Shi'ism - A Religion Of Protest by Hamid Dabashi

Author:Hamid Dabashi
Language: eng
Format: epub

Expanding the Political Community

Why insist on the singular significance of Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn in the making of the Shaykhi/Babi messianic movement? Among the most illustrious leaders of the Babi uprising, by far the most significant social revolution of nineteenth-century Shi’ism, Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn was the principal theorist of its radical faction and one of its top military commanders-in-chief. Far beyond that, she was one of the most remarkable women of all time. She left an indelible mark on the model of a revolutionary hero for all time. But to avoid truisms and hyperbole we must grasp what exactly she achieved through her revolutionary activities.

Because of the enormous historic significance of Qorrat al-Ayn and her extraordinary character, obviously many scholars and historians claim her for one cause or another—from anticolonial nationalism to Third World socialism, from radical Shi’ism to literary modernism, and of course from feminism to Baha’ism. None of these claims is unusual or strange, and Qorrat al-Ayn’s green and growing memory is large, expansive, and generous enough to give a share of credibility to all of these. But I wish to claim her life and revolutionary career for something entirely different.

The critical significance of Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn, as I see it, and her presence at the heart of both the Shaykhi messianic philosophy and the Babi revolutionary movement is in exponentially expanding the Islamic, Shi’i, and Iranian political community or Gemeinschaft to open up and embrace half of the humanity otherwise denied their social presence by the patriarchal foregrounding of Shi’i (and Islamic) feudal scholasticism, and thus encouraging that community toward the formation of an organic solidarity among its members, and thus toward the emergence of a modern society (Gesellschaft). In his groundbreaking study Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies had posited these two sociological categories by way of distinguishing between the communal (what he called Gemeinschaft) gatherings of individuals for a common purpose and the subsequent transmutation of these communities (under more advanced social and economic conditions) to a superior state of societal formation in which citizens and institutions would follow their own particular pursuits and yet fall within a larger frame of differential social formations and cultural mores.51 Working almost at the same time as Tönnies, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim articulated two modes of mechanical and organic solidarity in his seminal study, The Division of Labour in Society (1893). Roughly corresponding to Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft, Durkheim’s notion of mechanical solidarity designates communal formations that are based on normative similarities and strong moral identifications, whereas his organic solidarity corresponds to Tönnies’s Gesellschaft and identifies societal formations based on normative variations among the social actors and a far more subdued collective consciousness among them.52

What I propose here is the central significance of the figure of Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn, through the doctrinal insurrection and widespread appeal of the Babi movement, in pushing the Iranian (Shi’i) society out of a communal, Gemeinschaft, mechanical solidarity toward a social, Gesellschaft, organic solidarity. The path she took—militantly transforming the juridical figure

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