(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Hamid Dabashi

By Shujaat Hussain

For decades, Hamid Dabashi has cut a striking figure in academic and cultural circles.

An Iranian-American professor at Columbia University, he's known for his wide-ranging commentaries on cinema, Islam, revolution, and exile.

His prose is lyrical, references layered, and style unapologetically bold.

Shi'ism: A Religion of Protest, published in the wake of dashed hopes following the Iranian revolution, carries his familiar voice: part theorist, part memoirist, and always a provocateur.

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But this time, Dabashi's literary confidence comes at a cost.

His core claim, that Shi'ism is not a theological system but a cultural posture rooted in historical grief, raises eyebrows for reasons deeper than scholarly disagreement.

The book may be stirring, but it trades doctrinal accuracy for poetic mood, and collapses centuries of intellectual tradition into a metaphor of endless defiance.

In Dabashi's hands, Shi'ism becomes a ritualized resistance narrative.

From the martyrdom of Imam Hussain at Karbala to the chants of modern protestors, Dabashi reads the entire tradition as a theatre of dissent.

For him, power corrupts theology, while defeat preserves its soul.

This view, while emotionally charged, struggles to align with Shia sources or the tradition's own self-understanding. Faith, in this telling, lives only in mourning. Once it governs, it dies.

The problem isn't that Dabashi notices protest within Shia history, any student of Karbala or the Safavid era can confirm that defiance has deep roots. The issue is that he elevates protest into a theology of its own, sidelining core doctrinal pillars: divine unity, prophecy, and most crucially, the Imamate, divinely guided leadership central to Shia belief.

These concepts form a framework of knowledge, authority, and meaning. They cannot be reduced to metaphors of rebellion without losing their spiritual substance.

Dabashi's book on Shi'ism.

Dabashi's approach leans heavily on psychoanalysis. He recasts the Karbala tragedy as a site of inherited trauma, drawing from Freudian motifs rather than Qur'anic exegesis or hadith literature.

The Shia community, he suggests, is locked in an unconscious cycle of guilt and revolt. But grief in Shi'ism is a moral covenant, rather than a psychological wound.

Commemorating Hussain's sacrifice is a pledge to justice, a reaffirmation of divine principles. It isn't an act of helpless mourning.

Dabashi misses this.

The omissions pile up. There is barely a serious discussion of jurisprudence, scripture, or theology. Names like Shaykh al-Tusi, Allama Hilli, or Ayatollah Sistani don't enter his landscape. Instead, we get Zoroastrian imagery, Iranian cinema, and flashes of revolutionary nostalgia.

Even basic facts falter: claims about the Prophet's miracles, the Prophet's family, and early Islamic history are drawn from contested accounts and presented as fact, often at odds with Shia teachings.

His scope is equally narrow. While claiming to speak for global Shi'ism, the book remains steeped in post-revolutionary Iranian politics.

Shia communities in Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and East Africa receive scant attention, and when they do appear, they serve as supporting actors in an Iran-centered drama.

The diversity of practice, interpretation, and leadership across the Shia world is flattened into a single narrative of disillusionment.

Gender is another blind spot. Central female figures, Fatimah al-Zahra and Zaynab bint Ali, are treated briefly, if at all. Yet their roles in theology, history, and devotional life are indispensable.

Shia spirituality, like its politics, is shaped by women's voices, acts of remembrance, and claims to authority. To overlook them is to misread the tradition.

Perhaps the most troubling assertion in the book is its conclusion: that Shi'ism, once it seizes power, collapses. Here, Dabashi offers not theology, but resignation. For him, the tradition's only truth lies in resistance, never in responsibility.

But Shia thinkers have long grappled with questions of ethical rule, legal reasoning, and statehood. Imam Ali's caliphate, though marked by turmoil, was rooted in a vision of just governance. Jurists across centuries have sought to balance divine law with worldly responsibility. Shi'ism has never feared power. It has tried to sanctify it.

To be clear, Shi'ism: A Religion of Protest isn't without value. It captures a moment in Iranian intellectual history, a sense of despair among those who saw revolution fade into repression.

As a political memoir filtered through religious symbolism, it has power. But as a study of Shi'ism, it falls short. It mistakes poetry for theology, nostalgia for scholarship.

Faith, especially one as rich and contested as Shi'ism, deserves more than metaphor. It requires engagement with scripture, tradition, and the lived realities of its followers.

Shi'ism doesn't vanish in authority. It struggles to make authority just. Its truth isn't silenced by history, it lives through it.

Dabashi wanted to write about protest. In doing so, he forgot to listen to the faith he sought to interpret.

• The author is an English poet and an avid reader of Islamic philosophy, theology, and political thought. He lives in Budgam, Kashmir.

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