The cultural politics of Shi'I modernism: Morality and gender in early 20th-century Lebanon

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 249-270

  Weiss, Max ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNOPOLITICS; GENDER; MORALITY; POLITICAL HISTORY; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; TWENTIETH CENTURY; WOMENS STATUS;

ASIA; EURASIA; LEBANON; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 34248213191     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: 14716380     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743807070092     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. Zaynab Hammoud, "Shihadat janubiyya," al-Baheth 4, nos. 23 (1981): 307.
2. The intellectual, scholarly political weight of the Shi'i community in Greater Syria historically was Jabal 'Amil. Even with the demographic and political shift to Beirut during the 20th century, the relative marginality of the Beka' Valley, and, to a lesser extent, the south, persisted. For an encyclopedic and authoritative study of 'Amili Shi'i migration from Jabal 'Amil to Beirut and beyond, see Mounzer Jaber, al-Sharit al-Lubnani al-muhtall: Masalik al-ihtilal, masarat al-muwajaha, masir al-ahali (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999).
3. We need to distinguish this more recent mode of sectarian identification among the Shi'i community in Mandate and postindependence Lebanon as well as the process that gave rise to it - which I refer to as "sectarianization" - from the "original" formation of Shi'i sects. On the latter, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, "How Did the Early Shi'i Become Sectarian?" Journal of the American Oriental Society 75 (1955): 1-13. I am also pointing out how there has not only been a unitary "culture of sectarianism" in Lebanon but multiple cultures of sectarianism produced at different historical moments.
4. See Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, Calif./ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
5. Likewise, I use the term "modern" provisionally and, following Frederick Cooper, in its sense as a "native category" rather than a necessarily useful analytic category. See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), esp. 113-49.
6. This ignores the Shi'i community that once lived in Kisrawan and that was expelled sometime between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. See Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley, Calif./Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 103-106.
7. Sabrina Mervin, Un réformisme chiite: Ulémas et lettrés du Gabal 'Amil, actuel Liban-Sud, de la fin de l'Empire ottoman à l'indépendence du Liban (Paris: Éditions Karthala, CERMOC and IFEAD, 2000), 414.
8. In her ethnography set in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lara Deeb shows how the mobilization of Shi'i Islamist women has been contingent on fundamental transformations in Shi'i politics, morality, and culture. Deeb, "An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety among Islamist Shi'i Muslims in Beirut" (PhD diss., Emory University, 2003), which has been published as An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
9. The most important work on the subject of gendered citizenship in Mandate-era Syria and Lebanon is Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), but it hardly devotes any attention to life outside the capital cities, Beirut and Damascus. In fact, I would argue that the reach of the "colonial welfare state" did not extend into rural Lebanese areas in any meaningful way.
10. In her adaptation of the Habermasian notion of public sphere, Nancy Fraser argues that it is more fruitful to imagine a "multiplicity of mutually contestatory publics," which I suggest can be mapped onto the jostling for power among various discursive communities within the Lebanese national framework. Fraser, "Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Toward a Postmodern Conception," in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 295.
11. Mervat Hatem, "Modernization, the State, and the Family in Middle East Women's Studies," in A Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East, ed. Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 63-87;
12. Afsaneh Najmabadi, "Hazards of Modernity and Morality: Women, State, and Ideology in Contemporary Iran," in Women, Islam, and the State ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991), 48-76;
13. and idem, "Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran," in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 91-125.
14. Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28-50.
15. Some works that have begun to fill this historiographical lacuna are Kamran Scot Aghaie, ed., The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi'i Islam (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2005);
16. Moulouk A. Berry, "Radical Transitions: Shifting Gender Discourses in Lebanese Muslim Shi'i Jurisprudence and Ideology, 1960-1979 and 1990-1999" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2002);
17. Wilferd Madelung, "Shi'i Attitudes toward Women as Reflected in Fiqh," in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1979), 69-79;
18. Shireen Mahdavi, "The Position of Women in Shi'i Iran: Views of the Ulama," in Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, ed. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1985), 255-68;
19. and Arzoo Osanloo, "Islamico-Civil 'Rights Talk': Women, Subjectivity, and Law in Iranian Family Court," American Ethnologist 33, no. 2 (2006): 191-209.
20. See Ja'far al-Muhajir, Jabal 'Amil bayna shahidayn: Al-haraka al-fikriyya fi Jabal 'Amil fi qarnayn (min awasit al-qarn al-thani li-l-hijra/al-rab' 'ashr li-l-milad hatta awasit al-qarn al-'ashr/ al-sadis 'ashr) (Damascus: IFPO, 2005),
21. and Stefan Winter, "The Shiite Emirates of Ottoman Syria (Mid-17th to Mid-18th Century)" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2002).
22. Each religious community was represented differently by "Ottoman Orientalism" and had a different kind of relationship with the imperial Ottoman state. See Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Orientalism," American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-96.
23. The best works on the subject and the period remain Waddah Shararah, al-Umma al-qaliqa: Al-'Amiliyyun 'ala 'atabat al-dawla al-Lubnaniyya (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1996),
24. and Mervin, Un réformisme chiite.
25. I deal with a variety of juridical and religious practices that contributed to the transformation of Shi'i sectarianism during the Mandate period in my PhD dissertation, "Institutionalizing Sectarianism: Courts, Religious Culture, and the Making of Shi'i Lebanon, 1920 1947" (PhD diss., Stanford University, forthcoming).
26. Tamara Ahmad Chalabi, The Shi'is of Jabal 'Amil and the New Lebanon: Community and Nation-State, 1918 1943 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
27. In fact, some people argue that within a Lebanese cultural hierarchy, "the Shi'a" have been the most "reactionary" of all sectarian communities in their treatment of women. In my own experience, soon after moving into a new apartment in Beirut in September 2005 and before we were able to get any furniture, a neighbor passed by and commented on how we were still sitting on cushions on the floor in the living room. Aware of the fact that I was doing research on the Shi'i community, he said how appropriate such a setup was because "they" are such a "primitive people." In contrast, many Lebanese women are currently converting to Shi'i Islam, at least partially as a result of what N. J. Coulson calls the "comparative simplicity" of Ja'fari inheritance law. N. J. Coulson, Succession in the Muslim Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 108. Inheritance provisions in Shi'i jurisprudence are relatively favorable to women. Coulson is dismissive of Joseph Schacht's claim that there is little difference between Sunni and Shi'i laws of inheritance, arguing that the privileged position of female heirs in the latter permits immediate female kin to inherit before more distant patrilineal relatives. In other words, the major difference is the Shi'i "refusal to afford any special place or privileged position to agnate relatives as such,"
28. ibid. Moreover, Coulson argues, "Shi'i jurisprudence majestically sweeps aside all those troublesome distinctions and divisions, between Qur'anic and other heirs, and between agnatic and non-agnatic relatives,"
29. ibid., 110.
30. Most scholarship on women in Shi'i societies has dealt with Iran. See, for example, Camron Michael Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865-1946 (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2002);
31. Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998);
32. and Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
33. Aghaie, "Introduction: Gendered Aspects ofthe Emergence and Historical Development of Shi'i Symbols and Rituals," in The Women of Karbala 1-21.
34. The first volume of this five-part work is Muhsin al-Amin, al-Majalis al-saniyya: Manaqib wa masa'ib al-'itra al-nabawiyya (Najaf: Matba'at al-Nu'man, 1342 [1924]).
35. For more on these debates, see Werner Ende, "The Flagellations of Muharram and the Shi'ite Ulama," Der Islam (1978): 19-36,
36. and Mervin, Un réformisme chiite, 229-74.
37. The relationship between corporal discipline and religious practice is most brilliantly illuminated in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason in Medieval Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993).
38. 'Abd al-Husayn Sadiq, Sima' al-sulaha' (Saida: Matba'at al-'Irfan, 1345 [1927]).
39. Ibid., 5.
40. Ibid., 66.
41. It was published by the press of al-'Irfan in 1928-29.
42. See Yitzhak Nakash, "An Attempt to Trace the Origin of the Rituals of'Ashura'," Die Welt des Islams 33 (1993): 161-81.
43. Risalat al-tanzih, 15.
44. Ibid., 26-27. Amin leaves the citation in the original Persian, which says something about his intended audience: Educated, multilingual, elite 'ulama'.
45. I am grateful to Cyrus Schayegh for helping me read the Persian sections. In this sense, we can glean an indication of awareness among Shi'i 'ulama' but also, conceivably, among lay people of the deep potential within the exemplary qualities of Fatima and Zaynab for both inspiring and legitimating certain practices that would shore up women's agency and autonomy in Shi'i societies based on shared cultural memory.
46. Risalat al-tanzih, 4.
47. On the survival of such a discourse among Hizbullah Islamist women in Beirut, see Lara Deeb, "Living Ashura in Lebanon: Mourning Transformed to Sacrifice," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 122-37.
48. Hasan Muzaffar, Nusrat al-Mazlum (Najaf: Al-Matba'a al-'Alawiyya, 1345 [1927]), 19.
49. Ali Naqi al-Lakhnawi, Iqalat al-'athir fi iqamat al-sha'a'ir (Najaf: Al-Matba'a al-Haydariyya, 1348 [1930], 57-58.
50. Muhsin al-Khorrazi argues that the essential problem with such cross-dressing, or any other gender-bending behavior, is "intended or desired effect" (qasd); a man must not seek to "become like a woman" (ta'annuth) and a woman must not seek "to become like a man" (tadhakkur). The theological argument is buttressed by a distinction between "resemblance" (shibh) and "imitation" (tashābuh). "Tashabbuh al-rajul bi-l-mar'a wa bi-l-'aks," Fiqh Ahl al-Bayt 3, no. 9 (1998): 163-74.
51. Afsaneh Najmabadi points out how tashabbuh bih ghayr became an issue in the "achievement," as she puts it, of Iranian modernity, and how men's appearance needed to be reformed as well as women's. Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), 133.
52. See Tarif Khalidi, "Shaykh Ahmad 'Arif al-Zayn and al-'Irfan," in Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890-1939, ed. Marwan R. Buheiry (Beirut: American University in Beirut, Center for Arab and Middle East Studies, 1981), 110-24,
53. and Silvia Naef, "La presse en tant que moteur du renouveau culturel et litteraire: La revue chiite libanaise al-'Irfan," Etudes asiatiques, recue de la societé Suisse-Asie (1996): 385-97.
54. Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa al-Sadr and the Shi'a of Lebanon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 11.
55. Naef, "La presse en tant que moteur du renouveau culturel et litteraire," 397.
56. Some people did not read it at all. Although circulation figures are difficult to come by and reader response is hard to gauge, Mounzer Jaber related to me how his mother used to hear the news and opinions from al-'Irfan by way of her father and other extended family members in Bint Jbail. Jaber has produced some of the most informative and important historical scholarship on Jabal 'Amil. See, for example, Jaber, "al-Kiyan al-siyasi li-Jabal 'Amil qabla 1920," in Safahat min tarikh Jabal 'Amil, ed. Ibrahim Beydoun (Beirut: Al-Majlis al-thaqafi li-Lubnan al-janubi, 1979), 83-106.
57. I take the term "prescriptive discourse" from Marilyn Booth's wonderful study of biography in Egypt, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley, Calif./Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
58. Foucault refers to a similar cultural formation as a "prescriptive ensemble," which he sees as a looser kind of "moral code," in The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 29.
59. Hasan Muhammad Salih, Antulujiyyat al-adab al-'Amili: Al-adab al-'Amili min al-taqalid ila al-tajdid, vol. 1 (Beirut: Dar al-Juman, 1997), 157.
60. Ibid., 161.
61. Public culture in Jabal 'Amil and among Shi'a in Lebanon was relatively sparse under the Mandate, but there were a number of journals published concomitantly to al-'Irfan, including al-Qalam al-sarih, al-Marj, and al-Nisr al-marj'ayuni.
62. Although there are no good statistics on the proportion of Shi'i girls in such schools, al-'Irfan reported that according to the 1921 census, out of a total population of 710,562 in Grand Liban, there were 104,947 Shi'a (or about 15 percent of the national total), which included 62,796 in South Lebanon but only some 3,274 people in all of Beirut. See al-'Irfan 7, no. 7 (1922): 437-38.
63. Although figures cited by Meir Zamir corroborate this number of " mutawallīs" in the country, his sources put the total population of Greater Lebanon in 1921 at 609,069 (Zamir indicates that the total number of Muslims in Lebanon were underrepresented according to that census). By contrast, according to the 1932 census, out of a reputed population of 782,415, Shi'a (or, again, mutawallīs numbered 155,035, rising to approximately 20 percent of the national total. Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 98.
64. "Muslim Girls and Foreign Schools," al-'Irfan 9, no. 9 (1924): 854.
65. Al-Houmani, "The Virtue Behind the Veil," al-'Irfan 11, no. 3 (1925): 259-62.
66. Adiba and Su'adat Qaddureh, "The Hijab," al-'Irfan 11, no. 6 (1926): 630.
67. Su'adat Qaddureh, "When Will the Woman in Our Land Develop?" al-'Irfan 12, no. 1 (1926): 72-73.
68. Ibid., 72.
69. "The Women's Awakening in the East," al-'Irfan 13, no. 6 (1927): 603.
70. Ibid., 604.
71. Although I am fascinated by her argument, I do not have similar evidence for the case of Shi'i Lebanon corroborating Najmabadi's convincing claims about the relationship between the crystallization of Iranian gender roles and representations, on the one hand, and the related, broader work of heteronormativity engendered in such a process, on the other. This does not mean that a more tightly focused research project on the matter would not bear out such notions. Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards.
72. In this connection, one humorous anecdote from al-'Irfan relates a conversation in which a judge asks an accused man, "Are you married or single?" "Married, sir," he replies. "To whom?" "To a woman." "And have you ever heard of someone getting married to a man?" "Yes, sir." "Who?" "My sister." "Between Judge and Accused," al-'Irfan 14, no. 3 (1927): 356. A slight ambiguity over male-male intercourse (in both senses of the term) appears here for a moment, before vanishing.
73. Afsaneh Najmabadi also argues that "[m]odernity was to transform the invisible and mute woman into an unveiled and vocal public presence," which was "a contingent embodiment of science, sexuality, and discourse." Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards 151-52.
74. Fatat al-Furat, "On the Rights of Women," al-'Irfan 20, no. 1 (1930): 98.
75. Widad Sakakini, "The Islamic Girls' School," al-'Irfan 14, no. 5 (1928): 589.
76. For a more general introduction to the construction of masculinity and male forms of self-identification in the Middle East, see Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb, eds., Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2000).
77. "10 Commandments for the Housewife," al-'Irfan 6, nos. 1-2 (1920): 78.
78. "10 Commandments for the Housewife," al-'Irfan 6, nos. 3-4 (1921): 191.
79. "10 Commandments for the Housewife," al-'Irfan 7, no. 5 (1922): 316.
80. "10 Commandments for the Housewife," al-'Irfan 7, no. 10 (1922): 630.
81. "10 Commandments for the Housewife," al-'Irfan 8, no. 8 (1923): 628.
82. "Seven Commandments for a Healthy Body," al-'Irfan 8, no. 7 (1923): 552.
83. Adib As'ad Rahhal, "Health Study," al-'Irfan 7, no. 7 (1922): 426.
84. Sharif 'Usayran, "Commandments for the Husband," al-'Irfan 9, no. 3 (1923): 270-71.
85. Sharif 'Usayran, "Commandments for the Wife," al-'Irfan 9, no. 3 (1923): 271-72.
86. I thank one of the anonymous IJMES reviewers for reminding me that this should not be misconstrued as something unique to the Shi'i community in Lebanon. Such discourse would have been comprehensible to (not to mention similarly expressed) among other communities in Lebanon and the Arab world more generally.
87. Al-'Irfan 10, no. 2 (1924): 194.
88. "Marriage and Bachelorhood," al-'Irfan 16, no. 3 (1928): 323.
89. "Yes, Marriage Is the Cure," al-'Irfan 19, no. 3 (1930): 384.
90. "He Lived Because He Didn't Take the Medicine," al-Irfan 17, no. 2 (1929): 269-70.
91. "Question and Answer," al-'Irfan 20, no. 5 (1930): 636-37.
92. In this regard, I draw attention to an important dissertation about the Shi'i community in Lebanon that looks at, among other things, a variety of contemporary jokes. See Roshanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, "Constructing Lebanese Shi'ite Nationalism: Transnationalism, Shi'ism, and the Lebanese State" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005): Esp. 49-57.
93. There is a growing literature that looks at the role of humor and humorous literature in Jabal 'Amil. See, for example, Ja'far Muhsin al-Amin, al-Amthal al-'ammiyya fi Jabal 'Amil (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, al-Majlis al-Thaqafi li-Lubnan al-Janubi, 2004);
94. and, 'Ali Muruwwah, Mawsu' at al-adab al-dahik: Tara'if al-'Amiliyyin (Beirut: Mu'assasat al-Intishar al-'Arabi, 2002).
95. Chalabi, The Shi'is of Jabal 'Amil.
96. See also 'Ali'Abd al-Mun'im Shu'ayb, Matalib Jabal 'Amil: Al-wahda, al-musawa fi Lubnan al-kabir, 1900-1936 (Beirut: Al-Mu'assasa al-Jam'iyya, 1987).
97. "Electricity," al-'Irfan 21, no. 1 (1931): 121.
98. "The Judge and the Accused," al-'Irfan 20, no. 1 (1930): 110.
99. Al-'Irfan 19, no. 3 (1930): 384.
100. "Question and Answer," al-'Irfan 21, nos. 4-5 (1931): 613.
101. "The Wife's Idiocy," al-'Irfan 10, no. 1 (1924): 96.
102. Al-'Irfan 19, nos. 4-5 (1930): 615.
103. "He Got Married Before He Could Think Straight," al-'Irfan 22, no. 3 (1931): 397.
104. Al-'Irfan 17, no. 5 (1929): 630, my emphasis.
105. Al-'Irfan 16, no. 3 (1928): 323.
106. Al-'Irfan 17, no. 3 (1929): 384.
107. One brief example showing how religious authority figures were subject to ribbing in the journal recalled a man who was so bored during a particular sermon that he "forgot his own name." As a result, it was said that members of that congregation organized a separate majlis one that, it was hoped, would be streamlined and made more interesting. Al-'Irfan 18, no. 5 (1929): 653.
108. "The Wife's Husband and the Judge," al-'Irfan 10, no. 9 (1925): 929.
109. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 2:22.
110. Salih, Antulujiyyat al-adab al-'Amilī, 167.
111. For a recent perspective on this issue, see Hazem al-Amin, "al-'Tashaddur' al-siyasi fi Iran wa-Lubnan ... wa-l-'aba'a al-ijtima'iyya fi-l-'Iraq," al-Hayat, 14 May 2006.