ABSTRACT
Shiism represents Islam’s largest minority branch with up to 15 per cent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. This chapter discusses the sacred foundations of Shiism with reference to which subsequent significant Shia approaches to politics have developed. These foundations were laid during a period where the ‘proto-Shia’ lost the early confrontations over the Prophet’s succession. The chapter examines the period characterised by the ‘quietist’ rejection of politics and the consolidation of ‘private jurisprudence’. It discusses the period between Shiism’s emergence from semi-clandestine conditions as the official religion of the Safavid state and Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (CR) which divided the Shia hierocracy for and against democracy. The chapter examines the development of democratic and theocratic Shiism under the ‘modernising’ Pahlavi monarchy which approached Islam as a developmental hindrance. It covers the post-revolutionary ascendancy since 1979 of theocratic Shiism and its contradictory realisation in a theo-democracy or electoral theocracy.
