This chapter focuses on two passages from a historical novel in Malayalam, titled Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990), set in a Muslim matrilineal household in Calicut on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The first passage deals with a dispute between two groups on the appointment of a judge (qāḍī) and the right to carry out the Friday congregational prayer (in the early 20th century), while the second one involves two public debates in the wake of Wahhābism’s arrival in the region. Broadly speaking, the novel explores the gradual disintegration of the matrilineal tradition among Malabar Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the peak of colonialism, reformism and modernism.

The focus of the chapter is the overriding assumption in Shia fiqh in general and theories of the velayat-e faqih in particular that society is in need of proactive protection and guidance. The notion of velayat is neither exclusively nor predominantly Shia in origin and development. However, it has played a central role in Shia theology. The logic underlying the notion of velayat-e faqih is that society needs proper guidance and protection, both from the hostile world in which it exists and from itself. Guidance needs to be provided by a specialist of fiqh, a mujtahid who has reached the esteemed position of marja‘iyat and is a “source of emulation,” a marja‘-e taqlid. Protection, or velayat, meanwhile, in its fullest sense is also to be provided by a specialist of fiqh, a faqih, who would be selected to serve in a system based on the velayat-e faqih. In relation to Iran, the clergy have long assumed that Iranian society needs protection from a number of clear and present dangers, be they communism, secular nationalism, unchecked republicanism, modernity, indiscriminate autocracy, or, more recently, the reformist “sedition” (fitna).

Far from undermining it, factionalism actually keeps the Islamic Republic state flexible and dynamic, therefore helping its resilience. States, authoritarian or otherwise, preside over societies in which a majority of the population is politically ambivalent. Among those who are politically aware, and even among those only tangentially interested in politics, factionalism allows the state to expand the scope of its ideological appeal. It also prevents political elites from taking for granted their hold on power, forcing them to forge and maintain bonds with intended constituents. In Iran, political power is held among a relatively small group of elites. But this elite is far from static. It circulates from office to office, and groups within it often change their doctrinal inflections, factional positions, and coalition partners. The ensuing dynamism helps the system endure.

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.

This and the next chapter explore the gradations of this process in which Shāfiʿī texts contributed to and benefited from the eventual globalisation, modernisation, technological headways, legal and intellectual networks, and mobility of people, ideas and texts. This chapter in particular focuses on two supercommentaries on the Qurra via its autocommentary Fatḥ to analyse internal responses within the school to textual longue durée, coinciding with and influenced by several major historical developments across the world. It argues that the nineteenth century was a period of multiple syntheses for Shāfiʿīsm in terms of its geographical, intellectual and cultural realms, due to new challenges and prospects it came across in the wider society and specifically among Muslims. The existing internal and inherent divisions in the school were reconciled through constant efforts of its jurists, and this synthesis addressed a larger division in the Islamic world. Faced with new trials from political and legal entities and a few minor but radical sections of the community the traditional body of believers united against what they called bidʿa or false invention. These supercommentaries represent different geo-cultural and political backgrounds, as much as they reflect common trends of their time in adapting the attitudes of many divisions in the school.

Chapter 3 examines the 1993 (Rafsanjani), 1997 and 2001 (Khatami) elections, with a view to highlighting the departure from the three elements of Khomeini’s revolutionary religiosity. This shift was evidently influenced by major events of the time: the end of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq, the death of Khomeini in 1989 and the rise of his successor, Ali Khamenei. These major events opened up Iran’s socio-political environment beyond the contours Khomeini’s revolutionary discourses of jihad, martyrdom, the afterlife and ascetic equality. During this period, and in line with the processes of secularization, the meaning of Islam was reappropriated and infused with new meaning. It was conveyed as a religion of free-thinking, welfare, prosperity, peace and life, as opposed to jihad, martyrdom and poverty as expressed in the revolution’s first decade.

This chapter considers the possibility of an anti-marketised global justice, which is conceptualised as ‘occupying’ global justice. After considering the question of ‘reform or revolution?’, the chapter discusses four tactics of anti-marketised global justice: first, unplugged global justice, which concerns the abandonment of marketised visual and linguistic habits; second, despectacularised global justice, which emphasises the slow and quiet, therefore finding the time and means to focus on context; third, unmasked global justice, which reveals stereotypes by means of irony and satire and has a theatrical element to it; and fourth, resistance global justice, which foregrounds agency and insists on an internationalism of solidarity. The tactics can be utilised for different struggles at different times – but they all share the same strategy: anti-imperialism built on internationalism and solidarity.

This chapter explores the implications stemming from the advent of the Islamic Republic for liberal-thought practices inside Iran. Specifically, it seeks to clarify the differences between liberal objections to all varieties of religious governance and Islamic modernist-cum-reformist efforts to reconcile monistic doctrines with pluralistic realities. The latter cohort’s appropriation of some aspects of liberal thinking – by the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI) in 1970-80 and by religious reformists after the election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 – has obscured significant substantive differences between these visions, allowing for incoherent labels such as “Islamic liberalism”. Efforts to make the Islamic Republic more democratic or to advance a pluralistic vision of political Islam, however much progressive in the context of their times and political possibilities, nonetheless are substantially different in depth and scope from liberal-constitutional principles and visions of progress championed by advocates of political liberalism around the globe and inside Iran. Curiously, these differences have largely been downplayed, if not altogether overlooked, in political studies of post-revolutionary Islamic modernism and reformist thought. This chapter examines these differences and offers an explanation for their combined impact on liberal political thought in contemporary Iranian intellectual discourses.

The raising of raw silk in the United States at the start of the nineteenth century was a local phenomenon that remained concentrated in areas that had a colonial legacy. In the context of a fast-diversifying economy and the meteoric rise of cotton occurring in the South, it gave little hint of being a branch of agriculture that had the potential to survive in the expanding United States. But sericulture experienced a nationwide rejuvenation between 1820 and 1845, as pockets of cultivation developed across the nation, from Maine to Louisiana. Most of these efforts raised small quantities which tended to be reeled locally and inexpertly, and twisted into sewing thread, though they could hold great value and meaning to individuals and households. The chapter argues that three mutually reinforcing vehicles gave particular shape to these antebellum efforts at silk production: the agricultural press, the postal service, and the agricultural society. These packaged up a nationalist rhetoric that virtuously reconciled agriculture with manufacturing, production with consumption, and progress with nostalgia. But in spite of innovative justifications and wide uptake, many of the self-same issues that had compromised earlier efforts at sericulture eventually rose to the surface. The challenge of making silk American had been accomplished, but not that of making American silk.

This chapter outlines the history of the 30 years between the Iranian Revolution of 1978‒1979 and the Green Uprisings of 2009, and contextualizes specific days of action that took place in 2009. For example, a brief history of the 1979 US embassy seizure is given to explain the political importance of the Green activists’ day of protest in 2009, when the 30th anniversary of the embassy seizure was used to denounce the Islamic government and its foreign backers. Other subjects covered in the chapter include the post-revolutionary power struggle, the Iran‒Iraq War and its conclusion, the export of the Iranian Revolution, the baby boom, the educational reforms that were designed to create the new Islamist citizen, gender politics, and the reconstruction years when Iran embarked on a period of privatization and development. The chapter explains how the radicals who were ousted from power later returned as reformists in the late 1990s, which prompted a conservative backlash in the form of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, followed in turn by a backlash against the conservatives in 2009 with the candidacy of Mir Hussein Mousavi.

As revealed by its title, Chapter 9 “Jihadi Culture and Management (2005–2017)” examines the cultural production surrounding the nostalgic, romanticized, and ambiguous concept of “jihadi culture and management” (farhang va mudīriyat-i jahādī), which has increasingly appeared in the discourse and activities of politicians, officials, bureaucrats, and activists. The concept did not simply emerge from RJ, but a deliberately constructed and carefully crafted image and narrative of it as an ideal-type revolutionary organization and its members as archetypal jihadists (jahādgarān). Former RJ members in the bureaucracy and society have promoted the concept in an effort to infuse the state and society with the exemplary attributes, norms, values, structures, and practices that RJ had allegedly possessed as a revolutionary organization. To the dismay of some former RJ members, the IRI’s factionalized elites have appropriated the concept in an attempt to mobilize and socialize voters and supporters during local and national elections.