The Roots of the Sadrist Movement: Muhammad al-Sadr, Religious Authority, and Sociopolitical Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-385
Author(s):  
Harith Hasan

Based on Ba'th Party archival records, interviews, and secondary sources, this article aims to reconstruct and contextualize the story of Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the Shi'i cleric who led a grassroots religious movement in the 1990s that still plays a major role in Iraq. The article argues that the Sadrist movement and its project of social Islamization were a result of Sadr's enlistment of grassroots support to challenge his rivals in the Shi'i religious field during a leadership vacuum amid the decline of the clerical establishment's influence.

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 554
Author(s):  
Radhika Borde

This article aims to study how a movement aimed at the assertion of indigenous religiosity in India has resulted in the empowerment of the women who participate in it. As part of the movement, devotees of the indigenous Earth Goddess, who are mostly indigenous women, experience possession trances in sacred natural sites which they have started visiting regularly. The movement aims to assert indigenous religiosity in India and to emphasize how it is different from Hinduism—as a result the ecological articulations of indigenous religiosity have intensified. The movement has a strong political character and it explicitly demands that indigenous Indian religiosity should be officially recognized by the inclusion of a new category for it in the Indian census. By way of their participation in this movement, indigenous Indian women are becoming figures of religious authority, overturning cultural taboos pertaining to their societal and religious roles, and are also becoming empowered to initiate ecological conservation and restoration efforts.


2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-80
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Halemba

This article reflects on the place of emotionally arousing ex- periences within religious organisations. Using data obtained through participant observation and interviews, it outlines a research approach for investigations of the interrelationships between particular features of religious practices. Those features have been pointed out in many previous anthropo- logical and sociological works, but few works attempted to analyse connections and interdependencies between con- crete features of religious traditions. The present article takes inspiration from contemporary 'modes of religiosity' theory to explore further the relationships between highly emotion- ally arousing religious experiences and centralised religious authority. Going beyond Whitehouse's theory, it is argued that centralised religious organisations can influence the so- cial features of a religious movement through management of emotionality in ritual practice.


Focaal ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (53) ◽  
pp. 56-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kościańska

This article looks at various models of women's agency in Poland in the context of religion. Based on fieldwork among members of two feminized religious milieus—a new religious movement the Brahma Kumaris and an informal Catholic fundamentalist group—this article discusses the role of silence in ritual and everyday life as a form of agency. From the perspective of feminist discourse, particularly Western liberal feminism, silence is often interpreted as a lack of power. Drawing on informants' experiences, under Polish gender regimes, particularly as they relate to the organization of public and private spheres, silence is shown to be a fundamental component of agency. The analysis of silence displays the complexity of religious issues in Poland and serves as a critique of assumptions about religious homogeneity and the pervasiveness of religious authority in Poland.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-116
Author(s):  
Liyakat Takim

Utilizing a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Hamid Mavaniexamines the locus of religious authority and its contemporary expression inTwelver Shi‘ism. Starting with the time of the Prophet, he provides a comprehensiveand nuanced analysis of the doctrine of the Imamate and Shi‘i religiousand political authority from traditional, rational, theological, andpolitical perspectives.The first part of the book, comprising three chapters, focuses on the doctrineof the Imamate and contains some of the material that has already beencovered by scholars like Amir Moezzi, Wilferd Madelung, Mousawi, and MariaMassi Dakake. Here, Mavani examines the authority of the Imams and that ofthe jurists during the Twelfth Imam’s occultation. He stresses the Imams’ spiritualand religious-political authority as well as the ensuing doctrines of taqlīdand ijtihād during this period. Citing Shi‘i sacred sources, he provides a Shi‘iself-understanding of the concepts underpinning the Imamate, namely, thoseof wilāyah and walāyah (the Imams’ moral-spiritual authority).Mavani argues, convincingly, that Khomeini’s model of governance(wilāyat al-faqīh) has received a disproportionate amount of attention in recenttimes. His theory was only one among others that have been proposed by suchscholars as Montazeri, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Fadlallah, and Mahdi Shamsal-Din. Other Shi‘i theories of governance have been largely ignored. His discussionand critique of this model is both incisive and erudite, for not only doeshe examine the views of its proponents and opponents, but he also provides adetailed and nuanced discussion of other possible forms of government andthe dangers involved in Iran’s currently centralized form of leadership.The last three chapters cover material that has been largely neglected bywestern scholarship on contemporary Islam. This is where Mavani’s majorcontribution lies: his criticism of traditional ijtihād as being deficient and ineffectiveas regards meeting contemporary challenges (pp. 226-27) and someof the discriminatory rulings that are based upon it, many of which are casuistic,arbitrary, and often based on the principle of secondary rulings.Most works on religious authority in Shi‘ism focus on the authority ofthe Imams and the jurists during the Twelfth Imam’s occultation. Mavani proposesother state models to the one practiced in contemporary Iran ...


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 269
Author(s):  
Ja‘far Ja‘far

The article scrutinizes the tarekat (Sufi order) and the social-religious movement of Shaykh Hasan Maksum, a less noticeable Sufi figure within the literatures of tasawuf Nusantara but was an important figure who played essential roles and had great influence within the dynamic of social-religious aspects in East Sumatera. As a mufti-sufi, Shaykh Hasan was a prominent figure within literatures of religious knowledge, mainly theology, fiqh, and Sufism, and had greater influence than other Sufi figures in East Sumatera. It has been a result of his “religious authority”, which covered the entire sultanate’s sway in this region at that time. Shaykh Hasan was a Sufi of the tarekat Naqshabandîyah who held a duty as the mufti of the Deli Sultanate. His spiritual genealogy, unfortunately, has been an unrevealed mystery due to the absence of literatures which inform us the comprehensive biographies of his Sufi teachers. As the proponent of neo-sufisme, he authored a number of works in theology, fiqh, astronomy (falak), and mystical (tasawuf) disciplines. It has been known from his two mystical works that he combined sharî‘ah, tarîqah, and haqîqah, and also emphasized the importance of obedience towards sharî‘ah for mushrif and sâlik in order to achieve “the pearl of Reality”.


2001 ◽  
pp. 85-90
Author(s):  
O. V. Kozerod

The development of the Jewish religious movement "Khabad" and its organizations in the first quarter of the twentieth century - one of the important research problems, which is still practically not considered in the domestic Judaica. At the same time, this problem is relevant in connection with the fact that the religious movement "Khabad" during the twentieth century became the most widespread and influential area of Judaism in Ukraine and throughout the world.


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