Shaykh Ahmad
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He was a native of the Al-Ahsa region (Eastern Arabian Peninsula), educated in Bahrain and the theological centers of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq. Spending the last twenty years of his life in Iran, he received the protection and patronage of princes of the Qajar dynasty.
History
Early Life
Little is documented about the early life of Shaykh Ahmad, except that he was born in Ahsa, in the northeast of the arabian peninsula, to a Shi'a family that had ancestrally been Sunni in either the year 1166 A.H. (1753 C.E.), or 1157 A.H. (1744 C.E.). Nabil-i-Azam, an apologetic Babi historian documents his spiritual awakening thusly:
- He observed how those who professed the Faith of Islam had shattered its unity, sapped its force, perverted its purpose, and degraded its holy name. His soul was filled with anguish at the sight of the corruption and strife which characterised the Shí'ah sect of Islam.... Forsaking his home and kindred, on one of the islands of Bahrayn, to the south of the Persian Gulf, he set out,... to unravel the mysteries of those verses of Islamic Scriptures which foreshadowed the advent of a new Manifestation
[revelation] .... There burned in his soul the conviction that no reform, however drastic, within the Faith of Islam, could achieve the regeneration of this perverse people. He knew,... that nothing short of a new and independent Revelation, as attested and foreshadowed by the sacred Scriptures of Islam, could revive the fortunes and restore the purity of that decadent Faith.
Education and Mission
Shaykh Ahmad, at about age forty, began to study in earnest in the Shi'a centres of religious scholarship such as Karbala and Najaf. He attained sufficent recognition in such circles to be declared a mujtahid, an interpreter of Islamic Law. He contended with Sufi and Neo-Platonist scholars, and attained a positive reputation among their detractors. Most interestingly, he declared that all knowledge and sciences were contained (in essential form) within the Qur'an, and that to excell in the sciences, all knowledge must be gleaned from the Qur'an. To this end he developed systems of interpretation of the Qur'an and sought to inform himself of all the sciences current in the Muslim world.
He also evinced a veneration of the Imams, even beyond the extent of his pious contemporaries and espoused heterodox views on the afterlife, the resurrection and end-times, as well as medicine and cosmology. His views on the soul posited a "subtle body" separate from, and contained within the physical body. It was this body that ascended into Heaven, he posited, when Muhammad was said to have bodily ascended, and this also altered his views on the occultation of the Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi. His views resulted in his denunciation by several learned clerics, and he engaged in many debates before moving on to Persia where he settled for a time in the province of Yazd. It was in Yazd that much of his books and letters were written.
Founding the Shaykhi School
Cole summarizes the situation at the advent of the Shaykhi School, and the questions that were unfolding as his views crystalized and he aquired an early following:- When Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i wrote, there was no Shaykhi school, which only crystallized after his death. He saw himself as a mainstream Shi`ite, not as a sectarian leader. Yet he clearly innovated in Shi`ite thought, in ways that, toward the end of his life, sparked great controversy. Among the contentious arenas he entered was that of the nature of religious authority. He lived at a time when his branch of Islam was deeply divided on the role of the Muslim learned man. Was he an exemplar to be emulated by the laity without fail, or merely the first among equals, bound by a literal interpretation of the sacred text just as was everyone else? Or was he, as the Sufis maintained, a pole channeling the grace of God to those less enlightened than himself? How may we situate Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i with regard to these contending visions of Shi`ite Islam? http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/ahsai1.htm
Successors
Siyyid Kázim
Shaykh Ahmad led the sect for only two years before his death. His undisputed successor, Siyyid Kázim, also led the Shaykhís until his own death (1843). Siyyid Kázim said that he would not live to see the Promised One, but, according to the Bábís, his appearance was so imminent that Siyyid Kázim appointed no successor, instead instructing his followers to spread across the land and search him out.Siyyid Kázim did not explicitly appoint a successor. Rather, convinced that the Mahdi was in the world, he encouraged his followers to seek him out. Many of the Shaykhis expected Mullá Husayn, one of his favorite pupils, to take on the mantle. Mullá Husayn, however, declined the honor, insisting on obedience to Siyyid Kazim's final commands to go out in search of the Mahdi. Many of the followers of Shaykh Ahmad spread out as did Mullah Husayn. By 1844, two perspectives had emerged and camps arose based on the differing claims of two individuals.
Siyyid Alí-Muhammad (The Báb)
Siyyid Alí-Muhammad had visited some of Siyyid Kazim's classes. Later tellings of one of those visits infer from Siyyid Kazim's comments that the he had implied to his students that Ali-Muhammad was connected with Kazim's predictions of the appearance of the Mahdi. Ali-Muhammad later took the title of the Báb and claimed to be the Mahdi outright to Mullá Husayn during a long meeting at Ali-Muhammad's house in Shiraz, May 23, 1844. Mullá Husayn accepted this claim, as did many of the leading Shaykhi students, and these went on to become the earliest Bábís. The Báb was labeled a heretic, thrown into prison and was executed July 9, 1850.
Most of the Bábís ultimately followed the well known Bábí community leader Bahá'u'lláh, founder of the Bahá'í Faith, when he claimed he was the one prophesized by the Báb. Today the Bahá'í Faith, which traces its religious history from Shaykh Ahmad, through Siyyid Kázim, the Báb, and then to Bahá'u'lláh, has an estimated 6 million followers. The several thousand followers of the Báb who do not accept the claims of Bahá'u'lláh, known as Bayanis, are mostly located in Iran.
Haji Karim Khan of Kirman
Even as the Bábí movement was gaining in numbers and fervor, Haji Karim Khan attempted to resurrect the Shaykhi School by taking a more moderate approach. He attempted to bridge gaps with the mainstream Islamic ulema who called the Báb's movement heretical. It appears he did not manage a significant following and appointed no successor.Shaykhí teachings
The primary force behind Shaykh Ahmad's teachings is the Twelver Shi'a belief in the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. Twelver Shi'ah believe there were twelve Imams starting with Ali and ending with Muhammad al-Mahdi. Whilst the first eleven Imams died, the twelfth is said to have disappeared to return "before the day of judgment" and "fill the Earth with justice and make the truth triumphant". This messianic figure is called the Mahdi.
The Shaykhís believed that since Muslims required the guidance of the Mahdi, there must be an individual on Earth who is capable of communicating with him. This personage would be described as the "perfect Shi'a", and Shaykh Ahmad was the first to adopt that position. Due to his unique capability the leader of the sect attained a quasi-divinity in the eyes of his followers.
It is not clear whether it was Shaykh Ahmad or his successor, Siyyid Kázim, who predicted that the coming of the Mahdi was nearing.
The Source of Knowledge and Certainty
Shaykhí teachings on knowledge are similar in appearance to that of the Sufis, save that where the Sufi "wayfarer" arrogates to himself the role of interpreting and adjudicating truth, Shaykh Ahmad was clear that the final arbiter for interpretation and clarity was the 12th Imam.
- "For Shaykh Ahmad, then, the Shi`ite learned man is not simply a mundane thinker dependent on nothing more than the divine text and his intellectual tools for its interpretation. The Learned must have a spiritual pole (qutb), a source of grace (ghawth), who will serve as the locus of God's own gaze in this world. Both pole and ghawth are frequently-used Sufi terms for great masters who can by their grace help their followers pursue the spiritual path. For Shaykh Ahmad, the pole is the Twelfth Imam himself, the light of whose being is in the heart of the Learned. The oral reports, he notes, say that believers benefit from the Imam in his Occultation just as the earth benefits from the sun even when it goes behind a cloud. Were the light of the Imam, as guardian (mustahfiz), to be altogether extinguished, then the Learned would not be able to see in the darkness."
Mystical symbology and the origin of the Prophet
Shaykh Ahmad's perspectives on accepted Islamic doctrines diverged in several areas, most notably on his mystical interpretation of prophesy. The "Sun" and "Moon" and "Stars" of the Qur'an's eschatological surahs are seen as allusory, where common Muslim interpretation is that events involving celestial bodies will happen literally at the Day of Judgement. In other writings, Shaykh Ahmad synthesizes rather dramatic descriptions of the origin of the prophets, the primal word, and other religious themes through allusions and mystical language. Much of this language is oriented around trees, specifically the primal universal tree of Eden, described in Jewish scripture as being two trees. This primal tree is, in some ways, the universal spirit of the prophets themselves:
- " The symbol of the preexistent tree appears elsewhere in Shaykh Ahmad's writings. He says, for instance, that the Prophet and the Imams exist both on the level of unconstrained being or preexistence, wherein they are the Complete Word and the Most Perfect Man, and on the level of constrained being. On this second, limited plane, the cloud of the divine Will subsists and from it emanates the Primal Water that irrigates the barren earth of matter and of elements. Although the divine Will remains unconstrained in essential being, its manifest aspect has now entered into limited being. When God poured down from the clouds of Will on the barren earth, he thereby sent down this water and it mixed with the fallow soil. In the garden of the heaven known as as-Saqurah, the Tree of Eternity arose, and the Holy Spirit or Universal Intellect, the first branch that grew upon it, is the first creation among the worlds."
This notion of beings with both divine and ephemeral natures presages a similar doctrine of the Manifestation in the Babi and Baha'i Faiths, religions whose origins are rooted in the Shaykhi spiritual tradition.
See also
References
External links
- [alabrar.com] for more information about Shaykhi teachings. (This site is in the Arabic language.)
- [Early Shaykhism] - Some biographical notes, translations and studies
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