Hunting for Paradigms: Shiʿi Islam and the Challenge of History

The internal diversity of Shiʿi historiography presents a powerful counternarrative to views of “one linear Islamic time”. According to the conventional reading, Shiʿi Islam engages the powerful narrative of its third Imam, Husayn b. ʿAli (d. 661), and his struggle for Islam/justice/dignity/Muslim unity. Husayn’s martyrdom can be easily reconfigured and reread in various local and political contexts in order to make the 7^th century CE speak directly to the needs of the present. My presentation draws on Shiʿi periodicals, scholarly monographs, and polemics that were published in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian during the second half of the 20^th century and qualifies this “Karbala paradigm”. I argue that there are two fundamental problems with the attention paid to Karbala and the early history of the proto-Shiʿi community. First of all, plainly political readings, often tied to Iran’s Revolution, have been given priority over esoteric or mystical understandings of the events, for example. Second, Shiʿi historians in the Middle East and South Asia are by no means only preoccupied with early Islam. They have also seen the rise of the Safavids as the first self-confidently Shiʿi empire or the integration of local Shiʿi communities into modern nation states, such as Pakistan, Lebanon, or Iraq, as major watersheds. They have studied Urdu poetry and evaluated genealogies of the Prophet’s family and they have tried to understand the reasons for why Shiʿi clerics monopolize religious interpretation. Additionally, the Shiʿi community is faced with pressing questions related to the Occultation of the Twelfth Shiʿi Imam since the year 941 and how Shiʿis should conceptualize this empty presence, whether through passive resignation, active waiting, or trying to accelerate the return of the Mahdi. In sum, then, my presentation will make the case for fresh paradigms which enable us to obtain alternative conceptions of Shiʿi historiography.