Modern Islamic Political Thought

The wider social, political and economic matrix which may have been instrumental in turning these potentialities into doctrinal reformulations and occasional mass movements should certainly not be overlooked. An impressionistic account of this can be obtained from the history of the one country which has been both the birthplace and testing-ground of Shī‘ī modernism: Iran. As far as the genesis of new ideas is concerned, her history is not dissimilar from that of the Ottoman Empire or Egypt: increasing contacts with the West since the Ṣafavīd period (1502–1736), disastrous consequences of the wars with Russia (in 1813 and 1828), inconclusive attempts at modernisation by two enlightened statesmen (Mīrzā Taqī Khān Amīr Kabīr and Mīrzā Ḥusayn Khān Mushīr ud-Dawlah known as Sipahsālār), introduction of the printing press, the despatch of students abroad, and, finally, the influence of cultural and intellectual notions from the West, all contributed to a general trend in the direction of questioning the traditional modes of thought. The religious community could not be immune from this trend. The triumph, for instance, of the so-called Uṣūlī school of jurisprudence, insisting on the legitimacy of reasoning, and practising ijtihād on the basis of uṣūl (principles) in the face of the Akhbārīs (Traditionists) could not be unrelated to the pervading awareness of the inadequacy of rigidified legal formulae to cope with such changes. There is now a growing appreciation, among both Iranian and Western students of Shī‘īsm, of the impact of this triumph on the development of the Shī‘ī social and political thought.² To the chagrin of partisans of social determinism, one cannot define the exact relationship between specific social and economic processes, on the one hand, and the transformation of the religious mind, on the other. We do not know, for instance, whether the Uṣūlī–Akhbārī division corresponded to any particular polarisation of socio-economic forces, although – as will be explained below – the expected alliance of the Uṣūlī ‘Ulamā’ with the ‘freedom-seekers’ at the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 served the interests of the bourgeoisie. Again, the ever-widening interest of the ‘Ulamā’ in political matters from the mid-nineteenth century onwards may be accounted for by their reaction to consecutive imperialist ventures: the Reuter Concession of 1872, the opening of the Kārūn River in 1888, the Imperial Bank of Persia, the Tobacco Régie of 1890–2, and the manoeuvres of the Russian Banque des Prêts from 1900 onwards. (We must add, however, that imperialistic threats in all forms seem to have played a much less important role in the emergence of Shī‘ī modernism in the nineteenth century than in the case of its Sunnī equivalent, and this was mainly because of the relative aloofness of Iran, as compared with the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, from the maelstrom of European politics.)

The revival of Shī‘ī thought since the Second World War has also been stimulated by social causes. We leave aside the general causes affecting all social groups and classes, and mention only one, which is confined to the leadership of the religious community. Even religious or religious-minded writers have identified one of the principal factors of the immutability of Shī‘ī thought to lie in the dependency of the ‘Ulamā’ for their livelihood on the individual donations of the faithful, known as the ‘Imām’s share’ (sahmi-i Imām), and hence their inclination to steer clear of any idea that might offend popular predilections.³ If this diagnosis is correct, then the gradual radicalisation of certain areas of Shī‘ī thought since the Second World War must have been brought about at least in part by a converse phenomenon: the rise of a small, but highly influential group of religious intellectuals who were less in need of such donations, because they could earn their living through teaching, preaching, writing and publishing, thanks to the increase in literacy, the growth of student population and the coming of mass media. This category of religionists could thus address some of their ‘unorthodox’ ideas to large social groups inaccessible to their predecessors, without much fearing the dire consequences of alienating obscurantist circles.

Finally, the power and prestige of the office of Marja‘-i taqlīd (the ‘Source of Imitation’, the highest religious authority whose rulings and opinions should supposedly be accepted by all Shī‘īs), presents another example of the working of mundane forces in religious affairs. This office did not exist in Twelver Shī‘īsm until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the peerless jurisprudential genius of Shaykh Murtaḍā Anṣārī (d. 1864) introduced a centralised leadership in the hitherto pluralistic system of Shī‘ī scholarship and pastoral guidance. A climate of opinion was thereby reached to acknowledge henceforth the ‘most learned’ (a‘lam) of the ‘Ulamā’ as worthy of being ‘imitated’ by all Shī‘īs in his pronouncements. Spiritual centralisation soon entailed financial centralisation: a growing proportion of the payments made previously to local and provincial ‘clergy’ were now redirected towards the Marja‘. It was certainly the resultant concentration of both spiritual and material powers which made it possible for the Marja‘ at the end of the nineteenth century, Ḥājj Mīrzā Muḥammad Ḥasan Shīrāzī, to lead the first mass movement in Iranian history against European encroachments, in the famous ‘Tobacco crisis’ of 1890–2. In the same way, the controversy which broke out seventy years later over the wisdom of such concentration had visible political and social reasons. The watershed was the death of the Marja‘, the Āyatullāh Ḥusayn Burūjirdī in 1961. By then the immense influence of the position had exposed it to the intolerable pressures and expectations of the officialdom, particularly when the latter’s authority was in jeopardy. In due course the Marja‘s had come to the conclusion that the safest policy for them was to keep out of active politics. Their quietism manifestly favoured the rulers, as was demonstrated by Burūjirdī’s refusal to condemn the coup against the Muṣaddiq’s government in 1953. The unsavoury memories of that neutrality in the eyes of the militants, against the background of political upheavals accompanying the rise of the Āyatullāh Rūhullāh Khumaynī in the early sixties, fostered grave doubts over the viability of the position of the Marja‘. Meanwhile the growing complexity of social and economic life threatened to place the ‘Ulamā’ in the awkward position of having to answer an infinite variety of questions from their followers on issues which required expert, specialised knowledge. In such circumstances, no ‘ālim of upright character could lay claim to being the ‘most learned’ of his peers. An intriguing debate was thus engaged on the wisdom and feasibility of the institution itself, with most participants expressing preference for decentralising it, or giving it a collegiate form and most importantly, for lessening its paralysing dependency on the populace.⁴ This, in its turn, led to a critical examination of other related issues, such as the function of the ‘ālim in the modern world, the relevance of his education to the social and political problems facing the Muslims today, the justification, and limits, of taqlīd (imitation), the definition of ijtihād, the chasm between ideals and reality in Shī‘īsm and the attitude towards Sunnī Muslims.⁵

However, no amount of socio-political analysis of facts can account for the subtleties of thought processes. The historical background briefly described here can explain only the timing, but not the nature, of the new phase of Shī‘ī dynamism. And it is against this background that we now study three revised notions in modern Shī‘īsm which are important not only because of their character as determinants of political behaviour, but also owing to their implications in the total system of Shī‘ī culture: (1) constitutionalism, (2) taqiyyah, and (3) martyrdom. These do not represent three disjointed, random categories of thought. Chronologically, it was constitutionalism which brought the Shī‘īs, for the first time in their history, face to face with the democratic demands of the modern age. But the Shī‘īs soon realised that they could not rise to this challenge without first overcoming the inertia wrought in the popular conscience by an officially sponsored ideology which exonerated the distance between the political ideals and realities as an inevitable fact, and exalted self-sacrifice for lofty principles as the unique virtue of an infallible and divinely designated élite. A heightened political atmosphere in Iran since the end of the nineteenth century, combined with the pressure of having to answer Sunnī criticisms of Shī‘īsm –as described in Chapter 1 –as well as the rivalry of growing popular secular ideologies, both forced and helped a number of Shī‘īs to rethink the traditional attitudes on the second and third themes. The outcome of this rethinking has undoubtedly changed some of the political features of Shī‘īsm which we enumerated in Chapter 1 –turning it from an élitist, esoteric and passive sect into a mass movement animated by democratic ideals, and contempt for innate privilege. It is a rethinking which has greatly diminished Shī‘ī differences with the Sunnīs, and is as much entitled to the epithet modernist as similar stirrings of religio-political thought among the Sunnīs during the last century.

First is a view whose most aggressive exponent was Aḥmad Kasravī (d. 1946), one of the most controversial of Iranian historians, and author of the most popular existing account of the Revolution. According to him, the Shī‘ī ‘Ulamā’, by virtue of their belief in the exclusive legitimacy of the rule of the Imāms, have always been opposed to the very notion of state and political order⁷ –a view which is curiously at variance with Kasravī’s own detailed descriptions of the efforts of many of the ‘Ulamā’ towards creating the Constitutional regime. It is interesting to note that starting from diametrically opposed premises, Hamid Algar, who is deeply sympathetic to the ‘Ulamā’, has also arrived at more or less the same conclusion in his study of religion and politics in the Qājār period: ‘In the new situation [that is, after the establishment of Qājār rule]’, he says, ‘a political theory to accommodate the state within the system of belief was still not developed. Such a theory was probably impossible: The ‘Ulamā’, having established their position as de facto regents of the Imām, could not then have allotted the monarchy a similar position. Without such a position, the monarchy was bound to be regarded as illegitimate.’⁸

Second is the opinion of intellectuals who, despite their occasional appreciation of the positive part played by the ‘Ulamā’, on the whole regard the ‘Ulamā’ as a negative, retrogressive factor in the national struggle – with at best confused and contradictory ideas about the aims of the Revolution. Typical of this opinion is the statement by the contemporary historian, Firaydun Ādamiyyat, to the effect that ‘the only group which had a clear concept of Constitutionalism were the progressive, educated individuals committed to the (Western) type democracy’. He says this in connection with his critical survey of the ideas of two religious exponents of constitutionalism.⁹

Although such statements hold good for the attitudes of many of the ‘Ulamā’ during the eighteenth and greater part of the nineteenth centuries, they do not reflect the views of all of them certainly not during the Revolution. Ādamiyyat himself refers in another context to a number of ‘progressive’ ‘Ulamā’ during the Sipahsālār period who supported reforms; one of them, Mīrzā Ja‘far Ḥakīm Ilāhī, even advocated changing the script.¹⁰ In the absence of more specific information, we can only surmise that the political outlook of such men could not be the same as their predecessors’. Whatever the case, the fact that during the Revolution the urban masses, who were surely not less religious-minded then than they are now, responded so enthusiastically to the call for a constitutional government, should be proof enough that the opinion of the ‘freedom-seeking’ ‘Ulamā’ held great sway over them. There was one other possible centre for the dissemination of democratic ideals among the people: the writings of such Westernised thinkers of the period as Ākhūndzādih, Mīrzā Ḥusayn Khān Mushīr ud-Dawlah, known as Sipahsālār, Mīrzā Malkam Khān, and Ṭālibov. But what should make us cautious in estimating the influence of such modernists is not only their exotic ideology, but also their style of prose. Containing numerous Persianised forms of European political terms, as well as newly coined words and phrases belying unassimilated Western notions, their work could not possibly produce the same effect as the tracts of the ‘Ulamā’, whose style, however equally stilted, was at least familiar to the indigenous bourgeoisie, and comprised many symbols which could not fail to galvanise popular feelings, and many arguments which afforded evidence of greater originality of mind, and powers of synthesis. It is necessary to take a cursory glance at these arguments to see whether Shī‘ī political thought at the turn of the century accords with the picture painted of it by its critics.

The Constitutional Revolution represents the first direct encounter in modern Iran between traditional Islamic culture and the West. All the earlier attempts at modernisation, although involving important changes in the legal, governmental and administrative systems, were conducted in areas tangential to underlying traditional values. None of them openly and radically challenged any of these values. The great modernising minister, Mīrzā Taqī Khān, known as Amīr Kabīr, certainly took vital measures for centralising the judicial system, such as his curbs on the powers of the Imām Jum‘ah (leader of the Friday Prayer), or abolition of bast (sanctuary from secular oppression offered by mosques, residences of the ‘Ulamā’, etc.),¹¹ in the teeth of the ‘clerical’ prerogatives, but they did not aim at undermining any specific Islamic institution and principle. Such measures, just as the modernising campaign of men such as Mīrzā Malkam Khān, the advocate of the ‘total Westernisation of Iran’, were individual enterprises whose repercussions never went beyond a small élite. By contrast, Constitutional Revolution was a movement of unprecedented dimension in Iran’s modern history which embraced vast groups of people from every social quarter, thus generating a heated debate between diverse ideologies, old and new. The implication of many a constitutionalist idea challenged the very foundation of the religio-political consensus as well as the relative cultural harmony of the traditional order, thereby causing a deep rift amont the élites. Perhaps the significance of this rift can be better understood if a comparison is drawn with the constitutional history of Ottoman Turkey. When similar controversies broke out in Turkey during the famous Merutièt period from 1908 to 1918, that country had long passed through the travails of the Tanẓīmāt period (a half-century of reforms from 1826 onwards), and the Young Ottoman movement (formed in the mid-1860s).¹² By that time both sides in the debate had accumulated considerable eristic ability and sharpened their polemical tools, particularly over the thorny issues of the legal codification and judicial reforms, and modernisation of the educational system.

Neither side in the constitutional debate in Iran had such precedents to fall back on. Even the duality of the judicial system (between the religious and non-religious courts) had lasted so long (since the Ṣafavīd times) that it had become part of the traditional structure, and lost its potential for initiating ideas of change. So discussions on the uses and abuses of man-made laws inevitably provoked in its train dissensions over the virtues and vices of modernisation. The novelty of the controversy and the complexity of the issues involved could hardly be helpful to mutual understanding between the two sides of the debate. But there was one precedent which gave the religious proponents of the constitution an edge over all other groups in terms of argumentative skills. This was the development of the science of Uṣūl-i fiqh, the ‘roots’ or theory of jurisprudence, which had achieved great subtlety among the Shī‘īs, but reached new peaks in the nineteenth century. Tension between the Uṣūlīs and their opponents, the Akhbārīs (Traditionists), to which we referred before, had grown sharply since the middle of the eighteenth century. The Akhbārīs dominated the centres of religious teachings until the beginning of the Zand period, but with the emergence of Muḥammad Bāqir Waḥīd Bihbihāni (1704–91) they were decisively routed. The ground was then prepared for men like Mīrzā-yi Qumī, Shaykh Murtaḍā Anṣārī, Mullā Muḥammad Kāẓim Khurāsānī and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Nā’īnī to afford philosophical depth and methodological precision to this most stimulating of traditional Islamic sciences. Now there were of course some distinguished ‘alims who opposed constitutionalism: Shaykh Faḍlullāh was a faqīh of the highest rank. But it is noteworthy that while the opponents resorted to simple canonical strictures on the Constitution (such as the conflict between the superiority of Islam, and the recognition of all Iranian citizens as equals before the law, irrespective of their religion; the dangers of a free press which could open the way to atheistic foreign ideas; and the unacceptability of compulsory education for girls),¹³ the proponents countered by using concepts drawn from the science of Uṣūl. The presence of Khurāsānī and Nā’īnī among the foremost champions of constitutionalism, and the fact that Nā’īnī was the author of the only well-known and fairly coherent treatise in defence of its principles can, of course, be no more than circumstantial evidence of the link between their jurisprudential theory and their political outlook. But when one examines the principles of the Uṣūlī school, one can hardly escape the conclusion that they were more likely to produce a pre-constitutionalist mentality than its opposite.

The chief doctrine of the Uṣūlī school is the competence of reason (after the guidance of the Qur’ān, the Tradition and consensus) to discern the rules of the Sharī‘ah. This faith in reason brings forth other essential teachings: the necessity of ijtihād, the refusal to accept uncritically the contents of the four principal codices of Shī‘ī traditions (by Kulaynī, Shaykh Ṣadūq and Shaykh Ṭūsī), adoption of more precise criteria for ascertaining the reliability of sayings attributed to the Prophet and Imāms, and prohibition of the imitation of deceased authorities to ensure the abiding dynamism of ijtihād. The Akhbārīs contradict the Uṣūlīs on all these points: they reject reason and consensus, and find all individuals to be of the same level of mediocrity, and hence worthy of being only muqallid (imitators). They forbid ijtihād, and believe in the imitation of deceased authorities, saying that the truth of a proposition is not affected by the death of its expositor: the rulings of the past ‘Ulamā’ should be rejected if they are the products of their own arbitrary, probable knowledge or conjecture (ẓann), and accepted if they prove to be based on definite knowledge (‘ilm-i-qat‘ī), but this can only be communicated by the Imām. Instead of ijtihād, they regard the collection of sayings or narratives of the Imāms to be an obligatory duty, and reckon that every Muslim, even the uninitiated and the ordinary (‘ammī), is capable of performing this. Meanwhile, the Uṣūlīs allow wide scope for juridical innovations through their belief in the validity of ‘probable knowledge’ to deduce canonical rules, whenever access to ‘definite knowledge’ proves impossible. They also maintain that any act should be presumed to be permissible (aṣālat al-ibāḥah), except when explicitly forbidden by the Sharī‘ah. The Akhbārīs again disagree with them, saying that all knowledge is untrustworthy, except that conveyed by the Imām, and that whenever an act is not explicitly permitted by the Sharī‘ah one should refrain from performing it by way of precaution (iḥtīyāṭ) against committing a sin.¹⁴

The political implications of these principles can hardly be overstated. By upholding the authority of reason and the right of ijtihād, the Uṣūlī doctrines could not fail to render the Shī‘ī mind susceptible to social changes, and inspire confidence in the human ability to regulate social affairs. The reassertion of the status of the mujtahids and particularly the emphasis on the necessity of following a living authority certainly could help to mitigate the effects of the sclerosis of legal thought, and remove, at least partially, the stigma attached to intellectual dynamism. Moreover, principles such as those of the validity of probable knowledge and the permissibility of actions not specifically forbidden by the sources, encouraged a more flexible approach to the application of jurisprudence to emerging social and political problems. Before elaborating on the political significance of these conclusions, a word of caution is in order. It would be patently simplistic to portray the Uṣūlīs as outright ‘progressives’, and their traditionalist opponents as ‘reactionaries’. As can be gathered from the above summary, there were in fact many features in the Akhbārī doctrines too which could have made them equally receptive to certain democratic notions, for instance their stance against the mujtahids had strong anti-élitist, and consequently populist, implications, just as their distrust of reason could develop into a Lockian belief that ideas come from the senses. Indeed, some recent Shī‘ī scholars have hinted at a possible impact of the European school of sensationalism on the genesis of the Akhbārī ideas.¹⁵ Nevertheless, by proscribing rationalism, and urging imitation (taqlīd) as the only permissible way of learning the canonical rules, the Akhbārīs placed an interdiction on all the mental processes which could be turned to integrating new rules and institutions in the traditional political structure.

Surveying the difference between the Sunnī and Shī‘ī concepts of law, and the relationship of the political authority therewith, N. J. Coulson believes that ‘politically the difference is between a constitutional and an absolute form of government; legally it is between a system which is basically immutable and represents the attempt by human reason to discern the divine command and one which purports to be the direct and living expression of that command. It follows that consensus (ijmā‘), whether as a spontaneous source of law or as a criterion regulating the authority of human reasoning, has no place in such a scheme of jurisprudence, where the authority of the Imam supersedes that of agreed practice and his infallibility is diametrically opposed to the concept of probable rules of law (ẓann) and equally authoritative variants (ikhtilāf).’ However, he admits later that despite these restrictions, during the ‘protracted interregnum’ resulting from the disappearance of the Imām, ‘the exposition of the law has been the task of qualified scholars (mujtahids), and however much they may have been regarded as the agents of the Imām and working under his influence, their use of human reason (‘aql), to determine the law has been accepted as necessary and legitimate. Inevitably, therefore, the concept of probable rules of law and the authoritative criterion of consensus have been recognised by the Ithnā-‘asharites [Twelvers], and their system is certainly not without its variant scholastic opinions.’¹⁶

Assuming Coulson’s account of the original or earlier form of Shī‘īsm to be accurate, the question may well be asked whether the transition from that form to the more flexible version that he describes took place by sheer force of circumstance, or whether the fundamental principles of Twelver Shī‘īsm (as outlined in the earlier chapters) should also be given some credit for this change? We believe that the doctrine of the Imāmate is as much a part of the Shī‘ī concept of law as the necessity of ijtihād. It was thanks to the Uṣūlīs that the logical and indefeasible connection between the Imāmate and ijtihād, with all that it implies for a much less restricted exercise of human reason, was demonstrated with force and clarity. And if the corollary of the old concept was an ‘absolute form of government’, the inevitable result of the new one was a system of government which was, if not democratic, then at least accountable to people. The ‘Ulamā’ of all persuasions already enjoyed great influence among the masses as spiritual leaders, judges, administrators of awqāf (endowments), and even landowners, traders and moneylenders. What they still needed in order to stand up to the despotic monarchy of the Qājārs, without impairing the supremacy of the Sharī‘ah, was a political theory formulating the principles of representation and government accountability in the categories of Shī‘ī jurisprudence. They would not have been able to construct even the rudiments of such a theory without the Uṣūlī prelude. We conclude this section by considering some examples of the application of Uṣūlī concepts to constitutionalism.

These examples concern the two central issues facing the ‘Ulamā’ in the Revolution: (a) the novelty of legislation as a deliberate act of the human mind to regulate social relations, and (b) the doctrine of the illegitimacy of the state during the period of occultation of the Imām. In dealing with the first issue, they used specific concepts which were drawn from the theory of jurisprudence, but in dealing with the second they relied on general arguments based on expediency and realism, which they had inherited from the Ṣafavīd period, if not earlier.

(a) The jurisprudential concepts used for the first issue were (1) obligatory preliminary (muqaddimah-i wājib), (2) secondary apparent rules (aḥkām-i thānawiyyah-i ẓāhiriyyah), (3) miscellaneous formulae relating to the separation of religious (shar‘ī) from non-religious (‘urfī) matters. (4) The Tradition of ‘Umar Ibn Ḥanẓalah.

This forms one of the familiar sub-chapters of the Uṣūl treatises, comprising some of the most typically convoluted discussions on the definitions and varieties of the preliminaries of an act. The historian Kasravī denounces the bewildering complexity of such discussions as an exasperating illustration of the futility of some scholastic discourses,¹⁷ and so do many of the more independent-minded Shī‘ī jurisconsults.¹⁸ The Uṣūlīs define a preliminary as the precondition of an act. They have numerous ways for dividing such preconditions. One is to divide them into internal and external, the internal being the inherent or essential components of an act, and the external being the outside factor causing or facilitating the performance of an act. As always, such divisions are rather abstract, and sometimes extremely difficult to differentiate. But the division which is of interest to us is that between a preliminary which is explicitly required by the Sharī‘ah (such as ablution for prayer), and one which is not so but can become obligatory if another obligatory act depends on it. For instance, horse-racing and arrow-throwing are normally permissible or recommended practices, but if it becomes necessary for Muslims to wage jihād (holy war), the same acts become obligatory by implication. In the same way the adoption of a constitution becomes obligatory for Muslims when it is a precondition of their welfare, security or progress.¹⁹ It is interesting to note that the Sunnīs usually arrive at the same conclusion from a different premise – that of maṣlaḥah, literally welfare, which means that public interest should always prevail over the preference of jurisconsults. But since the Shī‘īs refute maṣlaḥah,²⁰ the concept of ‘obligatory preliminary’ is also a device to circumvent any objection to law-making for which there is no specific canonical license.

The rules of conduct in the Sharī‘ah are of two categories: the ‘primary, real rules’ aḥkām-i awwaliyyah-i ḥaqīqiyyah), which explain the eternal and abstract tenets of the religion, and the ‘secondary apparent rules’ which govern accidental and concrete details concerning their application to worldly affairs. The latter category itself has numerous subdivisions depending on their subject-matter, and the conditions of persons affected by them. Although the ‘Ulamā’ are the only people qualified to interpret the first category, and even to lay down the general principles concerning the second, deciding the subject-matter of the second kind is only the task of lay experts. Just as if two qualified physicians prescribe wine to a patient, wine-drinking which is otherwise a sin becomes permissible for him, so too if ‘doctors of politics’, who in this case are none other than the Majlis (Parliament) deputies, deliberate on matters of state interest within their competence, their decisions must be binding even without the approval of the ‘Ulamā’.²¹

This was the most widely used distinction in the controversy over the Constitution.²² The concept of ‘urf or non-religious matters was given great prominence to justify law-making as a measure regulating matters outside the purview of the Sharī‘ah, and therefore not at all detrimental to its paramount position. Since it was originally within the perimeter of the theory of jurisprudence that ‘urf was allowed to operate as a principle of subsidiary value, many notions and maxims taken from its corpus were also invoked in the course of argument. One was the concept of ‘deciding the subject matter’ (ta‘yīn-i muḍū‘) which practically meant applying a general rule to a particular case by allowing it more flexibility. Others were familiar maxims such as ‘necessity makes prohibited things permissible’, ‘actions should be judged by their ends’, and so on. Sometimes simple logical terms were used: for instance, the relationship between the Constitutional Revolution and Islam was said to be the same as that between the major premise (kubrā) and minor premise (sughrā). The major premise stated that Islam must last for ever, and the minor premise merely defined the sciences, instruments and methods which could most effectively bring this about. There was complete agreement among Iranians on the major premise, so it was up to the ‘scientists and wise men of the realm’ to provide for the means to that end. A simpler dualism, which was used less frequently because of its secular connotations, was that between worldly (ma‘āshī) and other-worldly (ma‘ādī) affairs, restricting the jurisdiction of the ‘Ulamā’ to the latter.

This Tradition (maqbūlah) is usually invoked to justify the authority of the mujtahids or the ‘Ulamā’ to adjudicate the affairs of Muslims in the absence of the Imāms, and, by extension, to act as their leaders in general. Upon being asked by an inquirer as to whether it is permissible for Muslims to refer their disputes over debts and inheritance right to temporal rulers, the sixth Imām, Ja‘far aṣ-Ṣādiq, forbids them to do so, quoting the Qur’ānic verse (4:60) which admonishes those who ‘go for judgement’ to Ṭāghūt (illegitimate ruler). Instead, the Imām instructs the Muslims to submit to the verdict of those who base themselves on the ḥadīth (saying) and the guidance of the Imāms on permissible and prohibited matters. What if, the inquirer asks, the judges give different verdicts on the basis of different ḥadīths ascribed to the Imāms? Then the opinion of the most just and the most learned and the most honest should be given preference over others, the Imām replies. But what if all the judges are equally just, learned and honest? In that case, the Imām answers, one should look into the ḥadīths which are attributed to us, accepting that which enjoys the consensus of our followers (aṣḥāb), and rejecting the one which is narrated by only a few (shādhdh), because ‘what is the subject of consensus should not be doubted’ (inna’l mujma‘ ‘alayhi lā rayba fīhi).²³

This tradition is still quoted in defence of the juridical authority of the mujtahids;²⁴ indeed Khumaynī refers to it as one reason to vindicate the government by the faqīh.²⁵ But during the Constitutional era, Nā’īnī used it as evidence of the weight given in Shī‘īsm to majority opinion – and hence to democracy – against those traditionalists who argued that ‘interpreting rules in the fashion of majority is an innovation’ (bid‘at būdan-i-ta’wīl bi akthariyyat).²⁶

Before proceeding to the second issue facing the ‘Ulamā’ in the Constitutional period, we must point out that, as was mentioned earlier, the majority of the ‘Ulamā’ were apparently agreed on the necessity of law-making. Even the tracts of the most steadfast opponent of the Revolution, Shaykh Faḍlullālh Nūrī, did not contain any objection to the concept of man-made law as such; on the contrary, the outspoken Shaykh repeatedly agreed with his opponents that the fact that the monarchy, owing to the ‘accidents of the world’, had deviated from the Sharī‘ah and degenerated into tyranny, made it necessary to devise special laws for it. Even those who adamantly refused to admit the legitimacy of such laws later on toned down their opposition with the ratification of Article 2 of the Constitution, which required the presence of at least five mujtahids in the Majlis to monitor all its enactments so that they would not contravene the Sharī‘ah. The ‘urfī line of reasoning may have played an important role in making this compromise possible. What both sides to the compromise failed to appreciate at the time was that the social and cultural consequences of the new rules and institutions were going to be far different from those of the politically ‘innocent’ dispensations on, say, conditions of sale or payment of dower, as demanded by the ‘urf.

(b) Of greater significance for the political theory of Shī‘īsm was the attitude towards the state, particularly the legitimacy of the monarchy. But this was an issue which had already been faced by the ‘Ulamā’ before, not only in the early periods of Islamic history, but also under the Ṣafavīds. The main obstacle to the ‘Ulamā’s acceptance of the necessity of state in its modern form was, of course, the theoretical negation of the legitimacy of all temporal powers. This was not the position of all the ‘Ulamā’, but nevertheless it was a powerful idea, and one which was always kept in reserve as the most effective weapon against rulers who dared to overrule the will of the men of religion. The way had already been paved for overcoming this obstacle, or at least rendering it less insuperable, by the teachings of such unquestionable authorities as Shaykh Ṭūsī and Ibn Idrīs²⁷ who recognised not only the permissibility of working for temporal rulers under certain conditions, but also the possibility of the existence of just rulers in the absence of the Imām. This recognition received further refinements during the Ṣafavīd period in the face of fierce opposition from such scholars as Shaykh Ibrāhīm Qaṭīfī who adhered to the fundamental rejection of temporal government.²⁸ Those religious leaders who supported the Constitutional movement more or less reiterated the arguments of pro-monarchical Ṣafavīd jurisconsults whenever they wanted to show that their antipathy towards despotism did not mean their opposition to all forms of state order. To give an idea of the tenor of such arguments, and thereby of the thinking of religious constitutionalists on rulership, we quote here a typical statement by an influential figure of the Ṣafavīd period, Mullā Muḥammad Bāqir, known as Muḥaqqiq Ṣabzavārī (d. 1090/1679):

No time is devoid of the existence of the Imām, but in certain periods the Imām is absent from the eyes of human beings for some reasons and expediencies, but even then the world is prospering thanks to the emanation of His existence. . . . Now in this period, when the Master of the Age . . . is absent, if there is no just and judicious king to administer and rule this world, the affairs will end in chaos and disintegration, and life will become impossible for everybody. But it is inevitable, and imperative, for people [to be ruled by] a king who will rule with justice and follow the practice and tradition of the Imām.

The author then goes on to enumerate the functions of such a king. These are: (1) to follow the practice and tradition of the Imām; (2) to repel the evil of the oppressors; (3) to protect his subjects who are the trustees of God Almighty; (4) to keep every subject in his deserved status; (5) to safeguard the faithful from the revolt and dominion of the infidel and renegades; (6) to disseminate the word of the Sharī‘ah; (7) to strengthen the people of piety and religiosity; (8) to refrain from coveting the belongings of his subjects and from making their persons and belongings the instruments of sin and lasciviousness; (9) to enjoin the good and forbid the evil; (10) to maintain the safety of highways and frontiers.²⁹

Thus, in return for the justness and integrity of the king, the Ṣafavīd Shī‘īs undertook to recognise his power as legitimate, and obey his commands. But with the monarchs’ repeated deviations from the canons of the Sharī‘ah, the compromise lost its validity, and strict Shī‘īs reverted to their pristine stance of total opposition to the state. By the end of the Qājār period, things had come to such a pass that, in the words of Nā’īnī, just kings were regarded to be as rare as the ‘philosophers’ stone’ (kibrīt-i aḥmar) and the fabulous bird ‘anqā.³⁰ But it is an indication of the political maturity of the religious constitutionalists that they combined their demands for justice and legality with a readmission of the necessity of the state. They could not, however, declare their opinion on the state without stating their position towards monarchy. The religio-political tracts of the time denote an attitude which, while returning to the compromise of the Ṣafavīd period, is as anxious to prevent the monarchy from lapsing into despotism and corruption. So on the one hand they accept the necessity of the monarchy, but on the other hand recognise the need for an ‘adjusting body’ (hay’at-i musaddidah), namely the national assembly, to supervise his acts.³¹

What certainly propelled many of the ‘Ulamā’ to take a conciliatory line on the question of temporal authority was their love of the country rather than monarchy. They felt that the independence and survival of Iran were at stake, and that to safeguard these, the ‘illegitimate or irreligious monarchy’ (salṭanat ghayr mashrū‘ah) had to be tolerated, even if temporarily. Some thought that such a course was necessary to protect Islam. The height of this patriotism was reached at the time of the Russian ultimatum to Iran in 1911, when it became almost fashionable for a number of the ‘Ulamā’ to intersperse their messages of solidarity to the central government with frequent references to the ‘Iranian homeland’, and their own readiness to defend the state against foreign aggression.

The picture emerging from this survey is indeed different from that painted by Kasravī. Far from indulging in the elaboration of barren jurisprudential schemes or anti-social esoterics, the ‘Ulamā’ thus appear to have done at least some preliminary work to turn their scholasticism to the service of the political cause of their people. Their realism tempered by a refusal to compromise on points of principle contrasts with their subsequent attitudes, which range from radical puritanism to opportunistic pacification. The reasons for this are manifold, and can only be hinted at. The ‘Ulamā’ soon came to see that constitutionalism and modernisation lessened their authority and prestige, and that fewer top intellects joined their circle, which until the nineteenth century attracted the best minds. Even many of their sons opted for modern education and Western ways of life. The social upheaval immediately following the Revolution of 1906 resulted in the weakening of all the traditional legitimating factors of authority, a situation which is not normally the right milieu for moderation. The bitterness left by the opposition of Shaykh Faḍlullāh to the Constitution, and by his execution, nurtured mutual animosities for a long time. Finally, the absolutism which dominated Iran in the wake of the post-Revolution anarchy naturally stunted the growth of religio-political thought along the course chartered by the Revolution. Conditions did not become propitious for a revival until the years following the Second World War, when the change in the balance of political forces with the collapse of Riḍā Shāh’s despotism gave birth to a new phase of religious thinking – this time on some of the crucial themes of Shī‘ī culture, of which taqiyyah and martyrdom, the subjects of the following two sections, had perhaps the richest potential for political action.

There is another argument in defence of the taqiyyah which is mystico-philosophical, and is predicated on the esoteric character of Shī‘īs, to which we referred before. If the raison d’être and the essential function of the Imāms should be sought in their status as the repository of the truth of the religion, or the ‘sacred trust’ placed exclusively at their disposal, then their knowledge of that truth cannot be communicable through propagation (idhā‘ah), otherwise not only will their claim to a privileged position be forfeited, but the knowledge itself will be in danger of being misrepresented and vulgarised. This view of the taqiyyah is most elaborately stated by one of the convinced Western exponents of mystico-philosophical schools of Shī‘īsm, Henri Corbin, who asserts that the practice was instituted by the Imāms themselves, not only for reasons of personal safety, ‘but as an attitude called for by the absolute respect for high doctrines: nobody has strictly the right to listen to them except those who are capable of listening to, and comprehending, the truth. To act otherwise, is to abandon ignominiously the trust which has been confided in you, and to commit lightly a grave spiritual treachery.’ On this basis, Corbin tries to explain a number of distinctive features of Shī‘ī culture. One cannot, he says, ‘ex abrupto, notebook and questionnaire at hand, ask a Shī‘ī about his faith. To do so would be the surest means of making him shut himself off to further questions, and inducing him to get rid of the questioner by giving inoffensive, [but] derisory answers’. This attitude, continues Corbin, may have to do with long periods of fierce persecution, but only in the most ephemeral sense, because the deeper reason is the refusal to allow religious knowledge to be debased through superficial dissemination. As an illustration of this point, he relates how he once heard ‘a young mullā in his thirties, declaring that while Shī‘īsm addresses the whole people, it could not receive the consent of but a spiritual minority’. He explains the absence of ‘the missionary spirit, and of proselytisation in Iranian Shī‘īsm’ in the same terms, and shows taqiyyah and Shī‘ī esoterics to be mutually dependent. According to a statement by the great Shī‘ī theologian Shaykh Ṣadūq (d. 381/991), which he quotes, ‘abolition of taqiyyah is not allowed until the appearance of the Imām announcing the resurrection [al-Imām al-Qā’im], by whom the religion will be made integrally manifest.’ If, concludes Corbin, ‘the teachings of the Imāms concerned only the explanation of the Sharī‘ah, the Law and the ritual, as some have claimed and still do claim, the imperative of the taqiyyah would have been incomprehensible.’³³

Such sophisticated interpretations of the taqiyyah have now come as much under the devastating attacks of the modernists as the more down-to-earth, popular perceptions of the term. For although both the Qur’ānic verses and the sayings attributed to the Imāms, and the glosses by authoritative Shī‘ī jurists and theologians, indicate that taqiyyah is an exceptional dispensation granted only in cases of emergency and compulsion (iḍṭirār), in practice it has become the norm of public behaviour whenever there is a conflict between faith and expediency. Small wonder, then, that it has at times degenerated into an excuse for downright hypocrisy and cowardice. For the same reason, one of the first tasks facing the Shī‘ī modernists has been to effect a thorough affirmation of its original meaning with a view to transforming it from a camouflage for political passivity into an instrument of activism. They have realised that unless they overcome this mental barrier among the ordinary Shī‘īs to oppositional politics, they have little chance of translating their other militant doctrines into a veritable, sustained mass movement. Hence their efforts to demonstrate how far the current notion of taqiyyah, both in Sunnī polemics and in popular Shī‘ī usage, has deviated from its real meaning.

The first important point to emerge from the modernist treatment of the subject is that what is commonly assumed to be a simple, monolithic concept is, according to its proper definition, in fact a convenient rubric for a variety of acts, each having a clearly defined purpose. It is, therefore, wrong to think that all acts of taqiyyah are either sanctioned or repudiated with unvarying force in religion. Four categories are particularly mentioned: (1) the enforced (ikrāhiyyah), (2) precautionary or apprehensive (khawfiyyah), (3) arcane (kitmāniyyah), and (4) symbiotic (mudārātī). The enforced taqiyyah consists of acting in accordance with the instructions of an oppressor, and under necessity, in order to save one’s life. Although being the simplest of all the four to define, it is also the most controversial kind, because it applies most readily to the political conditions of the Shī‘īs in most places – now as much as in the past – and involves the difficulty of reaching consensus as to who an oppressor is. The precautionary or apprehensive taqiyyah consists of the performance of acts and rituals according to the fatwās (authoritative opinions) of the Sunnī religious leaders, and in the Sunnī countries. Alternatively, it consists of the ‘complete precaution of a minority in its way of life, and dealings with the majority, for the sake of protecting oneself and one’s co-religionists’. The arcane taqiyyah is to conceal one’s faith or ideology, as well as the number and strength of one’s co-religionists, and to carry out clandestine activity for furthering the religious goals, in times of weakness and lack of preparation for conducting an open propaganda. It is this kind of taqiyyah which is the opposite of idhā‘ah (propaganda). Finally, the symbiotic type is simply a code of coexistence with the Sunnī majority, and of participation in their social and ritual congregations for maintaining Islamic unity, and establishing a powerful state comprising all the Muslims.³⁴

The point of this classification is twofold: on the one hand, it attests the Shī‘īs’ realistic understanding of the practical problems which arise in reconciling the conflicting demands of a pure faith, and the physical survival of an unlawful minority; on the other, it purports to emphasise that concealing one’s faith or ideology is simply a tactical device which should by no means interrupt the efforts towards its triumph, or conceived as a warrant for suspending essential religious duties. But the modernists seem to admit that even the fullest enumeration of the correct forms of the taqiyyah, and of their specific purposes, still leaves enough loop-holes for the feeble-minded and the comfort-seekers to use the whole practice as a convenient excuse for neglecting the obligation to speak and fight for the truth, thus acting as silent accomplices in rampant injustice. How can it be otherwise when safeguarding one’s life is explicitly recognised as a legitimate aim in the observance of at least two of the four varieties of the practice? A substantial portion of the modernist arguments is allocated, therefore, to a semi-scholarly, semi-ideological debate on the limits of self-protection, on the demarcation line beyond which safeguarding oneself, or one’s co-religionists, turns from a legitimate and judicious act of self-defence into a cowardly flight from the unmistakable summons of the religious conscience. The most frequent warning accompanying these arguments is that taqiyyah is definitely an illicit act whenever it entails ‘a corruption in religion’. What ‘corruption in religion’ exactly means is never quite clear, but the modernists use one or two vital clues in the sayings attributed to the Imāms, and in the works of distinguished jurists of the past, to elucidate its application. There is, for instance, the statement reportedly made either by the fifth Imām, al-Bāqir, or the sixth, aṣ-Ṣādiq, that they ‘never practise taqiyyah [although not proscribing it for others] in three things: wine-drinking, wiping over the shoes [instead of bare feet in the ablution for prayer, masḥ al-khuffayn], and abandoning the tamattu‘ pilgrimage’. Wine-drinking is banned by all Muslims, but the latter two acts are supposed to be Sunnī ‘innovations’. The Imām is thus saying that he will never perform these acts for the sake of pleasing the rulers or the majority although he does not prohibit them for others, because his own position as the leader of the Shī‘ī community requires absolute avoidance of all offences even those which others may be allowed to commit to escape molestation on the part of the rulers or the majority.³⁵ Moreover, the Prophet Muḥammad and the Imām aṣ-Ṣādiq are both quoted as having denounced anybody who glorifies the innovators (dhū bid‘ah); and the Prophet is said to have cursed the ‘ālims who do not ‘proclaim their knowledge’ to awaken the public upon the appearance of an innovation. In another saying attributed to the Imām ‘Alī, the ‘ālims ‘who do not proclaim their knowledge in time’ have been described as the ‘most stinking (antan) individuals on the Day of Judgement’.³⁶ Leaving aside the traditions associated with the Imāms, the behaviour of the militant Shī‘īs under the Umayyads and ‘Abbāsīds is also recounted to demonstrate that taqiyyah was never used as a means of evading moral responsibility: those militants who were arrested by the authorities never revealed the names or hide-outs of their fellow-fighters even under the severest torture. This attitude is reflected even in the opinion of classical jurists such as Shaykh Ṭūsī and Ibn Idrīs, who unequivocally rule out the permissibility of the taqiyyah whenever it results in the killing of people.³⁷ Having thus established that genuine Shī‘īsm never permits dissimulation if what is at stake is the very essence of religion, the modernists proceed to argue that all the statements ascribed to the Imāms which stress the incumbency of the taqiyyah, and identify it as an integral part of the religion, should be understood as a mere pleading for clandestine activity, to create ‘a secret organisation for protecting and propagating the doctrines of a Shī‘ī Imām’.³⁸

Discussion on taqiyyah sometimes involves a more delicate issue which concerns the principle of al-amr bi’l-ma‘rūf wa’n-nahy ‘an al-munkar (enjoining the good and forbidding the evil), since one possible result of any kind of concealment or dissimulation can be the suspension of this cardinal religious duty. A person who is allowed to hide his real belief or practice to protect himself in a hostile environment should, by the same token, be permitted to abstain from advising others what to do and what not to do. The two attitudes are indeed so interrelated that sometimes taqiyyah is thought to be the opposite of, not idhā‘ah, but al-amr bi’l ma‘rūf, etc. So if Shī‘īsm is to retrieve its pristine character as a creed of militancy, then it must go on the offensive in all areas of social and political life, and this makes ‘enjoining the good and forbidding the evil’ the strongest sanction of its campaign for the total regeneration of the community. Classical authors paid a great deal of attention to the questions of whether ‘enjoining the good and forbidding the evil’ is an individual duty (farḍ ‘ayn, which should be performed by every Muslim, like prayer), or a collective duty (farḍ kifāyah, which needs only to be performed by a group of Muslims, like jihād, the ‘holy war’); and of whether it is necessitated by reason or the law (shar‘). They also pointed out the different forms in which the duty may be implemented: primarily by speech, and, if this does not produce the desired result, by hand – although the latter is believed to be the exclusive function of the Imāms or their representatives.³⁹ The modernists mostly refuse to be drawn into discussions of a purely theoretical nature, dismissing them as pedantic digressions.⁴⁰ Instead, their debate is focused on the pre-conditions and the forms of the fulfilment of the duty. Most Shī‘ī authorities of the past agreed that a Muslim cannot perform the duty unless he meets three requirements: first, he should have the knowledge required to distinguish good from bad; second, he must be fairly certain that his advice will be effective; and third, he must be sure that no harm will come to his or her person as a consequence of performing the duty. The modernists consider the classical treatment of these pre-conditions to be unsatisfactory on two main grounds. First, they believe that even the absence of these pre-conditions does not negate the ‘obligatoriness’ of the act itself, unlike, for instance, the prerequisite of solvency in the case of paying pilgrimage to Mecca. The latter act ceases to be obligatory for a Muslim who does not have sufficient financial means. But ‘enjoining the good and forbidding the evil’ remains incumbent on every Muslim even in the absence of its pre-conditions, just as prayer is still obligatory for a person who is not physically clean. The only effect that the absence of these pre-conditions can and must have is to create a further obligation to achieve them. Thus a Muslim who does not have the knowledge of good and evil in Islam should do all in his or her power to obtain it, rather than using his ignorance as a pretext for indifference to problems of public morality. Second, the modernists refute the second and third conditions as absurdly obstructive, and an encouragement to quietism, arguing that if the great heroes of social and political struggle in Islamic history – men like ‘Alī, Ḥusayn and Abū Dharr – wanted to observe such conditions, they could have never revolted against the iniquities of their times.⁴¹ The whole debate acquires an all the more disputatious tone against the background of the controversy that has raged in the past among classical Shī‘ī jurists on the subject: while men like Shaykh Muḥammad Ḥasan Najafī, author of Jawāhir al-kalām, the most widely-used textbook of fiqh in centres of religious teaching in Iran, emphasise the essentiality of the preconditions, there are jurists like Shahīd Thānī (‘the Second Martyr’) and Muḥaqqiq Karakī whose arguments favour the militants’ case.⁴²

The Shī‘ī modernist views on taqiyyah, such as those outlined here, present one of the rare examples of genuine critical thinking in present-day Islam. While aiming at a radical reformation of a traditional concept and attitude, they seldom depart, as some quasi-religious modernist works do, from the accepted terms and categories of theology and jurisprudence. The arguments are often ‘immanent’, remaining always within Islamic idiom and thought, hardly invoking any notion drawn from any of the fashionable ideologies of our time, to substantiate or discredit a viewpoint. Misrepresentation of taqiyyah is denounced in the name of upholding religious sincerity, removing a major barrier in the way of unity with Sunnī Muslims, and exhibiting its virtue as a method of clandestine struggle. And the duty of ‘enjoining the good and forbidding the evil’ is exalted not in order to foster an attitude of inquisitiveness, or to pry into the private life and manners of individuals, but to stress the value of personal example as the most effective way of persuading others to rectify their ways,⁴³ and stand up to corruption and tyranny. Meanwhile, the fact that the two issues are examined in conjunction with each other signifies an awareness that no traditional or conventional practice, which is likely to have momentous ramifications in the political behaviour of Muslims, can be meaningfully studied without examining the network of supplementary or derivative notions connecting it with the entire system of religious behaviour.

Ever since the Iranian Shī‘ī dynasty of the Buyids popularised the Muḥarram ceremonies in the fourth/tenth century the Karbalā’ drama has been the object of fervent annual lamentations. In the sixteenth century, the introduction of ta‘zīyah (passion play) by the Iranian Ṣafavīd dynasty strengthened the popular character of the ceremonies, which together with rawḍah khānī (recitation of the sufferings of holy martyrs), zanjīr zanī (self-flagellation) and other street processions formed a distinct cult despite the opposition of the religious hierarchy, who disapproved of them on account of their ‘crude dogma’ and irreligious histrionics.⁴⁵

The main purpose of these ceremonies was to perform the lamentations in a form which would cause the greatest amount of weeping. Numerous prophetic sayings recommend or praise weeping, or its affection, during prayer, or recitation of the Qur’ān, or recollecting God, or from fear of God. Wensinck has noted more than forty of them.⁴⁶ To this catalogue, the Shī‘ī tradition has added the virtue of weeping in memory of the Imāms, particularly Ḥusayn, who is known as the Lord of the Martyrs (sayyid ash-shuhadā’). Examples are legion, but here we mention only three, one from an outstanding Shī‘ī traditionist, and the other two from conventional collections of stories about the Imāms, both written in the nineteenth century.

First the quotation from the traditionist, Shaykh Ṣadūq. In his ‘uyūn akhbār ar-riḍā, he quotes the eighth Imām, ‘Alī ‘Ibn Musā ar-Riḍā, to have said to Rayyān Ibn Shabīb, one of his companions: ‘O Son of Shabīb! If you want to be with us in the sublime paradise, bear grief for us, and remain stricken with our sorrow.’ And elsewhere: ‘O Son of Shabīb! If you wept for Ḥusayn until your tears rolled down your cheeks, all your sins, whether major or minor, will be forgiven.’⁴⁷

The same notion of salvation through grief is stated in Muḥriq al-qulūb (‘Burner of Hearts’) by Mullā Muḥammad Mahdī Narāqī, but in an ornate style typical of the more popular literature on the subject: ‘Revealed, authoritative ḥadiths indicate that had the Prophet willed, he would have averted from Ḥusayn the disaster that was to befall him [at Karbalā’]. But the Prophet did not do this for reasons which are partly known to us, but partly known only to God and the Prophet, and of whose perception our minds are incapable. Undoubtedly, the benefits of the martyrdom are countless: among others, it has proved the justness of the cause of the Prophet’s family, and the falsity of the way of his adversaries. . . . Besides, many a wretched sinner is forgiven and attains salvation by weeping for Ḥusayn.’⁴⁸

But the merit attributed to weeping in Riyād al-quds (‘Gardens of Paradise’) by Ṣadr ud-Dīn Vā‘iẓ Qazvīnī is of a different kind: here, weeping is said to benefit not the mourners but the cause of the Prophet’s house: ‘A learned man saw in a dream that the Imām Ḥusayn had recovered from all the wounds [inflicted on him at Karbalā’]. He asked the Imām how his wounds had healed up so miraculously. “With the tears of my mourners,” replied the Imām.’ ‘When Za’far the Jinnee, together with thirty-six thousand jinnees, came to help Ḥusayn at Karbalā’, the Imām refused him the permission to fight on his side, his reason being: “I am not at all keen on living in this world. I wish to meet my God. Whosoever wants to help me should merely weep for me.” ’⁴⁹

Thus lamentations for Ḥusayn enable the mourners not only to gain an assurance of divine forgiveness, but also to contribute to the triumph of the Shī‘ī cause. Accordingly, Ḥusayn’s martyrdom makes sense on two levels: first, in terms of a soteriology not dissimilar from the one invoked in the case of Christ’s crucifixion: just as Christ sacrificed himself on the altar of the cross to redeem humanity, so did Ḥusayn allow himself to be killed on the plains of Karbalā’ to purify the Muslim community of sins; and second, as an active factor vindicating the Shī‘ī cause, contributing to its ultimate triumph. When one adds to all this the cathartic effect of weeping as a means of releasing pent-up grief over not only personal misfortunes, but also the agonies of a long-suffering minority, then the reasons for the immense popularity of the Muḥarram ceremonies become apparent.

With the increasing tendency of the Shī‘īs to a passive form of taqiyyah, and acquiescence in the established order, the concept of the martyrdom of Ḥusayn as vicarious atonement prevailed over its interpretation as a militant assertion of the Shī‘ī cause. Concomitantly, weeping, and not edification or political indoctrination, came to be recognised as the sole aim of all reminiscence of Ḥusayn. This is primarily clear from the very titles of most of the popular histories of the Karbalā’ drama: miftāḥ al-bukā’ (‘Key to Weeping’), ṭūfān al-bukā’ (‘Tempest of Weeping’), muḥīt al-bukā’ (‘Ocean of Weeping’), muthīr al-aḥzān (‘Rouser of Sorrows’) and luhūf (‘Burning Lamentations’). One rarely, if ever, comes across a narrative redolent of combative vengefulness. The dominant trend is an elegiac account of the episodes in the drama, a concern which seems to stem from the conviction that submissive endurance of pain and suffering is the hallmark of all worthy souls. In the Amālī (‘Discourses’) of Shaykh Ṭūsī, ‘Alī is quoted as having warned his son Ḥasan that he would always be ‘a hostage of death, a target of adversity, and a victim of pain.’⁵⁰ ‘O brothers!’, to quote again from a populariser of the story, Mahdī Narāqī, ‘affliction is bestowed (only) on the Friends of God, oppression befalls the Chosen Men, and pain and suffering are proportionate to the degree of dignity and pre-eminence (while conversely) exemption from calamity and hardship is the trait of ill fate and wretchedness.’⁵¹ One could establish a link between this exaltation of suffering, and the asceticism of Islamic Ṣūfī traditions, which preaches the acceptance of pain as a necessary stage in the spiritual development of Man.

Ḥusayn’s passive and pietistic behaviour in the drama of Karbalā’, as described in orthodox Shī‘ī sources, is perhaps best exemplified by the epithet maẓlūm which often follows his name in the popular usage. Maẓlūm literally means injured, oppressed or sinned against, but in colloquial Persian its connotation goes beyond those associated with incurring injustice; it means a person who is unwilling to act against others, even when he is oppressed, not out of cowardice or diffidence but because of generosity and forbearance. That is why it is normally synonymous with najīb, literally meaning noble, but also gentle and modest. Thus being a maẓlūm, rather than signifying a negative attribute or a deprivation, counts as a moral virtue.

Hence the paradox of the drama of Karbalā’ in Shī‘ī literature, whether popular or scholarly. True, outside impassioned scenes, the drama is treated as something more than a simple agent of emotional catharsis, and Ḥusayn is praised for his sacrifice to vindicate the just cause of the Prophet’s family, or to revive the religion of his grandfather Muḥammad, and to save it from the Umayyads’ deviation. But his predominant image as a saint with an almost masochistic wish for martyrdom defeats any attempt at using the drama as a means of inculcating political activism.

How passive and harmless this image has been, from such a political point of view, can be understood from the fact that the ta‘zīyah was promoted by the financial and political oligarchs who used it under both Ṣafavīd and Qājār dynasties as a means of consolidating their hold over the populace; and in its golden age, a despot like Nāṣir ud-Dīn Shāh saw no contradiction between his oppressive methods of government and the provision of the most elaborate amenities for the performance of ta‘zīyah.⁵²

During the last ten years or so, the quiescent character of the drama of Karbalā’ has started to change at the hands of a number of Shī‘ī modernists who could not forego its obvious potential as a rhetorical instrument of political mobilisation. The modernists have tried to develop this potential primarily as part of their general drive for the reformulation of the crucial themes of Islamic history. But there is an ironic coincidence between their reinterpretation of the drama, and the strong interest taken in the drama by a number of Sunnī modernists. It is not unusual to find praise of Ḥusayn, as of any other member of the Prophet’s family, in classical Sunnī literature, especially of the Shāfi‘ī and Ḥanafī schools. But what is interesting in the new Sunnī literature on the subject is strong rejection of some criticisms of him in classical sources, and his glorification as a rebel and the prototype of all those who challenge false consensus. This provides an important example of that theoretical, inter-sectarian concord of which we spoke in Chapter 1. But the example may be the result of more than a simple coincidence; more probably, the ‘revisionist’ literature of one side has stimulated fresh thinking by the other.

What should be, however, of greater concern to us is that, however identical their political motives have been, the Sunnī and Shī‘ī reinterpretations have been widely different from each other with regard to both the kind of conceptual problems they have had to face, and their consequences. Any latter-day Muslim political activist with a rationalist turn of mind, and anxious to mobilise all the resources of the Muslim historical conscience in the service of a political cause, cannot use the drama for his purpose without first tackling a problem inherent in the drama, relating to Ḥusayn’s leadership. The problem is whether Ḥusayn acted responsibly and wisely by launching a revolt without adequate foresight and power, and if his revolt was merely an act of self-sacrifice, whether the long-term results justified its immediate disastrous consequences for the Shī‘ī community, or Muslims in general. Now if our political activist is a Sunnī, and finds the answer to be in the positive, all he has to do to exploit the drama for the particular brand of his indoctrination is to refute the Sunnī consensus on the legitimacy of Yazīd’s regime, or his personal honesty and integrity.

But for the Shī‘īs the problem is more intricate: for they have not only to explain away the numerous supernatural, legendary accretions to the drama, but also deal with the implications of their interpretation in the fields of Shī‘ī theology and political theory. Perhaps it was because of the relative ease of their task that the first Muslim writers in recent history to question the traditional accounts of the drama were the Sunnīs. While the Shī‘ī literature on Ḥusayn has naturally always consisted of high praise, there have been Sunnī historians who have condemned his uprising either as a sinful disruption of the prevailing consensus, or as an ill-considered move which was bound to end in fiasco.

The first line of criticism was represented by the twelfth-century judge and polemicist Ibn al-‘Arabī, the second by the outstanding historian Ibn Khaldūn. Ibn al-‘Arabī tries to bring discredit on Ḥusayn’s uprising by arguing that Yazīd, contrary to the Shī‘ī allegations, was an honest and pious man, and that Ḥusayn revolted against him despite the opposite advice of such distinguished companions of the Prophet as Ibn ‘Abbās, Ibn ‘Umar and his own brother Ibn Ḥanafiyyah; he wonders how Ḥusayn could have preferred the wishes of the riff-raff (awbāsh) of Kūfah to the counsel of these dignitaries. Yazīd’s tough reaction against Ḥusayn, concludes Ibn al-‘Arabī, was therefore merely an application of the law laid down by Ḥusayn’s own grandfather, the Prophet Muḥammad, which provided for the severe punishment of all those subverting the unity and peace of the Muslim community.⁵³

Ibn Khaldūn’s strictures are of a different kind. As usual, he is fair towards both disputants. He asserts that rebellion against Yazīd was justified because of his wickedness. Ḥusayn was therefore right in regarding a revolt against Yazīd as a duty incumbent on those who had the power to execute it. But he thinks that Ḥusayn was wrong in confusing his qualifications with his power. His qualifications were as good as he thought, and better, but he was mistaken as to his strength. Yazīd, on the other hand, was wrong in trying to justify his actions against Ḥusayn by arguing that he was fighting evildoers, because any such action should be undertaken only by a just ruler, which he was not.⁵⁴

Such criticisms of Ḥusayn’s actions have been reproduced by contemporary orthodox Sunnīs, sometimes with even greater emphasis than that of the original, as can be noticed from the footnotes by Muḥibb ad-Dīn al-Khaṭīb, the former editor-in-chief of al-Azhar’s review to Ibn al-‘Arabī’s Al-‘awāṣim min al-qawāṣim.⁵⁵

Since the turn of the century, when partly as a consequence of the modernism associated with the names of Asad-ābādī (Afghānī) and ‘Abduh, many a hallowed stereotype in Islamic history has been revised, the meaning and nature of Ḥusayn’s uprising too has gradually come under fresh scrutiny. So far as the present writer could establish, the first Sunnī writer in modern times to challenge the orthodox interpretation of Ḥusayn’s uprising was the Egyptian Ibrāhīm ‘Abd al-Qādir Māzinī. In an article in the periodical ar-Risālah of April 1936 he wrote that after attending for the first time a rawḍah khānī at the house of an Iranian shaykh in Cairo, he started to ponder Ḥusayn’s intentions in his revolt against Yazīd. He had just read an article in an English review asserting that Ḥusayn deliberately engaged in the enterprise with the full knowledge of his ultimate failure. But why, asked Māzinī, should Ḥusayn endanger his life in such a futile adventure? More important, why did he take the innocent members of his family to such a perilous journey? Māzinī’s answers to these questions build up Ḥusayn as a sincere, self-sacrificing, but by no means starry-eyed, visionary. He says that Ḥusayn realised from the outset that the odds were heavily against him, but since he held the Umayyad regime to be immoral, he felt, as an honest revolutionary, compelled to do his utmost, if not to overthrow, then at least to undermine that regime. By provoking Yazīd to adopt a most repressive policy, and commit air those atrocities at Karbalā’, Ḥusayn succeeded in creating a deep hatred against him among the masses. Henceforth ‘every drop of his blood, every letter of his name, and every invocation of his memory became a mine in the very foundation of the Umayyad state’, finally blowing it to pieces.⁵⁶

Almost twenty years after the publication of Māzinī’s article, the same theme was picked up and developed by other secular writers in Egypt, the most outstanding of whom is undoubtedly ‘Abbās Maḥmūd al-‘Aqqād. In his book entitled Abu’sh shuhadā’ Ḥusayn Ibn ‘Alī (‘Father of the Martyrs, Ḥusayn b. ‘Alī’) ‘Aqqād first emphasises the profound contradiction between the personalities of Ḥusayn and Yazīd. Their conflict, he says, was basically between two temperaments, magnanimity and meanness, and hence between two concepts, the religious Imāmah and the temporal dawlah (state, but also worldly fortune). Add to these personal disparities the legacy of internecine animosity among the Quraysh (between the Hāshimīds and ‘Abd Shamsīds) and even the romantic rivalry between Ḥusayn and Yazīd over Zaynab Bint Isḥāq (who married Ḥusayn), and the picture emerges of a most formidable antagonism.⁵⁷ ‘Aqqād tries not to depart too much from the Sunnīs’ overall recognition of the legitimacy of the Umayyad regime by drawing a distinction between the nature of political leadership under Yazīd and that under his father Mu‘āwiyah: the latter at least enjoyed the well-meaning advice of such eminent men as ‘Amr Ibn ‘Āṣ, Mughīrat Ibn Shu‘bah and Zīyād Ibn Abih, whereas Yazīd’s entourage was entirely composed of worldly, avaricious characters (but ‘Aqqād does criticise the ‘Abd Shamsīds refusal in pre-Muḥammadan days to take part in the Ḥilf al-Fuḍūl, the alliance between the Hāshimīds and their associates to ensure a degree of social justice in Arabian society by protecting the weak against the strong).⁵⁸

As regards the rightness or wrongness of Ḥusayn’s revolt, ‘Aqqād insists that the issue should not be judged from the point of view of workaday political adventures or commercial bargainings, thus indicating his disagreement with historians like Ibn Khaldūn, who, as we saw, censured Ḥusayn on utilitarian grounds for not having properly assessed his physical or strategic strength before the revolt. Being in essence a conflict between interest (or profit) and martyrdom, Ḥusayn’s dispute with Yazīd should be judged by a criterion which cannot be applied to every individual and in every period. With this proviso, he goes on to consider Ḥusayn’s revolt from two angles, its motives and its results. On both counts, his verdict is positive: Ḥusayn’s motives, all purely moral, were unquestionably noble, determined by his unshakeable faith in religion; and the results he intended were all achieved in due course: Yazīd died, a despondent man, four years after Ḥusayn’s death, all the perpetrators of the crimes at Karbalā’ were punished, and sixty years later the Umayyad dynasty was overthrown, with the memory of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom ‘having acted as an insidious disease in its body politic.’⁵⁹

‘Aqqād devotes a considerable part of his analysis to the justification of Ḥusayn’s conduct of political struggle. Throughout the revolt, he argues, Ḥusayn relied on peaceful means, always preferring persuasion to violence. The very day Muslim Ibn ‘Aqīl ascertained a solid popular support for Ḥusayn in Kūfah, he could have proceeded to overtake Yazīd’s agents by surprise, and establish an ‘Alīd regime; but Ḥusayn had warned him not to resort to deceitful tactics. Ḥusayn knew that what was at stake was the struggle between right and wrong, and trusted that once right became manifest, there was no need to have recourse to violence or stratagem. ‘Aqqād even justifies Ḥusayn’s decision to take his family to Karbalā’ by reminding that this was a custom in Arabian society since pre-Islamic days, whereby warriors took their kith and kin to the battlefield as evidence of their intrepid resolve to suffer all the consequences of their enterprise.⁶⁰

Reference should also be made to two more works by secular Egyptian writers typifying a leftist approach to the drama. In ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ash-Sharqāwī’s two-volume poetical play, al-Ḥusayn thā’iran, al-Ḥusayn shahīdan (‘Ḥusayn the Revolutionary, Ḥusayn the Martyr’), the uprising is portrayed as a class struggle on behalf of the poor masses. Although the limitations inevitably imposed by such a literary genre on a political theme preclude a coherent presentation, the play may succeed in widening the appeal of Ḥusayn’s tragedy for a modern audience accustomed to Brechtian radical drama – as urban, sophisticated literates in Tehran and Cairo are.

But apart from his adamant defiance, Sharqāwī’s Ḥusayn is poles apart from both Ibn al-‘Arabī’s seditious adventurer and ‘Aqqād’s meta-historical visionary. Compared with them, he is a reformist with modest aims: he wants neither to create turmoil and bloodshed, nor to achieve political power, but simply to avert injustice. He often seems to be carried by, rather than lead, the popular effervescence. More significant, he is given to spells of self-doubt and soul-searching, as is apparent from his Hamlet-like soliloquy at the Prophet’s grave before fleeing from Medina.⁶¹

In more radical literature, reformism is replaced by revolutionarism. Here Ḥusayn is decidedly siding with the left – although the meaning of the term left in its particular early Islamic context is not clear beyond a general opposition to Meccan capitalism and Damascene extravagance after the Umayyads’ take-over. But there is no doubt about the identity of the leaders of the left. These were: first the Caliph ‘Umar because of his austere policies, and prohibition against land ownership, then ‘Alī, whose regime was based on shūrā, or democratic consultation, then his son Ḥasan, who deemed it wise in the interests of the left to adopt a posture of compromise and leniency, and finally Ḥusayn, whose life epitomised the leftist spirit of rejectionism. Aware of the sectarian susceptibilities of some of their readers, such authors argue that if Ḥusayn had connived with Yazīd for the sake of preserving tranquillity, he would have betrayed Islamic ideals of social justice. He could have retired into the safety of isolation from politics the day he heard the news of Muslim’s execution, but such escapism was antithetical to his nature which rejected everything around him, and was ready to carry his rejection to critical heights. After the collapse of Muslim’s mission, Ḥusayn knew that his revolt would fail, but he also knew that if he wanted to revolutionise the Muslim community, self-sacrifice was necessary. With Ḥusayn’s death, the first ‘round’ of the trial of strength between the right and left came to an end – a process which had started with the right eliminating ‘Umar and ‘Alī from the political scene (the author does not pause to substantiate this arguable claim, since it has never been proved that ‘Umar’s assassin, a Persian freed slave, and ‘Alī’s assassin, a Khārijī, belonged to the same ideological camp). But like previous writers, the radicals too think that the martyrdom was in the long run a triumph for ‘progressive forces’, for it precipitated the Umayyads’ downfall by reinvigorating the Arabs’ moribund conscience.⁶²

As noted earlier, the Sunnī reinterpretation of the drama of Karbalā’ has not been confined to secular, Westernised enclaves, but has also infiltrated the religious circles. The best examples of this can be seen in the issues of the now defunct Egyptian review Liwā’ al-Islām, which for eighteen years, from 1947 to 1965, rivalled the organ of the University Mosque of Al-Azhar in presenting religious viewpoints, with a fundamentalist flavour, on a wide range of issues relating to Islamic society and history; but it enjoyed the advantage of freedom from the trammels that attach al-Azhar to the officialdom. In an article in the issue of September 1956, Muḥammad Kāmil al-Bannā’ is primarily concerned with clearing Ḥusayn of the charge of rashness in opening hostilities against Yazīd. To prove his point, he places special stress on Ḥusayn’s precaution in sending Muslim to Kūfah beforehand. Nevertheless, he shares ‘Aqqād’s judgement that ultimately Ḥusayn could not escape his destiny as a rebel in the face of the worldly Banū ‘Abd Shams. So even if Muslim’s findings in Kūfah had been negative, Ḥusayn would still have gone ahead with his expedition. But al-Bannā’’s reason for Ḥusayn’s innate tendency to rebellion smacks of the Shī‘ī conviction about the inherited moral qualities of ‘Alī’s descendants: Ḥusayn would have revolted in any case, because he was ‘a grandson of the Prophet, the son of ‘Alī, the knight of Quraysh and the hero of Badre’. A more interesting feature of his analysis, which again sounds uncanny coming from a Sunnī writer, is his lending credence to the thesis, mostly upheld by the Shī‘īs – as we shall see later – that Ḥusayn was aware of his inescapable fate as a martyr right from the beginning, from the time the Prophet had spoken about a dream he had seen in which Ḥusayn’s death was foreshadowed.⁶³

Another issue of the review carries the report of the proceedings of a symposium attended by such well-known advocates of a fundamentalist or socially committed outlook of Islam as Muḥammad Ghazzālī, ‘Abd ar-Raḥīm Fūdah, Muḥammad Abū Zahrah and others. They discuss three specific questions: was Ḥusayn motivated by worldly desires and political ambitions? Second, did he challenge, by his revolt, a qualified and competent ruler? And third, did he employ the right method to attain his goal? The discussants’ replies to the first and second questions are negative, and to the third positive, for more or less the same reasons as those adduced by the secular writers. But characteristically, they couch their arguments not in terms of criteria extraneous to their cultural background, but by repeated reference to analogies from Islamic history or Qur’ānic injunctions. Thus Ghazzālī justifies Ḥusayn’s seemingly suicidal challenge to the overwhelming forces of Yazīd by likening it to the bravery of Anas Ibn an-Naḍr at the battle of Uḥud who, upon seeing the Muslim troops retreat, sallied forth towards the enemy’s lines, shouting ‘I smell the paradise from beyond the Uḥud [mountain]’. Such men, concludes Ghazzālī, care more for being consistent with themselves and their God, than for the practical outcome of their actions.⁶⁴

Finally, Khālid Muḥammad Khālid’s highly idealistic Abnā’ ar-rasūl fī Karbalā’ (‘The Sons of the Prophet at Karbalā’ ’), is distinguished by its elaboration on the background of the drama as a conflict between ‘Alī’s conception of the Caliphate as an institution which should embody the loftiest virtues of the Prophet’s era, and the Umayyads’ ruthless determination to reduce it to an instrument of sheer domination. More than a third of the book is taken up by contrasting the honest, straightforward behaviour of the ‘Alīds with the artful practices of the first two Umayyad caliphs. So contrary to the fundamentalists, Khālid not only does not absolve Mu‘āwiyah, but holds him as ultimately responsible for the bloodshed at Karbalā’: by appointing Yazīd as his successor, Mu‘āwiyah not only violated his peace treaty with Ḥasan, Ḥusayn’s brother, but also offended the collective conscience of the faithful at a time when a number of the capable companions of the Prophet were still alive and could be considered as candidates for the Caliphate. But such historical niceties become irrelevant in the light of Khālid’s agreement with the fundamentalists that a bloody conflict between the ‘Alīds and the Umayyads was inevitable in any case. In support of this thesis, he quotes a tradition, so dear to Shī‘ī hearts, according to which ‘Alī had predicted Ḥusayn’s martyrdom: on the way to the Ṣiffīn battle. When he saw the plain of Karbalā’, he is reported to have said: ‘Here is the place of their [his grandchildren’s] descent and bloodshed’.⁶⁵ Thus the epic of Karbalā’ was not a one-act play beginning on the tenth day of Muḥarram and ending on the same day: it was a long story which started many years before 61 A.H., and its results stretched over many years after that.⁶⁶ The greatest lesson of Karbalā’ is that self-sacrifice should be admired for its own sake, just as right should be prized as a thing in itself. The memory of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom should be an occasion for jubilation, not mourning, just as the Great ‘Id of the Muslims (on the tenth day of the month of pilgrimage), equally reminiscent of an act of sacrifice, is celebrated by happy festivities.⁶⁷ This, incidentally, is what some Cairenes have been doing for centuries, although not in the militant mood envisaged by Khālid.⁶⁸

We can summarise the foregoing survey by saying that all the Sunnī writers mentioned here are unanimous in their rejection of Ibn al-‘Arabī’s apologia for Yazīd as an honourable man. They also contest Ibn Khaldūn’s verdict that Ḥusayn’s adventure was based on his erroneous estimation of his strength, and was therefore a wrong move, because they maintain that the matter should not be judged on pragmatic and utilitarian grounds, otherwise the central meaning of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom will be lost. Some writers praise Ḥusayn for moral, others for political, reasons. But in the course of their arguments, they all make a number of significant concessions to the Shī‘ī theology or Imāmology, apparently without thinking out their logical conclusions. None of these writers, however, bases his argument on a critical analysis of historical texts with a view to discovering their inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Rather, they all rely on individual speculation, and simply read their present thoughts into conventional sources.

It is now time to return to the Shī‘ī revisionist literature on Ḥusayn. Works under this heading are few and far between, especially when compared with the Sunnī literature. One reason for this, as was hinted before, is the enormity of the doctrinal problems facing the Shī‘ī revisionists, with the result that any heterodoxy in Shī‘īsm has far greater ideological ramifications than in Sunnīsm. In any event, of the few works that have appeared so far the most daring and the most influential has been Shahīd-ijāvīd (‘The Immortal Martyr’) by Ni‘matullāh Ṣāliḥī Najaf-ābādī, a religious scholar from the holy city of Qum. Although the book immediately became the object of a heated controversy among religious circles after its publication in 1968, it went largely unnoticed by the secular intelligentsia, a fact which highlights the dichotomy in Iran’s cultural life at the time. But it attracted a great deal of publicity during the uproar provoked in Iran in the spring of 1976 by the murder of a religious figure in Iṣfahān, Shams-Abādī, whose alleged murderers were said to be advocates of the author’s thesis. The introduction to the book by the Āyatullāh Ḥusayn ‘Alī Muntaẓirī, now designated as Khumaynī’s successor, vouches for the militant Shī‘ī approval of its contents.

What essentially differentiates ‘The Immortal Martyr’ from the works we have considered so far, and from other Shī‘ī writings on the subject, is its semi-scholarly methodology. True, like the bulk of the committed literature on Islam, the book has been written in a style more apposite to political polemics. But it works out its arguments through a detailed, critical analysis of the orthodox sources. Indeed, the underlying notion of all the author’s arguments is that a proper understanding of the Shī‘ī history is possible only when all its received dogmas are subjected to a thorough reappraisal. He thus challenges and puts to the test many a familiar anecdote in an attempt to prove the utter unreliability of conventional narratives about Ḥusayn, particularly Ḥusayn Kāshifī’s Rawḍat ash-shuhada’, Majlisī’s account in his Biḥār al-anwār, Ibn Ṭāwūs’s Luhūf, and the Persian translation of Kitāb al-futūḥ by the pro-Shī‘ī Ibn A‘tham. Conversely, he does not shy away from freely seeking evidence, in confirmation of his ideas, from Sunnī authorities such as Ṭabarī, Ibn al-Athīr, Ibn Kathīr and Ibn Asākir, whose statements are otherwise treated with the utmost caution by the orthodox Shī‘īs.

Najaf-ābādī’s untrammelled approach to historical sources stems from his repeatedly avowed intention of verifying every episode in the drama on the touchstone of what he himself calls ‘the ordinary causes, and the natural course of events’,⁶⁹ which is presumably his chosen term for rational guidelines of research. He follows these guidelines so far as they help him to demystify the drama, to purge it of all the supernatural, romantic and exaggerated versions of events. But he never allows them to impair his vision of Ḥusayn as a hero who combined readiness for self-sacrifice with foresight and political wisdom.

Starting from these premises, he aims at refuting the views of two groups: first those Sunnī critics like al-Khaṭīb, Ṭanṭāwī and Najjār, who, in the footsteps of Ibn al-‘Arabī, disparage Ḥusayn’s revolt as an improvident act, and a challenge to legitimate authority; second, those Shī‘ī writers who believe that Ḥusayn’s actions, having been ordained by the divine will, and informed by a knowledge exclusive to the Imāms (‘ilm-i imām) can be neither fully comprehended, nor imitated as an example of political behaviour by ordinary mortals.

It is, however, to the rejection of the latter view that the greater part of his book is devoted. He says in the preface that ever since his youth he was tormented by a glaring contradiction in the popular narratives of the drama: if Ḥusayn did possess the prescience that all Shī‘ī Imāms are believed to possess by virtue of their divinely inspired knowledge, why did he deliberately choose a course of action leading to his and his family’s destruction?⁷⁰ Such a suicidal venture becomes all the more incomprehensible when one remembers that the Muslim community at the time was in dire need of the leadership of the members of the Prophet’s family. Najaf-ābādī’s dilemma in his younger days thus seems superficially to have been the same as that faced by Māzinī. But, being the product of a Shī‘ī environment, his method of solving the dilemma has been different. Contrary to Māzinī, and indeed to the entire Shī‘ī consensus, he starts off by questioning the very belief in Ḥusayn’s foreknowledge of his fate. He does this not by openly disputing the Shī‘ī theological dogma on the Imāms’ prescience, but through exposing the absurdity of some of the popular stories about Ḥusayn’s foreknowledge. There are specifically seven such stories that he selects for repudiation, but here we summarise only three of them, and his arguments against them, by way of illustration.

The first story has been related by the tenth-century historian Ibn A‘tham: after refusing to pay homage of Yazīd in Medina, Ḥusayn visited the Prophet’s grave for two consecutive nights. On the second night, he saw the Prophet in a dream, telling him about his impending martyrdom. When Ḥusayn asked the Prophet to take him to his grave, the Prophet answered: ‘You have no choice but to remain in the world to become a martyr.’ Other Shī‘ī chroniclers of the Karbalā’ tragedy, including Kāshifī, have quoted this story either directly from Ibn A‘tham, or from unnamed sources. In disproving this story, Najaf-ābādī deems it unnecessary to consider whether dreams, even by the Imāms, can serve as rational proofs of historical claims. Instead, he concentrates on discussing whether the fact of Ḥusayn’s dreaming in the way alleged in the story could have taken place at all. His research shows that eleven authoritative Sunnī and Shī‘ī historians, including Ṭabarī, Ibn al-Athīr, Dinawarī, Shaykh Mufīd and Ṭabarsī, report that Ḥusayn stayed only one night in Medina after meeting the governor; some historians like Ya‘qūbī, Ibn ‘Asākir and Ibn Abd al-Barr even say that he left Medina on the same evening. So it is highly doubtful, concludes Najaf-ābādī, that Ḥusayn could have seen the dream in question, which is claimed to have taken place on the second night.⁷¹

The second story is traced back to Ibn Ṭāwūs’s Luhūf. Here Ḥusayn’s brother Muḥammad Ibn Ḥanafiyyah is reported to have heard from Ḥusayn, before the latter’s departure from Mecca for Kūfah, that the Prophet had once told him (Ḥusayn) in a dream: ‘Go forth [to Kūfah]. God has willed to see you killed.’ The author has two objections to this story, one historical or factual, the other rational. The historical objection is that according to Ṭabarī and Ibn Qūlūyah, at the time of Ḥusayn’s departure from Mecca for Kūfah, Ibn Ḥanafiyyah was in Medina, not Mecca. Besides, none of the outstanding Muslim historians and traditionists, whether Sunnī or Shī‘ī, mentions this story at all. The rational objection is that why should God want to see Ḥusayn killed in that gruesome manner? The death of Ḥusayn was a mortal blow to Islam, and especially to the young Shī‘ī community. It was perfectly logical for Yazīd or Ibn Zīyād to wish such a disaster on Islam and Shī‘īsm, but not for God. One conceivably logical purpose of God in decreeing Ḥusayn’s martyrdom is – as was suggested by Māzinī – the ultimate demeaning of Yazīd: Ḥusayn allowed himself to be killed, at the behest of God, so that his death would arouse popular resentment against Yazīd. But the author dismisses this supposition in the light of the controversial Qur’ānic verse: ‘Do not throw yourselves into death with your own hands.’ Just as it is a sin to kill the innocent, it is equally a sin to allow oneself to be killed, particularly in the case of an Imām, who is believed to be impeccable and infallible. Even the Qur’ānic verses on the jihād enjoin the Muslims primarily to kill the infidel and not to be killed, although those who get killed are entitled to the same reward as that conferred on those who kill.⁷²

Finally, there is the story told by Abū Ja‘far Ṭabarī, quoting a Sunnī narrator, Sufyān Ibn Wakī‘, to the effect that before leaving Medina for Kūfah, Ḥusayn was met by two men who offered him their help. Thereupon the Imām pointed to the sky, whence innumerable angels descended; he then said that he could always call on those angels to help him. But he knew that it was useless, since Karbalā’ was to be the place where he, together with the members of his family and his companions, would perish, all except his son ‘Alī.⁷³ But this story is also considered worthless because no less than ten of Ḥusayn’s companions did survive the Karbalā’ massacre, and it was through them that the Muslims came to know the full account of what had happened.⁷⁴

Although Najaf-ābādī thus succeeds in demolishing much of the authority of secondary Shī‘ī traditions about Ḥusayn’s foreknowledge of his martyrdom, his position is plainly vulnerable because of his refusal, perhaps deliberate, to come face to face with first-hand Shī‘ī sources on the subject, namely the great compendia of Kulaynī, Ṭūsī and Shaykh Ṣadūq, which abound in the ḥadīths confirming the Imāms’ divinely inspired knowledge ‘of the past, present and future affairs’.⁷⁵ But the author’s main intention in discrediting the secondary traditions is not so much to rebut the dogma on the Imāms’ prescience as to pave the way for the presentation of his thesis on the uprising itself. Here his difference with the Sunnī modernists is that he does not see the uprising in idealistic perspectives at all. He maintains that Ḥusayn began his movement neither to fulfil his grandfather’s forebodings, nor in a reckless mood of defiance, but as a wholly rational and fairly well-planned attempt at overthrowing Yazīd. Political circumstances at the outset looked promising: Yazīd’s regime was very unpopular, and the Kufans had rallied to the ‘Alīd cause. He himself was sacredly bound, as an Imām, not to condone an unjust and impious government. Motivated thus by a combination of political and religious considerations to start his rebellion, he took all the precautions that a responsible political leader should take before embarking on a momentous enterprise. The trepidations he felt are shown not only by his decision to send Muslim to Kūfah, but also by the doubts that invaded his mind after he heard the news of Muslim’s death. From that moment onwards, his actions were purely in self-defence, and should a fortifori be free from any reproach of precipitance. So the collapse of the rebellion was entirely due to objective, rational causes, with no room left for the vagaries of supernatural powers.⁷⁶

As can be readily seen, the principal aim of the ‘Immortal Martyr’ is the politicisation of an aspect of the Shī‘ī Imāmology which until recent times was generally interpreted in mystical, lyrical and emotional terms. The result has been a cautious, but growing tendency among the Shī‘ī militants to treat the drama of Karbalā’ as an essentially human tragedy, and concurrently, to avoid regarding Ḥusayn’s heroism as a unique and inimitable event in history, above the capacity of the common run of human beings. This tendency is epitomised by Khumaynī, who, perhaps more than any other Shī‘ī theologian of comparable stature, has used the memory of Karbalā’ with an acute sense of political urgency. ‘It was’, he says in his Wilāyat-i faqīh (‘The Guardianship of the Jurisconsult’), ‘to prevent the establishment of monarchy and hereditary succession that Ḥusayn revolted and became a martyr. It was for refusing to succumb to Yazīd’s hereditary succession and to recognise his kingship that Ḥusayn revolted, and called all Muslims to rebellion.’ Khumaynī likewise calls upon Iranian Muslims ‘to create an ‘Āshūrā’ in their struggle for launching an Islamic state.’⁷⁷

The orthodox religious hierarchy in Iran, however, received Najaf-ābādī’s book in a different spirit. They took particular exception to two features of his work: first, his over-reliance on non-Shī‘ī sources, and his failure to abide by the rule of tawthīq, namely verifying the accuracy and reliability of historical accounts in accordance with Shī‘ī criteria; second, his denial of the Imām’s prescience, with its clear threat to the doctrine of the Imāms’ divinely inspired knowledge, and indeed to the entire edifice of the Shī‘ī theory of the Imāmate. This soon led to an acrimonious debate on a host of issues not directly connected with the drama itself, such as the attributes of the Imāms, the nature of their knowledge, the scope left for human will by divine predestination, and the rational limits of self-sacrifice in the fulfilment of religious duties. But these are issued which should be discussed on another occasion.⁷⁸

5 Aspects of Shī‘ī modernism