God and Man in Tehran: Contending Visions of the Divine from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic 9780231541084

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
On Transliteration and Dates
ONE. O God, O Heaven, O Nature
TWO. Mediatory Theology and Its Discontents
THREE. God with Us
FOUR. The Law: God’s and Man’s
FIVE. Falsafeh and the Madraseh
SIX. Sufism Returns, and with a Vengeance
SEVEN. Varieties of Skeptical Expression
Appendix
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

God and Man in Tehran

GOD and MAN in TEHRAN Contending Visions of the Divine from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic

HOSSEIN KAMALY

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup​­.columbia​­.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kamaly, Hossein, author. Title: God and man in Tehran : contending visions of the divine from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic / Hossein Kamaly. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017031095 | ISBN 9780231176828 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541084 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: God (Islam) | Tehran (Iran)—History. Classification: LCC BP166.2 .K225 2017 | DDC 202/.11095525—dc23 LC record available at https:​­//lccn​­.loc​­.gov​­/2017031095

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher Cover image: © Kamyar Adl / Alamy Stock Photo

For my family Mojdeh, Mohammad, Mitra, and Reza With love

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xv On Transliteration and Dates xvii ONE O God, O Heaven, O Nature 1 TWO Mediatory Theology and Its Discontents 29 THREE God with Us 64 FOUR The Law: God’s and Man’s 86 FIVE Falsafeh and the Madraseh 110 SIX Sufism Returns, and with a Vengeance 145 SEVEN Varieties of Skeptical Expression 176 Appendix 191

[ vii ]

C ontents

Notes 193 References 197 Index 221

[ viii ]

Preface

God, a word everyone knows, but one that carries different meanings for different people. For believers, it defines the ultimate concern. Nonbelievers, skeptics, agnostics, atheists, and others also employ the word, sometimes far less reverently, in exclamations of surprise or cries of despair. Sometimes this term refers to the object of faith, the fount of values, or even the very ground of being. The present book surveys the terrain of the discourse on God as it has emerged and continues to evolve in Tehran, the capital of Iran, from the 1800s until now. For generations, God-related ideas and practices have intersected in expressions of shared faiths, forms of worship, charity, and service, bringing disparate peoples eye to eye and side by side. At the same time, conflicting perceptions of God and religion have split the people across fissures of creed, belief, class, gender, and other presumed hierarchies. Exploring these ideas provides a fresh perspective on social and intellectual history. Iran’s 1979 revolution rendered trite any proclamations that you cannot understand that country, and in fact the region, if you do not take religion into account. Four decades later the challenging question lingers: How and why did a rapidly Westernizing, outwardly secular nation take such a sudden reversal in the name of Islam? Many observers have commented on the roots and results of that seemingly unlikely, even unthinkable, turn from the king’s crown to the Imam’s turban, an untimely act of claiming the mantle of divine authority in the modern age (Amir-Arjomand 1988; Keddie 1983, [ ix ]

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2006; Kurzman 2004; Mottahedeh 1985). Alarmed by the rise of various forms of religious-political activism around the world in recent decades, some have come to see Iran’s Islamic Revolution as the usher of a new global age of theological politics and advancing worldly agendas in the name of God. Without commenting on the current international situation or pretending to address practical political concerns about Iran, this book adopts a rather different perspective, focusing on intellectual ferment in one Iranian city: Tehran. Tehran is one of the most densely populated metropolitan centers in the world today, sleeping over eight million souls each night. The city proper stretches seventeen miles north to south and sixteen miles east to west (Madanipour 1998). During work hours, hundreds of thousands of people commute to the heart of this urban colossus. Students, nurses, vendors, and laborers shuttle back and forth from the edge cities of Karaj, Varamin, and Shahr-e-Rey, or the more distant satellite towns of Malard, Meygun, and Robat-Karim. Tens of thousands more people travel a few times per week the hundred miles to Tehran from Arak, Qazvin, and Qom. As the capital of an internationally visible nation-state with enormous economic prospects and a rich cultural currency, the capital of Iran draws visitors from all over the world. Compared with neighboring Turkey’s Istanbul or Egypt’s Cairo, Iran’s capital bloomed late. The thirteenth-century geographer Yāqūt mentions Ṭihrān as a nondescript hamlet near the ruins of the once-glorious ancient city of Ray or Raga.1 No major urban development was yet in sight when ĀġāMoḥammad Khan (d. 1797), a warlord from the Turkic Qajar clan, encamped there in the 1780s. Beckoned by tribal confederates, the Turkic Afshar and Qiliç clans in nearby territories (Khazeni 2009), the Qajar chieftain crowned himself in Tehran, had coins minted, and proclaimed his divinely ordained authority by drawing on the Shia expectations of messianic deliverance (Soucek 2001). Vast pasturelands and abundant water sources of the southern piedmont of the Alborz mountain range, lying in the shadow of the perennially snowcapped Mount Damavand, added to the place’s appeal. Seven Qajar monarchs reigned there for more than a century: Āġā-Moḥammad Khan (r. 1789–1797), Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah (r. 1797–1834), Moḥammad Shah (r. 1834– 1848), Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (r. 1848–1896), Możaffar-al-Dīn Shah (r. 1896–1907), Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah (r. 1907–1911), and Aḥmad Shah (r. 1911–1925). [x]

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Many of the issues related to the theme of this book still carry the marks of the not-so-distant past when Tehran served as capital of the Qajar dynasty, with the king and his court as well as the men of religious learning, the ʿolamā, at the center, along with throngs of merchants, artisans, and peasants on the periphery. The Pahlavi dynasty that abrogated Qajar rule in 1925 patterned itself as its opposite. While keeping the capital in Tehran, Reẓā Shah (r. 1925–1941) and his son Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah (r. 1941–1979) dedicated their efforts to rapidly modernizing the city—revamping the legal, educational, health, and banking systems; constructing new roads, railways, and airways; building factories; and promoting a panoply of service industries—from chain stores to cinemas and nightclubs. Toppling the royal throne in 1979, the leader of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Rūḥullāḥ Khomeini (ca. 1900–1989), resolved to establish the rule of God on earth, negating and denigrating at every step what he called the ungodly (ṭāġūtī) ways of the Pahlavis. In retrospect, continuities have been no less significant than changes. The Islamic Republic has revived, rehabilitated, or re­ invented many Qajar-era traditions, customs, and values that hinged on the prominence of the ʿolamā. Meanwhile, the process of nation-state building reached its apogee—politically as well as ideologically—not merely as an upshot of revolutionary mass mobilization but even more effectively in the light of intensified national solidarity galvanized by the long Iran–Iraq War (1980–1989). After the bittersweet ending of that war, waves of economic, fiscal, political, social, and cultural revisionism have followed, bringing about a new world. As fragile and unstructured as it may still be, Tehrani civil society has grown and is becoming freer from the fetters of state control. At the core of these developments, there are deep-rooted notions about God, man, nature, and history. This book traces some of those roots. I cannot overstress the point that the explorations presented in this book are historical, not theological, metaphysical, or religious, in both purview and purpose. The objective is neither to prove any theological propositions nor to disprove any metaphysical principles; neither to discover and expose the existence or nonexistence of primary truths or immutable essences nor to justify the dogmatic origins of concepts or delineate their consequences. Here is a disclaimer: Neither a polemic nor an apology, this inquiry does not settle age-old philosophical, theological, or religious scores. Rather, my goal here is to illustrate how certain ideas have been made, [ xi ]

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unmade, and remade within the geographic and historical confines of the city of Tehran. Navigating through a sea of entrenched traditions, disciplines, and genres, distilling into words some major tides of thought and practice, this book focuses on the variety of views on God and man in Tehran. This is a case of historically contested concepts. The framework builds on a variation of earlier analyses of “essentially contested concepts,” but without affirming or denying whether the concepts under discussion truly possess essences (Clarke 1979; Gallie 1964; Ruben 2010). In the pages that follow, several positions will be framed successively in seven chapters. These views are interrelated in different ways, sometimes imbricating and convergent, sometimes discordant and diffusive, but always mirroring the concrete conditions that engender and sustain them. What Tehranis have believed or disbelieved reflects the ideals, anxieties, ambiguities, and ironies built or transpierced into their history. Chapter 1 surveys the impact of modern natural science on related conceptions of reason, law, religion, and art. Introducing the term “mediatory theology” as a comparative rubric, chapter 2 discusses the historical unfolding of pertinent debates on the agentive relationship between God and the world. Besides the dominant majority Shia Muslim population of the city, the views of other faith groups inform this presentation—the thousands of Armenian and Assyrian Christians, Jews, Sunni Muslims, Zoroastrians, Bahais, and the Ahl-e Ḥaq (People of the Truth). Chapter 3 continues with enumerating some God-oriented beliefs and practices that shaped the quotidian routines of ordinary women and men in Tehran. Of course, the intellectual elite often opined that the common folks’ understandings of the real issues involved were inadequate, quaint, or outright incoherent. The following four chapters outline some aspects of more theoretically systematic disciplines that define the turfs of the expert elite. First comes an elaboration on perceived relations between the law of God and man-made legislation in chapter 4. As early as the 1810s, Tehran began to have religious madrasehs—educational institutions for the ʿolamā. While law and jurisprudence formed the core of the curriculum in madrasehs, there was also room for metaphysical knowledge, or madraseh philosophy. This is the topic of chapter 5. Then chapter 6 follows with an overview of the development of some mystical ideas associated with Sufism. Finally, chapter 7 turns to religious skepticism and some other more recent theological [ xii ]

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developments. Ever since Tehran first rose to prominence, people of diverse walks of life embraced myriad beliefs about God. Where some stood unshakable in their convictions, others wavered in theirs. Looking at the expressions of theological skepticism, revisionism, and reformism, the last chapter draws attention to the discursive negative space that surrounds the many views encountered in the preceding ones. Relying on a wide array of sources, including many previously ignored or marginalized texts, this book aims to situate the historically contested idea of God directly amid key developments in Iranian history over the past two centuries. The chapters interweave narratives of the events, the contents of documents, the profiles of individuals, and activities of institutions that together shaped the lives of Tehranis. This exploration of God and man in Tehran, from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic, takes account of these elements together. However, it should be emphasized, at the risk of repetition, that the present inquiry focuses principally on Tehran, resisting the temptation to extrapolate to other cities, and avoiding the claim to be an intellectual history of modern Iran by any stretch.2 Wherever possible, I will refer to material available in English and to recent scholarship. On a handful of occasions, writings in other European languages are cited for clarification. Referencing sources in Persian and Arabic was inevitable, mainly because most of the primary sources drawn on remain untranslated and because secondary research in those languages ought to be acknowledged properly and explicitly. It goes without saying that this relatively short book could not be exhaustive. It leaves out a great number of events, individuals, and works. And since the sources do not always allow us to answer questions they were not written to answer, this should not be surprising. There is a great deal that remains to be explored. At best, this book can serve as an introduction to the making, unmaking, and remaking of historically contested views on God in Tehran, observing how some humans have treated each other and made a mark on the world, all in the name of God.

[ xiii ]

Acknowledgments

I take special pleasure in thanking Richard Bulliet, who originally suggested that I write this book and who read and commented on it from the beginning to the end. I similarly acknowledge my debt to Ramzi Roughi’s unwavering friendship. I also thank friends and colleagues who took the time to read parts of the manuscript and suggested important improvements. These are Paul Andrews, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Sajjad Rizvi, and Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi. My thanks are due to Columbia University Press, especially Anne Routon and Miriam Grossman. My gratitude to Mitra, Mojdeh, Mohammad, and Reza goes beyond words.

[ xv ]

On Transliteration and Dates

Names of individuals and locations that are commonly anglicized appear without transliteration. In rendering other Persian or Persianized names or phrases into roman characters, the system of transliteration employed is that of the Encyclopedia Iranica (EIr), the authoritative academic reference work on Iran. Therefore, I use Qom, not Qumm, for the shrine city near Tehran, and madraseh instead of madrasah. There are two exceptions. First, I use ż for ‫ ظ‬and ẓ for ‫ض‬. Second, to lessen visual clutter, I drop the final hamzeh wherever possible: thus ʿolamā instead of ʿulamāʾ, and māvarā instead of mā-warāʾ. Similarly, avoiding the intricacies of usage in Arabic and Persian, the word Shia is used here as a singular noun as well as an adjective in English. However, in keeping with common Tehrani vernacular and in favor of simplification, the noun and its qualifier are sometimes merged into one word, omitting the conjoining -e (eẓāfeh). Examples include Bāġ-Shāh instead of Bāġ-e Shāh, Sūr-Esrāfīl instead of Sūr-e Esrāfīl, and Amīr-Kabīr instead of Amīr-e Kabīr. In transliterating strictly Arabic terminology, the conventions of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies are followed instead of EIr, but still with the first exception noted above. Occasional inconsistencies may remain. Dates are consistently given according to the Common Era calendar.

[ xvii ]

God and Man in Tehran

ONE

O God, O Heaven, O Nature

FOR THE GENERATION coming of age in Tehran during the opening decades of the twentieth century, it was a universally acknowledged fact that God exists. While the existence of the divine as a transcendental person or a metaphysical principle remained uncontested, the content of this proposition underwent a sea change during the course of the preceding century.1 As society changed, views on God and man changed as well. Part of this change derived from a shift in perspective on nature. This chapter explores how a deep-rooted negative and derogatory conception of nature gradually gave way to a positive and celebratory one based on modern science. I capitalize the first letter of the word “Nature” from here on out to emphasize the universalizing claims that accompanied the new way of thinking about this concept. The idea of Nature as an all-encompassing universe, a unified realm that has uniform inviolable laws, evolved hand in hand with a set of related concepts—law, order, reality, and reason. A popular song that circulated on peoples’ tongues in Tehran of the mid1920s hints at the transformation that had surfaced in the understanding of Nature, God, and the human condition. In 1924 a nineteen-year-old singer named Qamar-al-Molūk Vazīri (1905–1959) stepped onto the stage of the performance hall at the Grand Hotel, a European-style entertainment venue newly built on Lālehzār Street, the capital’s up-and-coming bohemian neighborhood (Khaleqi 1994, 83–86; Shahri 1997, 301–20). Her sensuous looks and sonorous voice, coupled with the lyrics, left the audience spellbound: [1]

O G od , O H eaven , O N ature

O God, O Heaven, O Nature! Replace our pitch-black night with shining dawn.

Speaking to and through the proverbial bird, a nightingale or a dove in classical Persian poetry, the lyricist goes on to bemoan that a cruel trapper had trampled on its nest and disintegrated it to the wind. The constitutionalist poet Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār (1886–1951) had scribed the lyrics to Qamar’s song (Bahār 1956, 2:524f). It is notable that the poem birthing the lyrics was composed years earlier, during the so-called Minor Despotism, the dark years, 1907–1909, when the tyrant Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah, the sixth of the Qajar monarchs, had crushed the constitutionalists and bombarded the building of the parliament into ashes. The poem had an immediate relevance. Since its premier by Qamar, Bahār’s “Ode to the Morning Bird” has remained popular with performers and audiences beyond Tehran. Multiple musical releases abound on the market, and the demand for old and new performances has kept pace. Wherever the song is played, people join in belting out the refrain: “O God, O Heaven, O Nature.” The poem’s words and their overtones of political protest still resonate: O morning bird, sing and stir my sorrow. Blow your fiery sigh and break this cage. O fettered nightingale, rise and rejoice! Sing the song of freedom for all mankind, May your enchanted breath enliven this inert clay!

Later, Qamar would reminisce about the day she first cantillated this poem—how her big black eyes stared into the crowd gathered on Lālehzār, how her heart throbbed as she sashayed beneath the dazzling tiara she wore atop her done-up hair, how some onlookers glared at and chided her, a provincial girl, for appearing unveiled in public, while others raptly admired her charms (Shahri 1997, 2:276–89). Qamar’s dolled-up appearance provoked more controversy than her call to God, Heaven, and Nature in succession, as if they were somehow, or ought to be, interchangeable. Even a couple of generations earlier, the insinuation would have been complete sacrilege, but to those who heard it directly from the lips of their favorite singer, their “singing dove of Nature,” it rang innocent. [2]

O G od , O H eaven , O N ature

The poet Bahār may have juxtaposed God, Heaven, and Nature with less of an intention to make a theological statement than to observe the requirements of meter and cadence in his verse. Still, the poem as passionately sung by a woman in public signaled the striking shifts in social mores and theological mindsets that had occurred within a generation or two. At the turn of the twentieth century, the belief that supplicating Nature was on par with supplicating God and that knowing Nature was akin to knowing God was becoming more commonplace. In classical Persian literature, the motif of Heaven frequently recurs as a metonymic reference to God. Put simply, Heaven mediates and projects God’s will and power. It turns the wheel of fortune, opens doors, or forecloses opportunities. Day after day, night after night, in its motion, Heaven metes out divinely ordained fates. As the fourteenth-century poet Ḥāfeż wrote: I can only wish for Heaven to pick one of these options: Turn you loyal to me, promise to unite us, or make your chaperon disappear. (Ḥāfeż, Dīvan, ghazal 187)

Bahār’s usage of the term in his “Ode to the Morning Bird” aligns with the classical expectations from Heaven as seen in Ḥāfeż and others. By contrast, the idea of Nature, or the abode of Nature, which also appears in classical Persian and Arabic sources, in poetry and prose, hardly stands on par with Heaven, let alone God. More often, the lowly, dark, and inert abode of Nature was the opposite of the lofty, luminous, and lively Heaven, which was also believed to be somehow capable of acting on God’s behalf—giving things and taking them away. Again, in the words of Ḥāfeż: Trapped in the abode of Nature as you are, How could you ever hope to find your way to the right path? (Ḥāfeż, Dīvan, ghazal 144)

And as the Qajar-era poet Qāʾānī (1808–1854) similarly wondered: I am fed up with the avarice of picking grains in the trap of Nature I am tired of sniffing around the corpse of worldliness like a dog. (Qāʾānī, Dīvan, qaṣīdeh 17) [3]

O G od , O H eaven , O N ature

The elevation of Nature, as in Bahār’s “Ode to the Morning Bird,” contrasts with the inferior status ascribed to it by such spokesmen of the classical view as Qāʾānī and Ḥāfeż. This new usage signals a sea change in mentality. Seldom before was Nature conceived in such all-encompassing terms, and hardly ever had such a level of autonomy and agency been projected onto it in Persian writings. This change deserves closer study. Nature strikes a different character in other systems of knowledge that were engaged in Tehran as late as the nineteenth century. For example, doctrinal theology, known as kalām, counted Nature simply as part of God’s temporal creation (muḥdaṡ). Madraseh philosophy, the metaphysical discipline classically taught in madrasehs, categorized objects and phenomena such as fire, rocks, trees, and animals by their different essences or natures, in the plural. For instance, all trees have roots and all rocks are essentially solid. Fire would not be fire without being burning hot, and man would be a mere brute without language and reason—by nature. Madraseh philosophy does not use a unified concept of Nature but holds that different essential properties define a multitude of natures, arranged into hierarchies according to genera and differentia. Elements of kalām teachings and madraseh philosophy are selectively incorporated into Sufism, the discursive pursuit of mystical truths. In the words of a nineteenth-century Sufi poet ForūġīBasṭāmī (1798–1857), who enjoyed cordial ties to the monarch Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah, Step outside the murky well of Nature one night And behold that the clarity of Heaven reflects that of our inner selves. (ForūġīBasṭāmī, Dīvan, ghazal 77)

It squares that kalām theologians, madraseh philosophers, and the Sufis agreed on man’s moral imperative—escape the turbidity of Nature, ascend to Heaven, and then gravitate ever closer to God (Kruk 1996; Sabzavārī 1868). Nature was coextensive with the “realm of the elements,” where various natures exist alongside one another. Again, Sufis, kalām experts, and madraseh philosophers classically agreed that the realm of the elements merely comprised a small and rather inferior part of the much larger “realm of creation.” Their shared perspective regarded the latter realm as containing myriad other beings that were non-elemental in their constitution—angels, demons, and the normally invisible creatures called jinns. Souls [4]

O G od , O H eaven , O N ature

and intellects also belonged in this world. This perspective differs from the modern idea of Nature that was gaining ground in Tehran by the late nineteenth century. The emergence of the modern idea of Nature in the Qajar capital entailed a rethinking of the status of the so-called non-elemental beings and such phenomena as miracles. Gradually, an important distinction transpired between what should be viewed as natural and what should be viewed as supernatural—the former correlated with the rational, the legal, and the just; the latter, foreshadowed by ambivalence, was seen to be nonrational or extrarational and sometimes dismissed as merely irrational and sheer superstition. Polarizing debates unfurled about supernatural notions such as the possibility of miracles, the existence of empirically unverifiable forces, and the manner or extent of divine intervention in Nature. Viewing man and society as subjects of natural explanation and scientific exploration sometimes clashed with staid religious doctrines. Thus, the broader question about the relationship between science and religion quickly earned an unprecedented significance. Already during the second half of the nineteenth century in Tehran, natural science was seen as a force for the disenchantment of the world. In its modern sense, Nature harbors little room for anything essentially nonmaterial or intrinsically unseen. The very existence of such is either denied or skeptically excluded from the domain of natural inquiry. Hence, both modern science and natural scientific theories leave angels and souls out of their purview. At even their strongest manifestation, angels and souls are relegated to the classification of the supernatural or the paranormal—along with ghosts, spirits, sprites, and fairies. More commonly, the advocates of Nature simply dismiss angels, souls, and other such entities as superstitious, figments of an overactive imagination. Obviously, the theological stakes are high. During the nineteenth century, the whirlwinds of change tore old views up from the roots. Novel objects, products, and ideas arrived across the networks of commerce and piled up in Tehran’s doorway (Green 2009, 2010). They came from India, Russia, Turkey, Europe, and from as far away as the United States and Japan. Along with the boxes of Ceylonese tea, cartons of chinaware, and packages of pocket watches and fountain pens arrived parcels of letters, newspapers, pamphlets, and books—printed matter for a world-curious, rapidly expanding reading market. Tehran’s fledgling postal [5]

O G od , O H eaven , O N ature

service provided access to vast exchange networks. On the Caspian Sea, the steamers of the Russian Kavkaz-Merkur Company (est. 1861) ran a weekly cargo and biweekly mail service between Russian and Persian ports. By 1874 ships operated by the British India Steam Navigation Company provided weekly mail and cargo service between Bushehr in the Persian Gulf and the seaports of Bombay and Karachi in colonial India (Gilbar 1979, esp. 207). The palace intellectuals and their followers outside the court insisted on urgently redressing what they saw as the nation’s endemic decline and often called for catching up with European civilization. They did their best to make the Qajar capital look like what they perceived to be a shining progressive city. In the words of the resident American ambassador in Tehran (1883): “No city in the east after Canton, Bombay, Calcutta, and Constantinople surpasses it in appearance of vitality. The number of carriages owned by Persian and European gentlemen is nearly 500, all imported. Teheran also contains a European bakery, a European carriage maker . . . several town clocks . . . besides other evidences of a progressive tendency” (quoted in Balaghi 2008, 1). Of course, Tehran offered more than phaetons, French pastries, clock towers, and sundry novelties that would catch the eye of a mere outsider. Most importantly, new ideas were in ferment, forever changing the city’s intellectual landscape. Printed materials of unprecedented volume had come into circulation for Tehran’s rapidly expanding reading market. In particular, newspapers introduced novel questions and helped disseminate new knowledge systems. Ideas traveled through networks of commerce, fueling debates on the ideas of nature, reason, and law. The sum effect of colonial importation was not always progressive, positive, or without societal backlash. The means to replicate clocks and fountain pens, given their intricacies, were beyond the reach of local artisans, and domestically manufactured lamps, mirrors, and armoires often lacked the functionality of imported ones. To some Tehranis, it appeared natural to see higher quality objects as emblems of a superior way of life. They believed that European ideas and ideologies were to be coveted and coopted with as much fervor as artifacts. Many of those who held such an opinion served the Qajar court as high-ranking administrators and diplomats. I call them the palace intellectuals. They believed that it was the Europeans’ mastery over Nature that had allowed European civilization to progress [6]

O G od , O H eaven , O N ature

and ascend. To be civilized, they concluded, was to emulate Europe. They were convinced that Europe’s control of wealth and power was constructed from a natural substratum of scientific knowledge and reason. And, surely, they insisted, God wholly approved of mankind’s unraveling of Nature’s secrets. And to be civilized, Nature must be controlled. The palace intellectuals and their supporters appear to have been numb to some of the ethical implications of what they admired as civilization. The rapacity of European colonialism either went unnoticed or failed to raise emotion and stir scruples among them. The atrocities perpetrated by the soi-disant enlightened Frenchmen and Belgians in Africa, the appalling conduct of the British in India, and the barbarity displayed by the Russians under successive tsars during the prolonged Caucasian War (1817–1864) did not even register within the ranks of Francophile, Anglophile, and Russophile palace intellectuals. The machine-like precision with which the East India Company and, later, the British Raj operated in India in maximizing their profits before and after the 1857 rebellion was deemed natural and rational (Gubbins 1858). To the palace intellectuals, following the Europeans in their every step or stomp was a necessity of progress, a natural mandate. Mastery over Nature constituted the cornerstone of progress. The implicit argument that can be extruded from this is that God’s will manifested in all that was natural, and, therefore, gaining control over Nature, as it was believed the Europeans had, was an accomplishment of divine height. A corollary of this was that Nature itself embodies and manifests divine wisdom and power in its design. Far from Tehran, the cause of locating God in Nature and Nature in God found one of its earliest Muslim proponents in colonial India, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), from Delhi. Sir Syed was an advocate for Islam’s modernist reform and revision. Enviously admiring British supremacy, he sided with the victors politically, especially after they had quashed the socalled Sepoy Revolt in 1857 (Malik 1980; Troll 1978). Sir Syed had no formal philosophical education, but that never stopped him from sounding philosophical. Out of his admiration for the natural sciences, he added the word “neyčerī” to the lexicon of his native Urdu language. Derived from the English word “Nature,” the Urdu neyčerī become a key word in Sir Syed’s nomenclature. Somewhat imprecisely, neyčerī means “naturalist,” the possessor of natural science, or master of Nature. Sir Syed urged any fellow Muslims that would listen to become neyčerīs too. To him, neyčerīs were precisely what [7]

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India’s British overlords were, and what progressive Muslims should become. In his enthusiasm, he went so far as to profess that “Allah . . . is a pure and pristine neyčerī” because “Allah did not reveal Himself in any other way but through Nature” (Hameedullah 2004, 25–26). Thus conceived, Nature becomes a metonym for God. This would make sense of the call to God, Heaven, and Nature in Bahār’s “Ode to the Morning Bird.” But it is unlikely that Bahār knew of Sir Syed’s idea, at least not when he composed his poem. The Indian Muslim modernist failed to find a following in Tehran, where contemporaries criticized him, if not for his wayward political loyalties certainly for his ill-conceived intellectual and theological proposals. Most influentially, the renowned Muslim modernist Seyed Jamālal-Dīn Afghani (1838–1897), who did have quite a following in the Qajar capital, thrashed Sir Syed (Keddie 1968; Kedourie 1966; Pakdaman 1969). As a charismatic orator passionately calling for the reawakening of the Muslims, Afghani deployed his formal training in madraseh philosophy to refute the Indian modernist’s attempt to subsume theology in natural science. He faulted the neyčerī doctrine for being theologically naïve and peppered his formal rebuttal with ad hominem vitriol, maligning the neyčerīs, in toto, and especially their leader, as hypocritical, treacherous, corrupt, licentious communists (Abduh 1900; Afghani ca. 1890; Keddie 1968, 132–74, 175–80). But Sir Syed was no communist. Afghani had meant to add “materialist” and “atheist” to his list of invectives but mistook his terminology. More importantly, he misidentified the word neyčerī as a modern-day equivalent of dahrī in classical kalām and madraseh philosophy. He conflated Nature, in its modern sense, with “dahr”—the pre-Islamic notion of infinitely extended time within which material change unfolds. Indeed, the Qurʾān chastises as fools those who say, “There is nothing but our worldly life; [they say] we die, and we live, and nothing but Dahr destroys us” (Q. Jāṡiya 45:24). Classical Muslim heresiographers condemned as dahrīs whoever claimed that the world was eternal, not the temporal creation of God (Ghazzālī ca. 1090s). Such a claim was seen as tantamount to denying the existence of God, the Creator. Now, in his Rebuttal of the Neyčerīs, Afghani charged that Sir Syed “denies divinity and does not believe in the existence of an exalted Creator” (Keddie 1968, esp. 138, and 132–74, 175–80). Inaccurate as it was, applying such a potent label gave Afghani a marked intellectual advantage over his opponent. [8]

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The retrotranslation of the modern concept of Nature into the ancient idea of dahr is significant. It symbolizes a series of nonplussed efforts to explicate modern intellectual challenges in a vocabulary and structure already familiar from the classical heritage. In articulating Victorian-era natural theology in a language resembling classical kalām and madraseh philosophy, Afghani and many others like him tended to implicitly express modern concepts in terms of classical ones that were hardly commensurate with them. Indeed, a conception of Nature more or less aligned with Sir Syed’s neyčerī doctrine already had been making the rounds in Tehran decades before Afghani’s two visits to the Qajar capital. Afghani sojourned in Tehran twice, first from December 1886 to April 1887 and then from November 1889 to January 1891 (Keddie 1972, 271–82, 306–34). A few science-focused books had already appeared that explained physical motion and chemical change not by referencing essences but by citing natural law (Afshar 2002, esp. 98, 100). Revised into textbooks at the Dār-al-Fonūn (Ekhtiar 1994), the training grounds for Qajar palace intellectuals, these translations shaped the outlook of a new crop of reform-minded and modernist palace intellectuals. New ideas about politics, reason, and civilization came hand in hand with new visions of science and Nature. The emergence and evolution of the modern notion of Nature deserves a more thorough examination. Traces of this intellectual development can be discovered in correspondences between certain Qajar palace intellectuals and a contemporary advocate of modernist reforms, Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Āḵundzādeh (1812–1878) (Ādamiyat 1970; Akhundzadeh 1870s, esp. 349–55; and Mojtahedi 1977b). From his base in the Georgian town of Tiflis, 550 miles northwest of Tehran, Āḵundzādeh corresponded with a host of palace intellectuals. Noting his intellectual promise as a child, Āḵundzādeh’s parents and teachers hoped he would one day become, at least, a respectable preacher or, even better, a reputable mollā—a learned member of the ʿolamā. But Āḵundzādeh’s interests shifted away from those of his parents, and his intellectual aspirations were directed elsewhere. After completing his education in modern Russian schools, he became an apprentice translator in the office of the Russian viceroy to the Caucasus. From there, by 1873, he had risen to the rank of colonel in the Russian army. Colonel Āḵundzādeh became an especially strong critic of ideas and practices associated with Islam. [9]

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Āḵundzādeh had visited Tehran as a member of the Russian delegation when Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (r. 1848–1896) acceded to the throne in 1848. A few years later, Āḵundzādeh visited the reformist palace intellectual Mīrzā Ḥossein Khan Sepahsālār (1828–1881) during the latter’s lengthy ambassadorship in Istanbul. Astute as he was, Sepahsālār was not charmed by the man’s enthusiasm. After that, Āḵundzādeh started a series of correspondences and soon hosted elite Tehrani visitors in his lively cosmopolitan Tiflis, showing off the city’s neat architecture and the theater, schools, academies, and publishing houses. For years he also corresponded with the reform-minded and aspiring Qajar prince Jalāl-al-Dīn Mīrzā (1827–1872)—the bookish fiftyfifth son of Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah (Amanat 1999). But, above all, Āḵundzādeh had his highest hopes betrothed to Malkom Khan, whom he had first met in Istanbul in 1863 (Algar 1969, 86–99). Malkom Khan, the self-styled Prince Malkom, was the palace intellectuals’ intellectual (Algar 1973; Mohīt-Ṭabāṭabā’ī 1948). Admiring the progress-oriented civilization of Britain, France, and Russia, Āḵundzādeh regarded himself as a liberal in the mold of David Hume, a philosophe in the mold of Voltaire, a humanist in the mold of Ernest Renan, with the same free spirit as Alexander Pushkin (Mojtahedi 1977b). His writings fall short of supporting his self-image, but Āḵundzādeh’s profligacy compensated for his sketchy knowledge of history, philosophy, and science. He could deliver platitudes with a punch: “The philosophe excels in rational sciences and discerns the causes of things in terms of the law of nature: never believing in extraordinary acts, miracles, or revelation; not falling for magic works, divination . . . alchemical illusions of transforming base metals into higher metals and the like” (Mojtahedi 1977b, 103). Platitudinous perhaps, but Āḵundzādeh’s positions seemed innovative. To wit, regarding causality as the inviolable law of Nature, rejecting the possibility of miracles, and eschewing revelation went against established beliefs. These ideas were known in Tehran years before Sir Syed’s neyčerī doctrine arrived there. It is unclear whether Āḵundzādeh or any of his interlocutors knew of Sir Syed firsthand. However, akin to the latter they seem to have used the phrase “natural law” or “law of nature” to mean the “law of causality” (Mojtahedi 1977b, 105f). It would be plausible that Afghani’s attack on Sir Syed and the neyčerīs also aimed a bolt of warning at the palace intellectuals against turning their ears toward Āḵundzādeh. At least in some of his statements, Āḵundzādeh sounded like a dahrī in the sense that Afghani used the term, stressing the eternity of matter and [ 10 ]

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believing that “the world exists of itself, according to its own laws and within itself” (Algar, “Āḵundzāda,” in EIr). Eager to enlighten his readers, Āḵundzādeh questioned the mechanisms by which God was believed to interact with the world. Through only a secondhand reading of some British empiricists and French positivists, mostly via Russian translations, Āḵundzādeh had arrived at the conviction that what the senses could not perceive was of necessity nonexistent. This was a popular position to hold in nineteenth-century Europe, and not surprisingly he embraced it enthusiastically. However, his defective appreciation of philosophical thinking comes across in his selfrepresentation as a critical-minded heir to generations of Muslim philosophers and mystics whom he incorrectly thought lied about their true beliefs and were merely masked atheists. While Afghani shared the ideals of Qajar palace intellectuals in advancing political, social, and ideational reforms, he found it necessary to admonish them against advocating a dahrī position, à la Sir Syed and Āḵundzādeh, warning that it would be unreasonable, even irrational, to advocate for such an outlook. Pragmatically, he realized how alienating that would be to the ʿolamā and to the majority of the populace. The idea of causation or causality for latter-day dahrīs, as Afghani called them, was by no means new. Both kalām and madraseh philosophy declare God as the first and final cause of creation: God is the Origin and the End— the telos, the ultimate purpose of being. The educated public shared a philosophical view on there being four levels of causal explication: material, formal, efficient, and teleological. For example, man’s material cause was in being made of flesh, blood, and sinew; his formal cause, in having the form, structure, or design of a man, distinguished from that of a tree; man’s efficient cause was defined in terms of his relation to his parents, usually the father; and man’s teleological (or “final”) cause, which explained the purpose of man’s existence, was often understood, particularly in kalām, as servitude to God. The nineteenth century witnessed a modification of the principle of causality and a shift in the perception of Nature derived from that modification. Most significantly, the teleological dimension of this notion was downplayed, not to say dropped. Natural science and the axioms of natural law drew upon a nuanced meaning of causality. Using the classical nomenclature of kalām and madraseh philosophy, one could say that modern naturalistic explanations [ 11 ]

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of motion and change operate strictly in terms of formal, material, and efficient causes, to the detriment of final causes. Negating or neglecting the notion of a final cause or purpose in Nature readily minimized and marginalized the presence of the divine in it. A decisive move was occurring as an alternative or complementary view on the relationship between God and Nature evolved. Rather than viewing God as ultimate end of natural phenomena and their personal overseer in all particular instances, which was familiar from kalām, the universal law of causation was acknowledged as a nonpersonal principle that is manifest in the grand design of Nature. This emerging deism that emphasized a rational nonpersonal source of natural order did not negate the existence of a supreme being. However, unlike the theistic view according to which God exerts full control over His creation, deistic theology regarded Nature as a realm that is not subject to perpetual intervention from without. In modern theological parlance, the doctrinal theology of kalām spoke of God in theistic terms as the personal Creator, the Supreme King, and the ultimate arbiter. By contrast, attributing rational autonomy to Nature marked the beginnings of a modern science-based deism in late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Tehran. Covering the gap between the two views carried on with a manifold baggage that stirred successive crises. The theological transition from theism to deism occurred within a broader political context that made calling on God and Nature sound natural in Bahār’s “Ode to the Morning Bird.” A generation before him, Afghani, most palace intellectuals, and others sought to remedy what they saw as a chronic decadence and decline across the Muslim lands, and Nature seemed to hold the key. In the space between two global headlines, the termination of the Crimean War in February 1856 and the outbreak of the Indian Rebellion in May 1857, the entirety of a decisive conflict between Tehran and London erupted, then ended. It was October of 1856 when Britain declared war on Iran, objecting to its violation of the autonomy of Afghanistan, which acted as a buffer between Russia and British-ruled India. A steam-propelled British armada dispatched from the port of Bombay plunged into the Persian Gulf and bombarded Iranian ports. The devastation was forceful, the surrender inescapable. On December 4 the island of Kharg fell; six days later, the port of Bushehr. The port of Moḥammareh, the future city of Khorramshahr, surrendered on March 6, 1857—in, reportedly, about an hour’s fighting. The fall [ 12 ]

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of the city of Ahvaz, five months to the hour after the war’s start, delivered the coup de grâce. Malkom, the twenty-four-year-old palace intellectual, served on the diplomatic delegation sent to Paris with orders to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain. The delegation tendered official apologies to Britain and the British East India Company, accepting heavy penalties and conceding all Persian claims to Herat (Hurewitz 1972, 1:341–43; Standish 1966). From the British point of view, the Treaty of Paris, hurriedly signed on March 4, 1857, three weeks before the final British cannonballs fell on Ahvaz, was seen, at least by the British, as “the first considerable breach . . . in that crust of exclusiveness which had hitherto isolated Persia from all contact with European civilization” (Rawlinson 1875, 105). The Persian delegation had plied a weak negotiating hand as best they could but still felt devastated. The ambitious Malkom was bitten by the idea of reform (Blunt 1907, 63). To absorb the defeat he had witnessed firsthand, Malkom rationalized that even the greatest kings out of Persia’s ancient past never faced an opponent as formidable as Britain. The old ways were no longer viable, he insisted; exigent times called for gaining the appropriate means. Vapid gravitas and a round belly no longer count as signs of good leadership. These days, [our opponents] build an iron fortress thousands of parasangs away from Iran and send it to raze Moḥammareh in barely two hours. Arabic proverbs and the bones of dead ancestors fail to counter the might of neighboring powers. What we need today is science and [rational] insight. (Malkom 1858, 8–9)

Malkom had seen how Britain had the means to build a steam-propelled battleship and dispatch it to wreak havoc on the Protected Realms of Iran. He was awed at how town after town fell to Britain’s mobile iron fortressof-the-sea. He regarded such displays of might as a reflection of Britain’s unprecedented mastery over Nature, its laws and its forces. He was sure that “science and reason constituted the core of European civilization” (Malkom 1858, 9). As far as Malkom, other palace intellectuals, and a growing parcel of the elite could surmise, it was natural science and modern reason that propelled Britain and the rest of Europe in their progress, bringing economic wealth, military victory, and political ascendancy. [ 13 ]

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In their avidity to catch up with the passing march of history, the Persian delegation to Paris discovered a shortcut. Whereas studying science, economics, philosophy, or law—as taught in European universities at the time— demanded a higher level of commitment than they could muster, the palace intellectuals decided to enlist in a European organization that promised to deliver it all—quickly and efficiently. Becoming aware of the order of Freemasonry, like an earlier generation of diplomats from home, they fantasized that joining it would enable them to reinvigorate the withering body of Persia with the spirits of Science, Reason, Law, and Civilization (Algar 1970; Hutin 1960, 103). Progress could come prepackaged, they envisioned. So, on December 17, 1857, members of Persia’s Paris delegation joined the Sincère Amitié Lodge, a Paris branch of the Grand Orient Masonic Society (Algar 1970). The exotic oriental atmosphere of their initiation rite imbued them with a renewed commitment to retrieve and revive the lost traditions of their own oriental grandeur. Theatrics aside, the ideology of progress, as parceled up by the Sincère Amitié Lodge and similar institutions, came with a built-in understanding of God, man, and their relationship. Aligned with other philosophical developments in Europe, Freemasonry advocated a deistic point of view, an appreciation of the divine as the creator of Nature, and of Nature as an automatic, if not fully autonomous, manifestation or embodiment of a supreme rational consciousness. Deism depicts God as the author of the book of Nature and enunciates the divine as the architect of the world’s geometric order, the creator of the elements, the author of truths, and the giver of natural laws. Here, too, as in the familiar theism of kalām, God emerges as eternal authority, omnipotent cause, and all-knowing watchman. Nevertheless, subtle differences existed. The palace intellectuals who embraced the Masonic cause in Paris were not able to see, let alone resolve, the theological conundrum. Most notably represented by Malkom, they all lacked any serious training in philosophy. Their philosophically unexamined deism was coupled with the then fashionable positivism, with its characteristic contempt for metaphysics and its hampered view of the relationship between reason and natural science. Based on these premises, they brought home their understanding of Nature as a passe-partout. Malkom sensed something rotten in the Qajar realm and set out to take restorative measures upon his return to Tehran in 1858. Taking cues from the modernizing reforms and bureaucratic reorganizations occurring in [ 14 ]

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the neighboring Ottoman Empire, he presented Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah with the Secret Notebook: a set of guidelines for administrative reform. Istanbul had embarked on its own massive reforms, known as “Tanzimat,” just a few years earlier. Most of Malkom’s Secret Notebook contents derived from Ottoman Tanzimat manuals (Hanioğlu 2010). It opens with the assertion that “God abhors chaos.” The deistic principle of invoking God as the architect of Nature and natural order directly leads to the corollary that disorder is unnatural and somehow ungodly. As the de facto spokesman of the palace intellectuals, Malkom gave voice to the widespread sentiments of frustration rankling the already disorderly status quo. He characterized God as the world’s supreme administrator (Malkom 1858). Malkom engineered a platform to bind together the advocates of renewal and progress. Inspired by his experience with the Sincère Amitié Lodge in Paris, he founded an exclusive salon-like forum, dubbing it the “Farāmūš-ḵāneh.” The words forming the name “Farāmūš-ḵāneh” are sometimes mistranslated as “The House of Oblivion” or “The House of Forgetfulness” in English but, in fact, connoted neither.2 Confidentiality or secrecy were more apt. Expressions such as “The House of Confidentiality” or “The Chamber of Secrets” translate the name more accurately and describe the idea behind it more suitably. Malkom, it seems, borrowed the word “Farāmūšī” from a twinned term circulating in colonial India. Earlier uses appearing in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century travelogues described Masonic-like practices among India-based Europeans and their local clients. Delhi or Calcutta or Lucknow commonly coined neologisms that conveyed somewhat of a different nuance in the vernacular of Tehran. Malkom used their word “Farāmūšī” as an equivalent to Freemasonry and adapted it for his own purposes in coining “Farāmūš-ḵāneh.” Indo-Persian authors, in the ambiguity of the cognate, only thickened the mystique of the idea it represented. Upon Malkom’s request, Jalāl-al-Dīn Mīrzā, the genteel Qajar prince, agreed to host Farāmūš-ḵāneh in meetings in his private residence (Amanat 1999). To make the sessions seem more debonair and European, the prince set up a large parlor with chairs and other furnishings. To arrange a parlor in such a way was an innovation in and of itself. It defined a buffer space, a threshold, between the openly public (bīrūnī) and the exclusively private (andarūnī), which had been an age-old architectural dichotomy in the land. The liminality of the space reflected the tentativeness of the [ 15 ]

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unfolding process at the Farāmūš-ḵāneh. Attendance was by invitation only and exclusively male. Session details rarely leaked out because the very premise of the organization and the promise of the organizer boiled down to: what happened in the Farāmūš-ḵāneh stayed in the Farāmūšḵāneh. The roster of attendees, studied through a long lens and after the fact, and given the group’s secrecy, testifies to the Farāmūš-ḵāneh’s effectiveness in attracting part of the urban elite. In attendance were established courtiers, respected ʿolamā, and young rising glitterati from notable families (Rāʾīn 1978, 1:513–14, adapted in Algar 1973, 49–51; and Algar, “Freemasonry: ii. Qajar Period,” in EIr). Besides swapping news from Europe (mostly translated headlines and passages from French newspapers), the Farāmūš-ḵāneh encouraged discussions about politics, religion, science, reason, and the wealth and power of nations (Mohīt-Ṭabāṭabā’ī 1948, ḥā’). Reportedly, Malkom entertained attendees with “magic tricks,” but likely his prestidigitations were not magic at all but scientific experiments devised to display the miraculous power of modern science in producing and explaining natural phenomena. He may have followed experiments detailed in elementary physics books that were popular among nineteenth-century Freemasons, a copy of which is currently on display at the Musée de la Franc-Maçonnerie in Paris. The circle of educated participants in the sessions of the Farāmūš-ḵāneh knew something about the branches of learning at the time. Many had a general acquaintance with Sufism, had a broad appreciation of elementary kalām, and had heard about madraseh philosophy. Older and more conservative court administrators—among them Reẓā-Qolī Hedāyat (1800–1871), Yūsof Āštiyānī Mostōfi-al-Mamālek (1812–1886), and Majd al-Molk Sīnakī (1809–1881), especially—had gone through madraseh training. Of the two other occasional participants, Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Jelveh (1822–1897) and MollāHādī Najmābādī (1834–1902), the former was a prominent madraseh philosopher and the latter a capable jurist—a mojtahed. More is said about the ideas of the latter pair later. Differences in the quality and quantity of their metaphysical knowledge notwithstanding, members of the Farāmūš-ḵāneh sought to describe the relationship between God and Nature in more deistic, less personalistic, terms. But Malkom’s experimental foray into secret society founding sputtered. A royal decree released October 10, 1861, summarily quashed the Farāmūš-ḵāneh. The ban appeared in print in issue number 501 of the official government newspaper in Tehran. Reading [ 16 ]

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foreign newspapers, discussing politics and religion, and other activities deemed subversive and intolerable by the court evoked a royal scolding of Farāmūš-ḵāneh participants, lambasting them as ruffians and censuring them for what it characterized as their aping of the Europeans and engaging in Masonic activity. Malkom was not a theologian, but he framed his endeavor as one of religious reformism. Reporting on a July 1880 chance meeting with Malkom at a house in Kensington, during the London Season, a British interlocutor quotes him as saying: I knew that it was useless to attempt a remodeling of Persia in European forms, and I was determined to clothe my material reformation in a garb which my people would understand, the garb of religion. I therefore, on my return, called together the chief persons of Teheran, my friends, and spoke to them in private of the need which Islam had of purer doctrine. (Blunt 1907, 62–65)

The way Malkom pronounces his personal adherence to Islam and then goes on to outline his vital contributions in a private meeting with members of British high society is telling. Clearly, his understanding of religion had implicit deistic foundations, but contrary to what critics have implied, he was not a masked heretic (Algar 1973). These are Malkom’s words as recorded by his interlocutor, who was a Victorian man of letters: When I was a young man I founded a religion which at one time numbered 30,000 devotees. I was born an Armenian Christian, but I was brought up among Mohammedans, and my tone of thought is theirs. . . . Under the name of a Reformation of Islam I thus introduced what material reforms I could. To my doctrine is due the telegraph, the reorganization of the administrative departments, and many another attempted improvements since gone to ruin. (Blunt 1907, 62–65)

Of course, Malkom embellished his accomplishments and exaggerated his role. In reality, factors beyond the wish and efforts of any single individual were involved. Clamoring for progress and civilization, accompanied by a changing notion of Nature and related crises faced by theism, conditioned how ideas of reform in the domains of religion and politics were taking shape. Notably, where these ideas were discussed in earnest, Malkom [ 17 ]

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neither decries Islam nor shows any sign of disloyalty toward Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah. In fact, the latter had at first approved the opening of the Farāmūšḵāneh, and in the decades before and after its rise and dissolution, the monarch had displayed dual feelings of affection and loathing toward Malkom. Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah bestowed on Malkom the title “Reformer of the Realm” and supported the reforms outlined in the Secret Notebook.3 Later the king even dispatched this palace intellectual as his personal ambassadorgeneral to all the courts of Europe, probably to spare him from mounting vitriol back home. At the same time, Malkom’s sense of self-importance and his shadowy schemes in making deals for personal promotion at the treasury’s expense annoyed and enraged the king (Algar 1973). Although Malkom throughout his life maintained ties to several Masonic societies, his Farāmūš-ḵāneh in Tehran had no official sanction. The individuals who attended its sessions probably knew little about Freemasonry (Chehabi 2009). They loosely shared an interest in modern science, political reform, progress toward civilization, and commitment to reason and other ideals of the Enlightenment. Most of them lacked a uniform modern appreciation of Nature, law, or rationalism. At the same time, they engaged in critical debates on these and related notions. Their circle was one of the places where the distinction between natural and supernatural was articulated. Generally, guests at the Farāmūš-ḵāneh toed the political lines drawn by the conservative court. They shunned radicalism in thought and in practice and, despite their favorable rhetoric toward political reform, supported a strong monarchy, exalting the king as God’s shadow on earth. The most elevated function that Malkom and the other palace intellectuals aspired to was that of aiding the king in harnessing chaos, establishing justice, and maintaining the divinely ordained, natural order. They were “palace” intellectuals not simply because they spent their lives in the palace but because they spared no effort in defending the legitimacy of the royal house. When it came to religion, however, the palace intellectuals displayed more zeal for change. They and their wider circle of lay supporters often called for revising the matters of public belief and advocated the changing of certain religious practices. Few would go so far as to bluntly deny the existence of miracles and revelation in the way that Āḵundzādeh did. Lacking formal theological training, the majority of the palace intellectuals heeded Afghani’s warning and avoided the trap of being labeled dahrīs. However, the deistic tendencies derived from their new understanding of [ 18 ]

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Nature often clashed with the theological preferences of the ʿolamā, led at the time by the redoubtable Ḥājj Mollā ʿAlī Kanī (ca. 1805–1888) in Tehran. More radical criticism of Qajar politics and the ʿolamā’s religious policies came from the lay intellectuals outside the court. Here too, ideas of Nature, reason, and law provided the theoretical framework and operational guidelines. Considering Nature and politics as more or less independent of religion presented itself as a reasonable option. The idea that Nature as constituted by matter was the substance whose attributes we can examine empirically hardly left room for anything nonmaterial or supernatural. Was the stipulation that existence was not confined to the material realm a baseless belief, a mere superstition? This was a key revisionist question. The idea of the uniformity of Nature, universality of natural law, and the utility of science gradually pushed some lay intellectuals to label whatever was not natural as “superstition” (ḵorāfāt). The Persianized singular noun “ḵorāfeh,” or “ḵorāfāt” in plural, means baseless, foolish, and false. In classical Arabic usage, a ḵurāfah simply referred to a tall tale, and its plural, ḵurāfāt, to all outrageous flights of fancy. By definition, superstitions are untrue, not real. It was during the second half of the nineteenth century that this term acquired a new meaning that was conditioned by the emergence of new ideas about Nature. The dominant intellectual preference still was to maintain a special category, a liminal conceptual space, for that which may be supernatural but is not superstition. A new mode of discourse was needed to navigate the uncharted waters where science and religion seemed to interpenetrate. An early advocate for the compatibility of science and religion was ʿAbd-al-Raḥīm Ṭālebof (1834–1911), a reform-minded Muslim lay intellectual who took up the cause to popularize science and technology in the Persian language (Ādamiyat 1984). While not the first of its kind, his introductory book on natural philosophy, published in 1894, was more clearly written than preceding works on modern elementary physics and chemistry in Persian (Afshar 2002, 99).4 Ṭālebof used common words and simple sentences to convey new ideas. Striving to keep familiar theistic thought close to natural science, this spokesman of the budding nature-based and science-oriented intellectual revisionism observed and insisted that science fell short of adequately explaining certain extraordinary phenomena. Born to a father from Tabriz but basing himself in Temir Khan Shura (where the city of Buynaksk now lies, in the Russian Republic of Dagestan), [ 19 ]

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Ṭālebof relied on the postal service to keep in touch with his Persian-reading audiences, especially in Tehran. Observing that “in this day and age the splendor of science pervades the earth everywhere except for our dear homeland,” he took it upon himself, as a patriotic duty, “to present the basics of modern science and technology, together with the sound teachings of the past . . . in a manner that would enlighten novices . . . and prepare [the minds of the nation’s youth] for acquiring higher expertise” (Ṭālebof 1889, 2f). Reconciling modern science with the “sound teachings of the past” hinged on compromise. No doubt science had been successful, spectacularly so, in probing and explaining Nature, but Ṭālebof wanted to allow space for the nonmaterial, the supernatural, and even the paranormal in the world, insisting that so many phenomena escaped the grasp of science. For example, in explaining electricity and magnetism, Ṭālebof adduced the Quranic passage “my Lord’s command” (Q. Isrāʾ 17:85). Already in Ṭālebof, we find an implicit argument for God-of-the-gaps, a theological position that believes gaps in science would be filled only by God (Barbour 1965). This position depended on the recognition of phenomena that are real and supernatural. Ṭālebof’s other book, the Book of Aḥmad, is composed of didactic conversations between the author and his imaginary seven-year-old son, Aḥmad. The premise of the book is that “God has invested man with a natural disposition to search for the causes of all things.” This comes up in the very first conversation, which concerns God and religion. Despite the author’s amateurish grasp of science and technology, the intellectual impact of the Book of Aḥmad cannot be overstated, if only for its author’s naïve aplomb in “searching out” the fascinations of the world and delivering them into the ears of his imaginary son, and vicariously to his readers. In it Ṭālebof describes such global marvels as the recently erected Eiffel Tower in Paris, Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, Louis Pasteur’s discovery of microbes, the inner workings of the photographic camera, and other considered examples of man’s harnessing of the forces of Nature (Ṭālebof 1889, 12–16, 51–59). One can imagine seeing him, hovering over his young boy, sighing with admiration and envy at the civilized people of Europe who managed to train horses, elephants— even cockroaches—to perform in the circus. The book was read widely by the constitutionalists. Competing views on what is and what is not possible in Nature unfolded within Tehran’s political and ideological context. Many among the capital’s [ 20 ]

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powerful ʿolamā scowled at efforts to reform politics and revise the public creed. Many protested the berating of folk beliefs in supernatural phenomena as mere superstition. Some, though certainly not all, of the ʿolamā considered it an affront to faith if one rejected astrology, questioned the use of talismans, or insisted on giving strictly nature-based or science-oriented explanations for all phenomena (Ṭālebof 1905, 7–10). It was behind MollāʿAlī Kanī that a legion of ʿolamā and their followers gathered to combat such subversive teachings. Taking on Afghani’s tirade against Sir Syed’s naturist teachings in colonial India, most of Tehran’s preachers condemned the emerging emphasis on Nature as dahrī heresy. They maligned suitors of European science and civilization as friends of the infidels and footmen of foreign interests. Kanī, like-minded members of the ʿolamā, and their followers among the masses opposed the teaching, learning, or practicing of modern empirical science, including modern medicine and astronomy (Arjomand 1997). In their polemic, they chastised the palace intellectuals for weakening Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah politically and for neglecting religion. They blamed Sepahsālār, Malkom, and their rank for the loss of Herat and the declining welfare of the homeland. The palace intellectuals and their lay supporters struck back where it hurt the ʿolamā most. Armed with their new vision of rational politics and useful knowledge of Nature, they charged their adversaries with lacking both—and for being backward, decadent, and ignorant. This new vision and knowledge derived from natural science and led to a new order. The palace intellectuals insisted that the ʿolamā lacked the sophistication to appreciate the intellectual content and to assess the political stakes. As Malkom put it, “When we say fiscal officials must refrain from pilfering government funds, why should any mojtaheds [i.e., experts in Islamic law] object? . . . Our plans at reforming the bureaucracy violate no religion except that of those whose claim to self-importance is both the cause and the result of this chaotic state of affairs” (Malkom 1858, 14). An epistemological valuation was made with the purported backing of theology. In the same way that Kanī and his followers censured the palace intellectuals for the loss of Herat, the palace intellectuals blamed the ʿolamā for territorial losses in the Russo-Persian Wars of 1808–1813 and 1826–1828. Invoking the recent past, they chided the ʿolamā for squandering life and revenue by issuing reckless fatvās (religious decrees) that obligated believers to [ 21 ]

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take arms in a doomed jihad against the Russian army in which hundreds of thousands of souls perished and vast swaths of territory had been surrendered to the tsar, including what are now the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the Caucasus. The intellectuals inside and outside the Qajar court in Tehran condemned the thought, logic, and actions of the ʿolamā and their minions, accusing them of abdicating reason and working counter to the law of Nature. In turn, the ʿolamā vilified the palace intellectuals and their lay supporters as violators of the laws of God. It was in this crossfire between the ʿolamā and the intellectuals that ideas about the relationship between God, Nature, reason, and law were being reshaped. A case in point is that of Dr. Moḥammad Kermānšāhī (1829–1908), a pioneering physician, medical scientist, and high-profile palace intellectual. By the age of fifty, Kermānšāhī had received a medical diploma from the Sorbonne—the same Paris university where his contemporary Pasteur (1822–1895) made his groundbreaking medical discoveries. Like Pasteur, Kermānšāhī defended the newly formulated germ theory of disease (Ebrahimnejad 2005; Rustāʾi 2003). Recognizing the role of microorganisms in causing and spreading such diseases as cholera, diphtheria, and tuberculosis, which recurrently took casualties from the population in Tehran and beyond, he ardently advocated for public hygiene. On theoretical and practical grounds, he insisted that appealing to amulets, talismans, and other practices that he deemed to be superstitious had no place in the treatment of germ-based diseases. For that sin, the sin of denying the efficacy of supernatural means, Kermānšāhī’s defamers dubbed him “Kofrī”—a derogatory word that means “blasphemer” and “madman” in the same breath. An older generation of local medicine men, backed by a group of the ʿolamā, continually tormented him, though he was no less informed about Islam than most of them. In fact, before attending the Dār-al-Fonūn, Kermānšāhī had studied Islamic law in Najaf, a sure sign of distinction among the ʿolamā. It is true, like a typical scientist, Dr. Kermānšāhī did not suffer fools gladly, but there is no evidence the modern-educated doctor violated any principles adhered to by observant Muslims of the time. But his detractors continued to accuse Kermānšāhī of being a heretic, especially for his “perversion” of dissecting corpses. They declared his European medicines religiously impure— they referred to aspirin, which he had brought home shortly after its first manufacture in 1899, as the “accursed [ 22 ]

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powder.” From the heights of science, in Tehran, Kermānšāhī had fallen to become persona non grata. Even more vulnerable than the palace intellectuals were the lay intellectuals, who lacked the heft of the court’s backing. Many were sent into exile; some paid with their lives. One of them, his generation’s brightest, who met such a fate was Āqā Khan Kermānī (Ādamiyat 1967; Bāstānī-e Pārīzī 2008; Bayat-Philipp 1974a, 1974b; Kermānī ca. 1895). He theorized the mutually supportive and reflective roles of Nature and human reason, pioneering a naturalistic form of rationalism. Committed to the Enlightenment ethos that “reason rules supreme,” he urged that the light of the divine should be sought via empirical reason and natural science. Phrasing his ideal of philosophy on the model of ideas found in madraseh philosophy, he declared: “[Philosophy] is knowledge of the reality of things in accordance with the original order and natural design. The purpose of philosophy is the eradication of the chaotic darkness of ignorance and the enlightenment of the system of reason” (Ādamiyat 1967, 63, citing Kermānī’s work entitled Ḥekmat-e nażarī, n.p.). There is a parallel here with the standard definition of madraseh philosophy as “knowledge of the reality of being and the essence of things.” Āqā Khan Kermānī’s shift of focus from being-and-essence to order-and-nature is remarkable for its turn of mindset (Bāstānī-e Pārīzī 2008). Still, Kermānī never had the opportunity to flesh out his theological ideas as fully as he might have because he was beheaded in 1896, during his early forties, at the behest of the Qajar crown prince Moḥammad-ʿAlī Mīrzā (1872–1925). As works in progress, flowing from a mind on fire, Kermānī’s writing is riddled with contradiction, and on most topics, it is difficult to pin down his conclusions. For example, in some of his writings, in contrast to what is quoted above, suddenly he reverts to seeing Nature as a lower realm to be transcended (Kermānī ca. 1895, 122). In another passage, he writes: “[Religion] is a matter of essence not of accident. Thoughtless parroting of the formula that God is One does not suffice in the matter of religion. One has to rise in real and essential unison with all beings, either by way of knowledge and gnosis or that of love and affection” (Kermānī ca. 1895, 121). Still, Kermānī had by far a more profound philosophical understanding  of the modern crises of theism than most of his contemporaries. His writings bind the reader in multiple strands of thought. Retrospectively, twentieth-century historians have categorized Kermānī as an atheist [ 23 ]

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(Ādamiyat 1967). This is neither the only nor the most plausible reading of him. His treatise “Seventy-Two Creeds” (Haftād-o-dō mellat), a theatrical play centered on the question of God and man, which he completed circa 1895, gives a much more nuanced one (Kermānī ca. 1895). The passage cited above derives from this latter work. Here the author throws off the deistic view the palace intellectuals had embraced, seeming to defend and call for a pantheistic or panentheistic view: seeing God in all beings and in every corner of the world. So far we have seen how the changing notion of nature led to changes and challenges in ideological expression among modernist intellectuals and the ʿolamā. Changing views on nature, reason, and law shaped Iranian modernity in many ways. This was in no way confined to the spheres of religion and politics. It is worthwhile to turn now to an implication of those debates on the nondiscursive realm of art. During the nineteenth century, a shift in perspective occurred in the realm and practice of artistic painting. As with other social groups in Tehran, visual artists became more exposed to what was happening in the world at large than their predecessors had been. New tools were introduced, the scale of paintings was enlarged, and—more importantly—the belief that European visual arts were more natural encouraged many more realistic depictions of nature. The 1850s marked what I shall call a mimetic turn in Qajar visual arts. This was brought about by several factors. A few painters traveled to Europe and remained there to work; many more trained in European techniques while situated in Tehran. The photographic camera, with its novel capability of capturing snapshots of natural reality, played a big role in bringing about this mimetic turn. The spread of photography and the growing popularity of photograph-like illustration, coupled with lithography techniques, dramatically heightened the quality of visual replication. All of this affected the emergence of a new view of Nature. Various paintings of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah, drawn across a span of thirty years or so, trace this mimetic turn, reflecting the course of increasing emphasis on naturalistic realism. For example, the painting usually referred to as “Apotheosis of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah” depicts the monarch as an ascendant figure, sitting grandly atop a cloud in Heaven. This imaginative elevation of the king was completed during the very months that Malkom had conducted sessions of the Farāmūš-ḵāneh. Then came another painting by [ 24 ]

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the Armenian artist Akop Ovnatanian (1806–1881), from Tiflis (Robinson 1983, esp. 299 and pl. 8; see also Floor 1999). Executed during the same years that Āḵundzādeh had exchanged letters with the palace intellectuals, it exhibits a more realistic appreciation of perspective and proportion. The painter includes a view of scenic nature in the background (Hytier, preface to Gobineau ca. 1880, 2:213–14). In another painting, one of the most famous Persian paintings of the late nineteenth century, the monarch looks out on natural scenery from the inside of his magnificently designed palace as golden rays of the sun shine on him. A more developed technique of perspective and a more exact execution of proportions is strikingly visible in the last painting. The growing preference for realistic depictions of natural scenes, faces, landscapes, and still-life subjects went beyond the palace walls (Diba and Ekhtiar 1999; Emami and Matevossian 1967). Already in 1850 the Crafts Council had opened an artist training facility in a large building at the bazaar of Tehran. In it an apprenticeship workshop was combined with the European Academy–style mode of instruction. Thus, the Crafts Council helped disseminate a new appreciation of realistic visual arts. People from all backgrounds, and their children, were exposed to novel views of nature. The atelier even remained open for public viewing on Fridays—the last day of the Muslim week and a holiday (Diba 2012; Floor 1999, 142). Later, in the 1860s, drafting and painting were inserted into the curriculum of the Dāral-Fonūn, which emphasized copying the work of European masters but only in the most lifelike, naturalistic, and conservative style. In the capital’s bustling bazaar, painters, limners, and illuminators of books produced for a buyers’ market. Paintings on walls, canvases, wood, glass, enamel, paper, newspapers, pen cases, water pipes, screens, and tiles varied widely in cost and quality (Floor 1999). Coveted and prized skills included having the ability to make lifelike copies of originally lifelike scenes, paying attention to shade and light, abiding by the laws of perspective and proportion, and demonstrating expertise with the newly introduced watercolor and oil paints. A social hierarchy existed among the purveyors and consumers of artwork. A top visual artist had to excel in oil painting, portraiture, copying, lithograph making, and photography, whose exactitude of perspective raised the expectations of face drawings higher than ever (Afshar 1992; Diba 2013; Pérez González 2012). Even Nāṣer-al-Din Shah enjoyed doodling, dabbled in [ 25 ]

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painting, and took decent photographs. The Golestān Palace Library has a collection of more than forty thousand photographic prints; at least twenty thousand were taken by the shah himself. Outside the court, Persian photographers became active in the 1870s (Afshar 1983), and by the mid-1880s portraits and landscape paintings were popular (Etemad al-Saltaneh 1889, 125–26). The mimetic turn that ushered in Tehran’s artistic “renaissance,” so to speak, came part and parcel with shifting views on Nature. It sought to capture and reflect the vivid reality and the numinous potency of Nature in art. If there was one man whose work and vision dominated Tehran’s latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century visual arts, it was Kamāl-al-Molk (ca. 1848–1941) (Diba 2012). Descended from a line of visual artists from Kashan, some 160 miles south of Tehran, Moḥammad Ġaffārī, better known by his title, Kamāl-al-Molk, surpassed his contemporaries in elevating the mimetic ideal in Persian painting to its apogee. He excelled in copying European paintings as well as in rendering portraits and realistic scenes taken from nature and everyday life, capturing every shade of light or ripple of water with photographic precision (Floor 1999, 141f). In 1881, impressed by the artist’s rare talent, Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah summoned him to the court. From that day forward, Kamāl-al-Molk accompanied the king on trips and hunting excursions, making compositions en plein air with an attention to detail that rivaled his works at the atelier. A second-generation graduate of the Dār-al-Fonūn, Kamāl-al-Molk had the carriage of an enlightened intellectual and was said to have admired Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Victor Hugo, highly esteemed in Tehran as two torch-bearers of European Enlightenment (Dehbāšī 1998). What has been described before about Malkom, and most other intellectuals within and without the palace, applies just as strongly to Kamāl-al-Molk and that era’s other visual artists, in that most of them had no philosophical training whatsoever. Nonetheless, their commitment to mimicking Nature and producing natural-looking replicas of objects had philosophical underpinnings and implications. Even though a shared philosophical theory of Nature was lacking, those artists implicitly aspired to capture and record the reality of nature. Besides manifesting in visual arts, the shifting perception of Nature also manifested in Persian music. The mimetic-naturalistic turn in the visual arts ran parallel to a formal-naturalistic turn in music. Focusing on formal [ 26 ]

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characteristics and a new ordering of the modes of musical expression signaled another dimension of social, political, and cultural change. Hundreds of known melody types in traditional Iranian music were classified into seven groups (Farhat 1990). Each group, referred to as a structure (dastgāh), comprised several melodic figures (gūšehs), resulting in the classificatory matrix called the radīf system. The seven dastgāhs are Čahār-gāh, Seh-gāh, Rāstpanjgāh, Māhūr, Šūr, Homāyūn, and Navā (Farhat 1990; Khaleqi 1938, 250–347; Nettle 1987). Five additional dastgāhs were added later: Afšārī, Abū-ʿAṭā, Daštī, Bayāt-e Tork, and Bayāt-e Esfahān. The reformed system of seven plus five dastgāhs is commonly named for Mīrzā ʿAbd-Allāh (1845–1918), a musician who played a similar, if not as central, role in music as his contemporary, Kamāl-al-Molk, did in painting (Farhat 1990). The view of Nature also underwent revision in Persian literature and poetry. Years before Qamar simultaneously beseeched God, Heaven, Nature to end the night and let a shining day dawn, the idea had laid roots that Nature possesses the power to bring about change. The difference was that Qajar-era poets, as the unsung legislators of their age, acknowledged Nature primarily as a source of change for the worse. They promulgated the axiom that “the demise of the weak is an inevitable fact of Nature.” The poet-prince Īraj Mīrzā (1874–1926) encapsulated the Machiavellian wisdom of the age in verse: “one should become strong, for in the system of Nature the weak get pummeled.” Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Jelveh, the great madraseh philosopher and master of divine science, blamed the vicissitudes of old age on Nature. Parvīn Eʿteṣāmi (1907–1941), the greatest female poet in the classical tradition of Persian poetry (Moayyad 1994), brought a renewed vision in her own detailing of Nature in verses pregnant with ethical and, frequently, theological ideas. For her, Nature has character in the same way Heaven has, and she speaks of it as an active, living agent, with ideas rife with natural phenomena such as the moon, flowers, and nightingales (Karimi-Hakkak 1994). Later, the approach to Nature pioneered by Bahār and Parvīn would be raised to higher heights by Nīmā Yūšīj (1895–1960), who, in the 1920s, took to revolutionizing the form and content of poetry (Naficy 1997; Sarshar 2004). By the 1920s a conception of God as personal, present, and active in the governance and organization of Nature was widespread. Over the course of the preceding two or three generations, the tug of war between the procourt Oṣūlīs and the palace intellectuals, the intellectual efforts of lay [ 27 ]

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intellectuals, the mimetic-naturalist turn in visual arts, the formal-naturalist reform of musical melodic types, and the emergence of new nature poetry prepared the corridors of public perception to accept a parallel call for God, Heaven, and Nature. Meanwhile, a category of beings and phenomena was defined as supernatural. Some rejected the rational legitimacy of such a category, identifying it as sheer superstition. Stipulating that all that is natural is material, they pushed for a secularist disenchanted view of Nature. By contrast, the idea of the supernatural allowed for new theological ideas to grow. In particular, Nature came to be seen as endowed with the capacity to serve as a mediatory conduit for channeling divine will in the universe.

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TWO

Mediatory Theology and Its Discontents

THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT of Nature as a conduit for reflecting and delivering divine will into the universe signaled an ideational shift. This idea was grafted on a deeply rooted theological framework of postulating agents that mediate between the Godhead and the world. I shall be using the term “mediatory theology” as a general rubric for the many varieties of this framework. Monotheistic theologies stand or fall on their capacity to interpret the relationship between a uniquely immutable God and a diverse, dynamic, and seemingly autonomous world. Alternative, nonmonotheistic theories exist, theological and otherwise, for explaining universal inconstancy and imperfection. Some attribute inconsistency to the conflicting decisions or desires of multiple deities, demons, and fairies, while others account for it in terms of myriad interacting natural but possibly chaotic forces, all of which are subject to secular laws. Changing views on the independence and uniformity of Nature, as outlined in the previous chapter, bear on this central question of theology. Islamic theology emphatically vetoes any plurality of gods and ascribes all power to the one and only God, who has no associates and takes no partners (Q. Baqara 2:133, 163; Anʿam 6:63; Ḥajj 22:34; Furqān 25:2; Tawḥīd 112:1). Known as the Principle of Oneness, or tōḥīd, this constitutes the first and foremost pillar of faith. In Twelver Shia kalām, madraseh philosophy, Sufism, [ 29 ]

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and other theological frameworks, the Principle of Oneness stands at the center: God is one. Other religions in Tehran have shared in this idea. Differences exist in the interpretation of what it really means for God to be one, but like the majority Twelver Shia population, members of other faith groups—Sunni Muslims, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Bahais, Yārsāns (Mir-Hosseini 1994a, 1994b)—vehemently reject the accusation that they subscribe to anything other than monotheism. However, these different faith communities subscribe to a variety of mediatory theologies, each one describing and explaining differently what it is that mediates between God and the world. To place these different views on a comparative scale, I use the term “mediatory theology” to describe any postulation of agents that may enact or embody divine will, disclose revelations, or somehow do God’s work. For example, the Qurʾān speaks of angels carrying out certain actions by divine mandate, as in taking the souls of individuals when the time comes or heralding the Day of Judgment (Q. Baqara 2:248; Āl-ʿImrān 3:124–25; Nisāʾ 4:97). Similarly, the prophets deliver God’s message, reminding mankind to remember, obey, and serve Him (Q. Baqara 2:213, 252; Nisāʾ 4:69, 163; Anʿām 6:48; Maryam 19:30, 51, 58; Zumar 39:69). The Qurʾān introduces Adam, the primordial man, as God’s representative, steward, or viceregent—ḵalīfat-Allāh (Q. Baqara 2:30). As the father of all humans, Adam plays a pivotal mediatory role in creation, and all other prophets who descend from him follow his example in delivering the divine message of God to humankind. For the sake of accuracy, I distinguish between strong, intermediate, and weak forms of mediatory theology, using these hierarchic qualifiers in a logical sense. “Strong” forms of mediatory theologies tend to espouse God in anthropomorphic—that is, human-like—terms. They also speak of certain humans in divine terms, to an extent that sometimes may sound objectionable to monotheist ears. I call such formulations of mediatory theology “strong” only because they make strong theological claims. Endorsing or questioning the intellectual soundness, logical validity, or practical strength of the inherent claims of such theories is moot here. Instead of “strong,” one could use the word “intense,” “dense,” or a similar qualifier that ascribes strong, intense, or dense mediatory agency to an entity. By contrast, “weak” forms of mediatory theology limit the mediatory role to some abstraction, not to persons or personified agents. According to this proposed definition, a weak form of mediatory theology is at work when divine law, [ 30 ]

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Nature, or human reason are invoked to fulfill a mediatory role between God and man. Once again, labeling these as weak is only regarding the less personal and less concretized form of the stipulated mediatory theology and not an assessment of their validity or soundness. Words such as “mild,” “diluted,” even “indirect” or similar qualifiers may be used instead. Far from being a binary switch, the distinction between weak and strong forms of mediatory theologies delimits a spectrum of intermediate forms that to differing extents combine features from one to the other extreme. Multiple articulations of mediatory theology have coexisted in Tehran, with their associated, fluctuating levels of tension. Besides the majority Muslims in the city, Christians, Jews, Babis, Bahais, and others often subscribed to some form of mediatory theology, with each faith community drawing on conceptual and narrative frameworks peculiar to itself. With rare exceptions, all these groups have linked worldly success and political power to the will of God. This was the case at the outset of Tehran’s becoming the Qajar seat of rule, with the king being revered as God’s shadow on earth, up to the present, when the Islamic Republic claims a God-given legitimacy. Shia articulations of mediatory theology are diverse and elaborate, some very strong and others less so, going back to the earliest centuries of Islam (Amir-Moezzi 1994; Dakake 2007; Modarressī-Ṭabāṭabāʾī 1993). They display a color distinct from the other Muslim schools of thought in their way of explaining divine interaction with the cosmos and analyzing the means by which God intervenes in world affairs. Shia mediatory theologies hinge on the key concept of divine authority, velāyat. This Persianized cognate of the original Arabic wilāya, also walāya, is laden with a millennial heritage of layered theorization and variegated usage (Dakake 2007). In both Persian and Arabic, the term connotes affiliation, affection, guardianship, trusteeship, and patronage all in the same breath. The semantic field of this word is broad. In seventh-century Arabia, an affiliate or client of a tribe was called a mawlā—the receptacle and bearer of tribal authority or wilāya (Crone 2005; Wensinck and Crone, “Mawlā,” in EI2). Later, regional lords or patrons who represented a higher-ranking suzerain (greater king) were referred to as vālīs and carried the latter’s velāyat. The Qurʾān ascribes absolute and exclusive authority to God (Q. Kahf 18:44; Muḥammad 47:11; see also Anʿām 6:62; Tawba 9:51; Ḥajj 22:78; Taḥrīm 66:2). This is considered another expression of the Principle of Oneness [ 31 ]

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(tōḥīd), referred to above. As He wields His prerogative, God protects the faithful, forsakes the faithless, and lords over the world of His creation. Now, as stated earlier, a major challenge to monotheist theology has been to account for the ways in which the supreme authority of God manifests in the world of creation. Muslim theology of the mainstream endorses the idea that angels and prophets, beginning with Adam, mediate divine authority while delivering God’s message of providence and grace. This idea is elaborated further in various philosophies that have not always enjoyed mainstream sanction. The notion of velāyat is neither exclusively nor predominantly of Shia origin or development, but it plays a pivotal role in Shia theologies, not least in Twelver teachings. Early on, certain groups among the Muslims theorized that special individuals may be recipients and conveyors of divine authority. Such individuals were acknowledged as the lords of the spiritual realm, patrons of spiritual truth, guardians of its seekers, and trustees, friends, and favored agents of God. The bearers of velāyat, referred to as the ōliyā (the plural of valī), mediated between man and God. Twelver Shia belief sanctions Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jesus, and the major Israelite prophets—notably Isaac, Jacob, Solomon, and Moses—as divine mediators. A liturgical prayer, duʿā-e samāt, recited by Twelver Shia faithful before dusk every Friday, in Tehran as elsewhere, harmonizes: O God! I beseech Thee, . . . through Thy name, which is the most great, the most majestic, and the most holy; and through Thy glory, with which Thou revealed light to Moses, Thy addressee, peace be on him, on Mount Sinai; . . . and through Thy Glory, with which Thou fulfilled Thy promise to Abraham, peace be on him; and through Thy Oath in favor of Isaac; and through Thy witnessing favoring Jacob. (Qummī ca. 1920, 116–22, esp. 120)

What is particular to Shia kalām is that it primarily assigns such mediatory roles to the Pure Family (ahl-e bayt-e ṭāherīn) of the Prophet Muḥammad. Thus, divine authority suffuses the cosmos, above all, via the velāyat of the Prophet and those closest to him in kinship and spirit. The Twelver Shia denomination specifically emphasizes the authority of twelve divinely designated exponents of the Pure Family that it recognizes as the twelve Divine Guides (aʾemme-e hodā), the Emāms: namely, ʿAlī al-Murtaẓā, Ḥasan al-Mujtabā, Ḥusayn Sayyid-al-šuhadāʾ, ʿAlī Zayn al-ʻābidīn, Muḥammad [ 32 ]

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al-Bāqir, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, Mūsā al-Kāżim, ʿAlī al-Riẓā, Muḥammad al-Taqī alJawād, ʿAlī al-Naqī al-Hādī, Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, and the Mahdi. More broadly, velāyat is attributed to the Fourteen Infallibles (čahārdah maʿṣūm), embodied by the Prophet Muḥammad; his beloved daughter, Fāṭima; and the twelve named Emāms. In order to emphasize the exalted status and the eschatological role of these twelve persons in Twelver Shia thought, throughout this work I use the word “Emām” exclusively for them, with the first letter capitalized. In other cases, as the term “imām”—literally in Arabic, a foreman or leader—may be used, it will appear with a different spelling. Twelver Shia theology that accords a special mediatory role to the Emāms is also known as Emāmī theology. The crux of this classical position, as summarized by the seventeenth-century Twelver Shia scholar Moḥammad-Bāqer Majlesī (ca. 1627–1699), is that “guidance and salvation cannot be found except through the Emāms who mediate between God and mankind” (AmirArjomand 1984, 170). Although Majlesī lived almost two centuries before the heyday of Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah’s Shia revival in Tehran, his teachings proved to be pivotal in that process. Majlesī’s expression of mediatory theology, emphatically articulated, strongly formulated in several liturgical Shia prayers, became increasingly popular in the Qajar capital (Qummī ca. 1920). In Twelver Shia doctrine, God revealed His message through the Prophet Muḥammad, and God’s divine authority was channeled through him, who was infallible, free of defect, and the seal of the prophets (ḵātam-e anbiyāʾ). As bearers of the Prophet’s velāyat, all members of the Fourteen Infallibles partake in these graces. They convey God’s word, which was revealed directly to the Prophet, and through him to the others. Together they promulgate the exemplary conduct that the faithful ought to follow. The Fourteen Infallibles are unsurpassed in closeness to God, pious virtue, and divinely imparted knowledge. Obedience to them and respect for their role as divinely designated mediators is integral to demonstrating faith, and God punishes anyone failing in this regard. Narratives depicting the Fourteen Infallibles inform the Twelver Shia view of history; accounts of succession to the Prophet, sacrifices made for safeguarding his legacy, and related events mark the Twelver Shia calendar. For example, Shias in Tehran celebrate the Day of Ġadīr, a joyful observance to commemorate the day of Emām ʿAlī’s designation as the Prophet’s divinely chosen successor and bearer of velāyat. It was during the return from his farewell pilgrimage to Mecca, just weeks before he passed away in 632, [ 33 ]

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that the Prophet announced, “Whoever acknowledges me as a bearer of velāyat, ought to acknowledge ʿAlī as a bearer of velāyat as well” (Amīnī 1967–1977; Madelung 1997). The significance of recognizing Emām ʿAlī as bearer of divine authority is central to Shia theology (Ṭabāṭabāʾī 1969, commentary on Q. Mā’ida 5:3). Interpreting this as Prophet Muhammad’s explicit endorsement of ʿAlī’s divine authority, later Shias added to the two standard Muslim professions of faith (“There is no god other than God” and “Muḥammad is a messenger of God”) a third: ʿAlī is a valī of God. This last declaration comprised an inviolable element of Qajar-era Shia faith, with roots extending much deeper in history. Two other moments loom in the sacred history of the Fourteen Infallibles: the martyrdom of the third Emām, Ḥusayn, son of Emām ʿAlī and the Prophet’s daughter Fāṭima, all three members of the Fourteen Infallibles; and the occultation of the twelfth Emām, referred to and venerated as the “Mahdi”: the Savior. These climactic occurrences shape a wide range of theoretical thought and practical ritual in the Twelver Shia worldview. On the Day of ʿĀšūrā in the year 680, Emām Ḥusayn was confronted and slaughtered along with his loyal disciples on the land of Karbala, in presentday Iraq. In fulfilling his role as a divine mediator, the Emām had offered no allegiance to the day’s godless usurpers, so in an unjust battle, forces of darkness assaulted his traveling party—men, women, and children—violating the sanctity of the Pure Family, spilling the Emām’s blood, and profaning his dependents. The occultation of the twelfth Emām, in 874, similarly weighs on the historical consciousness of Twelver Shias. The hostile pressure mounting against the Shia community, especially in Baghdad, forced them to keep the birth of the twelfth Emām a secret, and after the birth he had to be protected from enemies—the ruling Abbasid caliphs as well as some illwishing relatives. And for the decades-long period referred to as the era of Minor Occultation (874–941), all contact with the twelfth Emām was conducted through exclusively designated intermediaries (Amir-Arjomand 1996; Darmesteter 1885; Modarressī-Ṭabāṭabāʾī 1993). From 941 on, the era of Major Occultation began and the twelfth Emām is to remain in concealment until God ordains his comeback, or Parousia (żuhūr)—a concept related and comparable to the Christian promise of the second coming of Christ. Then, as God’s agent, the Hidden Emām, the Mahdi, shall materialize to [ 34 ]

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avenge the unjustly spilled blood of Emām Ḥusayn and shake the earth with divine justice. As the officially empowered custodians of Emāmī orthodoxy and orthopraxy, Qajar-era ʿolamā took on the task of vetting and evaluating various theologies. In judging alternative expressions of mediatory theologies, they swiftly issued verdicts on which ones may be acceptable and which verge on heresy. This is evidenced by their denouncement of the Sufis, Ismaili Shias, Bābīs, even madraseh philosophers, and others. For example, the ʿolamā condemned itinerant Sufi mendicants, dervishes or darāvīš, for going too far in exalting Emām ʿAlī to the point of deification. Long, thick mustaches distinguish the men among these devotees of ʿAlī; their esoteric rituals include chanting often accompanied by playing music. Explicit and implicit references to the name of ʿAlī comprise the core of darāvīš ritual: ʿAlī is the king of humankind He is ʿAlī Truth is ʿAlī

Objecting to the intense and elevated mediatory role that the darāvīš ascribe to ʿAlī, detractors insist on calling them “ʿAlī-Allāhīs,” “those who conflate ʿAlī”—the man—with Allah, the one and only God. Some go as far as vilifying them as infidels and even devil worshippers (šeyṭān-parast). More recent anthropological fieldwork documents that at least some of the darāvīš themselves prefer to go by the moniker “Ahl-e Ḥaqq,” or “People of the Truth,” or Yārsān (Mir-Hosseini 1996). Yārsān doctrine, in its combination of earlier creeds, amounts to a particularly strong form of mediatory theology. High praise for ʿAlī as one certain manifestation of the divine, and the devotional exaltation of his name is justified by adducing evidence from the Qurʾān in which the word “ʿAlī,” which literally means “exalted,” appears as one of the names of God, most notably in one of the Qurʾān’s most important passages, the Throne Verse: God—there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of [all] ­existence. . . . And He is the exalted one, the greatest. (Q. Baqara 2:255; see also Shūrā 42:4)

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Still, Qajar-era ‘olamā and their heirs classified the darāvīš under the technical rubric of extremist or hyperbolist heretics (ġolāt) (Ḥakamī-Yazdī 1892). Determined to regulate the terms of mediatory theology, the ʿolamā— more specifically, the Oṣūlīs, as discussed more fully in chapter 4—eschewed any extension of the privileges acknowledged for the Fourteen Infallibles to others. Just as the chain of prophets culminates in the Prophet Muḥammad, the chain of the mediators of divine authority is said to culminate with the last of the Fourteen Infallibles, that is, the Hidden Emām. Therefore, along with the teachings of the darāvīš, the ʿolamā also considered most of the teachings of other Sufis unsound or superstitious and their actions—such as chanting, playing music, and ritual dance (samāʾ)—beyond the pale of proper religious conduct. In displaying their willingness to exterminate unacceptable forms of mediatory theology, the ʿolamā waged a full-fledged war against the Bābīs. The Bābī movement, as it is known, was a messianic uprising that broke out in 1844, repudiating the religious authority of the ʿolamā and renouncing Qajar legitimacy in the same breath (Amanat 1989; Browne 1918; Cole 1998b; MacEoin 1992). This movement that coincided with and exacerbated a number of other major concurrent developments and had long-term repercussions, socially and religiously, put forward a strong form of mediatory theology radically divergent from the mainstream Emāmī doctrine. Exactly a thousand lunar years after the Minor Occultation of the Twelfth Emām, the millenarian expectation of a messianic deliverance ran rampant. In Karbala and other shrine towns of the ʿatabāt in Iraq, a charismatic preacher was urging his disciples to be on watch for the Parousia or eschatological return of the Hidden Emām. This was Seyed Kāżem Raštī (1793–1843), an intellectual heir of an earlier highly influential, if only controversial religious figure, Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī (Cole 1994, 2001; Lawson 2005, 2010; Samawi 1998). Extending the teachings of the Shaykh, Seyed Kāżem emphasized a particularly strong form of Twelver Shia mediatory theology that his teacher had formulated (Rashti ca. 1830, ca. 1840). Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī had, in the early 1800s, like a meteor, ascended to fame only to fall from the heights of his esteem into infamy by the late 1820s. In a notable passage from a commentary he wrote on the important Twelver Shia liturgical prayer Ziyārat-e Jāmeʿeh, he expounded on the mediatory role of the Fourteen Infallibles. Drawing on the terminology of peripatetic philosophy, he spoke of the Emāms as the causes of creation: as [ 36 ]

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manifestations of God’s will, they are the active cause; all created beings embody the rays of light from them, in form and matter; and God created all things for that light (Ahsaie ca. 1820:11, 64, 76). The Shaykhīs, as Aḥsāʾī’s followers were called, revered the Fourteen Infallibles as the source of sustenance, the arbiters on the Day of Judgment. To most other Twelver Shias (non-Shaykhīs), the core of Aḥsāʾī’s pronouncements sounded acceptable and familiar, as they too cultivated the devotion to the Mahdi in their heart and prepared themselves for their encounter with the Hidden Emām. Although Aḥsāʾī explicitly rejected the position of the ġolāt, who, like the socalled ʿAlī-Allāhīs, were often condemned for apotheosizing the Fourteen Infallibles, some still objected that Shaykhī pronouncements border on the hyperbolic (Aḥsāʾī ca. 1825). Seyed Kāżem Raštī accentuated Aḥsāʾī’s teaching by prophesying the imminent return of the Mahdi as the millennial anniversary of the Minor Occultation approached. This message resonated with large crowds at a time when longing for Parousia had climaxed. Once Seyed Kāżem passed away, a group of his devotees rallied around a pious descendent of the Prophet, a man named ʿAlī-Moḥammad Shirāzī (1819–1850). Disciples rushed to this young merchant from Shiraz and identified him as “the Promised one” and a portal to the Hidden Emām—a Bāb, literally, a gateway. Thus, the Bābī movement burst into being. Politically, the devotees of the Bāb, known as the Bābīs, diverged from the Shaykhīs, despite the many doctrinal views that they shared. Both groups shared strong mediatory theology, acute alertness to the signs of imminent Parousia, and interest in occult teachings, especially numerology. But the Shaykhīs remained politically inert after Seyed Kāżem died. By contrast, the Bābīs went overt, radical, and militant. On more than one occasion, they reached out to the Qajar court, expecting the king to defer to the divinely ordained authority, velāyat, of the Bāb. The third Qajar king, Moḥammad Shah, must not have been bemused to receive these instructions from ʿAlīMoḥammad Shirāzī, someone he considered no more than a lowly subject: “If you pledge allegiance to me and subject yourself to my command, then shall I make your sovereignty great and bring the foreign powers under your rule” (Etezad-Saltaneh ca. 1850, 35). In the fall of 1844 scores of armed Bābīs congregated in Karbala, awaiting the return of the Hidden Emām to lead them in an apocalyptic battle of good versus evil. Dressed in bright red tunics and headbands, the Bābīs [ 37 ]

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burned with an avenging zeal, but their plan foundered. Holding up the memory of martyrdom of Emām Ḥusayn on ʿĀšūrā, the Bābīs saw themselves as God’s favored people (ahl-Allāh), and God’s chosen party (ḥizb-Allāh) dispensed to “purge the earth of corruption.” Nevertheless, the occultation of the Twelfth Emām continued, and the Bāb never found the opportunity to fight against injustice alongside the Mahdi. Eventually, he was dragged to Tehran under duress, facing humiliation on the way, especially from the ʿolamā, in one town to the next. Being denied an audience with the Qajar monarch in Tehran, he was eventually sent off to jail in a fortress far distant from his militant supporters. Undeterred—indeed, emboldened—by their leader’s imprisonment, the Bābīs intensified their protests in, but mostly outside, Tehran. Feeling rebuffed and reckoning with a thick wall of rejection, they called for armed religious uprising, or jihad, against the Qajar dynasty (MacEoin 1982). They charged on, newly fueled by their reactive exaltation of the Bāb not only as their gateway to the Mahdi but also as an access point to divine presence, and no less than an enfleshed manifestation of God. Eventually, the Bābīs would announce that they spoke for a new dispensation that abrogated Islam as the dominant creed of the land. They argued that the Arabian religion, as they referred to Islam, had run its course and that it was indeed the Bāb who now embodied God’s superseding revelation. From then on, any Bāb opponent was vilified as a fiend, an infidel, or a hypocrite in Bābī eyes (MacEoin 1982, 101). Bābī lore equated the grand vizier of the court, Ḥājī Mīrzā Āqāsī, with the despicable foe of Emām Mahdi, the Dajjāl—the Islamic equivalent of the Antichrist (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896, 232; Shoghi Effendi 1944). The monarch himself personified the Dajjāl’s infamous donkey. And when he died, the Bābīs branded his successor, the young Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah, as nothing but a lowly dog (MacEoin 1982, 89). Those sentiments did not go unpunished. Between 1848 and 1850, in the whirlwinds of transition from Moḥammad Shah to Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah, much blood was spilled in the clashes between the younger shah’s supporters and various recalcitrant groups, including the Bābīs. A couple of years into his fledgling reign, the new monarch eventually gave orders to execute the Bāb himself, on July 9, 1850 (MacEoin 1982). The pressure to uproot the Bābis once and for all had crested after a couple of Bābīs ambushed but failed to assassinate Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah in August 1852. This is usually described as a retaliatory act for the court’s execution [ 38 ]

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of the Bāb. However, it is worth noting that the culprits were caught hiding on the estate of a disgruntled Qajar prince who openly questioned Nāṣeral-Dīn’s right to the throne. The importance of mixed factors, especially political interests harbored by rival factions within the court, has paled in comparison to the emphasis placed on religious motivation. Whatever reasons may have stood before their attempt on the king’s life, the punishment of the Bābīs was meted out with startling severity, most forcefully in Tehran. Within days, numerous suspects were rounded up. Coming from all walks of life, they were divided up among the local inhabitants of the city. The monarch’s subjects—craftsmen, bureaucrats, the ʿolamā, and others— were expected to display loyalty to their sovereign by cracking down on Bābīs. Being charged with treason as well as apostasy, the living bodies of those suspected of Bābī affiliation were tortured, burned, or literally ripped apart from limb to limb. These punishments were spun as acts of suppressing heresy and the quashing of a fetneh, the blatant revolt against a divinely ordained order. Having originated as a Twelver Shia Muslim, the Bāb displayed supreme devotion to the Fourteen Infallibles, as evinced by his writings. Pinpointing the true authorship of Bābī material, however, can be difficult, but the workaday attribution of the writings to the Bāb himself is accepted here, for the sake of argument. Early on, the Bāb seemed to embrace the necessity of having mediators between God and man. The Fourteen Infallibles, especially the Hidden Emām, stood tall as the pillars of his mediatory theology. Later he extended his mediatory structure of divine manifestation, adding himself and as many as eighteen early disciples to it. The Shia tradition contains a rich legacy of esoterica (Mir-Kasimov 2015; Schimmel 1993). For example, numerical values are assigned to the letters of the alphabet. In line with the conventions of Persian calligraphy, all letters trace their elaboration to a simple dot, a single marking from the tip of a pen. This primary form, the Prime Dot, stands as an esoteric symbol of divine unity and absolute simplicity, a reminder of the Principle of Oneness (tōḥīd). The number nineteen, as specifically mentioned in the Qurʾān, is also considered sacred along various pathways (Q. Muddaṡṡir 74:30). Bābī doctrine selectively drew on this esoteric background—mobilizing numbers, letters, and esoteric codes to reach for a grasp of God’s majesty. The Bāb, also referred to as the Prime Dot, along with his eighteen early disciples, the Living Letters (ḥorūf-e ḥayy), as they are known, were believed to [ 39 ]

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embody divine mystery. Together they are said to channel the power, knowledge, and light of God in this world. Early Bābī doctrine embraced a strong form of mediatory theology, maintaining that the Fourteen Infallibles, Jesus, and other manifestations of God flow through the divine prism cut by the Prime Dot and the Living Letters. Here the messianic redeemer was conceived of as not just a single person but as a holy network of chosen individuals. One of the Living Letters was a woman referred to by the reverential title Ṭāhereh (the Immaculate), and the men also had theologically suggestive titles: one was called “the pivot of universal devotion,” the qebleh-e ʿālam, another “the Holy one,” and a third “the Transcendent,” or Qoddūs ( Jānī-Kāšānī ca. 1852, 152, 154, 181, 199, 202; MacEoin 1982; Shoghi Effendi 1944: 5–12). But the majority of Emāmīs, not least the ʿolamā, took offense at Bābī theology, first because it privileged elements in the mediatory hierarchy that traditional Shia doctrine rejected outright; then because its appeal to mystical esotericism went so far in its undermining of the ʿolamās’ textbased knowledge and authority. The Bābī claim to rendering Islam obsolete was not to be taken lightly. The Bābī voracious injunction to wage jihad against any non-Bābīs only aggravated things, enraging and alienating most of the populace. Shunning the Bābīs soon became an indirect but firm way to express one’s adherence to proper faith and a sign of political loyalty to the Muslim sovereign. In the end, the Qajar court, the ʿolamā, the Shaykhīs, and the majority of the palace intellectuals, madraseh philosophers, Sufis, and most others deemed the Bābī movement an abomination and disruption of the divinely sanctioned communal order. Within a generation after its quashing in the 1850s, two branches eventually grew from the Bābī seed: the Azalīs and the Bahais. While the latter continued to adhere to a strong mediatory theology, the former arguably abandoned it, or at least reformulated mediatory theology in a way that its tenets became effectively irrelevant. The Azalīs followed Yaḥyā Nūrī (1837–1912), a man whom the Bāb himself had once designated as his successor, referring to him affectionately as “Yaḥyā Ṣobḥ-e Azal,” literally translatable as “John the Dawn of Eternity.” Yaḥyā’s older half-brother, Ḥossein-ʿAlī Nūrī, headed the Bahai branch and went by the title “Bahāʾullāh,” the “Glory of God,” and thus his followers became known as Bahais. The infighting between the Azalīs and Bahais that split the trunk of their common theological ancestor into their two [ 40 ]

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demarcations mostly occurred outside Tehran and, as such, has minimal bearing on the present chapter’s focus. But suffice it to note that, by the 1870s, many of the salient features of early Bābī doctrine had changed and been revised or reversed by the Azalīs and Bahais. The Azalīs defended the messianic spirit of the Bābī movement but downplayed most of its implications with respect to mediatory theology. By the 1890s a group of lay intellectuals took on the Bābī-Azalī banner, rallying people around it for the cause of political progress and religious reformation. They preferred to be called “Bayānīs,” in deference to the Bāb’s Book of Bayān. Celebrating the advent of the Bāb as terminating the old order, they welcomed the dawning of a new age and called for the necessity of a new attitude toward law, reason, and religion. The Bayānīs were unabashed advocates of progress and rational enlightenment. The Book of Eight Paradises can be considered a Bayānī manifesto (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896). The text shows signs of being the work of many hands and of having been subjected to multiple revisions. It is commonly attributed jointly to Aḥmad Rūhī (ca. 1850–1896) and Āqā Khan Kermānī (Bayat-Philipp 1974a, 1974b). These two original thinkers of the late nineteenth century had spent time in Tehran, where they may have worked on the Eight Paradises together. Prophesying the imminent fall of the Qajars, they denounced the despotic king and blamed the obscurantist ʿolamā for the dark, dystopian, and even demonic status quo (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896, 161, 251). According to the Bayānī authors of the Eight Paradises, the advent of the Bāb heralded the age of reason: “[The Bāb] is the promised Mahdi. . . . He removes discord among nations, disseminates justice, and repels tyranny from the world. He enlightens reason and disperses superstition. He fills the earth with equanimity and justice” (Rūhī and Kermānī 1896, 265). Before long, Rūhī and Kermānī were beheaded at the behest of the Qajar heir apparent in Tabriz. The “light of reason” mattered more to Bayānīs than the purported mediatory role of the Bāb and his disciples, the Living Letters, as embodiments of the divine. The Bayānīs’ very choice of title, emphasizing Bayān, meaning “clear expression,” signaled their commitment to enlightened reason. Devotion to a human mediator faded away, supplanted by a commitment to disembodied objective reason. This was a momentous shift from person to principle. In the same breath, the Bayānīs also secularized the religious messianic motif and used it to articulate the secular Enlightenment ideal of [ 41 ]

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reason in religious terms. By the 1890s this emphatic interest in reason resonated with a broadening audience of Muslims in the capital, including court intellectuals and educated laymen. Another branch of the Bābī movement, the Bahai Faith, took a different path. It too drew on the motif of light, but, in contrast to the Bayānī branch, it continued to endorse, underscore, and embrace mediatory theology. The Bahais revered their eponymous leader as a messenger of sacred revelation, an embodiment of divine light, and as the one made manifest by God (man yużhiruhu-Allāh). As a bearer or vessel for God’s command (amr-Allāh), Bahāʾullāh embodied the divine light and represented the essence of the earlier prophets, Moses, Jesus, and Muḥammad. His theological opus, the Book of Certitude (Iqàn), and the very opening proclamation of the Bahai holy book, Aqdas, highlight the central significance of mediation in Bahai theology: “The first duty prescribed by God for His servants is the recognition of Him Who is the Dayspring of His Revelation and the Fountain of His laws, Who representeth the Godhead” (Bahāʾullāh 1873; Dāvūdī 1991). By the late nineteenth century, most Bayānīs and many Bahais joined politically radicalized Twelver Shia Muslims in criticizing absolute monarchy, arbitrary rule, over-taxation, coercion, and extreme forms of patriarchal domination of women. The cause of progress (taraqqī) enjoyed widespread appeal. Religiously dissident groups weighed in alongside court intellectuals, madraseh philosophers, and many members of the ʿolamā to abolish absolute despotism in favor of a constitutional monarchy or a republic in which an elected parliament would legislate and uphold the rights of the people. It was widely common to draw on a messianic narrative arc to articulate the expected transition from a dystopian present to a utopian future and a new era of justice, harmony, and unity for humankind. The presence of God in history was beyond dispute. The Bayānīs and Bahais both invested in reports that the Bāb had prophesied the fall of the Qajar dynasty. Turmoiled messianic expectations shaped political ideals and allowed for the expression of anxieties in apocalyptic terms. The timing seemed perfect circa 1906, since that prophesy was expected to come true within sixty (lunar) years since the time that the Qajars had spilled the blood of God’s favored people: namely, the Bāb and his early followers in Tehran and elsewhere, 1850–1852. As social commentary became wrapped in apocalyptic garb, the heightened expectations for social [ 42 ]

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change and political transformation combined the language of revolution with messianic prophesy. For the Bahais, political critique and religious penance unfolded in a mutual landscape of enchantment. Bahāʾullāh’s vision of political reform reflected his moralist viewpoint, and his morality was informed by his political idealism. He prophesied: “This absolutist, intolerant and patriarchal order is lamentably defective and is about to be rolled up” (Cole 2002b, 299). Similarly, the Bayānīs fused secular and religious idealizations of reason. In a characteristically farsighted section entitled “The Constitutional and Law-Based Form of Government,” the long Bayānī manifesto trumpets, “No king has ever the right to rule as an autocrat or to govern as a despot” (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896, 161). This fundamental critique of the dominant belief in the divine-right kings to rule was written almost two decades before the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. Similar ideals that were once upheld by the palace intellectuals (Mostašār-al-Dōleh 1871) had found far wider appeal. The markedly distinct approaches of the Bayānīs and Bahais to mediatory theology can best be appreciated by contrasting the ideas of Āqā Khan Kermānī and Prince Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Mīrzā, also known as Shaykh al-Raʾīs (1848–1920) (Afary 1996, 47–48, 197–99; Bayat 1991, 68–69; Cole 1998a, 1999, 2002a, 2002b; Javāher′kalām 1961). The former was a Bayānī lay intellectual; the latter, a Bahai member of the Qajar royalty. Both of these learned men were cutting-edge rationalists of their generation and had ties to the palace intellectuals, though neither man was a member of that group. At some point, both got involved in the Pan-Islamist movement, primarily a public relations campaign based in Istanbul that aimed to advance the political and religious agenda of the Ottoman court (Cole 2002a, 2002b; Özdalga 2005; Shaykh-al-Rais 1894). Shaykh al-Raʾīs, a Qajar prince, was a grandson of Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah. It is not exactly clear when he became a Bahai, but it is known that for some years he openly practiced the life of a Muslim man of learning, a member of the ʿolamā. He had studied with several of the most renowned ʿolamā masters of his time, including Mīrzā Ḥasan Shirazi (1815–1895), the respected religious authority best known for his decisive role in the Tobacco Protest that shook Tehran to the core in 1891 (Algar 1969). During his time in Shiraz, Shaykh al-Raʾīs led Emāmī congregants in prayer, delivered sermons at [ 43 ]

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their Friday Mosque, and maintained warm relations with the local ʿolamā (Forsat-e Šīrāzī 1984, 529). He is aptly described as a prince-mojtahed (Cole 2002a). Like many of the ʿolamā with similar training background, Shaykh alRaʾīs preferred a weak form of mediatory theology. This was the case at least before his conversion to the Bahai faith. He once penned a harsh polemic against Mīrzā Ghulam-Aḥmad Qādiani (1835–1908) and his claims to being a manifestation of the divine in the flesh (Khan 2015). The Mahdi of Punjab, as Ghulam-Aḥmad was reverentially called by his followers—the Ahmadis—had made messianic claims during the late 1880s, a generation after the Bābī movement had peaked. Some of Mīrzā Ghulam-Aḥmad’s teachings shared theological similarities with those put forward earlier by the Bāb. The points that Shaykh al-Raʾīs volleyed against the Ahmadis reflect a strong skepticism on his part about strong mediatory theology in general (Shaykh-al-Rais 1895). However, those doubts dissolved as the prince-mojtahed reconsidered his theological assumptions and gradually developed an attraction to the Bahai Faith. In the early 1900s, he addressed Bahāʾullāh’s son and successor, ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ (1844–1921) (Balyuzi 1971), in these terms: “The King whose crown is bestowed by God’s will, surely deserves to rule the world by divine eternal grace. The verse [in the Qurʾān] that refers to him as ‘Our chosen one’ is all but one of the many gems revealed in his praise.” Continuing on, Shaykh al-Raʾīs seemed prepared to acknowledge ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ as a mediatory agent: Ever since Bahaullah has ascended to heaven, his glory has intensified: for the glory of the more glorious is like that of the sun and his is like the moon. He, the Servant of Glory, i.e., ʿAbdul-Bahá, stands as the lord of the universe in our time, but this elevated idea lies beyond the grasp of imagination. (Afnan 1943, fols. 412–15)

Therefore, sometime around 1900, Shaykh al-Raʾīs embraced a strong form of mediatory theology, as this unequivocal exaltation of ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ and Bahāʾullāh as embodiments of divine glory, living proofs of divine truth, and lords of the universe. In chapter 1, we encountered Āqā Khan Kermānī in his writings, speaking as a natural rationalist. He insisted, unlike Shaykh al-Raʾīs, that in the postoccultation era transported in by the advent of the Bāb, natural reason—as [ 44 ]

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a universal principle—should become a point of reference and authority rather than any individual person. The two thinkers diverged in their valuation of mediatory theology. Unlike the prince-mojtahed, Kermānī showed no interest in a new messianic or prophetic leader. Kermānī’s attitude toward Islam could be described as equivocal, at best. In some of his writings, he presented the way of Bayān as perfectly harmonious with Islam (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896, 3). He even insisted that the Bayānīs were Shia Muslims: “No one is entitled to accuse them of disbelief, or attribute masked infidelity, apostasy, atheism or impurity in faith to them” (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896, 265). The authors of the Book of Eight Paradises declare that the Bayānīs “never deny a single point in the pure religion of Islam. . . . They believe in God and the Prophet; adhere to the Book [i.e., the Qurʾān] and the Prophet’s Exemplary Conduct. [The Bayānīs] are committed to the [Fourteen] Infallibles, Shia customs, the idea of the Afterlife and the Day of Judgment” (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896, 265). By contrast, in some other writings he emphatically denounced Islam (Ādamiyat 1967). Elsewhere, he did not stop short of cursing the Bābīs and even the Bāb himself. Especially emphasizing Kermānī’s prevarications on Islam and religion in general, some historians read such pronouncements as instances of ritual dissimulation (taqiyeh) commonly ascribed to the Shia. Instead, it is worth stressing that Kermānī actually may have held different ideas during different stages of his short life. He wrote most of what has survived of his work as a layman in his late thirties and early forties. His ideas, like those of most intellectuals around him, were in a state of flux, and sometimes heterodox (Yazdani 2005). Many advocates of political reform, before and after the Constitutional Revolution, embraced the egalitarian ethos of Islam in general and particularly the emphasis on justice in Shia doctrine. Some welcomed the liberating promises listed in the Bayānī manifesto as well. In the light of this, explicit declarations of religious loyalty to both Islam and the Shia creed, alongside radical endorsement of Bābī claims, need not be considered disingenuous. Professing loyalty to every “single point in the pure religion of Islam” allowed for a more broad-based recruitment of reform-minded individuals. Several intellectual leaders of the Constitutional Revolution, including a number of ʿolamā, embraced the rationalism of the Bayānīs and endorsed elements of the way of Bayān. Examples include Seyed Jamāl Vāʿeż-e [ 45 ]

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Isfahani (ca. 1863–1908), Yaḥyā Dōlatābādī (ca. 1865–1962), Malek alMotakallemīn (ca. 1860–1908), Mollā-Hādī Najmābādī (1834–1902), and Ebrāhīm Zanjāni (1856–1934). Strong supporters of the political and religious reform as they were, these men often distanced themselves from the Bahais in no uncertain terms (Najmābādī 1895). Mīrzā Jahāngīr Khan Shirāzi (ca. 1875–1908), the firebrand editor of the best-known newspaper of the Constitutional Revolution, voiced strong sympathies with the contents of the Bayānī manifesto. Published weekly from May 1, 1907, to June 20, 1908, this influential newspaper carried the apocalyptic title Ṣūr-e Esrāfīl—The Trumpet. This refers to the trumpet that, in Muslim exegetical literature, the angel named Esrāfīl, according to the Shia tradition, will blow to resurrect the dead and announce the Day of Judgment (Q. Anʿām 6:73; Kahf 18:99; Ṭā-hā 20:102; Muʾminūn 23:101; Naml 27:87; Yā-Sīn 36:51; Zumar 39:68; Qāf 50:20; Ḥāqqa 69:13; Nabaʾ 78:18). The logo of the newspaper featured a trumpet-blowing angel carrying the motto “Fraternity, Liberty and Equality” on banner wings (Āryan-pūr 1976, 2:77). A growing part of the Twelver Shia community, including notable members of the ʿolamā, candidly blamed the monarch for shortcomings and misdeeds. Unlike them, and unlike all Bāyānīs and most Bahais, that other branch of Seyed Kāżem Raštī’s intellectual heirs, namely the latter-day Shaykhīs, kept distant from political activity in general but never shied from praising those in power profusely. Their leader, Moḥammad-Karīm Khan Kermānī (ca. 1810–1872), based in Kermān some six hundred miles to the southwest of Tehran, condemned the Bayānīs and Bahais both. Condemning them as heretics, he advised others that true believers should revere the Fourteen Infallibles with wholehearted devotion. His teachings brimmed with pious advice peppered with esoterica but were devoid of political content, and his followers were wedded to political quietism (KarīmKhan ca. 1860, 1865, ca. 1870). Until the 1890s, the Shaykhīs remained a marginal minority in Tehran with only a single, small mosque of their own (Etemad al-Saltaneh 1889). But that changed as soon as Możaffar-al-Dīn Shah (r. 1896–1907) took the throne, just as demands for social, political, and religious reforms were spreading. Having grown up and come of age in Tabriz, a Shaykhī stronghold, the fifth Qajar monarch had developed strong sympathies for the Shaykhīs. The claim that he was a Shaykhī is hard to ascertain, but reports about Możaffar-al-Dīn Shah’s conduct—especially his emphatic devotion to [ 46 ]

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the Fourteen Infallibles—indicate that Shaykhī practices were accepted by the court under his rule more than before (Bāmdād 1968, 4:121). Sensing the religious sensibilities of the new king, pro-court ʿolamā co-opted elements of strong mediatory ideas of the Shaykhīs and emphasized them in public preaching. This was, in part, an effort to counter the popularity of nonmediatory theology of the Azalīs and to undermine the rising appeal of other alternatives, including the rational recasting of madraseh philosophy and reformed Sufism, topics that will be discussed in chapters 5 and 6. The Qajar court and the ʿolamā faction upon which it relied similarly drew on rampant apocalyptic euphoria. Delving into the controversial legacy of the Bābī movement, they smeared constitutionalist intellectuals as Bābī heretics and therefore as enemies of the real Mahdi. Spreading guilt through association, they were bent on reducing constitutionalism to the way of Bayān and using this misidentification to malign constitutionalist demands, such as the call for the establishment of a house of justice or parliament, as an affront to God and an evil disruption of divine order. This was by no means the fuel of all the ʿolamā or every madraseh student, but the pro-court ones, especially in Tehran, fanned its flames. Emboldened by the backing he received from them, the sixth Qajar king, Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah, resolved to reverse the concessions that his father had made and annul the Constitutionalist Proclamation. In revoking the rights that Możaffar-alDīn Shah had granted, Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah put pressure on court physicians to declare his father mentally unwell at the time of signing the said proclamation. Aided and abetted by the prominent Shaykh Faẓl-Allāh Nūrī (1843–1909) and like-minded members of the ʿolamā, he bombarded the Parliament. On June 23, 1908, shrapnel “poured in on the defenders.” After seven or eight hours “the two buildings which had for the better part of two years been the centre of the Nation’s hopes, and the focus of the new spirit which had stirred the dry bones of a seemingly dead people to new life . . . were reduced to ashes” (Browne 1910, 207–8). The next day a public park and royal entertainment venue known as Bāġ-Shāh, in the western outskirts of the capital, became the setting for the tragic slaughter of constitutionalists.1 The editor of Ṣūr-Esrāfīl and a fellow Bayānī constitutionalist, Malek alMotakallemīn, were strangled to death. As he watched from a balcony, Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah’s henchmen bastinadoed, manhandled, and murdered scores more constitutionalist critics who had been corralled into the venue [ 47 ]

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(Sa’idi-Sirjani, “Bagh-e Shah,” in EIr). Several others were hunted down and murdered outside Tehran. The anticonstitutionalists rationalized these acts of suppression as serving God, uprooting heresy, and restoring divine order. Reacting to a sternly worded reprimand Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah had received from three supreme Emāmī Shia religious authorities in Najaf—including MoḥammadKāżem Ḵorāsānī (1839–1911), better known as Āḵond-e Ḵorāsānī, who objected to his barbaric conduct—he retorted back, saying that as a divinely ordained monarch he expected the reward worthy of holy warriors and revivers of faith for rooting out the enemies of faith, and by that he meant the constitutionalists. During the period known as the years of Minor Despotism (1908–1911) under Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah, constitutionalist reformism continued to evolve, emphasizing nationalist ideals even more forcefully. An important transition occurred in messianic outlook, the result of which may be called nationalist messianism. Avoiding the millenarian controversy raised by the Bābī movement and its Bahai phase, nationalist messianism cherry-picked elements out of the structure of the familiar apocalyptic change narrative and adapted them to steep a new nationalist ideology. By the 1910s, a significant nuance was added to the apocalyptic view of renewal in history, as Nature along with the “national hero” replaced or at least complemented the “religious messiah.” Notably among others, the constitutionalist poet Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār, whose “Ode of the Morning Bird” we discussed in the previous chapter, articulated this longing for the advent of a savior, in a rebuke of Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah: Let’s await divine vengeance to awaken the ruler, like thunder jolting dry grass. Let’s await the coming of the great general, the bearer of almighty God’s halo . . .  May God heed Iran

Bahār’s expression of hope for national renewal deploys a messianic tone. In another poem, one from 1915, he continued to draw on themes arising via the narrative of occultation and expectation of the natural cum national savior: [ 48 ]

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Wait for a plant to grow Wait for thunder to burst from a black cloud Be patient for the dawn to end this night of agony . . . 

And he continues: Persevere today under the injustice of the tyrant Tomorrow, the avenger shall come to bring justice  . . .  May the cry of the bereft roll up a storm From the eyes of the storm a general may emerge.

Bahār’s “great general,” his “avenger,” was not the Hidden Emām. Channeling the voice of the people, the poet was expecting a political strongman to deliver punishment right on the spot. The theological substance of messianism was sapped in favor of making a political allegory. Deemphasizing the theological purport of mediation, the future the nationalist messianism longed for was not the coming of God’s kingdom but the establishment of a man-made, secular, political order. Bahār’s utopian vision focused on replenished national pride and prosperity. As the poet of nationalist messianism he envisioned Iran one day becoming a unified nation where workers will work the mines and move the mountains; all the lands will go under cultivation and the people will be hardworking and thrifty; exports will be high and imports will be low. Nationalist messianism placed two mythical national heroes from the Shahnameh, the ancient Book of Kings, at the center, vocalizing the hopes and promises of the nation through them. The task of saving the nation was delegated to Farīdūn (Fereydūn) and Kāveh—a noble prince and a blacksmith, destined to fight side by side to end the millennial reign of a tyrant. The Shahnameh glorifies Farīdūn as a paragon of justice and praises the heroism of Kāveh, who tied his blacksmith’s apron to the tip of a spear, brandishing it as a flag as he charged into battle against injustice. This new fascination with national heroes comes to view on the masthead of the premier outlet for Iranian nationalism, the newspaper Kāveh (Keddie 2006, 74, 80). This influential newspaper was published from 1916 to 1922 in Berlin under the directorship of Seyed Ḥasan Taqīzādeh (1878–1970), a leading constitutionalist [ 49 ]

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who had, and by the skin of his teeth, escaped Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah’s crackdown at Bāġ-Shāh. The masthead shows the sun breaking the horizon as armed folk rally behind a man, the blacksmith Kāveh, with a determined look on his face and a tall national standard waving in his hands. The conquest of Tehran in 1911, led by tribal chieftains ʿAlī-qolī Khan Sardār Asʿad Bakhtiarī (1856–1917) and Moḥammad-Valī Khan Tonekābonī (1846–1926), was celebrated as a moment of deliverance from the darkness of tyranny and evil (Khazeni 2009). This was seen as a fulfillment of a messianic promise and moment of national liberation, no less than the Cossack coup of 1921 that culminated in the abolition of the Qajar dynasty a decade later, bringing Reẓā Shah to power. Unsurprisingly, when Reẓā Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925–1941) sat on the Peacock Throne, that iconic heirloom of sovereignty in Tehran, the poet of messianic nationalism, Bahār, rushed to praise “the renowned monarch who is heir to the ancient kings of Iran” with a long, sonorous panegyric, in the lines of which he affiliated the new king with the land’s ancient rulers along a millennium (Bahār 1956, 2:148–157): ’tis been a thousand years Since a great purely Iranian king ever rode his steed But your ancestors were all Iranian A pure-bred lineage of sons, down from Bahman and Darius

In the same poem, Bahār credits himself with having the foresight to have predicted and delivered the good tidings of the advent of the nation’s savior— the king whose face reminds one of paradise, a man of great genius and charisma, rising in the land of the mythical king Jamshid to usher in an era of virtue and welfare for the nation. References to ancient kings—Jamshid, Bahman, Darius—and regard of the royal crown as God’s gift bestowed on the monarch commonly appeared in the works of other nationalists besides Bahār. Messianic nationalism swept over the nation, drafting hitherto marginal segments into the mainstream. Even outside Iran, the coming of Reẓā Shah stirred messianic hopes. Mohammad Iqbal-Lahouri (1873–1938), the philosopher-poet of India and one of the intellectual fathers of the nation-state of Pakistan who closely watched developments in Iran, held his hopes high for the dawn of an epoch-making [ 50 ]

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transformation. In an optimistic poem written not long before or after Reẓā Shah acceded to the throne in 1925, Iqbal wrote of a capable man who will rise to bring freedom to Iran: Good-tidings O Persian youth! I hold you as dear as my own soul A man shall come to break the shackles of the slaves I have witnessed this looking out from a crack in your prison cell. (Iqbal-Lahori 1927, part 2, no. 57, 176–77)

Published in Iqbal’s Persian Book of Psalms, this was part of a larger collection of poems that similarly expressed his ardent interest in the Turkish Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), as well as his high hopes for the rising of ʿAbdulaziz Ibn Saʿūd (1875–1953) in the Arabian Peninsula, as deliverers of divine promise who would mediate God’s power in the world (Iqbal-Lahori 1927, part 2, no. 12, 103). Nationalist messianism was rampant. Closer to home, the six thousand or so Jews residing in Tehran joyfully celebrated Reẓā Shah’s rise to glory, welcoming him as a latter-day Cyruslike redeemer. A couple of generations earlier, their forefathers knew about the special status accorded them as part of God’s “peculiar treasure” in the Torah (Exodus 19:5), but some may have asked God to choose some other group to live under the squalid, disdain-filled, and discriminatory conditions they had to face in the Qajar capital (Levi 1956; Shahri 1997; Tsadik 2007; Yeroushalmi 2009). Conditions did improve in 1898 when the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened a school for Jewish youth featuring instruction in both Persian and French (Levi 1956; A. Netzer, “Alliance Israélite Universelle,” in EIr). Only then could the Jewish community even consider partaking of emerging opportunities. The coming of Reẓā Shah heralded unprecedented possibilities for them, not by endorsing claims to their exceptional status as God’s chosen people but rather as a result of systematic efforts at nationstate building. Working under Reẓā Shah, veterans of the Constitutional Revolution, including Bahār and Taqīzādeh, envisioned Iran as a modern nation-state that was, in principle, inclusive and integrative of all ethnic, religious, and linguistic constituents of the nation. What used to be excluded from politics as the exception was to become integrated into the whole. The efforts to centralize the state’s power through the establishment of secular [ 51 ]

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institutions, such as the modern judiciary, upheld the promise of clearing the road to progress for all citizens, regardless of creed, ethnicity, or language. The promise hardly materialized, but in theory at least these secular institutions were blind to religion, ethnicity, and other differences or divisions within the nation. Viewed from another perspective, those centralizing efforts were meant to dismantle deeply entrenched patrimonial or patron–client networks that pervaded the society. The modern nation-state tasked itself with tearing them down, signaling a break with the ways of the past. Unlike what the term secularization may imply, this was not the same as eradicating the social and political significance of religion. Important, if only implicit, theological revisionism was at work here, especially involving interpretations of mediatory theology. Qajar authoritarianism was rooted in the ground of patrimonial loyalties, with the king sitting on top of the hierarchy, and patron–client relations between big men and lesser men trickling down from there, weaving the fabric of social reality (Schmidt et al. 1977). Patrimonial or patron–client relationships that defined and embodied the social and political norm depended on the patrons meting out favors as they pleased and the clients dutifully offering them service and loyalty. Only through the implicit or explicit mediation of patrons could clients access social resources. In return, the patrons were entitled to receive loyalty, which translated into service. Society recognized and accepted these relations as being reciprocal but asymmetrical, and thus unequal. The asymmetry of patronage and loyalty, benefice and service, consequently, made for a highly asymmetrical social structure. Who gets what depends on who is who, and on who knows whom. The client knelt in a position of receivership and subservience before the patron, the giver of benefice, the valī-neʿmat. The designation of the patron as the valī-neʿmat, in Tehrani vernacular, should be emphasized, in which valī—bearer of authority—is the keyword. It gives a clue to the way in which the social reality of patron–client relations was likened, albeit inadequately and inaccurately, to the cosmic hierarchy through which God’s power, justice, and will become distributed in his world of creation. As the nation-state set out to displace the prevailing patrimonial networks, the interpretation of mediatory theology upon which patron– client relations were implicitly modeled faced explicit criticism. [ 52 ]

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First, the realities of nation-state building muffled revolutionary promises and messianic expectations. During the 1930s a linear notion of time and incremental progress supplanted the ideal of the continuum of history as being blasted by direct divine intervention (Benjamin 1940, 252–64). As the growing national bureaucracy—from the military to the university— defined the scope of practical, political, and secular action, disciplined work was idealized. Even in the press, the language of statistics—the state’s secular arithmetic of facts, figures, and forecasts—prevailed over the previous generation’s mode of explaining the state of things. In a similar way, as Nature rising to the position of manifesting and mediating divine will through natural laws, the state acquired recognition as the mediator between God and nation, serving as an instrument of collective, and gradual, deliverance. The project of couching ideas of social reform in terms of religious criticism continued. In the name of combating superstition, messianism and the set of notions surrounding it became a target. The level of disdain for mediatory theology in the 1930s can be gauged by looking at the works of three authors who rose from ʿolamā ranks: Ahmad Kasravi-Tabrīzī (1890–1946), ʿAlī-Akbar Ḥakamīzādeh (ca. 1909–1987), and Šarīʿat Sangelajī (ca. 1891–1943). Reẓā-Qolī or Moḥammad-Ḥasan Šarīʿat Sangelajī, a well-educated Twelver Shia jurist, went so far as contending that certain Shia beliefs were blasphemous superstitions and should be abandoned (Rahnema 2016). Sangelajī had studied religious law and madraseh philosophy in the Qajar capital before moving to Najaf, where he furthered his training. Shortly after the Cossack coup of 1921, he returned to his native city and started leading prayers and preaching on religious topics at a mosque named after his late father, in Tehran’s Sangelaj neighborhood. Embarking from the premise that commitment to the absolute oneness of God forms the principal pillar of Islam, Sangelajī eschewed belief in the Fourteen Infallibles’ role in mediating between man and the divine. He argued that God was not some irascible sovereign who needed to be approached through and appeased by the intercession of what he irreverently called a select circle of courtiers (Sangelajī 1943, 138, 155–56). ʿAlī-Akbar Ḥakamīzādeh, a student with an apparent promising future, had, in his twenties, started questioning the tenets of Twelver Shia theology. During the 1920s his father had helped Grand Ayatollah Hāʾerī-Yazdī [ 53 ]

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establish the Conglomerate of Learning in Qom, the ḥōzeh. In spite of his background and upbringing, young Ḥakamīzādeh chose to live in the rapidly secularizing capital, where, along with like-minded writers, most of whom belonged to ʿolamā families like his, he published articles in the magazine Homāyūn, which raised objections against certain Shia beliefs and practices. Using a polemical pamphlet he put together entitled the Millennial Secrets, he taunted the religious authorities of the day by claiming, “Ninety-five percent of what you call religion is falsehood” (Ḥakamīzādeh 1943). Rejecting the mediatory role of the Fourteen Infallibles, Ḥakamīzādeh admonished that some Twelver Shia liturgies were at their pith idolatrous (Ḥakamīzādeh 1943, 7). As a young man, Ahmad Kasravi had participated in the Constitutional Revolution in Tabriz (Abrahamian 1973). He had moved to Tehran in his early thirties and, after a decade-long career in the judiciary working in various parts of the country, left government service and turned his abundant energies toward journalism and pamphleteering. He published on a broad range of topics: religion, philosophy, literature, psychology, history, linguistics—even zoology. Kasravi conveyed the critiques of Ḥakamīzādeh and Sangelajī even further. It was he who had been responsible for having Ḥakamīzādeh’s Millennial Secrets printed and distributed, identifying the author of the tract simply as a fellow sympathizer. Kasravi shunned any doctrine that bestowed or threatened to bestow divine status upon anyone or anything instead of the one and only God. Contending that Twelver Shia theology presents the hands of the Fourteen Infallibles working in the affairs of the universe, he concluded that seeking intercession, or any other form of mediation, between God and man amounted to polytheism (Kasravi 1944, 32–40). He felt, as Sangelajī and Ḥakamīzādeh did, that such a belief violated the purely monotheistic ethos of Islam, the ethos that “the Great Arabian man”—as he referred to the Prophet Muḥammad—had proclaimed (Kasravi 1944, 32–40). Kasravi applied his criticism of mediatory theology to Sufi and Bahai teachings as well (Kasravi 1943a, 1943b, 1943c). As a participant in the Constitutional Revolution, he bitterly recalled that ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ, the leader of the Bahai community, had ordered the Bahais to side with Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah (Browne 1910, 427–29; Momen 2012, 339f). For this, Kasravi vilified the Bahais as the enemies of the people of Iran. Political reasons aside, Kasravi rebuked the Bābīs and Bahais for what he reasoned to be their deification of [ 54 ]

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ʿAlī-Moḥammad Bāb, Bahāʾullāh, and other individuals they revered, including the Living Letters (Kasravi 1943a, 48). He interpreted the opening line of the Bahai scripture cited above to mean that Bahāʾullāh ordered his followers to worship him à la God. In this, and in many other parts of his highly critical polemics—against Shias, Sufis, and others—Kasravi refused to grant the benefit of the doubt to those he criticized. He derided Bahāʾullāh, calling him “a wretched man who denied his own claims every now and then for fear of his life” (Kasravi 1943a, 40). The fates that befell these three critics of mediatory theology is instructive. Sangelajī died of natural causes at a relatively early age while at the peak of his intellectual powers. His knowledge and character attracted the esteem of a few students, but the religious establishment treated him with disdain. As for Ḥakamīzādeh, in the decades after his pamphlet came out, he lived a long and somewhat peaceful life mainly because, as the son of a senior member of the ʿolamā, he was granted forbearance. He maintained a small group of followers in Qom, and a subdued current of criticism against strong forms of mediatory theology continued to flow underground ( Jaʿfariān 2011). Kasravi was knifed and gunned down by a vigilante group named the Sacrificial Warriors of Islam (Fadāʾīyān-e eslām). The Constitutional Revolution (1906), the ensuing abrogation of the Qajar dynasty (1925), and the ensuing rise of centralist statism were steps that led in the direction of dismantling patrimonial relations in society. Next to the Qajar court, these developments were detrimental to the established interests of some tribal chieftains, landholders, and members of the ʿolamā. Reẓā Shah quashed efforts by each of these groups at defying the state, hanging dozens of tribal dissenters, confiscating the private estates, and throwing many formerly elite families into poverty. A concomitant weakening mediatory theology was on the centralizing agenda of the state no less than on the minds of the advocates of religious reform. During the same decade when Reẓā Shah proceeded with eliminating resistance to the state’s monopoly on power, Kasravi, Ḥakamīzādeh, and Sangelajī published their critiques of strong mediatory theology. As these and other critics of established beliefs and practices continued, government bureaucracy banned the public observance of religious rituals, notably the mourning processions in ʿĀšūra. Mounting anxieties that stemmed from centralizing the state-building enterprise translated into pent-up resentment. On the heels of Reẓā Shah’s [ 55 ]

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abdication in 1941, during the chaotic years of the Second World War, there opened in Iran a space for the autonomous expression of public will within civil society. Witnessing the downfall of the iron-fisted ruler emboldened his critics. The once marginalized ʿolamā strove to rekindle the embers of the power they had lost and to once again compete among the other rising social forces. The assassination of Kasravi emblematized their return. Other forces came to the fore as well, much to the dislike of the ʿolamā. Directly backed by the Soviet Union, the communist Tudeh Party was founded in October 1941 mere days after Reẓā Shah’s abdication. It actively recruited from among the urban youth, welcoming former followers and admirers of Kasravi, among others. To the ʿolamā, this was alienating them even further from religion. The Bahai community also became more visible under the guardianship of the Oxford-trained Shoghí Effendí (1897–1957). Moreover, a group of Muslim lay intellectuals appeared on the scene during the 1940s who were ready, willing, and able to push back energetically against the Tudeh Party and the Bahais ( Jaʿfariān 2011). Working with a segment of the ʿolamā, best represented by Seyed Maḥmūd Ṭāleqānī (1911–1979), and under the leadership of Mahdī Bāzargān—a French-educated engineer and a professor at the University of Tehran—they resolved to win the youth back into the fold of faith. Once again, debates about God and religion shaped the intellectual and political discourse of the day in Tehran ( Jaʿfariān 2011). The Tudeh Party, the Bahais, the ʿolamā, the emerging group of lay Muslim intellectuals, the state, and others each contributed from different angles. The new monarch, Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–1979), established strong ties with the religious establishment. He disliked and distrusted the Tudeh Party and the godless ideology that it advertised no less than did the ʿolamā and their followers. The king was ready and willing to work with them against that threat. By contrast, while he tolerated the Bahais, they did not. Shoghí Effendí, who methodically reformed Bahai thought and administration during his long tenure as the “guardian of the cause” or “command of God” (valī-e amr-Allāh), endorsed but lessened the thrust of mediatory theology in the Bahai doctrine. Accepting the designation “guardian” or “valī” signals the continued acknowledgment of his mediatory role. Furthermore, he appointed thirty-one Bahai men as the “hands that carry out God’s command” (ayādī amr-Allāh). Their mandate was already set forth in ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ’s will: “The obligations of the Hands of the Cause of God are [ 56 ]

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to diffuse the Divine Fragrances, to edify the souls of men, to promote learning. . . . They must manifest the fear of God by their conduct, their manners, their deeds and their words” (ʿAbduʾl-Bahá 1991, 127). While he remained loyal to the mediatory framework of his forebears, Shoghí Effendí chose to decentralize the form of mediation, partly by deemphasizing both the Muslim context of Bahai teachings and the Twelver Shia background of the Bābī movement. The most significant institutional breakthrough came with the official establishment of the Universal House of Justice, whose inauguration by his appointed custodians of the cause of God occurred in 1963, only a few years after he had died. Restructured in historical, theological, and institutional terms, the Bahai Faith now stood as an independent community of faith more than before. Attempting to secure the welfare of the Bahai community, Shoghí Effendí assured the Pahlavi government of his followers’ full compliance with all its laws and policies (Cole 2002b; Smith 2000, 346–50). Thus, the Bahais had embraced modernizing efforts by the state. When Reẓā Shah mandated, as of 1936, that women appear in public without the traditional veil, the Bahais had no objection. Soon after that alongside a sizable minority of Muslim and other non-Bahai women, a majority of Bahai women began working in Tehran, especially as nurses and teachers (The Baháʾí World 9: 251; 11: 563; 15: 248). After the coup of 1953 Mohammad-Reẓā Shah adopted a two-pronged policy of rapid modernization coupled with a series of self-aggrandizing initiatives as God’s chosen monarch of the sole Twelver Shia nation in the world. The policy was meant to unite the nation and bring two tendencies together—the eager advocacy of modernization cum reliance on the religious legacy and royal tradition. Despite its built-in contradictions, the society at large seemed ready for the synthetic approach, and the shah demonstrated both tendencies in his own life and worldview. He had no doubts that, “where there’s no monarchy, there’s anarchy, or an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Besides, a monarchy is the only possible means to govern Iran” (Fallaci 1973). In principle, even the ʿolamā and their followers, at least most of them, agreed. However, many among them harbored practical reservations. While they savored the strong support of the state, and personally the shah, in the battle against godless communism, they still worried about the Bahai threat. The Bahais subscribed to those modern cultural habits that the ʿolamā opposed, and to their chagrin were rapidly on the rise. The ʿolamā felt alarmed that the Bahais were flooding the streets with subversive propaganda, [ 57 ]

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particularly proselytizing at the most vulnerable audiences—namely, the women and the youth. The fact that the Universal House of Justice, the institutionalized embodiment of Bahai mediatory theology, was founded in Haifa compounded the concerns of the ʿolamā because, like most of the public, they saw the Arab–Israeli conflict as a confrontation between Islam and its enemies. Besides their cultural habits and apparent political compliance, the economic success of the Bahai community as a whole provoked opponents to portray them as conspirators and promoters of foreign interests. Class location in the middle and upper strata made it easier to prod the underprivileged classes below into targeting the Bahais and other beneficiaries of the economic policies of the Pahlavi status quo. The opening of department stores, import-based consumer outlets, and governmentbacked manufacturing enterprises during the 1960s–1970s was traced to exclusive circles, with rumors spreading that running them were either Bahais and Jews or other Pahlavi “puppets” manipulated by Bahai and Jewish puppeteers. This not only fueled resentment among those who could not afford such products but also alarmed the more traditional merchants of the bazaar. Feeling increasingly more marginalized, these bazaaris joined the ʿolamā in exclaiming, “The Bahais are coming! The Bahais are coming!” The ʿolamā and the bazaaris had their own ways of combating the perceived Bahai threat, with a remedy partially prescribed by the highly motivated member of the ʿolamā, Shaykh Maḥmūd Tavallāʾī, better known as Shaykh Maḥmūd Ḥalabi (ca. 1900–1998) (Bāqī 1985; Cohen 2013; Sadri, “Ḥojjatiya,” in EIr). On the eve of the 1953 coup, Shaykh Ḥalabi had moved to Tehran in order to follow his calling, channeling his energies into organizing a network of activities in the service of the Hidden Emām by founding an organization—the Ḥojjatiyeh. The name expresses devotion to the Twelfth Emām, who is a proof (ḥojjat) of divine presence in the world. Its aim was to train new cadres for the “scientific defense” of Shia Islam, who were destined to face what he saw as an urgent Bahai threat. His vision captured certain segments of Tehran society, especially the bazaaris and the lower-rung employees of the expanding government bureaucracy, most of whom had ties to the bazaar or the ʿolamā as well. These were groups that no doubt wished to partake in the progress of the country but at the same time felt alienated by the accelerating rate of modernization and Westernization begun in the 1950s. The Ḥojjatiyeh projected messianic deliverance and the advent of an ideal world into a distant future (Aḥmadzādeh 1999, [ 58 ]

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27f; Bāqī 1985, esp. 78). What was deemed un-Islamic conduct—the mingling of men and women at work, going to the movies, and the open sale of alcohol—though lamentable, was regarded as a sign of the time. More important was strict devotion to the Hidden Emām in heart and in action. In their midst, Shaykh Ḥalabi and his followers called for the necessity of preparing the terrain for the coming of the Mahdi, mainly through combating against Bahais and communists. Emphasizing personal piety and sincere devotion in thought and practice to the Fourteen Infallibles, especially the twelfth Emām, Shaykh Ḥalabi rehabilitated mediatory theology in its strong Emāmī formulations. Stressing communal ties during the time of occultation, the Ḥojjatiyeh organization encouraged and provided opportunities to Muslim families to come together in worship. The annual celebration of the birthday of Emām Mahdi, the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Islamic calendar, became an important celebratory occasion. It had been piously observed in recent memory, especially during the reign of pro-Shaykhi Możaffar-al-Dīn Shah. Thanks to Shaykh Ḥalabi’s renewed dedication, local craftsmen, electricians, and carpenters cooperated on this occasion to set up temporary fairs, and bazaari families provided the food, soft drinks, and sweets to sustain attendees. Schoolchildren read aloud passages from the Qurʾān and recited little speeches and religious poetry. Ḥojjatiyeh recruits were “cleanshaven and groomed for success in the secular educational and professional world,” prepared and willing to negotiate a place in it for themselves (Sadri, “Ḥojjatiya,” in EIr). Eventually those recruits came to provide the early cadres of the Islamic Republic, a quarter of a century later. However, at the time, the shah’s more radical critics found the group’s political acquiescence inadequate, even reactionary. With the heightening of Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah’s autocratic policies, especially after the White Revolution of 1962, new forces joined the chorus of dissident ʿolamā and bazaaris in Tehran, faulting the rapid modernization of Iranian society as a blind parodying of the West and a direct threat to native values. The manifesto of this emerging nativist outlook was a punchy pamphlet entitled Westoxication, Occidentosis, or A Plague from the West, which diagnosed the condition as a deadly disease (Āl Aḥmad 1962; Boroujerdi 1996). First published in the fall of 1962 and distributed widely through underground channels, Westoxication was penned by a leading dissident intellectual named Jalāl Āl Aḥmad (1923–1969). Born into a traditional ʿolamā [ 59 ]

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family in Tehran, Āl Aḥmad had worked as an electrician before plying his vocation as a fiction writer, essayist, and political activist. Sympathizing with Kasravi’s criticisms of mediatory theology, he had once compiled a critique of Shia rituals, especially in the observance of ʿĀšūrā. Later, abandoning religious belief and practice, he joined the Tudeh Party for a while but soon parted ways with it. Although he was not a theologian and his writings betray no theological sophistication, Āl Aḥmad had an acute sense of personal and collective moral responsibility. Even after leaving the communist party in protest, Āl Aḥmad held on to socialist ideals. The publication of Westoxication marks a decisive turn on the latter’s part to rediscover Islam as an effective remedy for moral, social, and political ailments of the time. Of course, looking to Islam as the solution for ending social injustice and fighting against political oppression had deep roots. In Westoxication, Āl Aḥmad voiced a characteristically contrarian view among contemporary intellectuals and vindicated the nemesis of the Constitutional Revolution, Shaykh Faẓl-Allāh Nūrī. Digging out old accusations against the constitutionalists and the preceding generation of court intellectuals, Āl Aḥmad was joining other social forces that rallied around the banner of Islam to combat the status quo. For example, in 1965 a group of university students, originally attracted to the modern religious teachings of Bāzargān, formed the Mojāhedīn Ḵalq Organization (MKO), or the People’s Mojahedin Organization (PMO). This was a militant group dedicated to armed revolt against the shah and those it identified as his U.S. overlords (Abrahamian 1992). The slogan of the MKO, an extract from the Qurʾān, announced that “God ranks fighters over and above those who sit in passivity” (Q. Nisāʾ 4:95). These students, mostly in science and engineering fields, some with Ḥojjatiyeh connections, had no patience for what they considered the political inertness of Shaykh Ḥalabi’s organization. The founders of the MKO believed in revolution, as did most others of their generation. In their own words, they subscribed to an evolutionary notion that unfolded as an inviolable historical process and culminated in revolution (Mojāhedīn-e Khalq-e Īrān ca. 1968). This universal revolution would lead to the establishment of social justice, or, in words coined by those who had an interest in social science nomenclature, to the emergence of a “Unitarian Classless Society.” The term “unitarian” (tōḥīdī) is paramount here as it expressed allegiance to the fundamental theological principle of divine unity in Muslim theology. This ideological framework elevated the people (ḵalq) to the status of [ 60 ]

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divine agents, ascribing to them a mediatory role to bring about the divine promise of justice. Striving for such historical deliverance was linked in no uncertain terms with the active commitment to hastening the Parousia of the Hidden Emām. The foremost articulator of this rapturous view of God and society was Dr. ʿAli Shariati (1933–1977), the ideologue of revolution (Rahnema 2000). Dr. Shariati reconceptualized tōḥīd, messianic expectation, martyrdom, and almost all other key principles of Twelver Shia thought and practice (Shariati 1977). He parallelized the modern political notion of the revolution and the apocalyptic promise of messianic deliverance. His reformulations were constructed on the blueprint of a full-fledged ideology for guiding life and action in the here and now, and for interpreting the world’s past, present, and future. In order to iron out discrepancies between what Twelver Shia doctrine was and what he envisioned it should be, Shariati distinguished between two kinds of Shiism—the Red and the Black. Red Shiism preserved the purity of the teachings of Emām ʿAlī, whereas Black Shiism perverted it. He saw the latter as merely a counterfeit put into circulation under the Safavid dynasty back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shariati, his distinctions, and his reformulation of mediatory theology are worth exploring. Drawing stark contrasts between the Red Shiism of Ali and the Black Shiism of the Safavids, Shariati tossed out the traditional gist of the mediatory role of the Fourteen Infallibles in the strong sense. Worried by what he saw as the doctrinally heretical or hyperbolic views of Black Shiism, not to mention its politically quietist stance, he said that such strong claims about the cosmic mediatory roles of the Emāms violated the principle of divine oneness by assigning partners for God (Shariati 1973, 170–74). Echoing critiques that Ḥakamīzādeh, Sangelajī, and Kasravi had raised a generation earlier, Shariati likened the Shia doctrine of intercession to cheating on an exam by way of paying off the authorities to get a good grade. He peppered his presentation by protesting that in the Black Shiism of the Safavids, ʿAlī wins and God loses (Shariati 1973, 222, 275–84). Rather than concealing a trump card in an unfair game, Shariati spoke of intercession as a process of spiritual evolution to acquire a disposition to be saved (Shariati 1973, 322). His Red Shiism deemphasized, not to say dismissed, the eschatological and cosmic in traditional Shia thought. Instead, he stressed the political role of the Emāms. For example, as he saw it, [ 61 ]

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expecting the return of the Hidden Emām ought to focus the aspirations of faithful revolutionaries on a shared promise, the establishment of a just society. While Shariati’s theory of the Emāmate amounted to a weak form of mediatory theology, it made strong political assumptions and had potent political implications. The religious establishment was divided in its response to Shariati. A minority showed interest but reserved the right for itself to correct his views and emend his claims. The majority frowned on his teachings and eyed his popularity with a mixture of envy, suspicion, and contempt. A wellinformed eyewitness to the debates at the time speaks of a group of selfstyled wilāyatīs who supported the perfect knowledge and limitless power and divine authority, velāyat, of the Emāms (Modarressī-Ṭabāṭabāʾī 1993, 50f). In the wording adopted here, those wilāyatīs subscribed to a strong formulation of mediatory theology. They were Shariati’s most ardent detractors. Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah attempted to respond to his religious critics in a shared religious vernacular, drawing on religious motifs to buttress his legitimacy. He evinced not one doubt about being favored and protected by God in his mission to lead Iran toward greatness (Pahlavi 1960, 1977; see also Fallaci 1977, 267–69; 2011). Reemphasizing the motto “God-King-Country” as a national slogan perhaps hides in plain sight the effort made to elevate the king himself to an intermediary position between God and the nation. In that vein, from the middle of the 1960s, pageantry played an increasingly central role in the ceaseless reaffirmation of the mediatory authority of the king. One such pageant was the 1967 week-long coronation ceremony, whose staging commenced on the shah’s forty-eighth birthday, was choreographed to the minutest detail, and incorporated subtle religious motifs (Tajgozari 1967). Later, in 1971, standing on the grounds before the presumed tomb of Cyrus the Great (ca. 600–530 BCE), the shah greeted the biblical redeemer and assured the ancient emperor that he could rest in peace as he—Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah Pahlavi, the king of kings, the Shāhanshah, and the Aryan Sun (Āryāmehr)—will be watching after the nation. Looking back, the shah’s efforts failed to satisfy his detractors, and his grandiose claims alienated a spectrum of people, whether they were religious or not. Trying to legitimate political autocracy by depicting the ruler as an agent of the divine ultimately backfired, repelling both religious and secular political activists. However, the rejection of the shah as “God’s [ 62 ]

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shadow on the earth” birthed a rival form of mediatory theology that ascribed an even stronger mediatory role to the state in the name of the people. Politicians and saints have little in common, but theologians and state ideologues share more than either party would comfortably admit. Anthropologists have observed that “kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some degree a sacred office” (Evans-Pritchard 1964, 210). One pillar of early Qajar theory of kingship was the emphasis placed on the vital circuit between monarchs and the divine realm. Another was the imbuement of rulers with a divine mediatory capacity. The dissatisfaction of twentieth-century public intellectuals with strong mediatory theology indirectly led to the loosening of the ground on which those pillars of political legitimacy stood. However, their thrust lived on under the Pahlavis as well, and then became firmer than ever under the Islamic Republic. A public referendum held on March 31, 1979, gave birth to the Islamic Republic. Reveling in reports that 98.2 percent of the electorate had voted “Yes” to his favored form of government, Ayatollah Khomeini declared that day as the “first day of the sovereignty of Allah” (Khomeini 1989, 22:233–34). This was meant to be understood in more than a rhetorical sense. Any opposition to the nascent republic was deemed an affront to God, and those who dared to rise up against it faced persecution and punishment as the enemies of God. The identification of the state with God now acquired expansive new dimensions.

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THREE

God with Us

HERE IS a former soldier, once a young member of the paramilitary basīj, reminiscing about a curious incident that occurred on the earliest days of 1987, during Operation Karbala-5, a critical episode in the Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988: We were stationed on a Pī-Em-Pī armed with an artillery cannon.1 Before operations began, I tested the equipment, the launcher and everything. Our unit commander ordered me to fire on enemy embankments in the direction he pointed. I loaded the ammunition, aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing! Our commander was disappointed. I felt embarrassed but had no explanation.

He goes on: A day later, the commander tapped me on the shoulder, “Guess why the artillery didn’t fire yesterday?” I said, “No idea.” He explained, “Because those embankments belonged to friendly forces!” A strange feeling swept over me. That’s when I realized God was really with us.2 (Fahīmī 2002a, 2:54–55)

What can be more empowering than the conviction that God is on your side? God with us. Especially in war, when the stakes are high and [ 64 ]

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predictability is scant. When that cannon failed to fire, that basījī and his comrades in arms savored every sign of divine support they could find. Operation Karbala-5 was their moment of truth. The ghastly disaster of Operation Karbala-4 between December 24 and 26, 1986, had left thousands of men dead, missing in action, or seriously maimed. In order to rebuild morale, the High Council of Defense launched a massive counteroffensive within less than a fortnight (Hāshemi-Rafsanjani 2009, 2012). The postrevolutionary state apparatus in Iran, the sacred system (neżām-e moqaddas) of the Islamic Republic, has invested heavily in bootstrapping itself as a divinely ordained medium for enacting God’s will. During the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War, the state deployed this form of mediatory theology amid its arsenal of weapons within the theater of modern war. It cultivated the hope of having God’s support in the here and now, stressing the immediate presence and accessibility of the state as an embodiment of divine authority. The masses were nudged to follow the will of the state as the will of God and to adhere to the divine arithmetic that having God on their side depended on their standing on the side of the state. Back on March 31, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini had proclaimed the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the restoration of God’s sovereignty on earth. Now, in his redoubtable authority, the eighty-some-year-old Emām Khomeini, the commander-in-chief during the Iran-Iraq War years, promised ultimate victory and messianic deliverance. He believed what the Qurʾān promises was nigh: “Verily the Party of God [ḥizb-Allāh] will triumph” (Q. Mā’ida 5:56; Mujādala 58:22). Envisaged as the political embodiment of the Party of God, the Islamic Republic was bound to pave the way for the return of the Lord of the Age, the Mahdi. This was the war of all wars to topple the satanic superpowers of the East and West and to restore divine order by stopping the universe’s ungodly chaos—fetneh. Depicting it as the ultimate confrontation between Islam and infidelity (kofr), he insisted, up to the last hours of the Iran-Iraq War, that peace between the two sides was unthinkable.3 Aided and abetted by an assortment of military and civilian cadres, the ʿolamā strategized on reconnoitering the conduits of divine influence in society and throughout history. Newspaper columnists and preachers incessantly hammered the point into their readership and congregations while state-run radio and television did likewise, using broadcast interviews and [ 65 ]

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reminiscences similar to the one quoted above to push the belief into the nation’s heart and mind that divine support from the unseen realm was flowing in to aid the troops, the “warriors of Islam” (Moṭahharī 1975). Supporters were convinced that the Islamic Republic was destined to achieve Islam’s universal victory under the leadership of the Supreme Jurist (valī-e faqīh). As a special devotee of the Fourteen Infallibles, their leader was a valī, or bearer of divine authority. The state a valī leads has a mandate to do God’s bidding on earth, including warfare. By corollary, this elevates the state to an even loftier position as an intermediary between man and God. In general, mediatory theologies do more than interpret the world. They specify ways for changing it as well. Explicating divine actions via intermediaries has earthbound practical implications, often going hand in hand with prescribing acts of service, devotional practices, ritual procedures for approaching God, or petitioning bearers of divine authority. Thus, supplication, pilgrimage, and pious vows inhabit the world of believers. This chapter turns to such matters in Tehran long before visions of stateembodied mediatory theology materialized. Generations before the advent of the Islamic Republic, most people in Tehran acknowledged the existence of higher levels of reality behind and beyond the realm of quotidian life. Muslims surely concurred that God not only was present but was also approachable and responsive, all-seeing and all-hearing, rewarding good and punishing evil (Q. Baqarah 2:3; Anʻām 6:59; Yūnus 10:20; Maryam 19:61). In the Qurʾān, God says, “I am near, I answer the supplicant’s prayers as rendered. So, hearken my response, and keep faith in Me; thus, they shall be delivered” (Q. Baqara 2:186). The non-Muslim inhabitants of Tehran had their own proofs for a living, all-knowing, allpowerful God, who is also nigh and responsive. As the Psalmist says: “I will fear no evil; For You are with me; . . . Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me; All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever” (King James Bible, Psalm 23). Linguistic fieldwork confirms that similar ideas resonated with the Jewish population of the city as well (Soroudi 1990). As differently as they may conceive of the channels mediating divine presence in the world—Muslims and non-Muslims, commoners and the elite, faithful men and women—believers approached God by searching their lives for signs of divine presence. To the skeptic, belief in signs may sound like [ 66 ]

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supernatural distraction or outright superstition. The historian need not judge. Regarded as the outward manifestations that convey inward messages of such presence, believers seek to discern and decipher the signs. On the lookout for both signs of divine favor or approval and signals of admonition or wrath, they yearn to catch a glimpse behind the proverbial curtain that partitions off the visible world from what is hidden. Prophet Muḥammad had encouraged his followers, “Avail yourselves of divine breaths that breeze up in your time” (Rumi ca. 1270, bk. I, ln. 1954). According to the Qurʾān, one could look inside the heart or out on the horizon and see the signs of God everywhere (Q. Fuṣṣilat 41:53). In the Book of Psalms, the supplicant implores God for signs on multiple occasions (e.g., Psalms 74:8–10, 86:16–17). As a poplar nineteenth-century poem put it, “You are manifest in a hundred thousand ways, and I stare at you with a hundred thousand eyes” (Forūġī-Besṭāmī 1857, ghazal 9). In their keenness to discover divine signs, generations of Tehranis often appealed to the power of coincidence. All walks of people aspired for those ecstatic moments when it felt like God was winking at them, or speaking directly to them through dreams, divinations, and other channels that defy the grasp of the rational. As a gateway into the unseen realm, dreams might help one decide what to embrace and what to avoid. A special category of dreams known as “veridical dream-visions” were particularly cherished for unraveling the secrets of the hidden affairs of the world (Mittermaier 2011). Veridical dreams are believed to really matter, unlike other sorts of dreams that may be dismissed as nightly recollections of daytime anxieties or even as side-effects of indigestion. In their conveyance of messages to the dreamer from the higher realm, veridical dreams are anointed with the power to foretell, foreshadow, or even alter the course of future events (Q. Yūsuf 12:44; Anbiyā’ 21:5). Encountered during sleep or in wakeful moments of clairvoyance, veridical dream-visions were believed to affect waking life. By modifying subjective perceptions of reality, they could direct the beholders’ objectives and actions. Dreamers and the people around them might act differently according to which dreams they found meaningful and veridical. Seeing one’s deceased mother in a dream—hopefully in a state of bliss in paradise—would call for praying and giving alms for the further blessing and comfort of her soul in the afterlife, while experiencing an ominous dream would prompt the dreamer to take a vow to give alms or [ 67 ]

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make a pilgrimage in order to ward off an impending loss. In their elastic functioning between palpable and impalpable planes, dreams have the capacity to arouse a sense of proximity to the divine. In Shia theology one can never see God, not even in a dream. Because God is beyond all form and shape, as the Qurʾān states, “Sights perceive Him not, but He perceives all sights” (Q. Anʿām 6:103). However, the most intimate vision of the divine realm may come through beholding angels and saintly figures—the ōliyā, including Mary, the mother of Jesus; the immortal prophet Ḵeẓr; assorted other prophets; and the Fourteen Infallibles. It is believed that the devil could never dare to impersonate or misrepresent such carriers of divine grace and authority (Tonekābonī 1873, 519). In addition to dreams, divination, or fāl, has been believed to provide another means of revealing divine signs. The belief that the world of creation carries signs of God everywhere makes practically everything suitable for divination (Zarrīnkūb 1962). Natural phenomena, features of the human body, even the utterance of human words may be employed in seeking counsel from the unseen realm. The changing shape of a cloud, a crow cawing in the distance, or a star shooting across a night sky all may carry signs from the unseen, as could the length and number of lines on the palm or the features of one’s face (Dānešvar 1948, 2:230; Hedayat 1964, 80). The heart’s fluttering could forebode danger, as might happen when a mother worries for her child. A twitching eyelid may herald the arrival of good news (Hedayat 1964, 75–77). A sneeze could signal that one should pause before continuing. Divination sometimes seeks balance. The belief that beholding a handsome face brings good fortune (Ḥurr-ʿĀmili ca. 1600, 14:37) might be checked by the counter belief that outward ugliness, deformity, or insanity indicates an inward flaw—a disheveled, red-haired, squinty, greeneyed, wolf-faced hunchback with a huge scarred nose and a cleft palate would have little chance of receiving warm welcome anywhere these views are held. Randomness lurks in the core of divination techniques, and counting often plays a big role too. The number of birds sitting on a roof ledge, the number of camels plodding in a train, or the number of chickpeas randomly selected into a fistful. Posing a question in your heart, asking God whether you should or should not take an action—then, count: an odd number generally means “yes,” and an even number generally means “no.” Almost [ 68 ]

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anything may be used to create randomness, including rosary beads and decks of playing cards. Random words heard from passersby on a street corner might convey instructions for proper decision making. If you are trying to make a decision, listen to the crowd and you may hear a voice talking to another person on her cell phone but loudly saying “go for it” or “of course not!” A chance encounter with a person of high repute—say, a descendant of the Fourteen Infallibles, a Seyed—would bode well. Even running into an ordinary man or woman who bears an auspicious-sounding name may bring good luck (Kulaynī ca. 941, 2:246; Zarrīnkūb 1962, 551). Consulting the poems of the renowned fourteenth-century Persian poet Ḥāfeż for divinatory advice is a common divinatory practice. The procedure has an intrinsic randomness about it, and variations exist, but it generally ensues like this: after reciting the short first chapter in the Qurʾān, the Fāteḥeh, and offering blessings to the soul of Ḥāfeż, the supplicant concentrates on the specific subject about which he or she seeks advice. This is called the “declaration of intent,” or nīyat. Then, Ḥāfeż’s collection, called the Dīvān, is opened at random, and the first lines to fall across the seeker’s eyes are read as the advisory response (Zarrīnkūb 1962, 557). In the nineteenth century, as lithographs of the Dīvān of Ḥāfeż arrived in Tehran, at first imported from Calcutta and subsequently printed in multiple editions locally, the poet’s popularity as the oracle of the unseen realm (lesān-al-ġayb) spread even more. Reportedly, the Dīvān of Ḥāfeż goes through 350 reprints annually, as of 2014. A quick search on the Internet turns up hundreds of Websites offering divination services, and today street urchins sell excerpts from Tehran’s every crowded corner. How about randomly consulting the book of God, the Qurʾān, for advice? It is a divinatory procedure to open the sacred volume at random and take some action based on the tone and content of the passage that appears on the top right corner of the divined page. Out of reverence, this practice is not, in name, referred to as fāl or divination but as a “request” for God’s good council, or esteḵāreh. Its popularity notwithstanding, the educated elite, among the ʿolamā and others, often looked askance at using the word of God as frivolously as if it were a book of poetry (Ḥurr-ʿĀmili ca. 1600, 2:193; Kulaynī ca. 941, 1:370, no. 235). It usually takes an expert, or least some expertise, to decode signals from the unseen realm as revealed in dreams or through divination. Divine signs arrive encrypted, and most people fail to see them for what they are. As it [ 69 ]

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happens, the weight of performing acts of divination or clarifying the mysteries of dream-visions sometimes fell on the shoulders of socially marginalized or subaltern groups, such as poorer members of the ʿolamā, wandering Sufi dervishes, spinsters, and gypsies, or kōlīs. As might be ascertained empirically, divination experts and dream interpreters often fell short in actually affecting the course of the prophesies they spouted, so their power was generally limited to the decoding of divine signs. More often than not, they were found powerless to halt what the signs presaged. A more elevated goal was to conjure the unseen to effect positive, borderline miraculous changes in man’s daily life: healing the sick, curing infertility, retrieving missing objects, and so on. Only a fortunate few could do that. Anecdotal reports out of Qajar Tehran complement the record of extant manuscripts in documenting the widespread belief in dream interpretation, divination, and other occult arts. Besides the Sufis, some of the ʿolamā engaged in astrology, alchemy, and magic.4 Mīrzā Moḥammad Aḵbārī (1765– 1818), one of the leading ʿolamā who enjoyed a bout with prominence in Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah’s court during the early 1800s, had a reputation for casting spells. His preferred method was to first create effigies or wax figurines in the likeness of enemies and then mangle or otherwise maim them with the intent to inflict harm on the living person they represented. Reportedly, he had effectively used such occult practices to behead the Georgian Prince Pavel Tsitsianov (1754–1806), who was a feared general of the Imperial Russian Army (Algar, Aḵbārī, Mīrzā Moḥammad, in EIr; Donaldson 1938). Magic was not the first or necessarily the preferred cultural salve in Qajar Tehran. The ability to ameliorate existing conditions—for example, by curing grave illnesses—was thought to derive not from magic or divination alone but from having a pure and elevated spiritual status. The capacity to read and interpret divine signs is often seen as a divine blessing and favor in and of itself. Referred to as barakat, this spiritual potency facilitates access to the unseen realm. Extraordinarily virtuous conduct is often associated with high levels of barakat. The virtue of barakat has allowed dream interpreters, diviners, numerologists, astrologers, and fortunetellers to pose as go-betweens. Muslims and non-Muslims generally agree that earned proximity to God depends on piety, that is, living life in a manner approved by God or favored by His divinely chosen mediators. In Twelver Shia doctrine, the highest [ 70 ]

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levels of spiritual potency belong to a select ensemble of divine agents: Jesus, Moses, Noah, other prophets, and—always unquestionably—the Fourteen Infallibles. Therefore, in specific cases, God may empower them to perform marvelous deeds, even miracles, if called for. In a more restrained manner, God may also extend this privilege to other individuals, women or men, who live up to the strictest standards of piety and thereby acquire barakat. Methodical acts of piety were not regarded as replacing but, rather, as supplementing the alertness required to notice random signs of God. Pious acts reap the rewards of opening up vistas into the unseen and allowing the vision and ability required to effect changes there, changes that thereby loop back to deliver their effect on the ordinary. Performing willful acts of piety, the faithful’s aim becomes to solicit God’s favor, including the privilege of witnessing divine signs (Q. Baqarah 2:207, 265; Nisā’ 4:114; Mumtaḥinah 60:1). The following description, sometimes attributed to one of the Fourteen Infallibles, of the extraordinary effects of going beyond what is required by steadfastly performing supererogatory acts of piety is attributed to God: “My slave may draw so close to me through supererogatory acts of piety that he may see through my sight, listen through my capacity to hear.” The ideal of seeing as God sees, hearing as God hears, and doing God’s work was the highest one could wish. To be blessed with an extraordinary gift of seeing with divinely enlightened eyesight, or hearing with a divinely tuned ear, or manipulating with divinely empowered hands would manifest in feats of extraordinary magnitude. Issuing from individuals other than the prophets—and the Fourteen Infallibles or pious individuals—such feats were referred to not as miracles but as karāmat, and it took an enormous outburst of barakat to bring forth a karāmat. To ask who exactly possesses barakat and karāmat involves raising social and theological questions. Already by the 1860s, the Oṣūlīs had established that, by virtue of their knowledge and expertise, they were closely associated with God and were blessed with divine gifts. In his Stories of the ʿOlamā, completed in 1873, the hagiographer Moḥammad Tonekābonī (1819–1885) supplies numerous anecdotes that illustrate how God favors the ʿolamā, including the author himself (Tonekābonī 1873). High levels of spiritual potency, clairvoyance, veridical dream-visions, and other displays of karāmat were divine gifts bestowed on many of them (Tonekābonī 1873, 125, 215, [ 71 ]

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216, 257, 285f, 294, 313). Even knowledge of alchemy and magic was not rare among them (Tonekābonī 1873, 117, 291, 295); there were reports of instances of inexplicable access to gold (Tonekābonī 1873, 445, 447, 465, 600). Some members of the ʿolamā were said to exercise dominion over beasts and controlled the jinn, the typically invisible creatures said to have jolting, strange interactions with the human realm (Tonekābonī 1873, 244, 256, 293f). The prayers of the ʿolamā seldom went unanswered. Tonekābonī reports an incident when he personally implored God to liberate some villagers from the yoke of an alderman, and within days that alderman dropped dead (Tonekābonī 1873, 90). Incited by influential backers in Tehran, notably the powerful MollāʿAlī Kanī, public preachers disseminated Tonekābonī’s tales from their pulpits (Tonekābonī 1873, 150–51). A steady flow of reminders of the myriad ways in which God favors the mojtaheds held the masses rapt with awe, and the point was hammered home that disrespect toward the ʿolamā stirred God’s displeasure and caused imminent bad luck and punishment in the hereafter. Besides the ʿolamā, monarchs were believed to benefit from divine support. All seven Qajar monarchs retained astrologers to testify that God revealed discernible signs of His favorable will toward them, incarnated in celestial bodies or mirrored by their configuration.5 It was not uncommon for kings to claim they were capable of performing karāmat themselves. Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah reports a dream-vision in which he personally received assurances from God that he would never be forsaken. He writes, perchance to dream: I saw in front of me a large Qurʾān that also had interlineal Persian translations of God’s word. I took it and asked for divine counsel, as in divination. I inquired, “O God! Let me know whether you grant me your providence and walk with me.” Once I opened it, the Persian translation of the esteḵāreh was that God assured the Prophet “I shall never forsake you and I shall never deprive you of anything.” (Qāẓīhā 2002, esp. 31, 37)

Sometimes chroniclers recorded signs of the imminent fall of the Qajar dynasty after Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (Rūhī and Kermānī ca. 1896; Zarrīnkūb 1962). Watching for messianic signs of deliverance from tyranny and obscurantism persisted during the years of the Constitutional Revolution and [ 72 ]

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through the dark decade of the 1910s. Nevertheless, opposition to magic grew later in the nineteenth century. The court intellectuals rejected occultism because it contradicted their steadied preference for a scientific view of Nature. The Oṣūlī ʿolamā, who stressed the centrality of law in defining Muslim conduct, sometimes rejected the idea of magic. Both groups agreed, on different grounds, that magical belief equated with superstition and therefore had to be rejected. The Oṣūlīs also denigrated those who showed the slightest interest in esoteric beliefs and practices—including most Sufis and some madraseh philosophers—with as much fervor as they despised court intellectuals. At the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the equating of magic with trickery, illusion, and superstition had banished it into society’s fringes. Under Reẓā Shah, leading men of the new regime showed no interest in veridical dreams, barakat, or karāmat. As discussed in the previous chapter, public intellectuals of the age, notably Aḥmad Kasravi, raged against the strong form of mediatory theology, rejecting claims of supernatural power as superstition. Although the sycophants surrounding the court occasionally tripped over themselves to attribute spiritual potency to the new monarch, alleging that even the weather obeyed him (Sadr 1985, 329–31), the new monarch refused to indulge such self-aggrandizing claims and had no patience for people who did. By contrast, his successor, Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah Pahlavi, unlike (or perhaps in spite of) his father, nurtured a keen interest in finding and interpreting divine signs wherever they might be found—in dreams, wakeful visions, and divination. Especially in the wake of the coup of 1953, when he sensed the need for legitimacy more than ever before, Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah publicly shared his conviction that God had his back. In his autobiographical Mission for My Country (1960), he recounts his veridical visions. One such recounting describes how, at the tender age of seven, Emām ʿAlī had appeared to him in a dream and plied him with a potion that miraculously healed him of typhoid fever. Other instances are recounted as well. In his adult life too, MoḥammadReẓā Shah had seen signs of God. How could a ruler who survived two assassination attempts—one in 1949, the other in 1965—not see himself as a man of destiny, saved and guided by God to deliver Iran through what he called the Gates of the Great Civilization? (Pahlavi 1960, 1977). The Swiss-educated shah’s attempt at buttressing his rule by drawing on dream-visions and positioning himself as a man of supernatural blessing [ 73 ]

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alienated the ruling elite that served him more intensely than it endeared him to the ruled-over masses. The modern educational system that his father had founded in Iran demanded this. This system emphasized the role of the new dynasty in rescuing Iran from the obscurantism of the past, disposing the state’s bureaucratic cadres—from school teachers to ambassadors—to see dreams and divination as superstition and to associate them with the soot and dust of the purportedly backward Qajars rather than the polish and sheen of the professedly progressive Pahlavis. As products of the same system of education as the state’s loyalists, secular dissidents reveled in deriding Mohammad-Reẓā Shah’s religious claims, going so far as to reach out to the Western yellow press to feed its virtually insatiable appetite for gossip, scandal-mongering, sensationalism, and its habit of mocking the idiosyncrasies of megalomaniacal oriental despots. Most ʿolamā-rōḥānīs and their bazaari followers questioned MohammadReẓā Shah’s religious allegations not because they doubted the possibility of veridical visions in principle but because they believed it was unlikely for him to have the spiritual capacity for receiving such favors from God. As they saw it, the monarch’s persistent impious behavior in breaking Islamic law had distanced him too far from God—the dissolution of the observance of women’s veiling in public and the operation of taverns were cited as blatant examples of infractions. The fundamental idea is that acts of piety bring one closer to God and impiety to divine disfavor—an idea fully theorized in early Twelver Shia theology. The tenth-century book Rewards and Punishments of Deeds, by Sheikh Ṣadūq (ca. 923–991), lists 453 good deeds and 116 evil deeds, along with their commensurate rewards and punishments, spanning the reward for kindly caressing an orphan child to the punishment for dying in debt and points in between (Saduq ca. 980, 236). Rewarded meritorious actions include repeating the profession of faith (Saduq ca. 980, 2–7, 9), washing one’s hair with the leaf of the jujube tree (sidr) (Saduq ca. 980, 20), lighting a lamp inside a mosque (Saduq ca. 980, 29), praying in the right time (Saduq ca. 980, 36), and feeding the poor (Saduq ca. 980, 135–37, 150–51). Three interrelated categories of pious acts in particular weave divine presence into the fabric of religious life: naẕr, taking a vow or declaring a commitment for the sake of God; ziyārat, making pilgrimage to a site of holiness (Morinis 1992); and sacrifice, or qorbānī, offering something valuable in the way of God. [ 74 ]

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Well into the twentieth century, as Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah’s modernizing efforts were in full swing, life passed to a restrained tempo of naẕr, ziyārat, and qorbānī. Compared to what went on a century earlier, this was a faint echo but still heartily present. Later in the twentieth century, under the Islamic Republic, especially during the Iran-Iraq War, it crescendoed. Back in Qajar times, verse or prose writings, pictorial depictions, musical compositions, and theatrical enactments glorifying the Fourteen Infallibles dominated the scene—from street corners to royal courtyards, from public coffee houses seated with men to private charitable spreads (sofreh) thronged with women. The city’s Jews and Christians, too, occasionally participated in such ritual observances (Soroudi 2002). The Twelver Shia religious calendar is marked with multiple occasions for ritual observance (Massé 1938). Naẕr are often timed in reference to specific times. Most importantly, the commemoration of the ʿĀšūrā, the ten days before and forty days after the annual mourning for Emām Hossein, mark somber days (Aghaie 2004, 2005a, 2005b; Ayoub 1978). In the Islamic lunar calendar, months shift from season to season, so the ʿĀšūrā, for instance, might occur one year in the autumn, and several years later it might occur in the spring. No matter the season, ʿĀšūrā is a time to give charity, pray, and expiate sins. Feeding the poor and partaking of the food offered in devotion to the Emām and his companions are both considered meritorious. Today online social networks and apps on mobile devices are used to pinpoint where and when such food is being distributed. The goal of naẕr is to accumulate reward by winning God’s goodwill and deterring His wrath (Q. Āl-ʿImrān 3:162; Muḥammad 47:28). The person making a naẕr promises to undergo some kind of austerity or render some service for the sake of God. It is a pledge to offer some kind of material or behavioral sacrifice. It may be, but does not have to be, conditioned on having a desire fulfilled, or it may be entered as a token of repentance and expiation. Life’s difficulties also may be warded off by making naẕr. A man may promise to sacrifice a sheep after his wife bears him a son. The mother of a sick child may take a pledge to eventually marry the child to a man of God. A traveler in the desert might make a vow as a reaction to the danger. If someone is in distress at sea, they might promise offerings to God or to the Fourteen Infallibles, or may promise to fast or shear their hair upon being delivered from danger (Shahri 1997, 4:535–37). A mother may choose [ 75 ]

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to not comb her hair or seek shade from the sun until her son or daughter fulfills her wish. Offering to make a sacrifice is a common form of naẕr. In undertaking a naẕr, one often makes a pledge by invoking the name a credible witness. The witness’ name is invoked as an intercessor with God, mitigating the anxieties caused by uncertainty and guaranteeing sincerity. The Fourteen Infallibles are the most credible of all guarantors. Enlisting a witness quells a longing for assurance that cannot be attained by reliance on ordinary human intervention. Women make naẕr more routinely than men, but both genders name male and female members of the family of the Prophet as their witnesses. Beside the Fourteen Infallibles, the Prophet’s wife Ḵadījah, Emām ʿAlī’s daughter Zaynab, and his son Abu-ʾl-Faẓl enjoy high credibility as guarantor and intercessor (Pinault 1999). Closely related to naẕr and sacrifice is the ritual practice of pilgrimage, one of the most meritorious acts of piety in Shia thought and practice (Saduq ca. 980, 82, 85–99, 199). To visit a holy place and offer a sacrifice there makes for a popular kind of naẕr. While God’s signs can be seen everywhere, some places signify as holier than others and are therefore more conducive for making special connections with the divine. A crop that needs rain, a sick child, or a mortal fear of the afterlife all may impel a supplicant’s promise to go on pilgrimage, seeking to bend closer to the mercy of God. Mecca and Medina are, of course, the holiest of holy destinations for Muslim pilgrims— whether Shia, Sunni, or other. But a variety of factors set pilgrimage to the distant location beyond the reach of even wealthy and able-bodied Tehranis. During the nineteenth century, roads there were unsafe, and the local tribesmen and the Ottoman authorities who controlled the Ḥijāz, in the Arabian Peninsula, often restricted the flow of Shia pilgrims to Mecca (Faroghi 1994, 127, 134–39). Some adherents of stronger forms of Twelver Shia mediatory theology—including the followers of Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī, known as the Shaykhīs—hinted that pilgrimage to the shrine of the Emāms could be more meritorious than making the Ḥajj (Amir-Arjomand 1984, 168–70; Qulawayh ca. 970, 147–49, 267; Takim 2006, 64). By the ninth century at latest, visiting Emām Ḥusayn’s shrine in Karbala was established as an emblem of Shia identity. After the eleventh century, paying homage at the shrine of Emām ʿAlī in Najaf complemented this practice. More broadly, the visitation of the Emāms’ shrines in the ʿatabāt provided one of the basic memes of the Twelver Shia religious collective memory (Hussain 2005). The essential function of the “visitation” in Shia [ 76 ]

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Islam is to maintain the contact and covenant between the Emām and believers. During certain periods, the number of pilgrims to the ʿatabāt rivaled and may have surpassed the number of pilgrims to Mecca (Ateş 2010). In 1882–1883 the number of Ḥajj pilgrims is recorded as 46,519, while the number of visitors to the ʿatabāt is given as 71,883. Also important was pilgrimage to Mashhad, the shrine of the eighth Emām Reẓā, which stood six hundred miles to the east of Tehran (Amir-Arjomand 1984, 169, esp. table 6.1). Although it was closer, bad roads and attacks on caravans by Turkoman marauders made the pilgrimage to Mashhad equally, if not more, hazardous in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than trips to the ʿatabāt (Sykes 1910). However, there existed a pilgrimage hierarchy of increasing esteem from the Mashadī to the Karbalāʾī and peaking at the Ḥājī, which in a way reflected each journey’s degree of difficulty but not necessarily the tenacity of the pilgrim’s faith. To avail oneself of spiritual potency did not always require long-distance travel. Twelver Shia theology maintains that God—the ultimate source of all blessings—sends down barakat into mosques and other holy sites, especially into those near the tombs of holy persons such as the descendants of the Fourteen Infallibles (Meri 2003, 120). Several such burial sites were identified near Tehran and have provided local destinations for pilgrimage. Referred to as “emāmzādehs,” which translates as “the offspring of the Emāms,” these were “sites where divine favor and blessing occur, where mercy and grace descend; they are a refuge for the distressed, a shelter for the despondent, a haven for the oppressed, and a place of consolation for weary hearts” (cited in Algar, “Emāmzādeh, i.” in EIr). In the nineteenth century, it took days to reach the shrine town of Qom, which hosted the shrine to Emām Reẓā’s sister. A half-day’s effort would deliver you to Shahr-e-Rey, the ruins of the old city of Ray, where sat the emāmzādeh known as Shah-ʿAbd-al-ʿAżīm a scant four miles from the gates of Qajar Tehran. A few sites of holiness fell within the capital’s perimeter, near the bazaar and the royal palace, but most stood without. Before Tehran became the megapolis it is today, with its vast municipal divisions, it used to be a more compact city surrounded by hundreds of smaller villages. The fertile ravines of Kan (or Kand) cut into the earth ten miles to the northwest, embracing scores of hamlets. Farther north was Shemiran, with its fresh weather, gushing streams, and swaths of farmland. Traveling at the time’s average speed of three miles per hour, it seldom took [ 77 ]

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more than a day’s ride from the heart of Tehran to reach these nearby places (Gilbar 1979, 207; Sotūdeh 1992–1996). By now these have been absorbed into the city sprawl proper, though some of their original names live on as neighborhoods, districts, or bus and subway stops—Tajrīš, Evīn, Zargandeh, Čīzar, or Vanak. Many emāmzādehs were located within or on the outskirts of estates owned by the capital’s high society elite, most notably the palace intellectual Ḥossein Khan Sepahsālār; Yūsof Mostōfi-al-Mamālek (1812–1886), the head of the treasury; and Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī, the chief mojtahed of the capital. As many as fifteen emāmzādehs and sites of holiness resided in Kan, where Kanī owned most of the land. The estates of two of Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah’s grandsons enclosed Emāmzādeh Qāsem, in Darband, and Golāb-darreh. Many other villages and oases outside the capital’s walls belonged to the king and were earmarked as “royal crown lands,” or ḵāleṡehjāt. Among these were Ṣāḥeb-qirānieh, Niavaran, and Šāhābād (Sotūdeh 1992–1996). Surprisingly, royal crown lands, many of which were rented out for tax farming (Polak 1865, esp. 351), do not seem to have housed any emāmzādehs. This is significant. Although lands originally designated as pious endowments, or ōqāf, were not, in the strictest sense, immune to hostile takeover by the king, sites of holiness remained off limits, even to the most covetous of kings. In any case, designating parcels of private lands as emāmzādehs proper provided a mechanism for earmarking land-revenue for charitable purposes. With the exception of royal crown lands, almost every village had its own site of holiness—if not an emāmzādeh, then a revered shrine. Indeed, villages tended to cluster around one or more such sites. These sites, especially emāmzādehs, were central to the religious life of the capital’s denizens primarily because completing a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina could easily devour a full year, and even visiting the nearby Qom’s shrine could require a week or more. Upon arrival at an emāmzādeh, either in fulfillment of a naẕr or for any other reason, one generally follows a code of conduct. At every emāmzādeh, the recitation of prayers comprises the core of this code. By appealing to the virtues of the Fourteen Infallibles and their descendants, the believer asks for their intercession. Twelver Shia prayer manuals include instructions for the recitation of specific liturgical texts in a prescribed manner. The formulas for these rituals encapsulate the devotional purpose of all pilgrimage, as the following excerpt suggests: “I have come to you as a pilgrim, [ 78 ]

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entrusting you with my needs, as I entrust to you my religion, the outcome of my deeds, and all of my hopes until the end of my allotted span” (Majlisī ca. 1700, 102:272). Seeking protection by approaching a powerful protector was an established custom in patrimonial society. So were the related concepts of asylum, sanctuary, and intersession. In Qajar Tehran, the practice of seeking shelter in an inviolable space was referred to as “sitting bast” or simply “bast” ( Jean Calmard, “Bast,” in EIr). Religious asylum is provided in a holy precinct, a ḥaram. In Islam, the Kaaba stands as the ultimate sanctuary or ḥaram. Twelver Shia doctrine extends this notion to include other sites of holiness such as the shrines of the Emāms and emāmzādehs. Frequently the tombs of major Sufis and ʿolamā were treated with similar reverence. Seeking refuge in the sacrosanct space of bast guaranteed the safety of those who had fallen out of the king’s favor or otherwise faced persecution at the hands of local potentates. In the bast, asylum seekers, women and children fearing abusive husbands or fathers, sometimes non-Muslims, debtors unable to pay creditors, renegades, and even animals could remain safeguarded (Curzon 1892, 1:347, 155; see also Donaldson 1938, 68). Back when Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah banned the operation of Malkom’s Farāmūšḵāneh, Prince Jalāl, the host whose residence had been pelted and looted by Tehran’s real ruffians and goons, found it expedient to avail himself of the custom of bast (Etemad al-Saltaneh 1889, 118; Mohīt-Ṭabāṭabā’ī 1948, ḥā’). Whatever doubts the crestfallen prince may have harbored about God, Islam, and religion, he hastened to sit bast at Shah-ʿAbd-al-ʿAżīm and stayed there until threats waned. The traditional recognition of the living king as God’s shadow on earth and the supreme source of worldly justice, generosity, and glory bestowed a sacred aura upon the space that the ruler occupied. In the same way that sitting bast at Shah-ʿAbd-al-ʿAżīm and other emāmzādehs safeguarded the blood of those who feared persecution, one could also seek asylum within the ropes of the royal tent or at the gates of the monarch’s palace—groveling below the belly of the king’s horse or hanging on to its tail could guarantee a pardon. Competing with the bast custom, European powers offered protection to individuals who took refuge inside their embassies in Tehran. By doing so, the ascendant European civilization signaled its willingness to reward devotion and to protect oblations at its embassies, consulates, telegraph [ 79 ]

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houses, and even mercantile factories, similar to how Qajar Tehran offered up its Islamic sites of holiness. When Russia and Britain finally leveraged extraterritorial rights to extend punitive protection to their citizens and others who served their interests on Persian soil, their consulates and embassies became recognized spaces for bast. This legal capitulation had disconcerting religious and political implications (Lambton 1965, 136, 141f). In the eyes of local observers, the changing meaning of bast in the nineteenth century’s second half reflected the decline of Asian power and the rising fortunes of European civilization. Acknowledging the protective authority of non-Muslim governments and recognizing their embassies as legitimate sites for bast signaled the dwindling power of the king and the percolating rise of nonreligious European authority. The practice of bast affirmed the dual sanctity of royal and religious spaces while endorsing the adage of late antique king Anūšehravān “that religion and royalty are twinborn.” However, fearing that Russia and Britain might undermine the throne’s immediate this-worldly interests, the monarch had no choice but to acquiesce and allow his kingdom’s political jurisdiction to shrink. But sites of holiness offered more than an opportunity for fulfilling a vow—a naẕr to make pilgrimage and offer sacrifices there. Rural emāmzādehs like Emāmzādeh Dāvūd in Kan, the āstāneh of Shah-ʻAbd-al-ʻAżīm in Ray, and others more distant from Tehran also provided year-round abodes of succor for the poor, the elderly, the physically disabled, and the mentally infirm. Not infrequently, especially in more populous areas, circles convened around sites of holiness for the transmission of religious knowledge. A major act of piety was to retire in old age to the vicinity of a holy site, especially in Medina or in the ʿatabāt. In the same way that being a neighbor of a powerful living person could have active life benefits, seeking closer proximity to the shrine of divinely favored individuals could make one subject to their beneficence. For that reason, during the nineteenth century, it was common for the ʿolamā, Qajar princes, and merchants to prolong their pilgrimage destination stays. For the same reason, tens of thousands of men and women from Iranian towns, including Tehran, chose to reside in Najaf (Potter 2004, 69). The emāmzādeh was a place of succor and an environment for the exercise of piety, in life and in death. Where a shrine was found, a cemetery surely stretched out nearby. The inescapable solemnity of death was soothed by [ 80 ]

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the serenity of a holy site. Important people were usually buried inside the shrine or in its adjoining porticos (Varjavand, “Emāmzāda ii. Forms, Decorations, and Other Characteristics,” in EIr). It was a destination for pilgrimage, for the living and the dead. Most emāmzādehs and other sites of holiness in Tehran and its surrounding villages were compact, modest edifices. In architectural terms, many would be classified simply as “tomb towers”—a tomb within a hall or portico covered by a rising cupola or dome. Commonly a single entrance leads to the tomb itself. The mud brick, baked brick, wood, or stone walls of the tower and the surface of the dome may or may not be decorated with calligraphy or geometric designs. Larger tomb towers, sometimes called “pavilion shrines,” were usually built in two stories. Compared with simple tomb towers, it is more likely to find the tomb in pavilion shrines enclosed by a wooden or metal ẓarīḥ. Still larger shrine complexes are more elaborate, with multiple portal arcades, porticos, and domes. These larger shrine complexes are referred to as āstānehs—sanctified areas. Having an outside garden with shallow pool for making ablutions in preparation for ritual prayer was a near-constant feature of emāmzādeh architecture, one seen in both tomb towers and āstānehs (Meri 2003, 262, 264–70). In Iranian folklore, an aura of sacredness surrounds trees and water, and even today private gardens with pools and fountains signal privilege. Public emāmzādehs offered pilgrims, privileged or unprivileged, a chance to enjoy the paradise-like atmosphere that perhaps only trees and water can create. The architecture and landscaping of emāmzādehs provided an exquisite setting for conducing the religious experience of being present with God. Most inhabitants of Tehran were accustomed to taking refuge for prolonged times, especially during the hot months of summer in the pleasant ravines of Darband, Darakeh, or Sūlaqān in the north. To describe the environment around shrines in functionalist terms as a combination of the poorhouse, the hospice, and the bazaar is incomplete but not inaccurate. Picking and eating sweet Persian berries (tūt) in summertime and munching on freshly cut walnuts in the fall created memories for visitors, especially children. With the journey came other benefits. More ordinary people used ­pilgrimage as an occasion to indulge other pleasures of the spirit and body. Some men visited their multiple wives on the rounds—permanent or temporary ones. [ 81 ]

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Local innkeepers, vendors, and swindlers sometimes shortchanged or harassed the outsiders who returned the insult by calling them illegitimate offspring of pilgrims. Despite some hardships and hurdles, visiting emāmzādehs was an overall uplifting ritual and called forth the very best in people. A wide array of products and services, including food services, lodging, transportation, and souvenirs, developed around a shrine catering to the visiting pilgrims, amid which beggars often loitered, hoping to capitalize on the visiting piety (Cole 1986; McChesney 1991). The activities of the shrine bazaars peaked during pilgrimage seasons, especially in the lunar months of Moḥarram, Ṣafar, and Ẕu-’l-ḥijja. Cattle, sheep, and poultry were on sale for sacrifice. Agate and turquoise rings, to be properly worn on the right hand by Shias (Saduq ca. 980, 173–75), were available, along with prostration stones, sacred soil, perfume, and rosary beads—mohr, torbat, ʿaṭr, and tasbīḥ (Saduq ca. 980, 40). Even sugarloaf and crystal sugar, imported products that became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century, would have more barakat if they were procured here because it was assumed they had been taken on rounds of circumambulation and had touched the ẓarīḥ. Historically, the best-known and most splendid emāmzādeh near Tehran has been the āstāneh of Shah ʿAbd-al-ʿAżīm, which houses the tombs of several revered figures (Karīmān 1966–1970, 397–98). Two of these tombs contain a descendant each of Emām Ḥasan and a companion of ninth Emām Muḥammad al-Taqī, who lived in the ninth century. Two other emāmzādeh structures here, built with tall, tiled domes, presumably protect the tombs of descendants of Emām Zayn-al-ʿĀbidīn and Emām Mūsā al-Kāżim. The āstāneh complex of Shah-ʿAbd-al-ʿAżīm includes courtyards, a portal, a splendid hall complete with chandeliered portico, panoramic mirror work, a golden dome with two tiled minarets, and a mosque (Varjavand, “Emāmzādeh, iii. Number, Distribution, and Important Examples,” in EIr). In the early 1800s Fat′ḥ-ʿAli Shah undertook a major renovation of the shrine complex, which expanded the entrance and portico of the main building, heightened the ceiling, expanded the courtyards, and added the tileminareted mosque. Troughs and water stands were installed on the grounds, and pools of water were carefully situated to reflect the open-space views of the minarets and domes. In the late nineteenth century, as many as three hundred thousand pilgrims visited the shrine annually (Curzon 1892, 1:617). Today Shahr-e-Rey, [ 82 ]

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where the shrine is located, has grown into one of the capital’s most populous edge cities. To faithful pilgrims, the edifice itself, along with every object and construction inside and out, manifest the piety of its maker and donor, draw the best of offerings, and inspire the ultimate expressions of naẕr, qorbānī, and ziyārat amid the complex’s sacred space. To outsiders, emāmzādehs may first appear as small galleries of Islamic art. Any new technologies arriving in Tehran were typically first used in their potential relation to the ritual of visiting ziyārat. Taking advantage of the new and ready availability of glass mirrors, Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah ordered the interior of the āstāneh of Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAżīm to be decorated with mirrors all around. The newly introduced electroplating technology was used to plate the main tomb’s sepulcher with a shining layer of silver. Later, in the 1860s, Nāṣer-al-Din Shah installed a new cupola at the āstāneh built of bricks plated with gold. As the arts, especially painting, took their turn toward realism in the second half of the nineteenth century, religiously significant scenes began to appear inside emāmzādehs. The nation’s first railroad, inaugurated in July 1888 and publicly referred to as the “Smoke-Engine,” or Māšīn-Dūdī, ran directly from a station near the capital’s main bazaar to Shah-ʿAbd-al-ʿAżīm. When electrical lighting was introduced in the 1930s, Emāmzādeh Qāsem received its own dedicated electrical wire connection with the nearby Saʿdābād Palace, the royal residence Reẓā Shah had built earlier on the northernmost tip of his capital. Today the Red Line of Tehran’s Metro terminates just outside the shrine complex of Shah-ʿAbd al-ʿAżīm. Its other end lies in Tajrīš, a stone’s throw from Emāmzādeh Ṣāleḥ, the still-popular enclave nestled in a tranquil corner of the local bazaar. Some claim that the number of emāmzādehs nationwide has doubled since the revolution, and as many as fifty still grace the city. No matter the count, emāmzādehs no longer preoccupy the population’s religious life as they did a century ago. Under the Islamic Republic, Tehran’s Municipality has dutifully turned them into museum-like spectacles for public viewing. The practice of pilgrimage in general, visiting emāmzādehs in particular, became a target in the sights of modern public intellectuals. As early as the 1930s the prolific polemicist Ahmad Kasravi disparaged it in harshest words. Other critics of strong mediatory theology, including Ḥakamīzādeh— whose Thousand-Year-Old Secrets is discussed in chapter 2—referred to [ 83 ]

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emāmzādehs as nothing but idol houses and places of false piety. Routinely, doubts were raised about the real identity of those buried as the descendants of the Fourteen Infallibles. Critics insisted that the tombs belonged to others. The long processes of secularization, with their origins in the nineteenth century, engendered new venues for public gathering and socialization. By the time the locomotive Smoke-Engine was finally rolled out of service, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, faster, more efficient means of public transportation and privately owned automobiles had already rendered its iron anatomy obsolete. Partly as an outcome of such processes, emāmzādehs lost their significance against the prevailing parks, youth houses, and public libraries. Even the paramilitary force known as the basīj redirected the energies of youth—first toward the war effort during the 1980s and, more recently, in acting as a social pressure group. It was these and other factors that have diminished the social role of the emāmzādeh almost to the level of tourist attractions under the supervision of Tehran’s municipality. Another by-product of modern nation-state building efforts, increased public literacy, has contributed to the changing relationship between the faithful and the sacred geography of pilgrimage. The idea of keeping religious belief and display within the confines of individual life has become far more paramount. Coinciding with the early years of Pahlavi rule, Sheikh ʿAbbās Qomī (1877–1941) compiled a series of liturgical texts designated for Fridays, weekdays, and all occasions of the year in his book Mafātīh al-janān, or Keys of Paradise. Almost every day of the year is accounted for here. Modern publishing has made it feasible for Twelver Shias to worship via this book in the privacy of their homes. In 2012 a collection of supplications, Keys to Eternal Life, prepared as a sequel to Qomī’s century-old classic, entered the book market, seeing ninety-two reprints in that year alone and additional times since ( Javādī Āmolī 2012). For most of Tehran’s populace, the ideal of finding God in close proximity persists as an aspiration. Many young people, including those of yesteryear, prefer to wash their hands of the idea of God, having decided that to be an atheist is to be modern, secular, and progressive. However, recent anthropological fieldwork indicates that contemporary Tehran’s urban middle class remains surprisingly keen to locate supernatural signs in modern life (Doostdar 2012). In this quest, even modern science is sometimes employed to unravel the signs of God in the here and now. And despite the risks [ 84 ]

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involved, pilgrimage is still in full swing, not only to Qom, Mashhad, or Ḥajj but also to Damascus in Syria or to Karbala and Najaf in Iraq. An intimately related notion in defining personal and communal piety as a way of approaching God revolves on the centrality of knowing and following God’s law. In fashioning itself as a mediator between man and God, the Islamic Republic is fully invested in the idea that the system of guardianship of the supreme jurist embodies the will of the divine: reassuring its loyalists that “the state is with God, we are with the state, and, therefore, God is with us.”

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FOUR

The Law God’s and Man’s

ʿALĪ-AKBAR DĀVAR died in Tehran on February 10, 1937. That afternoon, Reẓā Shah Pahlavi had scolded him in front of the prime minister. At home that Wednesday, in the evening, the dejected fifty-two-year-old cabinet member retired to his bedroom and ingested a lethal dose of opium. Some thought he deserved such a humiliation; most agreed that he did not. As one of modern Iran’s preeminent statesmen, Dāvar had wielded a strong hand in breaking ground for the institutional pillars of the nation-state, including the transnational railroad and Tehran’s chamber of commerce. But, more eminently, Dāvar’s name is associated with the modern reformulation of the legal apparatus (Agheli, “Dāvar,” EIr; Āqelī 1990; Taqīzādeh 1993, 220–23). However, the monarch that the reputedly energetic politician had helped achieve the throne and the massive juggernaut of the centrifugal forces of the modern nation-state eventually crushed him. Dāvar had launched an overhaul of Iran’s judicial system at the behest of Reẓā Shah. The undertaking won him more enemies than friends. Judicial reform had been a long overdue demand of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which had called for the establishment of the House of Justice, or ʿedālat-ḵāneh (Mobārakyān 1998). As happened in other areas of society, the new reforms clashed with old customs and entrenched structures. Extending the state’s jurisdiction over all facets of social life met resistance from many sides. In particular, some of the ʿolamā vigorously protested the [ 86 ]

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prospect of granting any advantage to man-made state legislation over the divinely ordained precepts (ḥodūd) and legal values (aḥkām) of Islam (Ẓeymarān and ʿEbādī 1996). Minor nuances in usage notwithstanding, those divinely ordained precepts (ḥodūd) embodied knowledge truly worth having, feqh (or fiqh), and defined the holy path of šarʿ (or šarīʿat). Dāvar’s state-sponsored legal reforms played out against the backdrop of changes that had unfolded during the previous century, developments in Emāmī jurisprudence, demands for political reform, and ongoing social transformations (Enayat 2013). Rooted in feqh as it was, state legislation often had to break new legal ground, and it sometimes conflicted with customary law, not least with the prima facie opinions of the ʿolamā. For decades after Dāvar’s time, grievances mounted, and compromises had to be made among the various parties—the ʿolamā, the court, and other social agents. With the 1979 revolution, the ʿolamā reasserted the exhaustive jurisdiction of feqh as formulated a century earlier by the Qajar-era ʿolamā—otherwise referred to as the foqahā, Oṣūlīs, or mojtaheds. Redefining the state as the embodiment of divine will under the rule of the supreme jurist, or valī-e faqīh, the Islamic Republic took on a mandate to implement the law of God (Calder 1982; Kazemi-Moussavi 1996; Mavani 2001). Of the multiple dimensions of legal reform, the present chapter only discusses the evolution of some assumptions about God’s law in Tehran: what it is; whose prerogative it is to determine; and how it may be implemented in human society, especially modern society. More specifically, if religious law—šarīʿat or feqh, in the case at hand—reflects divine will, can humans rightfully legislate at all? Does the state have any right to pass laws or regulations that may clash with the requirements of religious law?  

Ten years before his suicide, merely twenty years since the constitutional parliament, or the Majles, had opened its doors in Tehran, Dāvar had become the nation’s minister of justice. Standing before the people’s representatives on February 17, 1927, he pledged to reform the legal system, imploring that reconfiguring the judiciary depended on formulating a legal code, qānūn. After nine weeks of hectic work and close collaboration with the legislature, his ministry had ratified over one hundred legal bills. A corpus of binding regulations and a uniform set of procedures for [ 87 ]

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enacting them were prepared. Finally, in an official ceremony held on April 25 of that same year, he proudly presented the nation’s revamped code of law to the monarch, and Reẓā Shah was pleased (Āqelī 1990). It looked like the king and all his men finally had delivered the progressive ideal of legal reform. By complementing the legislative parliament with a strong judiciary branch of the state, the constitutionalists’ dream of having a House of Justice seemed close at hand. Equipped with the will plus the means to prosecute violators in accordance with legal due process, the judiciary could oversee the actual enactment of laws crafted at the Majles. Within a few years, as these changes were initiated and implemented, Iran had its own National Supreme Court. In 1938, as a symbolic, material tribute to this change, an antiquated Qajar mansion was partially demolished and the remaining parts were incorporated into the construction of the capital’s modern Palace of Justice building, with the Angel of Justice high on its wall, carved out and peering down on passersby. In addition to codifying laws on paper and planting buildings on the ground, real judicial reform depended on establishing specific mechanisms for converting new legislative policies into actions. Qualified judges had to be employed, judicial personnel had to be trained, and standardized recordkeeping practices had to be devised. There was also an urgent need for a sweeping hierarchical appellate system that could encompass a fractured maze of neighborhood courts. For generations, the ʿolamā had ran those courts and overseen legal record keeping (Āl-e Dāvūd 2005; Ṭayyebī 2008). On top of the gargantuan bureaucratic challenges that Dāvar and his successors at the Palace of Justice had to overcome, social realities often got in the way. Various groups and communal forces resisted change and pushed back, shielding their vested interests by thwarting legal centralization. Major landowners, tribal leaders, neighborhood headmen, and village elders possessed the will and the means to dilute, delay, and derail any attempted reforms. In practice, these groups conducted themselves in accordance with their own internal set of largely unwritten, sometimes ambiguous habits, codes, and rules; thus, the state’s new written laws and regulations often conflicted with customary practices of administering justice and settling disputes. Wielders of power and influence competed in confronting the state and carving out their own jurisdictions. Negotiating mutual rights, duties, and [ 88 ]

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obligations vis-à-vis the state took time and effort. Nobody wanted the state meddling on their turf, or in their tribal tents and estates, or in their manorial mansions, or within the walls of the family home. What did the state have to do with domestic matters between husbands and wives? Was a landowning lord or a tribal chieftain expected to appear in court if a peasant or lower tribesman protested the traditionally accepted privileges, say, the droit du seigneur? Should an abused servant have a right to sue her master for restitution? How could nobles and commoners ever stand on equal footing in legal terms? Among others, the ʿolamā exclaimed, “How could men and women, or Muslims and non-Muslims be treated as equals?” Legal reforms, like other intended structural changes, clashed with deepseated customs and entrenched systems of hierarchical dependencies. Unable to scratch these hierarchies at once, reformers had to navigate around an archipelago of patrimonial structures or patron–client relations. Based on older political legacy, the king sat at the top of the patrimonial hierarchy; conceiving of his kingdom as an extension of his personal household, he felt free to reward or punish his subjects as he pleased. Similar top-down relations tied lords (arbāb) to subjects (raʿīyat), husbands to wives, parents to children, even teachers to students. Especially by the mid-nineteenth century, the mojtaheds had given definitive shape to a kind of patron–client bond between a mojtahed and his followers or emulators (moqalleds). This special bond hinged on the premise that the patron spoke for God and the clients had a religious duty to follow or emulate him (taqlīd). Clarifying the evolution of this special relationship calls for a short historical digression. Back in the 1790s, a bitter feud split the ranks of the ʿolamā. The contention between the two factions involved—the Oṣūlīs and the Aḵbārīs—had had deep roots in Twelver Shia history in one form or another. Modern scholarship often labels the two opposing factions as the rationalists and the traditionalists, or literalists and scripturalists, respectively (Algar 1969, 7ff., 19, 33–36, 64–66; Gleave 2007). Without picking a favorite in the debate and therefore avoiding such value-laden terminology, it is worth noting that, as Āġā-Moḥammad Khan appeared on the horizon, fighting his way to the throne in Tehran with the banner of Shia messianism (Soucek 2001), old rivalries had resurfaced with renewed urgency under a new rubric. [ 89 ]

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Originally breaking out in Iraqi shrine cities, the ʿatabāt, the discord rapidly spread to the Qajar capital, and the court could not afford to stand aloof. Fatʹḥ-ʿAlī Shah had to choose sides in the Aḵbārī–Oṣūlī standoff. The Aḵbārīs regarded the traditions or reports—aḵbār—from and about the Fourteen Infallibles along with the text of the Qurʾān as the primary signposts of divine guidance during the Age of Occultation. The Oṣūlīs were agreed on the central significance of these sources of divine guidance but emphasized a higher level of human agency in reconnoitering, intercepting, and interpreting God’s will in the world. Pointing out that some aḵbār contradicted others and observing that sometimes none could be found on a specific issue, the Oṣūlīs called for going back to the foundations or roots (oṣūl, Arabic uṣūl) of legal injunctions and substantive values involved. The Oṣūlīs developed a systematic methodology for jurisprudence, calling it oṣūl-e feqh and identified themselves as mojtaheds, masters of ejtehād, or ijtihād—a word often glossed as “independent rational reasoning,” which etymologically derives from the same Arabic root as the word jihad. Wielding reason to discern what God’s laws entail, the mojtahed subjects the text of the Qurʾān and aḵbār to analytic assessment, seeking not merely to separate the authentic reports from those which might be fabricated but, more importantly, to discern the proper meaning and legal purport (żoḥūr) of their contents (Calder 1979, 1989; Eliash 1969; Madelung 1978; Ṣadr 2003). Without tackling the Oṣūlī–Aḵbārī debate in detail here, to shed light on its implications for the mojtahed–moqalled bond, it helps to contrast the two factions’ views within the framework of mediatory theology. The Oṣūlīs and the Aḵbārīs defined the relationship between man and God in different terms. Using the terminology introduced in chapter 2, the Oṣūlīs upheld a weak or diluted formulation of mediatory theory, seeing divine authority as flowing into the community of believers through the divinely ordained precepts (ḥudūd) and legal values (aḥkām) specified in divine law or feqh. Instead of claiming to embody divine presence in the flesh or in the heart, the mojtaheds, as a distinct social group, provide expertise in jurisprudence. Their authority to speak for God is mediated by and dependent on disembodied discursive knowledge about divine law. The Aḵbārī theological framework is less explicit but implicitly relies on a denser or more assertive mediatory theology. For the Aḵbārīs, the Fourteen Infallibles channel divine authority in the world, and true knowledge of God derives exclusively through them. However, during the Age of Occultation, the believers are left in a tragic [ 90 ]

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state of incertitude, having to find their own way in the dark and fend for themselves in a hostile world. They eschewed ejtehād, characterizing the very idea of independent reasoning as sheer hubris. Therefore, following the religious judgment of another fallible individual (taqlīd) was utterly pointless. Through intense spiritual exercises and pious practices, the Aḵbārīs cultivated the capacity in themselves to secure direct guidance from the Fourteen Infallibles, fanning the flames of messianic yearning in their heart, and doing whatever it took to find themselves in the presence of the Hidden Emām—say, in veridical dream visions, by divination, or even through the arts of the occult (Cole 1994, 2001; Lawson 2010). To curry favor with one faction, Fatʹḥ-ʿAlī Shah initially extended patronage to a charismatic Indian-born exponent of the Aḵbārīs, Mīrzā Moḥammad Aḵbārī (1765–1818) (Algar 1969: 64–66; Algar, s.v. “Aḵbārī, Mīrzā Moḥammad,” in EIr). Shortly after that, the Qajar monarch invited the most prominent Aḵbārī scholar of the age to his court. This was Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī (1753– 1826), from al-Aḥsā, an oasis currently located in Saudi Arabia, in the oil-rich eastern regions of the kingdom that are still inhabited largely by Twelver Shias. Along his journey to the royal palace in Tehran, Aḥsāʾī passed through Iran’s cities. As his teachings resonated with local Aḵbārīs, Shaykh Aḥmad culled willing disciples from the ʿolamā, with the legion of followers eagerly identifying themselves as Shaykhīs, devotees of the Shaykh. Alarmed by the real and present danger of having to cede religious authority to their rivals, the mojtaheds did not take all this lying down. First, they declared Mīrzā Moḥammad Aḵbārī an apostate (Kashef-al-Ghita ca. 1810), chased him out of Tehran, and eventually conspired to have him murdered and dismembered in the ʿatabāt. Also, the Oṣūlīs turned the tide against Aḥsāʾī. By the time Shaykh Aḥmad arrived in Qazvin (1822), a city about one hundred miles northwest of the capital, they similarly had him declared a heretic, an apostate, and an infidel—mortad, kāfer. By the mid-1820s, Fatʹḥ-ʿAlī Shah had to reconsider his choice. The Aḵbārīs as well as the Shaykhīs were cast outside the sphere of official patronage in Tehran forever. Returning to the social significance of patron–client networks, it should be clear by now that the Oṣūlī position capitalized on the divide between mojtaheds and moqalleds. The former possessed the privilege of leading the public; the latter had the duty to follow them, obeying, imitating, or emulating their example and judgment in all matters of practice, from personal performance of prayer to family matters as well as other actions. Sometimes [ 91 ]

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the ʿolamā classified the people into three groups: First and foremost were the mojtaheds, esteemed as men of divine knowledge (ʿālim al-rabbānī); then came madraseh students (ṭalabeh, ṭollāb), identified as the seekers of knowledge on the path to salvation (mutaʿallim fī sabīl al-najāt); and the rest were swarming flies (hamaj raʿāʿ). It was the religious duty of the seekers of knowledge on the path to salvation, not to say anything of the so-called swarming flies, to follow the example of divinely learned men. According to a related taxonomy, members of the first two groups, the mojtaheds together with their students, comprised the ʿolamā. Together they constituted the special elect, the elite (ḵavāṣ). The rest of the public composed the rank and file, the grassroots, the masses (ʿavām). All non-mojtaheds, even among the ḵavāṣ, had a religious obligation to find a learned mojtahed and follow his judgment on matters of the law, personal as well as communal. The most learned of the mojtaheds functioned as an even more superior authority figure, called a point of reference or source of emulation (marājiʿ-e taqlīd), for not merely a few but a large portion of the ʿavām (Kazemi-Moussavi 1985, 1996; Walbridge 2001). In principle, being a fallible man, a mojtahed, ever a source of emulation, might make a mistake or two and misinterpret divine law on occasion. Nevertheless, he would still be rewarded because, from the Oṣūlī point of view, the very effort to unravel divine law counts as a meritorious act of ejtehād. The capacity to do so correctly results from a divinely bestowed intuition (malakeh-e qodsīyeh), through which divine will becomes manifest. Unlike the more assertive but uncertain Aḵbārī theology, the optimistic yet weakly mediatory theology of the Oṣūlīs guarantees reward and ultimate salvation for the followers (moqalleds) as well because trust in their mojtahed constitutes a necessary and sufficient pious act of merit, in and of itself. This combination of the best of both worlds imbued the mojtahed–moqalled bond with a potency beyond any other patron–client relationship. By the 1860s the chief mojtahed, Ḥājj Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī, had cemented the Oṣūlī powerbase in the Qajar capital more firmly than it had ever been. With the full blessing of the court, he bolstered the profile of the mojtaheds as the officially acknowledged spokesmen of mainstream Twelver Shia doctrine. Kanī wielded enormous influence, as both a man of religious authority and a man of means, heading a vast patron–client network of dependents and devotees—madraseh students, urban wage earners, peasants, and others. As a mojtahed, he led a large body of moqalleds. Although he took pride in having [ 92 ]

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attended the teaching circle of Moḥammad-Ḥasan Najafī (ca. 1786–1850), the leading Oṣūlī of his time in the ʿatabāt, Kanī’s writings indicate that he was more a patron of learning than a learned man himself (ModarressīṬabāṭabāʾī 1984, 174, 211). Under his effective supervision, other mojtaheds presided over religious courts, meted out decisions accordant with feqh, and served an important function in keeping records of marriages and real estate transactions (Āl-e Dāvūd 2005; Etteḥādīeh and Rūḥī 2006; Ṭayyebī 2008). The collective identity of the mojtaheds as the official spokesmen of Emāmī doctrine was robustly established. Already under Kanī, the mojtahed–moqalled relationship defined a special kind of mutuality, cutting across other patron–client bonds and in ways superseding them. The Oṣūlī ʿolamā intervened as a harmonizing force among the tiers of society from the royal court to the rural hovels. The merchant in the bazaar and the nobleman in the court could both follow or emulate the same mojtahed, abiding by his prescriptions and proscriptions. Just as Kanī consolidated Oṣūlī authority inside and outside the court, the palace intellectuals led by Mīrzā Malkom Khan and Moḥammad-Khan Sepahsālār spoke of reforming the system of law and order to its core. They sought to streamline political governance by centralizing all power in a bureaucratic system, regulating finances, administering justice, and curbing the king’s autocratic desires. The notion that, through their networks of patron–client relations, the ʿolamā had the final say in legal matters interfered with some of the reforms that the palace intellectuals considered rational, civilized, and conducive to progress. The nascent concept of Nature accompanied the perspective that advocated for natural law and scientific reason as the pivots of decision making in society and politics. The constitutionalists’ call for establishing a House of Justice less than twenty years after Kanī died and Dāvar’s subsequent overhauling of the judicial system under Reẓā Shah marked seemingly irreversible moments of transition. It was Malkom who first introduced and emphasized the term “qānūn” for a codified corpus of state law. He made a case for the codification and implementation of laws as being the indispensable pillar of reform, a rational instrument for policy making, and a natural medium for the exercise of political power. Already in the late 1850s, he had used the word in his Booklet of Reforms (Malkom 1858). Later in life, during his years in London, he published the newspaper Qānūn, the masthead and motto of which, as of [ 93 ]

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February 21, 1890, read, “Unity, Justice, Progress.” Some intellectuals, inside and outside the court, cheered for the anticlerical element in the French Enlightenment movement, and longed for subduing the ʿolamā and advancing reforms along European models. Malkom may have empathized with them early on, but had distanced himself from this group by the 1870s, years before publishing Qānūn and articulating his thoughts on unity, justice, and progress in substantive terms. The anticlerical faction of the palace intellectuals had Jalāl-al-Dīn Mīrzā as its leader, the same disaffected Qajar prince who hosted Malkom’s Farāmūšḵāneh seances in the late 1850s. A related figure was Fat′ḥ-ʿAli Āḵundzādeh, the tsarist colonel and self-described liberal humanist who kept in touch with palace intellectuals through correspondence from Tiflis. As exemplified by an extract from a letter dated March 25, 1871, written by Āḵundzādeh, the anticlerical faction desired to do away with the ʿolamā altogether, if possible, or at least to push religion and its spokesmen to the margins of oblivion: [We] urge that the matter of [legal] disputation . . . must be seized from the hands of the men of spiritual learning, and all courts of [legal] disputation ought to be attached to the Ministry of Justice. . . . Only religious matters may remain in the hands of the men of spiritual learning—prayers, fasting, preaching, public religious rituals, marriage, divorce, and burial of corpses. (Akhundzadeh 1870s, 199–200)

Incidentally, Āḵundzādeh’s letter documents one of the earliest instances of the ʿolamā being referred to as men of “spiritual” learning (ʿolamāʾ-e rōḥānīyeh). With a subtle sleight of hand, “religious” was interchanged with “spiritual.” This kind of sequestering religious, supernatural, and spiritual categories versus this-worldly, natural, or secular matters mirrored the effect on the understanding of politics and law that the changing notion of Nature had caused. In keeping with the reduction of religion to matters of the spirit, this characterization endorsed an emerging dichotomy between the secular and the religious. This, in turn, instantiated the natural versus supernatural binary, and the rational versus superstitious distinction. For Āḵundzādeh and like-minded secularists, religion had no place either in Nature or in politics. The rhetorical delegation to the ʿolamā of mortuary, nuptial, and other matters that the author [ 94 ]

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considered banal simply accentuated his disdain for those he branded the “men of spiritual learning.” The majority of Qajar palace intellectuals neither endorsed this sort of staunch anticlericalism nor embraced the botched religious understanding that engendered it. Notably, one such experienced civil servant and palace intellectual was Mīrzā Yūsof Mostašār-al-Dōleh (ca. 1823–1895) (Kia 1994). He was the addressee of Āḵundzādeh’s letter above. Like Malkom, he saw the cure for his nation’s chronic ailment of backwardness in the medicine of having laws, but unlike Āḵundzādeh, he displayed no comparable animosity toward the ʿolamā. The son of a merchant, Mīrzā-Yūsof had learned the basics, including the elements of feqh, or Islamic law, in his native Tabriz before joining government service in Tehran and taking minor diplomatic appointments abroad. His career break came during the 1860s, when he was appointed chargé d’affaires at the Iranian embassy in St. Petersburg, then consul general in Tiflis, and chargé d’affaires again in Paris—Napoleon III’s renovated city of charming boulevards, wide promenades, and neatly groomed plazas, all geometrically designed and mapped on a multitude of concentric circles: the material embodiment of Enlightenment reason. Before his end-of-the-­decade return to Tehran, Mīrzā-Yūsof had gifted himself a few trips to Victorian London, each time becoming more convinced that the progress and civilization he saw in Europe and Britain had resulted from their sound legal system. He wondered: “Why have other nations achieved such progress, while we have remained in such a state of lethargy and disorder?” His answer was: “One word sums up the base and origin of the European system of administration. Indeed, every visible sort of progress and benefit there results from this single word” (Mostašār-al-Dōleh 1871, 9; my translation slightly differs from Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn 2010). That single word was none other than “Law,” Qānūn. During a brief period in the 1880s, Mīrzā-Yūsof served at the Ministry of Justice and witnessed firsthand how legal matters were handled. He soon resigned. However, that was where and when he earned his title, Mostašār-al-Dōleh—high counselor. Mīrzā-Yūsof ’s experience at the Ministry of Justice, though brief, seems to have reaffirmed his convictions about the urgent priority of legal reforms. At some point Mīrzā-Yūsof may have come into direct contact with Malkom (Algar 1973, 139–40). Both men, like other palace intellectuals, were [ 95 ]

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strong advocates of reform. Going beyond what Malkom had suggested before in the Secret Booklet, Mīrzā-Yūsof observed: “A few of you attribute the administrative system and progress of Europe to derivative and transitory things. Some of you think that they are based on sciences and industries such as the telegraph, steam ships, wagons, and military arsenal. These are the results, not the requirements of progress” (Mostašār-al-Dōleh 1871, 11; my translation here slightly differs from Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn 2010). As Mīrzā-Yūsof understood it, the primary requirement of progress was none other than the law. He seemed not to tire of hammering the idea, especially in his One Word, a short and commonsensical pamphlet that remained blacklisted for years during and after its author’s lifetime. While the exact date of the first edition of Mīrzā Yūsof’s One Word remains uncertain, this influential pamphlet represents the late-nineteenthcentury resonance of the ethos of legal reforms. Its contents particularly displeased Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah and the hangers-on of his court, not least for its repetition of the idea that the prince and pauper ought to stand as equals before the law. The monarch and his devotees both had sufficient common sense to fathom the implication of a sentence such as this: “No king is entitled to decree a single blow of the bastinado for the least of men” (Mostašār-al-Dōleh 1871, 75; my translation here slightly differs from Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn 2010). Or this even more explicit plea for the rule of law: “No individual person in the world, whether king or beggar, civilian or soldier, has the right to rule. Men are not [natural-born] rulers, but are delegated responsibilities. Should they be called ‘rulers,’ it is only by way of metaphor, and not in reality” (Mostašār-al-Dōleh 1871, 83; my translation here slightly differs from Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn 2010). Mostašār-al-Dōleh did not have the luxury, as Malkom did, to maintain a safe geographical distance between himself and Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah. Whereas Malkom enjoyed working in his office next to lawyers and bankers on the historic Lombard Street in the British capital, relishing the London social season and his Hyde Park crossings, Mīrzā-Yūsof remained tethered to the immediate beck and call of the court. On multiple occasions Nāṣeral-Dīn Shah had him imprisoned, heavily fined, and stripped of his privileges. Apparently following direct orders from above, prison guards added insult by chaining the aged man’s neck and shackling his feet. The impetuous monarch was even said to have ordered his men to bang the author on the head and slap him in the face with his One Word (Āryan-pūr 1971–1976, [ 96 ]

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1:283). Questioning the limitless authority of the monarch, the pivot of the universe, and the shadow of God on earth did not go unpunished. Like Malkom and other central palace intellectuals, Mostašār-al-Dōleh positively spoke of religious ethics and Islamic legal values as providing the fundamental framework of political reform. During his brief Ministry of Justice tenure, Mīrzā-Yūsof insisted that all issued regulations had to comply with the contents of the Qurʾān and the teachings of Twelver Shia law (Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn 2010, introduction). The same equanimity courses through his much admired One Word. Like other palace intellectuals, his primary objection was to the arbitrary character of decision making inside and outside the Qajar court: “Arbitrary interference must stop and there should be no giving orders in public affairs on the basis of personal whim and idiosyncrasies, but only in accordance with what is written in the code of law” (Mostašār-al-Dōleh 1871, 19; my translation slightly differs from Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn 2010). He even hoped to have the backing of the ʿolamā—one example being when he asked the mojtaheds for a fatvā, a religious decree, in support of his plan to run the six hundred miles of railroad he hoped would connect Tehran with Emām Reẓā’s shrine in Mashhad (Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn 2010, introduction). Āḵundzādeh disfavored Mīrzā-Yūsof for all this and chided him in correspondence with others (Akhundzadeh 1870s, 197). The wish to see Qajar ʿolamā disempowered like the Christian clergy in post-Enlightenment France fizzled (Ādamiyat 1970). The reasons why derived in part from the upholders’ naïve view of religion no less than their failure to take into account the weight of the mojtaheds in the patron–client social structure. Also, far from being a matter of happenstance, the symbiosis between the mojtaheds and the Qajar court was intrinsic to the political order. A well-known anecdote about the ban on tobacco usage illustrates the extent to which the influence of the mojtaheds had penetrated even into the private chambers of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah’s harem. A smoke cloud started to rise after Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah, in 1890, made a concession to a British national for a full monopoly over the production, sale, and export of the land’s tobacco produce. The monarch was always on the lookout for new sources of revenue: besides conferring royal titles on his subjects for a fee, he also sought to attract foreign sources of wealth. In doing so, he had looked to the revenue model next door in Istanbul. A few years earlier, in 1883, the [ 97 ]

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neighboring Ottoman sovereign had farmed out a tobacco monopoly to the Régie Company, a business entity formed by a consortium of European banks (Birdal 2010, esp. ch. 5, 129–65). By the late 1880s the Ottoman Sublime Porte was raking in the revenues, and the Persian king wanted the same. However, the concession met with the objection of some ʿolamā who saw it as being borne of self-interest and disregard for religious law. Unlike the Ottoman Sunni ʿulemā, who had failed to muster public support when they protested on similar grounds, the Twelver Shia ʿolamā in Tehran had the means and determination to thwart the monarch’s plan, drawing on mojtahed–moqalled networks. The Tobacco Protest of 1891–1892 signaled the changing relations between the king and the ʿolamā. Most determined was Ḥājj Mīrzā Moḥammad Ḥasan Āštiānī (ca. 1830–1901), Tehran’s leading mojtahed after Kanī (Algar 1969; Keddie 1966; see also Āštiānī, Ḥasan, in EIr; Martin 2005). Loudly voicing his concerns, projecting the authority of a man vested by God, and driving others into protest, Āštiānī endorsed a fatvā, or religious edict, forbidding the consumption of tobacco by the faithful as long the concession held its place. The fatvā’s sway had Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah’s favorite wife refusing to serve him the hookah as she teased, “He who said you can have me, now says you may not have this.” The mojtahed–moqalled ties had more potency than merely affecting matrimonial relations between king and wife. When the enraged Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah threatened to expel Āštiānī, violence rocked his capital and musketeers guarding the royal palace fatally shot several men among the threatening crowds. After weeks of tumult, the king finally backed down and nullified the tobacco concession (Algar 1969; Etemad al-Saltaneh 1895, 786, 790–91; Keddie 1966; Lambton 1965; Teymūrī 1953, 135). While the rule of law sounded agreeable to the Oṣūlī ʿolāmā in principle, they interpreted this notion in a way other than what the palace intellectuals intended. The mojtaheds welcomed the rule of law, but only God’s law, not man-made legislation. They considered the idea of law making by fallible men as sacrilegious. To them, only God had the authority to prescribe laws (tašrīʿ), and it was for the mojtaheds to extract and distribute them (estenbāṭ) in the form of ordained precepts and legal values. With Sepahsālār, Jalāl-al-Dīn Mīrzā, and Āḵundzādeh dead, with Malkom exiled in England, and with Mīrzā Yūsof in prison as of 1891, the time was ripe for the mojtaheds to raise the stakes and plant their feet ever more firmly inside the doors of political [ 98 ]

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influence. Āštiānī was the man to do so. Speaking for a new generation of mojtaheds in Tehran, he was better qualified in learning than Kanī, no less involved in court affairs, and equally committed to the view that the mojtaheds functioned as surrogates for implementing God’s will in society. His leadership role in the Tobacco Protest victories reinvigorated the ʿolamā. As an emboldening act of public mobilization and political intervention, the Tobacco Protests prefigured the role of the ʿolamā in later uprisings such as the constitutional movement in 1906 (Hairi 1976–1977; Lambton 1970), then in the 1960s, eventually in the 1979 revolution, and ever since under the Islamic Republic. Time and again, Kanī, Āštiānī, Shaykh FaẓlAllāh Nūrī, later Ayatollah Khomeini, and still others made such interventions, condemning economic and political concessions to non-Muslim Europeans or Westerners as reprehensible examples of capitulation to the dominance (velāyat) of the infidels, an act that constitutes a blatant violation of God’s law. Before Āštiānī, back in the early 1880s, Kanī had pressured Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah into firing Sepahsālār, the palace intellectual prime minister who had taken the shah to Europe. After Āštiānī, Shaykh Faẓl-Allāh Nūrī and a coterie of like-minded mojtaheds accused the constitutionalists of being heretics and masked infidels who bowed to European laws and regulations, conspiring to substitute man-made legislation for God’s law (Dabashi 1988; Zargarinejad 2008). Decades later Ayatollah Khomeini drew on the same line to attack Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah, denigrating him as a mere marionette of Uncle Sam. As far back as it started, the social interventionism of the mojtaheds was never confined to the uppermost echelon of political power. With their networks of mojtahed–moqalled relations spreading vertically as well as horizontally throughout the society, the Oṣūlīs reframed the very meaning of faith and of being faithful. Their great achievement comprised a successful redefinition of faith and reconstitution of the identity of the faithful in terms of a judicial system and compliance with it. By rendering law into functional prescriptions—the “dos” and “don’ts”— the Oṣūlīs worked out a detailed structure of operational piety. Taking account even of the minutiae of human conduct, their framework of divinely ordained precepts and legal values was an exhaustive one. In principle, it systematized law and ethics, bringing personal duties, interpersonal and communal commitments, and even political obligations under a single legal umbrella. Adhering to it served as a touchstone of faith and a ladder to [ 99 ]

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God. Any infringement was a sin, an ethical evil, and thus a lapse in faith (Calder 1989). By the same token, voicing a false belief in matters of faith instantiated a violation of legal values and an ethical failure and, as such, amounted to a punishable sin. While law and morality are always tied in some ways, Oṣūlīs’ reduction of “the ethical” to “the legal” reshaped the idealized relationship between man and God in a manner that was unprecedented in Tehran. That which played a most vital role in the Oṣūlī formulation of the law was that vessel of vessels—the human body. This was the locus where the legal and the ethical converged. Judging by their writings, the mojtaheds seem to have found more wisdom in the body than in theology, philosophy, or even Qurʾānic exegesis put together.1 They certainly had more to say regarding the body than about theology, more curiosity about the circumstances of bodily functions than wonderment in God. They covered everything about the body in detail—from personal hygiene, dress, and toilet habits to men’s beards and women’s menstruation cycles. Detailed exactions were made to the age-old law of retaliation, lex talionis—“an eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth”—as the assessment of reparations for inflicting bodily injuries was copiously dealt with, even to the level of scratching at another person’s skin. Ayatollah Khomeini’s juridical magnum opus, The Means of Salvation (Taḥrīr al-wasīla), a work he completed in the late 1960s but wrote very much in the spirit of Qajar-era mojtaheds, pays ample attention to the details of divinely ordained precepts and legal values that involve the human body. Over 14 percent of this work deals with meting out corporeal punishments for thieves, fornicators, drinkers, and apostates. Out of 4,400 legal questions listed in this book, 32.2 percent pertain to washing the body, performing prayers, giving alms, and making charitable endowments. This was in keeping with works written by master Oṣūlīs in the ʿatabāt a couple of generations earlier. The Oṣūlī methodology that was fleshed out in these key works tended to corral everything under the rubric of jurisprudence, carving an idealized code of conduct into a formal system of laws and vice versa. An individual who lived up to the exacting requirements of that system could be acknowledged as properly religious, faithful, or motašarreʿ. Women played an instrumental role in the world of the properly religious. Not only did a faithful woman comply with the legal cum moral requirements of feqh—in dress, comportment, and spatial mobility, among other matters—but the proper qualification of [ 100 ]

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any man as motašarreʿ also depended on his ability to make women conform. Non-Muslims were treated as inferiors because, by definition, they failed to abide by the divinely ordained precepts and legal values. In Tehran, the Oṣūlī legal-moral framework was primarily inward looking and generally conservative. Prima facie, the mojtaheds’ advice for their moqalleds was to avoid foreign objects, ideas, and phenomena that came at them from the outside. Most motašarreʿ individuals, including a number of major mojtaheds and even sources of emulation, considered non-Muslims— for example, Armenians, Jews, and Bahais living in their neighborhoods— to be ritually impure, insisting that mingling with them should be avoided and that whatever they may have touched ought to be thoroughly cleansed, for example, by rewashing and rinsing three times. Āštīānī’s ban on tobacco is only one instance of rejecting the unfamiliar. He also opposed the use of modern pedagogical techniques for teaching school-age boys. Examples of what he and other mojtaheds initially banned and then over the decades adopted would amount to a long list. As reflected in a handful of pamphlets that circulated in Tehran during the first decade of the twentieth century, the mojtaheds particularly objected to the constitutionalist call for having the House of Justice as a place for new legislation (Zargarinejad 1995). One of those pamphlets, The Treatise to Awaken the Naïve and Inform the Ignorant, falsely attributed to the Shaykh Faẓl-Allāh Nūrī as it is, expresses this more unequivocally than the rest (Pseudo-Nūrī. ca. 1908; see Dabashi 1988 for translation). By contrast, working within the same Oṣūlī paradigm, some other mojtaheds used their expertise in deciphering the divine will to accommodate new ideas, objects, and phenomena to the extent possible. However, most of these mojtaheds were based in the ʿatabāt, not in Tehran. The most prominent among them all, Moḥammad-Kāżem Ḵorāsānī (1839–1911) in Najaf, openly and effectively backed the constitutional movement (Farzaneh 2015; Kadivar 2006). A master Oṣūlī as he was, Ḵorāsānī saw the way clear to acknowledge and endorse the political sovereignty of the people in worldly matters. Informed by the political affairs in Iran, Iraq, India, and Europe, he led a politically engaged faction of the mojtaheds and their students (ṭollāb) in the ʿatabāt. Pushing the analysis of the theory of jurisprudence (ʿelm-e oṣūl) to ­u nprecedented heights, expanding the methodological sphere of jurisprudence, Ḵorāsāni went beyond familiar methods of description and [ 101 ]

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classification. First, he set up a linguistic framework for discerning the pragmatic purport (żoḥūr) of phrases and propositions (Khurasani 1885, 1:6). From this framework he analyzed the standard sources of the law and the bases of ejtehād—the Book of God, the exemplary conduct of the Fourteen Infallibles, the consensus of the ʿolamā, and of human reason (ʿAlam-alhudā ca. 1040, 1:7; Tusi ca. 1060, preface). In his Principles of the Theory of Jurisprudence, the two-volume opus he completed by the early 1880s, Ḵorāsānī devotes page after page to textual and extratextual analytic sources of the law, inquiring into the modes in which juristic values impinge on obligatory practice (Khurasani 1885, 1:9; 2:165–361; cf. ʿAlam-al-hudā ca. 1040, 827–37; Jubaie ca. 1600, 217–22). Since the 1870s, and by the time Ḵorāsānī was expounding his influential treatise on the theory of jurisprudence, the meaning and scope of human reason had become a major topic of discussion inside and outside Oṣūlī circles. And the new views on the nature of knowledge and reason competed with each other as various groups, including the palace intellectuals and the ʿolamā, attempted to reappropriate, co-opt, or reinterpret these in the light of the already familiar. In 1885 his ground-breaking work entitled Kifāyat al-uṣūl appeared in lithograph and quickly came to set the gold standard in the study of Twelver Shia jurisprudence. In his other writings and oral teachings, Ḵorāsānī articulated that during the Age of Occultation, when no infallible ruler is available, the best alternative political system should derive from the will of the people. A source of emulation of impeccable Oṣūlī credentials, Ḵorāsānī argued in favor of effecting this major shift in Twelver Shia legal thought, going so far as to label the anticonstitutionalists enemies of Islam. It was as a religious leader of stature and a source of imitation that he threw his weight behind the Constitutional Revolution and added his echoing voice to the call for the establishment of the House of Justice. In equal measure, both gestures protested MoḥammadʿAlī Shah’s tyranny. He and like-minded mojtaheds issued fatvās, sent telegrams, and urged their followers to take up the holy struggle to overthrow despotism—declaring it a veritable instance of jihad (Kadivar 2006). The constitutionalists welcomed and relied on Ḵorāsānī’s unwavering support for their cause. Ḵorāsānī’s students and large number of moqalleds in Tehran religiously committed themselves to resist tyranny and fight for the ideals of constitutionalism. As part of the rival mojtahed–moqalled network, the Qajar court [ 102 ]

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backed the conservatism of anticonstitutionalist mojtaheds headed by Shaykh Faẓl-Allāh Nūrī in Tehran. With the Constitutional Revolution gathering momentum, the alliance between the two sides became stronger, and standing together they launched a smear campaign against the constitutionalists, characterizing them, including several mojtaheds who advocated constitutionalist ideals among them, as antinomians, Bābīs, and heretics (Hairi 1977). Death threats were common and were occasionally carried out, as in the cases of constitutionalist Oṣūlīs Moḥammad-Bāqer Eṣṭahbānātī (d. 1908), Malek al-Motakallemīn (d. 1909), and Seyed Jamāl Vāʿeż-e Isfahani (d. 1909). Eventually, the pro-court mojtaheds in Tehran lost face, but those Oṣūlīs who had supported the constitutionalist cause of establishing a House of Justice had won the trust of the public. Voicing no objection in principle to the stipulation that public will ought to be respected only as far as it did not violate the teachings of Islam, they approved of the legislative mandate of the Majles. Like their teacher Ḵorāsānī, they recognized popular will as a source of legitimacy, in principle. Within a generation, many of them joined Dāvar in the Palace of Justice, bringing their Oṣūlī training to build the backbone of the nation’s modern legal system. Reẓā Shah and his men were able to advance legal reforms only with the active support and participation of distinguished mojtaheds who had backed the new state judiciary. One such reformer was Seyed Naṣr-Allāh Taqavi (1871–1947), a graduate of the seminary in Najaf who had also independently studied European law and presided over the new National Supreme Court (Rejal 1999, 1:383; Sadr 1985, 290). Taqavi was the scion of an influential family that had played a central role in Tehran’s religious life since the time of Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah Qajar, back in the early 1800s. Another example was Moḥammad-Bāqer Olfat (1884–1964), son of the staunchly anticonstitutionalist mojtahed Sheikh Nūr-Allāh Najafī-Eṣfahāni (1846–1914), who served as a high councilor in the Supreme Court (Olfat 1969). Even more impressive is the list of distinguished Oṣūlīs who, as of 1936, had trained law students at the University of Tehran, including Moḥammad Sangelajī (1897–1980), who lectured, wrote books (Sangelajī 1934, 1936, 1945, ca. 1947, ca. 1948, 1950, 1954; Šehābī 1942), and gave his best effort to making Islamic law compatible with the requirements of modern civil law. Not to be confused with his independently notable brother Moḥammad-Ḥasan Šarīʿat Sangelajī (d. 1943), this graduate of Najaf had studied with the most illustrious students [ 103 ]

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of  Ḵorāsānī (Dabīrīneĵād 1975). Another scholar, Maḥmūd Shehābi (1903– 1986), who migrated to Tehran from Mashhad in 1929, served as a judge and trained generations of students at the University of Tehran. In centralizing judicial authority, Dāvar and his successors at the Ministry of Justice had no mandate to undermine divinely ordained precepts and Islamic legal values (Mobārakyān 1998). The content of the civil code that he and later successors prepared derived from the Twelver Shia canon. The reforms they launched impinged on the authority of the juridical knowledge of the ʿolamā as a pillar of the new legal system. Learned Oṣūlīs were in demand to make sure that the code of law, qānūn, that was being formulated and implemented would comply with the precepts and values of feqh. To be considered for employment and promotion, prospective judges in the modern judiciary had to take exams and demonstrate familiarity with Twelver Shia jurisprudence. Classical sources of the Emāmī legal tradition were revived, used as guidebooks, and published as textbooks by the University of Tehran. Built on Mostašār-al-Dōleh’s blueprint, the Pahlavi-era judiciary offered opportunities for the mojtaheds and lesser members of the ʿolamā to make their contribution to state-building efforts by serving at various levels, as judges, barristers, or clerks. The ʿolamā continued to be acknowledged as the spokesmen of the nation’s official religion. Having knowledge of divine laws and serving as the stewards of the spiritual well-being and ethical growth of the public, they were now recognized as men of the spirit, or rōḥānīs. Their expertise proved indispensable in certain social functions, notably in conducting weddings and funerals. Within half a century, Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Āḵundzādeh’s secular view of the ʿolamā as strictly men of spiritual learning (ʿolamā-e rōḥānīyyeh) almost came to pass, but to a degree that he had not fathomed (Akhundzadeh 1870s, 200). It is true that state-building efforts under Reẓā Shah had cost the ʿolamā, and by the 1930s their once respectable designations—including “Mollā,” “Āḵund,” even “Shaykh”—had lost their cachet and sometimes turned into mild pejoratives in Tehrani vernacular. Still, not only did some of the new ʿolamā- rōḥānīs help write and implement the nation’s new code of law, a larger number of them turned to preaching as a preferred public performance. From the beginning of its operation in 1939, the state-run radio ran weekly religious programming. Despite all this, a large segment of the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs and their followers objected to legal modernization, partly by questioning the personal [ 104 ]

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commitment of the planners and executors of state-led plans to God’s law. Complaining about those actions of the state that they believed to violate proper Islamic conduct often formed the meat of their grievances, from protesting the official state ban on women’s veiling (kašf-e ḥejāb) in 1936, to denouncing modern forms of entertainment such as the cinema, radio (1939), or TV (1960s), to condemning social reforms such as women’s suffrage and land reforms (1962) (Denman 1978; Majd 1987; Moghaddam 1972). The criticisms of the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs drew more on ethical sensibilities rather than legal technicality, making constant reference to the moral spirit of religious values. From another perspective, it appeared that the legal reforms had failed to block undue influence from patron–client networks of influence. The judicial reforms of the 1930s elevated the state to the position of both lawgiver and arbiter, promising that their citizens—all of them—would be afforded equal standing before the law. In theory, citizenship must trump patrimonial mediatory discrimination. However, this goal remained unachieved. Notably, Ahmad Kasravi, Tehran’s leading public intellectual of the mid-1930s to the early-1940s who had wholeheartedly joined the new judiciary as a young man, personally handed in his resignation to Dāvar, protesting outside pressures on legal decision making (Kasravi ca. 1941). This and other shortcomings of the state apparatus and its modernizing efforts stirred disaffection and alienation in many quarters (Marashi 2008). Some former constitutionalists observed that the Pahlavi state did not speak for the people. As early as the mid-1930s, the police silenced public protest. For example, Mīrzā Moḥammad-Ṭāher Tonekābonī (1863–1941), a constitutionalist mojtahed and member of the Majles who also had served as a high councilor in the Supreme Court, suddenly fell out of favor with Reẓā Shah, spent some time in prison, and then was exiled. And besides Dāvar, who committed suicide, a number of other former allies of the king died under suspicious circumstances. Most ʿolamā-rōḥānīs objected that the voice of God was even more blatantly absent than the voice of the people. A group known as the Sacrificial Warriors of Islam, the Fadāʾīyān-e eslām, took it upon itself to protest Pahlavi policies in the name of God and to deliver divine justice as freely—and forcibly—as they felt like it. The leader of this group of urban vigilantes, Seyed Mojtabā Mīrlōḥī (1923–1956), was a vocational high school dropout who had worked briefly as a laborer for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in the southern city of Abadan. Being [ 105 ]

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the orphaned son of an immigrant preacher from Isfahan, he wistfully renamed himself Navvāb-e Ṣafavī—“the Safavid Prince.”2 Later he put on a turban on a brief educational tour of the ʿatabāt. Thanks to Navvāb’s personal charisma, the Fadāʾīyān-e eslām recruited staunch members and attracted many more sympathizers, mostly drawn from the masses of semiliterate artisans, peddlers, and shopkeepers in Tehran’s bazaar. The group’s manifesto appeared in 1950 with the no-frills title The Guide to Real Truths (Rāhnamā-e ḥaqāʾeq). This ninety-two-page pamphlet portrays the Fadāʾīyān’s vision of the ideal Islamic state and society (Kazemi-Moussavi 1985, 118–35). The Fadāʾīyān called for the establishment of an Islamic state in which the law of the land was none other than the law of God. Written in platitudinous prose, the Fadā’īyān’s Guide to Real Truths offers an inventory of moral vices—gambling, prostitution, alcohol consumption, and whatnot—and anticipates a final utopian society where the energy of religion will have eradicated all ills and just as many evils. The overarching principles of the Fadāʾīyān program called for a full application of Islamic law and a complete administering of the Islamic judicial system, including the laws of retaliation, public flogging, and other myriad forms of punishment. The work praises the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs for their leadership as educators, moral guides, and rightful arbiters. Many of them returned the warm sentiments, approving of the group’s radical activism. However, out of principle as well as expedience, the Twelver Shia establishment frowned upon the Fadāʾīyān’s unruliness and deferred instead to the authority of Seyed Moḥammad-Ḥossein Ṭabāṭabāʾī Borūjerdī (1875– 1961). Acknowledged by a large base of followers in Iran and abroad as the most learned source of emulation (marjaʿ-e taqlīd), he had taken the helm of the most important institution of religious learning, called the ḥozeh, in Qom. He was a Grand Ayatollah (āyat-Allāh al-ōżmā). Throughout the years of WWII, the ḥozeh had suffered and in 1946 Borūjerdī was ready, willing, and able to breathe new life into it. Tasked with bringing moral as well as pedagogical discipline to the ḥozeh and with keeping radicalism out, he resolved to rehabilitate Oṣūlī methodology. Harkening fore and aft to models established by the earlier and later mojtaheds, he sought to express divine law in a form more accessible to the contemporary generation. A milestone was achieved when, under Borūjerdī’s supervision, a well-formatted Manual of Practice, also known as a Guide to Practical Questions (Resāleh-e ʿamalīyeh-e Tōẓīḥ-al-masāʾel) appeared in print in 1955. To prepare this, he had consulted [ 106 ]

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the important works of senior Qajar-era mojtaheds from the ʿatabāt, most notably the forty-three-volume Bejeweled Teachings ( Jawāhir al-kalām fī šarḥ šarāʾiʿ-al-islām) of Moḥammad-Ḥasan Najafī (1786–1850) and the oft-cited three-volume work of Moḥammad-Kāẓem Yazdī (d. 1919), The Unbreakable Bond (Al-ʿUrwat al-wuṡqā fī mā taʿamma bi hi al-balwā). Because those were written in Arabic, using them depended on having previous madraseh training. Borūjerdī’s Manual of Practice addressed the lay public, was neatly divided into numbered sections, and was written in Persian. Following the example set by Borūjerdī, other versions of the Manual of Practice or Guide to Practical Questions appeared in print shortly after the grand ayatollah died in 1941, leaving behind a vacuum in leadership (Kāżemī-Mūsavī 1991; Yazdānī 1998). To publish one’s personally endorsed version of this work by a mojtahed counted, and still counts, as a gesture toward being considered by the pool of moqalleds as a prospective source of emulation, marjaʿ. This move illustrated his knowledge of the laws of God along with his commitment to rendering it accessible to the public. Among others, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Guide to Practical Questions came out (Khomeini ca. 1964). What distinguished it was a keen legal interest in social affairs, devoting 25.3 percent of his book to public matters such as defense of the Muslim homeland and regulating Iran’s associations with non-Muslim nations. Much to Borūjerdī’s displeasure, Khomeini supported the Fadāʾīyān group, approving of their political ideal of an Islamic state and admiring their militancy. He criticized the Pahlavis with candor, and following a particularly personal putdown of Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah in 1963, the mojtahed spent a short time in prison and narrowly escaped a potential death sentence. Eventually, Khomeini landed in political exile, at the age of about sixty-five. From October 1965 until the autumn of 1978, he spent his days in Najaf poring over specialized topics in Twelver Shia law, thinking and teaching on the underpinnings of political legitimacy in Islam. In his nowfamous lectures of 1970, labeled the The Islamic State: Theory of the Guardianship of the Jurist (Ḥokūmat-e eslāmī va nażariyeh-e velāyat-e faqīh), Khomeini articulated the position that, in the Age of Occultation, during the absence of the Hidden Emām, the leadership of the Muslim community ought to be left in the effective hands of the mojtaheds. This was more than what most of the earlier Oṣūlīs demanded. By leadership, he meant taking charge of all matters of importance in social, cultural, economic, and political affairs (Kazemi-Moussavi 1992; Mavani 2001; Ṣāleḥī-Najafābādī 1984). This was a [ 107 ]

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clear break with the position of Ḵorāsānī and several other pro-constitutionalist mojtaheds. The vital corollary of basing political legitimacy on the expertly interpreted law of God, as in the Islamic Republic, leaves little room for contemplation and disputation. The judgment of the ruling jurist, derived from his divinely endowed legal intuition, malakeh-e qodsīyeh-e ejtehād, constitutes an absolute injunction to action, and is final. Understood like this, political engagement becomes an effort to eradicate evil: faith fighting falsehood. In this form of theological politics or political theology, disagreement readily translates into a presumed battle against evil. Political dissent is perceived and denigrated as a sinful transgression, an act of taking the devil’s side. This kind of reductive or totalizing dichotomy informed some dominant views of the Qajar-era on the Bābīs and most of the Sufis, it pervaded militant statism of the Fadāʾīyān during the mid-twentieth century, and it partly shaped the legal framework of the Islamic Republic that routinely vilified dissenters and political opponents by branding them with names invoked from the sacred history of faith—ungodly, infidel, hypocrite, and so on. On the eve of February 1979 the distinction between friends and enemies of the revolution reflected the theological irreconcilability between good and evil, or between God and Satan. Thus, the ancien régime went ungodly, the West quaked as a general abomination, and the United States contorted as the Great Satan. Instead of seeing cases of corruption as the by-product of human fallibility and moral fragility, the Revolutionary Court recorded it as a direct affront to God and swiftly sentenced hundreds of people to death. The most common charge was “revolt against God and spreading corruption on earth.” Somewhat unsurprisingly, the most infamous executioner-judge of the Revolutionary Court, Shaykh Ṣādeq ḴalḵālīGīvī (1926–2003), admired the Fadāʾīyān-e eslām and became the director general of a party named as such after the revolution. However, this view was not confined to the circle of the ruling ʿolamā. At the time most secularists, Marxist-Leninists, Muslim socialists, and other public intellectuals seemed to agree that evil was something demonic, and the fighting of it was described in eschatological terms. Depending on one’s perspective, apocalyptic punishment was to be exacted by the wrath of the people, the necessity of history, or the will of God. As a Revolutionary Court prosecutor phrased it, “It is one of the juridical values of the Islamic Republic that [ 108 ]

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whoever stands against this system, which is under a just ruler, ought to be killed. If they are wounded, their wounds ought to be worsened to kill them. . . . This is a legal value of Islam, not an innovation on our part.”3 Four decades after the revolution and well over a century after the constitutional movement, the relationship between God’s law and man’s legislative agency continues to be debated. Under the Islamic Republic, the state is said to function as an intermediary between man and God. The corpus of religious law, feqh, stands straight as its backbone. Like any other nation-state, in the modern sense of the word, the Islamic Republic has executive, judicial, and legislative branches. Deputies sit in council at the parliament, the Majles, formulating the nation’s laws. A higher body, the Guardian Council, is accorded a supervisory role to ensure that all laws passed by the Majles comply with Islamic legal values. This latter institution intends to embody Shaykh Faẓl-Allāh Nūrī’s vision of a century earlier. Nevertheless, the very idea of men—even more radically, women—coming together to formulate laws contravenes exactly what the author of the Treatise to Awaken the Ignorant, a conjectured disciple of the shaykh, considered anathema. The promise of justice for all has proven hard to keep in practice, and the equitable distribution of justice continues to be a central goal of political activism. In spite of a multitude of practical as well as theoretical impediments, some progress has been made, but the ideal of equality before the law for all citizens irrespective of gender, political preference, or religious affiliation remains unfulfilled. Already in the nineteenth century, philosophical ideas about God and man existed in Tehran that differed from those of the mojtaheds in their axioms and implications.

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FIVE

Falsafeh and the Madraseh Divine philosophers maintain that the essence of God is identical with absolute Being. Do you agree, or would you say rather that God’s holy essence is above and beyond absolute Being? —ĀQĀ- ʿA L Ī MO DA R R E S , 18 89

IN TEHRAN, a select group of minds have busied themselves exploring the intricacies of metaphysics, focusing on the ultimate object of all universal inquiry—Being. More broadly, men (and, more recently, women), have cultivated philosophical learning in search of answers to myriad perplexing questions about Being, God, and man. The tradition of metaphysical inquiry in Tehran has deep-reaching historical roots in the cities of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Baghdad. Generations before what is now called “Western philosophy” arrived in the city, metaphysical knowledge already made a home there, especially in the madrasehs, the institutions of Islamic education. Drawing from a well-grounded discourse, madraseh-based philosophers, or madraseh philosophers, enriched ongoing debates about God and Being in nineteenth-century Tehran. Their nomenclature and methodology were distinct both from that of the palace intellectuals and from that of the juristically oriented Oṣūlī ʿolamā or mojtaheds. Through the twentieth century, madraseh philosophers continued to influence intellectual developments, and their discourse is relevant still today. Some of the current relevance of madraseh philosophy had its genesis in 1889, when Prince Badīʿ-al-Molk (ca. 1837–ca. 1904), a great-grandson of the Qajar patriarch Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah, posed a set of metaphysical queries to the handful of madraseh philosophers closest to him (Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres ca. 1880s; 1889; Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 1996; 1997c). As a seasoned administrator and a man of learning in his own right, the prince sought insight into the reality [ 110 ]

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of being and the everlasting truth above and beyond the realm of the quotidian, transient, and mundane.1 The question that launched the present chapter was at the top of Badīʿ-al-Molk’s questionnaire: Is the essence of God identical with absolute Being? In response to the prince, Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres (1819–1889), the senior madraseh philosopher of the capital, quickly scribed a long treatise entitled The Marvels of Wisdom (Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres ca 1880s, 1889; Etemad al-Saltaneh 1889, 211–12; Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 1996). In it, he addressed all of the prince’s questions in detail. A younger madraseh philosopher, ʿAlī-Akbar ḤakamīYazdī (ca. 1851–1925), in his thirties at the time, penned a condensed set of answers to the same question from a somewhat different perspective (Dīnānī 1994; Ḥakamī-Yazdī 1892, ca. 1920; Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 1997c). Badīʿ-al-Molk held both men in high esteem. He was well-apprised of Āqā-ʿAli’s local fame, and, while governor of the province of Yazd in south-central Iran, the Qajar nobleman had supported Ḥakamī, showing eagerness to absorb some of that younger philosopher’s depths of learning. Prince Badīʿ-al-Molk’s questions, wed to the two philosophers’ replies, offer a perfect entry into the discipline of philosophy in late-nineteenth-century Tehran. Completed in 1889 but first published in 1896, the author, Āqā-ʿAlī, played on the word “ḥekmat” and Badīʿ-al-Molk’s title, naming his response to the interlocutor’s query Badāyeʻ-al-ḥekam—The Marvels of Wisdom. As madraseh philosophers, Āqā-ʿAlī and Ḥakamī relied on an analytical framework that spoke of God in technically abstract but intellectually substantive terms. Unlike Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī, Mīrzā Ḥasan Āštiānī, or other mojtaheds and their large circle of followers, the madraseh philosophers did not dedicate their efforts primarily to jurisprudence and determining what was or was not permissible in terms of legally defined values (aḥkām). As a part of their madraseh education, inside or outside Tehran, they studied law, but to them such matters were of secondary and only contingent significance. The essential concern in madraseh philosophy was God, the absolute idea of the divine above and beyond all contingencies of worldly life, law, and ritual. Rational contemplation upon the ideas of God and Being in the absolute sense, finding ultimate truth, and bending the knees as a consequence constituted an act of devotion more meritorious than unreflective adherence to legalistic minutiae or any rote repetition of ritual. At the same time, unlike some palace intellectuals and their disciples outside the Qajar court, madraseh philosophers never called for jettisoning [ 111 ]

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the traditional system of knowledge they had inherited from the past. Like the mojtaheds, they found their own system of thought to be rational, sound, and conducive to an enlightened existence. Beyond generalities, modern European metaphysics remained of marginal concern to them at best (Mojtahedi 1977a, 2004). It is known that Badīʿ-al-Molk took an interest in the works of some European philosophers, and in the last question he presented to Āqā-ʿAlī and Ḥakamī, he dropped several of their names—including Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and Georg Hegel (1770–1831) (Mojtahedi 1977a). However, most madraseh philosophers did not engage with modern European philosophy at all. Instead, as a whole, madraseh philosophers traced their intellectual pedigree primarily to Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. ca. 950), Abū ʿAlī Ḥusayn Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037), Shahāb-al-Dīn Sohravardī (d. 1191), Ḵvājeh Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1273), and, later, Ṣadr-al-Dīn Moḥammad Shīrāzī, better known as MollāṢadrā (d. ca. 1640). There were several others in between. Ultimately, the chain was extended further back to Aristotle and Plato in ancient Greece. During the heyday of translating Greek philosophy into Arabic, early Muslim philosophers in tenth-century Baghdad embraced the term “ḥikma” as an equivalent of not only the Greek word “sophia,” wisdom, but also for the Socratic ideal of loving wisdom, philo-sophia (Gutas 1998).2 This choice of terminology was a wise stratagem in asserting Islamic sanction for a manner of inquiry that some others considered alien to Islam. The Qurʾān declares, “[God] bestows ḥikma on whom He wills, and the recipient of ḥikma has a bounteous beneficence” (Q. Baqara 2:269). The attempt to reduce the divine gift of ḥikma to Hellenistic philosophy, rendered as falsafa in Arabic, faced fierce resistance and severe criticism in Muslim intellectual history. Already in the eleventh century, the intellectual giant Muḥammad al-Ghazzālī (1058–1111) wrote an influential treatise entitled The Incoherence of Philosophers, objecting that the conception of God in falsafa contravened the idea presented in the Qurʾān (Ghazzālī ca. 1090s). However, by the nineteenth century, falsafeh or ḥekmat—the vernacular pronunciations of falsafa and ḥikma in Persian—were used interchangeably in Tehran. A master of philosophical learning, called a fīlosūf, sometimes misread as faylosūf, was revered as a ḥakīm, a sage, a man of wisdom. No reference to women philosophers in nineteenth-century Tehran has come to light yet. Drawing a parallel between the activity of cultivating the mind and curing the body, the word “ḥakīm” also applied to medicine men. [ 112 ]

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Āqā-ʿAlī, Ḥakamī, and other proud bearers of the honorific ḥakīm, with their students, interlocutors, and admirers, ranked ḥekmat above other cerebral pursuits where knowledge was handed down from generation to generation. Most of traditional learning, including jurisprudence, was passed on or transmitted (naqlī). By contrast, falsafeh was hailed by its proponents as rational (ʿaqlī), unencumbered by dogma, and eternal in its method and content. To them, falsafeh, ḥekmat, or metaphysics was the prime science, the noblest discipline of learning, and the queen mother of them all. Its object of study, the noblest of all there is, was absolute Being. In Tehran the first real blossoming of madraseh philosophy occurred during the nineteenth century, with the consolidation of Qajar rule under Fatʹḥ-ʿAlī Shah. Philosophical inquiry had had deep roots in Twelver Shia thought (Rizvi 2005, 2006). Two hundred years before the Qajars came to power in Tehran, falsafeh and other rational disciplines had flourished elsewhere under the Safavid dynasty of kings. In Isfahan, the seat of Safavid rule, prominent madraseh philosophers greatly benefited from courtly patronage and enjoyed respect in the eyes of the public as scholars of Islam. Still, in towns remote from the center of political rule, especially in the shrine city of Mashhad, philosophy and philosophers were rarely welcomed at that time. Back then, Tehran was devoid of madrasehs and madraseh philosophers. In 1722, after Isfahan collapsed under foreign invasion, the Safavid court disintegrated, and its dependent networks of patronage dissipated into thin air (Riyāḥī 1998; Sepantā 1967, 119). Madrasehs barely survived this debacle, and madraseh philosophers became an endangered species. It took decades for madrasehs to recover and for ḥekmat to reemerge (Sefatgol 2005). Madraseh philosophy’s Tehran rebirth transpired from the conjunction of several factors. In the early 1800s the nascent Oṣūlī ʿolamā and the Qajar court enlisted madraseh philosophy to build mutual alliances and fight common enemies. For example, the need to confront the anti-Islamic polemics of Christian missionaries in suitable language brought the court and the madraseh closer, providing madraseh philosophers increased access to royal patronage and religious endowments, at once. Their discipline enjoyed a bout of growth and respectability, but as the nineteenth century progressed, support for it plunged. First, chasms broke out between the Oṣūlī ʿolamā and the court, and then fault lines emerged within the ranks of the mojtaheds themselves. Caught in the crossfire between rival factions, [ 113 ]

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madraseh philosophers were pushed to the margins, and their discipline went into eclipse. By the twentieth century’s turn, madraseh philosophers had almost completely fallen out with the court and the mojtaheds in Tehran. During the first half of the nineteenth century, madraseh philosophers supplied intellectual manpower in the fight against whatever the court and the Oṣūlī ʿolamā in Tehran considered heretical or heterodox. In the battle between the Oṣūlīs and the Aḵbārīs—the two factions within the ranks of Twelver Shia ʿolamā—the madraseh philosophers sided with the Oṣūlīs. As mentioned previously, the Oṣūlīs quickly gained the full support of the Qajar court, and to side with these mojtaheds ensured access to the substantial patronage that the court supplied. Like the Oṣūlīs, madraseh philosophers censured the Sufis, denigrating them as uncouth, impious, and utterly ignorant—improperly versed in both jurisprudence and ḥekmat. When it came to vitiating the threat of Christian missionaries, madraseh philosophers once again held their ground of faith, rising to the challenge with intellectual tools and techniques. They also joined the all-around assault on the Bābīs and their offshoots, maligning them as heretics and dismissing their teachings as irrational. The ʿolamā had determined that Christian missionaries worked hand in glove with foreign diplomats, fortune seekers, and military agents, all of whom conspired to win trophies for the Cross, plunder Muslim riches, and eradicate Islam (Amanat 2005). It behooved the king, as God’s viceregent and shadow on the earth, to stave off the evangelical invaders in defense of his subjects and the true faith, so, in fulfillment of his religious duty, he amplified the power of those who had the requisite knowledge and true gravitas to speak for Islam: the ʿolamā. They wrote multiple rebuttals, many of which they offered to their patron, Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah (Nūrī ca. 1817, 4). The Oṣūlīs seized the moment to prove their mettle. The most prominent of their rank rose up to respond to the polemics and slanderous allegations the European Padres had been disseminating against Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾān. The technical language and rationale of this counterattack came from the madraseh philosophers. Their discipline—falsafeh or ḥekmat— demonstrated the sound, solid, and sophisticated analytics of Muslim theology against the alien’s charge (Amanat 2005; Modarressī-Ṭabāṭabāʾī 1973; Salmānpūr 2002).3 This was nothing like some “flimsy” irrational superstition that the missionaries alleged. [ 114 ]

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A stand-out among the many rebuttals against missionary polemics was a Persian treatise entitled The Proof of Islam (Nūrī ca. 1817). Completed in or around 1817, it was authored by Mollā-ʿAlī Nūrī (ca. 1740–ca. 1830), the most influential madraseh philosopher of the early nineteenth century. Based in Isfahan, Nūrī had written this work in response to the Anglican bishop of the East India Company, Henry Martyn (1781–1812), famous for his missionary zeal and whose writings stirred revulsion among Muslims. Martyn had at some point traveled to Isfahan but had never made it as far inland as Tehran (Amanat 2005; Henry 2008; Nūrī ca. 1817; Smith 1892). Although the vituperative polemical pamphlet The Balance of Truth was not written by him but by another zealous missionary, Karl Gottlieb Pfander (1803– 1865), Martyn’s name became so synonymous with anti-Islamic polemic that even polemics by other missionaries were attributed to him—the Pādre-e farangī (Āqā-Buzurg al-Ṭihrānī 1935, 1:215). Nūrī’s treatise sought to definitively refute Martyn’s work and, by extension, that of all other missionary polemicists. Nūrī’s Proof of Islam relied on the methods of madraseh philosophy to set up a standard of rationality that emphasized the necessity of logical analysis in any defense of the truth. Rooted in revelation as it was, madraseh philosophy committed to formulating premises in logical terms and to making precise syllogistic arguments. Still, Nūrī complained that madraseh philosophy had deteriorated, with analytic framework and logical rigor losing ground to a theologically imprecise discourse that he ascribed primarily to the Sufis and other pretenders. In responding to the missionary challenge, he attempted to reverse this and restore methodological precision to ­falsafeh and to religious thinking in general (Nūrī ca. 1817). In doing so, Nūrī drew on the teachings of the Safavid-era philosopher Mollā-Ṣadrā. Thanks to Nūrī’s sustained efforts, Mollā-Ṣadrā came to be regarded retrospectively as the greatest madraseh philosopher of his time, and perhaps of all time (Rizvi 2009). But why did Nūrī choose him? There were other options available among Shia and non-Shia theologians who had come before and after Mollā-Ṣadrā. Nūrī’s ultimate decision derived from a number of considerations. First, Mollā-Ṣadrā’s system, known as “Transcendental Ḥekmat” (alḥikmat al-mutaʿāliya) possessed more than enough analytic power to nullify the missionary charge of irrationality against Muslim thought. Second, Nūrī’s preference for Transcendental Ḥekmat partly emerged in reaction to [ 115 ]

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the targeting of Mollā-Ṣadrā by the Aḵbārīs and their more recent incarnation, the Shaykhīs. Nūrī totally repudiated these latter groups, like his contemporary Oṣūlīs did, chastising them as dogmatist or as overly fanatical and ridiculing them as mere imposters—the pseudo-ʿolamā. As he saw it, they feigned having something worthwhile to say about religious truth when they utterly lacked intellectual preparation. Nūrī rebuked the actions of those he called pseudo-ʿolamā as “mollā-bāzī,” playing the part of a mollā but not actually being one (Nūrī ca. 1817). Adopting Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Transcendental Ḥekmat as the fulcrum of his philosophical inquiry, Nūrī aided the Oṣūlīs in the battle against their common enemies (Nūrī ca. 1817, 186). His effective refutation of missionary polemics, together with his stance against Aḵbārīs, Shaykhīs, and Sufis, helped vindicate Nūrī’s metaphysical position in the eyes of the Oṣūlīs, who, in their appreciation, tacitly endorsed Transcendental Ḥekmat as a valid framework for theological inquiry. Although Nūrī was not an Oṣūlī “insider,” contemporary mojtaheds in Isfahan and Tehran guardedly held him in esteem (Tonekābonī 1873). Moreover, the Oṣūlī agreed to venerate Mollā-Ṣadrā as a victim of the Aḵbārīs of his day. As historically inaccurate as it was to tuck the nineteenth-century Aḵbārī-Oṣūlī dispute into the pocket of a more distant past, rhetorically, this maneuver proved effective. Working within the framework of Mollā-Ṣadrā’s philosophy, Nūrī defended the metaphysical view of God as Pure Existence, and he tirelessly trained students in this intellectual tradition for over six decades. Regarding God as Pure Existence has deep roots in the Muslim philosophical tradition, going as far back to al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, and Sohravardī. In particular, the last philosopher founded what he called illuminationist philosophy, taking another step in linking being with light and putting hierarchies of existence in correspondence with gradations of illumination (ḥikmat al-išrāq, Suhrawardī ca. 1190). Later the mystical philosopher Muḥyi-al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165– 1260) and his students would expound further on the identification of God—or Truth—as the ultimate reality. Generations of commentators elaborated on this line of thought, redefining ḥekmat as a melding of analytical inquiry and spiritual quest (Knysh 1998). As a master synthesizer, MollāṢadrā integrated all of these potent currents under the rubric of Transcendental Ḥekmat. However, shortly after Mollā-Ṣadrā’s death circa 1640, a variety of factors drove this notion to the margins, and it took a century before Nūrī resuscitated Mollā-Ṣadrā’s works and rehabilitated it as the [ 116 ]

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new standard of madraseh philosophy. And in this endeavor, he had strong intellectual opponents to face. The first two decades of the nineteenth century brought the substance of Mollā-Ṣadrā’s metaphysics and theology potent opposition from Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī (Lawson 2005, 2010; Samawi 1998). Nūrī and Aḥsāʾī were contemporaries. As intellectual nemeses, the two perched on opposite sides of the wide hermeneutic gorge separating the Oṣūlīs from the Aḵbārīs. Shaykh Aḥmad, channeling the concerns and ideals of the Aḵbārīs, fought against Mollā-Ṣadrā with as much fervor as Nūrī fought for him. Both men lived outside Tehran, but their ideas still resonated there. Their theological differences reflected the deep fissures within the ranks of the Twelver Shia ʿolamā at the time. Even after Nūrī and Aḥsāʾī died within a few years of each other, their followers kept up the debate for decades. During the 1820s, the Aḵbārīs underwent an identity change. Most dropped into oblivion, many were absorbed by the Oṣūlīs, and some joined the emerging ranks of the Shaykhīs. As before, reason’s place in attaining knowledge of the divine remained in dispute. The parties involved disagreed on if, how, and to what extent man could comprehend the reality of God and of divine truths by the avenues of reason. The Shaykhīs, highlighting the uncontestable authority of the word of God, insisted on a literal reading of canonical sources, gravely warning against any adulteration of the inerrant clarity of the spirit of the Qurʾān or the teachings of the Fourteen Infallibles. Like the Aḵbārīs, the Shaykhīs distrusted human reason as an independent source of knowledge. They, too, eschewed falsafeh as an inadequate—indeed, misleading— fabrication of fallible human reason. In particular, Shaykh Aḥmad and his followers despised Mollā-Ṣadrā. While Shaykhīs remained a politically and doctrinally inert minority in Tehran, another branch that laid claim to the legacy of Shaykh Aḥmad were the Bābīs, whose even more radical political and religious claims jolted the very foundations of Qajar legitimacy and undermined the dominion of the ʿolamā (Amanat 1989; Cole 1998b; MacEoin 1992). Like the leaders of the Shaykhīs, their eponymous founder, the Bāb, and several of his closest associates had studied with Aḥsāʾī’s star student and successor in Iraq—Seyed Kāżem Raštī (1793–1843). Many of the early exponents of the Bābī movement were Raštī’s students. The Bābī credo incorporated some of the most blatantly esoteric elements of Raštī’s thought—numerology, inspired exegesis, and hypervigilance for harbingers of the end times (Rashti [ 117 ]

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ca. 1840). Common to them all was a strong aversion to the ʿolamā and the madraseh philosophers who walked among them. Just as Mollā-ʿAlī Nūrī had relied on Mollā-Ṣadrā’s ḥekmat in battling the Aḵbārīs, so did his followers in fighting the Shaykhīs and the Bābīs. Restructured on the foundation of Nūrī’s exposition, madraseh philosophy employed highly technical language and an arsenal of analytic tools mostly derived from Mollā-Ṣadrā’s teachings. Wielding those tools, madraseh philosophers undermined and dismissed the pronouncements of Shaykhī and Bābī leaders as pseudo-philosophical blunders and theological superstition. Capitalizing on rampant Shaykhī apathy toward falsafeh earned dividends for madraseh philosophers and brought them closer to the Oṣūlīs: an enemy of your enemy is your friend, sometimes. Gifts and endowments from men and women affiliated with the court helped promote the Oṣūlī position and, by extension, supported madraseh philosophy. Soon the Oṣūlīs oversaw the near dozen madrasehs opening in Tehran. For decades, many of these madrasehs catered to students and instructors who pursued ḥekmat (Kasaie 1998; Seyedzādeh-Moṭlaq 2011). In fact, Tehran’s earliest madraseh was also a bastion of falsafeh (Ostādi 1992). When the Qajar nobleman Faḵr-al-Dōleh Ḥājī Moḥammad-Ḥossein Khan-e Marvī (d. 1819) funded the construction of a new madraseh near the royal palace, he ensured that students of philosophy were as welcome as students of other branches of necessary religious learning, such as jurisprudence. Built between 1813 and 1816, the madraseh Khan-e Marvī had copious endowments ranging from agricultural revenues to rental income sourced from shops in the nearby bazaar. The deed of endowment restricted the use of all madraseh resources for the advancement of religious learning and to the benefit of the students of religion (moḥaṣṣelīn-e ʿolūm-e sharʿīyeh, elsewhere as ṭalabe-e ʿolūm-e dīnīye).4 The deed’s proper execution was overseen by the city’s most prominent Oṣūlīs, first Mīrzā Masīḥ Mojtahed-Ṭehrānī (ca. 1780–1847) and then Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī. Both agreed that philosophy instructors and their students should also be eligible to receive stipends for being engaged in bona fide religious activity at the madraseh (Ostādi 1992, esp. 20–27). Khan-e Marvī equipped his madraseh with a great library filled with exquisite philosophical manuscripts. It was his wish to make Mollā-ʿAlī Nūrī, the metaphysical cream of the crop, a trophy in the madraseh he had built [ 118 ]

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and funded so generously. The king officially invited Nūrī to teach falsafeh in his capital’s madraseh. As it went, rather than abandoning his circle in Isfahan, Nūrī recommended Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh Zonūzī (ca. 1772–1841), his top student, for the position (Zonūzī 1824, 7). From the time he arrived in the capital until he died there some twenty years later, Zonūzī called the Khan-e Marvī Madraseh home. The young ʿĀqā-ʿAbd-Allāh, son of Bāyrām-qolī (d. ca. 1800), hailed from the village of Zonūz on the countryside of the city of Tabriz. In Tehran he assayed the same philosophical path as his mentor did in Isfahan. Having spent his youth traveling from madraseh to madraseh, studying first in the town of Khvoy—not far from his native village—then in Karbala, Isfahan, and Qom, Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh was cut more from Oṣūlī cloth than was his mentor Nūrī. In the ʿatabāt, he had studied under prominent Oṣūlīs, including Mīrzā-e Qomi (ca. 1738–1816), Āqā-ʿAlī Ḥāʾerī-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (1748–1816), and the latter’s son, Seyed Moḥammad Mojāhed (ca. 1767–1826). In his teachings at the Khan-e Marvī Madraseh, Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh defined the framework of metaphysical inquiry and set its tone, peppering Nūrī’s anti-Aḵbārī theological stance with typical Oṣūlī gravitas. In Divine Splendors, Zonūzī’s own magnum opus (a gem of a Persian language treatise on madraseh philosophy), the author repeatedly pays homage to Mollā-Ṣadrā, implicitly rebuking Shaykhī antagonism toward the latter and his philosophical approach (Zonūzī 1824, 53, 57, 75, 120). At the time, most of the two hundred full-time students of religion (ṭollāb-e ʿolūm-e dīnī) enrolled at the Khan-e Marvī Madraseh in order to study metaphysics with him. For the generations that followed, perhaps down to the present, “madraseh philosophy” in Tehran was understood as Zonūzī’s formulation of it, a formulation that had in turn been drawn from Nūrī’s interpretation of Mollā-Ṣadrā. A legion of students branded by Zonūzī’s madraseh philosophy went on to condemn Aḵbārīs and Shaykhīs as two tail ends of the same unsophisticated obscurantism that had wracked and suffocated philosophical thought in the late Safavid era. Their critique extended to Bābīs and later Bahai inheritors of the Shaykhī legacy, no less. These madraseh philosophers berated Shaykh Aḥmad’s limited analytical rigor and considered his rational capacity far inferior to the intellectual caliber of Mollā-Ṣadrā, Nūrī, ĀqāʿAbd-Allāh, and their line of heirs in metaphysical thinking. What was it about Mollā-Ṣadrā’s philosophy that Shaykhīs so easily rejected and madraseh philosophers so eagerly embraced? The short answer [ 119 ]

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is embedded in Badīʿal-Molk’s question of earlier: the identification of God’s essence as pure Being. The cryptic expression warrants explanation, but its gist encapsulates a deeply rooted and quite sophisticated philosophical system that postulates pure being as the ultimate origin of all that is: all beings or existents stand on a graded scale of diluted purity in existence (vojūd). By placing existence center stage in his inquiries, Mollā-Ṣadrā had both revived and reformulated this basic idea with a cogency that had been unprecedented, at least among Twelver Shia philosophers. Aḥsāʾī rejected Mollā-Ṣadrā’s position. Situating himself in a long philosophical debate against the falsafeh tradition, especially the mystical teachings most notably expressed in works by Ibn ʿArabī and his intellectual heirs, he deployed the charged term “Unity of Being” to vilify Mollā-Ṣadrā and his followers. This term and the charge itself, derived from an established line of attack against Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings, had a long pedigree. The accusation was that the doctrine of Unity of Being conflated the created cosmos with the creator God. By embracing it, Aḥsāʾī argued, Ibn ʿArabī, Mollā-Ṣadrā, and whoever followed them had veered off the straight path of God and over a sacrilegious cliff. Tracing the footsteps of their master, the Shaykhīs went as far as to malign Mollā-Ṣadrā and like-minded philosophers as unbelievers (Lawson 2010, 24n210; Samawi 1998, 22, 30–31). Mollā-Ṣadrā’s philosophical system is developed most comprehensively in a work of profound depth and encyclopedic coverage known as The Four Journeys of the Intellect on the Path of Transcendental Wisdom (Mollā-Ṣadrā ca. 1640). It is possible that this multivolume book, commonly referred to as the Asfār (Four Journeys) may have been composed not by Mollā-Ṣadrā himself but compiled and collated posthumously by his students. Attribution and authorship conjecture aside, it was the efforts of Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh that placed The Four Journeys as madraseh philosophy’s cornerstone in Tehran. Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys depicts philosophy as a form of spiritual journey, a journey of worship and devotion: metaphysics as a vocation. Understood as a way of life, contemplating ḥekmat constitutes an act of pious service offered to God. Philosophy as an activity of reason can transform the spirit and move it closer and closer to God. Taking this perspective, philosophy and mysticism become inseparable. Rational reflection ties in with spiritual meditation; discursive inquiry encapsulates mystical experience. This kind of intellectualized mysticism or pensive metaphysics is called ʿerfān and has a long pedigree in Twelver Shia thought, reaching its apogee [ 120 ]

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in Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys but with much deeper roots. Mollā-Ṣadrā’s other works that expound on similar themes include The Divine Witnesses (al-Šawāhid al-rubūbīyah), The Beginning and the End (al-Mabdaʾwa’l-maʿād), The Book of Metaphysical Prehensions (al-Mašāʿir), Treatise on the Temporality of the World (Risālah fi al-ḥudūṡ), The Wisdom of the Throne (al-Ḥikmat al-ʿaršīyah), and his commentary on the Qurʾān, The Keys to the Unseen (al-Mafātīḥ al-ġayb). Thanks to the efforts of Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh, his son Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres, and their students, all of these works acquired a special position in madraseh philosophy down to the present. In his philosophical exposition, Mollā-Ṣadrā describes the soul or spirit embarking on a journey of four parts. The four journeys begin with and end with God—in harmony with the teaching of the Qurʾān, “He is the Beginning and He is the End” (Q. Ḥadīd 57:3). Here philosophy provides a roadmap for this journey. A broad-brush depiction of Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys might portray that, in the search for eternal happiness, the soul ought to sever all ties to the created cosmos first. Once all attachments break and are cast aside via intellectual and spiritual exercises, the soul approaches the divine presence. The transcendent light effaces all shadowy illusions of self, and the soul undergoes total dissolution as it is absorbed by the divine essence, the second part of the journey, to be alone with the one and only. Then, guided by divine truth and beheld in the world of Creation by the light of God, the soul discerns the mysteries of the apparent diversity and multiplicity of identities within the created cosmos. The revelation dawns in the soul that what comes from the One is one. In the journey’s final stretch, the seeker learns to walk with God within the world of Creation, ever vigilant in thought and action, immersed in eternal reunion with God (Rizvi 2009). Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh elaborated on themes from Mollā-Ṣadrā’s philosophy, cultivating the notion that the proper understanding of the unity of God (tōḥīd), the primary tenet of Islam, depended on acquiring knowledge of ḥekmat. In Divine Splendors, he glosses over multiple meanings for God’s oneness and then proceeds to formulate proofs for the existence of God as the one and only Necessary Existent. Analyzing eight primary divine attributes—knowledge, power, will, life, hearing and sight (taken as one), speech, generosity, and justice—he further speaks of God as the font of existence, the one and only Necessary Existent, the pure and absolute Being (Zonūzī 1824, 1–6). As focused as the present study is on history, it does not delve into the theological intricacies of Zonūzī’s presentation. Suffice it to [ 121 ]

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say that his formulation markedly differed from that of contemporary Sufis and Shaykhīs. It was also distinct from what the mojtaheds endorsed later in the nineteenth century. The tradition of madraseh philosophy that Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh established in Tehran flowed to his students, the most prominent being his son, ĀqāʿAlī Modarres, author of the aforementioned Marvels of Wisdom. The son was a man of tiny stature but lofty status. Because of his masterful teaching of philosophy, Āqā-ʿAlī was commonly referred to as the Magister (Modarress), and not only his students at the madraseh referred to him as a sage or ḥakīm but the Qajar court also acknowledged him as such (Etemad al-Saltaneh 1895, 805). Scattered other philosophers, not from the father-and-son circle but who had migrated to the capital during the second half of the nineteenth century, further enriched the philosophical discourse. Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres, the magister, had started teaching falsafeh at a small madraseh known as the Qāsem-Khān Madraseh, located inside the royal complex, but before long he had moved to the larger Old Sepahsālār Madraseh. The latter madraseh, built in 1853, is not to be confused with the New Sepahsālār Madraseh completed in the 1880s. The older madraseh had been funded and built as the namesake madraseh of Mīrzā MoḥammadKhan Sepahsālār (d. 1867), a high-ranking Qajar administrator, military man, and an uncle to Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah. This madraseh was built to extend the resources of the Khan-e Marvī madraseh that stood a stone’s throw to the east. For over a half-century, Āqā-ʿAlī resided in and taught philosophy at the Old Sepahsālār Madraseh. A bounty of capable teachers, eager students, and generous donors allowed madraseh philosophy to flourish (Kasaie 1998). Interest in madraseh philosophy and other rational sciences—including mathematics and ­astronomy— reflected a preoccupation with ideas on existence, knowledge, and God. Specific to nineteenth-century Tehran, this also signaled the burgeoning alertness to modern views on Nature and reason, and the prospects of engaging them with the gaze of madraseh philosophy. Unlike those palace intellectuals who bet all-or-nothing on European civilization and therefore saw no merit in madraseh philosophy, many other members of Qajar service nobility—Prince Badīʿ-al-Molk being a prime example—turned to this discipline of learning for answers to new questions about Nature, reason, and metaphysics. Revering philosophy as the very [ 122 ]

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embodiment of rationality, they tasked themselves with netting from madraseh philosophy a rational interpretation of religion. And instead of rejecting the mystical dimension of ḥekmat, they embraced it as the philosophy’s core and, occasionally, as a complement, if not necessarily an alternative, to the rigidly formalistic framework of the jurists. As early as the 1810s this emphasis on the rational element of religion, specifically Islam, informed the teaching of falsafeh at the Khan-e Marvī Madraseh, and in later decades it spread well beyond madraseh circles. Growing interest in madraseh philosophy swirled around the New Sepahsālār Madraseh, more commonly known as the Sepahsālār Madraseh. Built in the 1880s on a grand scale and with ambitious goals, it was funded by the bequest of Mīrzā Ḥossein Khan Sepahsālār, the progressive prime minister and palace intellectual. Taking their cue from Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī, the more juridically minded members of the ʿolamā and their followers showed nothing but contempt for Sepahsālār. A combination of mutual prejudice and suspicion was at work as well as radically different theological predilections. As the allocation of substantial personal assets for establishing a madraseh starkly illustrates, contrary to what those detractors insinuated, Sepahsālār held a keen interest in promoting religious learning. The madraseh he built played an instrumental role in keeping the philosophical tradition alive in Tehran until the present. The inauguration of the New Sepahsālār Madraseh coincided with the widening of the gap between Tehran’s leading mojtaheds and the madraseh philosophers. Once the mojtaheds’ allies, the latter had aided them in warding off the missionaries, battling the Sufis, rooting out the Aḵbārīs, fighting the Shaykhīs, quashing the Bābīs, and confronting other intellectual challenges. But by the 1880s two new developments alarmed Tehran’s mojtadehs: the palace intellectuals and madraseh philosophers seemed to be drawing too close for their comfort, and madraseh philosophy had opened up to mystical teachings, or ʿerfān, more explicitly than before. Both developments rattled the mojtahed leadership. As far as they were concerned, the rational dimension of Islam was more than adequately accommodated for by jurisprudence, a body of knowledge they had mastered. As experts in decoding divine law, they insisted that spiritual fulfillment depended on conducting one’s life in full compliance with legal values (aḥkām). Their suspicions about the true religious commitment of the palace [ 123 ]

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intellectuals, multiplied by their longstanding apathy toward the Sufis and their emerging weariness about the potential threat of the philosophers’ proclamations that analytic reason trumped handed-down knowledge, exacerbated the mojtaheds’ anxieties. The Sufis found themselves increasingly more comfortable in the Qajar capital in their mystical approach to madraseh philosophy. By contrast, some palace intellectuals and admirers of European civilization who had convened in Prince Jalāl’s house for the séances in Malkom’s Chamber of Secrets valued the logical approach—idolizing reason, chiming the praises of Enlightenment ideals, and glorifying philosophy as a guide into the discovery of rational truths. Among the occasional attendees of Malkom’s Chamber of Secrets was a distinguished madraseh philosopher named Seyed Abu’-l-Ḥasan Ṭabāṭabāʾī (1822–1897), who went by the pen name “Jelveh” ( Jelveh ca. 1890, ca. 1897; Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 1997b). The tall, thin, handsome bachelor was a good-­ natured but bookish philosopher. He trimmed his beard but dressed like the ʿolamā, wearing a dignified black turban to signal his being a seyed—a direct descendent of the Prophet. The capital’s elite circles welcomed his sharp mind, masterful knowledge of philosophy, and pleasant sense of humor. Jelveh was born in the so-called Manchester of the East, Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat in colonial India, and grew up in his merchant father’s household. When still a child, around 1835, he moved with his parents back to their ancestral homeland, Isfahan. Like a typical Victorian scholar, he abhorred ambiguity and preferred to nourish his mind with facts, facts, facts. In his early thirties, Jelveh migrated to Tehran, establishing himself, as of 1856, at the Dār-al-Šifāʾ Madraseh. Constructed initially as a hospital during the reign of Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah, the place later turned into a madraseh of meager endowment. Having sufficient personal means to sustain an independent livelihood, Jelveh taught philosophy there for over forty years. Jelveh was a strict rationalist. He displayed no interest in the mystical implications of madraseh philosophy. Emphasizing logical precision in philosophical analysis, he even faulted Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Transcendental Ḥekmat approach as too speculative and not rigorous enough in formulation. Instead of teaching Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys, he preferred to teach the logically structured works of the eleventh-century philosopher Ibn Sīnā, the Book of Healing (al-Šifāʾ) and Remarks & Admonitions (al-išārāt wa al-tanbīhāt). [ 124 ]

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Another impetus for rationalist philosophy in Tehran came from an unlikely source: Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), the French ambassador and by far the most intellectually savvy foreign diplomat in town. Carrying a romanticist air about him, as French intellectuals familiarly did in the Second Empire of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (r. 1852–1870), Gobineau sported a mustache like the emperor himself, and he cultivated an interest in matters oriental like many contemporaries. He knew Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres and other madraseh philosophers, and when they queried him about European philosophy, he responded to the best of his ability. Once, as an intellectual experiment, he picked René Descartes’s Discours de la method as a “characteristically European work” and had it translated into the Persian language. Gobineau had entered diplomatic service as a protégé of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805—1859) and represented his country in Tehran twice, as the French mission’s first secretary from July 1855 to October 1856, then as chargé d’affaires from October 1856 until January 1858. During his second appointment, from January 1862 to October 1863 ( J. Calmard, “Gobineau,” EIr), he reached beyond the familiar circle of court literati and acquainted himself with a broader range of individuals, including a number of madraseh philosophers. Among his embassy staff, Rabbi Lālehzār Hamadāni (d. ca. 1880s) served as native assistant. It was this “Jewish mollā,” as Gobineau referred to him, who produced the first, if rather faulty, Persian translation of Descartes’s book, entitling it Naṣerī Wisdom, Ḥekmat-e Nāṣerīyeh, in deference to the monarch, Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (Danešpaĵūh 1983, 267f; Lalehzar 1863; Manāfzādeh 1991; Mojtahedi 1975). Many of the ideas pulsing in Discours de la method already sounded familiar to Muslim readers. Still, the Jewish translator readily included quotations from the Qurʾān in his preface in order to make sound it even more familiar. The book’s frequent references to God and its constructing of a philosophical system to prove the existence of God made it easy for them to acknowledge the French author as a “divine sage” and his treatise as one of divine wisdom (Manāfzādeh 1991). Still, the translator diffidently inserted a disclaimer in the book’s introduction, offering that Descartes had little to offer the great ʿolamā. In retrospect, this translation did not stir much interest in and of itself, but the appearance of Naṣerī Wisdom marked an important moment in Tehran’s intellectual history. [ 125 ]

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Lamentably, Lālehzār’s “translation” obfuscated the very substance of Cartesian philosophy from the get-go. For starters, the very first term in the treatise, a key word in Descartes’s thought and modern philosophy, the French expression “Le bon sens,” which means “good sense” or “reason,” the cornerstone of Cartesian rationalism, was rendered as maʿāš—a word that refers to “means of sustenance” and “quotidian livelihood.” Inadequacies of translation notwithstanding, fundamental differences existed between madraseh philosophy and the Cartesian system, centering on the difference between each side’s notion of reason. The Cartesian notion of reason as an equitably distributed human capacity to distinguish right from wrong differed subtly from what Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres, Jelveh, and other madraseh philosophers knew as reason or intellect. To them, quotidian reason embodied a diluted and weakened reflection of real reason or pure intellect. In the same way that nature, as they understood it in the nineteenth century, was inferior to heaven, worldly reason was inferior to higher forms of intellect. With roots extending centuries back in history, their metaphysical theory of reason tied in with the Ptolemaic astronomy that held celestial spheres to be immaterial living intellects: from the uppermost heaven down to Saturn, then to Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon. Next to the moon or the lunar sphere came the tenth intellect, also known as the “agent intellect” or “active intellect,” that linked the upper nine celestial intellects with the material or elemental world that man inhabits on the earth. It was the purpose of philosophy to train, improve, and elevate human reason to the higher level of pure intellect and, ultimately, to God. Multiple levels mediated between “Being qua Being” and man’s earthly existence. Each intermediary level corresponded to a divine manifestation, referred to as an “intellect.” Sometimes it was identified with the angel who conveyed divine words to the prophets (Reisman 2005, esp. 56–58). This hierarchical theory of intellects still underlies the view of knowledge and being presented in Āqā-ʿAlī’s Marvels of Wisdom and even later madraseh philosophers (Khomeini 1931). Despite sacrificing much to the rabbi’s translation, some of the ideas of Descartes and other European rationalists did survive passage. More than adding philosophical substance, they fueled a palpable sense of redirection. For example, both madraseh philosophers and palace intellectuals agreed with Descartes that reason and its principles mutually apply to God and man. God’s supreme goodness, power, and knowledge are to be [ 126 ]

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understood in the light of reason. Human agency, too, derives from rational knowledge and the will to align life with reason. This formulation of the mutuality of reason between man and God certainly had precedent in the Islamic theological tradition, especially in classical Twelver Shia theology. Nevertheless, its rearticulation in the nineteenth century, especially pertaining to European rationalism, resonated with new relevance. It would be hard to overstress the importance of the implications of this new emphasis on reason and knowledge, as spearheaded by the madraseh philosopher Jelveh and echoed by the palace intellectuals and their followers. In parallel with the strong rationalist tendency that Jelveh promoted, a more mystic and esoteric approach to ḥekmat was advocated by the madraseh philosopher Āqā-Moḥammad-Reẓā Qomšehʾī (1825–1888) and his circle of devoted students. Qomšehʾī will return to us in the next chapter, but suffice it to say now that since his arrival at the capital in 1872, he added a new dimension to philosophical inquiry in Tehran. Beyond Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys, he centered his teachings on two major works by Ibn ʿArabī, the Bezels of Wisdom and the Meccan Revelations, books that especially ĀqāʿAlī and Jelveh found little use for but ones that had left a deep influence on Mollā-Ṣadrā himself. The sheer diversity of philosophical views in nineteenth-century Tehran renders inaccurate and misleading any notion of a unified “School of Tehran” (maktab-e Tehrān). While the age’s four greatest madraseh philosophers— Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh Zonūzī, Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres, Āqā-Moḥammad-Reẓā Qomšehʾī, and Abuʾ-l-Ḥasan Jelveh—did teach Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys, they differed in their assumptions, the questions they posed, and the conclusions they derived. Zonūzī mildly peppered his philosophizing with esoterica, going beyond the explicit pronouncements of Mollā-Ṣadrā (Zonūzī 1830). His son, Āqā-ʿAlī, rarely strayed from the text of Asfār, and in doing so he sometimes disagreed with his father’s philosophical interpretations; Qomšehʾī extended the textual canon by pursuing a broader program of research with a vigorous emphasis on ʿerfān; Jelveh, who found no rational merit in ʿerfān, even criticized Mollā-Ṣadrā fundamentally and reached back to earlier philosophers, especially Ibn Sīnā. The four did not enjoy the same social standing, either. While Qomšehʾī was grazed by bigoted charges of infidelity, ĀqāʿAlī, an Oṣūlī, and his father, Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh, kept their respect among the capital’s prominent mojtaheds—no one accused them of sacrilege. As for Jelveh, he mostly remained fringe-bound and avoided alarming the ʿolamā. [ 127 ]

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The set of questions Badīʿ-al-Molk presented to the madraseh philosophers of his time reflects his awareness of the range of available philosophical opinions. He even nurtured a degree of curiosity about modern European philosophers. More radical intellectuals, within and without the Qajar court, were more bent on practical results than philosophical contemplation. As ideologues, they welcomed madraseh philosophy only as far as it harmonized with their paying lip service to rationality as a desideratum for progress. Āqā-ʿAlī offered an accessible presentation of madraseh philosophy, elaborating on the two complementary notions of divine self-disclosure and causality to explain the relationship between God and everything else. He postulates that all beings derive from God through emanation or divine self-disclosure. From the loftiest sphere of heaven to the tiniest speck of dust, all things embody, reflect, and represent a manifestation of God. This was a rather more sophisticated expression of some folk beliefs outlined earlier in chapter 3. Moreover, Āqā-ʿAlī uses the principle of causality to establish the inescapable dependence of the cosmos—the well-ordered world of Creation—on one God, the Prime Agent or the First Cause, the origin and originator of the great chain of Being. In essence, all things or effects have causes that engender them. Since, by definition, the sequence of causes and effects may not continue ad infinitum, an ultimate first cause must therefore exist. This First Cause is none other than God. Alternatively formulated, this argument identifies God as the one and only Necessary Existent. As cosmos initiator and maker, God causes all things to be and determines the course of creation. Both ideas, as abstract as they sounded in the language of philosophy, resonated well with folk beliefs about the ubiquitous presence of God and the ultimate dependence of all things on Him. Madraseh philosophers were not immune to vilification by the Oṣūlī ʿolamā, especially after the 1870s, when Tehran’s greater mojtaheds dropped falsafeh from the list of required religious subjects. Tonekābinī’s popular book of laudatory anecdotes about the ʿolamā leaves out most traces of the madraseh philosophers, with the exception of Mollā-ʿAlī Nūrī, who receives an ambivalent portrayal at best (Tonekābonī 1873). The influential mojtahed of Régie fame, Mīrzā Ḥasan Āštiānī (ca. 1830–1901), expressed his disgust of ḥekmat by censuring Qomšehʾī in vulgar terms. After Qomšehʾī and Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres died within months of each other, late 1888 and early 1889, respectively, most students of philosophy flocked to Jelveh. With his inimitable [ 128 ]

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sense of humor, the Isfahani rationalist later observed, “Some desired to pick up the jargon, some hoped to collect a thing or two for showing off, and a smaller minority came truthfully and innocently because they had faith in the metaphysics” ( Jelveh ca. 1890). It was unmistakable: madraseh philosophy, under the weighty eyes of the powerful Oṣūlīs, had been downgraded. Jelveh’s aversion to ʿerfān, his dislike for the Sufis, and his unambiguous confrontation with the Bahai theologian Abu-ʾl-Faẓl Golpāyegānī (1844– 1914) appealed to the ʿolamā (Nūrāʾī-neĵād 2007). Not considering Jelveh a threat, they let him be. Partly because of his mild-mannered character, contemporary mojtaheds tolerated the peripheral teaching of philosophy in the madraseh, if not altogether deeming the practice worthwhile. But with Jelveh’s death in 1897, the fortunes of madraseh philosophy in Tehran were depleted. To the administrators of the city’s madrasehs, the teachers and students of this discipline became like guests who had overstayed their welcome. Madraseh philosophy, which had risen to its 1880s zenith in Tehran, plunged to its nadir in the early 1900s. The ʿolamā challenged its claims to truth and admonished the populace against the dangerous heresy and moral laxity lurking in its pursuit. It was easy to convince the masses that falsafeh was just so much banter in an incomprehensible tongue, and the objections to Ibn ʿArabī’s Unity of Being teachings reemerged. Mollā-Ṣadrā and his intellectual disciples were implicated by association, leaving the Oṣūlīs confident enough to appropriate and embrace the Shaykhī rhetoric against ʿerfān and Mollā-Ṣadrā’s philosophy as their own. Law and jurisprudence, in name if not always in spirit, overtook the madrasehs. The Dār-al-Šifā’ Madraseh, where Jelveh had taught for decades, and the Ṣadr Madraseh, where Qomšehʾī resided in his later years, now fell into new hands no longer friendly to ḥekmat, falsafeh, or ʿerfān. Teachers and students of this kind of material were pushed out, urgently. Part of the divide was theological. At the turn of the twentieth century, most of Tehran’s mojtaheds preferred what may be labeled commonsense or folk formulations of mediatory theology over the hyperintellectualized view of God in madraseh philosophy. Rather than speaking of God as Pure Being and the transcendental Necessary Existent, they characterized God as the supreme master of the world of Creation. Finding the master/slave [ 129 ]

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theological paradigm closer to a literal reading of most passages in the Qurʾān and the traditions of the Fourteen Infallibles, they characterized God as the king and lord of the creation and everything else as His obedient servitors. To their peevish ears, descriptions of the relationship between God and humans in ʿerfān-like intimate terms sounded inappropriate, if not sacrilegious. As Islam teaches, man’s salvation depended on serving God, and the mojtaheds interpreted this service as unquestioning obedience to God’s normative law. However, the rift between jurists and madraseh philosophers was not confined to matters of theological purport. Historical evidence indicates that most scholars and students of ḥekmat and related rational disciplines in Tehran at the turn of the twentieth century leaned in favor of political reform expressed in constitutionalist terms. Unlike the majority of the mojtaheds and their political allies, madraseh philosophers voiced criticism and called for change. Silent protests and orderly rallies against despotism and in favor of constitutionalism took place primarily at those madrasehs where philosophy, mathematics, and other rational subjects were taught. The constitutionalist madraseh philosopher and future parliamentarian Mīrzā Moḥammad-Ṭāher Tonekābonī (1863–1941) taught at the Kāżemiyeh Madraseh for several years. This latter place, as well as the Abu al-Ḥasan Khan Madraseh in the ʿŪdlājān neighborhood, where the latter had once studied philosophy during his younger years, along with the Monīriyeh Madraseh inside the bazaar, the ʿAbd-Allāh Khan Madraseh, and the newly founded Fīlsūf-al-Dōleh Madraseh, were teeming centers of pro-constitutionalist enthusiasm. Obviously, the pro-court mojtaheds fancied allocating madraseh space, stipends, and resources exclusively to the most loyal teachers, students, and caretakers. Given this institution’s integral role in the ʿolamā’s patron– client networks, when no bona fide students of religious learning could be found to replace the ones that had left (or, more accurately put, been evicted), surrogates such as unlettered peasants or semiliterate laborers were huddled in, especially into smaller madrasehs. Using a tried and true way for quashing unwanted competition, the court-supported ʿolamā and their clients undercut madraseh philosophers. They pulled no punches in charging advocates of falsafeh-style rationality with lacking heart in faith and violating divine law in practice. A good example that exposes the tendentious nature of such charges is that of [ 130 ]

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Shaykh Mollā-Hādī Najmābādī (1834–1902), a paragon of piety with impeccable credentials as a Najaf-educated mojtahed (Morsalvand 1999; Rōḥānī 2004). For three decades he had presided over a court of law adjudicating cases according to Twelver Shia law. But neither his expertise as a Oṣūlī jurist nor his exemplary moral conduct could halt the relentless pro-court elements from demonizing and maligning this constitutionalist. No discernable action in Shaykh Hādī’s life justifies the ad hominem attacks made against him. He was a senior mojtahed who, despite the harassment he faced, insisted on reforming religious legal practices and advocated the necessity of fighting superstition with reason. Humbly sitting on dusty ground, he sermonized daily to the crowds who gathered outside his home, calling on all walks of men and women to rely on reason (Najmābādī 1895). Many tales circulated about his compassion for his fellow humans, Muslims and non-Muslims, regardless of their religious affiliation (Morsalvand 1999; Rōḥānī 2004). Even as a mojtahed, he allocated funds from religious contributions for building an elementary school, a hospital, and one of Tehran’s earliest modern pharmacies. By the early 1900s, under mounting pressure, the madraseh philosophy’s center of gravity shifted from Tehran to Najaf, in its own right the citadel of Oṣūlī learning in the ʿatabāt. Seyed Moḥammad-Bāqer Eṣṭahbānātī (ca. 1837– 1908) played a key role in this transfer. He was a trained Oṣūlī, a learned ḥakīm, and at the same time a fervent constitutionalist. The premier mojtahed of the capital at the turn of the century—the anticonstitutionalist FaẓlAllāh Nūrī—taught him law and jurisprudence. Concurrently, Eṣṭahbānātī studied philosophy under Āqā-ʿAlī, Qomšehʾī, and Jelveh. He mastered the art of mathematics as it was taught in turn-of-the-century madrasehs. In 1908 Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah had Eṣṭahbānātī and several other constitutionalists hunted down and murdered. For a couple of decades after that, madraseh philosophy thrived in Najaf under the shade of jurisprudence, but it had lost its footing in the Qajar capital. It was not until the eve of the Cossack takeover of March 1921, with the hope of order and stability glinting, that madrasa philosophy’s pulse of revival started in the nearby shrine-town of Qom and later, as of the 1930s, could be felt in Tehran once again. Grand Ayatollah ʿAbd-al-Karīm Ḥāʾerī-Yazdī welcomed madraseh philosophers into the Islamic learning complex he had founded. As a wise builder of institutions, he knew that, as Emām ʿAlī advised, “to be a leader one has to keep an open mind.” He [ 131 ]

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reinjected philosophy into the religious curriculum of the ḥōzeh. Under his leadership, three scholars shaped the new framework of madraseh philosophy: Moḥammad-ʿAli Shāhābādi (1875–1950), Mahdī Āštiyānī (1889–1953), and ʿAlī-Akbar Ḥakamī (Ḥakamī-Yazdī ca. 1920; Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 1997c). The last of these was one of the recipients of Badīʿ-al-Molk’s philosophical query, which was introduced earlier in this chapter. All three had suffered at the hands of anticonstitutionalist mojtaheds. They shared a common pedagogical lineage and successfully integrated the philosophical approaches of the previous two generations not only in Tehran but also from the cities of Mashhad, Isfahan, and Najaf. And it was Mollā-Ṣadrā’s philosophy, especially his Four Journeys, that once again beat as the heart of the ḥozeh’s philosophical revival. Jelveh’s critical methodology and his dedication to logical rigor maintaining the rhythms of Ibn Sīnā formed the backbone of the new curriculum. The extended repertoire of texts that Qomšehʾī had introduced for the study of ʻerfān in the 1880s—especially the Bezels of Wisdom—remained central as well. Eventually the standard textbook materialized as The Best of Truths (Ġurar alḥikam), or the Book of Systematic Wisdom (al-manżūma fī al-ḥikma), more commonly referred to as the “Manżūmeh,” composed by the previous century’s Mollā-Hādī Sabzevārī (1797–1872) in Mashhad (Rizvi 2010). Beyond its limited Qom horizon, madraseh philosophy received a boost when, in the winter of 1935, the University of Tehran opened its doors in the northwestern outskirts of the sprawling city and, thus, a new venue for learning and common good was born. The university was a secular but not a sacrilegious institution, one where commitment to reason, dedication to the homeland, and allegiance to the king converged in one curriculum, which from the start offered programs in history, ethics, law, literature, and philosophy. The man who inaugurated the University of Tehran’s program of madraseh philosophy, linking the discipline’s past and future, happened to be the former constitutionalist and parliamentarian Moḥammad-Ṭāher Tonekābonī. This patrician-scholar had spent the bulk of his life studying and teaching philosophy, from the days of his youth, when he first migrated to the Qajar capital, until the day he died (Ṣadūqī-Sohā 1981, 98). For decades, his home away from home had been the Sepahsālār Madraseh, the one that Mīrzā Ḥossein Khan Sepahsālār, the palace intellectual had funded. As a student, he had sporadically attended Āqā-Ali’s teaching sessions but had [ 132 ]

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learned more from Qomšehʾī and even more from Jelveh—the latter’s ardent rationalism had inspired this young falsafeh student along with many others of his generation. After the Constitutional Revolution, from October 1906 to sometime in 1923, Tonekābonī intermittently served as an elected member of the parliament during the first, third, and fourth terms of the Majles.5 He and like-minded philosophers made a case for including philosophy in the modern enterprise of nation-state building. Conceiving of this knowledge-sourced discipline as a guide for the methodical use of reason in improving society and the self, Tonekābonī fixed philosophy into the University of Tehran’s curriculum. Tonekābonī’s tenure at the university was brief, primarily due to Reẓā Shah’s personal vendetta against him and his family of politically influential landowners in northern Iran. Eventually Tonekābonī landed into short-term imprisonment and then long-term exile. But his role remains a decisive one for bringing madraseh philosophy to the university, introducing the idea of God as Pure Being into the curriculum, and stressing the link between ḥekmat and ethics. This modern emphasis on ethics and morality at the University of Tehran and other state-supported institutions (see, for example, Aḵavī 1938; Balāġī 1949) occurred parallel to an ethical turn in madraseh philosophy as reshaped in Qom and Najaf. All agreed that a proper ḥakīm was one who combines mastery of abstract metaphysics with dedication to ascetic practice, spiritual purification, and social morality. Madraseh-trained and more secular nationalist intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century concurred that knowing how civilized people thought and behaved could usher in opportunities for the nation to become more civilized. Moḥammad-ʿAlī Forūġī (1877–1942) was one exponent of these nationalist intellectuals. His book Tour of Philosophy in Europe (Seyr-e ḥekmat dar Orūpā), the first systematic introduction to Western philosophy in the Persian language, was released in piecemeal form in print between 1931 and 1941. The publishing of this influential work’s first edition by the Majles further corroborates philosophy’s perceived significance to Iranian state building. After multiple reprints by different publishers, Forūġī’s Tour of Philosophy still stands out as a milestone in modern Iranian intellectual history. Organized as a chronological Who’s Who of Western philosophy, Forūġī’s Tour of Philosophy traverses the pre-Socratics in Greece, William James in [ 133 ]

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the late-nineteenth-century United States, Henri Bergson in early-twentieth-century France, and points between, offering along the way anecdotes about the life and times of the major Western philosophers (Foroughi 1931– 1941, pt. 3, introduction, 21). One learns how assiduously Kant observed his daily routine of strolling away afternoons in Königsberg; how Blaise Pascal experienced reveries as he struggled with an excruciating toothache; and how Hegel only came to understand his own ideas on logic after reading a French translation of his work on the topic. By contrast, one discovers only scanty outlines of logical arguments that these and other Western philosophers had formulated to advance knowledge of philosophy. Forūġī’s Tour conceived of European philosophy primarily as wisdom about right and wrong. The author followed earlier madraseh philosophers in their reverence for philosophy as a path to happiness via the cultivation of perfection in thought and action—ḥekmat. He took European philosophy to be the direct continuation of the Hellenistic tradition but stretched this canvas to bring modern developments into its purview. To Forūġī, Western philosophers played a similar role to sages, savants, even religious authorities. His approach satisfied the expectations of an audience intent on acquiring a bird’s-eye view of the hitherto uncharted terrain of the Western mind (Foroughi 1931–1941, pt. 3, introduction, Alef and Beh). The choice of a narrative biographical structure and a low-density analytic substance reinforced a moralistic view of philosophy and mirrored the contemporary anecdotal, nonanalytical approach to all things European. Appealing to the authority of Western philosophers, citing trivia, and quoting their witticisms facilitated professional promotion as might donning a bowtie and frock coat or playing cards and observing proper etiquette at the table. The new skills and knowledge repertoire displaced or complemented the traditional one. This was useful particularly to most graduates of the Teacher’s Training Center, Tehran University, and others who sought employment as high school teachers or positions in the growing state bureaucracy. Even by stating the most mundane of platitudes, they in effect sounded more modern, channeling a European man of wisdom rather than staidly quoting some typical Islamic sayings or reciting lines of Persian poetry or Arabic proverbs. As the direct heirs to the earlier generation of Qajar palace intellectuals, Forūġī and like-minded nationalist intellectuals capitalized on highlighting distinctions between Asian or Eastern thought versus European or [ 134 ]

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Western philosophy. As a modern-day state intellectual, Forūġī harkened back to Malkom’s teaching that “the mind of Asia is speculative, of Europe practical” (Blunt 1907, 63). A strong endorsement of this view of European philosophy hailed from Wilhelm or Willie Haas (1883–1956), a German refugee who had escaped Nazi persecution and found succor in Tehran, like many others, especially from Poland. Thanks to the connections Haas had with Iranian nationalist intellectuals, most notably with the constitutionalist leader Seyed Ḥasan Taqīzādeh, he had found employment as an advisor to Tehran’s Ministry of Education. Besides serving as an advisor to the Ministry, Haas sometimes lectured on Western philosophy at the Teacher’s Training College and the University of Tehran. He insisted that Western and Eastern mind structures represented two radically divergent modes of consciousness (Haas 1956; Kamaly, “Haas” in EIr). Inspired by Haas, the respectable pedagogue Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Forūġī (1884–1960), younger brother of the author of The Tour of Philosophy in Europe, ventured out to create his own systematic philosophy by synthesizing ideas from East and West (Forughi 1936, 1940). In this attempt, he inspired a stream of similar syncretic attempts by Muslim public intellectuals, notably heralded by his student Mahdī Bāzargān (1907–1995). As the University of Tehran marshaled resources to reconstruct the nation’s intellectual heritage, salvaging and rehabilitating the past’s rational and methodological currents became urgent priority (Ṣadīqī 1950). If or where a discrepancy existed between the modern and the archaic, men like Forūġī, Tonekābonī, and their students cornered it as a matter of degree and not of kind. In shaping their views on philosophy and theology, most nationalist intellectuals did not jettison the national heritage; rather, they embraced it, but selectively. The technical vocabulary and conceptual framework of philosophers such as the eleventh century’s Ibn Sīnā, the thirteenth century’s Naṣīr-al-Dīn Ṭūsī, and the seventeenth century’s Mollā-Ṣadrā were deployed in translating and explaining the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, and others. From the mid-1930s to the late 1960s, the retrieval and enrichment of the rational or rationalist strain in classical Iranian-Islamic heritage shaped the crux of the university’s philosophy research program. The nationalist intellectuals who helmed the university lauded reason as a key characteristic of ancient Iranian thought that had transferred over to Islam. Within and outside the university, a consensus emerged that the Iranian philosophical [ 135 ]

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tradition ranked favorably against the highest rational standards, including the European Enlightenment. The university undertook a further bolstering of the rational element in the Islamic tradition. Four of the university’s most esteemed Western-­ educated professors—ʿAlī-Abkar Siyāsī (1895–1990), Ġolām-Ḥossein Ṣadīqī (1905–1992), ʿAli-Morād Dāvūdī (1921–ca. 1979), and Yaḥyā Mahdavī (1908– 2000)—cataloged, edited, translated, published, taught, commented, and expounded on the many works of Ibn Sīnā (Dāvūdī 1970; Foroughi 1937; Ṣadīqī 1953; Siyāsī 1954; Mahdavī 1954; Yarshater 1954). The millennial celebration of Ibn Sīnā, held in May 1954, marked the culmination of the collective effort to demonstrate once and for all that the iconic philosopher had unflaggingly abided by logical rigor and remained unquestionably loyal to the core principles of faith in the same breath. Even though many of the nationalist vanguards of modern education eschewed the madraseh as an inferior institution, they did look to it for intellectual allies among the ranks of the ʿolamā. Regarded as the intersection of morality and faith, religion was welcomed as a vital element in the nation’s civilizing process. In the university, religious education had to have its place. Participating in the enterprise of rehabilitating the nation’s rational-philosophical heritage were some of the most distinguished members of the faculty with unblemished madraseh credentials from Mashhad, Isfahan, Najaf, and Tehran— three luminaries among them were Mīrzā Mehdī Āštiyānī, MoḥammadḤossein Fāẓel-e Ṭūni (l871–1960), and Seyed Moḥammad-Kāżem ʿAṣṣār (ca. 1885–1975). Before long the Sepahsālār Madraseh itself became part of the university. In Qom of the 1940s and 1950s, two figures sustained madraseh philosophy: Seyed Rūḥollāh Moṣtafavī, also known as Khomeini, and Seyed Moḥammad-Ḥossein Ṭabāṭabāʾī (1902–1981), better known as ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī (Algar 2006). Both had spent most of their lives outside Tehran, but their impact on the fate of metaphysics in Tehran was immense. The rise of automobiles and intercity bus service by the 1950s rendered the ninety miles between Qom and Tehran negligible, taking less time to travel from Tehran’s Bazaar to the shrine in Qom than it had half a century earlier to travel from the same place to Emāmzādeh Ṣāleḥ in the much closer village of Tajrīš. By placing law and jurisprudence at the epicenter of the curriculum, Grand Ayatollah Seyed Ḥossein Borūjerdi, the leader of the ḥōzeh from 1946 [ 136 ]

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to 1961, marginalized teaching philosophy. Although versed in the subject, he chose to displace madraseh philosophy from the curriculum, much in the same way that mojtaheds such as Faẓl-Allāh Nūrī had done half a century before. Not considering madraseh philosophy a worthwhile branch of religious learning, he cancelled the stipends of the roughly one hundred religious students, or ṭollāb, who attended lectures on the subject. Simultaneously, a new wave of assaults on madraseh philosophy had originated outside Qom, in the holy city of Mashhad, with ripples reaching Tehran. Objections similar in form and content to those that Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī had raised over a century before targeting the philosophical system of Mollā-Ṣadrā resounded again. Intellectual history may not have been repeating itself, but the new call and rumble seemed to be following a familiar rhyming pattern. Much of the new criticism against madraseh philosophy was formulated by Seyed Mūsā Zarābādī (1877–1934), Mīrzā Mahdī Ġaravī-Eṣfahānī (ca. 1886–1946), and Shaykh Mojtaba QazvīnīḴorāsānī (ca. 1900–1967). This line of attack on the legitimacy of madraseh philosophy and ʿerfān was initially launched under the rubric of “The True Teachings of the Blessed Family of the Prophet” (Maʿāref-e ahl-e bayt). Retrospectively, it has been dubbed “The Discipline or School of Difference” (Maktab-e tafkīk), stressing the difference and distinction between the faith-based doctrines of the Fourteen Infallibles and the claims that falsafeh makes in the name of reason (Gleave 2010; Ḥakīmī 1992, 1997, 187–317; Rizvi 2012). The “Discipline of Difference” found some support in Tehran, both with the ʿolamā and more so among the laymen. Its principal theological idea sprang from the premise that accepting the existence of God is simply innate, and this intuitive reality requires no philosophical proof. Any further knowledge of God—for example, His divine attributes—must derive exclusively from the teachings of the Fourteen Infallibles. Intellectual inquiry is legitimate only if it is rooted in revelation and conveyed through inerrant channels, such as the Qurʾān and authentic ḥadīṡ. Everything else, and not in the least independent philosophical inquiry, is doomed to fall short of the real truth: “The way of the philosophers culminates in materialism and atheism (al-māddiyya wa-l-dahrīyya) and the way of the Sufis culminates in indiscriminate antinomianism and succumbs to illusions” (Ḥakīmī 1997, 25–29). Again, philosophy is seen as akin to dahrī heresy. This amounted to a rejection not merely of metaphysical inquiry in the framework of [ 137 ]

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madraseh philosophy, but also of the foundations and implications of modern ideas of Nature, natural law, and reason. Such a denigration of philosophical learning resonated with some madraseh-folk who perceived modernizing efforts in the field of education as a threat to religion. Drawing on a parallel with the introduction of Greek philosophy to Islam as of the eighth century, they protested modernizing the national educational system under Reẓā Shah. The leaders of the Doctrine of Difference opined that the reason for the translation of Greek philosophy and the encouragement of the Sufi way taken from Greece was naught but a policy to suppress the teachings of the Fourteen Infallibles. In the simplest terms, they condemned philosophy because they saw it as being alien to the teachings of the Emāms (Możaffarī 2005, 2006). This objection stirred emotions against madraseh philosophers, not least in the ḥozeh, a short bus ride away from the capital. Gathering winds of opposition drove the masters of madraseh philosophy out of Qom. Facing vicious humiliation, the learned Ḥakamī-Yazdī passed away in 1925. Another leading scholar, Mahdī Āštiyānī (ca. 1889– 1953), headed to Tehran where he could respectfully lecture at the University of Tehran and collaborate on scholarly work with Moḥammad-ʿAli Forūġī (Āštīyānī 1951; Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 2000). The outspoken advocate of ʿerfān, Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shāhābādi, also left. Khomeini and Ṭabāṭabāʾī, junior instructors at the time, came under pressure but remained in Qom, teaching and sharing an intersecting network of patrons and students there from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Together they expanded the dissemination of madraseh philosophy beyond Qom into Tehran. Both of them had tread the path of asceticism and moral discipline under the guidance of two saintly masters of ethics: Khomeini under Javād-Āqā Malekī-Tabrīzī (ca. 1865–1925) in Qom and Ṭabāṭabāʾī with Seyed ʿAlī Qāẓī (1866–1947) in Najaf. But for both being of the madraseh, these two men of philosophical learning could not have been more different in trait and temperament: the latter avoided conflict and controversy all his life, while the former used his combative charisma to topple the royal throne. In his youth, Khomeini had studied philosophy with ʿAlī-Akbar ḤakamīYazdī and Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shāhābādi. Under their tutelage, he rapidly progressed from reading Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys to contemplating Ibn ʿArabī’s Bezels of Wisdom. Ṭabāṭabāʾī had sprouted his thoughts under Seyed [ 138 ]

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Ḥossein Bādkūbī (ca. 1870–1939), focusing on Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys in Najaf (Ṣadūqī-Sohā 1981, 71–72; Tehrani 1986, 13). When Grand Ayatollah Borūjerdi prohibited the teaching of philosophy in the ḥozeh, Khomeini refused to acquiesce. Curtailing his public teaching of the subject, he continued to hold private sessions, focusing on The Four Journeys and The Bezels of Wisdom, elaborating on gnostic or ʿerfān-oriented topics (Fischer 1980, 242, 31; Mottahedeh 1985, 242–43). Much to the dismay of the critics of ḥekmat, he stressed that anyone who denies the intuitive awareness of the Gnostics “forfeits the attribute of humanity” (Khomeini 1931, 60, 109, 116–18; Knysh 1992). Faced with the same predicament, Ṭabāṭabāʾī declined to abandon his public philosophy teaching but in the same breath conceded to modify its content. Making a compromise, he agreed to avoid controversial topics in ʻerfān and abandoned teaching Ibn ʿArabī’s Bezels of Wisdom and related commentaries on it (Tehrani 1986, 101–40). Figuratively, ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī upped the ante by refashioning logic and falsafeh as required knowledge for proper religious learning, insisting that lack of it renders the proper appreciation of Qurʾān and ḥadīṡ impossible (Tehrani 1986, 34). He intimated that joining the abandonment of ḥekmat, specifically Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Transcendental Ḥekmat, would be tantamount to falling into the darkness of hypocrisy—what he characterizes as a “seeker’s blasphemy” or being untrue to one’s vocation (kofr-e solūkī) (Tehrani 1986, 61). Later he would recall that to make the decision to continue teaching philosophy, he had sought a sign from God, consulting, as described before, the Dīvān of Ḥāfeż for his divination and clearing him of all doubt as to what he should do: Far be it from me to abandon the company of a pretty face and a goblet of wine Such is not my habit, and the moralist naysayer knows it well.

The translation of the divinatory verse is somewhat freely done here, but it should be clear that in this case, the pretty face symbolically belongs to philosophy and the goblet of wine refers to inebriating truth. ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī strengthened his case by emphasizing that philosophy was particularly needed at a time when society, not least students of religion (ṭollāb), faced intellectual challenges posed by the rampant materialism of the age. “Today we must save the students of religion,” he said: [ 139 ]

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I came from Tabriz to Qom [in 1946] with the sole purpose of correcting the beliefs (ʻaqā’id) of the students of religion on the basis of the truth. . . . Today [i.e., the mid-1950s] every student of religion as he crosses the town-gates into Qom, carries in with him bagfuls of doubts and problems. (Algar 2006; Rizvi 2012; Tehrani 1986, 61f)

ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s enlistment of philosophy in the service of faith brought the discipline back into the mainstream of the ḥōzeh, transforming falsafeh from a perceived enemy into a promising ally of the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs. The religious establishment was expected to provide answers to skeptical questions posing from both East and West. Truth was under siege, and the moral prosperity of the Muslim community was at stake. With Borūjerdi’s approval, he launched a philosophical curriculum to respond to the intellectual challenges of the time. Repackaging madraseh philosophy as “real Islamic philosophy,” ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī embarked on teaching a new generation of students in this discipline. From the late 1940s to early 1950s he taught Islamic philosophy in once- or twice-a-week sessions, teaching sessions at the Ḥojjatiyeh Madraseh in Qom, beginning with the logically rigorous writings of Ibn Sīnā.6 Each volume of the latter’s works took months to complete, from the brief Book of Salvation (al-Najāt) to the tomes of the Book of Healing (al-Shifāʾ) and the Remarks & Admonitions (al-Išārāt wa ʾl-tanbīhāt). Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys came only at the end of a protracted program of study. Forūġī’s Philosophical Tour of Europe served as a guidebook to the foreign land of Western philosophy. Not sure what “real Islamic philosophy” was, many modernist public intellectuals, left and right, proclaimed that it was nothing more than some incarnation of antiquarian ways of thought and therefore it belonged in the dustbins of history. Those who took it for granted that reality is material and idealism is unrealistic identified Islamic philosophy with scholastic idealism, some version of Berkeleyan philosophy of immaterialism. Adding arrogance to ignorance, they translated the word “idealism” into “pendārgarāʾī”—a loaded word meaning “fancifulness” in Persian, a nonsubtle synonym for belief in superstition, literally superstitionism. Rejecting the diametric polarity of philosophical materialism and idealism, ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī proposed that Islamic philosophy offered a third alternative comprising the best of both, the shortcomings of neither. He  dubbed it “realism,” reality-oriented philosophy, or methodological [ 140 ]

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realism (raveš-e reʾālism). This was a term with intended proactive connotations: first, it signaled that Islamic philosophy never limited itself to the realm of ideas merely existent in the mind, so it is not idealism; second, it hinted that matter is not the only dimension of reality, placing soul above matter; third, and most vital, the central notion in Islamic philosophy is that Being is the ultimate reality and Islamic philosophy is reality-oriented— and therefore embodies the formulation of the “real,” or realism. And God, the ultimate reality, is pure Being. The Pahlavi court was supportive of this effort. The influential book that materialized out of ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s lectures in Qom, The Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism, earned the Best Book of the Year Award from Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah in 1953 (Ṭabāṭabāʾī 1953). State support for Islamic philosophy became more substantive when Seyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933), one of the nation’s leading conservative thinkers (Boroujerdi 1996), sought to deploy Islamic philosophy, in the heat of the Cold War, as a weapon against ideological perils, including Marxist atheism, the godless ideology of the communist Tudeh Party and the Eastern Bloc, as well as the threat of unbridled Western modernization (Nasr 1976). Upon his 1958 return to Iran, Harvard Ph.D. in hand (Nasr 1964), Nasr started teaching philosophy at Tehran University, quickly scaling to the highest rung of academic recognition. His array of talent, hard work, dedication to excellence, unfailing expressions of loyalty to the monarchy, widespread network of connections, and personal charm placed him, by the ripe age of thirty-five, as dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tehran, the fortress of academic conservatism. In his efforts at promoting what was being branded as Islamic philosophy (Corbin 1964; Nasr 1973), Nasr reached out to Henry Corbin (1903–1978), a consummate French philosopher who has been described as a sui generis orientalist, with a somewhat controversial legacy (Green 2005; Subtelny 2003; see also Algar 1980, esp. 20, 150; Boroujerdi 1996, 85–86n125; Shayegan 2011; Van den Bos 2002: 31–44; Wasserstrom 1999). Fascinated with Islamic thought, Corbin was quick to distance himself from earlier orientalists and proudly disclaimed in the foreword to his History of Islamic Philosophy that, in the pursuit of such a study, he had no predecessor (Corbin 1964, xiii). He contested the period’s dominant Western scholarly view that philosophical inquiry in the Muslim world had ended centuries ago with Ibn Rushd (1126–1198). Corbin pointed out philosophical [ 141 ]

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inquiry had continued productively, especially in the Shia tradition in Iran (Corbin 1970, 1971; Shayegan 1990). This is what I have called madraseh philosophy. He emphasized that the Shia tradition was “the only religion that has always maintained the link of divine guidance between God and man,” an achievement made possible by its belief in the continued reality of the Mahdi—the Lord of the Age (Ṭabāṭabā’ī 1977, 12–16). It had been shortly after the end of the Second World War that Corbin set up the Département d’iranologie de l’Institut franco-iranien, the “FrancoIranian Institute,” functioning as the cultural arm of the French Embassy (Hourcade 1987). By 1947 Corbin had developed the habit of planning his few weeks per year in Tehran to coincide with the city’s enchanting days of autumn while he prepared manuscripts for print and made contact with local learned circles. Under his supervision, the Franco-Iranian Institute edited and published several Persian and Arabic manuscripts on ḥekmat and ʿerfān. Corbin and Nasr had met in Tehran. Beginning around 1959, for years they jointly ran a seminar on philosophy and mysticism during the weeks that Corbin made his annual autumnal rounds at the Franco-Iranian Institute.7 Usually on Friday evenings a select group of individuals would gather around them to discuss issues related to what they conceived of as “comparative gnosis” and “timeless wisdom”—philosophia perennis. At least some of the ʿolamā reacted with cautious delight to such developments as Corbin’s appreciation of Islam and the Shia intellectual tradition. For a time, even the great madraseh philosopher ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī attended the Nasr–Corbin circle, taking the direct bus from Qom. Corbin and Ṭabāṭabāʾī engaged in genuine philosophical dialogue (Ṭabāṭabā’ī 1977, 10). Besides discussing the finer points of Islamic philosophy, they also exchanged ideas on texts such as the Tao Te-Ching, the Upanishads, and the Gospel of John. Corbin had expected Ṭabāṭabāʾī to have stronger opinions regarding the significance of the traditions of the Fourteen Infallibles for deducing the esoteric meanings of the Qurʾān. By contrast, in their discussions ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī gave more weight to logic and analytic proof in his philosophical thinking than he did to mystical intuition. He also vested more value in jurisprudence and the law than the French orientalist desired. Corbin maintained that the existence of philosophy in Islam was “proof that, contrary to what has been unjustly claimed, canon law (feqh) alone is neither [ 142 ]

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an adequate nor a decisive expression of Islam” (Corbin 1993, xiv). Ṭabāṭabāʾī did not endorse that outlook, and eventually those discussions dissolved. As fruitful as that scholarly interaction was, many other advocates of the idea of Islamic philosophy, inside and outside the ḥozeh, kept their distance. The perception did not help that the Imperial Academy of Philosophy, which Nasr founded in 1974, was too close to the Pahlavi court. ʿAli Shariati, the leading ideologue of modernist Muslim intellectuals at the time, denounced philosophers in vulgar terms and characterized the encounter between Corbin and Ṭabāṭabāʾī as that of a supplicant, here the Frenchman, approaching an ocean of ideas, the Muslim sage. Still, Islamic philosophy lived on. The embers of madraseh philosophy, smoldering in the early 1900s, blazed back to life in the 1930s, embraced as part and parcel of the national heritage in the university as well as the ḥozeh. Under the title of Islamic philosophy, it benefited from the direct and indirect support of the Pahlavi establishment inside and outside the modern institution of the university. ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī made it ever more accessible in his writings and teaching (Ṭabāṭabāʾī 1970, 1975). After the 1979 revolution, Islamic philosophy became even more relevant to advancing the interests of the state. The first head of the revolutionary council, Ayatollah Mortaẓā Moṭahharī (1920–1979), fully agreed with his mentor, ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī, on the necessity for transforming Islamic philosophy into “a comprehensive, harmonious and concrete design, whose central object is to perfect man and secure universal happiness” (Moṭahharī ca. 1960, 1985, 500). Soon after he was assassinated, merely a month following the date that the Islamic Republic of Iran officially was named, his colleagues, former students, and admirers joined forces to bring his opus to the forefront (Sorūš 1980). In part thanks to Moṭahharī’s teachings on Islamic philosophy, including copious notes on Mollā-Ṣadrā and a substantive commentary on Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism (Moṭahharī ca. 1960) and Sabzavārī’s Monżūmah, Islamic philosophy came to be in vogue like never before. Another factor that helped this philosophical movement was that Ayatollah Khomeini himself had a reputation for being a madraseh philosopher. Knowledge of Islamic philosophy became an element of instruction, educational evaluation, and even political indoctrination. Soon Mollā-Ṣadrā became a household name (Noroozi 1994), with watered-down versions of [ 143 ]

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his Transcendental Ḥekmat being fed to students in high school and university students. Even in prison, political dissenters could have a share. Perhaps as an unintended consequence, the state’s rehabilitation of Islamic philosophy, inside and outside the madraseh setting, led to a veritable philosophical movement during the 1980s, a movement with significant results that extend to the present and are bound to unfold in the future.

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SIX

Sufism Returns, and with a Vengeance

IN JUNE 1989 a hitherto unpublished poem by Ayatollah Khomeini was released to the press just a few days after he had died, and it started like this: I fell for the beauty mark on your lip, O Beloved, Your ravishing stare stirred my melancholy. (Seyed-Gohrab 2011)

The poem was readily received as an esoteric allegory on mystical yearning for God, one composed in the spirit of Muslim mystics, the Sufis. In the next line, the poet explicitly self-identifies with one of the most iconic Sufi figures in Muslim history—namely, the tenth-century Ḥusayn, son of Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj, who was put on trial and eventually executed on behest of the ʿolamā of his time: Relinquishing awareness of who I am, I declared: “I am the Truth” Bargaining to be crucified like [Ḥusayn, son of] Manṣūr.

On multiple levels, this short, soft, and unabashedly sensuous poem, called a ghazal, contrasted with larger-than-life portrayals of the leader of the Islamic Revolution, the stern imām, and the implacable warrior against the infidels—the Great Satan and the rest. Khomeini was not a Sufi but a jurist, a grand ayatollah—an authoritative source of imitation for the faithful. He had reached the acme of the ranks of the ʿolamā. [ 145 ]

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How could the revered source of emulation, the incorrigible commander in chief write soft poems instead of fulminating against ungodly tyrants? Where did all that sacred revolutionary wrath go? As shocking as the tone, wording, and imagery of the poem may sound to uninitiated detractors, most of Ayatollah Khomeini’s admirers had already heard about his intimacy with mysticism and Gnosticism or ʿerfān. They also knew that the key for deciphering this ghazal lay in madrasah philosophy, particularly in its more esoteric and Gnostic dimension, ʿerfān. In publishing this poem, the imām’s heirs and legatees—his personal descendants and the state—capitalized on his reputation of being an Islamic philosopher, especially a master of ʿerfān, to highlight a more humane and compassionate aspect of the revolutionary leader’s personality. Also, this was an understated acknowledgment of the ideas and ideals of Sufism in the Islamic Republic as well as a nod to their enduring presence in the nation’s collective psyche. Sufism has deep roots in Iranian history (Čahārdehī 1981; Lewisohn 1992; Masum-Ali-Shah ca. 1900; Van den Bos 2002; Zarrīnkūb 1978, 1983). Although Sufism was disfavored during the first few decades of Qajar rule, it gained a footing in the capital as early as the 1840s and later became an integral element in spiritual and intellectual life of the public, especially on the eve of the Constitutional Revolution (Bayat 1982). Half a century after that, Sufism enjoyed another bout of revival during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the majority of the mainstream ʿolamā never took a shine to it, the Islamic Republic keenly drew on Sufism for public mobilization and in manufacturing consent, not least in valorizing warfare as a battle of good against evil, and glorifying military loss in terms of sacrificial oblation to the divine. In one guise or another, Sufism continues to inform perceived relations between God and man in Tehran to this day. Speaking of God as the beloved, and the human individual as a lovesick wayfarer who frequents taverns and blunders through idol houses on the quest for God, constitutes a salient theme in Persian Sufi literature. A related major idea is that of breaking down the illusions of selfhood and severing all worldly attachment to the point of ultimate self-dissolution or self-annihilation. This was annihilation in God—fanāʾ fi-Allāh or simply fanāʾ. One of the most familiar tropes used to express it was that of a moth being consumed by fire in its unrelenting desire for union with candlelight. Another one was that of a raindrop joining the ocean, losing its insignificant individual identity as a mere raindrop but becoming one with the [ 146 ]

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infinitude of the ocean. The ideal of dissolution of the lower human self in the sublime being of God constituted the ultimate destiny of Sufi mystics. Madrasah philosophy incorporated many theoretical elements of Sufi teachings under the rubric of ʿerfān. In his Four Journeys, Mollā-Ṣadrā provided a philosophical interpretation of the notion of transcending the finitude of self in terms of a journey that begins with self-abnegation and culminates in the realization of the absolute oneness of Being. He and others adept in ʿerfān did not shy away from describing the relationship between man and God as one between a lover and the beloved. In ʿerfān, one imagines God as being sublimely beautiful and loving beauty. These sensibilities and their underlying aesthetic theology seldom appealed to mainstream ʿolamā well before Tehran became the capital of the Qajars. Especially since the late 1600s, under the influence of the ʿolamā, the Safavid court had turned against the Sufis (Anzali 2017). In matters of religious authority, all competition was to be contained. Sustained persecution effectively marginalized the Sufis and confined them to backwater regions. Many leading Sufi masters, called mašāyeḵ or morāds, and their disciples, known as morīds, left for India, Central Asia, and even Africa, where local courts as well as the public afforded them more tolerance. After a prolonged dormancy, wandering Sufis, also called dervishes, trekked back to major towns in Iranian territory (or the Protected Domains of Persia [mamālek-e maḥrūseh-e Īrān], in Qajar court nomenclature) at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the consolidation of Qajar rule was under way. Despite prolonged persecution of the Sufis, tens of thousands of people across Iran deferred to the religious authority of the Sufi masters even up to the early 1800s. Most of the population of the land may have frequented Sufi hospices or Ḵāneqāhs more often than mosques (Lewisohn 1998, 441; Malcolm 1829, 2:292ff; Masum-Ali-Shah ca. 1900). Like their forebears in the late Safavid period, mainstream ʿolamā of the Qajar era did not tolerate rivals, especially when it came to claiming the authority to speak for God. In particular, the nascent Oṣūlīs were intent on nipping Sufi comeback in the bud, much like they snuffed the Aḵbārīs and later rooted out the Shaykhīs and the Bābīs. This iron fist became manifest in Moḥammad-ʿAlī Kermānšāhī (1731–1801), the elder son of the champion of the Oṣūlīs, Seyed MoḥammadBāqer Behbahānī (ca. 1705–1791). Based in Karmanshah, a town less than three hundred miles west of Tehran, he busied himself with waging war on the Sufis, proudly carrying the sobriquet “Sufi-killer” (Čahārdehī 1981, 8; [ 147 ]

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Davānī 1983; Kermānšāhī ca. 1800). Kermānšāhī lived up to his reputation by poisoning and torturing several Sufis to death. The Qajar monarch Fat′ḥʿAlī Shah did not object, if only because the powerful mojtahed claimed to be doing God’s work by ridding the earth of infidel Sufis (Van den Bos 2002, 60; Zarrīnkūb 1983, 324). Caught up in more pressing concerns, the king turned a blind eye to reports of cruelties perpetrated against Sufis in the outer flanks of his kingdom. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Sufis received no welcome, neither from the court nor the public in Tehran. Should a dervish be charged with heresy and dragged around in shackles, the best Fatʹḥ-ʿAlī Shah could muster was to offer him a few words of advice to follow the proper doctrines of religion as advocated by the ʿolamā (Pourjavadi and Wilson 1978). Firstgeneration Oṣūlīs in the capital—including Mīrzā Masīḥ, who headed the Khan-e Marvī Madraseh, and Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh Zonūzī, who taught falsafeh there—worried little about the Sufis and focused more on battling the Aḵbārīs, Shaykhīs, and Christian missionaries. Matters improved for the Sufis by the late 1830s under Moḥammad Shah. Even one of the sons of the Sufi-killer Kermānšāhī felt comfortable enough to stand against his father’s anti-Sufi legacy. The new Qajar monarch had grown sympathetic to Sufism during his years as heir-apparent in Tabriz, where he had a Sufi for a personal tutor. Some even say that the Crown Prince was initiated into a Sufi order himself (Pourjavadi and Wilson 1978, 139, 142; Van den Bos 2002, 62). Be that as it may, upon acceding to the throne in 1834, the twenty-six-year-old monarch picked his former Sufi tutor as his new grand vizier. This was ʿAbbās Īravānī, better known as Ḥājī Mīrzā Āqāsī (ca. 1783–ca. 1848). Having arrived on Iranian soil as an itinerant dervish from the ʿatabāt, Iraqi shrine towns, Āqāsī had found patronage in Tabriz, where he proved his mettle as a clerk and then as tutor to the local court’s most notable pupil, the Crown Prince (Amanat, “Āqāsī,” EIr). In the eyes of disciples, the charismatic Āqāsī was a consummate master of the Sufi path and a veritable manifestation of divine grace. Drawing on professed spiritual powers of divination and prognostication, like a beneficent father figure, he reassured the heir-apparent of his being destined to rule as the third king of the Qajar dynasty. Moḥammad Shah’s reign enlivened the Sufis. Under him, Sufi ideas functioned to advance court interests, sometimes at the expense of the [ 148 ]

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landowners, merchants, and not infrequently the ʿolamā. From his high position, Āqāsī facilitated the spread of Sufism in theory and practice, for better and for worse. As a Sufi master, he aggrandized the sovereign as a friend of God or a carrier of divine authority, valī-Allāh. Drawing on Sufi heritage and rehabilitating a strong form of mediatory theology in political discourse, he referred to the monarch as a divine viceregent, ḵalīfat-Allāh. A man of politics as he was, Āqāsī himself preferred to be called the “first man of the land” (ṣaḵṣ-e avval-e mamlakat), translatable as “premier of the realm.” The tacit implication of this uncommon title was that primarily he channeled the king’s will, and thereby divine authority, throughout the kingdom. Āqāsī clearly saw himself as above and beyond a mere worldly grand vizier (ṣadr-e aʿżam). On more practical grounds, he empowered Sufi-leaning tribal chieftains by granting them land entitlements and government appointments. He resettled hundreds of families particularly in villages near Tehran—from Tajrīš, Qolhak, and Vanak in the north; Karaj in the west; to Varamin in the east (Bayānī and Etteḥādiyeh 2008). Most of those families belonged to Turkic, Kurdish, or Arab extended kin groups and revered Āqāsī personally as their patron and Sufi master. In many cases land had to be confiscated or forcibly purchased below fair price before it could be redistributed, and this brought Āqāsī into direct conflict with established landowners as well as the ʿolamā. Emphasizing the prerogative of the monarch as a carrier of divine authority and the premier’s role as a Sufi master, hundreds of acres of private estates were repossessed in the name of God. These religiously illegal practices of land confiscation, as effective as they were in mobilizing labor, improving irrigation, and raising agricultural yield in reassigned lands, alienated landowners and infuriated the ʿolamā. Both groups objected to arbitrary violations of private property, which Twelver Shia jurisprudence considers as sacrosanct as blood. When Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah inherited the legacy of his father, he faced the challenge of placating disgruntled Oṣūlīs without antagonizing the Sufis in his capital. He managed to draw on a more diverse base than his predecessors. Even as more power was accorded to the Oṣūlīs, best represented by Tehran’s chief mojtahed Ḥājj Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī (1805–1888), the Sufis still found Tehran more welcoming than ever. The talented Sufi poet ʿAbbās ForūġīBasṭāmī (ca. 1798–1857), who enjoyed favors from Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah, praised the young monarch profusely, exalting him as the shadow of God (żill-Allāh) (Browne 1924, 336; Forūġī-Besṭāmī 1857). Drawing heavily on Sufi themes in [ 149 ]

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his poetry, Forūġī was an important link in continuing the Sufi ethos inside the Qajar court. For example, in one of his best-known poems, he spoke of the ubiquitous presence of God in all of creation: You never departed from the heart that I should crave you. You never hid away that I should find you. You never disappeared that I should wish you were present. You never absconded that I should make you reappear. And now that you shine like a hundred thousand rays of light I may behold you with a hundred thousand eyes. (Browne 1924, 337; emended translation)

The most renowned Persian Sufi to appear during the latter half of the nineteenth century in Tehran was Moḥammad-Ḥasan Eṣfahānī (1835–1899), better known by his assumed title Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah (Barq 1973; Green 2004). Like Forūġī-Basṭāmī, he too praised Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah, especially for welcoming Sufis such as himself to the capital (Ṣafī-ʿAlī Shah ca. 1870, 5). Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah’s decision to settle and operate there came as a response to an emerging dynamic between layers of society—the ʿolamā, palace intellectuals, landowners, bazaar merchants, and others. Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah had arrived in Tehran sometime between 1868 and 1871. Disciples flocked around him, acknowledging him as a Sufi master and a carrier or conduit of divine authority, a valī-Allāh. Like Āqāsī, he traced his spiritual lineage to the revered fourteenth- to fifteenth-century Shah-Neʿmat-Allāh Valī. Before Ṣafī-ʿAlī Shah, most Sufis in the nineteenth century similarly attached themselves to the Neʿmat-Allāhī Order and were identified as Neʿmat-Allāhī Sufis (Homāyūnī 1992; Lewisohn 1998; Pourjavadi and Wilson 1978; Sheil 1856, 194). Ṣafī-ʿAlīShah’s followers in turn became known as members of the Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shāhī Order, or simply Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shāhīs. On a plot of land located on the northeastern limit of Tehran at the time, Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah founded for his disciples a “Ḵāneqāh,” which is the name for a Sufi gathering place. The land came as a gift from a Qajar prince. The Sufi master steadied a new conciliatory vision and attracted a wide range of people. Disciples or morīds came from every walk of life to sit at his feet— merchants, craftsmen, officials, and princes were among those initiated into his order. Many others maintained looser ties, visiting the Ḵāneqāh only occasionally if at all. It is reported that the Sufi master even became [ 150 ]

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friendly with the monarch, but in reality, Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah was never as close to him as Forūġī-Basṭāmī (Van den Bos 2002, 65n101). He did have close relations with the Nizārī-Ismaili Shias, a small circle in the capital. They too had historic ties to the Neʿmat-Allāhī Order. As recently as a generation earlier the leader, or Living Imām of Nizārī-Ismailis, Ḥasan-ʿAlī-Shah (ca. 1804–1881), better known as Agha Khan Mahallātī, had married into the Qajar ruling house. For political reasons, the Agha Khan had eventually based himself in Bombay but still maintained cordial relations with Tehran. Shortly before moving to the Qajar capital for good, Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah had visited Agha Khan in India and may have accepted the spiritual charge of looking after the welfare of the Nizārī-Ismailis in his new hometown (Green 2004; Van den Bos 2002, 91–92). Mindful of the mistreatments suffered by Sufi precursors at the hands of Moḥammad-ʿAlī Kermānšāhī—the Sufi-killer—and his ilk, Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah tread lightly. He avoided confrontation, especially with the ʿolamā. Emphasizing the mystical Sufi ethos, he called for a close, direct, and personal experience of divine presence, advocating a commitment to God in total trust and absolute obedience. But he repudiated smoking narcotics, sexual misconduct, and all other antinomian tendencies that were commonly, if not always fairly, attached to Sufism. Without prevarication, Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah insisted on the necessity of the proper observance of the requirements of šarīʿat, which was a nonnegotiable demand of the Oṣūlīs. This may be seen as an effort on his part to define urban Sufism, distancing it from the unruly practices of wandering Sufis or vagrant dervishes. Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah’s avoidance of what the mojtaheds might find extreme went hand in hand with a sober political conservatism. He reconciled his own lofty place in Sufi mediatory theology with political loyalty by upholding a structure of dual authority oriented toward himself and the ruling monarch (Van den Bos 2002, 108). Demanding obedience and service to himself, he also forbade his flock from speaking ill of the king in public or in private. Always wielding the proverbial olive branch, the Sufi master was prepared to make peace with whoever came. By the 1870s, as Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah’s Ḵāneqāh attracted public attention in Tehran, a trilateral rapprochement was under way among palace intellectuals and Sufis, Sufis and madrasah philosophers, and madrasah philosophers and certain palace intellectuals. To them all, Sufism offered a viable framework for reconciling religion and civilization—delineating a space for [ 151 ]

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the sacred as well as the secular. The philosophical worldview that pervades Sufism presented itself as an aptly sophisticated intellectual system for bridging the past and the future, providing a bedrock for spiritual enlightenment, moral buildup, communal integrity, rational development, and worldly progress, all in one. One of the most prominent thinkers of the age, Āqā-Moḥammad-Reẓā Qomšehʾī, brought madraseh philosophy and Sufism closer than ever in Tehran (Ṣadūqī-Sohā 1981, 45–59; Ṣahbā ca. 1885; Masum-Ali-Shah ca. 1900, 3:508). He delivered a potent shot of ʿerfān into the veins of madrasah philosophy and enriched Sufi discourse with more philosophical rigor. More than anyone else among his contemporaries, he became greatly admired for placing the Sufi ethos of “ʿerfān-for-all” on firm philosophical footing. This migrant from Isfahan arrived in the capital in 1872 on the eve of a devastating famine that resounded as “the most tragic event in the modern economic and social history of Persia” in the nineteenth century (Goldsmid 1876, 49, 96; Homā’ī 1964, 21; Masum-Ali-Shah ca. 1900, 3:237; Okazaki 1986). Having spent many of his personal resources to feed indigent students and others, Qomšehʾī left his homeland in protest over what he considered corruption and profiteering by heavyweight local mojtaheds in collusion with high-ranking Qajar administrators. While it is doubtful Qomšehʾī had formal ties to any particular Sufi order, it is clear that Sufis high and low gravitated to him in Tehran, not least the Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shāhīs among them ( Jamāli 1977, 68). His superb mastery of madraseh philosophy, his unpretentious character, and his unmatched commitment to the ascetic lifestyle were hard to resist. As first-rate a philosopher as he was, Qomšehʾī accentuated a more mystical approach to ḥekmat. He augmented the curriculum of madrasehs in Tehran by introducing new texts for study. Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys had been its principal text since Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh Zonūzī had started teaching philosophy at the Khan-e Marvī Madrasah back in the 1810s, but Qomšehʾī centered his teachings on two other important works: Bezels of Wisdom (Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam) and Meccan Revelations (Futūḥāt al-Makkiyah), both by the thirteenth-century mystical philosopher Ibn ʿArabī (Ibn al-ʿArabī ca. 1220, ca. 1240). These works and their chains of associated commentary had a deep influence on MollāṢadrā himself (Chittick 1982). And in building the edifice he called Transcendental Ḥekmat, Mollā-Ṣadrā had drawn heavily on commen­t aries on Ibn ʿArabī, especially those by Ṣadr-al-Dīn Qūnavī (1210–1274), [ 152 ]

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ʿAbd-al-Razzāq Kāšānī (ca. 1260–ca. 1330), Dāvūd Qayṣarī (ca. 1260–1350), and Mehmet Fenāri (1350–1431). These and similar works, completed between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, gave shape to a textual tradition of analytic expository interpretation arising from Ibn ʿArabī’s thought. Mollā-Ṣadrā also had availed himself of a parallel interpretive tradition, notably expressed in the writings of Ṣāʾen al-Dīn Ebn-e Torkeh (1368–1432) in fifteenth-century Isfahan, which dealt with Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas from a more esoteric perspective (Melvin-Koushki 2012). This alternative or complementary interpretive tradition may be labeled “hypermystical.” The two interpretive traditions, the analytic and the esoteric, or the mystical and the hypermystical, combined in the discipline of theoretical ʿerfān, or ʿerfān-e nażarī. Before Qomšehʾī, Tehran’s madraseh philosophers often downplayed theoretical ʿerfān, even to the point of exclusion. As it pertains to the three major madraseh philosophers discussed before, Zonūzī included some esoteric elements in philosophical teaching, especially seen in his Glaring Lights (Anvār-e jalīyyeh; Zonūzī 1830), but his successors, Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres and especially the rationalist philosopher Jelveh, displayed far less interest in the esoterica. Qomšehʾī changed all that. Sometimes referred to as the Ibn ʿArabī of his time, he taught Ibn ʿArabī’s works alongside commentaries on these works as fundamental texts together with the mystical poem of ʿUmar ibn ʿAlī ibn al-Fāriḍ (1181–1235), known as the Order of Spiritual Ascendance (nażm al-sulūk). In his presentation, the migrant philosopher elaborated on the esoteric approach expounded in Ebn-e Torkeh’s book of Ground Rules (Tamhīd al-qawāʿid). Qomšehʾī also composed works of his own, including copious commentaries on Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys and Ebn-e Torkeh’s Ground Rules (Ibn Turkah ca. 1430). He penned a short book called On the Unity of Being and All Beings and another one titled the Subject of Knowledge. Qomšehʾī’s Note on Divine Viceregency and, most famously, his Treatise on Walāya offered philosophical formulations of mediatory theory (see Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 1997a; Ṣahbā ca. 1885). The latter treatise, which commented on the “Bezel of Seth” in Ibn ʿArabī’s Bezels of Wisdom, contains a mystical discourse on the notion of walāya and a theoretical defense of mediatory theology in its “strong,” “dense” sense, as manifested in the primordial man, Adam, and his successor in embodying divine authority among men. If he did not already have enough within him to offer up, Qomšehʾī also composed mystical poetry, [ 153 ]

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often drawing on esoteric allegories to express ideas in ʿerfān (Ṣahbā ca. 1885). Here Mollā-Ṣadrā’s philosophy and Sufi doctrine fuse in an illustrative quatrain: The universe of love is different It has another earth and another heaven Not all caravans are allowed to enter it This land has a different group of wayfarers (Ṣahbā ca. 1885)

For his poems, Qomšehʾī used the pen name Ṣahbā—literally meaning “wine.” As hinted at by his chosen poetic signature, he placed himself within the tradition of allegorical Sufi poetry. Writing within the same literary tradition, when Forūġī-Basṭāmī said, “The men of God behold nothing but God anywhere they look,” his words echoed the most fundamental teaching of ḥekmat and ʿerfān in easily understood words (Forūġī-Besṭāmī 1857). Bringing the subtle teachings of ʿerfān to the public, this poetry expounded the fundamental idea that God is the fount of Being and present in all creation. Decades later, Ayatollah Khomeini drew on the same coded way of expression, musing on the beloved’s lip, fancying the alehouse, and reminiscing about the idol temple. For centuries ʿerfān poetry spoke of the spiritual meditative journey toward God in metaphorical terms. Focusing on the notion of Being and accenting the link between Being and Knowing, Ṣahbā raised ʿerfān poetry to unprecedented heights in Tehran, impregnating his poetry with far more profound technical philosophical observations: saying, for example, the more you know, the more you are; the more you are, the closer to God. The Sufi master Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah similarly produced volumes of ʿerfān poetry (Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah ca. 1870). As much as the mystical perception of God as the ultimate beloved ­appealed to the Sufis, some madraseh philosophers, and some palace intellectuals, it repelled most mojtaheds, who objected to such intimate characterizations of the relationship between God and man. They dismissed both this kind of phraseology and manner of conceptualization for having no basis in proper religion and for being misleading. Qomšehʾī had solid training in the Oṣūlī tradition but chose not to resemble the mojtaheds in mannerism, comportment, or even dress. In his disregard for the formalism of the ʿolamā, he cut more the appearance of a village cloth vendor, plain and guileless (Ṣadūqī-Sohā 1981, 58). Tehran’s [ 154 ]

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religious elite at the time, led by Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī, did not approve of him or of his teachings. The social privileges afforded to other men of madraseh learning, even those with a fraction of his knowledge, were denied to Qomšehʾī. For years he slept in a bare room at the neglected Ṣadr Madrasah, which squats before the Shah Mosque near the Tehran bazaar. He did not deliver lessons at the madraseh but taught in abandoned buildings such as a decrepit coffeehouse near a ditch outside the city wall. In expressing his disregard for feigned hierarchies, he used the term for forbidden places of merriment in the Sufi literary tradition, referring to his “classroom” as the ḵarābāt—ruins frequented by outcasts (Ṣadūqī-Sohā 1981, 58). Angered by Qomšehʾī’s refusal to bow to their conventions, some of the lesser ʿolamā petitioned the court to have him banished from Tehran. Perhaps it was to charm these petitioners that Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah rebuffed Qomšehʾī. During a brief audience with the sage, the supercilious monarch made an offhanded comment likening the philosopher’s teaching of MollāṢadrā’s Four Journeys, the Asfār, to a donkey carrying heavy loads of books— and the Arabic word for books is asfār (Etemad al-Saltaneh 1895). When Qomšehʾī died, just after Mollā-ʿAlī Kanī, only a scattered few attended his funeral, a sparse attendance in sharp contrast to the throngs who rushed to the affluent mojtahed’s. The episode drove the mojtahed Mīrzā Ḥasan Āštiānī to contrast what he saw as the lowly stature of Hellenic nonsense against the exalted value of feqh. Āštiānī’s ferocity reflects a deep-seated insecurity stirred in the mojtaheds by the implications of Qomšehʾī’s broad conception of God-given authority, velāyat. The philosopher’s emphasis on ʿerfān and his philosophical defense of strong or dense mediatory theology went a long way toward buttressing the legitimacy claims of the Sufis. Recognizing the walāya of the Sufi masters was tantamount to acknowledging a source or manifestation of divine authority alongside—in truth, beyond—the worldly power of the king and the formal religious authority of the mojtaheds. The claim that, inwardly and spiritually, a Sufi may surpass a king or a man of formal religious learning had an unmistakably subversive ring. Being the divinely ordained guides of man’s journey to God, the Sufi masters boldly proclaimed: “We do not need the crown of kings anywhere close to the degree that the crown needs us” (Van den Bos 2002, 80). Some went so far as to warn that neglecting their spiritual authority was bound to result in the monarchy’s downfall (Pourjavadi and Wilson 1978, 117). [ 155 ]

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The political implications of the Sufi claim to God-given authority aside, this had more explicit corollaries for acknowledging Sufi masters as the true manifestations of divine will among the people. It particularly undermined the Oṣūlīs’ exclusive claim that the mojtaheds were the spokesmen of God. The Sufis urged that salvation depended not simply on showing obedience to formal feqh but on cultivating a loving devotion to God and displaying it through absolute obedience to a Sufi master. The idea was that the world revolves around and pivots on the dominant Sufi master of the age, who was recognized as the pole, the axis, or the qoṭb. Traditionally, the position of the qoṭb occupied the highest rank in Sufi hierarchy (Van den Bos 2002, 82). Clearly, endorsing this view amounted to a strong form of mediatory theology. Its growing popularity and its potential consequences alarmed the ʿolamā more than the court. The ʿolamā’s objection to the Sufis had ethical and theological reasons as well as political justifications. For them, relying on ʿerfān and seeking a mystical loving connection with absolute being was neither sufficient nor even strictly necessary. To extend the sphere of velāyat beyond the Fourteen Infallibles and to override the authority of mojtaheds in working out divine mandates was viewed as anathema. Believing the form and content of ʿerfān alien to their teachings, many of the ʿolamā forbade reading or reciting Sufi poems, further warning that even keeping Sufi writings at home was sure to attract only misery and misfortune. The ʿolamā were not alone in their battle with the Sufis. As expressly opposed as they were to the power of the mojtaheds, most palace intellectuals and their followers also bore no interest in seeing the Sufis empowered. They equated mysticism with superstition and found most Sufi teachings to contravene progress toward civilization. However, neither the majority of the public nor many of the senior members of the nobility were convinced, either by the mojtaheds’ admonitions against the Sufis or by the palace intellectuals’ condescension. The appeal of the Sufi idea of a meditative journey of the soul had found patrons among high-ranking Qajar administrators. Together with palace intellectuals, this group of administrators formed what may be labeled as the Qajar service nobility (Kamaly 2006). An established faction within the ranks of the service nobility kept distant from the palace intellectuals and their out-and-out emulation of all things European. Since Moḥammad Shah’s time, this segment of the emerging class of trained administrators [ 156 ]

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had shown sympathy for Sufism as an intellectual and religious platform. Unlike the palace intellectuals, several powerful members of this group refused to dismiss ʿerfān as passé. The embracement of Sufism is most notably illustrated in the case of Mīrzā Yūsof Khan Āštiyānī (1812–1886) and Mīrzā Hedāyat-Allāh Khan Vazīr-Daftar (ca. 1819–1892), two of the most prominent exponents of the more conservative segment of the service nobility. They were patrons of Sufis and Sufi learning, both opening their homes and hearts to masters of the esoteric hidden realm (ʿālam-e bāṭen). Mīrzā Yūsof Khan Āštiyānī, better known as Mostōfi-al-Mamālek, was in charge of all fiscal matters in the Qajar kingdom. He was a major landowner, and a number of Tehran neighborhoods still carry his original holdings’ names—Yūsof-ābād, which he named after himself; Ḥasan-ābād and Behjatābād, named after his son and daughter, respectively; and still others (Shahri 1997). Even the monarch kept him in high esteem. Mostōfi-al-Mamālek welcomed and supported Sufis coming from as far away as India (Etemad alSaltaneh 1889, 202f, 302). On his private estate in Vanak, a village tucked in the northern suburbs of Qajar Tehran—one of those places that Āqāsī had populated with loyal Sufi families a generation earlier—Mostōfi-al-Mamālek built a shrine for the guru he revered, next to whom he was later put to rest. Today their adjoining tombs stand on the bustling campus of Tehran’s premier women’s university, Al-Zahrā. Vazīr-Daftar courted the Sufis in the same way that his slightly older cousin and brother-in-law, Mostōfi-al-Mamālek, did. Furthermore, he dabbled in alchemy, dream interpretation, other arts of the occult, and penned treatises on ʿerfān (Derāyatī 2010; Kamali 1995; Moṣaddeq 2004–2005). Men of substance as they were, Vazīr-Daftar, Mostōfī-al-Mamālek, and a few other like-minded exponents of the Qajar service nobility made Sufism respectable, calling to elevate faith in the divine from barren juridical routine to the enlivening heights of love. By the time Qomšehʾī arrived in Tehran, the Ḵāneqāh that Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah had recently founded was materializing as a locus of Sufi activity. Weekly gatherings were held on Thursday evenings. Scores of men and sometimes several women attended. Disciples, or morīds, filtered from the ranks of Qajar royalty, service nobility, and military commanders (Barq 1973, 11f; Etemad al-Saltaneh 1895, 1059). The weekly rituals included the collective chanting of divine names, or ẕekr: Compassionate, Merciful, All-Knowing, Bestower of Bounty, and the other ninety-nine or more good names of God. [ 157 ]

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After the chant (ẕekr), Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah would deliver a sermon, often commenting on passages from the Qurʾān. During meetings, new morīds were initiated into the order. Then a reverent, open palmful of close disciples received the privilege of a private audience with the Sufi master, the morād himself. A two-volume commentary, or tafsīr, on the Qurʾān contains a partial record of Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah’s Thursday sermons. This unique work is composed in verses similar in meter to classical Sufi masterpieces such as Farīd-al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds and Jalāl-al Dīn Rūmī’s Maṡnavī from the thirteenth century. Compared with Qomšehʾī’s philosophical writings, the expository works of Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah fall short in their analytical rigor. By contrast, the latter’s poetry is livelier and more passionate than the former’s. Taken side by side, though, they exude the potency of mystical ideas during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and testify to the strong appeal of ʿerfān for the inhabitants of Tehran. Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah died in 1899, but his spiritual legacy lived on. The Sufi order he had founded, the Ḵāneqāh he had built, and the disciples he had trained thrived long after him. Thursday evening sessions continued, and the scope of the Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shahī activities expanded. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah’s legacy led to a modern revival of Sufism and a new articulation of relations between man and God. To a large extent, this revival was made possible by the spiritually ambitious and politically connected visionary leader ʿAlī-Khan Żahīr-al-Dōleh (1865–1925), who succeeded ṢafīʿAlī-Shah as the new head of the Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shahīs. Assuming the title ṢafāʿAlī-Shah, he placed the Sufi order center stage in the social life of Tehran. Żahīr-al-Dōleh rebranded the Sufi order a modern “Fraternal Society,” or anjoman-e oḵovvat, trailblazing a modern assembly of political activism with the ideals of serving God and loving His Creation. Ṣafā-ʿAlī-Shah obtained a royal decree from his brother-in-law Możaffaral-Dīn Shah (r. 1896–1907), and with such strong backing launched the activities of the Fraternal Society on Thursday, December 21, 1899. The day of inauguration was chosen in observance of the birth of the Hidden Emām, the embodiment of divine authority of the age (valī-e aṣr). Żahīr-al-Dōleh had handpicked each and every one of the 110 invited guests to stress the esoteric significance of this number. According to the art of numerology near and dear to the Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shahīs and other Sufis, the number 110 equals [ 158 ]

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the computed value of the words “right” (yamīn), “true” (b.ḥ.q), and, most importantly, the name “ʿAlī” in Persian letters. Like all other Sufi orders in nineteenth-century Iran, the Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shāhīs traced their spiritual lineage back to Emām ʿAlī, the first of the twelve Emāms (Van den Bos 2002). As of the second half of the nineteenth century, the birth of the first Emām was observed publicly, partly due to Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah’s expressed devotional dedication and his declaration of the thirteenth of the seventh lunar month (Rajab) of the calendar as the day to celebrate the birth of Emām ʿAlī. Beginning in 1900 the Fraternal Society celebrated this occasion with great festivity year after year. A decisive spin was added and a new emphasis was placed on paying homage to Emām ʿAlī as the paragon of justice, not only in the cosmic sense but also in social terms. This resonated with the society’s ethos of combining faith in God, devotion to the Emām, and interest in social justice. Weather permitting, Fraternal Society festivities were held in a park-like setting, often in Bāġ-Shāh, where the public attended without distinction of birth, wealth, or social rank. The festivities lasted for several hours. Modifying the Sufi performances of ritual dance and sacred music, samāʾ, poets and master musicians of the time attended to recite lyrics and play songs. The intersection of spiritual self-improvement, religious celebration, social action, and political progressivism begat a new form of public participation. Organizing public observances in open urban areas was a major shift from the habit of holding cloistered private events, signaling a departure from Malkom’s closed Chamber of Secrets sessions of the late 1850s or similar venues. The setting of the Fraternal Society’s public feasts was far from that of the private theaters where courtiers and their imitators hosted musical performances and other forms of licit and illicit entertainment. Public gatherings that the Fraternal Society organized also differed from religious observances regularly held under the supervision of the ʿolamā, especially the mass mourning processions on ʿĀšūrā. The Fraternal Society opened an arena of social life that in an unprecedented manner integrated public participation in urban life together with political activity. The institution originating from centuries of Sufi organization flung open the gates for the creation of Tehran’s public sphere, in its modern sense (Habermas 1989), while forging a space for individuals to come together, engage in conversation, and arrive at common judgment. [ 159 ]

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The public sphere went beyond its initial scope of group meetings to circumscribe discussions about such matters as commodity exchange, social reforms, legal change, and even women’s rights. The Fraternal Society was becoming a venue for the construction of public opinion and discussions of public interest. The resulting emergence of a collective identity prepped the terrain for taking progressive public political action (Habermas 1989, 30). This was not a blind imitation of European enlightenment ideology but drew on deeply rooted traditions in Twelver Shia doctrine and in Sufism, reviving, reemphasizing, and reformulating the ideal of justice in Twelver Shia theology and the emancipatory ethos of Sufism. Similar debates were already simmering in the town’s coffee houses. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, social clubs had mushroomed in Tehran’s fertile soil. Many shrouded themselves in layers of secrecy that sometimes seemed to mimic a Masonic lodge. The Fraternal Society loosely operated in a similar manner (Algar 1970, esp. 291; Lambton 1987), and some of its members were indeed card-carrying Freemasons. In particular, the membership of the retrospectively infamous Persian Awakening Lodge, the loĵ-e bīdārī, shared a lot with that of the Fraternal Society (Algar 1970). On some level, the Masonic idealization of the divine as a cosmic force or a unifying principle of light and truth, above and beyond the minutiae of quotidian life, resonated with Sufi teachings. But to characterize the Fraternal Society as merely a Masonic entity behind a different shroud is inaccurate. No matter what flaws the Fraternal Society may have endured, and whatever moral, intellectual, or political shortcomings its members may have suffered, the institution embodied a novel set of ideals that distinguished it from other currents of the time. Although in the same waters, its ideas differed from those of the ʿolamā, those of the palace intellectuals, and other contemporary factions. Its integration of a mystical faith in God with a dedication to public service and commitment to civic duty spoke to a wider swath of the public. Men, but also many women, who combined progressive political views with mystical sensibilities were drawn to the Fraternal Society. The Sufi ethos of self-dissolution had acquired new meaning, one with more emphasis placed on annihilating and uprooting not individual selfhood but  the evil deeds contaminating the self. A significant nuance was at work that called for personal betterment, moral empowerment, and selfimprovement in a modern sense. Even more than the annihilation of evil, [ 160 ]

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the cultivation of virtue took priority. Thus, a new form of humanism was born, inspired by the age-old wisdom summed up in a saying attributed to the Prophet and formulated into a poem by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Saadi: Humanity is like a body with many parts, All created from the same essence. Once any member feels pain, others become restless. So any person unaffected by the anguish of others, Surely does not deserve membership in the body of humanity. (Saadi ca. 1296, Golestān, Section I, Anecdote 10)

The humanistic ethos expressed in Saadi’s poem became the mantra of reinvigorated Sufi sensibilities at the turn of the twentieth century. Sufism was understood to be humanistic, rational, and mystical at the same time. The Fraternal Society operated as a conduit for self-improvement through fostering good deeds, assisting fellow human beings, and serving the public. Helping the poor became a central concern. In 1901 the Fraternal Society raised and donated considerable funds to rebuild the town of Āmol, in northern Iran, after it was destroyed by fire. The society’s dedication to furthering personal refinement and active social reform appealed to many of the students and graduates of the Dār-al-Fonūn and of newly founded institutions such as the School of Political Science and the American College (Boyce 1954). Several madraseh students (ṭollāb) who nurtured an interest in ḥekmat and other rational sciences were attracted as well. Membership swelled, with many arrivals from these modern educational institutions. The theological realization that God is good was seen to imply that devotion to God must translate into doing good in the world. The Ethical Miscellany, a periodical published in Tehran as of 1905, gave new voice to the aspirations of those who cherished humanistic ideals, valued moral integrity, and promoted reformist ideas inside and outside Żahīr-­ al-Dōleh’s Fraternal Society (Ṣadr-e Hāšemī 1948–1953, 1:79–80; 4:190–91). The magazine was put together by the society member Mīrzā ʿAlī-Akbar Khan Moṣavver-Ḥajjār (d. ca. 1935?), a modernist painter and sculptor who had accompanied to Europe the famed Kamāl-al-Molk, the pioneer of the naturalmimetic turn in Iranian visual arts. Moṣavver-Ḥajjār’s Ethical Miscellany lasted a run of only nine months and eighteen issues, drawing heavily from [ 161 ]

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Sufi themes and wisdom literature. Women’s liberation and related topics were also discussed in its fleeting but progressive pages. In effect, the Fraternal Society reoriented Sufism into the here and now. Alongside sincere devotion to God, personal empowerment and social reform were deemed matters of urgent concern. The political implications were clear. Most members, including Żahīr-al-Dōleh himself, actively supported the constitutional movement (Algar 1970, 291; Lambton 1987). For their effort, the anticonstitutionalist Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah and the procourt ʿolamā did everything in their power to deflate, defame, even destroy, the Fraternal Society and its associates. During the clampdown of June 1908, at least three constitutionalist affiliates were murdered. Żahīr-al-Dōleh’s residence was looted; his son put in chains (Ṣadūqī-Sohā 1981, 105; Van den Bos 2002, 98). In a reversal, the next year found the society celebrating the tyrant’s defeat and exuberantly calling it a “National Victory” (Anwār, “Anjoman-e Oḵowwat,” in EIr). The proceeds from ticket sales and other contributions wrung from the celebratory occasion went toward assisting the families of constitutionalist martyrs. The Fraternal Society’s structure was the picture of orderliness and a reflection of rational organization. Acceptance for membership required recommendations from two persons, usually other members. Dues were collected and preprinted membership identity cards issued. All contributions were carefully monitored. During official meetings, members sat on 102 custom-made, identically carpentered chairs (Żahīr-al-Dōleh ca. 1925). All of this was new. In this process, Sufism changed, redirecting its focus from ascetic otherworldliness to spiritual self-improvement, moral progress, and political activity. By the 1920s moral reform had become a national preoccupation. Institutions such as the Fraternal Society as well as individuals from various walks of life competed to be recognized as the most qualified authorities on ethics and virtue. Outward cleanliness, personal hygiene, hard work, and economic self-sufficiency defined a new standard of personal conduct. More than ever before, urban, middle-class Sufism distanced itself from vagrants, mendicants, addicts, and the rest of the stereotyped images of Sufi dervishes (Van den Bos 2002, 7). The transformation of Sufism was not utterly peaceful. Before and after the Constitutional Revolution, hostilities against the Sufis continued, and divisions formed within Sufi orders themselves. This was the case especially [ 162 ]

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outside Tehran, where authority claims by local Sufi masters clashed with the interests of major landowners, tribal chieftains, and locally independent ʿolamā families. For instance, bloody rivalries tainted the Gonābādī Sufi Order, which was an offshoot of the Neʿmat-Allāhī Order with a strong presence in Khorasan as well as in the capital. In 1909 and 1918 two successive leaders of the order, Solṭān-ʿAlī-Shah (d. 1909) and his son Nūr-ʿAlī-Shah (d. 1918), were murdered (Van den Bos 2002, 79–80). Division and discord rankled the Sufi masters and their followers. Violence was a constant hazard in a patrimonial society where centralized state power was absent even in name during the dark days of 1910s. Sufi circles in Tehran were affected as well, if only indirectly. The establishment of effective police and gendarme forces under Reẓā Shah in 1921 worked to save the Sufis too. First and foremost, it protected them from mortal abuse at the hand of enemies such as rivals and local potentates. When the Cossack brigade captured Tehran in March 1921, Żahīral-Dōleh, the Sufi master and head of the Fraternal Society, served as acting governor of the city. This cooperation signaled a tactical alliance between the two sides (Van den Bos 2002, 98–99). However, the rising columns of the nation-state posed structural challenges to Sufism, weighing down on Sufi forms of mediatory theology among others. The pressures from above changed Sufism, and in drastic fashion: no longer could Sufi masters claim God-given authority above and beyond the state. Members of the Gonābādi Order were assured by their spiritual leader that the new king, Reẓā Shah, harbored sympathies for them and other Sufis (Pourjavadi and Wilson 1978, 162). There was an inside rumor that Reẓā Khan had met a Gonābādi Sufi who had delivered good tidings to the hungry, poor, and simple soldier that someday he would be king (Van den Bos 2002, 88). In 1939 the Gonābādī Sufi master Moḥammad-Ḥasan Ṣāleh-ʿAlī-Shah (1891–1966) prepared a booklet of advice, Pand-e Ṣāleḥ, intended to integrate the Gonābādi Order as a religious organization. This provided at once a code of moral conduct and a spiritual plea for national unity (Tahririyeh 1988). Many other Sufi masters similarly instructed their disciples to abstain from all forms of political machination. In fact, many of the builders of the modern nation-state of Iran maintained ties to Sufism (Van den Bos 2002, 90–91). Several high-ranking government officials, especially members of the parliament, belonged to some Sufi order. In their eyes, personal and spiritual devotion to God was fully compatible with dedicating one’s energies to [ 163 ]

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formulating and implementing modernizing policies, benefiting from the windfalls of worldly power in the meantime. Eyewitnesses have claimed that, during the 1930s, “almost the whole of the class of the junior government clerks [nationwide] . . . belonged to the . . . Gonābādī order,” and that many merchants, landowners, members of the Majles, and statesmen were Gonābādī affiliates (Van den Bos 2002, 86). More generally, the contribution made by Sufi orders to develop a sense of loyalty to the nation as loyalty to God, and to seeing service to the nation as service to God, was welcomed. The Fraternal Society took another decisive step, of utmost theoretical as well as practical importance, by actually removing the qoṭb position from its organizational chart. This turning point occurred under Seyed Moḥammad Enteżām-al-Salṭaneh (ca. 1860s–1932), who succeeded Żahīr-alDōleh as head of the Fraternal Society in December 1923. Son of a devoted disciple of Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah, the new head of the Fraternal Society was a graduate of Dār-al-Fonūn, a veteran chief of police, a high-ranking official at the Interior Ministry, and owner of expansive estates in the capital (Van den Bos 2002, 96). Enteżām-al-Salṭaneh was a man of the state if not a statesman. Żahīr-al-Dōleh bestowed upon him the Sufi title “Bīneš-ʿAlī-Shah” (Van den Bos 2002, 84). And a man of insight, or Bīneš, he was. For years, he had served on the society’s council. Finally, when the time came for him to take over the helm, Bīneš-ʿAlī-Shah declined to claim the mediatory role of qoṭb for himself. He went a step further and abolished the rank of qoṭb within the Fraternal Society altogether (Homāyūnī 1992, 326–26). He remained the leader of the council, in principle as the first among equals (Van den Bos 2002, 106–7; for members, see Rāʾīn 1978, 495–96). Bīneš-ʿAlī-Shah did not appoint a successor. Instead, he left the twelve men on the council to run the Fraternal Society after him. Contrary to most other Sufi orders, the society acknowledged the right of its members to make independent discretionary decisions without the permission of higher-ranking authority (Van den Bos 2002, 100). Reference to traditional tokens of legitimization was minimized; for example, receiving instructions from the Fourteen Infallibles or other spiritual authorities through dream-visions was deemphasized, and this had far-reaching implications for Sufism (Van den Bos 2002, 107–8). As the rising authority of the centralized nation-state called for a rethinking the notion of qoṭb within Sufism proper, an important voice in negotiating the new status of Sufism belonged to the charismatic Keyvān [ 164 ]

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Qazvīnī (1861–1938) (Čahārdehī 1981, 108; Van den Bos 2002, 81–84). Born in Qazvin, some hundred miles northwest of Tehran, Keyvān had traveled widely and affiliated himself with several Sufi orders, including the ṢafīʿAlī-Shāhīs and Gonābādīs. For years he had served as an itinerant delegate of Sufi masters, journeying as far as India, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Arabian Peninsula. He had picked up some madraseh training in the ʿatabāt and considered himself a qualified mojtahed. But, eventually, after years of clashing with rival Sufi masters, Keyvān suddenly severed all ties to the institution and, as of 1926, became Sufism’s ardent critic. In his sharp critique, Keyvān went beyond questioning the authority of individual Sufi masters or specific Sufi orders. His principle compelled a rejection of all Sufi masters’ claims of God-given authority, walāya or velāyat. Theoretically speaking, he, too, was targeting mediatory theology, in the same way as Kasravi, Sangelajī, and many other contemporaries did. Like them, he protested individuals becoming subservient to other individuals they regarded as poles of the universe, or qoṭb. Keyvān’s critique of Sufism combined theological and social concerns. A standout work in his oeuvre, his Book of Mysticism (ʿErfān-nāmeh), speaks of Sufism as a symptom of decadence: [Sufism] came forth in the era of decline of sovereign rule in Iran, during the time when the Zands and the Qajars fought each other. It then split into myriad branches. As of this writing in 1928, twenty Sufi Orders exist across Iran. They flaunt one another with sarcasm and except for negating one another they have no ground to substantiate themselves. (Keyvān Qazvīnī 1930, 307, 311–13)

As much as Keyvān disavowed the formal structure of Sufi orders—with their poles, Sufi masters (morāds) and disciples (morīds)—he did not give up on the idea of an authentic ʿerfān or true Sufism. He pitted the formalistic and customary (rasmī) Sufism of the day against what he called real ʿerfān, which he conceived as a modern, rational, and scientific enterprise. As meager as Keyvān’s substantive knowledge of modern science was, he insisted on explaining human agency and subjectivity in terms he believed to be natural and scientific. He used an organic metaphor to comment on human society and social relations: “Classes in society are like organs in the body, each class must be present in the society to the extent that it fulfills a necessary function, no more and no less. Otherwise, society would [ 165 ]

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become defective like the man with four eyes and one hand, or four feet and one tooth” (Keyvān Qazvīnī 1930, 311–12). He objected to the most fundamental Sufi desideratum of dissolving one’s personal agency in the presumably superior will of the Sufi master, because he saw no rational basis and no scientific justification for it. Kasravi, Sangelajī, and Taqi Arānī had similarly targeted Sufism, blaming it for a range of problems, from moral decadence to theological backwardness and intellectual bankruptcy (Arānī 1934; Kasravi 1943b; Sangelajī 1943). Compared with them, Keyvān had deeper acquaintance with Sufism. Nevertheless, like them and a majority of contemporary public intellectuals, he held the individual accountable for choices made in life, emphasizing ethics over metaphysics. Keyvān, like most others, advocated a form of ethicsbased religion that complied with the mandates of political centralization. In keeping with the spirit of the times, Keyvān acknowledged the nation-state as the primary beam of authority. Adopting a teleological stance, he viewed every major achievement in contemporary history— from the defeat of the Régie tobacco monopoly (1891) to the Constitutional Revolution—as a stepping-stone leading to the establishment of the nation-state in Iran (Keyvān Qazvīnī 1930, 269). He too placed behavior above belief and was keen on contributing to the formation of modern Iran as a nation of behavers, not merely believers. Keyvān is said to have had thousands of pupils and admirers during his lifetime, among whom flickered several well-known literati of his day (Čahārdehī 1981, 109; Van den Bos 2002, 82). With their pointed criticism, he and other public intellectuals changed the face of Sufism in twentieth-­ century Tehran. In their eyes, Sufism no longer had the appeal it once had. A few Sufi orders survived the social antipathy that was reflected in the negative assessments of Sufism in the works of Keyvān, Kasravi, and others. In particular, the Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shāhī and Gonābādī Orders continued to operate, adapting to the demands of the centralizing nation-state apparatus. The key to their survival lay in making themselves relevant to the nation-state and redefining their terms of spiritual and ethical self-improvement, the very same ideas that critics of Sufism had advocated. At the same time as criticisms of traditional Sufism unfolded, as the idea of qoṭb and strong Sufi mediatory theology gave way to virtue ethics and an emphasis on individual character and conscientious conduct, many of the [ 166 ]

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ʿolamā-rōḥānīs weighed in to support and celebrate this transformation. The wedding of ʿerfān and virtue ethics is clear and present in the special case of Khomeini. He was less a mystic than Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah and, compared with Qomšehʾī, less a philosopher. Nevertheless, not only did he compile a treatise on ethics based on the teachings of the Fourteen Infallibles (Khomeini 1939), young Khomeini also commented on Ibn ʿArabī’s Bezels of Wisdom (Ibn al-ʿArabī ca. 1240) and Mollā-Ṣadrā’s Four Journeys (Khomeini 1936; Knysh 1992). Above all, he always emphasized moral discipline and self-­ purification (tazkieh), providing a religious foundation for virtue ethics. Nonetheless, as a representative voice from the ḥozeh in Qom, Khomeini continued to defend mediatory theology, and that in its strong formulations. This comes through in the ʿerfān commentaries he penned on Muslim prayer and Twelver Shia litany (Khomeini ca. 1928, 1939), and even more strongly in his principal work on ḥekmat where he delved into the esoteric meanings of divine authority (wilāya) and deputyship (ḵilāfa) (Khomeini 1931). Among the critics of mediatory theology, he bashed Kasravi and Sangelajī in harsh terms (Khomeini 1944). The Grand Ayatollah Borūjerdi’s efforts at streamlining religious authority aimed to muffle strong mediatory claims made in Sufism and ʿerfān. To him, the direct embodiment of God-given authority by any fallible human agent was untenable. Khomeini’s refusal to comply with Borūjerdi’s interdiction against the teaching of philosophy stemmed from a theological as well as a political difference in worldview. Continuing to lecture on Ibn ʿArabī in a manner reminiscent of the contents of Qomšehʾī’s treatise on divine deputyship and his commentary on the Bezels of Wisdom underscored the role of individually embodied conduits for divine authority (qoṭbs), or the Perfect Man (al-insān al-kāmil), in Ibn ʿArabī’s expression. Khomeini formulated a strong mediatory theology in his Light of Guidance on Divine Authority and Deputyship (Khomeini 1931). This is a short but sophisticated treatise on ʿerfān, a detailed discussion of which would require a digression from the historical focus of the present study. The author makes references to his teachers in ḥekmat, mainly to Shāhābādī and Āštiyānī, and to Qomšehʾī and earlier philosophers back to Aristotle (Khomeini 1931, e.g., 37, 78, 98, 148, 153). While postulating a direct connection with Khomeini’s later political doctrine requires more substantive elaboration, it is worthwhile to take notice of the political subtext of these early philosophical inquiries. [ 167 ]

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Khomeini may have capitalized on the idea of qoṭb, or Perfect Man, using it as a new key for unlocking and augmenting the authority of the jurists, or the most learned among them. This theological platform may have provided the grounds for his formulation of the doctrine of velāyat-e faqīḥ, sometimes translated as the “guardianship of the jurist,” which he fully articulated during the 1960s (see Kazemi-Moussavi 1992; Mavani 2001; Ṣāleḥī-Najafābādī 1984). However, during the 1930s, insistence on regarding a living individual as the locus of God’s authority in the world seemed out of place against the backdrop of centralizing efforts in the state apparatus. Letting go of the qoṭb, the Fraternal Society sailed through the rip currents of modernization, raising its spinnaker of national spirituality. Its influential members threw their support behind the young MoḥammadReẓā Shah, focusing their social interests principally on the moral education of the nation (Van den Bos 2002, 108). Its prominent members and affiliates, like those of other major Sufi orders, occupied parliament seats and government posts. As it continued merely to warn against political rebellion as a grave danger to spiritual peace and cosmic harmony, the once-progressive Sufi organization became all but socially irrelevant by the late 1950s. In the years after the overthrow of the nationalist prime minister Moṣaddeq in 1953, the insecure but increasingly autocratic shah turned to supportive allies from the ranks of quietist Sufi sympathizers and apolitical members of the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs. He found an unlikely intersection of interests and ideals shared by some madraseh philosophers and lay admirers of Sufism. Some had ties to Sufi orders, but most did not. The amalgam of ḥekmat, ʿerfān, and state patronage placated segments of the ʿolamā and recruited some laymen for subduing parts of the secular, mostly leftist, opposition. A multipronged cultural initiative undertaken as of the 1950s focused on celebrating the national Sufi heritage, in literature as well as philosophy. Part of this enterprise, which unfolded at the University of Tehran, primarily focused on highlighting the literary legacy of such luminaries of the Sufi tradition as Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, and Rūmī. Led by the scholar Badīʿ-al-Zamān Forūzānfar (1903–1970) and his students and colleagues, notably ʿAbd-alḤossein Zarrīnkūb (1923–1999), this academic push aimed to bring together the essential elements of what it identified as Iranian Sufism. Another angle, pursued by Seyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) and Henry Corbin (1903–1978), was [ 168 ]

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mentioned in the previous chapter. Together, these efforts led to a major recovery of the textual tradition of Sufism, ʿerfān, and ḥekmat.1 Besides advising the Franco-Iranian Institute, Nasr supervised other publications on his own. The two were selective in their editorial treatment: the works of the rationalist madraseh philosopher Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Jelveh and even those of a similar bent such as Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres were not included, while the ʿerfān-laden works of Qomšehʾī and Zonūzī were. Similarly, the cryptic works of ʿAyn-al-Qoẓāt Hamadānī (1098–1131) and the mystical Illuminationist philosophy of Shahāb-al-Dīn Sohravardi (d. 1191) received ample attention, while the works of Ibn Sīnā or Naṣīr-al-Dīn Ṭūsī, even those in Persian, remained marginal. No doubt, choices were driven by intellectual preference, but the role of political prudence should not go overlooked in this process. At the time, privileging material that appealed more to the apolitical Sufis and quietist ʿolamā served the interest of the state. Whatever political potency Sufism and madraseh philosophy had a couple of generations earlier, and as recently as the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, was to be neutered. On some level, the rehabilitation of ʿerfān aimed to delegitimize any strains of bellicose criticism against the status quo that came mainly from the left and to arrest any political unrest. More importantly, it was meant to mitigate the alienating effects of rapid modernization and to provide a robust foundation for spiritual fulfillment, reintroducing the sacred into modern life by drawing on the teachings of what was extolled as perennial philosophy (Guénon 1945). In hindsight, a contradiction lurked in the details of this plan. Nasr advocated the revival of a certain nuanced iteration of what he identified as traditional Islam (Nasr 1966, 1987). Seeking to inculcate his own sense of veneration for tradition in his countrymen, he censured those Westernized Iranians who swooned over contemporary European philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre but knew next to nothing about their own Ibn Sīnā, Sohravardi, or Mollā-Ṣadrā. Ironically, Nasr, the Western-educated philosophy enthusiast, diagnosed modernity as a malady that could be—and should be—cured with a regimen of some traditional elixir. With as much fervor, Corbin objected to the “reign of quantity” in the West. A scholar of Iran’s later Sufi history describes the collaboration between Nasr and Corbin as the perfect [ 169 ]

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illustration of how to deploy “non-political and transhistorical definitions of religiosity [to] serve exterior and temporal political purposes” (Van den Bos 2002, 22). At least in part, their instrumentation of traditional Islam and esoteric philosophy was devised for real-world combat. In the heat of the Cold War, the Pahlavi court counted on ʿerfān’s virtues as a weapon in the fight against the Marxist-Leninist ideology, along with what the state called Islamic Marxism as well as other various forms of intellectual dissent. Eventually, in 1973, concurrent with widespread crackdowns of the secret police SAVAK on political dissenters, the state-funded Imperial Academy of Philosophy begat “Iranian Islam,” a notion that Corbin had adumbrated, and Nasr was its strong advocate (Algar 1980, 316n48; Corbin 1971; Wasserstrom 1999, 134, 150–52). However, the conception of traditional Islam or Iranian Islam spawned the very antithesis of what its originators intended. It raised a question of authenticity. To the general public, including university students who were the primary targets of the rehabilitation of ʿerfān, madraseh philosophy, and Sufism, the question of authenticity led to a contradiction. Who could authentically speak for traditional Islam? The court, the Imperial Academy of Philosophy, the ostensibly secular professoriate at the University of Tehran, or the ḥozeh, the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs, and the Muslim intellectuals? ʿAli Shariati (1933–1977), the leading spokesman of revolutionary Muslim intellectuals at the time, deployed Sufi ideals to tear down the status quo. The master of the art of articulating ideas in bite-sized morsels, he averred that “all history . . . converges on three royal pathways—Freedom, Justice and ʿerfān” (Shariati 1977, 2:59–90). For him, Shia Islam and mysticism, in its real essence, was not the manner and gesture of court mandarins but the faith and religion of the oppressed masses. Far from being politically inert, it was in fact revolutionary and messianic. While detaching himself from the Sufi label, Shariati connected the Sufi ideal of the dissolution of the self, fanāʾ, with the Shia ethos of martyrdom, šahādat. With his inimitable skill at reformulating old concepts in novel terms, Shariati proposed šahādat as an exemplary witnessing attained through sacrifice and self-abnegation, insisting that this ultimate act of selfless sacrifice elevates the martyr, the šahīd, to stand as a lofty witness or šāhed to vital matters for the community of faith, the ommat (Talebi 2013). He explained that by going through tribulations in the path of God, standing witness to divine truth, and offering his or her life as the ultimate sacrifice, [ 170 ]

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the šahīd transcends into a higher realm of everlasting existence. A martyr rebels against injustice and corruption, and in doing so stands as a witness to the cause of justice and testifies to the truth. Because this process revolves around the community of faith commemorating, venerating, and ultimately emulating the selfless sacrifice of martyrs, it constitutes a collective duty for the faithful. Like the heart beats inside the human body, the martyr circulates life within society and history. Therefore, martyrs, in their spirit, enliven and embody the ideals of the community of faith, and the life of the community depends on keeping the martyr alive, in memory, and in emulative action. The plea for conscientious protest and collective action led Shariati to dismiss both intellectual dilettantism and democratic uncertainty as frivolous vanities. From his perspective, democracy—decision making by headcounts—was a Hellenistic farce. Individual wayfaring couldn’t amount to anything until self-indulgent scruples disappeared. The image of Muslims from all nationalities and backgrounds joining together in pilgrimage and indistinguishably circumambulating the Kaaba in Mecca, God’s very House on Earth, with barely a stripe of white cloth on their back, compelled from him: O . . . Nothing! O trifling drop. . . .  Join the torrent of the People . . .  Flow (Shariati 1977, Ḥajj, 32–89)

In his lines, Shariati used the Sufi “drop in the ocean” metaphor with a caveat. Sufis only sought dissolution in the ineffable reality of God, the font of being, the sea of light. To the Sufis, fading into the anonymous multitude of a crowd fell far short of their lofty ideal. Shariati, in agreement with earlier public intellectuals—from Āḵundzādeh to Ahmad Kasravi and Taqi Arānī— with whom he had little else to share, brushed off the metaphysics of classical Sufism. What set him apart from those and many other public intellectuals was that he meant to prescribe a Sufi-based cure for the distinctly modern malady of alienation: first prepare the self through disciplined self-exertion and protest, then submerge it in the community of believers, the ommat, for returning to God can only occur in collectivity (Amir-­ Arjomand 1982; Shariati 1977, Ḥajj, 26–240). [ 171 ]

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Among religious and nonreligious dissidents and advocates of armed rebellion, a readiness for martyrdom served as a primary weapon in the fight against perceived injustice. As a goal, martyrdom defined a course of ethical life and a course of ethical death, where life becomes an offering to the cause of justice, when living ethically is rendered impossible. The young Marxist Bīĵan Jazanī (1937–1971), one of the earliest advocates of armed guerrilla warfare against Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah and the ruling class in Iran, who was also a talented painter, titled one of his paintings—perhaps his best—“Ḥallāj” in honor of the renowned tenth-century Sufi martyr. For Islamic groups, including but not limited to the Mojāhēdīn-e Ḵalq Organization, resisting enslavement to tyranny signaled one’s submission to God, and martyrdom, the strongest form of resistance, was understood as the ultimate act of servitude. They heard this firsthand from Shariati. After the 1979 revolution, ʿerfān provided a framework for legitimizing the modern nation-state as an embodiment of divine will. The spiritual head of the state, the leader of the revolution, the valī-e faqīh, was not merely regarded as a superior expert in Shia jurisprudence but revered as a representative of God—a valī or qoṭb in the Sufi sense (Algar 2003; Knysh 1992; Martin 1996). As political agents, authorities of the state and ordinary citizens alike owed loyalty and service to the nation and God at the same time. This mystical formulation of the relationship between man and God in terms of that between citizens and the state spurred, among other things, a transformation in martyrdom’s meaning. During the Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988, the state propaganda apparatus reassured soldiers of the state, more commonly dubbed the warriors of Islam, that fighting the war was an act of religious devotion. Frequently that devotion was likened to love (Fahīmī 2003, 2:63; Seyed-Gohrab 2012). Drawing on the language of Sufism and ʿerfān, soldiers—most of them in their twenties, but thousands as young as fifteen or younger—were cheered on as lovers and Gnostics who strove for union with the beloved (Fahīmī 2002b, 1:94–95). They were doing God’s work, routinely being reminded of this heartening verse in the Qur’an: “You did not fight them; rather, it was God who fought them; and you did not throw when you threw, rather, it was God who threw” (part of Q. Anfāl 8:17; Fahīmī 2002a 2:51). In their holy struggle to combat evil, inside the soul and out on the battlefield, martyrdom defined the consummate act of self-annihilation (fanāʾ). The fallen soldier, the martyr, reached the pinnacle of faith, choosing God above all else, [ 172 ]

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and delivering the ultimate promise. By virtue of this self-sacrifice, the finite human subject came as close to divine infinity as possible, rising above transitory earthly life to defy death itself. A particularly consoling passage from the Qur’an that came to adorn the logo of the fast-growing, state-operated Martyrs’ Foundation (Bonyād-e šahīd) decrees: “Do not suppose those who were slain in the way of God to be dead; no, they are living and provided for near their Lord” (Q. Āl-ʿImrān 3:169). Another Sufi idea that exalted the prospects of the human subject rising to a position of doing God’s work in the world was expressed in the form of a promise made by God: “As my servant draws nearer to Me through supererogatory actions, I shall show him love. And when I love him, I shall be his hearing with which he shall hear, his sight with which he shall see, his hands with which he shall hold, and his feet with which he shall walk” (Kulaynī ca. 941, 2:352). This passage, historically favored by the Sufis and found with minor variation in early Shia sources, became a reference point in identifying soldiers, especially martyrs, as agents of the divine. Some of the most theoretical teachings of ʿerfān were put into practice during the war. After the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the state continued to name streets, highways, and buildings after martyr-warriors, adorning high walls and billboards across Tehran with their larger-than-life portraits. However, as the more mundane but no less urgent reality of postwar reconstruction set in, the tone and content of state propaganda changed. The ethos of selfannihilation quickly gave way to self-enrichment and self-engagement on multiple levels. The movie The Wedding of the Blessed, which was funded by the Martyrs’ Foundation in 1989, captures the moment of transition. In the opening scene, the camera looks through the windscreen of a luxury car with the recognizable brand marker cutting through faded writing on the wall of a decrepit dwelling place, quoting Ayatollah Khomeini’s promise to honor the poor, the unjustly down-trodden masses, and to privilege them over the rich. The irony was hard to miss. The movie Wedding of the Blessed screened first in Tehran mere weeks after Khomeini ghazal, cited in the beginning of this chapter, was published. Earlier that year, in January, the leader of the Islamic Revolution drew on his background in ʿerfān to chime in on the diminuendo of the decades-long Cold War between communism and the West, sending an official letter to the chairman of the presidium of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The leader of the Islamic Republic advised Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev [ 173 ]

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(b. 1931) to educate himself in the truths of Islam, specifically as formulated in Islamic philosophy.2 Paying homage to Ibn ʿArabī, Mollā-Ṣadrā, and Ibn Sīnā by name, he advised the communist-in-chief to fill the ideological vacuum created by the fall of Marxism with God: “The main problem confronting your country is not that of private ownership, freedom and economics. Your predicament results from the absence of true faith in God.”3 Gorbachev neither replied to the letter nor gave it any weight in his Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century (Ikeda and Gorbachev 2005). Not only did the missive fall short of shaking its foreign recipient into action, even closer to home, Ayatollah Khomeini’s exhortation of mystical philosophy to the communist leader raised some incredulous eyebrows. Detecting weakness in the leader on the eve of his acquiescence to ending the war on lessthan-ideal terms, his conservative detractors who were also staunch critics of madrasah philosophy and ʿerfān jumped at the opportunity to make their voices heard (Moin 2000, 275). In addition to them, mistrust of mysticism was on the rise from several other directions. The posthumous publication of his ghazal was also a rejoinder to the critics and a reminder to the base. However, during the years 1989–2004, collectively referred to as the eras of reconstruction and reform, the gripping appeal of sober cost–benefit analyses prevailed. Neither the state nor most of the public intellectuals vouched for asceticism, self-denial, or similar ideas and practices, as was done before. These were driven to the margins of social and intellectual life (Varzi 2006, 2008). Still, some called for rethinking, redirecting, and modernizing the mysticism, branding an unlikely product as modern mysticism, or rationalist mysticism. So far, the most tangible outcome has amounted to remolding and adaptation of some of the classical teachings of ʿerfān to modern psychology, epistemology, and ethics. Compared with Żahīr-al-Dōleh’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century Fraternal Society, or the 1940s ethical turn in Qom, little practical progress has occurred. However, a theoretical paradigm shift has taken place, reversing the old negative valuation of the self (ḵod, nafs) in Sufism and ʿerfān, dropping the emphasis on ascetic selfnegation, and pushing instead toward the cultivation of individual success. This paradigm shift may prove to be temporary or not, but a point of no return has been passed, requiring a reformulation of the perceived relation between the self, society, and God. Keen on suppressing any alternative to officially state-sanctioned moral, spiritual, and religious authority, the Islamic Republic disapproves of the [ 174 ]

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spectrum of modern forms of mysticism that have emerged in Tehran over the past three decades, ever since the publication of Khomeini’s parting ghazal. In practice, these self-enhancing and self-empowering ideologies of success may open avenues for thinking and conducting life more freely, providing opportunities for expressing intellectual and artistic dissent in art, music, poetry, and fiction. Some will last, and some will perish, but these and other forms of questioning dominant ideational frameworks continue to inform debates about selfhood, identity, and alienation in contemporary Tehran.

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SEVEN

Varieties of Skeptical Expression

IN HIS long poem Thus Spake the Earth, the Iranian poet-intellectual Ahmad Shamlu (1925–2000) presents a soliloquy in which the earth pleads with man (Shamlu 1992, 69–77). Sitting on a rock, timorous, dejected, and ashamed, man is gently reminded: I gave you bread, and fodder for your sheep and your cattle; Tender leaves of basil for you to mix with bread.

In these lines Shamlu mimics the tone of passages in the Qurʾān that enumerate the bounties of God: “We sent waters down; We broke open the earth; We made grains grow, and also grapes, herbage, olives, palm trees, thick orchards of fruits, and fodder for you and your cattle” (Q. ʿAbas 80:24–33). But in his poem, instead of a male heavenly deity speaking or being spoken of, Shamlu voices the unspoken message of a decidedly feminine earth: I clamored and reached out to you in many a sound and voice, Through the whistling of the wind, and gurgling of the stream that gushes forth from rocks, As waterfalls roared and as avalanches crashed

Reciting the loving gifts of the earth—water wells, fertile soil, nourishing bread—Shamlu prods man to abandon heaven, which he faults for being a false lover and tormentor: [ 176 ]

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Give up on heaven, for revelation comes from the earth Your status is not that of slaves You are the king of these expanses And your kingship derives not from heaven glancing down on you, but from the love earth throws at your feet.

When Shamlu spoke, thousands listened to his daring ideas festooned in vivid imagery and pulsating language. In the eyes of his admirers, iconoclastic vigilance in public matters bestowed Shamlu with the aura of an oracle and the authority of a seer. Begun in the summer of 1964 but not completed until 1984, Thus Spake the Earth was and is an unequivocal illustration of the poet’s virulent religious skepticism or agnosticism, not to say outright atheism. Over the past two centuries, Shamlu’s unabashed call to “give up on heaven, for revelation comes from the earth” is a rarity. Partly because of potential dire consequences of such expressions, few public intellectuals dared to make them in print. Heretics, or individuals accused of heresy, could find themselves denuded of basic civil rights, end up in prison, or even be killed. Nevertheless, expressions of theological and religious skepticism, made on a sliding spectrum ranging from mild criticism to outright denial, have formed the backdrop or the negative space to our book-length discussion of God and man in Tehran. The preceding chapters indicate how social and political debates surrounding mainstream ideas about God and man eventually changed what was considered mainstream. This final chapter focuses on two other challenges to mainstream theology. One is the literary expression of theological skepticism, as exemplified by Shamlu’s poem. The other, a more recent phenomenon on Tehran’s intellectual scene, is the reception of modern and postmodern philosophies, from analytic and continental epistemology and philosophy of religion to attempts at radical reconstructions of theology. During the later years of Reẓā Shah’s iron-fist reign, when intellectual activity was severely limited, a bold voice of political dissent and theological skepticism came from the prodigious Taqi Arānī (1902–1940). Trained as a chemical engineer in Germany, Arānī never got a position to teach at the state-dominated University of Tehran. Instead, he gathered a circle of like-minded leftist intellectuals around himself and, in 1934, launched a [ 177 ]

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monthly magazine, Donyā. Only twelve issues appeared in print between February 1934 and June 1935. Then it was shut down by the government, and shortly after that Tehran’s police arrested the entire editorial staff. Arānī received the maximum sentence, ten years of solitary confinement in the dreaded Qaṣr Prison, an abandoned Qajar palace that was turned into a prison, but within months he died in custody. Arānī’s Donyā represented the common talk of a small but influential group of intellectuals in Tehran. Using an academic style and convoluted language to thwart police censors, it was arranged under the four rubrics of science, technology, philosophy and society, and art, discussing such relevant topics as fascism, racism, religion, psychology, quantum physics, evolutionary theory, and modern humanities (Mo’menī 2005, esp. app. I, 243–46, and 247–333 for sample articles; Parvin, Donyā, in EIr). For the next half-century, at least, the ideas first introduced through this journal remained centrally relevant to secular as well as religious public intellectuals. With the fall of Reẓā Shah, an unprecedented expansion of the intellectual space occurred. By the 1940s, in addition to followers of Kasravi, sympathizers of the Tudeh Party, and the Muslim intellectuals, there emerged a group of public intellectuals in Tehran that had a more focused interest in art and literature. The writer, folklorist, and literary critic Ṣādeq Hedayat (1903–1951) pioneered the use of literary genres, specifically fiction, for expressing radically controversial theological ideas. Admirers praised him first and foremost as a writer of short stories, plays, and essays. His novella The Blind Owl, first published in 1936, stands as a towering monument over the landscape of modern Persian literature (Hedayat 1936; Katouzian 2008). While his literary talent resisted the dispute of even his harshest critics, Hedayat’s idiosyncratic hostility toward religion, the state, and the ruling elite garnered him enemies across the board. Still, he had a sizable audience. Hedayat’s agnostic theology hardly has received any substantial analysis. Although he had no systematic training in philosophy and he seldom fleshed out his metaphysical ideas, sinews of existentialist thinking pervade his writings. Interested in a nihilist trend in European philosophy of his age, he subscribed to the view that ideas of good and evil originated from a situation of weakness. And as far as he could see, no way out of the apparent banality of both was in sight. More than any other theological concern, the problem of theodicy or divine justice riled him. [ 178 ]

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Hedayat’s entanglement with the human condition sensitized him to the pitiable fate of the acting, feeling, living human individual. He refused to understand the order of this world as expressing the subordination of physical laws to ethical laws established by a righteous God. Born into history, burdened with existential anxiety, doubtful of happiness, cowering from all-pervading evil, cursed with old age’s inevitability—where could man turn, but to death? By the tender age of twenty-one Hedayat had arrived at a one-word answer: nowhere! Hedayat discerned no redemptive logic at all to the tragic sense of life, so he objected to the futility found on earth and defied whatever heavenly compensation that religion promised. The classical explanation of theodicy that attributes evil to a benevolent agent or a principle of goodness made no sense to him. He found justifying evil as a necessary element in a divine plan for creation absurd. Thus, protesting a God who, in his judgment, could only be justified by calling injustice just, Hedayat did not simply denounce theodicy, he derided it. Rebelling against the religion of his forefathers and his motherland, he caustically lampooned religious beliefs and practices, refusing to account for life’s hardships as the prepaid price of some coveted outcome in the afterlife. On occasion after occasion in his short stories, he sardonically mocked Shia rituals, satirizing solemn ʿĀšūra observances, pilgrimage, vows, intercession, and the very notion of redemptive suffering. In the story Begging for Redemption Hedayat depicts a caravan lumbering along a dark dirt road across a barren desert (Hedayat 1932). A woman pilgrim, bruised black and blue from continual jolting on camelback for thirty-six days, assures herself, “This is all good for me because I am on pilgrimage.” Upon the caravan’s arrival in Karbala, she rushes to the shrine, where her frenetic wailing and weeping draws a crowd. Shrieking with fear that God might never forgive her perversions, she confesses to having murdered two infants and their mother (her husband’s second wife). To calm her, other pilgrims share accounts of egregious sins they have committed and admit that they also have come on pilgrimage to beg for redemption. Hedayat sardonically ends the story with the words off the lips of another woman, also a murderer: “Surely . . . as soon as anyone resolves to set off on pilgrimage, even if her sins outnumber the leaves on a tree, she instantly becomes good and pure.” [ 179 ]

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Horrified by the senseless pain and agony he sees everywhere he looks around him, the writer intimates in Begging for Redemption that the death of two babies by a murderous stepmother lies beyond redemption. To Hedayat, believing that such cruelty could be forgiven flies in the face of justice because it was neither in any way due to the infants’ fault nor could it bring peace and happiness to anyone. As a reader of European literature, Hedayat pored over the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), and Albert Camus (1913–1960). The existentialist revolt against the God of traditional theodicy, as symbolized by the “Ivan” character in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, shook him to the core (Baukham 1987; Dostoyevsky 1880, bk 5, ch. 4; Harries 1978; Surin 1983; 1986, 96–105; Sutherland 1977). Hedayat’s objection was not as reflective as Dostoyevsky’s but was no less sardonic. Recognizing no supernatural origin for religious and ethical values, Hedayat disbelieved in a moral God as the ultimate source of succor. Occasionally, faint traces of Buddhist-like tendencies shimmer in Hedayat’s works. However, being opposed to mediatory theology as he was, rather than embracing the Buddhist ideal of a personal embodiment of blissful enlightenment, the Bodhisattva, Hedayat envisioned no path to salvation in a metaphysical sense whatsoever. His rejection of the providential God directed him not to a new tragic faith but to a tragic fate: suicide. Hedayat’s theological apathy aligned with his politics of despair. His nihilistic atheism that held life in contempt, disparaged the earth, and saw no recourse to heaven held a bleak view of earthly politics as well. Hedayat’s resentment translated into expressions of ridicule and rebuff for those in power. He jeered at authoritarian modernization or forced progress and its proponents, even Reẓā Shah himself, no less bashfully than he attacked Islam—its history, teachings, as well as the ʿolamā and ordinary believers on the street. Hedayat’s aesthetic sense and social sensibility differed from those of his Tudeh Party friends and from parvenu emulators of the West who dominated the public sphere. Unlike Taqi Arānī, the contemporary public intellectual idolized by the left, Hedayat dismissed the modernists’ view of technological advancement as panacea and did not share the hope that the deployment of machinery could automatically manufacture human happiness (Arānī 1934, 70). He lambasted self-styled sophisticates who climbed their way into high government office by serving as tools of state propaganda. Hedayat’s meager faith in man’s ability left him with no [ 180 ]

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alternative to fill the gaping God-shaped void in his thought. To him a world of justice simply was too good to exist. Hedayat’s radical agnosticism, or outright atheism, repelled the public at the time, disgusted the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs, and displeased most public intellectuals no less. For decades, the Tudeh Party, along with other advocates of revolutionary action on the left, disowned Hedayat as a bourgeois dilettante. Arānī’s colleague in Donyā, the Marxist writer Bozorg Alavi (1904–1997), taunted Hedayat to throw his personal statue of the Buddha on a pile of rubbish. To the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs, the man’s name was anathema. Muslim intellectuals avoided him like the plague (Moṭahharī 1970, 188–89). Before and after the revolution, religious and secular middle-class families alike— Muslims, Jews, Christians, Bahais, and others—discouraged their youth from reading him (Shariati 1969, 2:91–94; Yarshater 1973). Almost a century after they were written, his writings still are banned by the government, but photocopies, offset reprints, and PDFs abound in cyberspace and Tehran’s back-alley booksellers. Hedayat’s radical agnosticism kept its appeal for a small but influential circle of writers and poets in Tehran. Shamlu’s poem Thus Spake the Earth, cited in the beginning of this chapter, has traces of Hedayat in it. More often than not, members of this group of writers and poets, Shamlu included, preferred to wrap their theological skepticism in pantheistic tropes, deifying man and humanizing God. Their works ranged from mildly seeing man and the world of creation as holding up a mirror to the divine to expressions of views that could be judged blasphemous outright. Let’s look at two passages from the poems of a significant but lesser-known representative of a generation of mid-twentieth-century young, upwardly mobile men who migrated in droves from the provinces to Tehran in pursuit of a university degree, in search of suitable employment, and in the quest for higher living standards. The same year Hedayat killed himself in Paris, 1951, the twenty-year-old ʿAlī-Akbar Saʿīdī Sīrjāni (1931–1994) came to study philosophy at the University of Tehran, a long way from his native town, Sīrjān, in south-central Iran (Saʿīdī Sīrjāni 1967). Coping with the loss of innocence in the big city— the Babylon of the sullied, as his mother had warned him—pricked the young man’s mind (Saʿīdī Sīrjāni 1967, 21–25, 33–35). Then, in a dark night of the soul, finding himself “cross” with his God, as he phrases it, he wrote a sonorous poem to calm himself (Saʿīdī Sīrjāni 1967, 21–25, 33–35, 39–40): [ 181 ]

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There is no distance between my beloved and me. . . . Blessed is the moment when I find myself free of worldly attachment, stepping onto the pure throne, I call O God, ’tis I. I sooth broken hearts, I cure injured minds; I am the masthead of the book of truth and the vanguard of the troops of purity; I am the elixir that transforms copper into gold for those in need. (Saʿīdī Sīrjāni 1967, 61–64)

Saʿīdī’s poem is not as explicitly blasphemous as it is deliberately ambivalent. The poet’s candor may sound exceptional to anyone alien to Sufism, but the young poet’s play on Sufi ideas bolstered the cachet of his lines for his intended audience. The translation given here is selective and not verbatim but conveys the gist by preserving the repetition of the agentive “I” and the objective “me,” which the poet draws on to intimate the personal relationship between man and God as he understands it. He weaves allusions to the Qurʾān and cites the ecstatic utterance of the tenth-century martyred Sufi Ḥallāj: The beloved calls out “Return,” and I keenly respond to His call [Q. Fajr 89:28]. The beloved is unveiled and I prepare for conquest raising the banner of “I am the truth” to heaven. Nothing is there to behold but the beloved, look and see how far I have come. Beholding the beauty of the beloved in imagination, I wonder whether it’s the beloved or it’s me! No, it’s all the beloved in me and I am the beloved, there is no separation between the beloved and me. (Saʿīdī Sīrjāni 1967, 61–64)

References to Sufi tropes and the iconic figure of Ḥallāj notwith­ standing, young Saʿīdī’s appreciation of Sufism was a far cry from that of Qomšehʾī, Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah, or even Sufis closer to his own time. As a student in the University of Tehran, he had studied the classics of Iranian Sufism, but in the process of cultural translation and interrogation of the past, something was lost: ascetic self-denial and the ethos of self-annihilation (fanā) was deemphasized, but the ideals of spiritual progress, self-apotheosis, and consummate union with the divine were embraced. A similar trend is detectable in the compositions of several other poet-intellectuals from the 1950s–1970s. Saʿīdī, Shamlu, and most of their readers who belonged to the Pahlavi-era middle class showed little interest in either strong mediatory theologies or what could be labeled as the master–slave paradigm, one that depicts God [ 182 ]

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as a despotic master and humans as slavish subjects. Calling such notions superstitious and associating them with the uneducated public, it was common to blame the ʿolamā-rōḥānīs for propagating what may be called folk theology. For example, in another poem Saʿīdī lambasted the sheikh for claiming direct exclusive access to God. Entitled “I Know Not Your God,” the poet targeted a deity, which, as he saw it, was a needy and capricious idol that feeble minds had fabricated: Have you heard O learned sheikh that I know not your ungodly god! I do not fear if you brand me an infidel. . . . There is no pride in worshiping your god. A god so entrapped in his need for you to worship him; a god that becomes enraged or is otherwise appeased with an offering of two prayers; a god that only understands the tongue of the Arabs. (Saʿīdī-Sīrjāni 1967, 120–25)

Saʿīdī pushed the envelope when he said: “Your god that sometimes lies low and other times lashes out is but a demon that needs to be kept under a spell. Should he not be a manipulating schemer, would there be any room for intercessors to operate? Your god goads his slaves with promises of giving them young boys and houris.” The poet did not pull his punches. Closely following the plot in a puppet show that Hedayat had written in 1930 and called The Tale of Creation (see Ghanoonparvar 1998 for translation), Saʿīdī sarcastically continued: “Your god and his crowd of cherubim have set up a feast around the throne. Like a king at the completion of the task of creation, he has turned to matters of the harem, secluding himself behind curtains.” Such explicit expressions of disbelief disgusted the majority population in Tehran, before and after the 1979 revolution. Pooh-poohing folk theology, as seen in Hedayat’s satire or in Saʿīdī’s rendition, was unacceptable to them. In fact, the latter’s mockery of the crowning achievement of the ʿolamārōḥānīs, namely the Islamic Republic, eventually cost him his life. In March 1994, following the publication of a series of his strongly worded opinion pieces in the newspaper Eṭṭelāʿāt, the sixty-two-year-old man of letters was detained by state security forces. Saʿīdī died in custody within a few months. Saʿīdī’s newspaper writings ought to be placed in context. Once the IranIraq War ended with a suppressed whimper in 1988, the theological premises and promises of the Islamic Republic came under criticism from multiple quarters. The national infrastructure was damaged beyond measure. Human [ 183 ]

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capital had been squandered. Tens of thousands had been killed, maimed, or mentally impaired. Thousands of dissidents had been tortured and killed in state prisons. State-fueled messianic expectations for the eradication of evil from the world had come to naught. A decade after the revolution, the assertion that the establishment of the Islamic Republic marked the beginning of the rule of God, as Ayatollah Khomeini had declared in 1979, rang hollower than ever before (Amir-Arjomand 2009). Saʿīdī was not alone, neither in noticing nor in crying out that the emperor had no clothes. In the postwar intellectual milieu, philosophical and sociological questions rose to the forefront, above and beyond newspaper columns. The fall of the communist bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 added to the urgency of revisionism. As seen in chapter 6, Ayatollah Khomeini expressed his theological diagnosis of the crisis through the highest diplomatic channels, taking advantage of the moment to renew his insistence on the effectiveness of religion in politics. By contrast, the task of administering a modern nation-state—with all its economic, social, and political complexities—in the name of God, compounded by the daunting challenge of the war, compelled some high-ranking state administrators to ask what, if anything, was wrong with mixing religion and politics. Many of those who had played instrumental roles in the establishment of the Islamic Republic felt compelled to rethink the ideas and ideals they had embraced before the 1979 revolution, and to analyze the costs and benefits of establishing an Islamic state. Most significant among them was Mahdi Bāzargān (1907–1995), a high-profile Muslim intellectual who served briefly as the prime minister of the interim revolutionary government, from February to November 1979. After resigning from that post, partly in protest to some radical elements’ storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Bāzargān had continued to lead the Freedom Movement of Iran (FMI), tirelessly critiquing the conduct of the Islamic Republic in Islamic terms (Chehabi 1990). Leading contemporary Muslim public intellectuals who upheld the banner of faith-based scientific progress, Bāzargān had dedicated his life to training a legion of reform-minded youth who looked to Islam for solutions of political problems and social shortcomings (Boroujerdi 1996). Complementing his broad knowledge of Muslim tradition, specifically wisdom literature primarily derived from the Qurʾān and secondarily from the teachings of the Fourteen Infallibles, he had a lot to say on those themes (e.g., Bāzargān 1959a, 1959b, 1971, 1977). Unlike militant young revolutionaries who [ 184 ]

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called for armed rebellion to overthrow the status quo (e.g., Aḥmadzādeh 1970; Pūyān 1969), Bāzargān insisted on engaging the minds of the public. In January 1993, standing before a loyal audience at the Islamic Association of Engineers, the same venue where he had expounded views on the desirability of Islamic governance since the late 1950s, Bāzargān delivered a rather different lecture entitled “The Afterlife & God as the Goals of the Mission of the Prophets.”1 Reviewing a lifetime of religious and political activism, the revered eighty-six-year-old Muslim intellectual emphasized the necessity of not using religion as an instrument for state-building but redirecting it tout court toward God and the afterlife. Shortly after Bāzargān died in January 1995, a printed account of his reassessment of a lifelong preoccupation with political reform conceived as a religious duty first appeared in Kiyān, a progressive intellectual periodical founded and operated by Muslim intellectuals. Committing itself to providing a forum for the open expression and exchange of ideas from a wide variety of perspectives, secular as well as religious, Kiyān quickly became a serious intellectual platform. Many of the leading intellectuals of the land wrote in Kiyān, and countless inquisitive minds read their articles. As reflected in page after page of Kiyān, Muslim intellectuals widely called for religious reform. The most influential among reform-minded Muslim thinkers at the time was Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945), who, back in 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini had personally appointed to the Campaign for Cultural Revolution, along with six other trusted Muslim intellectuals, with a mandate to revise and Islamicize teaching curricula for universities that were shut down at the time (Soroush 2000). During the 1980s, Soroush helped launch an intellectual movement to advance philosophical knowledge. As mentioned in chapter 5, the philosophical movement of the 1980s had ties to a broader state strategy for countering leftist doctrines that threatened the ideological tenets of the Islamic Republic (e.g., Dāvarī-Ardakānī 2005). However, as usually happens, the pairing of potent ideas with state institutions begat some remarkable unintended consequences. Under the auspices of the said Campaign for Cultural Revolution, the state-run Iran University Press provided a repertoire of books in various branches of humanities, including philosophy. Other organizations also participated in the importation of foreign books as well as funding translations and publishing writings in the Persian language, especially on epistemology, philosophy of religion, and ethics. The effect on religious discourse was immediate. Within [ 185 ]

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a decade after the revolution, critical discussion of religion was under way. The emerging field of comparative philosophy that Ṭābāṭabāʾī and Moṭahharī had mapped out a couple of decades earlier had begun to bear fruit, and their wish for having a new kalām, a modern theology of Islam, seemed closer at hand (Qarāmalekī 2004). Propelled by a keen dedication to reform and perhaps partly prodded by some expatriate publications (e.g., Mohājer and Mīrzā’ī 1986), intellectuals in Tehran turned their attention to the aims and limits of history, language, art, and religion. Some ventured to discover how Christian and Jewish thinkers had fared in their attempts at reconciling faith with modern life. Translations of philosophical works, mostly from English into Persian, proliferated. The number and diversity of first-edition philosophy books that came out of print during the 1980s and 1990s is unprecedented in Iranian history. Identifying themselves as “religious intellectuals,” Soroush and a legion of like-minded Muslim intellectuals, including university graduates and many students at the ḥozeh, began to direct their energies to religious reform. Some had had intellectual and political affinities with Bāzargān’s FMI and its various offshoots. To many among them, the dominant narrative about the transformative effects of the modern age on religion in Western history applied to the future of Islam and Iran as well. They aimed to preserve what they saw as the essential kernel of Islam by releasing it from an outmoded husk. For years, modernist intellectuals—religious and secular— agreed on highlighting the epistemological and historical transition from traditional to modern thought as the principal discourse that had to be explored and expounded. Debating the role of religion in society and discussing the ramifications of contested ideas of God sometimes took center stage. Those intellectual efforts, alongside myriad other factors, culminated in the landslide victory of the reformist president Seyed Moḥammad Khatami (b. 1942) in 1997 (Khatami 1997). During the late 1990s and the early 2000s, labeled the Era of Reform (dōreh-e eṣlāḥāt), theorizing about avenues for transitioning from tradition to modernity was on all lips. Moving from traditional theologies to modern ones composed a part of this larger undertaking. Discussions of personal versus nonpersonal views of God, cataphatic versus apophatic theologies, and other abstract ideas were in vogue. Thanks to the efforts of thinkers, authors, and translators both inside and outside the university, a wide range of material amassed on the dominant discourse around tradition and [ 186 ]

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modernity—problematic as the dichotomy was in and of itself. Many philosophers and theologians who might appear as borderline anonymous academics or narrow specialists at home in the Europe and the United States became household names in Iran: from Karl R. Popper (1902–1994) to Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) to Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and from Martin Buber (1878–1965) to Paul Tillich (1886–1965), John Hick (1922–2012), and many others (see, for example, Buber 1952; Hick 1970; Solṭānī and Narāqī 1996; Tillich 1952). With official government invitation, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) visited Tehran, as did Richard Rorty (1931–2007) and a few other intellectual heavyweights. More often than not, they received a celebrity-style welcome, and sometimes their names came up even in debates at the Islamic Consultative Assembly and other chambers of state power. For a short while, a broad-based intellectual consensus seemed at hand. Shared emphasis on democratic governance, free market economy, and human rights brought secular and religious intellectuals close. A new generation of postrevolution well-trained mojtaheds, including a few women, came forth with well-informed critiques of feqh. Even Ayatollah Khomeini’s main idea was not immune from revision (Ḥā’erī-Yazdī 1995). Most of the secular and religious intellectuals, academics, mojtaheds, and journalists involved would readily identify their ideas as modern. On the one hand, privatizing and deregulating the relationship between man and God appealed to the secular intellectuals, who welcomed its political and economic implications in denuding the ruling ʿolamā-rōḥānīs, and therefore the state, of the claimed authority to speak for God. On the other hand, since the religious intellectuals recognized modern science as the key pillar of secularism, it seemed reasonable to some of them to take the next step in adopting a secular standpoint, contending for its compatibility with their individualistic, ethics-oriented, neo-rationalist, and spiritualistic understanding of being faithful. According to a growing faction of public intellectuals, advocating intellectual pluralism and tolerance inside the country went hand in hand with deescalating tensions on the international front. Even the incumbent government seemed to agree. The specter of war on terror terminated that bout of optimism in Tehran. With the outbreak of violence and war in the Middle East at the turn of the new century, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the intellectual terrain shifted like quicksand. The openly modernist, [ 187 ]

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implicitly liberal reformist agenda was eclipsed together with the intellectual current that fed into it. The tide of pluralism that had gradually gained momentum since the 1990s rapidly reversed under recurrent threats of foreign military action against Iran. Capitalizing on public repugnance at the catastrophic consequences of foreign militaristic adventurism, the Islamic Republic doubled down on its claim for speaking in the name of God. Drawing on a messianic discourse for the legitimation of the state escalated to new heights. Reemphasizing its mediatory role, the state apparatus reclaimed the final say in demarcating what is properly Islamic and what is not. When it faced public protests against what was deemed electoral malfeasance in 2009, the state spared no effort in quashing it. A full century after Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah’s crackdown on the constitutionalists in BāġShah, Tehran witnessed widespread violence against political critics again; in the summer of 2009, the state apparatus acted in the name of God, as the bearer of divine authority (velāyat), to suppress heresy and restore divine order by eradicating evil—fetneh. The early revolutionary initiative of Islamizing knowledge was relaunched with vengeance to counter the “cultural onslaught” and “soft war” said to be waged by the West to colonize the mind of the nation. The state’s crackdown on perceived religious dissent has been vigorous and systematic in recent years, from the persecution of formerly insider reformists to pressuring Sufis and Bahais, from going after new Christian converts to banning modern forms of organized mysticism. Meanwhile, Tehranis continue to experiment within a notional panorama of historically contested God-based conceptions. State-centered mediatory theology is only one among many. Modernist reformism lives on. Moreover, postcolonial critiques of modernity have now found a following, and postmodern theologies, even so-called nonrealistic ones, are on the market (Cupitt 1988, 1998). Various forms of folk mysticism, highfalutin spirituality, and supposedly science-based methods of connecting with the supernatural realm (māvarā, ʿālam-e māvarā) have also had a growing audience (Doostdar 2012). At the same time, varieties of skeptical ideas find expression, from underground songs to pirated translations of writings from the so-called new atheism movement (Dawkins 2006). Still, long-term implications remain to unfold. Countless ideas involved may not withstand the tests of time. Nevertheless, Tehran provides an [ 188 ]

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important case as a theater of ideas, from its days as the burgeoning Qajar capital to its year of rapid modernization under the Pahlavis, to four decades under the Islamic Republic. Far from rote academic curiosity, it is hard to overemphasize the real, historically relevant effects of these contending visions, each waxing and waning, playing off one other to shape, sign, and stir a significant world of intellectual activity centered on the idea of God.

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Appendix

Electronic Resources Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia (Persian): http://www.cgie.org.ir Encyclopedia Iranica (EIr): http://www.iranicaonline.org Encyclopedia Islamica (EI2) (Persian): http://www.encyclopaediaislamica.com/ Hathi Trust Digital Library: http://hathitrust.org Humanities & Social Sciences Online: https://networks.h-net.org/ Internet Archive: http://archive.org Iranian Humanities Database (Persian): http://www.ensani.ir/ Ḵāneh-e Ketab (Persian): http://ketab.ir Mīrāṡ-e Jāvīdān: http://www.mirasejavidan.com/ NoorLib (Persian and Arabic): http://www.noorlib.ir NoorMags (Persian): http://www.noormags.com Qurʾān and Exegesis (Arabic & English): http://www.altafsir.com/

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Notes

Preface 1. Until the mid-twentieth century, this name was also spelled as Ṭihrán, Ṭiherân, and Teheran. 2. For more on modern Iranian history, see Abrahamian 2008; Amanat 2017; ­Ansari 2007; Keddie 2006; Kedourie and Heim 1980; Nabavi 2014.

1. O God, O Heaven, O Nature 1. For various discussions of social and cultural change during the long nineteenth century, see Bosworth and Hillenbrand 1983; Gilbar 1986; Gleave 2005; Mostōfī ca. 1950; Nāṭeq 1990; and Saʿdvandiyān and Etteḥādieh 1989. 2. See “House of Oblivion” in “Freemasonry: i. Introduction”; “Jalāl-al-Dīn Mīrzā,” in EIr. See also Algar 1973, 47; and “House of Forgetfulness” in “Freemasonry: ii. Qajar Period,” in EIr. 3. W.  S. Blunt inaccurately translated Malkom’s court title Nāżem-al-dōleh as “Reformer of Islam” (Blunt 1907, 63). 4. Afshar 2002 cites Ṭālebof’s book as Ḥekmat-e ṭabīʿīyyeh (Istanbul, 1311/1894). For earlier works, see Afshar 2002, 96–100, 108.

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2. M ediatory Theology and I ts D iscontents

2. Mediatory Theology and Its Discontents 1. Here is an example of a word in nineteenth-century Tehrani vernacular, BāġShah, where the noun Bāġ merges with its qualifier (Shah), and the conjoining -e (eżāfeh) is dropped. The same applies to Ṣūr-Esrāfīl, valī-neʿmat.

3. God with Us 1. During the war, Iranian military forces referred to Soviet-style infantry fighting vehicles, Boyevaya Mašīna Peḵoty (Боевая Машина Пехоты, or БМП for short), as Pī-Em-Pī. 2. The text is shortened in translation. 3. See Sahifeh, vol. 18, dated 3 Sharivar 1361Š; vol. 16, 20 Ordibehesht 1382Š; and vol. 20, n.d (all online). 4. For manuscript catalogs, see Monzavī 1997–2014, 4:2761–3126 (on astrology); 5:3937–3991 (on alchemy). 5. For an example of astrological predictions, see Karīmiyān 2001.

4. The Law 1. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885) says: “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. And who knows for what purpose your body requires precisely your best philosophy.” Cited in Dabashi 2012. 2. It has been suggested that Navvāb was Mīrlōḥī’s mother’s last name. Regardless, the literal meaning of the pseudonym should not be overlooked. 3. Seyed Ḥossein Mūsavī-Tabrīzī interview in Keyhān, 29 Shahrīvar 1360Š/September 20, 1981.

5. Falsafeh and the Madraseh 1. On Prince Badīʿ-al-Molk, son of Emām-Qolī (d. 1875), son of Moḥammad-ʿAlī Dōlat-Shah (d. 1821), son of Fat′ḥ-ʿAlī Shah (d. 1834), see Moḥaqqeq-e Dāmād 1997c, 106; Mojtahedi 1977a. 2. For more background on the history of this line of philosophical thinkers, see Adamson and Taylor 2005. 3. Āqā-Buzurg al-Ṭihrānī 1935, X, 214f; XXIV, 190; XXV, 175, lists several “­Responses to the Christian Padre.” 4. For the deed of endowment (vaqf-nāmeh) of the Marvī Madraseh and a list of the books in its library, see Ostādi 1992. [ 194 ]

7 . Varieties of S keptical E xpression

5. Mehr no. 1, 1327Š/1948, p. 4. 6. See Kayhan-e Farhangi, no. 8 (Aban 1368/October 1989): 2. 7. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Iran-nameh 9: 667–80.

6. Sufism Returns, and with a Vengeance 1. The works published by the Franco-Iranian Institute under Corbin’s supervision included ones by Sohravardi (d. 1191), Rūzbehān Baqlī (1128–1209), ʿAzīz al-Dīn Nasafī (d. ca. 1295), Seyed Ḥaydar Āmolī (d. ca. 1390), and Ṣadrā (d. 1630s). 2. “Study Islam, Khomeini Suggests to Gorbachev,” New York Times, January 5, 1989; and Moin 2000, 274f. 3. See Ṣaḥife-e Emām 21:220–26, http://farsi.rouhollah.ir/library/sahifeh?vol​ume​ =21&tid​=130&s​c=220&q=%DA%AF%D9%88​%D8%​B1​%D8%A8%​D8%A7%DA%​86%D9​ %81. For an English translation, see http://www.ghadeer.org/english/imam/ letter%20Imam/callto/callto2.html.

7. Varieties of Skeptical Expression 1. See the periodical Kiyān, no. 28:46.

[ 195 ]

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[ 220 ]

Index

Abadan, 105 Abbās Effendi. See ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ Abbasid caliphs, 34 ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ, 44, 54, 56 ʿAbd-Allāh Khan Madraseh, 130 Abu al-Ḥasan Khan Madraseh, 130 Abu-ʾl-Faẓl, 76 Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Mīrzā (Shaykh al-Raʾīs), 43–44 Adam, mediatory role of, 30, 32, 153 Afghani, Seyed Jamāl al-Dīn, 8–12, 18, 21 Afshar clans, x “Afterlife & God as the Goals of the Mission of the Prophets, The” (Bāzargān), 185 Āġā-Moḥammad Khan, 89 Age of Occultation, 90, 102, 107. See also Major/Minor Occultation; occultation, of the twelfth Emām agnosticism, 177–78, 181 Ahl-e Ḥaqq (“People of the Truth”), 35 Aḥsā, 91 Aḥsāʾī, Shaykh Aḥmad, 36–37, 76, 91, 117, 120, 137 Aḵbārī, Mīrzā Moḥammad, 70, 90–92, 116, 119

Aḵbārīs, 89–91, 114, 116–19, 123, 147–48 Āḵundzādeh, Fat’h-’Ālī, 9–11, 18, 25, 94–95, 97, 98, 104, 171 Āl Aḥmad, Jalāl, 59–60 Alavi, Bozorg, 181 alchemy, 70, 72, 157 Alī-Allāhīs, 35, 37 ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī, 136, 139–43 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 51 ammad, 95 anjoman-e oḵovvat (Fraternal Society), 159–64, 168, 174 anticlericism, 94–95 anticonstitutionalists, 48, 102–3, 131–32. See also Constitutional Revolution Anūšehravān (ancient Iranian king), 80 Āqā-ʿAlī Ṭehrāni. See Modarres, Āqā-ʿAlī Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh. See Zonūzī, Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh Āqāsī, Ḥājī Mīrzā, 38, 148–50, 157 Aqdas (Bahai holy book), 42 Arak, x Arānī, Taqi, 166, 171, 177, 180 Arendt, Hannah, 187 Armenians, 101

[ 221 ]

INDEX

art/visual arts, Nature in, 24–26, 28 Asfār. See Four Journeys (Mollā-Ṣadrā) ʿAṣṣār, Seyed Moḥammad-Kāżem, 136 Assyrian Christians, xii Āštiānī, Ḥājj Mīrzā Ḥasan, 98–99, 101, 111, 128, 155 Āštiyānī, Mahdī, 132, 138 Āštiyānī, Mīrzā Mehdī, 136 Āštiyānī, Mīrzā Yūsof Khan, 157 astrology/astrologers, 21, 70, 72 astronomy, 21 ʿatabāt, 36, 76–77, 80, 90–91, 93, 100–101, 106–7, 119, 131, 148, 165 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 51 atheists/atheism, 8, 11, 23, 45, 84, 137, 141, 177, 180–81, 188 authoritarianism, 52 Azalīs, 40–41, 47 Bāb (ʿAlī-Moḥammad Shirāzī), 37, 38–42, 44–45, 55, 117 Bābī movement/doctrine: Azalīs and, 41; Bahai Faith and, 42–44; constitutionalist reformism and, 45–46, 48, 103; doctrinal views of, 37–40; madraseh philosophers and, 114, 118–19, 123; mediatory theology and, 31, 35–36; Raštī thought and, 117 Badīʿ-al-Molk Mīrzā, 110–12, 120, 122, 128, 132 Bādkūbī, Seyed Ḥossein, 139 Bāġ-Shāh, 47, 50, 159, 188 Bahais, 30–31, 40–43, 46, 54, 56–59, 101, 181, 188 Bahār, Moḥammad-Taqī, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 27, 48–51 Bahāʾullāh (Ḥossein-ʿAlī Nūrī), 40, 42–44, 55 Bakhtiarī, ʿAlī-qolī Khan Sardār Asʿad, 50 Balance of Truth, The (Pfander), 115 barakat/karāma, 70–73, 77, 82 basīj, 64–65, 84 bast/sitting bast (seeking safe haven, sanctuary), 79–80

Bayānīs, 41–43, 45–46 Bāyrām-qolī Zonūzī, 119 Bāzargān, Mahdī, 56, 60, 135, 184–86 Begging for Redemption (Hedayat), 179 Beginning and the End, The (Mollā-Ṣadrā), 121 Behbahānī, Seyed Moḥammad-Bāqer, 147 Bejeweled Teachings (Najafī), 107 Best of Truths, The (Sabzevārī), 132 Bezels of Wisdom (Ibn ʿArabī), 127, 132, 138–39, 152–53, 167 Bīneš-ʿAlī-Shah (Enteżām-al-Salṭaneh, Seyed Moḥammad), 164 bird, in classical Persian poetry, 2 Black Shiism, 61 Blind Owl, The (Hedayat), 178 Booklet of Reforms (Malkom), 93 Book of Aḥmad (Ṭālebof), 20 Book of Bayān (the Bāb), 41 Book of Certitude (Iqàn), 42 Book of Eight Paradises (Bayānī manifesto), 41, 45 Book of Healing (Ibn Sīnā), 124, 140 Book of Metaphysical Prehensions, The (Mollā-Ṣadrā), 121 Book of Mysticism (Qazvīnī), 165 Book of Salvation (Ibn Sīnā), 140 Book of Systematic Wisdom (Sabzevārī), 132 Borūjerdī, Seyed Moḥammad-Ḥossein Ṭabāṭabāʾī (Grand Ayatollah), 106–7, 136, 139–40, 167 Britain, war on Iran, 12–13 British Raj, 7 Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky), 180 Buber, Martin, 187 Cairo, x Calcutta, 6, 15, 69 Campaign for Cultural Revolution, 185 Caucasian War, 7 causality, principle of, 10–11, 128 Chamber of Secrets (farāmūš-ḵāneh), 15, 124, 159 Christian missionaries, 113–14, 148

[ 222 ]

INDEX

Constantinople, 6 “Constitutional and Law-Based Form of Government, The” (Bayānī manifesto), 43 constitutionalists: Bābī movement and, 47–48; Book of Aḥmad and, 20; Jalāl Āl Aḥmad and, 60; legal reform and, 88, 93; martyrs/martyrdom and, 162; Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah and, 2, 188; mojtaheds/oṣūlīs and, 99, 101, 102–3, 105, 108, 130–31. See also anticonstitutionalists; Taqīzādeh, Seyed Ḥasan; Tonekābonī, Mīrzā Moḥammad-Ṭāher Constitutional Revolution: Bahais and, 43; Bayānīs and, 45–46; judicial reform and, 86; Kasravi and, 54; Ḵorāsānī and, 102–3; modern nation-state and, 51, 166; opposition to magic, 72–73; patrimonial relations and, 55; Sufis/Sufism and, 146, 162, 169 Corbin, Henry, 141–43, 168–70 Crafts Council, 25 dahr, notion of, 8–11, 18, 21, 137 Dajjāl, 38, 59 Dār-al-Fonūn, 9, 22, 26, 161, 164 Dār-al-Šefā’ Madraseh, 124, 129 darāvīš, 35–36 dastgāh, 27 Dāvar, ʿAlī-Akbar, 93, 103–5 Dāvūdī, ʿAli-Morād, 136 Day of ʿĀšūrā, 34, 38, 55, 60, 75, 159, 179 Day of Ġadīr, 33 Day of Judgment, 30, 37, 45, 46 deism, 12, 14 Delhi, 7, 15 Descartes, René, 125–26, 135 Discipline/Doctrine of Difference, 137–38 Dīvān of Ḥāfeż, 3, 69, 139 divination/divination techniques, 67–70, 72–74, 91, 139, 148 divine authority (velāyat), 31–34, 37, 62, 99, 155–156, 165, 188

Divine Guides (aʾemme-e hodā), 32 divinely ordained precepts (ḥodūd), 87, 90, 99–101, 104 divine presence, signs of, 38, 58, 66–67, 74 Divine Splendors (Zonūzī), 119, 121 Divine Witness, The (Mollā-Ṣadrā), 121 doctrinal theology (kalām), 4, 12. See also kalām/kalām teachings Donyā (periodical), 178, 181 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 180 dreams/visions, 67–68, 70–74, 91, 157, 164 East India Company, 7, 13, 115 Egypt, x Emām ʿAlī, 33, 34, 35, 61, 73, 76, 131, 159 Emām Ḥasan, 82 Emām Ḥusayn, 34–35, 38, 76 Emāmī theology/orthodoxy, 33, 35, 36, 40, 43, 48, 59, 87, 93, 104 Emām Mahdi, 33–34, 37–38, 41, 44, 47, 59, 65, 142 Emām Muḥammad al-Taqī, 82 Emām Mūsā al-Kāżim, 82 Emām Reẓā, 77, 97 Emāms, 32–33, 36, 61–62, 76–77, 79, 138, 159 emāmzādehs, 77–83 Emām Zayn-al-ʿĀbidīn, 82 Enteżām-al-Salṭaneh, Seyed Moḥammad (Bīneš-ʿAlī-Shah), 164 Era of Reform, 186 erfān (intellectualized mysticism): appeal of, 158; diversity of views in, 127, 129; Khomeini and, 146, 167, 174; madraseh philosophy and, 137–39, 147; modern nation-state and, 172; mojtaheds/oṣūlīs and, 123; Pahlavi court and, 170; Qomšehʾī and, 152–55; relationship of God/man in, 130; Sufis/Sufism and, 156–57, 165, 168–69, 173; texts/manuscripts of, 132, 142; in Twelver Shia doctrine, 120

[ 223 ]

INDEX

Eṣfahānī, Moḥammad-Ḥasan, 150. See also Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah esoterica, 39, 46, 127, 153 Eṣṭahbānātī, Seyed Moḥammad-Bāqer, 103, 131 esteḵāreh (requesting God’s council), 69, 72 Eʿteṣāmi, Parvin, 27 Ethical Miscellany (periodical), 161 Eṭṭelāʿāt (newspaper), 183 European colonialism, 7 European Enlightenment, 26, 136, 160 Fadāʾīyān-e eslām, 106, 108. See also Sacrificial Warriors of Islam Faḵr-al-Dōleh. See Khan-e Marvī, Ḥājī Moḥammad-Ḥossein falsafeh, 112–15, 117–20, 122, 123, 128–30, 133, 137, 139–40, 148 Fārābī, Abū Naṣr, 112, 116 Farāmūš-ḵāneh (The House of Confidentiality/Chamber of Secrets), 15–18, 24, 79, 94 Farīdūn (Fereydūn), 49 Fat′ḥ-ʿAli Shah, 10, 33, 43, 70, 82–83, 103, 110, 114, 124, 148 Fāṭima al-Zahrā, 33, 34 Fenāri, Mehmet, 153 feqh (knowledge of divine law), 87, 90, 93, 95, 100, 104, 109, 142, 155–56, 187 fetneh (ungodly chaos), 39, 65, 188 Fīlsūf-al-Dōleh Madraseh, 130 Forūġī, Moḥammad-ʿAlī, 133–35, 138, 140 Forūġī-Basṭāmī, ʿAbbās, 4, 149–51, 154 Forūzānfar, Badīʿ-al-Zamān, 168 Four Journeys (Mollā-Ṣadrā), 120–21, 124, 127, 132, 138–40, 147, 152–53, 155, 167 Fourteen Infallibles: Aḵbārīs and, 90–91; Bābī doctrine on, 39–40; Bayānīs and, 45; Bāzargān on, 184; in divine realm/as divine agents, 68–69, 71; emāmzādehs and, 77–78, 84; glorification of/offerings to, 75; as guarantors/intercessors, 76; Islamic Republic and, 66; Khomeini

on, 167; Ḵorāsāni on, 102; madraseh philosophers and, 137–38; mediatory theology/role of, 36–37, 53–54, 59, 61; mojtaheds and, 130, 156; Shaykhīs and, 46–47, 117; Sufis/Sufism and, 164; Ṭabāṭabāʾī and, 142; in Twelver Shia doctrine, 33–34 Franco-Iranian Institute, 142, 169 Fraternal Society (anjoman-e oḵovvat), 159–64, 168, 174 Freedom Movement of Iran (FMI), 184, 186 Freemasonry, 14–16, 18, 160 Ġaffārī, Moḥammad. See Kamāl-al-Molk (Ġaffarī, Moḥammad) Ġaravī-Eṣfahānī, Mīrzā Mahdī, 137 ghazal (form of poem), 145–46, 173–75 Ghazzālī, Muḥammad al-, 112 Glaring Lights (Zonūzī), 153 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 125 God: in creation, 150; deistic/theistic views of, 14; essence of, 110–11; existence of, 8, 121, 125, 137; God-of-the-gaps position, 20; law/ legal reform and, 22, 89, 109; in madraseh philosophy, 11; in monotheistic theology, 29; Nature and, 12, 16, 27–28; as Necessary Existent, 121, 128–29; “Ode to the Morning Bird” and, 2–4, 8, 12; presence in history, 42; as Prime Agent/First Cause, 128; promise made by, 173; as Pure Being/ Existence, 64–66, 116, 120, 129, 133; relationship with man, 14, 90, 100, 130, 147, 154, 172, 182, 187; views on, 1. See also religious life ġolāt, 36, 37 Golestān Palace Library, 26 Golpāyegānī, Abu-ʾl-Faẓl, 129 Gonābādī Order, 163–66 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich, 173–74 Ground Rules (Ibn Torkeh), 153 Guardian Council, 109

[ 224 ]

INDEX

human reason, 23, 31, 102, 117, 126 hypermysticism, 153

Guide to Practical Questions (Khomeini), 107 Guide to Real Truths, The (Fadāʾīyān manifesto), 106 gūšehs (melodic figures), 27 Haas, Wilhelm, 135 Habermas, Jürgen, 187 Hāʾerī-Yazdī, Abd-al-Karīm (Grand Ayatollah), 53, 131 Ḥāfeż/Dīvān of Ḥāfeż, 3–4, 69, 139 Ḥakamīzādeh, ʿAlī-Akbar (ḤakamīYazdī, ʿAlī-Akbar), 53–55, 61, 83, 111, 132, 138 Ḥalabi, Shaykh Maḥmūd, 58–60 Ḥallāj, Ḥusayn son of Manṣūr, 145, 182 Hamadānī, Ayn-al-Qoẓāt, 169 ḥaram (sanctuary), 79 Ḥasan-ʿAlī-Shah, 151 heaven, motif of, 3 Hedāyat, Reẓā-Qolī, 16 Hedayat, Ṣādeq, 178–81, 183 Hegel, Georg, 112, 134 Heidegger, Martin Wilhelm, 187 ḥekmat, 112–14, 118, 120–21, 123–25, 127–30, 133–34, 139, 142, 154, 161, 167–69. See also Transcendental Ḥekmat Hick, John, 187 Hidden Emām, 34, 36–37, 39, 49, 58–59, 61–62, 91, 107, 158 High Council of Defense, 65 ḥikma, 112 History of Islamic Philosophy (Corbin), 141 ḥodūd (divinely ordained precepts), 87, 90, 99–101, 104 Ḥojjatiyeh (organization), 58–60, 140 holiness, sites of, 77–81 Homāyūn (magazine), 54 House of Justice (ʿedālat-ḵāneh), 86, 88, 93, 101–3 ḥozeh (institution of religious learning), 54, 106, 132, 136, 138–40, 143, 167, 170, 186 human body, 68, 100, 171

Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muḥyi-al-Dīn, 116, 120, 127, 129, 138, 139, 152–53, 155, 167, 174 Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ʿUmar ibn ʿAlī, 153 Ibn Rushd, 141 Ibn Saʿūd, ʿAbdulaziz, 51 Ibn Sīnā, Abū ʿAlī Ḥusayn, 112, 124, 127, 132, 135–36, 140, 169, 174 Ibn Torkeh, Ṣāʾen al-Dīn, 153 “I Know Not Your God” (Saʿīdī Sīrjāni), 183 illuminationist philosophy, 116, 169 imām, 33, 145–46, 151 Imām Khomeini, 65. See also Khomeini, Seyed Rūḥullāh (Ayatollah, Imām) Imperial Academy of Philosophy, 143, 170 Incoherence of Philosophers, The (Ghazzālī), 112 intermediate form, of mediatory theologies, 30–31 Iqbal-Lahouri, Mohammad, 50–51 Īraj Mīrzā, 27 “Iranian Islam,” 170 Iran-Iraq War, 64–65, 75, 172–73, 183 Īravānī, ʿAbbās, 148. See also Āqāsī, Ḥājī Mīrzā Isfahani, Seyed Jamāl Vāʿeż-e, 45–46, 103 Islamic Association of Engineers, 185 Islamic Consultative Assembly, 187 Islamic legal values, 87, 90, 97–104, 109, 123 Islamic Republic: Bāzargān and, 184; birth of, 63; emāmzādehs in, 83; Khomeini and, 145–46, 173–75; legal reform and, 87; mediatory theology/role of, 31, 85, 188–89; modernization and, 75; Moṭahharī and, 143; as Party of God, 65–66; political intervention/legitimacy in, 99, 108–9; recruits to, 59; Saʿīdī and, 183

[ 225 ]

INDEX

Islamic State: Theory of the Guardianship of the Jurist, The (Khomeini), 107 Istanbul, x, 10, 15, 43, 97 Jalāl-al-Dīn Mīrzā, 10, 15, 94, 98 Japan, 5 Jazanī, Bīĵan, 172 Jelveh, Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan, 16, 27, 124, 127–29, 131–33, 153, 169 Jews/Jewish community, 30, 51, 58, 66, 75, 101, 125, 181, 186 jinn, 4, 72 judicial system/reform, 86–88, 93, 103–5 jurisprudence: Borūjerdi and, 136; Dāvar and, 87; madraseh philosophers and, 111; mojtaheds and, 123, 129, 131; Oṣūlīs and, 90, 100–102, 114; Ṭabāṭabāʾī and, 142; as traditional learning, 113; Twelver Shia canon and, 104, 149; valī-e faqīh and, 172. See also legal reforms kalām/kalām teachings: divine authority in, 32; Farāmūš-ḵāneh participants and, 16; God in, 11, 14; modern theology of Islam and, 186; on Nature, 4, 8–9, 12; Principle of Oneness and, 29 Ḵalḵālī- Gīvī, Shaykh Ṣādeq, 108 Kamāl-al-Molk (Ġaffarī, Moḥammad), 26, 161 Kan (or Kand), 77–78, 80 Ḵāneqāh, 147, 150–51, 157–58 Kanī, Ḥājj Mollā ʿAlī, 19, 72, 92–93, 98–99, 111, 118, 123, 149, 155 Kant, Immanuel, 112, 134, 135 Karaj, x, 149 karāmat/barakat (ability to interpret signs), 70–73, 77, 82 Karbala, 34, 36–37, 76, 85, 119, 179 Karbala-4 (Operation Karbala-4), 65 Karbala-5 (Operation Karbala-5), 64–65 Kāšānī, ʿAbd-al-Razzāq, 153

Kasravi, Ahmad (Kasravi-Tabrīzī, Ahmad), 53–56, 60–61, 73, 83, 105, 165–67, 171, 178 Kasravi-Tabrīzī, Ahmad, 53 Kāveh (newspaper), 49 Kavkaz-Merkur Company, 6 Kāżemiyeh Madraseh, 130 Kermānī, Āqā Khan, 23, 41, 43–45 Kermānī, Moḥammad-Karīm Khan, 46 Kermānšāhī, Dr. Moḥammad, 22 Kermānšāhī, Moḥammad-ʿAlī, 22–23, 147–48, 151 Keys of Paradise (Qomī), 84 Keys to Eternal Life (Javādī Āmolī), 84 Keys to the Unseen, The (Mollā-Ṣadrā), 121 Khan-e Marvī, Ḥājī MoḥammadḤossein, 118–19, 122–23, 148, 152 Khan-e Marvī Madraseh, 118–19, 122–23, 148, 152 Khomeini, Seyed Rūḥullāh (Ayatollah, Imām): Gorbachev and, 173–74; on human body, 100; Islamic Republic and, 63, 65, 184–85; madraseh philosophy and, 136, 143; mediatory theology of, 167; poetry and, 145–46, 154, 175; in political exile, 107; post-revolutionary mojtaheds and, 187; study/teachings of, 138–39; on violations of God’s law, 99; virtue ethics and, 167 Khorramshahr (Moḥammareh), 12–13 kingship, theory of, 63 Kiyān (periodical), 185 kofr/Kofri (infidelity/blasphemer), 22, 65 ḵorāfeh. See superstition (ḵorāfāt) Ḵorāsānī, Seyed Moḥammad- Kāżem (Āḵond-e Ḵorāsānī), 48, 101–4, 108 Lālehzār Hamadāni, Rabbi, 125–26 lay intellectuals, 19, 23, 41, 56 legal reforms: accommodation of new ideas and, 101; bodily functions and, 100; Dāvar and, 86–88, 93, 103–5; hierarchical dependencies and, 89; as

[ 226 ]

INDEX

inward looking, 101; mojtahed– moqalled relationship in, 90, 92–93, 98, 99, 102; Oṣūlī–Aḵbārī debate and, 89, 114; palace intellectuals and, 93–94, 97–99, 102; patron-client networks/ relations and, 89, 91–93, 97, 105; political opponents/dissenters and, 108; religious law and, 87, 98, 109; social functions and, 104; social realities in, 88–89; Tobacco Protest anecdote, 43, 97–98, 99, 101, 166 legal values (aḥkām), 87, 90, 97–104, 109, 123 Light of Guidance on Divine Authority and Deputyship (Khomeini), 167 literature, Nature in, 27 Living Letters (ḥorūf-e ḥayy), 39–41, 55 madraseh philosophy: Afghani and, 8–9; assaults on/opposition to, 137–38; Bābī movement and, 40; to build alliances/fight enemies, 113–14; Cartesian system and, 125–26; center of learning, 131; concept of dahr in, 8–9; concept of Nature in, 4, 27; curriculum of, 132–33, 136–37, 140, 152; definition of, 23; on divine self-disclosure, 128; esoteric beliefs/practices and, 73; essential concerns of, 111–12; God in, 11; intellectual pedigree and, 112; language/tools of, 118; mediatory theologies and, 35; mojtaheds-philosopher gap, 123–24; nationalist intellectuals and, 133–35; participants in, 16; philosopher/jurist rift, 129–30; principle of causality and, 11, 128; rational sciences and, 122–23; as “real Islamic philosophy,” 140–44; relevance of, 110–11; Sufis/Sufism and, 124, 147, 152; Twelver Shia doctrine and, 29, 42, 113; as Zonūzī’s formulation, 119. See also falsafeh; Four Journeys (Mollā-Ṣadrā); ḥekmat; Mollā-Ṣadrā

madraseh students (ṭollāb), 47, 92, 101, 119, 137, 139, 161 magic/occult practices, 16, 70, 72–73 Mahallātī, Agha Khan, 151 Mahdavī, Yaḥyā, 136 Mahdi of Punjab, 44 Majd al-Molk (Sīnakī), 16 Majles, 87–88, 109, 133, 164 Majlesī, Moḥammad-Bāqer, 33 Major/Minor Occultation, 34, 36–37. See also Age of Occultation; occultation, of the twelfth Emām Malard, x Malek-al-Motakallemīn, 46, 47, 103 Malkom Khan, 10, 13–18, 21, 24, 26, 79, 93–98, 124, 135, 159 man’s existence, purpose of, 11 man’s moral imperative, 4 Manual of Practice (Borūjerdī), 106–7 Martyn, Henry, 115 Martyrs’ Foundation, 173 martyrs/martyrdom, 34, 38, 61, 162, 170–73, 182 Marvels of Wisdom, The (Āqā-ʿAlī Modarres), 111, 122, 126 Marxism, 170, 174 Means of Salvation, The (Khomeini), 100 Mecca, 33, 76–78, 171. See also pilgrimage, ritual of Meccan Revelations (Ibn ʿArabī), 127, 152 mediatory theology: coexistence of multiple faith communities, 31; forms of, 30–31; state-centered, 188; strong/weak forms of, 30–31, 35, 36, 40, 44, 55, 62, 73, 149, 156, 167; term usage, 29, 30; as way to change the world, 66 medicine/medicine men, 21–22, 95, 112 Medina, 76, 78, 80. See also pilgrimage, ritual of Messiah, 48 messianism/messianic themes, 36, 40–45, 48–51, 53, 58, 61, 65, 72, 89, 91, 170, 184, 188 Meygun, x Millennial Secrets (Ḥakamīzādeh), 54

[ 227 ]

INDEX

mimetic turn in Persian visual arts, 24, 26, 161 Minor Despotism (1908–1911), 2, 48 Mīrlōḥī, Seyed Mojtabā (Ṣafavī, Navvāb), 105, 106 Mīrzā, ‘Abd-Allāh, 27 Mission for My Country (MoḥammadReẓā Shah), 73 Modarres, Āqā-ʿAlī, 110–11, 121–22, 125–28, 153, 169 modernization, 57–59, 104, 141, 168–69, 180, 189 Moḥammad-ʿAlī Shah Qajar, 2, 47–48, 50, 102, 131, 146, 162 Moḥammareh (Khorramshahr), 12–13 Mojāhed, Seyed Moḥammad, 119 Mojāhedīn Ḵalq Organization (MKO), 60, 172 mojtaheds (experts in Islamic law): Aḵbārī and, 91; client-patron (mojtahed-moqalled) bonds and, 89, 91–92, 97; God’s favor and, 72; on human body, 100; important works of, 107; Jelveh and, 129; judiciary and, 90, 104; legal reforms and, 103; madraseh philosophers and, 111–14, 123, 128; Malkom on, 21; mediatory theology and, 129–30; mojtahed– moqalled relationship, 90, 92–93, 98, 99, 102; on non-Muslims, 101; perception of God, 154–56; postrevolutionary generation of, 187; on rule of law, 98–99; social interventionism of, 99. See also Oṣūlīs Mojtahed-Ṭehrānī, Mīrzā Masīḥ, 118 Mollā-ʿAlī. See Nūrī, Mollā-ʿAlī Mollā-Ṣadrā, 112, 115–21, 124, 127, 129, 132, 135, 137–40, 143, 147, 152–55, 167, 169, 174 monarch/monarchs: authority of, 97; in Bābī lore, 38; Bahār on, 50; divine support of, 72; in paintings, 24–25; Shaykhīs and, 46, 91; Sufism and, 148–49. See also specific monarchs monotheistic theologies, 29–30, 32, 54

morāds (Sufi masters), 147, 165 Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century (Ikeda and Gorbachev), 174 morīd/morād, 147, 158, 165 Moṣavver-Ḥajjār, Mīrzā ʿAlī-Akbar Khan, 161 Moṣtafavī, Seyed Rūḥollāh, 136. See also Khomeini, Seyed Rūḥullāh (Ayatollah, Imām) Mostašār-al-Dōleh, Mīrzā Yūsof, 95–97, 104 Mostōfi-al-Mamālek, Yūsof Āštiyānī, 16, 78, 157 Moṭahharī, Ayatollah Mortaẓā, 143, 186 motašarreʿ, 100–101 Muḥammad, Prophet, 33–36, 54, 67, 114 music, Nature and, 26–27 mysticism. See erfān (intellectualized mysticism) Najaf, 22, 48, 53, 76, 80, 85, 101, 103, 107, 131–33, 136, 138–39 Najafī, Moḥammad-Ḥasan, 93, 107 Najafī-Eṣfahāni, Sheikh Nūr-Allāh, 103 Najmābādī, Mollā-Hādī Shaykh, 16, 46, 131 Naṣerī Wisdom (Lālehzār), 125 Nasr, Seyed Hossein, 141–43, 168–70 nationalist intellectuals, 133–36 nationalist messianism, 48–49, 51 National Supreme Court, 88, 103, 105 nation-state/nation-state building, 51–53, 84, 86, 109, 133, 163–64, 166, 172, 184 natural law/law of nature, 9–11, 14, 19, 22, 53, 93, 138 Nature: in art/visual arts, 24–26; causation/causality and, 10–12; civilization and, 6–7; concept of dahr and, 8–11; in doctrinal theology (kalām), 4, 12; heaven, comparison to, 3; in madraseh philosophy, 4; as metonym for God, 8; music and, 26–27; neyčerī/neyčerī doctrine and, 7–10; “Ode to the Morning Bird” and, 2–4, 8, 12; science as

[ 228 ]

INDEX

explanation for, 20; shifting views/ perspective on, 1, 11, 24, 26; Sufism on, 4; theism/deism transition, 12; view of natural/supernatural in, 5, 18–22, 28 naẕr (a vow for the sake of God), 74–76, 78, 80, 83 Neʿmat-Allāhī Order, 150–51, 163 New Sepahsālār Madraseh, 122, 123 neyčerī/neyčerī doctrine, 7–10 Nizārī-Ismailis, 151 Note on Divine Vicegerency (Qomšehʾī), 153 numerology, 37, 117, 158 Nūr-ʿAlī-Shah, 163 Nūrī, Ḥossein-ʿAlī (Bahāʾullāh), 40, 42–44, 55 Nūrī, Mīrzā Yaḥyā (Ṣobḥ-e Azal), 40 Nūrī, Mollā-ʿAlī, 115, 118, 128 Nūrī, Shaykh Faẓl-Allāh, 47, 60, 99, 101, 103, 109, 131 Occidentosis: A Plague from the West (Āl Aḥmad), 59–60 occultation, of the twelfth Emām, 34, 38, 44, 48, 59. See also Age of Occultation; Major/Minor Occultation “Ode to the Morning Bird” (Bahār), 2–4, 8, 12, 48 ʿolamā: on absolute monarchy, 42; Āḵundzādeh and, 94–95; Bābīs/Bābī theology and, 39–40; Bahais and, 57–58; Bayānīs and, 45–47; classifications of people by, 92; competing view of Nature and, 21–22, 24; divinatory practices/ magic/visions, 69–74; on divine influence in society, 65; evaluation of theologies, 35–36; in Farāmūsḵāneh, 16; Hedayat and, 180–81; Jelveh and, 127–29; jurisprudence/ legal reforms and, 86–89, 102, 104–6; Khomeini as, 145; madraseh philosophy and, 111, 113–14, 118, 128, 130, 136–37; mediatory theology

and, 47; patron-client networks/ patrimonial relations and, 55, 93; pilgrimages of, 80; Qomšehʾī and, 154–55; religious criticism and, 53; Revolutionary Court and, 108; Sepahsālār and, 123; Shaykh a lRaʾīs and, 43–44; Sufis/Sufism and, 146–51, 156, 169; theological preferences/differences, 19, 117; Tobacco Protest and, 97–99; tombs of, 79; Tudeh Party and, 56 ʿolamā-rōḥānīs, 74, 104–6, 140, 167–68, 170, 181, 183 Old Sepahsālār Madraseh, 122 Olfat, Moḥammad-Bāqer, 103 ōliyā (saintly figures), 32, 68 One Word (Mostašār-al-Dōleh), 96–97 On the Unity of Being and All Beings (Ibn Torkeh), 153 Order of Spiritual Ascendance (Ibn Fāriḍ), 153 Oṣūlīs: ʿĀqā-ʿAbd-Allāh Zonūzī and, 119; association with God, 71; feud with Aḵbārīs, 89–91; jurisdiction of, 87; on law/legal values, 99–100, 103–4; madraseh philosophers and, 114, 118, 129; on meaning of faith, 99; mediatory theology and, 36, 92; Nūrī and, 116–17; palace intellectuals and, 27–28; Sufis/Sufism and, 147–49, 151, 156; on superstitions, 73 Ovnatanian, Akop, 25 Pahlavi, Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah, 56, 57, 59, 62, 73–75, 86, 99, 107, 141, 168, 172 Pahlavi, Reẓā Shah: Bahais and, 57; Bahār and, 50, 51; Constitutional Revolution and, 55–56; Dāvar and, 86, 88; Hedayat and, 180; IqbalLahouri and, 50–51; Jews/Jewish community and, 51; legal reforms and, 93, 103–4; modernization and, 138; Sufis/Sufism and, 163; supernatural power/superstitions and, 73; Tonekābonī’ and, 133. See also Pahlavi, Moḥammad-Reẓā Shah

[ 229 ]

INDEX

palace intellectuals: Afghani and, 11, 12; Āḵundzādeh and, 9–10, 25; anticlerical faction, 94–95; Bābī movement and, 40; deistic view of, 24; on divine-right kings, 43; European philosophy/civilization and, 6–7, 122, 124, 126–27, 134–35; on legal/judicial reforms, 93, 98; madraseh philosophers and, 123; Malkom as, 13, 15, 18; metaphysical inquiry and, 110; on nature of reason, 102; ‘olamā and, 21–22; Oṣūlīs and, 27; in Paris Masonic Society, 14; political reform and, 97; on religion/religious practices, 18–19; Sufis/Sufism and, 151–52, 154, 156–57, 160 Palace of Justice, 88, 103 Pand-e Ṣāleḥ (advice booklet), 163 Pan-Islamist movement, 43 pantheism/pantheistic views, 24, 181 Parousia (żuhūr), 34, 36–37, 61 Pascal, Blaise, 134 patron-client networks/relations, 52, 89, 91–93, 97, 105, 130 People’s Mojahedin Organization (PMO), 60 Perfect Man (qoṭb), 156, 164–68, 172 Persian Awaking Lodge, 160 Persian Book of Psalms (Iqbal), 51 Perso-British War, 12–13 Perso-Russian Wars, 21–22 Pfander, Karl Gottlieb, 115 pilgrimage, ritual of, 66, 68, 74, 76–78, 80–85 pluralism, 187–88 poems/poetry: ʿerfān poetry, 154; ghazal, 145–46, 173–75; of Khomeini, 145; Nature in, 27; “Ode to the Morning Bird” and, 2–4, 8, 12, 48–49; of Qāʾānī, 3–4; of Saadi, 161; of Saʿīdī Sīrjāni, 181–83; of Shamlu, 176–77, 181–82; of Forūġī-Basṭāmī, 4, 150 polytheism, 54 Popper, Karl R., 187 Prime Dot, 39–40

Principle of Oneness (tōḥīd), 29–30, 31, 39, 61, 121 Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism, The (ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī), 141, 143 Principles of the Theory of Jurisprudence (Ḵorāsānī), 102 Proof of Islam, The (Nūrī), 115 Pure Family, 32, 34 Qāʾānī, Mīrzā Ḥabīb (poet), 3–4 Qādiani, Mīrzā Ghulam-Aḥmad, 44 Qajar, Aḥmad Shah, x Qajar, Moḥammad Shah, 37, 38, 148 Qajar, Możaffar-al-Dīn Shah, 46–47, 59 Qajar, Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah: artwork of, 25–26; Bābis and, 38–39; cupola installation by, 83; dream-vision of, 72; Kamāl-al-Molk and, 26; legal reforms and, 96; Malkom and, 18; Naṣerī Wisdom and, 125; paintings of, 24; palace intellectuals and, 21; Qomšehʾī and, 155; Secret Notebook and, 15; Sufis/Sufism and, 149–50, 159; Tobacco Protest and, 97–99; Forūġī-Basṭāmī’s tie to, 4 Qamar. See Vazīri, Qamar-al-Molūk qānūn (legal code), 87, 93, 104 Qānūn (newspaper), 93–94 Qāsem-Khān Madraseh, 122 Qayṣarī, Dāvūd, 153 Qazvin, x, 91, 165 Qazvīnī, Keyvān, 164–66 Qazvīnī- Ḵorāsānī, Shaykh Mojtaba, 137 Qiliç clans, x Qom, x, xvii, 54–55, 77–78, 85, 106, 119, 132, 133, 136–38, 140–42, 167, 174 Qomī, ʿAbbās, 84 Qomšehʾī, Āqā-Moḥammad-Reẓā (Ṣahbā), 127–29, 131–33, 152–55, 157–58, 167, 169, 182 qorbānī (valuable offering), 74–75, 83 qoṭb (Perfect Man), 156, 164–68, 172 Qūnavī, Ṣadr-al-Dīn, 152 Qurʾān: Aḵbārīs and, 90; ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī and, 139, 142; children

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reading from, 59; Christian missionaries and, 114; consulting for advice, 69; declaration of intent, 69; on divine mandate, 30; esoterica and, 39; on gift of ḥikma, 112; on God/authority of God, 31–32, 66, 176; on ḥikma, 112; intellectual inquiry and, 137; Mīrzā-Yūsof and, 97; MKO slogan from, 60; mojtaheds and, 100, 130; Mollā-Ṣadrā’s commentary on, 121; in Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah’s dreamvision, 72; Naṣerī Wisdom and, 125; on ‘Our chosen one,’ 44; on Party of God, 65; Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah and, 158; Saʿīdī and, 182; on seeing God/signs of God, 67, 68; Shamlu and, 176; Shaykhīs and, 117; Throne Verse in, 35–36; wisdom literature and, 184 radīf system, 27 Raštī, Seyed Kāżem, 36–37, 46, 117 rationalism, 18, 23, 45, 126–27, 133 Ray (Raga), x, 77, 80 reason, xii, 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 22–24, 31, 41–44, 80, 90, 93, 95, 102, 117, 120, 122–24, 126–27, 131–33, 135, 137–38 Rebuttal of the Neyčerīs (Afghani), 8 Red Shiism, 61 reformism, xiii, 17, 48, 188 religion/science relationship, 5, 19 religious intellectuals, 186–187 religious life: acts of piety/pious acts, 70–71, 74, 76, 80, 82–85; divination/ divination techniques, 67–70, 72–74, 91, 139, 148; magic/occult practices and, 16, 70, 72–73; ritual observance, 75; ritual of pilgrimage, 66, 68, 74, 76–78, 80–85; signs of divine presence, 38, 58, 66–67, 74; veridical dreams-visions, 67–68, 70–74, 91, 157, 164 religious skepticism, 177 Remarks & Admonitions (Ibn Sīnā), 124, 140 revisionism, xi, xiii, 19, 52, 184

revolution: friends/enemies of, 108; God/law after, 109. See also Constitutional Revolution; White Revolution (1962) Revolutionary Court, 108 Rewards and Punishments of Deeds (Sheikh Ṣadūq), 74 ritual observance, 75 Robat-Karim, x Rorty, Richard, 187 Rūhī, Shaykh Aḥmad, 41 Saadi, Moṣleḥ-al-Dīn (poet), 161 Sabzevārī, Ḥāji Mollā-Hādī, 132, 143 Sacrificial Warriors of Islam, 55, 105. See also Fadāʾīyān-e eslām Ṣadīqī, Ġolām-Ḥossein, 136 Ṣadr-al-Dīn Shirazi (Ṣadr-almutaʾallihīn). See Mollā-Ṣadrā Ṣadr Madraseh, 129 Ṣadūq, Shaykh Moḥammad ibn ‘Ali Ibn Babawaih, 74 Ṣafā-ʿAlī-Shah, 158 Safavid dynasty, 61, 106, 113, 115, 119, 147 Ṣafavī, Navvāb. See Mīrlōḥī, Seyed Mojtabā (Ṣafavī, Navvāb) Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shah, 150–52, 154, 157–59, 164–67, 182 Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shahi Order (Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shāhīs), 150, 152, 158–59, 165 Ṣahbā, 154. See also Qomšehʾī, ĀqāMoḥammad-Reẓā (Ṣahbā) šahīd (martyr), 170–71. See also martyrs/ martyrdom Saʿīdī Sīrjāni, ʿAlī-Akbar, 181–83 Ṣāleh-ʿAlī-Shah, Moḥammad-Ḥasan, 163 samāt (duʿā-e samāt), 32 Sangelajī, Moḥammad, 103–4, 165–66 Sangelajī, Moḥammad-Ḥasan Šarīʿat, 53–55, 61, 103 šar (šarīʿat), 87, 151 Sardār Asʿad. See Bakhtiarī, ʿAlī-qolī Khan Sardār Asʿad SAVAK, 170

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science/religion relationship, 5, 19 Secret Booklet (Malkom), 96 Secret Notebook (Malkom), 15, 18 secular intellectuals, 187 secularization/secularism, 29, 41, 43, 49, 51–54, 59, 62, 74, 84, 94, 104, 108, 132–33, 152, 168, 170, 178, 181, 185–87 Sepahsālār, Mīrzā Ḥossein Khan, 10, 21, 78, 122–23, 132 Sepahsālār, Moḥammad-Khan, 93, 98–99, 122 Sepahsālār Madraseh, 122–23, 132, 136 “Seventy-Two Creeds” (Kermānī), 24 Shāhābādi, Moḥammad-ʿAli, 132, 138 Shah-ʿAbd-al-ʿAżīm, 77, 79–80, 82–83 Shahnameh (Book of Kings), 49 Shahr-e-Rey, 10, 77, 82 Shamlu, Ahmad, 176–77, 181–82 Shariati, ʿAli, 61–62, 143, 170–72 Shaykh al-Raʾīs, Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Mīrzā, 43–44 Shaykhīs, 37, 40, 46–47, 76, 91, 116–20, 122–23, 147–48 Shehābi, Maḥmūd, 104 Shia mediatory theologies, 31, 36, 76. See also Twelver Shia/Twelver Shia doctrine Shirāzī, ʿAlī-Moḥammad (the Bāb), 37, 38–42, 44–45, 55, 117 Shirazi, Mīrzā Ḥasan, 43 Shirāzi, Mīrzā Jahāngīr Khan (ṢūrEsrāfīl), 46 Shīrāzī, Ṣadr-al-Dīn Moḥammad, 112. See also Mollā-Ṣadrā Shoghí Effendí, 56–57 Sīnakī, Majd al-Molk, 16 Sincère Amitié Lodge, 14–15 sites of holiness, 77–81 Siyāsī, ʿAlī-Abkar, 136 skepticism, xii–xiii, 44, 177, 181 Ṣobḥ-e Azal. See Nūrī, Mīrzā Yaḥyā (Ṣobḥ-e Azal) Sohravardī, Shahāb-al-Dīn, 112, 116, 169 Solṭān-ʿAlī-Shah, 163 Soroush, Abdolkarim, 185–86

state’s right, to pass laws, 87 Stories of the ʿOlamā (Tonekābonī), 71 “strong” form, of mediatory theologies, 30–31, 35, 36, 40, 44, 55, 62, 73, 149–56, 167 Subject of Knowledge (Torkeh), 153 Sufi masters, 147, 149–51, 154–56, 158, 163, 165–66 Sufi Orders. See Fraternal Society (anjoman-e oḵovvat); Gonābādī Order; Neʿmat-Allāhī Order; Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shahi Order (Ṣafī-ʿAlī-Shāhīs) Sufis/Sufism: ‘Ali Shariati and, 170–71; Āqāsi and, 149; under Borūjerdi, 167; critique of, 165–66; emancipatory ethos of, 160; entitlements/ appointments for, 149; Farāmūšḵāneh participants and, 16; Fraternal Society and, 159–64, 168, 174; Gonābādī Order, 163–66; humanistic ethos of, 161; as intellectual/religious platform, 157; Keyvān Qazvīnī and, 165–66; legitimacy claims of, 155; martyrs/ martyrdom, 34, 38, 61, 162, 170–73, 182; Marxism and, 170, 174; meditative journey idea of, 156–57; modernization and, 168–69, 174; modern revival of, 158; under Moḥammad Shah, 148–49; national heritage celebration, 168–69; on Nature, 4; neutering of, 169; paradigm shift in, 174; persecution of, 147–48; political implications of, 156; Principle of Oneness and, 29; Qomšeh’ī and, 152; for religion/ civilization reconciliation, 151–52; roots in Iranian history, 146; Ṣafā-ʿAlī-Shah and, 151; Sa’īdī’ and, 182; in social life of Tehran, 158; soldiers and, 172; transformation of, 162–63, 166–67; virtue ethics and, 166–67 Sunnis, xii, 30, 76, 98 supernatural realm, 5, 18–22, 28, 67, 73, 84, 94, 180, 188

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superstition (ḵorāfāt), 5, 19, 21, 41, 53, 73–74, 114, 118, 131, 140, 156 Supreme Court/National Supreme Court, 88, 103, 105 Supreme Jurist (valī-e faqīh), 66, 85, 87, 172 Ṣūr-e Esrāfīl—The Trumpet (newspaper), 46 Syed Ahmad Khan (Sir Syed), 7–11, 21 Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Seyed Abu’-l-Ḥasan, 124. See also Jelveh, Abu-ʾl-Ḥasan Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Seyed Moḥammad-Ḥossein. See ʿAllāmeh Ṭabāṭabāʾī Tabriz, 46, 54, 119, 140, 148 Ṭālebof, ʿAbd-al-Raḥīm, 19–20 Tale of Creation, The (Hedayat), 183 Ṭāleqānī, Seyed Maḥmūd, 56 Tanzimat manuals, 15 Taqavi, Seyed Naṣr-Allāh, 103 Taqīzādeh, Seyed Ḥasan, 49, 51, 135 Tavallāʾī, Shaykh Maḥmūd (Shaykh Maḥmūd Ḥalabi), 58–60 theism, 12, 14, 17, 23 theological skepticism, 177, 181 Thousand-Year-Old Secrets (Ḥakamīzādeh), 83 Throne Verse, 35–36 Thus Spake the Earth (Shamlu), 176–77, 181 Tillich, Paul, 187 tobacco/Tobacco Protest, 43, 97–98, 99, 101, 166 tōḥīd (Principle of Oneness), 29–30, 31, 39, 61, 121 tombs of holy persons (emāmzādehs), 77–83 Tonekābonī, Mīrzā Moḥammad-Ṭāher, 105, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135 Tonekābonī, Moḥammad, 71 Tonekābonī, Moḥammad-Valī Khan, 50, 71–72 Tour of Philosophy in Europe (Forūġī), 133, 135 Transcendental Ḥekmat, 115–16, 124, 139, 144, 152. See also ḥekmat

Treatise on the Temporality of the World (Mollā-Ṣadrā), 121 Treatise on Walāya (Qomšehʾī), 153 Treatise to Awaken the Ignorant (PseudoNūrī), 101, 109 Treaty of Paris, 13 Tudeh Party, 56, 60, 141, 178, 180–81 Ṭūni, Moḥammad- Ḥossein Fāẓel-e, 136 Turkey, 5 Ṭūsī, Ḵājeh Naṣīr al-Dīn, 112, 135 Twelver Shia/Twelver Shia doctrine: acts of piety/pious acts, 74; the Bāb and, 39; Bayānīs/Bahais and, 42, 46; Borūjerdī and, 106; burial sites/emāmzādehs in, 77, 79; divine agents in, 70–71; erfān in, 120; fissures in, 117; Fourteen Infallibles in, 33–34; on God’s essence, 120; Ḥakamīzādeh and, 53–54; jurisprudence and, 104, 149; Kasravi and, 54; Khomeini and, 107; Ḵorāsānī and, 102; madraseh philosophy and, 29, 42, 113, 127; mediatory roles/theology in, 32–34, 36–37; mediatory theology of, 76; Mīrzā-Yūsof and, 97; Oṣūlīs/Aḵbārīs feud, 89; pilgrimage in, 84; prayer manuals in, 78; Principle of Oneness in, 29–30; on private property, 149; religious calendar in, 75; Shariati and, 61; Shoghí Effendí and, 57; Sufis/Sufism and, 160; tobacco/ Tobacco Protest and, 98 Unbreakable Bond, The (Yazdī), 107 United States, 5, 108, 134, 187 Unity of Being doctrine, 120, 129 Universal House of Justice, 57–58 University of Tehran, 56, 103–4, 132–33, 135, 138, 141, 168, 170, 177, 181–82 Varamin, x, 149 Vazīr-Daftar, Mīrzā Hedāyat-Allāh Khan, 157 Vazīri, Qamar-al-Molūk, 1–2, 27

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INDEX

velāyat (divine authority), 31–34, 37, 62, 99, 155–56, 165, 188 veridical dreams-visions, 67–68, 70–74, 91, 157, 164 virtue ethics, 166–67 visual arts, Nature in, 24–26, 28, 161 war: with Britain, 12–13; God with us in, 64–66; Perso-Russian, 21–22 Warriors of Islam, 55, 66, 105, 172 “weak” form, of mediatory theologies, 30, 44, 62 Wedding of the Blessed, The (movie), 173 Westoxication (Āl Aḥmad), 59–60 White Revolution (1962), 59 wilāya/wilāyatīs, 31, 62, 167 Wisdom of the Throne, The (Mollā-Ṣadrā), 121 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 187

women: in Ethical Miscellany, 162; formulation of laws and, 109; Fraternal Society and, 160; requirements/critiques of feqh, 100–101, 187; social reforms and, 105 Yārsān/Yārsān doctrine, 30, 35. See also Ahl-e Ḥaqq (“People of the Truth”) Yazdī, Moḥammad-Kāẓem, 107 Yūšīj, Nīmā, 27 Żahīr-al-Dōleh, ʿAlī-Khan, 158, 161–64, 174 Zarābādī, Seyed Mūsā, 137 Zarrīnkūb, ʿAbd-al- Ḥossein, 168 ziyārat (making pilgrimage), 74–75, 83 Zonūzī, Āqā-ʿAbd-Allāh, 119, 121, 127, 148, 152–53, 169 Zoroastrians, xii, 30

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