LARA DEEB

University of California, Irvine

Emulating and/or embodying the ideal:

The gendering of temporal frameworks and Islamic role
models in Shii Lebanon

A B S T R A C T
In this article, I discuss two of the major temporal
frameworks that pious Shii Muslims in Lebanon draw
on, as seen through the example of the Battle of
Karbala, its annual commemoration during Ashura,
and the work that the religious figures Imam Husayn
and Sayyida Zaynab do in linking history to the
contemporary moment. I suggest that, to fully
understand how these two temporalities work, it is
necessary to attend to the ways in which they are
differently gendered. I conclude by proposing
explanations for that gendering that take into
account both the Ashura history itself and
contemporary local and transnational political
contingencies. [temporality, gender, Islam, Shiism,
narrative, role models, transnationalism]

He is our Husayn.
A martyrs mother, speaking about her son
What would Zaynab do in this situation?
Hajjeh Fatima, volunteer at an independent Islamic welfare
organization
This resistance in Lebanon has always been our Karbala in Lebanon and
our strength and hope and our aspiration to the future.
Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, Hizbullah Secretary General, Ashura speech,
January 30, 2007
n the ten years I have done fieldwork in the southern suburb of
Beirut, the sentiments expressed by these statements and others like
them have been among the most common I have heard, especially
in discussions of activism in the community and participation in the
resistance to Israeli attack and occupation.1 They invoke the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammads grandson, Imam Husayn, in 680 C.E. at
the hands of the Sunni caliphs troops on the plain of Karbala and the subsequent captivity and leadership of his sister, Sayyida Zaynab. Husayn and
Zaynab are perhaps the most commonly cited religiohistorical role models
in Shii Muslim communities, including that in Lebanon (e.g., Aghaie 2005;
Pinault 1998; Rosiny 2001). Looking to role models from Islamic history is
a crucial element in formulations of what it means to be a moral and pious
person in this community, as it is in other Muslim communities around
the world. But what form does this looking to the past take? Does this recourse to history mean, as is frequently assumed in the United States, that
pious Shii Muslims in Lebanon, such as the people I quote above, desire to
return to a golden era of Islam or even to lifestyles and values that reflect
that earlier time? Or does it mean something else?
Clearly, return to the past is not an allusion to time travel. Rather,
I would contend, the phrasing betrays the persistence of an evolutionary understanding of time and place in relation to notions of modernity,2

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 242257, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01133.x

Gendering temporal frameworks

and it also is an echo or remainder of ideas about the incompatibility of modernity and religion, especially Islam,
when Muslim communities are not granted the same historicity or the same possibilities for complexity of change
and temporality that other communities are. At its core, the
idea that looking to a historical figure such as Husayn or
Zaynab implies a looking backward is based on assumptions about the forms of temporality that must structure the
lives and expectations of those people drawing on such figures for inspiration. It is against such assumptions that I
writenot merely to refute them but to use them as a starting point from which to explore the relationship between
understandings of temporality and the importance of religiohistorical role models in the present.
I begin by explicating two of my own starting assumptions: that the deployment of notions of return or cyclicality in reference to religious time masks lingering assumptions about secularity and modernity and that, in the
Lebanese Shii community (as in many others), there exist multiple possible temporal frameworks on which people draw in understanding the relationship of time(s), histories, pasts, and futures in their lives. I then tease apart two
of the major temporal frameworks at work in Shii Lebanon,
best illustrated through the example of the Battle of Karbala,
its annual commemoration during Ashura, and the work
that Husayn and Zaynab do as figures linking history to the
contemporary moment. I suggest that to fully understand
the ways these two temporalities work in conjunction with
one another, it is necessary to attend to the ways in which
they are differently gendered in the discourses and lives of
Muslims in this community. I conclude by proposing explanations for that gendering, locating its source in both the
Ashura history itself and contemporary local and transnational political contingencies.

Multiple temporal frameworks

The compulsion to coordinate past and future so as to
be able to live at all is inherent in any human being. Put
more concretely, on the one hand, every human being
and every human community has a space of experience
out of which one acts, in which past things are present
or can be remembered, and, on the other, one always
acts with reference to specific horizons of expectation.
Reinhart Koselleck
The anthropological and sociological literatures on
time and temporality are vast and vary widely in approach
as well as in their definitions of their object.3 Some of this
work focuses on the experience of time and of duration, on
notions of times passage and of time slowing down or
speeding up. Other work focuses on the organization and
conceptualization of time, for example, exploring the ways
that clocks and calendars coexist with ideas of bedtime

American Ethnologist

or lunchtime (see Tonkin 1992) or explicating genealogical understandings of time and history (Ho 2006; Shyrock
1997).4 Timetemporality also emerges as something that
has been recently compressed in various ways, whether in
the form of the speeding up of the world associated with
late modernity (e.g., David Harveys time-space compression) or as synchronic spatializations or aestheticizations
of events.5
For my purposes, rather than focus on questions of
how change takes place or is experienced within some constant framework that is a naturalized and a priori time, I
am interested in the relationships people have to time and,
specifically, in the ways that events in the past, or figures
from the past, are a part of the present. I use the phrase
temporal frameworks to connote this concept, building on
the ideas of temporality as the condition of being caught in
time or of existing in time and of a framework in the sense
of a narrative or conceptual formation through which that
condition is articulated and understood. My assumption is
that people can live within and think in terms of multiple
temporal frameworks. This is neither a new nor an unusual
idea. In anthropology, for example, there exist numerous examples, often from studies with indigenous groups, of the
coexistence of multiple mythic and historical pasts (see
Cohn 1995; Howe 1981; Sahlins 1981, 1995; see Munn 1992
for an overview).
As Nancy D. Munn (1992:100) and others have pointed
out, one problematic characteristic of many of these discussions of time and temporalities is a tendency to classify forms along a dichotomization of cyclical versus linear.6 She notes that this binary has been questioned on
the basis that so-called circular (repetitive) time does not
logically exclude linear sequencing because each repetition of a given event necessarily occurs later than previous
ones. The analogy between time and a circle closing back
on itself necessarily misleads here (Munn 1992:101; cf. Gell
2001). In other words, the slinky, or old coiled telephone
cord, model of time is still a linear one, despite its loops.7
Munn cites the classic study of Balinese time by Leopold
E. A. Howe (1981), who argues that the Balinese temporal
system incorporates both linearity and cyclicality precisely
because events do not repeat themselves but remain in sequence. The linear axis exists; it just might not be a straight
line.
If one applies this logic to the assumption that pious Muslims are striving to return to a golden age of Islam, a different rationale is revealed. The cyclicality implied in the notion of a return suggests repetition, the idea
that the past can be relived and that time is not unidirectional. Yet I do not think that that is what is intended
by this characterizationpeople do not intend to say that
time is reversed or that pious Muslims believe that they
will, in fact, repeat past events or return to the time of the
Prophet to live alongside him. Return is a bad descriptor

243

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009

here, and I suggest that what is being implied has more to

do with notions of what is modern, valued, contemporary,
and/or progressive than about the structure or experience
of time itself. The problem with an insistence on the language of cyclicalityor, rather, with an insistence on a binary differenceis that the cyclicallinear binary is linked
to other binary oppositions, such as modernnot modern,
secularreligious, and nationalmythic. This is problematic
not only because of the historicist and teleological value
judgments inherent in these binaries as they are deployed,
as Johannes Fabian (1983) noted decades ago, but also because of the ways that these binaries occlude much more
complex relationships and possibilities that fall between the
poles.
For example, Benedict Andersons (1983:2426) classic depiction of nationalism, along with much of the work
that builds on his, depends on a stark contrast between
national timewhich is labeled modern and follows a
Benjaminian notion of homogenous, empty timein
contrast to religious timethe messianic time of Christianity. This contrast reflects Kosellecks (2002) elucidation of
the emergence of European notions of modernity and,
especially, progress as key temporal categories, an emergence that rested on several historical conditions, including, crucially, the decline of Christian eschatology. Another
example comes from Minoo Moallems discussion of discourses about Islamic movements:
The collision of temporalitiesthe cyclicity of myth,
the linearity of modernity, and the repetitive time
of prime-time television, for examplehas brought
Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism up against
their limits by staging an Islamic subjectivity that is incomplete, plural, and fragmented. While the time of religious myth is in the realm of the sacred, which transcends the temporal duration that precedes or follows
it, the time of modernity has been constructed as developmental and universal time. [2005:127]
In these explications of temporalities one sees different
structuring binary oppositions as well as different resulting
conflations. Anderson relies on a modernnationalempty
versus religiousmessianic (and, by extension, nonmodern)
schema. Moallem distinguishes between myths cyclicality
and televisions repetitivenessyet cyclicality and linearity
are also opposed to one another, with the former cast as
sacred and the latter modern and universal. The first
two conflations are noted above: that cyclicality is clearly
still linear and that much of the power of these binary constructions resides in the value judgments inherent in them,
including the assumption that what is religious cannot be
modern because what is modern is defined by its secularity. The use of modern as a descriptor is itself the problem
here because the term cannot be neutral. To be modern
is either better than or worse than to not be modern, and,

244

generally, better than is the assumed course. These oppositions also ignore the ways in which nationalist time works,
as Moallem notes for religious time, to transcend the temporal duration that precedes or follows it.8
Another aspect of these constructions raises the question, why can religious time not be viewed as progressive as
well? Why is it that religious and progressivein the sense
of movement forward along a linear axisare assumed to
be incompatible modifiers? One answer lies in the continued hegemony of modern European notions of temporality
and of progress itself. In his analysis of European modern
time, Koselleck notes that it is identified with progress,
since it was progress that conceptualized the difference between the past so far and the coming future . . . progress is
the first genuinely historical definition of time that has not
derived its meaning from other areas of experience such
as theology or mythical foreknowledge (2002:120). Here
progress is a concept that refers to and constructs a future
that is limitless, accelerated, new, and unknown and that requires the decline of any religion-based expectation that the
world will come to a known end (Koselleck 2002).
It is this requirement for limitless and unknown possibility that is at work in Benjamins empty and Moallems
universal and that brings me to the crux of what is viewed
as incompatible with religious time: the insistence that,
to paraphrase Dipesh Chakrabarty (1997), historical time
(labeled modern time) is secular in the sense of allowing no agency for nonhuman actors. Chakrabarty describes
this eloquently: Historys own time is godless, continuous,
and, to follow Benjamin, empty and homogenous. By this
I mean that in employing modern historical consciousness
(whether in academic writing or outside of it), we think of a
world that, in Webers description, is already disenchanted.
Gods, spirits, and other supernatural forces can claim no
agency in our narratives (1997:36).
But what would happen if one allowed for the possibility for gods and spirits to occupy positions of agency
in historical narratives? How might this disrupt the modern European understandings of progress and temporality that Koselleck explicates and Anderson and Moallem
reflect? In relation to some forms of Islam (and of Christianity), the principal factor that seems to make religious
time incommensurable with the empty, progress-oriented,
universal time of history is the notion of a known, godgiven endpoint. When time is empty, it acts as a bottomless sack, any number of events can be put inside it
(Chakrabarty 1997:36). In religious time, there exists an ending; the sack is not bottomless. This poses a fundamental
problem, but, I suggest, does not mean that this same religious time does not hold to a conception of progress quite
similar to that outlined by Koselleck. Although messianic or
millennial time cannot be empty, because it is not limitless,
it is possible for the bottom of the sack to be unseen, for the
moment at which the sack will be filled and time will stop to

Gendering temporal frameworks

be completely unknown. The when of the end is unknown,

and it is precisely that uncertainty, that unknown quality,
that makes it possible to conceive of progress within a
model of religious time in which gods and spirits act along
with (or through) humans. The empty space of the sack itself is not predetermined in this model, only the very last
event is. What the analyses above seem to be getting at is a
sense that the past is different from the future, that the duration of time does not bleed into itself, from one era into
the next, in an unending progression of eras. It is simply the
unending part that is a problem for a messianic notion of
time in which a god has agency (of course, another assumption here is that gods and spirits can unhinge linear, empty
times in ways that mere mortals cannot). The key point here
is that one can still have a notion of progress to an uncertain
next point in the time line, even with a known eventual end.
This point emerges in two recent discussions of time
in millennial Christianity. Joel Robbins (2001) describes
the apparent contradiction that the expected rapture constructs in contemporary dispensationalist premillennial
Christianity. This contradiction is encapsulated in the idea
of a person who fully expects time to end at any moment
but who, at the same time, continues to go about his or her
daily business in the world. Yet Robbins (2001:527) argues
that this is, in fact, not a contradiction, that if one attends
to the model of time underlying this millennialism, one can
understand the ways in which such Christians are able to simultaneously live a belief in the imminent end of the world
while carrying out the tasks of daily life in the world. What
distinguishes time in the everyday millenarianism that he
describes is its constant potential for disruption. Although
millennial time is linear in the sense of being irreversible,
it is always potentially discontinuous. The problem then
becomes how to live millennially in daily life (Robbins
2001:531). For Robbins, the answer lies in the narrative
structure underlying understandings of time, and indeed,
he goes on to elucidate the ways in which both Urapmin
and dispensational Christian narratives share a structure
that can simultaneously grasp both continuity and the
ever-present possibility of radical change (2001:531).9
Timothy Webers discussion of dispensationalist premillennialist Christians takes a slightly different approach
to the same problem, which he describes as a contradiction
between Christians active participation in the world and
the passivity that would be expected to follow from dispensationalisms pessimistic and fatalistic worldview (e.g., a
sit, let the world go to hell, and wait for the endtimes attitude; 2004:45). Weber argues that dispensationalists have
a logic of their own that allows them both to give up on
the world and to engage it simultaneously (2004:46). Like
Robbins, he looks to notions of time in explanation, arguing that this seemingly contradictory blend is dependent on
the belief that people are living in the great parenthesis
of time, during which prophetic time is suspended. Simply

American Ethnologist

put, this means that there is no way to know when the end
of the world will be, and the imperative to be ready for the
rapture requires living as Christian a life as possible.
In both of these analyses, it is perfectly possible to
imagine daily progress made within a temporal framework
that itself contains an endpoint, that is not empty. Yet this
reconciliation of the assumed incompatibility of religious
and progressive time requires redefining progress and replacing its quality of infinite limitlessness with a contingent limitlessness. The conflict between these notions of
progress is not easily resolved and is one of the elements
that holds the temporal frameworks I outline below in tension with one another. The temporal frameworks at work
in the pious Shii community in Lebanon share the knowledge of an eventual endpoint to time, but the ways in which
each deploys (or ignores) that knowledge differ. This difference emerges in their varying emphases on progress to
an unknown futurea future that, in this context, as I discuss below, is also expected to be better than the present.
To tease apart these contrasts, I focus both on gendered
invocations of religiohistorical role models in the present
and, following Robbinss approach, on narrative structures
as two key methodological and theoretical tools through
which to elucidate these different temporal frameworks.10
I consider these narrative structures and temporal frames
part of a Shii discursive tradition addressed to conceptions
of the Islamic past and future with reference to an Islamic
practice in the present (Asad 1986:14), and I view as my
task to tease apart the ways in which this discursive tradition links the past to the present.
In doing so, I take Chakrabartys methodological point
to heart: It is all the more imperative, therefore, that we
read our secular universals in such a way as to keep them
always open to their own finitude so that the scandalous
aspects of our unavoidable translations, instead of being
made inaudible, actually reverberate through what we write
in subaltern studies (1997:52). It is precisely this sense of
scandalous translation that I hope to be able to capture.
This is more difficult than perhaps it seems. How does one
write in a way that allows gods and other nonhuman forces
to have certain kinds of agency in the world? At one point,
while writing about changes that had taken place in Ashura
commemorations in Lebanon, I passed a draft of my analysis to a friend who is a member of the pious Shii community. Although he did not agree with everything I had written, in general he said that my discussion made sense to
him. Yet he took serious issue with one thing: You have not
described the Imams revolution correctly. When I asked
him where I had made mistakes, he said, You dont seem
to believe that this was foreshadowed. I can tell from reading this that you dont believe in Husayn, that you dont believe that his revolution will bring us to the Last Day eventually. You write as though it is a made-up story. It is my hope
that, by giving credence to both the temporal structures and

245

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009

narrative frameworks at work in relation to the Ashura story

in Lebanonincluding one in which Gods time is prioritized over life on earthI will be able to present a more
complex reading of the martyrdom of Husayn and the subsequent leadership of Zaynab. To their history, then, I now
turn, making stops at two key moments and places: Karbala,
Iraq, in 680 C.E. and the southern suburb of Beirut, around
the turn of the 21st century.

Karbala in the past and present

The roots of the Battle of Karbala lie in the initial division
between Shii and Sunni Islam, which began over the issue
of leadership of the Muslim community after the death of
the Prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E. Put simply, the group
that eventually coalesced into Shii Islam believed that
leadership was hereditary and had been left by the Prophet
Muhammad to his son-in-law and cousin, Ali,11 and to Alis
descendants, who are all called Imams.12 Sunni Muslims,
who were the majority, instead followed the caliphate, understood as a nonhereditary line of leadership that began
with the Prophets companions.
By the year 680 C.E., the Prophets grandson Husayn
was the Shii Imam. When the Caliph Muawiyyah died,
his son Yazid inherited his position, initiating dynasticism
in the caliphate for the first time. At that time, a group of
nascent Shii Muslims in Kufa called on Imam Husayn to
lead them in revolt, as Yazid was reputed to be especially
corrupt. Husayn agreed, anddespite having foreknowledge of his imminent deathset out to confront Yazid on
the first day of the Islamic month of Muharram, taking with
him a small group of armed men as well as women and
children from his family. The party was intercepted and
besieged at Karbala and prevented from reaching the Euphrates, the major water source nearby. The battle began on
the tenth of Muharram, and by its end, Husayn, along with
all the men in his party save one son, had been killed. The
women and children were taken captive and marched to the
caliph in Damascus, where they were led and represented
while in captivity by Husayns sister, Sayyida Zaynab.
Shii Muslims around the world commemorate these
events annually. In Lebanon, commemorations begin on
the eve of 1 Muharram and culminate on the tenth day,
known as Ashura, although various commemorative and
mourning practices often continue for another 40 days.13
During this time, pious Shii Muslims observe mourning
practices, dress and behave somberly, and attend mourning gatherings at which the history of the Battle of Karbala is
retold, often in conjunction with sermons teaching lessons
to be learned from this history. Depending on the area of
Lebanon and the specifics of the local community, tenthday commemorations may include a passion play, processions, and various forms of lamentation, such as selflaceration, the singing of elegies, and a ritualized striking

246

of oneself in grief. In the wake of a Shii Islamic mobilization in Lebanon that crystallized in the 1970s,14 there
have been rather dramatic changes in these commemorative forms. Among the most striking of these changes have
been reforms of mens lamentation practices, a relative emphasis on activist interpretations of Ashura over soteriological meaning, a focus on didactic rather than affective elements, and a reformulation of portrayals of Zaynab from
a plaintive mourner to an activist community leader who
puts aside her grief for the sake of others.15
In contemporary Lebanon, both Imam Husayn and
the reinterpreted version of Sayyida Zaynab are held up as
examples of ideal piety and public service, as specifically
Shii models for living a moral lifestyle. This has been especially important in the Lebanese political context of Israeli military occupation and continued war with Israel.
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982, the second time laying Beirut under siege. Israeli forces eventually
withdrew from much of the country but continued to occupy a zone in the south until May 2000. Residents of the
south, many of them Shii Muslims, bore the brunt of the Israeli invasions and occupation, and the now internationally
prominent Shii political party Hizbullah eventually took
the lead in armed resistance to the occupation. Although
the LebaneseIsraeli border was relatively calm from May
2000 until July 2006, low-grade military conflict continued
over the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms area and was also
fueled by continued indefinite detention of Lebanese and
Arabs in Israel.16 In July 2006, it escalated into the largest
Israeli attack on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure seen
since 1982, and, again, Lebanons Shii Muslim population
bore the brunt of the human and material losses and took
the lead in military resistance.
In this context of resistance, both men and women
draw on the examples set by Husayn and Zaynab during and
after the Battle of Karbala. Yet the ways in which they do so
differ. Before considering the specifics of the relationship of
this past to the present and future, and the specifics of mens
and womens embodiments and emulations of Husayn and
Zaynab in the contemporary moment, I turn to the two narrative readings of the Battle of Karbala that underlie the
temporal frameworks in use.

Readings in parallel: Paradigmatic and

syntagmatic
The relationship of the Battle of Karbalas narrative
structure to time can be read in at least two ways in contemporary representations in Lebanon. Both of these narrative
readings describe linear temporal frameworks, involving
notions of time that is nonrepeating, irreversible, and sequential (no time travel allowed), although they involve different relationships between the linear flow of time and
the events that take place along the time line. Both are

Gendering temporal frameworks

teleological in the sense that the future is understood to be

a better place than the present, an endpoint toward which
actions are calibrated, the expected future that is a horizon for the present. The differences between these narratives and the temporal frameworks they reveal are not oppositional; there is no polarity of experience or perspective
here. Rather, they are differences in parallel, two readings of
time, two different relationships of the past to the present
(and the future) that, for heuristic purposes, I call syntagmatic and paradigmatic. These categorical terms have
been used with reference to time and temporality by Valerio Valeri (1990), in his discussion of legitimation narratives
for Hawaiian kingship, and by Alessandro Portelli (1997),
in his explanation for differences in the remembrance of
two major labor battles (the Battle of Evarts and the Battle
of Crummies, the former understood as a historic event
and the latter relegated to memory outside the historical
canon).
In its linguistic connotation, a syntagmatic relationship is one in which elements exist in a sequential construction, one following the next, and it is the sequence
that determines the relationship among the elements themselves. A paradigmatic relationship is one in which elements
can substitute for one another in the same context (so a
paradigm as a pattern or model works here); for example,
various tenses of a verb might be able to substitute for one
another in a sentence, thereby existing in a paradigmatic
relationship to one another. Valeri builds on the linguistic
roots of the terms to define them in relation to narrative
as follows: Syntagmatic relations are established between
events qua events, as defined by their position in the temporal chain. Paradigmatic relations are established between
events as members of classes of action, that is, as instantiations of the rules that govern or constitute them
(1990:157).17 These definitions point to a critical similarity
in these two categorical ways of understanding time and
its duration or of understanding the relationships among
events in time: Both highlight the ways that the past is a part
of the present. In Valeris discussion, this allows for the imbrication of the two and the simultaneous reliance on syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures of time as kingship is
negotiated and substantiated.
One of the narrative structures at work in my example, in relation to the Battle of Karbala, can be read as
paradigmatic. This reading of the Ashura story is teleological, placing the Battle of Karbala into a temporal framework in which the future is never unknown. Instead, there
exists a constant battle between good and evil that is consistently foreshadowed and reinstantiated in different eras
and that will not be resolved until the Day of Resurrection,
or Judgment Day.18 In this narrative structure, the Battle of
Karbala is not the chronological origin point of all Shii resistance against (generic) evil, but rather, it plays a pivotal
role within broader foreshadowings in the hadith and in a

American Ethnologist

longer history of Shii martyred Imams, beginning with the

first Imam, Ali. Perhaps the most commonly cited of these
hadith among my interlocutors is one that reports that the
Prophet Muhammad was informed by the angel Gabriel of
the future martyrdom of his grandson Husayn, who was an
infant at the time. Gabriel also related that Husayn would
have followers, would be granted intercessionary powers
with God, and would be triumphant on the Day of Resurrection. The hadith ends with the Prophet saying, Blessed
are those who are the friends of Husayn, a saying commonly included as a part of lamentation liturgies and elegies commemorating Husayns martyrdom in Lebanon. In
this paradigmatic framework, time is understood to come
to an end on Judgment Day, when it will be disrupted and
good will finally triumph over evil. As my friend noted in
the opening section of this article, many pious Shii Muslims believe that Husayns revolution will bring us to the
Last Day, and many consider it a necessary step on the way
to that known end.19
Here, Karbala and Husayn, in particular, have become
(and, in fact, were foreshadowed as being) the paradigmatic
instance of Shii resistance. The battle is an ever-repeating
type of event rather than an event that repeats itself. This
was often articulated by my interlocutors in Beirut as the
idea that Husayns movement was not confined to his time
and, in fact, continues today. In the words of one woman,
as she explained to me the importance of commemorating
Husayns martyrdom annually, In every era there is an oppressor and an oppressed. And this history always repeats
itself, throughout all eras. Ashura reminds us of this, so we
will never forget that there is a Yazid and a Husayn in every time, in every nation, in every government, and people
should always have the spirit of revolution against oppression, in all its faces, no matter what its identity.
Rather than a return to Karbala, this phrasing is about
using Karbala in parallel, as a potentially metaphoric
substitute, which works to emphasize the morality of ones
stance and to identify one with the side of good in the good
evil binary. Contemporary Shii battles, like those against
the Israeli occupation or the Israeli attack on Lebanon in
July 2006, become yet another instance of this universal
moral battle for which Karbala represents the paradigm, a
battle in which good will eventually triumph over evil at the
end of time.20 Although it is possible to imagine that there
might be other instances of this universal battle that work
as authorizing moments, the Battle of Karbala provides
the paradigm for my interlocutors and other Shii Muslims
because it is viewed as a moral tragedy of an unthinkable
scale, enough to shock or awaken people to join the side
of good in this everlasting battle (cf. Pinault 1999) and understood as the least we can do after Husayn went to his
death willingly. Indeed, it is through the notion of Husayns
conscious self-sacrifice as part of a larger transcendent
plan that death is converted here into victory, and it is in

247

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009

this sense that Husayns martyrdom is a necessary step

toward the Last Day.
The second narrative structure I point to can, instead,
be viewed through the lens of a syntagmatic reading. Here
Karbala is the point of origin for a sequential historical narrative, the location of the beginning of the history of the
possibility of Shii resistance in Lebanon as well as its locus
of inspiration. The next step in this reading may seem to involve partial rupture, in which centuries of historical time
are skipped over in a telescoping move to the early 1980s
and the beginnings of the history of the Lebanese Islamic
Resistance in its contemporary and local manifestations.
Yet this rupture is not one of time itself, or even of events in
times duration, but is, instead, part of the specificity of this
particular narration, in which the missing centuries and
events are understood to exist outside the particular telling
of the history of the Lebanese Islamic Resistance. In this
narrative, Karbala is chronologically followed by any number of acts of resistance and other events, which are left out
of the narration but serve as an implicit bridge that links
Karbala to key moments in this chronological history: first,
the Islamic Revolution in Iran and, then, the birth of the resistance to occupation in Lebanon.21 And in this narrative,
that resistance and the events that constitute itthe taking of an outpost, the defense of a village, the building of
a school, and so oncontinue today. An added feature of
this reading is that this chronological history of resistance
is fought not only literally against the Israeli occupation but
also against other factors viewed as representing evil, such
as poverty, misinformation, illiteracy, and stereotypes.
In the temporal framework revealed by this narrative
structure, the details of the future remain unknown until
the endpoint; and although time is still believed to have a
known end on Judgment Day, that ending is often ignored,
emphasizing the uncertainty and openness of the time line,
as though it were, indeed, entirely empty. My friends
comment about the relationship of Husayn to the Last
Dayalthough not an unusual beliefis the sort of statement that was rarely articulated outside of Ashura commemorations. Furthermore, the Last Day was often downplayed in conversations I had about Husayn and Zaynab or
was described to me as what some people believe, in a
self-distancing move.
In addition to the perpetually unstated knowledge that
this time line too will come to an end someday, another
qualification of unknown is necessary. This future is not
unknown in the original Darwinian sense of absolute randomness, in which things just change, neither for better
nor for worse, with no necessary value or direction. Here
there is an expectation of progress, meaning that each
future moment on earth has the potential to be better than
the present as well as new and unknown. My interlocutors expressed this expectation that the future would be
not only different than but also better than the past by

248

using terms like taqaddumusually opposed to takhalluf, or backwardnessand by emphasizing educational,

economic, infrastructural, and technological improvement
projects in their community. They also noted that it is
humanitys responsibility to ensure this progressthe improvement of the community as it moves forward in time to
a limitless (albeit temporarily) futurea responsibility I return to below. In this sense, there also exists a teleological
linearity in this temporal framework, but one more characteristic of modernization discourses than of end-time
discourses.22
These two temporal frameworks (and their narrative
structures) are not opposed to one another, nor are they
entirely separable. One way to think through their relationship might be to draw on Kosellecks (2002:123) heuristic
constructs of event and structure, in which a temporal
structure, through processes of repetition and association,
provides the meaningful framework within which events
can be experienced. In this regard, one can think of the
Ashura paradigm, or the constant battle of good versus evil
for which Karbala provides the paradigmatic moment, as a
structure that imparts a certain nuance of meaning to the
events of the formation, struggles, and eventual successes
of the Lebanese Islamic Resistance community. This is a
slightly different way of understanding the relationship
of temporal frameworks to one another than that found
in the works on millennial Christianity discussed above.
Although, in both cases, the unknown date of the end
of time facilitates daily life and work in the present, in
millennial Christianity, it is only personal progress (e.g.,
pilgrims progress) that is commensurable with a sense of
waiting for the rapture. Societal progress is more difficult to
reconcile with the ever-possible rupture signaling the end
of the world. However, in the Shii case, societal progress
itself is understood as possible and desirable (implemented
through the work of individuals) and is, in fact, a crucial
component of the syntagmatic temporal framework and
narrative. The paradigmatic framework presents a greater
difficultyin which the meaning of progress must be
revised significantly to allow for movement to the known
ultimate ending. The tension that emerges between progressive and end-times discourses as well as between the
syntagmatic and paradigmatic frameworks may, in fact, be
partially resolved through the relative lack of eschatological
discourses in the Lebanese Shii community as compared
with other communitiesfor example, Iran, where Mahdiism end-times imagery and predictive discourse are more
prevalent.23
Another set of terms through which the entanglements
of these temporal frames can be understood is in the
contrast and similarity between the metaphoric and the
metonymic relationships of the past to the present and future they encompass. If metonymy is understood as an association of two elements that is not dependent on their

Gendering temporal frameworks

similarity to one another but, rather, on shared overlapping correlations, the syntagmatic temporal framework can
be viewed as one in which Karbala in the past and Karbala in the present exist in a metonymic relationship to
one another. In contrast, the relationship represented in the
paradigmatic temporal framework is a metaphoric one, involving similarity, a shared quality that allows a concept or
term to be transferred among contexts. To further clarify
these distinctions, let me return to my example and consider the implications of each of these temporal frameworks
for the ways that individuals relationships to figures from
the Islamic past are understood.

Karbala in the present and future

The two frameworks outlined abovethe syntagmatic
and the paradigmaticemerge in differing interpretations
of the events of Karbala and in differing views of how it
should be understood and drawn on in the pious Lebanese
Shii community today.24 In the realm of ritual commemoration, one perspective, which tends to accompany an
emphasis on the soteriological meaning in Ashura, draws
on the paradigmatic frame of meaning. This interpretation
highlights the belief that commemorating the battle should
involve reexperiencing it annually, so that participants in
commemorations feel the presence of Zaynab with them
in mourning gatherings and so that the affective weight of
their grief and regret is held as primary. In a sense, time
is held still at this essential and essentializing moment in
Shii history. A competing understanding of Ashura commemorations draws, instead, on the syntagmatic temporal
framework. This is the understanding that is dominant today in the southern suburb of Beirut. Here, more recent, activist interpretations are highlighted, along with the importance of working toward linear temporal change. Lessons
are to be learned from history but applied toward the future, reflecting a commitment to progress in the here and
now. As I have discussed the differences in commemorative practice and perspective in depth elsewhere (see Deeb
2006a), here I focus, instead, on the ways that the Battle
of Karbala is brought from the past into the present and
the future through the figures of Imam Husayn and Sayyida
Zaynab and their contemporary deployments in the pious
Lebanese Shii community. Again, the two temporal frameworks hold implications for the ways in which ones relationship to these figures from the Islamic past is imagined
and understood, for the ways in which one lives the message and lesson of Karbala in the present (and future).
In the paradigmatic reading, this relationship is understood metaphorically, and historical and contemporary
persons are viewed as living lives in parallel. For example,
the martyred Husayn and a Lebanese resistance fighter are
understood as participating in the same war and in the
same type of battle, just different instantiations of it. In con-

American Ethnologist

trast, the syntagmatic reading privileges the metonymic,

and the historical figure is held up as a role model who can
teach certain lessons or inspire certain values, in part because of conjunctures of political contingency and context,
precisely because she or he is a historical predecessor.25 In
this case, for example, the behavior of Husayn or Zaynab
is viewed as demonstrating certain values associated with
moral behavior, values that are then interpreted through the
lens of the contemporary world. Characteristics associated
with Husayn or Zaynab, such as bravery or sacrifice for ones
community, are then to be emulated in the present to shape
the future.
In practice, pious Shii men and women may bring Karbala into the present in a variety of ways. It is often assumed
that, for men, the only way to live the message of Karbala is
through direct participation in the military resistance to Israeli attacks and occupation, whereas, for women, it is to
fulfill the classic role of mother of martyr. Yet these are
not the only ways of being as or like Husayn or Zaynab. It
is widely understood in the pious Shii community that not
all men are able to participate militarily and that the talents
and skills of some may be better put to use in other arenas.26
Similarly, in an important addition to the maternalist role
often delegated to them in nationalist struggles, women are
understood to have individual capacities and skills that are
God given and, therefore, meant to be cultivated and put to
use for the betterment of the community in various ways.
For both men and women, public activism is a key
way in which people strive to live Ashura on a daily basis. This primacy of public activism is one of the legacies
of the mobilization of Ashura discourses by Shii religious
and political leaders that began in the 1960s and developed
in conversation with discourses emerging from revolutionary Iran. In Lebanon, this mobilization was multistranded
and had aims that ranged from grassroots education and
social-welfare development initiatives to military resistance
toward Israeli invasion to the amelioration of sectarian
political-economic inequalities in the Lebanese nationstate (Deeb 2006a). Public here is broadly defined to include not only activities located in the public sphere but
also the many types of work that are viewed as contributing to the common good, often, although not exclusively,
through the institutional framework of a social-welfare
or community-development organization. These organizations may be affiliated with a political party (e.g., Hizbullah)
or religious leader (e.g., Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah) or may be independent.27 For example, men may work
or volunteer with Jihad al-Binaa, a Hizbullah-affiliated organization that oversees construction and rebuilding as
well as other infrastructural, engineering, and agricultural
development aspects of the partys work, or through a variety of other institutions, both Hizbullah-affiliated and not,
that serve to support the resistance movement and promote
its values and goals. Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyid

249

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009

Hasan Nasrallahs father, for example, was, for some time,

a volunteer at the Martyrs Association, a party-affiliated organization that provides monthly support for the families of
martyrs.
For women, in particular, volunteering (or, more rarely,
working) for a social-welfare organization is perhaps the
most common way of bringing Zaynab into the present.
Zaynabs example translates as thousands of women volunteering their time and energy in Islamic social-service
organizations, often taking on a third shift, in addition to
paid employment and their household work, to do so. In
addition, more Shii women are formally employed than
ever before, and the types of employment have diversified
widely.28 Much of this volunteerism or employment is described by pious women as their contribution to the development of their communitywhether by providing goods
and services for the poor, facilitating girls education, or
working as a doctor in a clinic.
Despite differences of detail, however, my point here
is that both men and women are able to bring the values
and ideals of the Battle of Karbala, or to live the Ashura
story in the present, in a variety of ways in practice. The
sole, although major, gender difference here is participation
in the military arena. In terms of the teachings of the major Shii religious leaders in Lebanon, a woman is permitted to carry arms and participate in military struggles only
when she, her family, or her property must be defended.
Obviously, Israeli attacks and occupation would constitute
such a circumstance, but in practice, Lebanese Shii women
have not carried arms as part of the Hizbullah-led Islamic
resistance.29
However, in idealized formin the ways that men and
women are talked about in relationship to Husayn and
Zaynab and in their representations in relation to these
figuresthere is a difference in the ways these models and
their temporal frameworks are invoked. Although both temporal frameworks and their related understandings of the
role of Husayn and Zaynab as models for or in the present
coexist, their relative emphasis is gendered in particular
ways.
One might expect such a gendering of roles to take the
classically invoked forms of roles in anticolonial and nationalist resistance movements, in which women are often
allotted responsibility for preserving religious and cultural
tradition and men are expected to represent and facilitate
modernization (e.g., Aretxaga 1997; Chatterjee 1993; Lazreg
1994). However, in this case, an inversion of those classic
roles is evident. When men are called on by religious and
political leaders to fulfill the ideal of Karbala, it is almost exclusively in relation to military resistance, and when their
participation is recognized, it is usually framed as a paradigmatic instance of participation in the continuous universal
battle of good against evil. In other words, Lebanese Shii
fighters are called on to be Husayn. They are frequently

250

equated with Husayn in discourse and in memorialization

practices and are often referred to as our Husayn. Men are
described as going to Karbala, their military operations as
part of the Battle of Karbala, the land on which they fight
as our Karbala, and the Israeli enemy as Yazid.
In contrast, calls for women to participate, or recognition for their participation, are more frequently cast in the
syntagmatic framework, as part of an open-ended progress
of the community into an unknown but inevitably more
developed future. Women are placed into the chronological narrative of resistance and development so that they become part of the process within the nation-state of developing their community on a linear axis of progress.30 Women
activists are not equated with Zaynab. Zaynab is looked to
for inspiration, and values associated with her are adapted
to the current context. Not only are women called on to
be like Zaynab but they also often describe themselves
as striving to be like her or to behave like her. For example, one woman described the changes she saw in younger
women who volunteered with her at a social-welfare organization, saying, Young women here, they become less shy,
they find their voice, they become like Zaynab. In other
instances, volunteers used the example of Zaynab to admonish poor women or sister volunteers who had done
something they viewed as incorrect or inappropriate, asking them what Zaynab would have done differently in that
situation. The crucial point here is that, in all these cases,
women may be like Zaynab, but they are never Zaynab.
Ideally, men are meant to embody Husayn, whereas
women are expected to emulate Zaynab. In embodying
Husayn, within the paradigmatic narrative and temporal
framework, men-as-Husayn are Karbala in the present. In
emulating Zaynab, within the syntagmatic narrative and
temporal framework, women draw on Zaynab as a role
model to lead the community into the future. One way to
think about this is to view women as having become representatives and agents of linear limitless progress in this
ideal model in ways that men have not, again pointing to
a stark contrast with the ways gender roles have been described in many anticolonial and nationalist movements.
Of course, sometimes these deployments of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic can be quite entangled. For
example, mens martyrdom can also be seen as necessary
to bring the earthly Lebanese Shii community into its immediate future, by defending it from Israeli attack aimed
at its destruction. Consider an excerpt from Secretary General Nasrallahs Ashura address in 2007. Simultaneously addressing Hizbullah fighters and the broader community approximately six months after the July 2006 war, he said, In
July and August 2006, you showed that blood can triumph
on the sword and the oppressed can triumph on the oppressor. This resistance in Lebanon has always been our
Karbala in Lebanon and our strength and hope and our aspiration to the future (January 30, 2007). Both fighters and

Gendering temporal frameworks

the community are cast here as the oppressed on the side

of Husayn, with the resistance as both Karbala in Lebanon
(paradigmatic) and aspiration to the future (syntagmatic).
Here victory has occurred both in the context of a local, single instantiated episode of the transcendental battle and as
another foreshadowing of the ultimate victory of the Day of
Resurrection.
Similar entanglements emerge in women volunteers
deployments of these narrative structures. Although most
volunteers emphasize the importance of developing their
community and representing it as modern, some also note
that they volunteer and behave like Zaynab to collect
good deeds that will assist their tally on Judgment Day and
ensure that they go to heaven in the afterlife. In this concern
with end-times discourses, even as the syntagmatic is prioritized, the paradigmatic is never completely effaced. Small
acts of piety or of assistance to others (not necessarily separable things) can be understood as contributing to the side
of good in the universal battle of good versus evil. Being like
Sayyida Zaynab indexes multiple meanings simultaneously:
being a good person so as to go to heaven in the afterlife at
the end of the world, developing the community, contributing to social welfare, modernizing the community, and representing the community as a modern woman.
Yet again, and perhaps surprisingly given these entanglements, in idealized form and most of the time, there are
differential gendered emphases in the ways these narrative structures and temporal frameworks are invoked. In the
next section, I begin to think about why these gendered emphases exist in the idealized expectations of pious Shii men
and women.

Thinking through differential gendered

emphases
In thinking about the relationships of contemporary men
and women to Husayn and Zaynab, I first consider the content of the Ashura story itself and the ways that gender
informs this narrative and then turn to the contingencies
of the national and transnational context. One explanation
for the gendering of these role models and the temporal
frameworks with which they are associated is the congruence between lived experiences of war and occupation and
the Karbala history. In the history of the battle, Husayn obviously dies at Karbala, whereas Zaynabs story begins at
that point. This is reflected in the ways that Husayn and
Zaynab emerge in the present as well as in actual lived experiences in contemporary Lebanon, where Shii men are
dying and Shii women are holding the community together
as it moves into the future. Obviously, men are not the only
people killed during military conflicts. In fact, one of the
striking things about the July 2006 war was that most of the
Lebanese killed were not fighters but civilians. However, in
general, when men join the Islamic Resistance as fighters,

American Ethnologist

the expectation is that they may face death and the call to
join is a call to be prepared to sacrifice ones life (as is the
call to join any military organization or armed service), and
when men and women are called to participate in the resistance and the community, the expectations for the outcomes in their lives differ. When men are called on to be
Husayn, they are envisioned as having no future, at least no
future on earth. Such expectations color the possibilities for
a syntagmatic reading of Husayn as a model to be emulated
by pious Shii men, as that reading leads directly to death
without emphasizing the afterlife and the greater purpose
and battle highlighted by a paradigmatic reading.
This brings me to a second possible explanation.
Husayns story did not really end in Karbala. He went willingly to his death and was martyred, and therefore the
expectation is that heand, by extension, those who are
equated with himis now in heaven in the afterlife. In the
pious Shii community, death is neither an absolute ending
nor evidence that one has no future. On the contrary, the
afterlife is something to which the pious look forward and
for which they prepare. This does not mean that they seek
to die but, rather, that people work toward heaven in the
afterlife by carefully committing more good deeds than bad
ones in their lives on earth. This may suggest a distinction to
be made between personal progress or self-improvement
and societal progress or improvementa distinction that
makes sense in the dispensational Christian contexts mentioned above. However, as I have noted, in the pious Shii
context, personal progress and societal progress are inextricably linked to one another, with the accumulation of
good deeds (e.g., personal progress) leading to community
welfare and communal progress, more broadly. The gendered differential here is seen in a greater emphasis placed
on mens personal progress and womens contributions to
communal progressan emphasis perhaps related to the
trajectories of gendered contributions in the first place.
Considering the afterlife as a valued aspect of futurity
indeed, as the most valued aspect of futurityalso raises
the question of whether the gendered difference in the
way men may embody Husayn and women can only emulate Zaynab might reflect a perceived difficulty for women
to fully embody religiosity. Does womens physicality
relegate them to a secondary relationship to piety as compared with men? If answered in the affirmative, this question suggests that the gendered emphases of these temporal frameworks point to the association of women with
(less valued) worldly life and men with the sacred realm.31
This is certainly not the case in the understandings of
pious Shii women with whom I have spoken or in the
teachings of the prominent religious leader Fadlallah, who
has stated that women can attain the highest level of jurisprudential training, interpret religious tenets, and even
be followed or emulated by other practicing Shia. However, this remains a question for exploration in the context

251

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009

of other interpretations, as Fadlallahs views, although popular in Lebanon, are not the norm in contemporary Shii
jurisprudence.32
Another interesting aspect of this gendering is that men
in this case carry the burden of representing the community
as a mythic entity, as metaphors for the nation through their
paradigmatic identification with the figure of the martyr
Husayn. It is also possible to draw on the insights of work
on masculine genealogical reckonings of history in the Arab
world (e.g., Ho 2006; Shryock 1997) to suggest that men are
able to be a direct part of Husayns lineage in ways that
women cannot. Mens metaphorical links to Husayn thus
call on a genealogical authority to incorporate them into
the foreshadowed paradigmatic narrative in ways unavailable to women. In keeping with this association, it is striking
that narratives about Husayn seem to have been more static
historically than those about Zaynab in the Lebanese context and more broadly in the Muslim world. Husayns actions and the relationship of those actions to moral status
have not been subject to the same level of debate as Zaynabs actions have in recent decades in Lebanon. Womens
metonymic role allows for their incorporation into a narrative with greater transformative potential. This difference in
representational stability suggests that female figures may
be represented with more moral flexibilityallowing for
more space for transgression in their representations than
is allowed in representations of male figures.
And, indeed, representations of Zaynab have changed
dramatically in Lebanon in recent decades. The emphasis
on Zaynabs leadership and activismon her role as leading the community into the futureis relatively recent in
Lebanon. Prior to the 1970s, Zaynab was usually depicted
as a plaintive mourner, as the caretaker of the children and
orphans during and after the battle, and as responsible for
the continuity of the community through her grief and her
retelling of the story of loss to Husayns followers. In conjunction with the Shii Islamic mobilization around religion in Lebanon that began in the 1960s, representations
of Zaynab began, instead, to focus on her outspokenness,
strength, burden of responsibility, and leadership characteristics.33 This activist Zaynab stands up to the caliph while
in captivity, accusing him publicly of his crimes, works to
spread the message of Ashura after the Imams martyrdom,
and leads the community after Husayns death until his surviving son can take his place as Imam. Furthermore, the
emphasis on Zaynab herself is relatively recent, especially
in the ways that she is emphasized over Fatimadaughter
of the Prophet and mother of Husayn and Zaynabwhose
ideal qualities are generally described as steadfast faith, stoicism, patience, and maternalism.
Similar shifts, both in emphasis from Fatima to Zaynab
and in terms of the valued qualities that were to be emulated, took place in Iran prior to and during the Islamic revolution of 197879 as well. In the Iranian context, Zaynab was

252

touted as the model for women as activists in the moment

of acute political crisis (i.e., the revolution), whereas Fatima
was the idealized model for periods of calm, during which
her steadfast and self-sacrificing maternalist role was emphasized (Betteridge 1983; Nashat 1983).34 Iranian scholar
Ali Shariati had held Fatima up as an alternative to both
traditional and Westernized women in Iran in 1971 (see
Shariati 1996).35 Yet, although he presented Fatima as an
ideal model for women in multiple dimensions, including
those of daughter, wife, mother, and a responsible, fighting woman when confronting her time and the fate of her
society (1996:211), her relational roles were still emphasized in both Shariatis lectures and in Iranian revolutionary
discourses.
In the Lebanese context, during a series of recent theological debates about the life of Fatima, Fadlallah has argued that her religious, social, and political activities should
be prioritized.36 Indeed, Fadlallah seems to consistently
emphasize Fatima over Zaynab as an activist model for
pious Muslim women (cf. el-Husseini 2008). Pious Shii
women frequently described Fadlallahs emphasis on Fatima to me, but when they did so, they nearly always noted
that they viewed Zaynab as an equally important role model
in their lives. Significantly, outside the context of discussing
Fadlallahs views, almost every woman with whom I spoke
in the southern suburb of Beirut highlighted Zaynab as the
most important model for her efforts to live an appropriately pious and modern life. In addition, several of my interlocutors were cognizant of the possibilities for women to be
called on to participate actively in political life only during
moments of crisis, and they expressed concerns that they
needed to work to ensure that such a fate would not befall
them in Lebanon. It remains to be seen what the effects of
an ever-changing political landscape will have on the ways
in which Zaynab (and Fatima) are deployed among pious
Shii Muslims in Lebanon and how the relationship between
these two models may shift. What is clear, however, is that
discourses around both Zaynab and Fatima have been subject to debate and revision in ways that discourses around
Husayn have not.
In Lebanon, the change in depictions of Zaynab is related to broader changes in the pious Shii community
such that, over the course of the past few decades, emulating Zaynab has become part of a modernist or progressive project. This brings me to the second approach I
take in looking at the question of why these two ways of
understanding role models and temporality are gendered:
looking to the national and transnational contexts. The Islamic mobilization of the 1970s, which was eventually institutionalized in the 1990s in a constellation of political,
social-welfare, health, educational, and leisure sites and institutions, forged new links between notions of piety and
modernity (Deeb 2006a). One of the results of this process was a new model for normative moral womanhood.

Gendering temporal frameworks

Today, being a modern woman (which is a highly desirable status) involves a combination of education, employment or volunteering, social-welfare work, and visibly expressed piety. The reformulated Sayyida Zaynabadmired
for her strength, compassion, dedication to others, outspokenness, and courageprovides the normative model for
this moral woman, who is both an active and responsible
member of society and deeply pious. The key shift here is
that, for women, bringing Karbala into the contemporary
moment requires public participation in the betterment of
the community as a necessary component of being a moral
person.
Although one can argue that this is true to a certain extent for both women and men and that the reality
of mens multifaceted participation in the community reflects an importance placed on their activity in a progressivist narrative as well, it is womens activity that is both
the marked category and the prioritized one in this case.
This status is related to a variety of factors, including recent changes in womens public visibility, discussions of
concurrent change in domestic relationships, and the ways
that womens participation is always marked, not only as
womens activity but also, increasingly, as Muslim womens
activity. This marking has taken place (and continues to
take place) in a transnational discursive field dominated
by U.S.-based media and academic discourses and undergirded by U.S. economic and military power.37 My Shii interlocutors were acutely aware of and articulate about the
centrality of womens public activity in signifying the modern status of their community and their religion.
The transnational field in which such ideas about gender, modernity, and Islam are articulated is one in which
gender norms have been and continue to be implicated
in the boundaries between binary civilizational constructs.
The lines between societies cast as civilized versus those
cast as barbaric (or modern vs. nonmodern) are drawn on
the basis of womens roles and bodies and their activities,
status, and visibility (Abu-Lughod 1998; Moallem 2005;
Spivak 1988). More recently, gender norms have emerged as
a boundary in the constructed oppositions specifically between Islam and the West, according to which over there
women are not free and over here they are. And, indeed, the status and image of Muslim women is one of
the most consistent and contentious issues that arose during my field research, in my interlocutors passionate and
often unsolicited responses to what they viewed as Western discourses about Muslim women, discourses encountered most frequently through media like CNN or through
travel to or communication with relatives in North America or Europe.38 One of the most common phrases I heard
was A culture is judged by the level of its women, reflecting both genders role as barometer of womens status
and the notion of a world opinion that pronounces such
judgments.39

American Ethnologist

This sense of being judged extended to encounters

within Lebanon as well. For example, while praising the
nursery her social-welfare organization ran, a volunteer
noted that people from all over [Lebanon] walk in to see,
and they are surprised, they say, Wow, these are Muslims, but they understand, they are educated, they have
awareness. Her defensive tone and recounting of the
phrase Muslim . . . but here are indicative of the extent to
which she has confronted local Lebanese discourses stereotyping Muslimsin particular, Shii Muslimsin negative
ways. Such local stereotypes also emerged in my conversations with the coordinator of an explicitly feminist NGO
in Lebanon, who repeatedly insisted that Islamic feminism
was an oxymoron and felt strongly that the head scarf was
absolutely incompatible with what she called progress
which included rais[ing] the living standards and be[ing]
outspoken and voic[ing] your opinions like men. Such
transnational and Lebanese discourses are not necessarily
unrelated and, in fact, work in conjunction with one another in various ways. As a result of confrontations and encounters with both transnational and local judgments, utilizing their public activities and participation in the public
sphere to actively combat stereotypes of oppressed Muslim
women was a major concern for many of the pious Shii
women I spoke with.
The imperative to prove ones status as modern in
this context is commensurate with the way that women
have been more frequently cast into the syntagmatic temporal framework, with its emphasis on continual progress
to an improved future, as opposed to the paradigmatic one.
On the one hand, the narrative structure of a progressivist
history that emerges from the syntagmatic framework, and
the emphasis on Zaynab as role model to be emulated, may
be seen as emerging from different gendered emphases on
the groundin terms of gender roles and their transformation as well as the relationship of women versus men
to the sacred. On the other hand, that framework, and its
accompanying narrative and relationship to Zaynab, has
facilitated the transformation of gender roles in contemporary Lebanon. Similarly, the normative casting of contemporary men as Husayn in a paradigmatic framework and
narrative of continuous battle simultaneously reflects the
realities of fighters lives (and deaths) and their association
with the afterlife and facilitates the emphasis on participation in military resistance as the most valued role for men
in the community.
In thinking through the gendering of temporal frameworks in the pious Lebanese Shii community, I hope not
only to have refuted simplistic assumptions about the relationship between Islam and desires to return to a golden
past but also to have described two of the temporal frameworks at work in the pious Lebanese Shii community
and their mutual entanglements. These temporal frameworks are revealed both through differences in the narrative

253

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009

structures of the Ashura story and through differences in the

ways in which Husayn and Zaynab, as pivotal figures in that
story, are brought from the past into the present. In contemporary Lebanon, the relationships of men and women
to Imam Husayn and Sayyida Zaynab and to their respective
temporal frameworks differ and overlap in complex ways.
Thinking through these differences and overlaps may alert
scholars to complex dynamics in both the narrative and social realms and their interrelationships. In this case, in attempting to account for gendered differenceat core, a difference of temporal frame and not merely of gender roles
it has been necessary to consider both the details of the
Ashura story and the role of transnational discourses about
Muslim women and modernity.

Notes
Acknowledgments. I am grateful to Lori Allen, Dina al-Kassim,
Steve Caton, Engseng Ho, Pardis Mahdavi, Joel Robbins, two anonymous reviewers for AE, and audiences at the University of Chicago,
the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Texas at
Austin, Harvard University, Rice University, and Chapman University for their suggestions and comments.
1. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 and occupied the
south of the country from 1978 until May 2000. Low-grade conflict
after 2000 broke into acute warfare during July 2006. The Lebanese
political party Hizbullah came into being as a militia resisting the
initial invasions and continues to maintain its military wing, known
as the Islamic Resistance. For more on Hizbullah, see Deeb 2006b
and Norton 2007.
2. Reinhart Kosellecks (2002) elucidation of the emergence of
European notions of progress and temporalitydiscussed subsequently in the textalso provides a historical explanation for the
emergence of ideas about universal history in which progress is the
measure of societies against one another, a discourse that continues to underlie insistence that Shii Muslims in Beirut are returning to the past. See also Eickelman 2000 for an overview of the relationship of Islam to this universal history.
3. For a useful review of the anthropology of time, see Munn
1992. Hughes 1995 also contains a useful review of literature on
time and temporality as does Robbins 2001. See also Fabian 1983
and Gell 2001.
4. For more on calendrical aspects of time, especially the relationship between calendrical commemorations and national time,
see Gell 2001, Zerubavel 2003, C
inar 2001, and Munn 1992.
5. For example, Lori A. Allen (2005) discusses the ways in which,
in Palestine, the suffering of today and that of ten years ago have
been compressed so that the martyr becomes a generic and detemporalized icon of the Palestinian nation, and Allen Feldman (2003)
describes the ways in which a synchronic history is written on the
Northern Ireland landscape.
6. See Fariss 1995 for another critique of dichotomizations of linearity versus cyclicality. She argues that these two concepts cannot
coexist on equal footing in a single system and that one must be
subordinated or incorporated into the other (Fariss 1995:113).
7. For an example of what something actually cyclical might look
like, see Fariss 1995 on Mayan temporalities. For a brief but eloquent discussion of the coimbrication of cyclicality and linearity
in the colonial and postcolonial moments, see El Shakry 2007:218
222.

254

8. On nationalist times construction of an essential and continuous national community, see C

inar 2001 and Ohnuki-Tierney
2002. The Japanese case Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney describes also contradicts the idea that myth itself represents a circular or a premodern temporality and that societies with history are more modern
in some lineal developmental sense. She notes that, in fact, Japans
modernity began with the replacement of history with a myth
about imperial genealogy and the imperial soul. As she puts it, The
official history of Japan entered the myth time (Ohnuki-Tierney
2002:248).
9. J. D. Y. Peel notes that the encounter between Yoruba and
Christian missionaries was less a matter of the clash of world
views, considered as timeless sets of moral and theological alternatives, than it was a contest between rival narratives of schemes for
how individuals and communities should project themselves over
time (1995:600). As in Robbinss approach, here it is the narrative
structure of how the relationship with time is understood and enacted that is at stake.
10. See also Sherry B. Ortners (1989) elaboration of cultural
schemas as plot structures that both shape and are grounded in
ritual and daily life practices.
11. This simplification does not do justice to the long histories of
political difference among these communities that gradually and
only later coalesced into minor differences in religious tenets. It
also ignores the diversity within both Sunni and Shii Islam. The
Shiism I refer to here is known as Twelver Shiism, the common
form in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world.
12. Imam here with a capital I is not to be confused with imam,
the leader of a mosque.
13. For a detailed discussion of Ashura commemorative practices and the transformations that have recently occurred in relation to these practices in Lebanon, see Deeb 2006a:ch. 4.
14. Beginning in the late 1960s, a multistranded Shii Muslim mobilization took place in Lebanon in response to politicaleconomic marginalization, underrepresentation in the Lebanese
state, and disproportionate poverty in Shii areas of the country and
the capital. (In some ways, current political tensions in Lebanon
represent another phase of the conflict born at that time.) This
movement was inspired by the success of the Islamic Revolution in
Iran in 1979 and catalyzed by Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978
and 1982 and the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon (19782000).
15. I have detailed these changes in Deeb 2006a. See also the essays collected in Aghaie 2005, especially the introduction to a series
of ethnographic discussions of representations and deployments of
Zaynab and her mother, Fatima, in a variety of Shii Muslim communities.
16. Lebanon and Syria claim that the Shebaa Farms area is
Lebanese territory, whereas the United Nations and Israel claim
that it is Israeli-occupied Syria, like the Golan Heights.
17. Compare Portellis grammar of time: Events are identified
and located in time in terms of a linear syntagmatic axis (chronology), two vertical paradigms (temporal simultaneity, formal similarity), and their combination in historical discourse (1997:99).
Here the syntagmatic is units of time, for example, days or years,
and the paradigmatic is the way in which certain events become
part of a historical canon. In Portellis application of this analytic
framework to the two labor battles, because the one that took place
first was seen as something new, it became a part of the historical
canon, and the second one was viewed as simply a reminder or repetition of the first.
18. On foreshadowings and prefigurings of Husayns martyrdom
in antediluvian history, see Pinault 1999:290 and Kohlberg 1980.
Etan Kohlberg notes that some Shii theologians describe Gabriel
recounting the story of Husayn to Noah, who then held the first

Gendering temporal frameworks

commemorative mourning gathering for Husayns (future) martyrdom. David Pinault also notes that Shii theologians explicitly emphasize the predestinarian quality (1999:287) of Karbala.
19. Similar to the form of millennial Christianity discussed previously in the text, messianic belief accompanies belief in the end of
time, along with the sense of the possibility for time to be disrupted
at any moment. When pressed, my interlocutors would sometimes
explain the details of this end, noting that shortly before Judgment
Day, the Mahdi, believed to be the Twelfth Shii Imam, who is currently in occultation, will return to implement justice on earth and
fight the Antichrist alongside Jesus. However, in contrast to the
prevalence of eschatological references in some Sunni and Shii
communities, unless I pressed them on this point, very few pious
Shiis with whom I spoke mentioned this aspect of their beliefs,
and in fact, quite a few people described it as what some people
believe rather than as an aspect of their own faith.
20. See also Babayan 2002:186, although I would argue that this
conception of history is not a cyclical one.
21. One can imagine a different syntagmatic narrative structure
at work in each Shii Muslim communityspecific to each communitys local history.
22. For more on how the teleological aspects of the syntagmatic
temporal framework have emerged in this community since the
1970s, see Deeb 2006a.
23. Thanks to Alireza Doostdar for noting this contrast with Iran.
In Lebanon, pamphletlike books detailing and predicting the approach of Judgment Day are available but are frowned on both
by Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the prominent Lebanese
cleric, and by the majority of the people with whom I spoke, who
dismissed them as superstition or exaggeration.
24. Note that debates about these interpretations are not limited
to the contemporary moment in Lebanon or to recent decades
see, for example, Max Weisss (2007) discussion of the reform period
of the 1920s and 1930s.
25. Compare Kathryn Babayans discussion of mystical Alid
craftsmen narrating stories about the Abrahamic family, in which
memory of an Alid past is to serve as an elucidation of the present
(2002:178).
26. In addition, Hizbullahs resistance maintains only a small
standing fighting body; many men undergo a certain amount of
military training and then return to their day-to-day lives, only to
be called on as a reserve force in cases of emergency (as during the
July 2006 war).
27. Fadlallah is the most prominent Shii religious scholar in
Lebanon and has attained the rank of marji al-taqlid, which means
that practicing Shii Muslims may choose to follow or emulate
him in religious matters. He has also founded two large socialwelfare organizations that operate numerous institutions, ranging
from hospitals to orphanages.
28. In addition to reflecting ideas about Zaynabs role model, this
increased employment is also related to shifting gender ideologies,
broad economic and educational changes in the Shii community,
and the institutionalization of the Islamic mobilization. For example, Hizbullah-affiliated organizations, including the partys television station and hospitals, are major employers of pious Shii
women.
29. This is not to say that women have not participated in the
military resistance to Israeli occupation and attack; they have.
However, they have not participated as members of the Islamic Resistance but mainly through leftist parties and militias.
30. For more on how the Lebanese case inverts gendered roles
associated with modernity in anticolonial movements, see Deeb in
press. See also El Shakry 1998, although a key difference between
the Egyptian case El Shakry discusses and that of contemporary

American Ethnologist

Lebanon is the critical importance in colonial Egypt of notions of

mothering as the sphere within which womens progress was to occur. In the southern suburb of Beirut, rhetorics of progress have
been taken outside the boundaries of the family so that women are
charged with community development.
31. Compare Orthodox Jewish communities in eastern Europe,
where women are responsible for economic labor to free men to focus on Talmudic study, considered the most important work in the
community (Susan Slyomovics, personal communication, July 10,
2006). Contrast evangelical Christian communities in which people ask, What would Jesus do? and also use phrases like Shes our
Martha or Shes our Mary (I am grateful to Mary Alice Haddad for
this observation). In this case, rather than calling on a woman to be
Martha or Mary, the latter phrasing seems to describe personality
types, with Martha more service oriented.
32. See Mir-Hosseini 1999 on the wide range of views on women
among jurisprudents in Iran and el-Husseini 2008 and Berry 2002
on the contrasting views of Lebanese jurisprudents.
33. Interestingly, neither characterizations of Zaynab nor
womens Ashura practices seem to have been a large part of
the reform debates that took place during the 1920s and 1930s
in Lebanon. A survey of the journal al-Irfan from that period
confirms this, as has Max Weiss (personal communication, May
19, 2008) with regard to ulama debates during that period. This
suggests that, in Lebanon at least, the ways that Zaynab and Fatima
were deployed as models beginning in the 1970s was, in fact, novel.
This does not, of course, preclude inspiration from Iranian ulama.
34. Although the comparison with Iran is instructive, it is crucial to note that such discourses in Iran have been deployed by
the state, whereas in Lebanon they have not been backed by state
power. Hizbullah does carry influence as a political party, but it by
no means promotes a top-down insistence on religious models for
living in the contemporary world.
35. See Hermansen 1983 for a discussion of Shariatis reinterpretation of and deployment of Fatima as a role model for Iranian
women in his pivotal lecture Fatima Is Fatima.
36. See Rosiny 2001 for a detailed discussion of his position and
these debates, more generally.
37. The most striking example of the figure of the oppressed
Muslim woman in need of liberation by the U.S. military emerged
in the rhetoric just prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in
which the burka was used to provide added moral justification.
38. And more recently, through the Internet. For example, several people asked me detailed questions about the Feminist Majority Foundation and its rhetoric about womens Islamic dress in
Afghanistan.
39. This linking of women to culture has a long colonial history (see Abu-Lughod 1998), and my interlocutors statements here
echo those of elite Egyptian reformers during British colonialism,
such as Qasim Amin, as well as Lebanese reformers during the
17th-century Nahda. Those reformers generally argued for unveiling and for womens education without calling for womens participation in the political and economic realms (Amin 1992; Traboulsi
2007:6367). For more on contemporary Lebanese Shii womens
positioning in relation to both colonial and contemporary gendered civilizational discourses, see Deeb in press.

References cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila
1998 Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions. In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in

255

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009

the Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod, ed. Pp. 331. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.
Aghaie, Kamran Scot, ed.
2005 The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic
Discourses in Modern Shii Islam. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Allen, Lori A.
2005 Suffering through a National Uprising: The Cultural Politics of Violence, Victimization and Human Rights in Palestine.
Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of
Chicago.
Amin, Qasim
1992 [1899] The Liberation of Women. Samiha Sidhom Peterson,
trans. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
Anderson, Benedict
1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Aretxaga, Begona
1997 Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Asad, Talal
1986 The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Washington, DC:
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.
Babayan, Kathryn
2002 Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of
Early Modern Iran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Berry, Moulouk
2002 Radical Transitions: Shifting Gender Discourses in
Lebanese Muslim Shii Jurisprudence and Ideology. Ph.D.
dissertation, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University
of Michigan.
Betteridge, Anne
1983 To Veil or Not to Veil: A Matter of Protest or Policy. In Women
and Revolution in Iran. Guity Nashat, ed. Pp. 109128. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh
1997 The Time of History and the Times of Gods. In The Politics
of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd,
eds. Pp. 3560. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chatterjee, Partha
1993 The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
C
inar, Alev
2001 National History as a Contested Site: The Conquest of Istanbul and Islamic Negotiations of the Nation. Comparative Studies of Society and History 43(2):364391.
Cohn, Bernard S.
1995 The Pasts of an Indian Village. In Time: Histories and Ethnologies. Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann, eds.
Pp. 2130. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Deeb, Lara
2006a An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shii
Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2006b Hizbullah: A Primer. Middle East Report Online, July
31. Electronic document, http://www.merip.org/mero/
mero073106.html, accessed February 6, 2007.
In press Piety Politics and the Role of a Transnational Feminist Analysis. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
15(supplement 1).
Eickelman, Dale F.
2000 Islam and the Languages of Modernity. Daedalus
129(1):119135.

256

Fabian, Johannes
1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Fariss, Nancy M.
1995 Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History,
Time, and Cosmology among the Maya of Yucatan. In Time:
Histories and Ethnologies. Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas
R. Trautmann, eds. Pp. 107138. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Feldman, Allen
2003 Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse,
Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities. Radical
History Review 85(winter):5873.
Gell, Alfred
2001 The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. New York: Berg.
Hermansen, Marcia K.
1983 Fatimeh as a Role Model in the Works of Ali Shariati. In
Women and Revolution in Iran. Guity Nashat, ed. Pp. 8796.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Ho, Engseng
2006 The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Howe, Leopold E. A.
1981 The Social Determination of Knowledge: Maurice Bloch and
Balinese Time. Man 6(2):220234.
Hughes, Peter
1995 Ruins of Time: Estranging History and Ethnology in
the Enlightenment and After. In Time: Histories and
Ethnologies. Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann, eds. Pp. 269290. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
el-Husseini, Rola
2008 Women, Work, and Political Participation in Lebanese Shia
Contemporary Thought: The Writings of Ayatollahs Fadlallah
and Shams al-Din. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa
and the Middle East 28(2):213282.
Kohlberg, Etan
1980 Some Shii Views of the Antediluvian World. Studia Islamica
52:4166.
Koselleck, Reinhart
2002 The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing
Concepts. Todd Samuel Presner and Others, trans. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Lazreg, Marnia
1994 The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question.
New York: Routledge.
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba
1999 Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary
Iran. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Moallem, Minoo
2005 Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Munn, Nancy D.
1992 The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay. Annual
Review of Anthropology 21:93123.
Nashat, Guity
1983 Women in the Ideology of the Islamic Republic. In Women
and Revolution in Iran. Guity Nashat, ed. Pp. 195216. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Norton, Augustus Richard
2007 Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.

Gendering temporal frameworks

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko
2002 Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Ortner, Sherry B.
1989 High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa
Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Peel, J. D. Y.
1995 For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology. Comparative Studies of Society and History 37(3):581607.
Pinault, David
1998 Zaynab Bint Ali and the Place of the Women of the Households of the First Imams in Shiite Devotional Literature. In
Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and
Piety. Gavin R. G. Hambly, ed. Pp. 4856. New York: St. Martins
Press.
1999 Shia Lamentation Rituals and Reinterpretations of the Doctrine of Intercession: Two Cases from Modern India. History of
Religions 38(3):285305.
Portelli, Alessandro
1997 The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Robbins, Joel
2001 Secrecy and the Sense of an Ending: Narrative, Time, and
Everyday Millenarianism in Papua New Guinea and in Christian Fundamentalism. Comparative Studies of Society and History 43(3):525551.
Rosiny, Stephan
2001 The Tragedy of Fatima al-Zahra in the Debate of Two Shiite Theologians in Lebanon. In The Twelver Shia in Modern
Times: Religious Culture and Political History. Rainer Brunner
and Werner Ende, eds. Pp. 207219. Leiden, the Netherlands:
Brill.
Sahlins, Marshall
1981 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in
the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
1995 How Natives Think about Captain Cook, For Example.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
El Shakry, Omnia
1998 Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in
Turn-of-the-Century Egypt. In Remaking Women: Feminism
and Modernity in the Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod, ed. Pp.
126170. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2007 The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in
Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.

American Ethnologist

Shariati, Ali
1996 [1971] Fatima Is Fatima. In Shariati on Shariati and the Muslim Woman. Laleh Bakhtiar, trans. Pp. 75214. Chicago: ABC
International Group.
Shryock, Andrew
1997 Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral
History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Pp. 271
313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Tonkin, Elizabeth
1992 Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Traboulsi, Fawaz
2007 A History of Modern Lebanon. London: Pluto Press.
Valeri, Valerio
1990 Constitutive History: Genealogy and Narrative in the Legitimation of Hawaiian Kingship. In Culture through Time:
Anthropological Approaches. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, ed. Pp.
154192. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Weber, Timothy
2004 On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israels Best Friend. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Press.
Weiss, Max
2007 The Cultural Politics of Shii Modernism: Morality and Gender in Early 20th-Century Lebanon. International Journal of
Middle East Studies 39:249270.
Zerubavel, Eviatar
2003 Calendars and History: A Comparative Study of the Social
Organization of National Memory. In States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection. Jeffrey K. Olick, ed. Pp. 315337. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
accepted November 26, 2008
final version submitted October 24, 2008
Lara Deeb
Associate Professor
Department of Womens Studies
University of California, Irvine
1320 Bio Sci 3
Irvine, CA 92697-2655
laradeeb@gmail.com
ldeeb@uci.edu

257