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MEI blog & the Sins of Middle Eastern Scholarship 21, May 2009

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I’ve followed Michael Collins Dunn over at the Middle East Institutes’s blog since its beginning in January this year. Overall, it is one of the best blogs on Middle Eastern affairs. It is a selection of educated and manifestly knowledgeable ruminations of various aspects of Middle Eastern politics and international relations in the broadest sense. To my mind, the best post so far is, in fact, a link that Dunn posted in April to a blog by Professor of Political Science, Eric Davis. This post is entitled “10 Conceptual Sins” in Analyzing Middle East Politics” gives a critical and insightful run-down of the grave errors that are made by Western scholars when looking at and analyzing the Middle East. As Dunn beseeches his readers, you really ought to read the article if you’ve got any interest in ME IR at all. Below is a brief recapitulation of Davis’ ‘sins‘ and a word or two, usually taken from his text, briefly explaining them.

…

Sin # 1: “Presentism.” – Not “taking history seriously” and believing in stereotypes to a large degree.

Sin # 2: Overemphasizing the ethnic and confessional identities, the “ethnoconfessional model.”

Sin # 3: The idea of a “communal mind.” – “If a political scientist from Iraq, Egypt, Iran or any other Muslim country in the Middle East were to come to the United States and assert that, if s/he knew the ethnic, racial or religious background of an American, s/he could tell us what that person’s ideology and political beliefs were, Americans would find such a notion ludicrous, to say the least. Yet many analysts of Middle East politics base their assessments of the region’s political dynamics on the social background of the political leader or activist in question.”

Sin # 4: The excessive focus on elites

Sin #5: The myth of “Islamic fundamentalism.” – “the notion of a radical Islam at the root of much if not all of the Middle East’s problems is pervasive in the Western media.”

Sin #6: Seeing the Middle East politics through binary thinking. –  For example, “the Council of Guardians in Iran, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad constitute a set of unsavory political leaders, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, as many public opinion polls have demonstrated, Iranians by and large are very supportive of democracy, especially the educated middle classes.

Sin #7: Failure to learn the history, language and cultures of the region. –  For example, “would we take seriously a correspondent who was bureau chief in Washington, DC, for a major daily newspaper in Iran, the Arab countries, Turkey, or Israel if s/he did not speak English?”

Sin #8: The failure to consider political economy – For example,  “the percentage of young people under the age of 25 is as high as 60% in countries such as Iraq and Iran, and a very large percentage of them are unemployed or under employed.”

Sin #9: Failure to account for exogenous influences and “neighborhood effects’” on the region’s politics.

Sin # 10: Why can’t they be like us?

….

Dunn comments on several of the sins here, here and here.


Iran and Shiism: A misunderstood relationship 28, April 2009

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As usual there’s an excellent article over at the Middle East Institute’s blog, this time discussing the false association of Shiism with Iran. The article concisely explains that its roots are “as Arab as Sunnism” and that it is only since the 16th century or so when the ruling Safavids adopted Shiism that a closer association began. This Shia-Iran nexus was, of course, further entrenched with the 1979 revolution which began to pyrolyze across the region, worrying Sunni powers.

One of the most interesting aspects of this is the belief from the Sunni minority in Iraq (and who knows how many other people) that because the majority of Iraq’s population is Shia that they will somehow ‘side’ or be overly sympathetic towards Iran. This, as I have written about before, is just not the case. The MEI article adds another dimension to what I previously wrote and lends strength to the overall argument.

Backgrounder: Some Thoughts on Iraqi and Iranian Shi‘ism and Misperceptions

The attacks on the shrine of Al-Qazimiyya in Baghdad on Friday and on other Shi‘ite targets on Thursday and Friday threaten a renewal of sectarian conflict, as I noted at the time, but also spur me to talk a little about the role of Shi‘ism in Iraq, which is often misunderstood.

One fundamental misunderstanding is the idea that Shi‘ism is somehow intrinsically “Persian,” because of its contemporary association with Iran. Misunderstood by whom? I can think of at least three major groups:

  1. Westerners who know enough about Islam to understand the differences between Sunni and Shi‘a, but who have a fairly superficial knowledge;
  2. Most Sunni Arabs, at least those from countries without a large Shi‘ite population;
  3. Most Iranian Shi‘a.

The last one may be a bit unfair, and the second needs to be qualified, as it is above, to note that Sunnis from countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain or Kuwait usually have a more sophisticated understanding of Shi‘ism. But this is not just a rhetorical point: Shi‘ites in largely Sunni countries are sometimes portrayed as a pro-Iranian fifth column because of this misperception.

Shi‘ism was, in its origins, as Arab as Sunnism. It was born in Medina, nurtured in Kufa and had its great martyrdom on the field of Karbala’.

Of the 12 Imams of Twelver Shi‘ism, only one, ‘Ali al-Rida (‘Ali Reza), the eighth Imam, is buried in Iran (at Mashhad). The twelfth Imam disappeared in Iraq, and the other ten Imams are buried in Saudi Arabia or Iraq: ‘Ali, the central figure of Shi‘ism, is buried in Najaf, Iraq; Hasan, the second Imam, is buried in Medina; Husayn, the third, is buried where he fell at Karbala’ in Iraq; the fourth, ‘Ali Zayn al-‘Abidin, is buried in Medina, while the fifth and sixth are also buried in Medina; the seventh and ninth are buried at the Qazimiyya shrine attacked last Friday in Baghdad; the tenth and eleventh are buried in the al-‘Askari shrine in Samarra’ (blown up in 2006, starting a wave of sectarian killing); the twelfth disappeared in Samarra’ as well.

The reason there were so many Iranian pilgrims killed in the attacks in Iraq (leading Iran to blame them on the US and Israel, though clearly Sunni radicals were responsible) is that most of the major shrine mosques of Shi‘ism are in Iraq, final resting place for six of the twelve Imams.

The close identification of Iran with Shi‘ism really only dates from the 16th century, when Safavid Iran officially adopted Twelver Shi‘ism as its faith. While there had been earlier Shi‘ite dynasties there, Shi‘ite dynasties of one kind or another flourished in many Arab countries. Cairo’s ancient Fatimid gate, the Bab al-Nasr, even has an inscription reading “There is no God gut God; Muhammad is the Prophet of God and ‘Ali is the wali of God,” the Shi‘ite formulation of the Muslim shahada. (The Fatimids, though, were Isma‘ili Shi‘ites, not the Twelver variety found in Iran, Iraq, etc.)

Until Saddam Hussein began really cracking down on the Shi‘ite clerical establishment during the Iran-Iraq war (again, the suspicion of Shi‘ites as a fifth column), Najaf was the most important scholarly center for Shi‘ite theology; it was where the Ayatollah Khomeni himself taught in exile from Iran. With the Iranian Revolution and Saddam’s crackdowns, the importance of Najaf declined and Qom, Mashhad, and other Iranian clerical schools became suppliers of clerics to Shi&lsquites in other countries; with that came some genuine Iranian influence (such as with Hizbullah in Lebanon), but most Arab Shi‘ites are Arabic-speakers, not Persian-speakers.

As I said though, many Sunnis assume Arab Shi‘ites are somehow more Persian than they are, and many Iranians are surprised when Arab Shi‘ites do not avidly follow the Iranian model of clerical rule. Iraqi Shi‘ites rightly and proudly consider their country the seedbed of Shi‘ite Islam.