Understanding Shiite Leadership

Shaul Mishal is a Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University and at the School of Government, IDC Herzlia, and a Visiting Professor at Yale University, Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and Senior Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has authored and co-authored several books on Palestinian issues including West Bank/East Bank, The PLO under Arafat, Speaking Stones with R. Aharoni, The Palestinian Hamas with A. Sela, and Investment in Peace with R. Kuperman and D. Boas. Mishal has authored numerous articles, which have appeared in many leading journals. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ori Goldberg teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Shi'i Theology in Iran: The Challenge of Religious Experience and Thinking Shi'a, as well as a collection of lectures examining Shiite culture, politics, and consciousness from various perspectives. Dr Goldberg's research focuses on the comparative study of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish theological thought; Middle East politics and culture; and the critical role of religious thought in social theory and practice. He received his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History from Tel Aviv University.

• Introduction; 1. Leadership as interpretation; 2. The quest for authority; 3. Void and spaces; 4. Khomeini's middle ground; 5. Forming the middle ground: intra-Shiite issues; 6. Seeking the middle ground: extra-Shiite issues; 7. The struggle for the middle ground: the 2009 presidential elections; 8. Middle ground as resistance: Lebanese Hizballah; 9. HB and the temperate city; Epilogue: Shiite leadership and the emergence of the middle ground regime.

'This study is bound to give rise to the usual academic hullabaloo in light of its attempt to constructively assess what is at stake in our understanding of political radicalism and religious fundamentalism, the two easy labels of dismissing serious appreciation of the political consciousness at work in Iranian and other Shiite communities of the Middle East.' Abdulaziz Sachedina, IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies, George Mason University, Virginia