Tag: Shiite Islam

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A Marxist and an Ayatollah Shaped Iran’s Islamic Republic

Kaveh Kazemi / Contributor / Getty

(This is part four of a four-part series on Shiite Islam and the Iranian regime. Please click here to read parts one, two, and three.)

While the first three parts of the series explored the history of Shiite Islam and how the lack of an earthly imam formed Shiite political culture, today we look at modern Iran and the rise of the Islamic republic.

Although other Shiite sects exist, Iran adopted the Twelver faith—based on a line of 12 imams. The last of these disappeared, and in the centuries that followed, the sect waited for the Twelfth Imam to return as Mahdi, a messiah-type figure, and establish global Islamic governance. In his absence, Shiites submitted to political authority without admitting its ultimate legitimacy.

Something began to shift in mid-19th century Iran as Western influence seeped into the still-Shiite but increasingly secular monarchy. In 1890, the shah granted an English business monopoly over the local tobacco industry, and in response, the masses protested the blow to national sovereignty and their personal economic interests.

Sitting at home, a leading Twelver scholar then issued a fatwa (legal opinion) declaring that continuing to smoke represented a war against the Twelfth Imam himself. The wave of support for the fatwa drove the shah to reverse his policy, and clerics began to sense their secular influence. Five years later, some joined the push for a national constitution.

Most clerics stayed quiet, however, focusing on ordinary religious affairs. But decades later in the 1960s, frustration with an unpopular shah led Ali Shariati, a Paris-educated sociologist from a clerical family, to apply a Marxist reading to the story of Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

Hailed as “Lord of the Martyrs,” Hussein gathered a small contingent of faithful followers and set out from Medina, the city of Muhammad in today’s Saudi Arabia, to oppose the unjust caliph who ruled from Damascus, Syria. Along the way in Karbala, Iraq, the caliph’s army intercepted Hussein’s approach, and a siege ensued. After ten days of negotiation, the army killed Hussein and his supporters.

The standard Twelver narrative held that as an imam, Hussein had divine foreknowledge of the massacre yet went to his death anyway. Faithful Shiites treated it as a redemptive act compensating for the failure of their ancestors to follow the imam. A Shiite tradition quotes Muhammad as saying, “[Hussein] shall die for the sake of my people.”

By visiting Hussein’s shrine and lamenting during the yearly commemoration of Ashura, they seek fulfillment of another traditional saying: “A single tear shed for Hussein washes away a hundred sins.” Extreme Shiites will even whip themselves with ropes or chains to demonstrate their remorse.

Shariati pushed back on that interpretation, calling for a “Red Shiism” that returned the faith to an activist posture against oppression and away from the “Black Shiism” of mourning. Shariati said Hussein had died valiantly. Though he had failed, in imitation Shiites might yet succeed in taking down the unjust shah. Shariati popularized a new phrase to remember: Every day is Ashura. Every land is Karbala.

The clergy…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on July 11, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.

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Shiites Await a Savior. How Should They Govern Now?

HUSSEIN FALEH / Contributor / Getty

(This is part three of a four-part series on Shiite Islam and the Iranian regime. Please click here to read parts one and two.)

The previous articles centered on the origins of Shiite Islam and its political history to examine the Shiite basis for Iran’s vision of government, one that is based on the central concept of wilayat al-faqih, translated literally as “guardianship of the jurist,” meaning the rule of a sharia expert. 

A brief recap: The two primary theological concerns of Shiism are Islamic justice and leadership, both represented in the figure of the imam. The large majority of Shiites, including most in Iran, are called Twelvers since they follow the line of 12 imams beginning with Ali, Muhammad’s cousin, whom they believe should have immediately inherited the prophet’s political position—but was wrongly denied.

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Iran returned Shiites to power. Prior to the Islamic Republic, the ruling shah belonged to the sect but was a secular and modernizing leader. But does the restoration of religious government honor or betray the Shiite heritage? To evaluate, we will now examine the end of the lineage of imams and the two rare instances when Twelver dynasties ruled in Iran—without a rightful imam.

Ali did eventually lead the Islamic community as the fourth caliph, and Sunni Muslims agree his governance was just. Yet when civil war and assassination ended Ali’s rule, Sunnis controlled the empire and often persecuted Shiites as rival claimants to Muhammad’s mantle. The imams counseled patience to the Shiite community, knowing they were a vulnerable political minority. They focused on religion, guiding their followers in the right understanding of Islam.

But in AD 874, the Twelfth Imam, a five-year-old boy, disappeared.

This threw the Twelver community into confusion, and many drifted toward a rival Shiite sect called Ismailism, which had broken off from the Twelvers in AD 765 and ruled a powerful dynasty from Cairo. But Twelvers said that the child did not simply vanish but that Allah had preserved his life in occultation.

In astronomy, the term refers to one celestial body passing in front of another and blocking its view. Here Shiites said that Allah was hiding the imam from public view—especially from the Sunni authorities—until he could grow up and restore Shiites to Islamic political leadership. In the immediate aftermath, the treasurer of the deceased 11th imam continued to collect the Shiite tithe and answer believers’ questions, claiming to communicate with the child in secret. After nearly 70 years passed without the imam’s reappearance, this “minor” (or short-term) occultation gave way to a “major” occultation that lasts to this day.

Twelver scholars held that…

This article originally published at Christianity Today on July 10, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.

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Imam’s the Word

HUSSEIN FALEH / Contributor / Getty

(This is part two of a four-part series on Shiite Islam and the Iranian regime. Please click here to read part one.)

The previous article introduced the Shiite concept of justice through Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Ali is a linchpin for understanding the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, the former representing the majority of Muslims in the world and the latter representing the majority in Iran. In 1979, Iran led a revolution that resulted in the world’s only Shiite government, establishing wilayat al-faqih, the “guardianship of the jurist,” meaning the rule of an expert scholar in sharia law.

This article will continue our examination of Shiite history, starting with the way Shiites see the Quran as containing both literal commands and mystical values. Shiites say it takes spiritual insight to understand the Quran correctly. And there are a multitude of traditions—the Sunna, from which Sunnis take their name—describing what Muhammad said and did.

Sunni scholarship recognizes many of these reports as authentic and others as uncertain or outright invented to support a political cause. They exist in the thousands, and although the standards of determining authenticity are internally rigorous, the task is a human endeavor.

Shiites say the Sunni criteria are necessarily insufficient. They believe proper Islamic leadership requires supernatural insight passed directly from Muhammad to his offspring—those who knew him best. Ali married the prophet’s daughter Fatimah, and they had two sons, Hasan and Hussein. Recall that Ali was assassinated in an Islamic civil war and leadership passed into Sunni hands. In AD 680, Hussein led a revolt against Yazid, the sixth caliph, whom many Sunnis consider impious. Yazid’s army slaughtered Hussein with his small contingent in Iraq, marking another blow to Shiites while reinforcing…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on July 9, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.

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How Iran Became an Islamic Republic

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When asked last month about his goals in attacking Iran, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that he sought to stop a nuclear threat. Yet he also expressed hope for a regime change.

“The decision to act,” he said, “is the decision of the Iranian people.”

Although Iranian sentiment is hard to measure, some surveys suggest widespread disillusionment with the country’s rulers. According to the nonprofit Freedom House, Iran ranks No. 20 on its list of the least-free nations in the world. But if Iranians were free to decide, on what basis would they decide what is right?

Shiite Islam offers Iranians a standard it views as just. Iran calls itself an Islamic republic. Many Iranians may appreciate the Western understanding of human rights. But long before Freedom House existed, their sect prized two concepts through which the Shiite people can judge their governments: justice and leadership.

Najam Haider, assistant professor of religion at Columbia University, calls these the core theological beliefs of Shiite Islam. Iran’s constitution purports to enshrine them via the judiciary in wilayat al-faqih, the “guardianship of the jurist.” In plain terms, the religious scholar, an expert in sharia law, is to rule and ensure fidelity to Islam. Iranians can theoretically vote politicians out of office but the chief religious scholar is in charge. He can be removed from his post—but only by fellow religious scholars.

To understand the Iranian government we need to understand Shiite political history. This article is the first in a four-part survey, based on Haider’s Shi’i Islam, Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival, Mark Bradley’s Iran and Christianity, and interviews with Shiite experts.

Part one is the origin story, describing why Shiites view themselves as cheated out of Muslim leadership. Part two looks at how different branches within the sect responded to this loss. Although Shiite rule is historically rare, part three considers how two premodern dynasties shed light on later developments in Iran. And part four describes two Iranian personalities who played a key role in politicizing the Shiite faith.

The starting point: Politics is never far from Islam, as the Muslim prophet Muhammad also became a head of state. But for centuries, most Shiites waited for divine intervention on their behalf, and did not push to create a government themselves.

Iran is one of only four majority Shiite countries in the world—Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan are the others—but is unique as the only nation with specifically Shiite governance. The global majority Sunni population may admire Iran for its centrality of religion, its anti-Western posture, or its opposition to Israel. But Sunnis reject the theological basis of wilayat al-faqih.

This article will focus on what Shiites think. An anecdote about…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today, on July 8, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.

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A Lebanese School Brought Christmas Cheer. Then Came the War.

Edits by CT / Source Images: Getty / NESN

The predominantly Shiite city of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon once boasted the nation’s largest Christmas tree, erected to symbolize good relations between local Muslims and the tiny Christian minority of only 20 families.

The local evangelical school—with a 99 percent Shiite student body—had celebrated the holiday for years, and in 2018 it built a 100-foot wrought-iron conic structure topped with a radiant star. (The use of natural firs or pines is uncommon in Lebanon). Several of the hundreds of students, parents, neighbors, and dignitaries in attendance wore Santa hats. Many had trees in their homes and gifts to open on Christmas day.

Earlier that December, Ahmed Kahil, the Hezbollah-affiliated president of the municipality, continued the annual tradition of erecting a smaller tree in the souk, the traditional marketplace and heart of the city. And at both events—alongside Shadi El-Hajjar, the principal of the National Evangelical School of Nabatieh (NESN), heads of other private schools in the city, and various government and religious officials—Kahil wished Christians a Merry Christmas.

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Lebanon’s economic crisis made 2018 the last year NESN could afford to erect its massive Yuletide construction. But over the following years, elementary school classrooms still featured Christmas trees, students exchanged secret Santa gifts, and teachers enjoyed the annual holiday dinner. “If Christmas isn’t found in your hearts,” the school reminded, “you won’t find it under a tree.”

But there was no Christmas celebration in Nabatieh last month, after over a year of war between Israel and Hezbollah. On October 8, 2023, the Shiite militia launched rockets into Israel in support of Hamas following its attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 250 hostages. The subsequent daily missile exchange drove tens of thousands from the border regions of both nations.

A year later, most of Nabatieh’s 80,000 residents fled their homes as Israel intensified its military campaign against Hezbollah. On October 16, an Israeli missile killed Kahil and 10 others at the Nabatieh town hall as they coordinated the daily distribution of food and medicine to the 200 families who remained in the largely evacuated city.

Initially, NESN stayed open for its 1,400 students. Located 35 miles south of Beirut and only 7 miles from Israel, the historic evangelical institution won local respect over the years by offering a nonreligious but values-based educational environment that consistently ranked among the top high schools in Lebanon. The September 2024 pager attack delayed the start of the academic year, and the exodus from the city eventually shifted education online. But within a week NESN opened its doors as a shelter for the locally displaced.

Over the course of the war, its staff stood by the Shiite community, including one who rescued Kahil’s colleague after the October 16 strike.

“When you see your hometown destroyed and the damage at the school,” Hajjar said, “you have to ask: Why is this happening to those who are not involved?”

A safe haven

In the early stages of the war, Nabatieh mostly…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on January 31, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.

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A Christian and a Shiite Confront Loss in Lebanon

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In early October, in a Christian village in southern Lebanon, “Samira” (we’re using pseudonyms due to the political situation) decided to water her lemon trees. The autumn winds were dry this season. Rain was less frequent. The frail, hunched-over grandmother filled her bucket and went outside.

Samira’s husband had died two years earlier. Her children had long ago moved away, seeking better opportunities in Beirut, but her daughter owned the house next door and made frequent trips back, recently refurnishing the interior with modern decor. Samira loved the home’s colorful bedspreads in the rooms where her great-grandchildren often stayed.

But such visits were infrequent these days. A year earlier, Hezbollah had entered the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza by shooting missiles into Israel. Israel had pushed back, and the exchange of fire between the Shiite militia and Israel drove thousands from their homes on both sides of the border. And in late September, Israel increased its bombing campaign against suspected Hezbollah sites throughout the country. Nevertheless, Samira had remained, adamant that her Christian village was not a target.

Samira had just begun watering her lemon trees when everything went black…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today, on January 8, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.

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Lebanon Evangelicals Serve Shiites Displaced by Hezbollah-Israel War

Marwan Naamani / AP Images

On September 23, Mustafa put his family of five on a small motorbike and drove seven hours north from Tyre to a village in the Lebanese mountains, weaving slowly through lines of gridlocked vehicles. Some in those cars—like his brother Hussein’s family of six—would not arrive for another two days.

The path normally takes two hours.

Mustafa, and thousands like him, were frantically fleeing Israeli bombs aimed at Hezbollah, the Shiite militia designated by the US government as a terrorist organization. Until that moment, he and his brother had been agricultural workers in a farm outside the city, living in a spartan two-bedroom apartment provided by his employers.

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CT agreed to withhold his family name for security reasons. Mustafa is a Christian originally from Afrin, a Kurdish area in northwest Syria. Asked if he shared his brother’s faith, Hussein said, “Not yet.”

Their home nation does not recognize converts from Islam. And while Lebanon is the only Arab nation to grant freedom of conversion, Tyre is a socially conservative Shiite city under the political sway of Hezbollah.

This was Mustafa’s second displacement. In 2013, he and his brother fled the Syrian civil war. But over the past five years, as poverty rates tripled in Lebanon, the nominal Sunni Muslims found support from a local Christian ministry offering aid.

Eighteen months ago, Mustafa professed faith in Christ.

“I follow Jesus,” he said. “He saved me.”

When Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon, it issued evacuation orders to both Muslim and Christian villages in the south. But the large majority of the displaced come from Shiite areas suspected of housing weapons depots and underground tunnels—where resident Shiites may or may not align with Hezbollah’s Islamist ideology.

According to a survey conducted in early 2024, while 78 percent of Shiites viewed positively the militia’s role in regional affairs, only 39 percent said they felt closest to Hezbollah among Lebanon’s political parties, compared to 37 percent of Shiites who felt closest to none.

Only 6 percent of Christians had “a lot of trust” in the Shiite militia.

Within these realities, Christians are eager—and cautious—to help. Gospel commitments and national solidarity require hospitality. Sectarian guardedness encourages suspicion. And Israel’s bombing campaign creates fear that welcoming the displaced might make them a target. 

Many are helping anyway.

Mustafa and Hussein found shelter in living quarters offered by an evangelical church in the mixed Muslim-Christian village where they sought refuge. A plastic rug covered half of the cement floor in their private allotment, with thin mattresses pressed up against the walls. Blankets and pillows strewn about were evidence of their children’s fitful night of sleep.

“This is our message: to show love in action as we lead people to Christ,” the church’s pastor said. (CT is granting him anonymity due to the uncertain political situation in Lebanon.) “As they receive, we teach them to give.”

His congregation currently hosts about 100 people, displaced from their homes in the south and in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. More than half are from neighboring Syria; the rest are primarily Lebanese Shiites. The pastor said 60 percent of the total are believers in Jesus. Others, like Hussein, are their relatives or Muslims already closely connected to churches in their original area.

They all pitched in to prepare 500 tuna sandwiches for local distribution.

Not Just Talk

Hezbollah’s current conflict with Israel began last year on October 8, one day after Hamas invaded from Gaza and killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, taking 250 hostages. The Lebanese militia initiated what it called a “support front” for Hamas, launching missiles that caused 80,000 Israelis to flee from villages near the border.

A similar number of Lebanese also fled from Israel’s retaliation, and for 11 months the two sides had kept their missile exchange relatively contained, aiming to avoid a larger and perhaps regional conflict with Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah as proxy forces.

That status quo held despite…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on October 17, 2024. Please click here to read the full text.

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Why a Shiite Martyr’s Funeral Was Surprisingly Christian

From Lokman Slim’s funeral, at his family home.

A Protestant mother. A Shiite son. A plea for vengeance on his killers.

But unlike many responses to political martyrdoms in Lebanese history, she yields it to God.

Last month in the Hezbollah-controlled south of Lebanon, unknown gunmen shot Lokman Slim in the head. It was a targeted assassination of a man dedicated to the hope that his small Middle Eastern nation might overcome sectarian divisions.

He was his mother’s son.

“I will not go and kill them, but ask God to avenge him,” said the grieving 80-year-old, Selma Merchak. “This comes from my faith in God as the great authority.”

But her next response reflects the family’s—and Lebanon’s—complex religious identity.

“And as it says in Islam: Warn the killer he will be killed, though it tarries.”

Born in Egypt, Selma’s Protestant lineage traces back to her grandfather in Syria, who found Christ through the preaching of the first wave of Scottish missionaries to the Middle East. As a child, she attended the American School for Girls—now Ramses College—founded in 1908 by American Presbyterians.

The family attended Qasr el-Dobara Church, located in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. And Selma continued in the Protestant educational heritage, graduating with a degree in journalism from the American University in Cairo, which by then had become a secular institution.

The Merchak family mixed freely in an Egyptian upper class that was open to all religions, vacationing often in Lebanon’s mountains. But in the chaos of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalizing of the Suez Canal, in 1957 Newsweek relocated its regional headquarters to Beirut, and Selma went with it.

She reconnected with Muhsin Slim, her childhood friend from the family vacations. The Slims were an influential Shiite family known for its good relations with the Lebanese Christian elite. Muhsin’s father served as a member of parliament in the 1960s, and during the civil war advocated against the use of Lebanon as a staging ground for the Palestinian armed struggle against Israel.

Now a lawyer, Muhsin married Selma shortly after her arrival in Lebanon. Her Egyptian accent was the toast of the town, aiding the political career of her parliamentary husband.

While Muhsin would only “pray in his heart,” Selma said, she worshiped on-and-off at the National Evangelical Church in Beirut, the oldest indigenous Protestant congregation in the Middle East.

Lokman, their second of three children, was born in 1962. Registered as Shiites within Lebanon’s sectarian system, Muhsin and Selma raised them to be moral, but to make up their own minds about religion. Statues of Buddha were part of the décor of their 150-year-old home. On property located in what was once known…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on March 15, 2021. Please click here to read the full text.

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Pope Francis Secures Favorable Fatwa for Iraq’s Christians

Via Vatican News

Pope Francis, a “pilgrim of peace” to Iraq, has made history by becoming the first pontiff to meet a grand ayatollah: Ali al-Sistani, whose hawza (seminary) in Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, is considered the foremost center of learning in Shiite Islam.

Two years ago, the pope met the grand imam of Egypt’s al-Azhar, considered the foremost center of learning in Sunni Islam. With Ahmed al-Tayyeb, Francis signed the “Declaration of Human Fraternity,” calling on both Christians and Muslims to embrace religious diversity with freedom and respect.

This weekend, Francis came to Iraq to support and encourage the nation’s beleaguered Christians, whose numbers have decreased from 1.4 million in 2003 to about 250,000 today.

But he also wished to sign a similar document with the reclusive leading figure in Shiite Islam, which represents 1 in 10 of the world’s Muslims—and 6 in 10 Iraqis.

The result with Sistani was more modest than with Tayyeb, but Francis did secure a very important fatwa (religious ruling).

“[Christians should] live like all Iraqis, in security and peace and with full constitutional rights,” said Sistani in an official statement. “The religious authority plays [a role] in protecting them, and others who have also suffered injustice and harm in the events of past years.”

Francis removed his shoes upon entering Sistani’s modest home. And while the ayatollah usually sits to receive visitors, he stood to welcome the pope.

Will the ruling make a difference? Will it have any impact in Iran, the neighboring theocratic Shiite state? And what really drives the regional conflict: religion or politics? In Muslim history, the answer is…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today, on March 7, 2021. Please click here to read the full text.

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Word or Deeds: Shiite Firebrand Pledges to Restore Iraqi Christian Property

Muqtada al-Sadr

If Pope Francis can avoid the complications of COVID-19 travel and get to Iraq in March, he will hear a lot about stolen property. Muqtada al-Sadr, a leading Shiite politician fiercely opposed to the US military presence, has told Christians he will do something about it.

The issue is not new.

As Iraq’s pre-Gulf War Christian population of 1.25 million dwindled to about 250,000 today, opportunistic non-Christians laid claim to their unoccupied homes and lands. The city of Mosul, next to the traditionally Christian Nineveh Plains—where Pope Francis is scheduled to visit— located 220 miles north of Baghdad, provides telling examples of the problem.

In 2010, in the waning days of official US occupation, Ashur Eskrya’s father decided to sell his family home. Years of chaos had depleted the once 60,000-strong Christian population of Iraq’s second-largest city, representing 10 percent of its total. Property values were plummeting. Especially in hindsight, Eskrya felt fortunate to get 25 percent of its market value.

Four years later, his neighbor got nothing.

ISIS invaded Mosul, putting its Christian population to flight. In 2015, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) surveyed 240 individuals displaced by the fighting throughout Iraq. Nearly 9 in 10 (89%) had their homes confiscated.

A 2014 study estimated that ISIS made more money from selling stolen real estate than it did from oil revenue.

After the liberation of Mosul, some Christians returned, including Eskrya’s neighbor. While 42 percent had lost their property documentation altogether, according to IOM, the neighbor was able to enter a lengthy legal process and eventually regain ownership of his home.

But uncomfortable with the security situation, he returned to Erbil, 55 miles east of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan, where thousands of displaced Christians still reside.

He lives there today with his children, which is more than a third family can say.

This neighbor benefited from Mosul’s earlier oil boom, and lived in a home valued at $1.2 million in one of the plush city districts. But in 2006, his daughter was kidnapped and killed. In 2012, another daughter tried to emigrate through Syria, and was killed there. The parents eventually moved to Australia—with the deed to their home. But last year, they were stunned to receive news…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today, on January 21, 2021. Please click here to read the full text.