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46) The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr

This is a survey of Shia history, culture, and politics by an Iranian-American academic. Nasr has several big theses: That Shia states would make a better ally for the West in the Middle East than Sunni states, that the Shia world is experiencing a revival of identity and culture as it challenges Sunni domination, but all are overshadowed by one primary theme: The West has historically done a poor job of understanding Shiism, and this needs to change fast.

I found I was mostly reading it as a vocabulary book, because it was stunning to me how words whose Western meaning I understand well hold totally different valences when you understand the history of Shiism and Sunnism in the Middle East. Words like 'democracy' or 'freedom' don't mean what I thought they meant. I feel like I've been having conversations for the past ten years where everyone was talking at crosspurposes, and I'm just now realizing.

Taking democracy as an example, some Shiite clerics have spent the past century positioning what I would term Islamic theocracy (velāyat-e faqīh) as the true democracy, because Islamic law is the true representation of the will of the people. This is by no means the only definition of democracy in circulation that Nasr shows, but Nasr vividly illustrates how this definition, which didn't originate with Khomeini but which he perhaps most prominently brought to the fore, influences even the most Western-minded Middle Easterners' understanding of the concept.

After brief but important discussion of the origins of Shiism and its historical touchstones (important because Nasr continually makes callbacks to these touchstones, showing how memories of Ali and Umar, memories of the Safavids and the Ottomans, continually influences the conversation in the Middle East in a similar way to how references to the Framers constantly influence American ideology and politics), Nasr spends most of the book on the political landscape of the past 30 years, essentially from the Iranian Revolution to today, showing how a major theme in the Middle Eastern political scene has been Shiites discovering a voice and learning how to use it. He spends a lot of time on the Iraq war, naturally given the book's publication in 2006, and the framework he has laid for understanding the war's Shia/Sunni dynamic in previous chapters makes his sections on the Iraq War incredibly potent. For me it was a string of sudden realizations, moments of shock when my past understanding of a concept combined with some new premise about Shia/Sunni politics to generate a new, deeper and more complicated vision of the war.