Political Sociality in the Narrowing of Time

Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani and the Late Ottoman Najafi Revival

Bibliographic Data

ID8967474
AuthorsSara Pursley (0000-0001-6871-7030, New York University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume55
Issue1
Pages43-66
Publication date2023-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743823000569
OpenAlexW4367846581
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited18

This article explores the pre–World War I writings of the Najafi cleric Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani (1884–1967), situating them within the broader Islamic revival movement, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the Arabic Nahda, and the Ottoman Shiʿi shrine cities in the years preceding the British invasion of Basra in 1914. It makes four arguments. First, al-Shahrastani's calls for constitutionalism, Islamic unity, revival, and the cultivation of the self were all attempts to respond to what he saw as the immediate and existential threat to his world posed by European imperial expansion. Second, he attempted in a variety of ways to mobilize what he called the Islamic social practices against this threat. Borrowing from his own theorization of these practices, I employ the concept of political sociality to gather his attempts to foster various social assemblages—of both newer and older provenance—that would cultivate Muslim subjects with the capacity to resist European aggression. Third, his conceptions of sociality and of political temporality, although often resonant with those of the more widely studied Sunni and Christian reformers of the Nahda, had specificities that I relate to his understandings of subject formation, the sense of impending calamity in his writings, and the borderlands context of the shrine cities. These conceptions were not necessarily affiliated with the nationalist and disciplinary project of the modern territorial state and were animated by a temporality of urgency rather than deferral. Finally, I consider how al-Shahrastani's theorizations of sociality and ultimately of revolution ( al-thawra ) reveal moments in the historical constitution of a reformist and soon-to-be insurgent Shiʿi public in these cities

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Islam · Political science · Politics · Sociality · Sociology · State (computer science · Temporality · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Turkey's Politics and Society

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access