Divergent processes of localization in twenty-first-century Shiʿism: the cases of Hezbollah Venezuela and Cambodia’s Cham Shiʿis

Abstract

This contribution discusses two striking twenty-first-century cases of the global spread of Shiʿism beyond the Middle East, with a particular focus on accompanying processes of localization. On the arid Guajira Peninsula shared by Colombia and Venezuela, Teodoro Darnott, a self-declared liberator of an indigenous people, has framed Shiʿism as a revolutionary ideology that helps justify the Wayúu people’s struggle for self-determination. In Cambodia, however, Shiʿism has recently entered a Muslim community in this predominantly Buddhist country on somewhat different terms. Here, its localization involved a re-emphasis on ancient traditions of the local Cham people that trace the spread of Islam among them to Imam ʿAli. It is precisely the vastly different contexts of the two cases that highlight that the localization of Shiʿism has, in these cases at least, paradoxically gone hand in hand with cultural revival and a quest for the preservation of local culture.