*Shi’ism*

The author is Hamid Dabashi and the subtitle is A Religion of Protest.  This book is excellent in every chapter and on virtually on every page, including in its discussion of cinema and aesthetics.  Excerpt:

[In Shi’ism] what we see is the exact opposite of deferred obedience.  Instead we witness a permanent state of deferred defiance — a defiance in the making, a defiance to come.  What the Shi’is have deferred in the aftermath of the murder of their primordial son is not obedience — it is defiance.  Because the central trauma of Shi’ism is the killing of a primordial son and not a primordial father, Shi’ism has remained a quintessentially youthful religion, the religion the young revolutionaries defying the patriarchal order of things.