The Emergence of Modern Shi‘ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran+PDF

This book specifically focuses on the origins and early development of the modern Usuli movement, a period that roughly spans the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This book takes a fresh look at the foundations of modern Islam. Scholars often locate the origins of the modern Islamic world in European colonialism or Islamic reactions to European modernity. However, this study focuses on the rise of Islamic movements indigenous to the Middle East, which developed in direct response to the collapse and decentralization of the Islamic gunpowder empires. In other words, the book argues that the Usuli movement as well as Wahhabism and neo-Sufism emerged in reaction to the disintegration and political decentralization of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires.

The book specifically highlights the emergence of Usuli Shi‘ism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The long-term impact of the Usuli revival was that Shi‘i clerics gained unprecedented social, political, and economic power in Iran and southern Iraq. Usuli clerics claimed authority to issue binding legal judgments, which, they argue, must be observed by all Shi‘is. By the early nineteenth century, Usulism emerged as a popular, fiercely independent, transnational Islamic movement. The Usuli clerics have often operated at the heart of social and political developments in modern Iraq and Iran and today dominate the politics of the region.

About the Author

Zackery M. Heern is a professor of Middle East and Islamic studies at Murray State University. His research and teaching interests include Shi‘ism, Iraq, Iran, Islamic Movements, and Global History. He lives in Murray, America.

Bibliographic Information

Title: The Emergence of Modern Shi‘ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran

Author: Zackery M. Heern

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

 Language: English

Length: 240 pages

ISBN:  978-1780744964

Pub. Date: July 14, 2015

The Emergence of Modern Shi‘ism Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran