Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Research Assistant Professor, MEMEAC

About

I obtained my doctoral degree from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France in December of 2003. My dissertation titled “Le retour des héritiers: les élites politiques de la Deuxième République Libanaise” examined the Lebanese polity in the immediate post-civil-war period (1989–2003) and explicated the role of political elites in state reconstruction. The dissertation was substantially revised, expanded, and rewritten in English. The resulting manuscript titled titled Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon includes a discussion of events in Lebanon from 1989 to 2011, with a primary focus on the period of Syrian institutionalized influence (1989-2005). This book is forthcoming in Fall of 2012 with Syracuse University Press.
In addition to the book manuscript, I have published several pieces on the Lebanese Hezbollah.This concern with Hezbollah forms the link between my first research project and a new research stream on Arab Shiism.
My new project has so far been focused on two leading Lebanese ayatollahs, Muhammad  Hussein Fadlallah and Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din. I argue they created a new school of thought engaging in a dialectic with Iran, and promoting Arab ayatollahs as major contenders for the marja`iyya in the Shi`i world. I have analyzed their works on women and political participation  in an article which appeared in Contemporary Study of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and their works on jihad and resistance in a piece that appeared in the Middle East Journal. I am continuing my work on these understudied scholars with an examination of their works on the concept of the Islamic state and its leadership by looking at their critique of Khomeini’s “guardianship of the jurist.”
The idea of the Islamic state is at the heart of my second book project which will bring together a discussion of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, an analysis of Khomeini’s writings, and an examination of how  religious scholars such as Fadlallah, Shams al-Din, and the Iraqi Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr received and reacted to Khomeini’s theory. I seek to understand whether the theory of “wilayat al-ummah ala nafsiha” (Guardianship of the [Islamic] Nation upon itself) proposed by Ayatollahs Baqer al-Sadr and Shams al-Din is an adequate counterbalance to Khomeini’s “Guardianship of the Jurist.” I also seek to examine whether this theory provides the grounds for the conceptual  compatibility of Islam and democracy.