NSmolenskiFan on Nostr: As bombs fall on #Beirut, it struck me that perhaps some of my fellow Americans and ...
As bombs fall on #Beirut, it struck me that perhaps some of my fellow Americans and Westerners would like to know more about the history of Beirut and of #Lebanon. And how Shi'a Islam figures into that history.
In my early days as an anthropologist, I wrote a short article about the role of Shi'a book publishers in the intellectual landscape of Beirut and the wider region (link below). In short, Lebanon's relatively weak state and multi-religious population made it a center for free expression. Many refugees from both #Iran and #Iraq immigrated there during and after the Iran-Iraq war, seeking more stability, opportunity, and even the freedom to criticize the governments of their home countries. For example, some Lebanese religious thinkers imagined Islamic political models that avoided the pitfalls of the Saudi model of shari'a-as-law and the Iranian model of vilayat-i-faqih.
These Islamic thinkers openly called for dialogue with the West and with "the American people." Virtually nobody in our media has reported this; instead, our media and government have frightened us of these people so that we would not listen to them. As a result, Americans are largely unaware of how badly Muslim thinkers in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries have wanted to talk with us openly about what civilization is and how civilization can progress while staying rooted in its traditions and values. These are conversations we are all having now. We could have been having them with friends and colleagues around the world, but we didn't even know they were there.
I never formally published the article, but I put it online for free. ⬇️ It's just a tiny drop in the scholarship on this topic, but if it helps just one person understand another world, perhaps it was worth it.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2nujm
In my early days as an anthropologist, I wrote a short article about the role of Shi'a book publishers in the intellectual landscape of Beirut and the wider region (link below). In short, Lebanon's relatively weak state and multi-religious population made it a center for free expression. Many refugees from both #Iran and #Iraq immigrated there during and after the Iran-Iraq war, seeking more stability, opportunity, and even the freedom to criticize the governments of their home countries. For example, some Lebanese religious thinkers imagined Islamic political models that avoided the pitfalls of the Saudi model of shari'a-as-law and the Iranian model of vilayat-i-faqih.
These Islamic thinkers openly called for dialogue with the West and with "the American people." Virtually nobody in our media has reported this; instead, our media and government have frightened us of these people so that we would not listen to them. As a result, Americans are largely unaware of how badly Muslim thinkers in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries have wanted to talk with us openly about what civilization is and how civilization can progress while staying rooted in its traditions and values. These are conversations we are all having now. We could have been having them with friends and colleagues around the world, but we didn't even know they were there.
I never formally published the article, but I put it online for free. ⬇️ It's just a tiny drop in the scholarship on this topic, but if it helps just one person understand another world, perhaps it was worth it.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2nujm