Who decides which Shiʿis are moderate?
This week I finished a paper on Asadullāh Mubashshirī’s preface to the Persian translation of Henry Corbin’s history of Islamic philosophy. In it I cited Rasūl Jaʿfariyān with gratitude, as the historian who had mapped the reformers of twentieth-century Iran who wanted an Islam purified of superstition. I closed my paragraph on them with what I called the strange fate of a purifying movement that ends by needing a category of the impure. His note ‘Extremist Shiʿis, Moderate Shiʿis in Western Research and Iranian Politics’, posted on the Persian site Rāhak on Sunday 7 Tīr 1394 (28 June 2015), was brought to my attention by a friend who had read the first draft of my paper on Mubashshirī. Jaʿfariyān’s note makes fifteen points on Shiʿi studies in the West and Iran. There the category of the impure is called extremism. Its seventh point names the Institute in which I work.
His case deserves a fair hearing first. There are, for him, two Shiʿisms. The extremist one reads the world as a gnostic would, gives the imams a trace of divinity and makes the imamate the whole of religion, so that the law counts for little and the inner meaning for everything. Moderate Imāmī, that is Twelver, Shiʿism puts the law first and sifts what is reported in the imams’ names; it upholds the authority of the senior jurists, who uphold it in turn. On his account the extremist line runs through the Ismailis, or some of them, whose thinkers produced what he calls strange philosophies of religion, Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s included, and on to the Shaykhīs and the Bābīs of nineteenth-century Iran. Much Western scholarship, from Corbin to Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, has taken the extremist face for the original. At home, the eulogists of the pulpit and a politics built around the awaited twelfth imam spread it further. He wrote when Wahhabis, al-Qaeda and ISIS were saying the Shiʿa had left Islam through extremist beliefs, and his wish to show the world a moderate Shiʿism is honourable. About the eulogists (the new class of devotional signers supported by the state – the maddāḥs, in post-revolutionary Iran), I think he is right.
Yet the note fails at its foundation, and its foundation is one sentence. Moderate Imāmī Shiʿism, he writes, tries to fit the faith within ‘what the majority of Muslims want’, on the basis of reasonable beliefs and an accepted law. Accepted by whom, and reasonable to whom? Inside his sentence the only answer on offer is the majority. The three tests collapse into one test of conformity. In Mubashshirī’s preface the same premise holds that Muslims are properly one community, so that whatever divides them is a graft put there by enemies, by missionaries and the hirelings of colonialism. In Jaʿfariyān’s note the one community has become the majority, the graft has become extremism, and the enemies have become sponsors abroad. In his last point they include some of the world’s great intelligence services, whose political meddling in this research he does not at all deny. Stated so generally, the charge of meddling specifies nothing until someone names the service and the study. Run honestly, the premise gives itself away. Belief in a twelfth imam hidden until his return, and in imams preserved from error, has never been what the majority of Muslims want. By Jaʿfariyān’s own measure, then, the Twelver Shiʿism he defends belongs in the extremist column – beside the rest of us. A measure that would disqualify the tradition of the man who applies it tells us where he stands, and little else.
At 5:48 the Qurʾān takes the position contrary to the premise of the single community. God tells the communities of revelation that He has given each of them a law and a way, and that had He willed, He would have made them one community. He did not, so that He might test them in what He had given them; they are to vie with one another in good works, since all of them return to Him, who will tell them what they differed over. The verse leaves Muslims free to argue that others are wrong. It keeps for God the verdict on who belongs.
A second weakness lies in the label itself, and Jaʿfariyān supplies the evidence. In his first point he records that the old quarrel over the extremists was political as well as intellectual, that it came to charges of unbelief, and that the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers, in the name of fighting deviation, executed extremist leaders such as Abū’l-Khaṭṭāb. Who, then, drew the line between moderate and extremist? The word was a weapon before it was a category. The catalogues of sects that preserve it were written by parties to the fight. To adopt their verdicts as a historian’s categories is to read a partisan record as a neutral one. Doing so also prejudges the question Amir-Moezzi raises: was the line drawn later and read back into the early reports? His thirteenth and fourteenth points show the weapon still in service, sorting a former president’s circle and the rivalry between Hāshimī Rafsanjānī and Miṣbāḥ Yazdī. What the label hides is a disagreement about authority, which Jaʿfariyān himself states. In the view he rejects, the imamate is the foundation of the faith. In his, the faith has its own foundation, which the imams protected and the jurists now guard. A disagreement about authority deserves an open argument. Calling one side extremist is a way of avoiding it.
The seventh point is closer to home. Jaʿfariyān grants that the London Institute’s research is academic and objects instead to its effect, a picture of Shiʿism close to the Ismailis and their esotericism. He asserts that effect without measuring it. Why should a picture of Shiʿism be a distortion merely because it stands close to the Ismailis? His own list of serious scholars undoes the assumption, since its first name, Wilferd Madelung, was a senior research fellow at the same Institute from 1999 until his death in 2023. On the law, the texts tell against him. Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, chief judge to the Fatimid caliphs in the tenth century, wrote their law book and then a second book on the inner meaning of the same law. The second never displaced the first. A century later the chief preacher of the Fatimid mission, Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s teacher in Cairo, attacked those who treated the ritual prayer as a mere symbol and stopped performing it. The record is not clean, since at Alamūt, the Nizārī Ismaili stronghold in northern Iran, the outward law was suspended in 1164. Yet it was suspended by the imam’s command, and the Nizārī texts rebuke those who took the suspension for a licence. Within half a century the same line of imams restored the law. As for filing research on the Ismailis, in principle, with research on the Bābīs and the Bahāʾīs, which he does while warning against too close a link, in Iran, I fear, that classification does not stay in the library.
He ends by asking educated readers to tell the currents apart. I would add one discipline: judge a reading by its evidence, whoever sponsors it, and let the unconventional reader stand, since a settled reading can be tested only against one that differs from it. Two findings would count against me. One is that the early imams made the majority’s preference the test of sound belief; the other, an Ismaili author of the Fatimid or Alamūt period who, on his own authority, set the inner meaning against the law and was upheld by his tradition for it. Until then I shall go on citing his history of the reformers with gratitude. I had not expected to find its author on his own map.
This essay was originally written in Persian. An adapted English translation of it, almost verbatim, is posted on Twin Wisdoms. AI (Claude, Opus 5) has done the translation.
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