Reason, Dissent, and Ecumenism in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life and Thought of “Shaykh” Hadi Najmabadi

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the life and thought of Hādi Najmābādī (1250–1320/1834-1835–1902), a largely neglected Iranian, Twelver Shīʿī jurist (mujtahid) of the top religious scholarly rank who was philosophically inclined, led dissident networks against authorities and was an innovative and atypical Muslim thinker including in the ecumenical aspects of his life and thought. This is the first comprehensive study devoted to Najmābādī, of this length in any language, and in any form in English. Najmābādī, a religious authority of controversy as well as wide popularity during his life, lived in a period in which there were a dynamic political, economic, religious, and socio-cultural shifts and challenges, for Iran, the wider Middle Eastern and Islamic regions and the world, particularly as a result European expansions in colonialism. His much better-known ally, with whom he shared much in common, including a philosophical bent and disdain for the Iranian government, Sayyid Jamāl al-Din “al-Afghānī” Asadābādī was the so-called “father of Islamic modernism” who traversed the world in anti-colonial and Pan-Islamic efforts while favoring European style reforms, including in education, law and limiting excesses and authoritarian dimensions of government for Muslim nations. The limited scholarship on Najmābādī has followed much of the hagiographic primary sources by his students and admirers that fits within a “great man” theory framework, this dissertation collects together the primary material available on Najmābādī to present the views and understandings of him during his life and memories of him after, allowing the sources and his writings to reveal what was most prominent in his life and ideas and how others viewed him. This study was able to reconstruct and reevaluate Najmābādī’s life and his leading role in Iranian society through examining and evaluating a wide variety of disparate sources ranging from biographies and prosopographies, memoirs and diaries, travelogues, histories by contemporaries, family documents and accounts, interviews, letters, accounts by religious minorities, foreign and domestic government documents, accounts and letters including by British officials, police reports, manuscripts of his writings that mention or reveal clues about Najmābādī, his interlocutors and his context. By reading against the grain of the hagiographic accounts about and documents on Najmābādī and revealing the many tensions in his life and work previously ignored or missed, this study arrives at a more complex picture of him that places him in his proper context politically and theologically. While not entirely dismissing the accounts and relying on the kernels of truth within them to build a narrative of some of his life, this research also identifies and evaluates contradictions between the sources and details of his life that bear further examination. Among these are his close contacts and allyship and mentorship over a Qajar prince and powerful statesmen who worked for the state, including a prime minister, despite being depicted as a staunch anti-Qajar government dissident and allying with those dissident groups and inveighing against the shah and his supporters in his main book. Moreover, the dissertation is the first to do such a close study of his text, Taḥrīr al-ʿuqalā’, identifying and examining its major themes and innovative ideas that previous scholarship has largely, or in some aspects entirely, missed. In the first chapter of the study, I explore Najmābādī’s context, focusing on native developments and movements both continuities as well as new movements and breaks with the past as well as the encounters with European imperialism in the Great Game between Britain and Russia in which Iran was caught in between. I show how Najmābādī fit with some of these developments or could have encountered or been impacted by them or those among his networks who were. I then examine his life and times, his education and prominent family that was important in his life, how prominent Iranians who knew him and the British viewed him, and piece together the disparate sources and mentions of him to put together a more full, complex picture of his role and life. In the next chapter, I identify the key broad themes of Taḥrīr al-ʿuqalā’ that include Najmābādī’s central focus on reason (ʿaql), affirming monotheism (tawhid) and ethics (akhlāq). While much of the content he discusses is theologically based, including reflecting some of his innovative and unique beliefs, there is a heavy focus on epistemology and discerning truth from falsehood, which the training of character (tahdhīb al-akhlāq). The next focus of the study expands on his focus on ethics as a foundation from which he views politics and challenging of authority, as he critiques the Qajar government in limited but crucial aspects of his book. His strong connections and dissident cooperation against Nāṣir al-Dīn and his ministers, similarities to and differences with Afghānī and Malkam Khān are also explored and analyzed. Finally, the last chapter focusing on Najmābādī’s interfaith interactions and ecumenical stances contains some of the most original and significant discoveries on Najmābādī and his atypical positions within Islamic and religious history, much of it relating to his ecumenical attitudes and activities that I argue are reflective of and informed by his strong philosophical orientation, as much of the rest of his life and thought was. In this last chapter, the dissertation addresses the controversy and debates surrounding him about his religious identity, particularly allegations during his life and since about whether or not he was a Bābī and how prominent figures of different religions viewed him.