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Studies 20 February, 2018

Ta’ifah, Sect and Sectarianism: From The Etymology of the Term and it’s Variable Implications to an Analytical Sociological Term

Azmi Bishara

Azmi Bishara: Prominent Arab intellectual, political philosopher, and researcher with numerous books and academic publications on political thought, social theory and philosophy. He was named by Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire as one of the world’s most influential thinkers. His latest books are The Question of the State: Philosophy, Theory, and Context (2023) with a second volume titled The Arab State: Beginnings and Evolution (2024); and Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice (2024), originally released in English in 2022 by Hurst Publishers in London, published concurrently with The Flood: The War on Palestine in Gaza (2024).

Bishara’s publications in Arabic, some of which have become key references within their respective field, include Civil Society: A Critical Study (1996); From the Jewishness of the State to Sharon (2004); On The Arab Question: An Introduction to an Arab Democratic Manifesto (2007); To Be an Arab in Our Times (2009); On Revolution and Susceptibility to Revolution (2012); Religion and Secularism in Historical Context (in 3 vols., 2013, 2015); The Army and Political Power in the Arab Context: Theoretical Problems (2017); The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Daesh): A General Framework and Critical Contribution to Understanding the Phenomenon (2018); What is Populism? (2019); and  Democratic Transition and its Problems: Theoretical Lessons from Arab Experiences (2020).

His English publications include On Salafism: Concepts and Contexts (Stanford University Press, 2022); Sectarianism without Sects (Oxford University Press, 2021); and his trilogy on the Arab revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, published by I.B. Tauris, Understanding Revolutions: Opening Acts in Tunisia (2021); Egypt: Revolution, Failed Transition and Counter-Revolution (2022); and Syria 2011-2013: Revolution and Tyranny before the Mayhem (2023), in which he provides a rich theoretical analysis in addition to a comprehensive and lucid assessment of the revolutions in three Arab countries.

Bishara serves as the General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

This article, a chapter from the author’s recently published book (March 2018) titled, Ta’ifah, Sectarianism and Imagined Sects, attempts to build fundamental conceptual idiomatic distinctions between community according to religious or confessional affiliation (at-tai’fah), sectarianism (at-ta’ifiyyah) and confessionalism (al-madhabiyyah) – concepts and phenomena that are deeply intertwined. The author also explores related concepts such as identity, religious affiliation, sect, difference, fanaticism (taasub), and others. Bishara analyzes the linguistic and semantic conceptual evolution of the term sectarianism, as well as the evolution of the term through the concepts of confession/group (firqa), sect (tai’fa), and craft (hirfa) – concepts that reflect on the ways (turuq), the occupational and professional congregations as well as the Sufi orders, within Islamic society. All of these developments are examined to reach an understanding of the widespread modern Arabic term sectarianism – sectarianism being a modern term, and sect an old one. Through a critical debate with the modern Western sociological concepts of sectarianism (al-ta’ifiyyah or al-firqiyyah), the study attempts to develop the term “sect” as an analytical sociological term that can be used to analyze the formation, evolution, and characteristics of new contemporary imagined communities, according to religious communities that the author calls imagined sects in his book. One of the major theses in this work is that modern religious communities (tawa’if: plural of tai’fah) do not produce sectarianism; rather, it is sectarianism which breeds the imagined communities that the author calls imagined sects.

To read the full text of this paper, available free of charge on JSTOR click here. 

The Arabic version of this study was originally published in Issue 23 (Winter, 2018) of Omran, a scholarly quarterly published by the ACRPS and devoted to the social sciences and humanities.