17 See ElSadda (2001) for an analysis of deployments of the Prophet’s wife A’isha in thisregard.
18 See Thompson 2000: 124.
constant presence in this book, Sayyida Zaynab, who were most com-monly cited.
In the context of gender jiha–d, Zaynab’s outspokenness and leadershipqualities were emphasized, her position as “heroine of the heroes” ofKarbala. Pious women underscored her confrontation with the Caliphduring her imprisonment, and her indispensable role in spreading themessage of revolution after the Imam’s martyrdom:
What would have happened if Imam Husayn went to Karbala and SayyidaZaynab wasn’t there? Because the story always begins after the martyrdom.So Zaynab (peace be upon her), she went and witnessed, and she was the onewho carried the truth of Karbala with her. She stood before Yazid and spoketo him, and she showed the world what happened when Imam Husayn wasmartyred. It was she who carried the message of revolution to others. It wasshe who made possible Ashura. This is the role of women. There are manywomen in Islamic history who have sacrificed themselves and worked hard insociety, and they prove wrong all those who say that Islam tells women toonly be wives and nothing else. (a volunteer)
This is the ultimate image upon which women I worked with drew tohighlight the value of their public roles in their community.
The multiple elements that make up pious women’s gender jiha–d to-gether posited a model for an ideal pious modern woman, one who waseducated, outspoken, strong, and visible while also being pious andcommitted to her faith, family, and community. This model existed in atense relationship to ideas about western modern womanhood.19 Forsome, it necessarily incorporated an appreciation for the ways “all partsof the West are working; women and men are all working together.” Inthis view, the contributions of women were crucial to western economicand political dominance in the contemporary world. “They are workingwith two teams while we work with only half of that.” At the same time,the pious modern ideal rejected the tenets that modern selves must be in-dividualized and (for women) “liberated.” As Saba Mahmood has ar-gued in her work on the Egyptian mosque movement (2001, 2005), andas the preceding pages of this chapter demonstrate, it is crucial to takewomen’s desires and motives into account without adopting the norma-tive assumption that all women ultimately desire gender equality as de-fined by mainstream liberal western feminisms.
For devout Shi‘i women, public participation is a necessary part ofhow a person is pious and moral on three levels. First, before God—where it is an element in the fulfillment of one’s piety and will contribute’ajr to one’s afterlife account. Second, before others—where it provides a
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d • 217
19 See my introduction.
visible display of one’s morality. And finally, before oneself—where itnourishes the continued development of one’s own faith. The ultimategoal of gender jiha–d was to facilitate women’s abilities to be good,moral, pious Muslims, unhindered by patriarchal social norms that lim-ited their public participation, norms that they viewed as standing in thepath of their piety. While they were confronting patriarchal norms, theirmajor motive for doing so was not the emancipation of individualizedselves but equity in the possibilities for practicing a pious and morallifestyle.
Women as Representative of the Pious Modern
Beyond local resistance to their public activities, pious women faced ste-reotypes held by the West and other communities in Lebanon aboutMuslim women, stereotypes that depict Muslim women as backward,passive, and oppressed by their religion. Their self-conscious confronta-tion of these stereotypes constituted the final aspect of their jiha–d that Iwill discuss and framed their community-level struggles.
Pious Shi‘i women and men alike expressed a keen awareness that“the West” and “others in Lebanon” had their eyes trained constantlyon “their women” as a marker of their “level” of modern-ness. Womenwere especially aware that others wanted to know what their lives werelike as women in particular, scrutinizing how they were “treated” andwhat their societal roles were. They often articulated feeling a burden ofresponsibility to represent Muslim women both within and outsideLebanon.
Women combated external stereotypes about themselves as nonmod-ern in the same ways that they confronted patriarchal norms in theircommunity. They drew upon women’s jam‘iyyas as examples, empha-sized interpretations of Islamic texts that highlight gender equity, andhighlighted Zaynab’s model. For example, earlier in this chapter, we sawHajjeh Amal discuss her hope that women’s jam‘iyyas would provide ev-idence of women’s capacities to contribute productively to society. Herintended audience was not only pious Shi‘i men, but also outsiders, asshe continued:
And this fight is not only an internal one. We are also fighting the outside im-age of Muslim women. We admit that there are some bad images out there, ofvery oppressed Islamic women, but this is not authentic/true [h.aqı–qı–] Islam.We want to represent authentic Islam and to show that iltiza–m goes alongwith being cultured and educated. We have no examples, because the exam-ples are either of oppressed women or of western women who are equal to
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men in everything, even in the things they should not be equal in. Instead, wehave to set a new example for the world, an example of women who are Mus-lim but strong and educated. Our goals as women are to improve these imagesof Muslim women within our society that thinks that women are less thanmen, and to change the image of the oppressed Muslim woman that existsoutside our society. This work is part of our religious duty, because woman isthe example for everything. A culture is judged by the level of its women.
As Shi‘i women’s jiha–d takes on the work of proving to the West thatMuslim women can be both pious and modern, it becomes crucial to thewider community’s self-presentation as modern. Women’s progress—materially and spiritually—is understood as both evidence of the largerprogress of the Shi‘i pious modern and necessary to it. The visibility ofpious Shi‘i women—marked by muh.ajjabas’ public activities andmetadiscursive voices—is crucial to the demonstration of this progress.Equally important, the constructed distinction between pious modernwomen and western—or westernized—modern women is necessary tothis Lebanese Shi‘i community’s identity and self-positioning nationallyand globally.
That distinction is constructed around the social and religious com-mitment, the iltiza–m, of the ideal pious modern woman, iltiza–m ex-pressed in public piety. As public piety takes on meaning in the transna-tional context, the stakes of piety for Shi‘i women are raised. Yet despitethese stakes, or perhaps because of them, the relationship between per-sonal and public piety is never constant or simple. The final chaptertakes up some of these cracks and complexities in order to revisit thepublic piety ideal.
Public Piety as Women’s Jiha–d • 219
C H A P T E R S E V E N
The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps
Thus Far, we have seen the visible manifestations of iltiza–m in the spa-tial and temporal cadences of al-Dahiyya, in daily religious practices anddiscourses, devotion to community service, Ashura commemorations,and emulation of ’ahl al-bayt and especially of Sayyida Zaynab. We havealso seen how these various textures incorporate the tight weave of piety,humanitarianism, and politics, which constitutes and reflects authentica-tion and the pious modern. The continuing transformations of all thesemanifestations implicate the tensions between the personal and the per-formed.
The relationship between public and personal piety varied from per-son to person, moment to moment. While they can be conceived as sepa-rate and not necessarily complementary, they often worked to reinforceone another. Public piety reinforced the necessity and importance of per-sonal piety among the devout, while personal piety emerged in andthrough their performative acts of religiosity. My aim in this closingchapter is to underscore both the processual nature of public piety as it iscultivated through authentication, and the fact that a seamless mesh be-tween the public and the personal is an unrealized ideal and the ultimategoal for the devout. By considering briefly the gaps that linger betweenpersonal and public religiosity, the process of “becoming pious,” and ef-forts to foster that same process in the community’s youth, we will re-visit the ideal of the pious modern.
Gaps and Limits
At first look, public piety appeared seamless in al-Dahiyya. Those whodid not perform piety could easily be located outside the boundaries ofthe pious modern. With time, however, and as my relationships devel-oped, I began to see both that the boundary itself was not as sharp as Ihad originally believed, and that there were people who considered them-selves devout Muslims who did not quite fit, those in whom there was a,sometimes rather jarring, disconnect between personal and public piety.My initial conceptualization of these disconnects as contradictions gaveway to a sense that they represent tensions in the relationship between
The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps • 221
public and personal piety, not only for those who feel them intimately,but also for the broader milieu.
Gaps in the fabric of public piety ranged from the more common—such as the generational differences I will come to below—to the in-tensely private reflections of personal, usually concealed, struggles withfaith. People could be located on the margins—whether they felt theirmarginality or not—in a variety of ways. Fractures sometimes appearedbetween public and private selves in the service of social conformity orefforts to place oneself within the bounds of normative morality,whether merely for appearances or in a heartfelt desire to become amore normatively moral person.
Undoubtedly, there were some who practiced perfect public piety thatwas not mirrored in their private lives. For a few people, especially thosewho expressed a deep reflexive awareness of their “double life,” as onewoman put it, this resulted from doubt and crises of faith and causedtremendous emotional strain at times. For others, this was less a crisis offaith than a disjuncture of performance. So, for example, a womanmight be muh.ajjaba and volunteer, and be held up as a perfect represen-tation of piety by her peers, but secretly listen to popular music when noone else could hear. Many people who experienced disjunctures of per-formance felt confident in their faith and beliefs. They either did notagree with all the tenets of public piety but were not ready to contradictthem publicly, or they hid secret “vices” that they hoped to purge them-selves of someday. Underlying the latter experience was the idea that bycontinually practicing piety, one would naturally get “better” at it.
Another factor that must be considered is the way that the attributionof moral meaning to public piety has linked it to a particular sort of so-cial capital, a component of status in the Shi‘i pious modern. This linkdistressed some women, who feared that some of their peers volunteeredor wore their h.ija
–bs “just for appearances” (bas lil-mazhar). It is impos-sible to know to what extent particular acts do or do not represent“true” piety; it is clear that for some women, public piety was motivatedby intense faith, while for others, it did not necessarily follow from reli-gious conviction.
Both these gaps—where people were not necessarily as pious as theyappeared to be in public and where a person who did not appear to beparticularly pious may have actually prayed and fasted regularly andpossessed a strong sense of faith—were discussed with me from time totime. Some pious Shi‘is feared that such gaps were rampant and poten-tially detrimental to the pious modern, while others considered themvery rare occurrences. Most people agreed, however, that most of thesedisjunctures were critically linked to and could be explained by genera-tional differences in the process of becoming pious.
Becoming Pious: Vanguard versus BANNA–T (Girls/Daughters)
Hajjeh Khadija: Ka–n ballasht in-na–s, h.a’ ı–’atan, ballashit min ’awa–’il is-sab‘ı–na–t, ya‘ni, ballashit tayya–r il-isla–m ith.arak, ka–n, bi’awal ballashshway h.arakeh, li-na–s ta‘rif usu–l dı–n(h)a . . . [People had begun, really,beginning in the early seventies, the Islamic movement began to be ac-tive. In the beginning it was slow, to get people to know the basis of theirreligion . . . ]
For example, I knew I was Muslim, but I didn’t pray. If I fasted, Iwould fast because my parents did, and sometimes I would break myfast, I didn’t know that was wrong. I was only Muslim on my identitycard. There was no Islamic environment. There was a traditional envi-ronment, a very conservative one.
Lara: How was this different from today’s environment?Hajjeh Khadija: Look, for example, my parents said to me, “wear a scarf
[on your head]; it is required.” OK, what was that scarf I would wear?Half my hair would show and it wasn’t a problem. My arms were half-showing and it wasn’t a problem. Even though for us, Islamic dress cov-ers the body. You wear long [skirts], none of your body shows, and noneof your hair. This is the true Islam [hayda il-isla–m l-h. a’ı–’ı–]. But the Islamour parents taught us said you should wear a scarf because it is a signthat you are Muslim.
Now, I rejected this tradition; as I told you, we were a generation ofchange. At first we believed that perhaps this scarf was preventing usfrom progressing. This was what many of the writers and politicianssaid, that a woman’s h. ija–b confined her, so that she just raised childrenand sat at home. So at first we rejected it. But later we came to under-stand the truth of Islam, and we said no, Islam is preferable. A Muslimwoman, she is an educated woman, an activist woman, a woman whoworks in society and raises her children correctly at the same time, whois able to balance the world and her family.
This passage, taken from an interview with Hajjeh Khadija, encapsu-lates a personal perspective on the changes depicted throughout thepreceding pages. Her highlighting of the h. ija
–b as a representative objectaround which both her struggle and her eventual commitment revolvedis typical, as putting on the h. ija
–b is taken to represent a woman’siltiza–m. The struggle and shift she describes is characteristic of hergeneration, women who came of age in a Beirut where support forleftist political parties gradually shifted to participation in the Shi‘i Is-lamic mobilization. Indeed, the personal trajectories of many youngShi‘i women mirrored that of the mobilization. As they adopted theh. ija
–b and lengthened their skirts, young women began completing
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The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps • 223
their educations and participating in the community in unprecedentednumbers.
Many of these young women committed to Islam against the wills oftheir parents and extended families. Hajjeh Zahra described her decisionto commit as “difficult, because this was something that set me apartfrom my family. They worried about me a great deal when I first becamecommitted.” Women like Hajjeh Khadija and Hajjeh Zahra were thevanguard of piety and had great influence in both generational direc-tions, as daughters to an older generation and as mothers to today’syouth. Eventually some of their mothers and grandmothers joined themin iltiza–m. Each person who “became religious” and embraced publicpiety accompanied by religious understanding contributed to the trans-formation of the wider environment. At the same time, these shifts in mi-lieu encouraged further commitment and emphasized the importance ofknowledge underlying practice.
In the Shi‘i pious modern of contemporary al-Dahiyya, iltiza–m has be-come a social norm. Yet this apparent success was also a cause for con-cern, as today’s parents work to raise pious children. On the one hand,some people believed that the new milieu, al-bı–’a, facilitates this task.On the other hand, others feared that the normalization of public pietywould contribute to a potential increase in discord between public andpersonal piety.
The first view was by far the dominant one. The way people casuallythrew the word al-bı–’a around was reminiscent of how “culture” issometimes used in the United States, as a catchall that connoted all thosethings children somehow inhale from their surroundings. Yet at the sametime, al-bı–’a involved a certain amount of very self-conscious cultiva-tion. The bı–’a referred to was always that in which those forms andpractices specific to the pious modern dominate. It implied a normativemorality.
When I asked for more clarification of al-bı–’a, primary elements beganto emerge from this blur, including, in no particular order, home, school,and all the details of public piety I have described in this book, such asvisual images, prayer, Ashura, and volunteering. Al-bı–’a also includespolitics and the hardships of war and occupation, whether experienceddirectly or brought into children’s lives via television, radio, and adultconversations, none of which make any effort to hide the realities of Is-raeli aggression. The extent to which the occupation factored into theworlds of many Shi‘i children was highlighted for me during a visit to anIslamic school. The kindergarten’s walls overflowed with drawings stu-dents had done the previous week for the “Day of Resistance and Liber-ation.” The artwork was strongly evocative of violence, with tanks,bombs, missiles, Resistance fighters, Israeli soldiers, stones, destroyed
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homes, the lifeless bodies of martyrs, and so on. A teacher kept up a run-ning commentary on the artists: “His father was killed six months ago,”“She saw her house destroyed,” “She has never seen her grandparents inher village.”
Islamic schools formed the institutional backbone of the bı–’a for manyparents, who knew their children would receive an education that was ofbetter quality than the notoriously shoddy public schools in al-Dahiyyawhile including “proper” values. The schools facilitated children’s par-ticipation in the Islamic milieu, via school plays, projects, and specialevents. During Ashura, girls acted out the battle of Karbala and its after-math for an audience of weeping mothers, aunts, and cousins, emphasiz-ing the role of the young women, especially Sayyida Zaynab. Anothersort of play took place in order to mark taklı–f.
The word taklı–f—the same term used in volunteers’ phrase taklı–fila–hi—literally means a commissioning, charging, or commandment,usually from God. It was commonly used to refer to the h.ija
–b: when agirl turns nine, the h.ija
–b becomes her taklı–f, her commission, her duty.Since the mid-1990s, schools have been holding large ceremonies, alsoreferred to as taklı–f, to mark these girls’ “coming of age.”
Today Aziza and I went to the al-Mabarrat taklı–f, in the large auditorium un-derneath the major mosque in the neighborhood. A shaykh stood to one sidegreeting male attendees, while three women on the other side greeted women.When we entered, Hajjeh Umm Ali spotted us and sat us in the first women’srow with journalists and other official looking people. . . .
After the introduction, the girls being honored walked down the side aislesto the stage, to resounding applause from the audience. They were dressed likebrides (reminiscent of Catholic first communions) mostly in white, with goldgarlands wrapped around their head-coverings. They sang a song, then joinedthe audience. Then Fadlullah’s son, Sayyid Ali, spoke in his father’s name. Hespoke about the responsibility that comes with the h. ija–b, about how it is acover for one’s heart and morals, and about choosing the Islamic path.
Following this there was a play put on by younger and older girls from al-Mabarrat, those not being honored that day. In the play, a group of girlsfound a gold box. A princely figure appeared in flowing white, and they askhim to open it. He tells them that the only thing that can open the box is a se-cret word, which they have to discover on their own. So the girls divide intothree groups to search for the word. During their wanderings, they encountervarious puppets (trees, flowers, butterflies) that teach them lessons. Eventu-ally, they reconvene at the box. One group exclaims that the secret word ismah. abat alla–h [the love of God], another group counters that it is ma‘rifa[knowledge], while the third claims that it is tawa–d. u‘ [modesty]. None of thewords open the box. They think for a while and then one girl exclaims: “But
The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps • 225
1 This phrase literally means “May God’s name be upon him/her” and connotes “Godbless him/her” with undertones of invoking protection from the evil eye.
it’s all three!” and says “al-taqwa–” [absolute piety/faith]. At this, the boxopens, and a voice announces that there is a treasure inside, which turns outto be the Qur’an. After the play, a long announcement listed donors of giftsfor the girls being honored, and then each girl was given a bag that Azizaspeculated held prayer clothes and a Qur’an.
Over the next few weeks I asked everyone I saw about these taklı–fs.The ceremonies had begun because school administrators felt that pub-licly acknowledging this transitional moment in girls’ lives would markthe changes that accompanied the h.ija
–b (such as only attending single-sex beaches) as positive, a moment of joy worthy of celebration. Yet atthe same time, some feared that public taklı–fs would create external andnonreligious motivations for girls to want to wear the h.ija
–b, so that theywould wear it in order to participate in the ceremony or fit in with theirclassmates. Most people felt that that was the mostly likely scenario formost nine-year-old children, but that with proper education and al-bı–’a,they would eventually wear their scarves in earnest. The issue of howconsciously committed a nine-year-old can be, coupled with the empha-sis placed on choice in veiling, has led to some debate over the properage at which a girl may become muh.ajjaba. Several women insisted thatFadlullah had at one time contemplated raising the age of veiling to thir-teen for this reason.
For girls, taklı–f also marks the moment at which prayer, fasting, andother religious duties begin. I asked one shaykh why they do not simi-larly celebrate the beginning of fasting and prayer for boys—whosetaklı–f begins at age ten—and he replied that since most children of thatage already pray and fast, those practices do not represent a majorlifestyle change like the h.ija
–b does. The shaykh’s reply also confirmedwhat I had noticed during my visits to many pious households: youngchildren often prayed and fasted alongside their parents and older sib-lings.
The notion that children naturally absorbed pious practices from theirparents was a common one. Very few children were actively taught topray. They usually began by imitating older household members, whothen gently corrected their pronunciation and postures until they learnedtheir prayers correctly. Children who prayed on their own at a young agewere proudly praised. “Smallah ‘alay(ha),1 s/he’s already praying!”Young girls who played dress-up with their mothers’ scarves also gar-nered such praise, as did any acknowledgment on a child’s part that sheunderstood the tenets and practices of authenticated Islam.
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Religiosity was also understood to be absorbed as children accompa-nied their mothers as they went about their days. During Ashura, pre-school children attended maja–lis with their mothers, and often hit theirchests during nudbas or brought Mama tissues to wipe her tears. Theywere also a constant presence in many jam‘iyyas. Some children weretaught to contribute a portion of their allowance to an orphan sponsor-ship or put coins in jam‘iyyas’ collection boxes. They were also giventasks like carrying a meal to a poor family or sick neighbor, enablingtheir participation from a young age.
Most people trusted that this Islamic milieu would be sufficient toteach their children “authenticated” Islam and public piety. They alsotrusted their children in ways they described as new. People bemoanedthe ignorance of their own parents and invoked “the way of Islam” inchild rearing with regard to everything from allowing children to dressthemselves, to encouraging them to choose their own careers, to not us-ing corporal punishment. I was frequently referred to Fadlullah’s book onthe subject, World of Our Youth, sitting on many parents’ bookshelves.In a sense, this “new” process reflected larger shifts in relationality—fromthat which was mostly family-focused to a wider engagement with thecommunity of the pious modern. No longer was family necessarily theprimary source of religious knowledge and practice, but peers, institu-tions, and indeed, al-bı–‘a, played a critical role.
Generational Gaps? or “Do Our Daughters Have ILTIZA–M?”
This trust in al-bı–’a to raise pious children is somewhat surprising giventhat most of today’s parents came to their piety via a certain amount ofgenerational conflict. And indeed, as noted above, the Islamic milieu wasa source of concern for some pious Shi‘is, who feared that the ease withwhich their children were integrated into a pious lifestyle belied a poten-tial for inauthenticity in that very lifestyle. Again the question emerges:What is the relationship between public and personal piety? Or, morespecifically: “Do our daughters have iltiza–m?”
When I became committed there was a lot of talk about us. Even within myfamily there was talk, you know, “What’s this iltiza–m?” While today, it’s nor-mal, a girl can put on the h. ija–b and she doesn’t have a problem. She can workin a jam‘iyya and she doesn’t have a problem. So there has been change. Butwe still need more wa–‘ı– [consciousness]. There is a generation growing upnow that is committed, but it is a little, how can I express this? It likes to dothings that don’t fit exactly with iltiza–m. They don’t realize that they will get
The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps • 227
used to it. Especially because today there are more possibilities for people tobe committed without being restricted.
This is the opposite of what it was like when we first became committed.Then, we had to adapt, and we did. I want to give you an example. When webecame committed, of course we could no longer go to the beach. And at thattime there were no women-only pools and beaches like there are today. Ididn’t have a problem with that. I didn’t go to the beach, but I didn’t have apersonal crisis that “oof, I’m not going to the beach!” You see what I mean?
But now! Now my daughter is thirteen, and it causes her a crisis if I don’tfind a way to take her to a women-only beach! So I have to work so that shedoesn’t feel a religious . . . , so that she doesn’t feel that religion has trappedher, because then she will mutiny against it. Maybe the difference is that I haveconviction, and my daughter isn’t convinced of her convictions. (Hajjeh UmmJa‘far)
Hajjeh Umm Ja‘far’s comparison of her generation with that of herdaughter is telling. First, she reminds us that pious women of the van-guard often had to fight their elders in order to wear the h.ija
–b, volunteer,attend religious classes, and otherwise participate in the newly formingIslamic community. The opposition they faced solidified the strength oftheir convictions. In contrast, as we have seen, many girls of her daugh-ter’s generation donned the h.ija
–b at age nine as a matter of course, eitherbecause it was required by their school, or because it was the normativemodel of women’s dress to which they had been exposed.
Hajjeh Umm Ja‘far and some of her peers feared that because publicpiety has become the norm and institutionalized as such, it no longer re-quires the same strength of conviction. “I know I had conviction, I hadto fight the world because of my conviction, but all of this is so normalfor Lama [her daughter] I’m not certain that she understands thesethings,” Hajjeh Huda observed. These women also worried that if theyounger generation’s piety did not necessarily stem from within, but in-stead emerged from a desire to conform to the normative moral orderaround them, they would be more likely to feel restricted by their reli-gious duties.
Other people disagreed with this view, suggesting instead that the nor-mativization of piety was a wholly positive development. Disagreementcame from girls who disproved Hajjeh Umm Ja‘far’s fears, as well asfrom other women of the vanguard generation: “Today, if a girl puts onthe h.ija
–b, she doesn’t face strange looks, or people asking, ‘Why did youdo this?’ the way that we did. Now it’s become the system; it’s accepted,and we are the majority. Today we ask, ‘Why aren’t you muh.ajjaba?’ It ismuch easier” (Noha). I pushed Noha on this, asking her whether the fact
228 • Chapter Seven
that it was the “system” might not mean that more girls are muh.ajjabawithout the necessary underlying convictions. She replied that yes, thatwas possible, but it meant that the girl needed to “work to strengthenher conviction.”
Once again, this links to debates and uncertainties within the piousmodern over the relationship between public and personal piety. Therewere those who believe that visible display should only reflect one’s innerstate of piety, and find “gaps” troubling and problematic. Others, likeNoha, viewed this as an ideal, emphasizing instead the dialectical rela-tionship between the two. For them, “becoming religious” was a processby which inner states and visible display would eventually come to mir-ror one another. The latter perspective is one that understands publicpiety as a means for spiritual progress on the personal as well as thecommunity levels.
Conclusion: The Ideal of the Pious Modern
As we have seen, my interlocutors form a community assembled aroundthe values of public piety. According to these values, religious practicefollows from accurate knowledge; piety includes community activismand participation; commemoration of a historic-religious martyrdom fu-els a contemporary fight against military occupation; and women wearthe h.ija
–b as they participate actively in the public realm for the greatergood. These are among the myriad constituent elements of the piousmodern.
The pious modern is an ethos, a way of being in the world, and a self-presentation. It is an ideal, hegemonic in a Gramscian sense, institution-alized for pious Shi‘is as an infrastructure, a social norm, and a desiredexperience. Incompletely manifested, it is a community. Its “members”draw on multiple discourses about modern-ness in order to positionthemselves and their community as modern/civilized in the contempo-rary world, and to highlight their forward movement on an axis that in-cludes both material and spiritual progress.
Material and spiritual progress were linked causally in both direc-tions. On the one hand, working to construct and maintain an advancedmedical facility was seen as material progress that reflected publicpiety—in the motivations of the agents involved as well as in the imple-mentation of principles of rationally motivated development taught byauthenticated Islam. On the other hand, literacy and an improved educa-tional system led to increased awareness in the community of authenti-cated Islam and its tenets, and therefore to spiritual progress. One couldnot be fully “modern” according to the pious modern ideal if either the
The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps • 229
material or the spiritual were missing. Spiritual development alone wasnot complete without the drive to improve one’s situation materially,and material progress alone would lead to the empty modernity of theWest—spiritually and morally vacuous, and therefore incomplete.
Throughout the preceding chapters, we have seen the ways the prac-tices and beliefs of authenticated Islam and public piety are understoodas wound up with this path of dual progress. That path is one piousShi‘is continue to forge today, as progress is a continual project of work-ing toward the pious modern. By accepting the pious modern as a con-struction of modern-ness based upon a notion of progress that includes aspiritual element, we can view pious Shi‘is—and many other contempo-rary religious communities—as trying to live an enchanted modern.
We do not need to end up in a Star Wars world. One gets there by treatingmodernity as a reified and universal state of being. Modernity persists as apowerful narrative, but there are Other stories to be told. (Rofel 2002: 189)
Not quite an “Other” story, what we instead have here is an instanceof multiple and ambivalently coexisting stories drawn upon by the samepeople in different contexts and in relation to different comparative oth-ers. For pious Shi‘is, secularity and gender norms present areas wherethese stories interact tensely and ambivalently. These ambivalences arelinked to the political stakes of being modern, as Shi‘i Muslims definetheir place in the world in relation to others in Lebanon, Iran, Israel, andthe West/United States, in addition to their own “traditional” past andcontemporary instances of “tradition” within their community. The con-cept of modern-ness is used as a value-laden comparison, in relation topeople’s ideas about themselves, others, progress, and historical mo-ments that hinge around encounters with global and local power anddifference.
Deployments of multiple discourses of modern-ness are not merely ab-stract, nor do they have an impact only on the level of global or nationalpolitics; these deployments affect people’s notions of self, faith, andmorality. They imbricate people’s understandings of themselves as moralpersons in the world. In al-Dahiyya, as spiritual progress is included inthe definition of modern-ness, public piety has emerged as both evidenceand building block of the Shi‘i pious modern. The visibility of piety hashad ramifications for the meaning of piety itself, changing the ways pi-ous Shi‘is practice and understand religion. We have seen the effects ofthis on the ways that people dress, talk, pray, mourn, and express theirreligiosity. This is one instance of a process where the stakes and meaningof religiosity are transformed through engagements with transnationaldiscourses, politics, and power relations. This transformation has beenespecially significant for pious Shi‘i women’s lives. Women are crucial to
230 • Chapter Seven
definitions of the modern itself, in part because of a transnational con-text where women, particularly Muslim women, are seen as markers of asociety’s status in relation to modern-ness. This linking of piety tomodern-ness has added a new layer of meaning where the personal andpublic intersect. On a personal level, with regard to the visibility of thecommunity as a whole, and especially in the overlaps of those arenas,the stakes of being a pious person have been transformed.
Coda
Pious Shi‘is in Lebanon felt a part of a transnational Muslim communityand took an active interest in “Muslim” politics around the world. Theinternational news stories of most interest during my field research werethose about Palestine, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya, joined todayby Iraq. People empathized with the struggles of other Muslims, andread them through the lense of their own struggles. These transnationallinks emphasized their position as Muslims in the international commu-nity, a position heavily implicated in the current context of global powerrelations.
In the opening passage of this book, Hajjeh Umm Zein exclaimedabout the Taliban’s act of cultural destruction, “This backwardness isnot true Islam!” She self-consciously defended the integrity of her faithby making a distinction between Islam as she understood it, and the Tal-iban. That was in March 2001. In a post-9/11 world, many Muslims likeHajjeh Umm Zein are positioned as having to continuously make thatstrategic move of distinction.
Although a constructed opposition between an “anti-modern” Islamand a “modern” West existed long before September 11, 2001, the at-tacks that took place on that day served only to solidify it. Since then,the mainstream U.S. media have been replete with stories about variousIslamist groups, ranging from al Qaeda to the Palestinian Hamas to theLebanese Hizbullah—often lumped together into that same category ofnonmodern other. This has been accompanied by an increase in reportsabout “Muslim women,” as their “liberation” from the “traditions” oftheir religion was incorporated into the U.S. administration’s justifica-tions for attacking Afghanistan.
It should go without saying that such a constructed polarization of theworld erases far more than it clarifies. In addition to erasing the differ-ences among Muslims and various Islamic politics, it most glaringlyerases the effects of U.S. policy in the Middle East and around the world.Underlying discursive oppositions—whether drawn by political and/orreligious leaders, individuals, organizations, or news media—there are
The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps • 231
very real causes and effects affecting people’s daily lives. The politics thatare the stakes in confronting modernity are tangible.
The Shi‘i pious modern was forged in a military maelstrom wherewestern notions of modern-ness were concretized in Apache and Black-hawk helicopters, CBU-58 cluster bombs, fighter planes, and missiles.U.S. support for Israeli military actions in Lebanon and Palestine, as wellas U.S. involvement in prerevolutionary Iran, during the Iran-Iraq war,and during the first Gulf War fomented an “us” versus “them” divisionlong before the “clash of civilizations” repercussions that multiplied af-ter 9/11. The question then arises: what will happen as this politicallandscape changes?
I am often asked whether the public piety imperative has diminishedsince the liberation of south Lebanon in May 2000. As I write this, it hasbeen nearly five years, yet the simple answer remains that it has not. Inpart, this may be related to factors extending the conflict with Israel, in-cluding the continued territorial struggle over the Shebaa Farms area, anoccasionally volatile border, and the intensified violence in Palestinesince the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. And itmay have to do with the recent intensification of rhetorical polarizationsof the world. However, the continued importance of the intersection ofpiety and modernity also underscores the inseparability of religion, poli-tics, and social responsibility in the pious modern.
This is not to say that there have not been changes in the past fewyears. As I finish this book, the Khiam Prison has become a museum andtourist site, with signs guiding visitors through its rooms in Arabic andEnglish, some rooms devoted to memorials to former prisoners, Hizbul-lah memorabilia available for purchase, and an art/photo exhibit that in-cludes reference to the ongoing Palestinian struggle. In a sense, Libera-tion has been institutionalized into the historical narrative andcontinuing trajectory of the Shi‘i pious modern.
To the extent that the stakes of piety on a personal level are affectedby global events and dynamics, then the meanings and stakes and under-standings and practices of piety will continue to be transformed. A num-ber of possible futures could be reflected in such a continuing trans-formation: a just end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a stable andindependent Iraq and Afghanistan, economic stability and opportunityin Lebanon, political change in Iran, the potential manifestations of U.S.intentions in Syria, and the continued integration (or a new marginaliza-tion) of Hizbullah after Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Generationalshifts add another element, especially as young people continue to leavethe country for both the Arab Gulf States and the “West” in search ofemployment. There already exists a sense of the mutability of the piousmodern. In 1998 when I visited an Islamic school, a doorman handed
232 • Chapter Seven
me an ‘aba–ya and h.ija–b; in 2001 I left my head bare upon entering the
same school and no one looked twice.As the local, national, and international political landscapes continue
to change, as a global enchanting of the modern persists or diminishes,and as a generation is raised in a milieu closer to the ideals of authenti-cated Islam than that of their parents, it remains to be seen how the Shi‘ipious modern will distill into new forms. Other moderns and otherpieties remain to be imagined.
7.1. Inside the Khiam Prison Memorial. The plaque to the right reads, “ThePost of Torture Where Three Martyrs Passed Away.”
Glossary
‘aba–ya — long black full body covering worn by Islamist women, in Iran“chador”
’ajr — divine compensation, “points” with God; literally, “remunera-tion” or “wages”
‘aql — mind/rationalitybı–’a — environment /milieufatwa — nonbinding religious ruling or opinionh.adı–th — authoritative record of the Prophet’s speech and actionsh.ija
–b — headscarf, veilh.usayniyya — building for Shi‘i ritual gatheringsift.a
–r — the fast-breaking meal at sunset during Ramadanijtiha–d — religious interpretationiltiza–m — commitment, religious/social commitmentjam‘iyya — social welfare organizationjiha–d — a great effortkhums — a Shi‘i specific religious tax, literally, “one-fifth”lat.am — ritualized striking of the self in mourning, especially during
Ashuramajlis (plural, maja–lis) — mourning gatheringmarji‘ al-taqlı–d — a religious scholar of a certain rank who is emulated
with regard to religious practice; literally “source for imitation”ması–ra — processionmuh.ajjaba — a woman who wears the Islamic headscarfmujtahid — one who is qualified to do ijtiha–dnudba — elegy, lamentationtaka–ful ijtima–‘ı– — mutual social responsibility, social contracttakhalluf — backwardnesstaklı–f — literally a commission, charge or commandment, usually from
God; also used for the ceremonies celebrating girls first wearing of theh. ija–b.
taqlı–dı– — traditionalal-taqwa– — absolute faith and piety; its Qur’anic meaning also includes
“fear of God”taw‘iyya — consciousness-raising, education
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114n, 127, 178–79, 179n, 231Asad, Talal, 21, 21n, 35n, 105, 105nasceticism, 63, 103Ashura, 6, 61–65, 61n, 82, 97, 102,
105–6, 117, 127–64, 130n, 131n, 132n,134n, 135n, 184, 213, 217, 220,223–24, 226; authenticated, 133,137–39, 141–43, 142n, 145–54,156–58; discourses of, 133–56; and gender, 139, 139n, 148; history of, 61,61n, 123; and public space, 154–55,155n; traditional, 133, 133n, 136, 139, 141–42, 142n, 144, 146–52, 154, 156–58; transformation of, 7,131–33, 154
authenticated Islam, 6–8, 18, 20, 21n,22–23, 30, 33, 49, 75, 97, 102–3,113–14, 116–19, 124, 127–28, 138n, 176–77, 180, 184–86, 204–5,208, 212, 214–15, 218, 225–26,228–29, 232
authentication, 8, 20, 20n, 21–22, 22n, 27,35, 71, 71n, 101n, 102, 118, 121–22,124, 127–30, 133, 149, 151, 154,156–59, 171–72, 177, 195, 201, 204,207, 213, 216, 220
authenticity, 19, 20, 21, 23n, 31, 33, 140,143, 156, 226
authoritative discourse, 23, 35, 124–27,149, 156
awareness, 19, 77, 116–17, 132, 143, 164,183, 186n, 201, 225–26, 228
ba–b al-ijtiha–d, 70, 70nbackwardness, 3, 13, 16–19, 19n, 22–24,
24n, 28n, 30, 33, 75, 113, 132, 136, 142, 142n, 154, 158, 172, 180,182–83, 214–15, 218, 230. See alsotakhalluf
banners: for Ashura, 62–63, 144, 155,160; for the h.ajj, 65
al-Basha–’ir, 60, 126Beirut, 12, 42, 42n, 43n, 43–45, 45n,
48–51, 55, 60, 64–65, 67, 73, 73n, 74,78–81, 83, 85–86, 88, 91, 99, 132, 155,173, 188–89, 192–93, 200, 222
Beqaa, 47–48, 72, 72n, 73n, 79, 82, 86,88, 132n, 159, 188
Berri, Nabih, 55, 82n, 88nal-bı–’a, 42, 49, 61, 65, 119, 128, 222–26,
232–33binaries, 26, 33, 153, 230–32blood, 131, 134, 134n, 135, 137–38, 145,
149–50, 153, 158, 199bombardment, Israeli, 13, 44, 48, 158,
164, 200born-again Christianity, 27, 28, 35. See
also Christian fundamentalismbureaucratization, 27, 91, 172, 176Bush, George W., 28, 161
Index
call to prayer, 59–61, 60n, 121, 133,167–68
Calvinism, 22n, 36camps, refugee, 47, 81, 189capitalism, 14, 25, 26n, 73–74, 76capitalists, 108captives, Ashura, 61, 130, 138, 141–42,
145–46, 148, 159, 217cassette tapes, 60, 60n, 126, 126nCatholicism, 26n, 116, 224celebration, 63–65, 86, 168, 225census, 47n, 72, 72nchaos, 19, 43, 86, 108, 167charitable organization, 50, 89, 91. See
also jam‘iyyacharity, 23, 41, 88, 169, 176, 199, 207;
Islamic, 183, 207child rearing, 126, 184, 215, 223, 225–26children, 53, 64, 90–92, 129, 135, 137–38,
144–45, 156, 159, 163, 167, 171,173–75, 177, 181, 183, 185–86, 188,192–93, 196, 198–99, 201, 206, 206n,210–11, 222–26
choice, 112, 115, 205, 224–25Christian fundamentalism, 4, 4n, 28, 29.
See also fundamentalismChristianity, 24n, 28, 28n, 35n, 40, 101n,
102n, 105, 119n, 131n, 201; Shi‘i ideasabout, 9–10
Christians, 123; Lebanese, 11, 45, 47, 47n,48, 60n, 84n, 85; in Lebanon, 5, 72,72n, 84, 92–93, 132n
Christmas, 65civilization, 16–18, 76, 171, 231civil war, 13, 24, 36, 43n, 44, 47–48, 49n,
55, 55n, 67–68, 67n, 68n, 73, 77n,78–79, 83–84, 84n, 86, 88, 91, 151,173, 178, 187–88, 192, 200
class, 45, 75, 110–11, 178–79, 178n, 210clientelism, 85, 85n, 88coexistence, 44, 55, 71n, 92, 94colonialism, 4n, 29, 31n, 112ncommitment, to community, 31, 165,
187–88, 190–91, 196, 200, 217; reli-gious, 34–36, 76–77, 80, 93, 102–3,105–7, 112, 115, 121, 124, 169,186–87, 189, 191, 194, 200–2, 205,217–20, 222–23, 225–27, 233
common good, 34, 169, 228communism, 75–76Communist Party, Lebanese, 74, 77, 162
community, definitions of, 4n, 7–9, 8n, 11,36, 48, 102, 105n, 128, 228; member-ship in, 105, 220, 228
community service, 7, 22, 38, 75, 125,149, 154, 161, 163–205, 207–11,213–15, 220, 228; as norm, 207; andpiety, 194, 196, 207
community welfare, 34, 84, 87–88, 164,169, 176–77, 195, 202, 210, 213n, 228
confessionalism, 10, 43, 53, 72–75, 84, 88, 197n
consciousness, 19, 77, 116–17, 132, 143,164, 183, 186n, 201, 225–26, 228
consciousness-raising, 176, 180, 182–83.See also taw‘iyya
consumerism, 25conversion, 9–10, 37, 101, 123conviction, 77, 113, 207, 221, 227–28. See
also faithcorruption, 75, 85, 88, 130, 145, 164, 196counternarrative, 75, 80crying, 102, 131, 131n, 141–51, 159,
175, 224cultivation of iltiza–m, 105, 105n, 115,
118, 118n, 194, 218, 220–21, 223cultural imperialism, 24, 25, 31nculturedness, 184–85, 189, 218
al-Dahiyya, 3, 6–8, 17, 37–38, 42–66, 42n,55n, 68, 73, 78, 82, 82n, 86, 89–92, 94,103, 105–8, 106n, 110–13, 117,119–20, 119n, 125, 129, 130, 132n,135–37, 146, 151, 154–55, 161, 164,170, 172, 177, 178–79, 187, 190,192–93, 197–98, 200–1, 207–8, 214,220, 223–24, 229; description of, 7,45–52, 45n, 47n, 48n, 59; poverty in,19, 33, 173–74
daycare, 91, 183, 211deprivation. See poverty.desire, 33, 74–75, 106, 114n2, 192, 194,
207, 217, 221, 227–28detainees, 86, 90–91, 231development, 17–18, 19n, 73, 91, 94, 105,
168, 170–71, 178, 180, 182–83, 182n,184n, 228–29
dialect, 145, 147dignity, 176dirge. See nudbadiscipline, 206Discourse, 119, 119n
252 • Index
discursive piety, 103, 118–19, 128, 158disenchantment, 23, 26, 26n, 28displaced persons. See refugeesdispossession. See marginalizationdisruption, 22, 32; temporal, 57ndivorce, 99, 120, 186, 211domesticity, 31n, 208–11, 215domestic sphere, 30–31, 212, 212ndonations, blood, 135; charitable, 37, 64,
89–91, 91n, 165–69, 168n, 178, 181n,207, 225; to Resistance, 85
“door of interpretation”, 70, 70ndouble shift, 209–10, 210ndress, 36, 76, 103, 110, 112, 155, 166,
178–80, 206, 225–27; Islamic, 51, 110,111–14, 185, 205–6, 222, 229
Druze, 72n, 100duty, 64–65, 193, 204; household, 194,
209–11, 215; religious, 103, 106, 124,128, 179, 194–95, 207, 211, 219,224–25, 227
the East, 24, 33economy, 88, 88n, 173–74, 178–81, 179n,
183, 192–93, 196, 217, 231education, 19, 22, 23n, 38, 61–62, 74–76,
79, 89–91, 93, 105, 111, 124, 124n,133, 146, 150, 171, 174, 182–83, 185, 188–90, 214, 216n, 218–19,222–25, 228
Egypt, 22n, 112n, 118n, 217elections, 49, 51, 55, 214; and Hizbullah,
84, 85nelectricity: and desire, 108; lack of, 44,
120, 174, 181, 184, 193; in torture, 86elegy, 135, 138nelites, 29, 73, 75, 92, 108, 132, 179,
180n, 196embodied piety, 103, 111, 117, 119,
127–28embodiment of Ashura, 149–50, 158–59,
162, 201, 207emigration: from Lebanon, 12, 48, 74n,
126, 179, 231; and return, 31nemotionality, 141–44, 146–47, 150–51,
157, 175, 221employment, 74, 91, 113n, 169n, 172,
174, 183, 208n, 209, 210n, 216n, 231emulation, 69, 69n, 70, 71n, 94, 104, 127,
163, 201–2, 207, 220enchantment, 4, 4n, 28n
enlightenment, 19Enlightenment, 27environment. See al-bı–’aequality, 30, 212n, 213n, 217–19equity, 212n, 213n, 216, 216n, 218–19ethnography, 5–6, 15–16, 34n, 40Europe, 23–24, 27, 108evangelism, 24n, 27, 124nexhibitions, 37–38, 58, 58n, 161,
193, 231expatriates, 43
Fadlallah, Sayyid Ali, 115, 126, 224Fadlallah, Sayyid Muhammad Hussein, 38,
54–55, 60, 60n, 62, 71, 71n, 78, 78n,82, 89–94, 93n, 94n, 100, 104, 104n,113n, 114–15, 125–27, 126n, 138n,142, 148n, 150, 150n, 154, 162n, 189n,190–91, 201, 225–26; on gender issues,126, 148n, 210, 215–16, 216n
faith, 5–6, 8–10, 20, 27, 34–35, 37, 40–41,58, 75, 77, 95, 103, 112–13, 117, 128,159, 161–62, 169, 176, 191, 194–96,210, 218, 221, 229–30. See alsoconviction
false consciousness, 40Falwell, Jerry, 27, 35family law, 22nfashion, 18, 47, 99, 178fasting, 34, 37, 64, 70, 100, 102–3, 109,
117–18, 120–21, 120n, 165, 167–68,194, 205, 207, 221–22, 225
Fatima, Sayyida, 61, 64, 69, 70n, 148n,202, 202n, 215–16
fatwas, 93, 93n, 135, 135n, 153, 233fear, 44–45, 53, 67, 204, 227female-headed households, 173, 173n,
181, 208feminism, 30n, 212n, 213n, 216; liberal
western, 30, 217feminists, 29n, 212n, 216n; early
Lebanese, 31nfiqh, 118, 125–26fitna, 108, 108n. See also chaosfit.ra, 119, 196Foucault, 25, 119France, 68fundamentalism, Christian, 4, 4n, 28–29;
Islamic, 3–5, 5n, 15, 18, 22n, 26, 29n1,39, 48, 60n, 80, 111, 162n, 201, 230;religious, 3–4, 27
Index • 253
fundraiser, 38, 63–64, 172, 172n, 178–79, 187
fundraising, 51, 53, 64, 89–91, 91n, 168,172n
future, 15n, 27, 143, 149, 152, 231–32
Gandhi, 27, 151gender: and collective identity, 5n, 218–19;
and modernity, 5, 26, 29–30, 29n, 204,213, 217–19, 230; and public piety,30–31, 204–7, 219; and the publicsphere, 31, 149, 212–14, 213n; and ra-tionality, 213–14; and visibility, 7, 34,113, 115, 140, 149, 204–7, 213n,217–19
gender equality, 30, 212n, 213n, 217–19
gender equity, 212n, 213n, 216, 216n,218–19
gender roles, 22, 26, 29, 33, 94, 163,202–3, 208, 210, 215, 217–18, 224,229; ideal, 5, 205, 208, 215. See alsowomanhood: ideal
generational difference, 7, 20, 76, 116,119n, 124, 146–47, 178–79, 187,221–23, 226–27, 231–32
generosity, 64, 179, 191, 202, 207gesture, 59, 192gift from God, 185, 190, 195, 210good deeds, 104, 165, 190, 211, 214gossip, 212–13, 226government, 72–73, 75, 77, 79, 83n, 85,
88, 152, 174, 174n, 184. See also stategreetings, 102, 106–9, 107n, 165, 224grief, 56, 129, 131, 147–48, 150, 163
h.adı–th, 11, 62, 64, 70, 102, 122, 124–25,129, 145, 194, 197, 197n, 205, 233
h.ajj, 19n, 63–64, 64n, 109, 179, 189–90handshaking, 103, 106–11, 110nHarakat Amal, 47, 47n, 51, 54–55, 62,
77n, 78–79, 78n, 82–83, 82n, 83n, 88n,92, 135n, 155, 162
Harb, Shaykh Raghib, 54hawza, 78, 126, 147, 160, 216nheadscarf. 10, 17, 36–37, 51, 76, 99,
102–3, 107, 109–16, 111n, 112n, 113n,118–119, 124–25, 138, 179, 182, 185,189, 204, 206, 221–22, 228, 232–33;literature on, 6n, 112, 112n; and piety,113, 221–22, 224–27
health care, 18, 38, 75, 90–91, 171, 174,178, 184
hegemony, 49, 49n, 59, 228hell, 68heroes, 53, 129, 158, 198, 217Hidden Imam, 27, 64, 69, 79, 80n, 94,
152h.ija
–b, 10, 17, 36–37, 51, 76, 99, 102–3,107, 109–16, 111n, 112n, 113n,118–119, 124–25, 138, 179, 182, 185,189, 204, 206, 221–22, 228, 232–33;literature on, 6n, 112, 112n; and piety,113, 221–22, 224–27
Hijri calendar, 61, 63–65, 93historicism, 14, 14n, 33hit h.aydar, 134, 134n, 135, 138n, 139n.
See also lat.amHizb al-Da‘wa, 77–80, 82Hizbullah, 3, 5n, 32, 34, 38–40, 39n, 45,
47, 49n, 50–51, 52n, 54–55, 60, 62, 64,78, 84n, 85–87, 85n, 87n, 90–92, 94,104, 106, 110–11, 113, 124, 124n, 135,135n, 138–39, 138n, 146, 146n,150–52, 151n, 154–55, 155n, 158–59,161–62, 174n, 184, 200, 230–31; con-stituency of, 11n, 86, 85n; generaliza-tions about, 7–8, 25; origins of, 82–84,82n, 83n. See also the Resistance
Hizbullah Women’s Committee, 38, 90,159, 215
holiday, 36, 64–65hospitals, 73, 89, 91, 115, 171–72, 175,
189, 214nhousehold responsibility, 194, 209–11, 215humanitarianism, 7, 34–35, 169, 189, 191,
193, 195–96, 199, 202, 220; and piety,193, 196
Husayn, Imam, 6, 61–64, 62n, 69, 106n,123, 129–30, 134, 134n, 137–38,142–52, 154–60, 162–63, 160n, 200,202, 217
h.usayniyya, 62, 62n, 91, 126, 129, 132n,137, 144, 146, 155–57, 233
iconography, 55, 58–59, 198identity, 12, 37, 42, 154n, 187; Arab-
American, 10n; collective, 51n, 58, 60n,103, 119n, 130n, 149, 219; crisis of,12–13, 13n, 36; in Lebanon, 9–12, 10n,14n; religious, 9–10, 36, 49; and sectari-anism, 10–11, 10n, 13, 36, 43, 60, 222
254 • Index
ift.a–r, 38, 64, 166–69, 178–79, 211, 233
ignorance, 19, 23, 75, 77, 116, 120, 123,177–78, 180, 182, 215–16
ijtiha–d. See interpretation: religiousiltiza–m, 34–36, 76–77, 80, 93, 102–3,
105–7, 112, 115, 121, 124, 169,186–87, 189, 191, 194, 200–2, 205,217–20, 222–23, 225–27, 233
images, 49, 51, 51n, 54, 58–59, 223;Ashura, 62 (see also banners); critiquesof, 55–58; of orphans, 49, 51–53, 53n,57–58, 64, 197, 199; of martyrs, 49,51–53, 52, 56–58, 57n, 140, 161; of re-ligious leaders, 49, 51–53, 55–58, 79, 80
Imam Ali, 11, 60–61, 64–65, 69, 117n,129, 134, 134n, 182, 202, 215
Imam Husayn, 6, 61–64, 62n, 69, 106n,123, 129–30, 134, 134n, 137–38,142–52, 154–60, 160n, 162–63, 200,202, 217
Imam al-Mahdi, 27, 64, 69, 79, 80n, 94, 152
Imams, 32, 69, 70n, 102, 119, 127nImam al-Sadr Foundation, 88n, 92, 110imitation, 225. See also emulationindividualism, 24, 30–31, 31nindividualized selves, 176, 217–18infallibles, 70n, 201infrastructure, 73, 85, 174, 192, 228injustice, 133, 152, 158, 158n, 200–201institutionalization, 27, 33, 66–67, 73,
87–88, 91, 94–95, 127, 130–31, 170,207, 227–28, 231
institutions, 38, 44, 59, 78–79, 82–84, 87,92, 94–95, 177, 205, 226; charitable,23, 88–89, 91, 88n, 172; religious, 23;sectarian, 73
intercession, 142, 149ninternet, 47, 125–27, 126n, 127ninterpretation, 34, 106n; religious, 20–21,
23, 35, 70–71, 70n, 71n, 93–94, 101–2,110, 120, 123, 125–26, 127n, 128, 149,201, 214–16, 216n, 218, 233; of Za-ynab’s behavior, 130, 148–49, 162–63,202, 205
Iran, 23n, 25, 51n, 68, 80n, 82n, 83, 84n,90, 90n, 94n, 112n, 127n, 131n, 133,135, 138n, 139n, 172n, 216n; Islamicrevolution in, 6, 23n, 26n, 31n, 69, 71,75, 77n, 78–80, 79n, 82, 112, 116,150n, 151n, 201, 229, 231
Iraq, 24, 40, 51n, 68, 71, 78–79, 230–31;and Ashura, 61, 138n, 144, 147; inva-sion of, 161; U.S. occupation of, 24, 40,106n, 158n
Islamic calendar, 61, 63–65, 93Islamic Charity Emdad Committee, 38, 90,
92, 172, 175, 177, 185, 197Islamic fundamentalism, 3, 5, 39. See also
fundamentalismIslamic history, 31, 61, 94, 121–23,
130–31, 143, 149, 151, 156–58, 160,177, 201–2, 207, 216–17, 228
Islamic law, 22n, 71, 93, 102, 111–12,177, 206n, 210
Islamic movement, 22n, 60n, 162n, 201;Lebanese Shi‘i, 6, 8, 52, 58–59, 65–68,75, 77, 88, 91–92, 94, 102, 110, 127–28,131, 133, 135, 153, 170, 189, 207, 222
Islamic Resistance, 8, 51, 57, 63, 83–86,147n, 151, 155, 158–62, 161n,198–200, 204, 208, 223; fighters in, 34,160–62, 199; as nationalist, 159, 162;operations of, 159, 161n; support for,12, 34, 51, 85, 85n, 199
Islamic revolution in Iran, 6, 23n, 26n,31n, 69, 71, 75, 77n, 78–80, 79n, 82,112, 116, 150n, 151n, 201, 229, 231
Islamism, 4, 5, 5n, 15, 18, 26, 29n, 48, 80,111, 230
Islamization, 5Israel, 4, 4n, 6, 24, 40n, 50, 68, 75, 79, 81,
81n, 83, 83n, 86, 85n, 87n, 90, 129,159, 198, 200, 229; and attacks onLebanon, 13, 44, 48, 77, 77n, 78n, 80,82, 85, 85n, 133, 159–60, 188–89, 192,223, 231; and occupation of Lebanon, 6,8, 39–40, 68, 79, 82, 84, 86–87, 150,158, 161, 163–64, 173, 198–99, 208,223, 228; and withdrawal fromLebanon, 37, 53, 68, 84–87, 85n,105–6, 159, 199, 223, 231
Israeli occupation forces, 81–82, 86, 162izdiwa–j, 194
Jabal ‘Amil, 72, 77n, 131–32, 132njam‘iyya, 37–39, 50–51, 59, 63–64, 88–92,
94–95, 99, 101, 104–6, 109, 124–25,155, 159–60, 164, 166, 168–72, 168n,169n, 172n, 174–87, 177n, 193–94,197–201, 205–11, 208n, 209n, 214,226, 233; women-only, 213–14, 218
Index • 255
Japan, 25, 25n, 26njiha–d, 70, 204, 233; gender, 204, 212,
212n, 214, 216–18, 216n; women’s, 7,32, 203–4, 212, 218–19
jinn, 122Judgment Day, 27, 69, 117, 152,
195, 199
Karbala, 61, 63, 129–32, 130n, 131n,132n, 141, 145, 147–49, 149n, 151–52,151n, 154–60, 158n, 162, 202, 217, 224
Khadija, Sayyida, 32, 202, 216Khamenei, Ayatollah, 54, 63, 71, 94, 94n,
125, 135n, 138, 153, 155Khiam Prison, 86–87, 231–32Khomeini, Ayatollah, 28, 50, 54–55, 62,
71, 80–81, 90, 94n, 116, 129, 135n,138, 184, 201, 215, 216n
Khu’i, Sayyid, 71, 89, 94nkhums, 70, 70n, 89, 127, 168n, 207, 233.
See also religious taxeskin relations, 176, 209, 209nkinship idiom, 176–77, 209, 209nknowledge, 27, 35, 60, 119n; and poverty,
182; religious, 20, 23, 30, 60, 77, 100,103, 116–19, 121–28, 150–51, 153,182, 184, 202, 222–26, 228; scientific,27, 184; women’s, 122, 216
Koselleck, 18n, 27
labor, 31n, 74, 89–91, 172, 208n, 214lamentation, 129–30, 130n, 133, 138n,
141–45, 147lat.am, 131, 131n, 132, 134–40, 134n,
135n, 138n, 139n, 149–50, 150n,153–54, 233
laylat al-qadr, 64, 64nLebanese identity crisis, 12–13, 13n, 36Lebanese Shi‘i Islamic movement, 6, 8, 52,
58–59, 65–68, 75, 77, 88, 91–92, 94,102, 110, 127–28, 131, 133, 135, 153,170, 189, 207, 222
Lebanese Union of Muslim Students, 78, 82
lecture, Ashura, 129, 143–45the Left, 77, 79, 80, 222; failures of, 53,
79–80, 79nLiberation, 37, 53, 68, 84–87, 85n, 105–6,
159, 199, 223, 231Libya, 68, 79liturgy, 141
Al-Mabarrat Association, 38, 88–89, 92,177, 181, 189–91, 197, 210, 214n, 224
al-Mahdi, Imam, 27, 64, 69, 79, 80n, 94, 152
maja–lis ‘aza, 23, 37, 62, 62n, 121, 123–24,131, 131n, 132n, 133, 135n, 137–51,139n, 141n, 146n, 147n, 153, 155–58,155n, 156n, 157n, 164, 226, 233
majlis. See maja–lis ‘azaal-Mana–r, 60, 84n, 86, 126, 159–60, 160nmandate, French, 47, 72marginalization, Shi‘i, 13, 19, 36, 50, 52,
67, 69, 74–75, 79, 87–88, 95, 132, 201, 231
marji‘iyya, 69, 69n, 70n, 71n, 94n, 127marji‘ al-taqlı–d, 23, 37–38, 69–71, 69n,
71n, 82, 89, 92–94, 94n, 102, 125–26,168n, 201, 233
Maronites, 47–48, 72–73, 72n, 78marriage, 32n, 64, 74, 111, 127n, 210–11,
216n (see also images); temporary, 120,120n, 127
martyrs, 38n, 52–53, 56–58, 91, 140, 142,145, 161–62, 161n, 224, 232; family of,161, 163, 198–200; Resistance, 49, 53, 90, 138, 158n, 198–200; women,162, 162n
Martyrs’ Association, 38, 53n, 90–92, 115,124, 161, 171–72, 197–200, 214n
martyrdom, 49n, 61, 69, 154, 157–58,202, 208, 228; of Imam Husayn, 61–62,69, 123, 130, 141, 143, 151, 156n, 162, 217
martyrdom operations, 162, 162nması–ra, 97, 105, 131, 131n, 133, 135,
135n, 137–40, 139n, 149, 155, 159, 233massacres, 80–81, 81n, 189materialism, 24, 30, 179mawlid, 63–64, 168, 184Mecca, 64media, 25n, 43, 51n, 61, 64, 82, 106n,
114, 126, 156, 156n; Hizbullah, 38, 57,126; U.S., 3, 24–25, 30, 162, 162n, 230
memorialization, 56–57, 106n, 161, 231message, Ashura, 148, 151–52, 156, 158,
163, 199, 217metadiscourse, 122, 219middle class, 31n, 47, 85n, 88, 178–79,
207, 214milieu, 42, 49, 61, 65, 119, 128, 222–26,
232–33
256 • Index
military, 24–26, 68, 73, 84, 83n, 86–87,161–62, 231
militias, 49n, 68, 78, 80millenarianism, 27mind, 21, 23, 27, 70n, 93, 114, 120, 143,
151, 162, 233mobilization, Shi‘i Lebanese, 33, 68,
74–75, 78–80, 82, 95, 112, 116–17,130, 132–33, 139, 150–51, 170, 187,222. See also Lebanese Shi‘i Islamicmovement; women’s, 138n
models. See role modelsmodernism, 19th century Islamic, 27nmodernity, alternative, 14–15, 153, 229;
and Ashura, 152–53; and authenticatedIslam, 23, 228; as civilized, 16–19, 25,29, 33, 76, 80, 171, 228; critiques of,14, 14n; discourses of, 4–5, 13–19, 15n,22, 25, 29, 32–33, 113, 153, 153n, 170,177, 184, 212, 218–19, 228–32; en-chanted, 4–5, 28, 41, 95, 153, 228–29,232; and gender, 5, 26, 29–30, 29n, 204,213, 217–19, 230; Islam and, 15–16,15n, 18, 25–26, 229; literature on, 14,15n; nonsecular, 27, 29; plural, 14, 16;political stakes of, 5, 15, 25, 229, 231;and religion, 4, 80, 153, 171, 229, 231;salience of, 15; semantics of, 4n, 14,15n, 16–17, 16n; and social relation-ships, 8, 30, 176, 186; and temporality,18n, 152–54; western, 4n, 25, 29, 171,176, 217, 229; western discourses of, 5,14, 25, 25n, 26, 33, 36, 75, 153, 170,176, 213, 230–31
modernization, 8, 19, 25–26, 33, 73–74,93, 170–71, 176
modesty, 106, 109, 179, 224morality, 5, 19, 22n, 23, 27, 31, 36, 75,
95, 102, 110, 115, 128, 151, 154, 169,182, 182n, 187n, 201, 205–8, 217–18,221, 223–24, 227, 229; normative, 206,221, 223, 227
moral order. See moralitymosque, 59, 60, 62, 71, 105, 115–16,
118n, 126, 129, 134, 137, 155, 217, 224
mothers of martyrs, 163, 163nMother Theresa, 32, 194, 201motivations, 76, 161–62, 213n, 217–18,
225, 228; for volunteering, 171–72,186–87, 191, 196–97, 199, 207
mourning, 57, 59, 62, 129, 131, 142,148–49, 149n, 155, 229
mourning gatherings, 23, 37. See alsomaja–lis ‘aza
Movement of the Deprived, 77–78, 132mu‘amala–t, 118, 169muh.ajjaba, 75–76, 99–100, 102, 107–11,
113, 113n, 115–16, 138, 168, 181, 185,206, 219, 221, 225, 227–28, 233
Muhammad, Prophet, 6, 26–27, 28n, 32,61, 62, 64–65, 69, 70n, 100, 114n, 117,119, 124, 127n, 141, 145–46, 197n,198, 201–2, 215
Muharram, 61, 61n, 62, 129–30, 133,135, 137, 141, 144–45, 151, 155. Seealso Ashura
mujtahid, 35, 70–71, 82, 94, 107, 110n,113n, 233. See also religious scholar
al-Musawi, Sayyid Abbas, 50, 54, 78n,158–59
muthaqqaf, 184–85, 189, 218mutual reciprocal social relations,
118, 169
Nabatieh, 82, 133, 133n, 134n, 135–37,135n, 139n, 150, 155, 159
Najaf, 78, 132narration, Ashura, 129, 135n, 137, 141,
143–44, 146, 148narrative, 7, 49, 53, 58–59, 58n, 79, 130,
151n, 156–57, 229, 231; volunteers’,197, 200
Nasrallah, Sayyid Hasan, 50, 53n, 54, 71,78, 82, 105, 138, 150, 155, 158n, 159,199, 201
national culture, 12, 36National Pact, 72, 84nationalism, 33, 49n, 105n, 112n, 162,
162n, 198nationalist movements, 139n, 163;
Lebanese, 13, 13nnation-state, 161–62; Lebanese, 13, 19,
22n, 50, 52, 59, 67, 72, 74, 77, 84n, 92,106, 162
networks, 43n, 187n, 209nNGOs, 177, 177nnormative moral order, 206, 221, 223, 227normativity, 22n, 36, 205–7, 217, 221,
223, 227normativization, 5, 127, 227North America, 24, 24n, 178
Index • 257
nudba, 62, 138, 138n, 143–46, 226, 233al-Nu–r, 60, 84n
objectification: of religion, 20–21, 23n; ofwomen, 24, 114
occupation: of Lebanon, 6, 8, 39–40, 68,79, 82, 84, 86–87, 150, 158, 161,163–64, 173, 198–99, 208, 223, 228; ofIraq, 24, 40, 106n, 158n
official discourse, 23, 35, 124–27, 149, 156
oppression, 58, 80, 111, 151n, 152, 154,158, 164, 173, 200–201, 205, 218–19
orphanages, 89, 92, 172, 177, 181, 183, 189
orphan, 49–50, 52–53, 58, 88–92, 165,168, 172–73, 175, 177, 185, 189,197–99, 202, 211; as icon, 64, 198–99.See also images
orphan sponsorship, 89–90, 177, 197–98, 226
orthodoxy, 21, 21n, 105n, 122Ottomans, 72, 72noverpopulation, 43, 45, 47, 51, 174
Palestine, 162, 230–31Palestinian liberation movement, 68, 74,
77n, 139nPalestinian resistance, 162Palestinians, 40, 188Parliament, 72–73, 72n, 82n, 84–85, 85nparticipation of children, 224–27passion play, 131n, 133, 134n, 135n, 151npatriarchy, 209–10, 210n, 213–14, 216,
218–19performance, 36, 119n, 138, 220–21personal piety, 103, 115, 169, 220–21,
227–28, 231; and public piety, 23, 128,169, 219–21, 223, 226, 228, 230
personal status law, 22npersonhood, 184n. See also selfhoodPhalangists, 78, 80, 81nphotographs. See imagesphotography, 51n, 56–58, 57n; duality in,
56–58; memorial, 56–57piety. See personal piety; public pietypilgrimage, 19n, 63–64, 64n, 109, 131n1,
138n, 172n, 179, 189–90planes, 231; Israeli, 44, 158–59pleasure, 194poetry, 129, 144, 147, 156, 161
polarizations, 26, 33, 153, 230–32political climate, 39, 53, 106, 113political Islam, 4political quietism, 133, 149–50politics, 6–7, 24, 26, 35, 42, 47–49, 51,
54–55, 58n, 60, 66, 68–69, 75, 79, 84,85n, 88, 94, 94n, 106, 112–13, 128,146n, 191, 198–99, 215, 220, 223,229–32
the poor, 33–34, 65, 79, 88, 90, 92, 100,105, 112, 165, 171–72, 174–76,180–85, 184n, 193, 197–99, 202, 207,212, 214, 226
population density, 43, 45, 47, 51, 174portraits. See imagesportraiture, 57n, 58; political, 49, 51n,
53, 56postcolonialism, 24poverty, 8, 45, 73–74, 90, 171–74, 173n,
177–78, 187–88, 191–93, 196–98,200–1, 204; ideas about, 177–78,180–82; and ignorance, 180, 182
power, 15–16, 24–26, 24n, 80, 153–54,229–30; discursive, 5, 25
prayer, 34, 37, 59–61, 64, 70, 76, 100,102–6, 104n, 105n, 106n, 109, 112,115–19, 121, 125, 138, 144, 145n, 165, 170, 186, 194, 196, 205, 207,221–23, 225
prisoners, 86, 90–91, 231. See also KhiamPrison
processions, 97, 105, 131, 131n, 133, 135,135n, 137–40, 139n, 149, 155, 159, 233
progress, 16–20, 18n, 22n, 24–27, 29, 33,52, 61, 66–67, 70–71, 75–76, 80, 87,94, 110, 140, 152–54, 159, 170, 172,178, 182–85, 207–8, 214, 219, 222,228–29; material, 18–19, 170–71, 176,178, 180, 207, 213, 219, 228–29; no-tions of, 5, 8; personal, 30, 118, 171,185–86, 209, 212, 214, 228; spiritual, 5,7, 18, 20, 22, 34, 42, 52, 87, 102, 113,117, 127–28, 143, 152–53, 171, 176,178, 180, 185, 207, 213, 219, 228–29
Prophet Muhammad, 6, 26–27, 28n, 32,61, 62, 64–65, 69, 70n, 100, 114n, 117,119, 124, 127n, 141, 145–46, 197n,198, 201–2, 215
Protestant Ethic, 28, 182nProtestantism, 22n, 28, 35Protestant Reformation, 27, 35
258 • Index
public arena, 34–35, 34n, 59, 95, 107n,112, 156n, 207; and gender, 31, 149,212–14, 213n
public good, 34, 164, 169, 176–77, 202,210, 213n, 228
public participation of women, 31n, 94,102, 113, 122, 140, 148n, 149, 156,163, 202, 204, 207–9, 211–19, 222–23,228; in discourse, 156–57, 205, 213,213n, 216, 219; in military, 162, 208,208n, 216; as progress, 207, 213–14,219, 222–23
public piety, 35, 59, 93, 95, 102, 115, 128, 130, 158, 164, 180, 203–7, 212,219, 221, 223, 226, 228–29, 231; andAshura, 154, 158; definition of, 8, 34; gaps in, 220–21, 226–28; and gender, 30–31, 204–7, 219; andmorality, 221; normativization of, 5, 36, 206–7, 221, 223, 227; as new, 20,204–5, 207; and personal piety, 23, 128, 169, 219–21, 223, 226, 228, 230;and spiritual progress, 8, 18, 219,228–29
public religiosity, 4, 26, 35, 103public space, 6, 42, 48, 49n, 53, 112–13,
115, 154–55public sphere, 34–35, 34n, 59, 95, 107n,
112, 156n, 207; and gender, 31, 149,212–14, 213n
public welfare, 34, 84, 87–88, 164, 169,176–77, 195, 202, 210, 213n, 228
purity, 71n, 118, 121, 127n
al Qaeda, 3n, 230Qana, 13, 85, 85nQasim’s wedding, 157, 157nquietism, political, 133, 149–50Qur’an, 60, 62, 64–65, 70, 76, 80, 89,
102, 114n, 117–19, 122, 127n, 129,143, 165, 170, 170n, 186n, 195, 197,205, 225
radio, 42n, 60–62, 64, 84n, 125–26, 126n,156, 156n, 159, 161, 223
Ramadan, 37–38, 51, 53n, 63–65, 64n,89–91, 100–2, 117, 120–21, 165–66,167n, 168–69, 172, 187, 205, 207, 209, 211
Ramadan food center, 165–69, 172, 179,187, 197, 211
rationality, 20, 22–23, 26–28, 35, 71,93–94, 118, 205, 228; and gender,213–14
rationalization, 22, 27, 35reading, 123, 125–27, 141n, 215–16reasons for volunteering, 171–72, 186–87,
191, 196–97, 199, 207recitation, Ashura, 141–47; Qur’anic, 60,
89, 118–19recitor, Ashura, 141–43, 141n, 145–47,
150, 152, 156reconstruction, 43n, 192, 192nreform, 75, 94, 116, 178, of Ashura,
131–33, 131n, 132n, 149–50, 157refugees, 45, 79, 80–81, 88, 175, 188–89,
192; Palestinian, 47; Shi‘i, 48, 81, 173regret, 131, 149–50reinterpretation of Zaynab’s behavior, 130,
148–49, 162–63, 202, 205relationality, 31, 31n, 186, 209, 226religion as category of analysis, 35, 35n,
101nreligious fundamentalism. See fundamen-
talismreligious history, 31, 61, 94, 121–23,
130–31, 143, 149, 151, 156–58, 160,177, 201–2, 207, 216–17, 228
religious law, 22n, 71, 93, 102, 111–12,177, 206n, 210
religious leaders. See religious scholarsreligious obligation, 103, 106, 124,
128, 179, 194–95, 207, 211, 219,224–25, 227
religious scholars, 23, 35, 28, 69–71, 70n,76, 78, 82, 94, 107, 110–11, 110n,113n, 119, 125–27, 133, 135, 135n,138, 148–50, 156–57, 201, 233. See alsoimages
religious taxes, 70, 90, 118, 168n, 178. Seealso khums
representation, 53, 56–57, 141, 148, 218,221; political, 75
reputation, 123, 180–81, 206, 208resilience, 43–44, 114, 148, 192resistance, 25, 106n, 150, 150n, 152, 201,
208; cultural, 15; the h.ija–b as, 111–12,
112nthe Resistance against Israeli occupation,
8, 51, 57, 63, 83–86, 147n, 151, 155, 158–62, 161n, 198–200, 204, 208,223; fighters in, 34, 160–62, 199;
Index • 259
the Resistance (continued)as nationalist, 159, 162; operations of,159, 161n; support for, 12, 34, 51, 85,85n, 199
responsibility: God-given, 190–91, 193,195, 215; household, 194, 209–11, 215;to Resistance martyrs, 199; religious,115, 117, 224 (see also duty); social,106, 129, 144, 184, 186n, 215, 231;women’s, 204, 215, 218
revolution, 76, 80, 92, 132n, 133, 143,146n, 148–49, 151–53, 151n, 153n,156–59, 158n, 200, 217. See also Iran
ritual, 34, 41, 61, 75, 105, 119, 131n, 186role models, 26, 27, 31–32, 130, 153–54,
158, 158n, 160, 162–63, 172, 191,201–2, 204–5, 214, 216–17; volunteersas, 185; Zaynab as, 130, 153, 156, 163,191, 202, 202n, 204, 207, 217–18, 224
Sabra and Shatila, 80–81, 81n, 189sacrifice, 8, 41, 49n, 57, 129, 143, 150–51,
158, 161–62, 162n, 164, 191, 198–200,202, 212, 217
al-Sadr, Sayyid Musa, 28, 54, 55, 74,77–80, 78n, 78n, 88, 88n, 92, 132,132n, 138, 201; disappearance of, 79,82n, 88
al-Sadr, Sayyida Rabab, 88n, 201Safar, 62–63salvation, 142, 149–51Saudi Arabia, 25, 65, 68nSayyida Zaynab, 27, 32, 129–30, 138n,
142, 144–46, 148–49, 148n, 153, 156,159, 162–63, 172, 191, 202, 202n,204–5, 207, 217–18, 220; reinterpreta-tion of, 130, 148–49, 162–63, 202, 205;as role model, 130, 153, 156, 163, 191,202, 202n, 204, 207, 217–18, 224
sayyids, 28n. See religious scholarsschool, 33, 73, 76–77, 89–91, 92, 104,
109, 115–17, 119, 119n, 143, 159, 164,168, 172–75, 177, 187–90, 205–6,223–25, 227, 231–32
science, 33, 89, 143, 184; and Islam,27–28, 93
Scopes Trial, 28scouts, 116, 138–39seasons, 5, 22, 60–61, 63–65; of mourn-
ing, 61–63, 65sect, 60, 73
sectarian identity, 10–11, 10n, 13, 36, 43,60, 222
sectarianism, 10, 43, 53, 72–75, 84, 88,197n; and space, 43, 43n, 48–49, 60
secularism, 26, 35, 113secularists, 24n, 162; Lebanese, 10n, 11,
75–76, 78, 162, 162nsecularity, 5, 27, 29, 229secularization, 23, 26, 29, 32self-betterment, 30, 118, 171, 185–86,
209, 212, 214self-consciousness, 20–22, 218, 223self-development, 30, 118, 171, 185–86,
209, 212, 214self-expectations, 205self-flagellation. See lat.amselfhood, 30–31, 31n, 105, 105n, 114,
118, 176, 185–86, 191, 194, 209,217–18, 221, 229
self-improvement, 30, 118, 171, 185–86,209, 212, 214
seminar, 38, 184, 214–15; volunteer train-ing, 175, 185, 196, 205
seminary, 78, 126, 147, 160, 216nSeptember 11, 2001, 3, 4, 230–31sermons, 60–61, 60n, 82, 113–15, 118n,
123, 125–27, 126n, 150n, 154, 215;Ashura, 141–43, 145n, 147
sexism, 214. See also patriarchyShamseddin, Shaykh Muhammad Mehdi,
78n, 88, 88nsharı–‘a, 22n, 71, 93, 102, 111–12, 177,
206n, 210Sharon, Ariel, 80, 81nshaykhs, See religious scholarsShebaa Farms, 87, 87n, 231Shi‘ism, origins of, 11n, 69–71, 69nSistani, Sayyid, 71, 94nSocial Advancement Association, 38,
91–92, 151, 172, 174–75, 179, 185–86,196–97, 200, 213
social capital, 106, 106n, 221social expectations, 11n, 113, 115,
205–7social norms, 36, 107–8, 115, 169n, 180,
204–7, 212, 214, 218, 223, 228–29social pressure, 11n, 113, 115, 205–7social responsibility, 106, 129, 144, 184,
186n, 215, 231social status, 30, 178, 180, 180n,
182n, 221
260 • Index
social welfare, 34, 84, 87–88, 164, 169,176–77, 195, 202, 210, 213n, 228
solidarity, 57–59, 132, 138, 149, 153soteriological meaning, 133, 148,
152–53sound: public, 64, 103; sacred, 59–60soundscape, 42n, 59–62, 64, 103Sour, 42, 77, 88the south, 8, 42, 47–48, 53, 72–73, 73n,
77, 77n, 79, 81–88, 82n, 90, 92, 105–6, 110, 131, 131n, 158, 164, 173,188, 231
South Asia, 29Southern Lebanese Army, 84–86, 86nsouthern suburbs of Beirut. See al-Dahiyyaspace, 7, 21, 47, 103, 152; claiming of,
52–53, 56, 60, 60n, 64–65; and gender,208–9; public, 6, 42, 48, 49n, 53,112–13, 115, 154–55; sacralization of,59–60, 143, 145n; sectarianization of,43, 43n, 49, 60
speech, 102, 114, 118–19, 119nspiritual progress, 5, 7, 18, 20, 22, 34, 42,
52, 87, 102, 113, 117, 127–28, 143,152–53, 171, 176, 178, 180, 185, 207,213, 219, 228–29
state, 13, 22, 52, 59, 74, 77, 84, 92. Seealso government
status, 131, 230; political, 180; social, 30,178, 180, 180n, 182n, 221; of women,29–30, 204, 213, 218–19, 230
stereotypes, 13–14, 13n, 25n, 34n, 45, 47;about Islam, 4, 13n, 24, 32, 153; aboutLebanese women, 114, 114n, 213–14;about Muslim women, 30n, 32, 111,213–14, 218, 222, 230; about Shi‘i Mus-lims, 13, 13n, 17, 19, 113, 136, 183;about the West, 13, 24
stigma, 11, 34n, 36, 132subjectivity, 12, 14, 186nsuicide bombings. See martyrdom opera-
tionsSunni Muslims, 13n, 61, 63, 65, 69–70,
72–73, 72n, 104n, 120–21, 120n, 132n, 216
support from men, 211, 215Supreme Islamic Shi‘i Council, 77,
78n, 79Syria, 13n, 53n, 53, 68, 82n, 83, 84n,
85–87, 85n, 86n, 87n, 123, 179, 231Syrian Social Nationalist Party, 74, 162
Ta’if Accord, 68, 84taka–ful ijtima–‘ı–, 195, 195n, 201, 207, 233.
See also social responsibilitytakhalluf, 180–83, 185, 198, 233. See also
backwardnesstaklı–f, 190, 195, 224, 233; of girls, 224–25Taliban, 3, 3n, 230taqiyya, 72taqwa–, 117, 117n, 169, 184, 194, 225, 233taw‘iyya, 175, 180–85, 233; for men,
214–15; for volunteers, 185–86, 209tears, 129, 137, 142, 145–46, 148–50,
153–54, 158, 226technology, 15, 17–18, 25, 91, 93, 170–71;
communication, 22, 23n, 71n, 126n;and Islam, 171
television, 3, 60–62, 84n, 102, 106, 114n,125–26, 126n, 155–56, 159, 161, 181, 223
temporality, 18n, 22n, 26–27, 147,152–54, 154n, 220
tent, Ashura, 137, 155, 155nterritoriality, 51, 53, 55, 55n, 62, 83terrorists, 39–40, 83, 83ntexts, 141n, 143, 153; access to, 20; reli-
gious, 21, 23, 28n, 35, 62, 102, 119,121–22, 126, 126n, 198, 215–16, 216n, 218
textures, 42, 42n, 48–50, 61, 64, 66–67,127, 220
time, 18, 48, 59–60, 152, 164, 201; volun-teers’, 168–69, 172, 191, 194, 200, 207,210, 214; wasting, 179, 214
tiredness: lack of, 193–94, 200, 210torture, 86tradition, 17n, 18–23, 21n, 25, 29–31, 33,
77, 102, 112, 116–18, 123–24, 128,131–32, 146, 153–54, 153n, 154n, 157,212, 214, 216, 216n, 222, 229–30
traffic, 43–45, 50, 86, 165, 168transnationality, 30n, 105n, 110, 161,
177n, 219, 229–30Tufayli, Shaykh Subhi, 54–55, 78nturf wars, 51, 53, 55, 55n, 62, 83Turkey, 24, 53n, 139n, 180nTwelfth Imam, 27, 64, 69, 79, 80n,
94, 152Tyre, 42, 77, 88
ulama. See religious scholarsuncertainty, 35–36, 71, 228
Index • 261
underdevelopment, 19underrepresentation, 72–73, 84unemployment, 74, 174, 181, 208nUnited Nations, 13, 85nUnited States, 22–24, 28–29, 35, 39–40,
49n, 65, 68, 83, 83n, 102n, 106, 106n, 127, 161, 177n, 187, 223,229–31; and occupation of Iraq, 24, 40,106n, 158n
urbanization, 18, 47, 73–74, 132–33, 179urban planning, 43n, 47U.S. armed forces, 161–62U.S. policy, 40, 230
vanguard, 116, 187, 222–23, 227veil, 10, 17, 36–37, 51, 76, 99, 102–3,
107, 109–16, 111n, 112n, 113n,118–119, 124–25, 138, 179, 182, 185,189, 204, 206, 221–22, 228, 232–33;literature on, 6n, 112, 112n; and piety,113, 221–22, 224–27
video, 161, 161n, 168village, 18, 45, 47–48, 73–75, 77n, 86,
132, 132n, 188, 224violence, 24, 40, 48, 55n, 67, 77n, 81–82,
86, 135n, 150, 173, 192, 199, 204,216n, 223, 231
visibility, 13, 34–36, 34n, 99, 106, 106n,127, 228; of commitment/iltiza–m, 180,204–7, 218, 228–29; and modernity, 7,230; of piety, 180, 204–7, 218, 228–29;of poverty, 173, 187, 193; of religion,34, 52, 67, 99, 101–3, 101n, 106, 113,115, 119, 122, 127, 206, 228; of Shi‘a,34, 42, 48, 50, 102, 106, 127, 204, 228,230; of volunteering, 207; of women, 7,34, 113, 115, 140, 149, 204–7, 213n,217–19
visiting, 65, 105, 214; as method, 174–75,177, 184, 208, 212
visits: fundraising, 178–79volunteering, 37, 91, 124, 164, 170,
186–87, 189, 193–95, 206–9, 211, 221,223, 227
volunteerism, 7, 169, 169n, 187–88, 194,204–5, 207–8, 213n; and gender roles,208, 208n, 211–12; as new, 207; andpiety, 169, 194. See also community service
volunteers, 7, 32, 38, 39n, 63, 89–92, 95,105, 117, 125, 151, 164–65, 167n,
168–71, 169n, 172–80, 182–87,191–201, 205–15, 208n, 224
vow, 135, 138n, 139n
Wahabi Islam, 19nwa–‘ı–, 19, 77, 116–17, 132, 143, 164, 183,
186n, 201, 225–26, 228war, 13, 24, 36, 43n, 44, 47–48, 49n, 55,
55n, 67–68, 67n, 68n, 73, 77n, 78–79,83–84, 84n, 86, 88, 91, 147n, 151, 173, 178–79, 187–88, 192, 198,200–201, 223
wealth, 47, 85, 89, 111, 165, 173, 178–80,183, 196
Weber, Max, 4, 22–23, 26n, 27–28, 35,182n
wedding, 62; Qasim’s, 157, 157nweeping, 102, 131, 131n, 141–51, 159,
175, 224welfare, community/public/social, 34, 84,
87–88, 164, 169, 176–77, 195, 202,210, 213n, 228
welfare provision, 172, 174the West, 3–4, 17, 23–27, 33, 36, 40,
75, 80, 110–11, 153–54, 217–19,229–31
West Africa, 12, 178–79westernization, 16, 24, 30, 110, 219wila–yat al-faqı–h, 69n, 80, 80n, 94womanhood: ideal, 5, 30, 31n, 191, 205,
214, 217–19, 222women: discourses about, 29, 30, 204, 213,
217–19, 222, 230; image of, 29, 213,218–19, 230; Islamist, 29n, 215n; publicparticipation of, 31n, 94, 102, 113, 122,140, 148n, 149, 156–57, 162–63, 202,204–5, 207–9, 208n, 211–19, 213n,222–23, 228; status of, 29–30, 204, 213, 218–19, 230; stereotypes about,30n, 32, 111, 114, 114n, 213–14, 218,222, 230
women-headed households, 173, 173n,181, 208
women’s liberation, 29n, 30–33, 76,217–18, 230; critiques of, 30n, 76,217–18
women’s rights, 76, 213n, 215–16World War I, 47
Yazid, Caliph, 61, 123, 130, 138, 145–46,151–52, 159, 217
262 • Index
youth, 14n, 24, 74–75, 77–78, 91, 111, 134,138, 150, 179, 198, 220, 223, 226, 231
zaka–t, 70, 118, 207Zaynab, Sayyida, 27, 32, 129–30, 138n,
142, 144–46, 148–49, 148n, 153, 156,
159, 162–63, 172, 191, 202, 202n,204–5, 207, 217–18, 220; reinterpreta-tion of, 130, 148–49, 162–63, 202, 205; as role model, 130, 153, 156, 163, 191, 202, 202n, 204, 207, 217–18, 224
Index • 263
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Language
- Part One: Encounters, Approaches, Spaces, Moments
- Introduction: Pious and/as/is Modern
- Chapter One: Al-Dahiyya: Sight, Sound, Season
- Chapter Two: From Marginalization to Institutionalization
- Part Two: Living an Enchanted Modern
- Chapter Three: The Visibility of Religion in Daily Life
- Chapter Four: Ashura: Authentication and Sacrifice
- Chapter Five: Community Commitment
- Chapter Six: Public Piety as Women’s Jihad
- Chapter Seven: The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps
- Glossary
- References
- Index
