Introduction
The Iraqi Shiʿi scholar, Muhammad b. Mahdi al-Khalisi (1890–1963), had pinned his hopes on Ayatollah Borujerdi.Footnote 1 When the two men met in the mid-1940s in the holy Iranian city of Qom, they spent a whole day in conversation. Al-Khalisi tried to convince the newly elected head of the seminary of Qom—the hawza—that its system of education was in dire need of reform. The way young Shiʿi clerics were taught was outdated and resulted in no palpable benefit for the Muslim community. To remedy this deplorable state, religious education should be combined with an intensive focus on the natural sciences. Borujerdi, according to al-Khalisi's account, frankly acknowledged the deficiencies of the hawza's structure but nevertheless dismissed the suggestion of his Iraqi interlocutor as too radical: ‘The minds of the people are not able to bear this sort of reform. We fear that if we carry it out, the people will splinter and we will remain here alone without being able to do anything.’Footnote 2
Yet the cold shoulder al-Khalisi received from the Shiʿi establishment did not deter him from continuing to be extremely vocal about his reformist and modernist project. This paper is especially interested in tracing the various stages of his thought and his legacy, attempting to connect them to the specific local circumstances of Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. Al-Khalisi embodied nothing less than all the characteristics of an activist transnational Shiʿi scholar of the twentieth century: he wrote in highly accessible Arabic and Persian prose and styled himself as a global (and the single truly modern) spokesman for both Shiʿi Muslims and Islam more generally, attending international conferences in Lebanon and travelling to Egypt. In his political activism, he repeatedly clashed with various governments in Iran and Iraq. In 1922 the British exiled him to Iran, where he remained until 1949. His early Iraqi and Iranian publications urged Muslims to close the gap on the scientifically advanced Western countries so that Islam could remain relevant in a world dominated by a hegemonic discourse of science. While the view of a complete harmony between Islam and science was shared among modernist Sunni Muslim thinkers at the time, al-Khalisi's experience of living in Iran decisively shifted his focus. There he encountered specific medicalizing discourses which led him to identify the preservation of human health as God's primary concern. Beginning in the mid-1940s, al-Khalisi attempted to discern a medical rationale for every single ruling of the shariʿa, an effort that dominated his major work on Islamic law.Footnote 3 Medicine and physiology could, as he saw it, finally unlock all the secrets of divine law. Instead of simply pointing to the well-ordered character of the universe in which God had assigned galaxies, suns, and planets their proper place, al-Khalisi became deeply interested in the workings of the human body as a marker of God's unity (tawhid). Late in life and following his return to Iraq, his reformist interests shifted yet again. Al-Khalisi suddenly began styling himself flag bearer of intra-Muslim unity, with clearly transnational consequences: even decades after his death, a heated debate over his legacy lingers on in Pakistan, a country he never visited.
In discussing these stages of al-Khalisi's reformist thought, my paper makes three contributions. First, it widens our understanding of the scarcely studied field of Shiʿi approaches to Islamic modernism. Second, it emphasizes the decisive importance of local contexts in the development of such seemingly universal modernist concerns. Finally, it enriches the growing body of studies on transnational Shiʿism which often focus primarily on political contestations.
Al-Khalisi's diverging Iranian, Iraqi, and global calls for reform, combined with his later, selective reception in South Asia, can provide us with a useful supplement to Sabrina Mervin's important work on Shiʿi thought in the first half of the twentieth century. She has argued that until 1950 and the publication of al-ʿAqaʾid al-imamiyya (The Imami Articles of Faith) in Najaf by the Iraqi reformist Muhammad Rida al-Muzaffar (d. 1963), no Shiʿi writer had attempted to compose a systematic modernist vision of theology similar to Muhammad ʿAbduh's Treatise on Divine Unity (Risalat al-tawhid).Footnote 4 Earlier reformist projects advanced by Muhsin al-Amin and other clerics stemming from Jabal ʿAmil in South Lebanon were, in Mervin's eyes, only ad-hoc patchwork. Yet, even these limited approaches remained intimately tied to Lebanon. Unconventional ideas spread among Shiʿis along the Mediterranean coast but not in Iraq or Iran due to a combination of such diverse causes as the direct experience of the Ottoman Tanzimat, the influence of the Persian Constitutionalist Movement, the boom of printing houses in Lebanon as well as the immediate clash with Europe as manifested by the French mandate and, later, the necessity to integrate the Shiʿi community into ‘un petit État-mosaïque’.Footnote 5 As far as recent studies on transnational Shiʿism are concerned, questions of social history and political conflict usually take centre stage. Laurence Louër, for example, provides an excellent account of exile politics in the Gulf during the Iran–Iraq war. In carefully delineating the tensions between Iraq's two main Shiʿi organizations—al-Daʿwa and the so-called Shirazi group—Louër discusses varying conceptions of the relationship between politics and religion but does not enter into a discussion of the bases on which these diverging arguments rest.Footnote 6 Similarly, Elvire Corboz explores in her groundbreaking forthcoming book the many facets of prominent Shiʿi clerical families’ attempts to project global authority. She very skilfully studies such initiatives through the lenses of interpersonal networks, patronage, and political activism. Corboz is less concerned, however, with the transmission of religious knowledge and its various local manifestations.Footnote 7 A close reading of al-Khalisi, I hold, can supplement such concerns of structure by taking seriously the role of ideas and their reshaping in the intersection of the national and transnational arenas of Shiʿism.
In the following sections I will provide a short biographical account of al-Khalisi before examining the role of science in his early work. I will contextualize his thought by contrasting it with similar discussions in the wider Muslim world before moving on to the specific environment of Iran and al-Khalisi's development of a medical lens on the shariʿa during his exile. Finally, the last section of this paper departs from science to trace the continued polemics surrounding al-Khalisi in Pakistan, a country where his reformist demands to overcome sectarianism have drawn—and still draw—heavy criticism.
The making of a transnational ʿalim
For about a decade, al-Khalisi was set to become a leading figure for the Shiʿi community of the 1920s in both Iran and Iraq. As the son of one of Najaf's leading clerics,Footnote 8 he received a privileged education from his father, Mahdi al-Khalisi, and reached the stage of independent legal reasoning (ijtihad) in his early twenties.Footnote 9 The cooperation between Mahdi and Muhammad al-Khalisi did not stop here, as both distinguished themselves in the jihad against the British authorities. Serving as the right hand of his father, Muhammad al-Khalisi coordinated guerrilla-style operations in the Iraqi countryside between 1917 and 1919.Footnote 10 He participated personally in several battles, in one of which a British bullet hit his right eye.Footnote 11 When exiled to Iran in 1922 for these activities, al-Khalisi quickly built up his following in Tehran, founding anti-British organizations and publishing a treatise on their crimes in Iraq. Putting to use his self-appointed position as preacher and Friday prayer leader of the Sultani mosque in the city's bazaar, he repeatedly mobilized large crowds of, at times, up to 20,000 participants to stage demonstrations in front of several Western embassies in the capital.Footnote 12 Consequently, the British envoy in Iran, Percy Loraine, identified al-Khalisi as the principal agent of anti-British agitation.Footnote 13 Yet, it was probably his equally brazen outspokenness against the plans of Reza Khan, later the Pahlavi dynasty's founder and then Iran's prime minister, to transform the country's political system into a republic, that led to his sudden marginalization and disappearance from the public scene. Al-Khalisi had expressed his fear of ‘despotism’ and rejected the idea that the state should be turned into a ‘fake’ (qallabi) republic. He also strongly condemned the presence of ‘Bahais, Bolshevik sympathizers and materialists among government functionaries’.Footnote 14 These positions forced him into internal exile in Iran until 1949, a period he spent inter alia in Khawaf near the border with Afghanistan, in Toyserkan in Kurdistan, Kashan, and Yazd, interrupted only by a comparatively short return to Tehran during the war years.Footnote 15 Even though the shah kept him under constant surveillance and al-Khalisi was occasionally imprisoned and banned from writing, he proved to be quite prolific during his years of exile.Footnote 16 Al-Khalisi repeatedly lashed out against other ʿulama during this time, accusing them of utter backwardness and of being opposed to progress and civilization.Footnote 17 He never gave up on political agitation either, but rather published opinion pieces in newspapers and wrote personal letters to Iranian politicians.Footnote 18
After his return to Iraq in 1949, al-Khalisi dedicated himself to intra-Muslim unity, calling upon his fellow Shiʿi believers to adopt an ecumenical outlook. He urged them to abandon specific Shiʿi practices like the third shahada Footnote 19 in the call to prayer in order make rapprochement with the Sunnis (taqrib) possible. He believed that if the two sects did not manage to close ranks, the Muslim world would continue to be helpless in the face of the threat of both imperialism and communism. This attitude was reflected in al-Khalisi's journal Madinat al-ʿIlm (The City of Knowledge) which identified striving for unity among Muslims as its primary goal, despite their divergent beliefs. Even though an editorial in his journal acknowledged the strong opposition this provoked, it simultaneously stressed al-Khalisi's determination to overcome such setbacks by relying on a call to reform infused with ‘the spirit of science’ (ruh al-ʿilm) in order to increase the religious knowledge of the people.Footnote 20 The Shiʿi establishment was indeed quick to denounce al-Khalisi's suggestions as a complete sellout of Imami identity. Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim Tabatabaʾi (d. 1970) and others insisted that ‘the third shahada [in the call to prayer] was not only a recommended act, but also the cornerstone (rukn) or secret (sirr) of the true faith, the perfection (kamal) of religion, the symbol (ramz) of Shiʿism and its distinguishing mark (shiʿar) which must not be abandoned’.Footnote 21 These high-ranking scholars might have been additionally worried by al-Khalisi's increasing attempts to claim far-reaching authority to speak for Islam while dismissing—once again—Najaf's backwardness and ignorance.Footnote 22 Criticized for taking part in a Christian-Muslim conference in Lebanon in 1954 on the invitation of Professor Philip Hitti of Princeton University,Footnote 23 al-Khalisi lashed out against all the isolationist and reactionary (inʿazaliyun jamidun) Islamic men of religion whose voices did not reach beyond the confines of their own madrasas. It was precisely because they were not attempting to influence the discourse abroad that the world had such a distorted, caricatured image of Islam and perceived Muslims as universally backward and a threat to civilization. By accepting the invitation to go to Lebanon, al-Khalisi argued, he was offered a unique chance to finally show the world what Islam really is and to effectively avert further destruction of Muslim lands.Footnote 24
Quite understandably, such a career, in combination with al-Khalisi's opposition to communism and the Baʿth party in Iraq, has led to his classification in the literature as an uncompromising firebrand. Said Amir Arjomand frames al-Khalisi as a forerunner of Khomeini, hinting at their shared activism, along with the unusual step they both took in assuming (or at least not to objecting to) the highly charged title of ‘imam’.Footnote 25 Pierre-Jean Luizard credits him with mediating between two generations of activist ʿulama: following his father's death in 1925, al-Khalisi kept the flame of clerical involvement in politics alive—until this torch was taken over by Khomeini and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (d. 1981) in Iraq.Footnote 26 Others have argued that al-Khalisi never managed to build a broad following since he was constantly embroiled in conflicts with the state, other ʿulama, secular modernists, and, in his eyes, heterodox Shiʿi sects. Werner Ende has thus labelled his project of Islamic modernism as ‘failed’: al-Khalisi simply advanced ideas so radical to Shiʿi ears—like abolishing the third shahada in the call to prayer, refraining from self-flagellation in Muharram (the Shiʿi month of mourning) or praying together with Sunnis—that at least about a dozen anti-Khalisi writings were published in Iraq, bearing such telling titles as Al-Khalisi, the Musaylima Footnote 27of the Twentieth Century or Al-Khalisi, the Madman in the Morass of his Lies and Slanders.Footnote 28 Iranian opponents, tempted by the possible pun on his name, which can also mean ‘the pure one’,Footnote 29 have regularly referred to him as makhlut zadah (of impure descent).Footnote 30 Later on, Pakistani Shiʿi scholars like Muhammad Husayn al-Najafi Dhakku (b. 1932), Mufti Jaʿfar Husayn (d. 1983) or Husayn Bakhsh Jara (d. 1990), who saw it as their mission to reform the practices and beliefs of the Shiʿi community in their country, were dismissively referred to as ‘Shiʿi-Wahhabis’ or simply the ‘Khalisi group’ by opponents such as Muhammad Hasnayn al-Sabiqi (d. 1999) or Muhammad Bashir Ansari (d. 1984).Footnote 31
Discourses on science
As we have seen, al-Khalisi never hesitated to denounce the lack of scientific knowledge among his fellow ʿulama, suggesting at one point that there was no single ʿalim present in Tehran who would truly understand that a conflict between science and Islam could never arise.Footnote 32 Despite this claim, the notion of harmony between science and religion was not unusual among reformist authors, both Sunni and Shiʿi, who attempted to come to terms with perceived Western world domination. Already Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1889) in India had maintained that both the revealed text and science refer to the same factual, descriptive truth and that this makes it necessary to provide an interpretation (taʾwil) of the Qurʾanic text if its literal meaning appears to be in disagreement with modern discoveries.Footnote 33 While the influential Egyptian reformist, Muhammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905), did not share the same optimism, urging his readers to accept that the Qurʾan is too elevated to be contradicted by modern science, Khan's approach proved to be very attractive.Footnote 34 ʿAbduh's disciple, Rashid Rida (d. 1935), embarked on such a path even more boldly, crediting inventions like the telephone or the radio with shedding light on some of God's hitherto simply incomprehensible, miraculous ways since the former revealed how human voices could cover vast distances.Footnote 35 Daniel Stolz has argued recently that even though Rida's fatwas on materialism were of a rather conservative character, he usually attempted to ‘engage directly with the scientific knowledge in question, to accept its basic validity, and, framing it in the traditions of kalām and natural theology, to show its consistency with Islamic belief’.Footnote 36 Similarly, the Egyptian physician, Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920), a frequent contributor to Rida's journal al-Manar, was especially concerned with demonstrating that recent discoveries in the field of astronomy were in line with Qurʾanic teachings.Footnote 37 Sidqi was, of course, a layman but Lebanese Shiʿi ʿulama in the early 1930s voiced similar opinions regarding the structure of the universe.Footnote 38
From there, it was only a short step to more radical readings which attempted to locate all modern discoveries within the Qurʾan. From 1923 onwards, Tantawi Jawhari (d. 1940) published an explicitly ‘scientific’ commentary on the Qurʾan that went as far as to suggest that the well-ordered natural world should be regarded as a second direction of prayer (qibla) for the Muslims beyond the Kaʿba in Mecca.Footnote 39 Consequently, he chastised his co-religionists for their lack of interest in science and for being in a state of slumber, content to waste away their years with mysticism since the time of al-Ghazali (d. 1111).Footnote 40 The Turkish scholar, Bediuzzeman Said Nursi (d. 1960), asserted that the Qurʾan predicted inter alia aviation and the discovery of electricity.Footnote 41
Al-Khalisi's early works, I argue, fit well into such a general—even though by no means unchallenged—‘hegemonic culture of science’Footnote 42 which spanned the broader Muslim world in the first half of the twentieth century and was also reflected in Shiʿi journals.Footnote 43 Claiming ‘true’ science for Islam while rejecting the anti-religious orientation of scientific materialism was an attitude which, in fact, remained a lifelong topos for al-Khalisi.Footnote 44 This inclination was primarily kindled, he recollected, by his father. During the last years of Ottoman rule, the latter attempted to establish in Iraq a religious school modelled along the lines of a modern university. This institution was supposed to comprise 14 individual faculties that would cover all the sciences and branches of industry (jamiʿ al-ʿulum wa-l-sanaʾiʿ). Mahdi al-Khalisi was convinced that they collectively pointed to God's unity.Footnote 45 Even though the outbreak of the First World War halted this ambitious project, Muhammad al-Khalisi nevertheless managed to finish one philosophical work which his father had commissioned to be used in the school's curriculum. In the introduction to his Al-Maʿarif al-Muhammadiyyah (Muhammadan Sorts of Knowledge), published in 1922, al-Khalisi expressed his intention to write not only in an accessible style but also to take the contemporary requirements of sensual perception (matalib al-mahsusa) into account.Footnote 46 Echoing earlier notions developed by Shiʿi mujtahids who emphasized the existence of a wise sage (mudabbir-i hakim) in devising and sustaining the order of the universe,Footnote 47 al-Khalisi quoted Henri Milne-Edwards, the French zoologist, to drive home the point that ‘proper science’ always refuted the fanciful notion of imagining nature without a creator.Footnote 48 The concept of a well-structured cosmos was more fully developed in a commentary al-Khalisi wrote on the 1928 Persian translation of Camille Flammarion's Dieu dans la nature, originally published in 1867.Footnote 49 Here the Iraqi scholar tied Flammarion's discussion of Kepler and the laws of planetary movements to quotations from the Qurʾan and the Shiʿi Imams, emphasizing the overarching harmony of the universe.Footnote 50 He once again expressed his astonishment that the ʿulama displayed such negligence (ghuflat) in failing to establish a connection between Newton's discoveries on gravity and several, seemingly explicit, sayings of the Imams which were already spelling out this truth in the first Islamic centuries.Footnote 51 Al-Khalisi also wholeheartedly condoned Flammarion's critique of Ernest Renan, who praised man as the most intelligent being in the universe. By relying on Shiʿi works of law, our author identified the strong nuclear force with jinns and the weak interaction with angels to make sense of the Qurʾanic accounts.Footnote 52 Al-Khalisi followed Flammarion in a shift of scale from the level of stars and planets to the workings of an individual cell, claiming that God's dictum in the Qurʾan of having created everything in pairs perfectly applied to the atomic nucleus and its surrounding electrons. Yet, unlike in later writings, in 1928 al-Khalisi did not yet display any sustained interest in delving into more substantial discussions of medicine and physiology and he barely commented on Flammarion's remarks on the human body.Footnote 53
Rather, besides hinting at God's management of the world's affairs, science provided al-Khalisi with one of his most powerful weapons with which to attack his opponents. Such a strategy came to the fore in his dealings with internal Shiʿi opponents and the communist threat alike, and is clearly reflected in a polemical treatise dating back to the late 1940s. The book The Shiʿi ʿUlama and the Struggle with Unlawful Innovations and Internal Superstitions in Religion was written during al-Khalisi's involuntary stay in Yazd. In this work, our author was most of all concerned to inform his fellow believers and the secular authorities about the dangerous creed to which the speculative school of theology known as the shaykhiyya adhered.Footnote 54 Al-Khalisi intended to dispel any confusion as to whether the shaykhiyya might still belong to ‘orthodox’ Shiʿism, attacking their conception of the Imams as übermenschen.Footnote 55 In a second, quite Rawlsian, move that transformed a religion-based argument into a claim in line with public reason, and avoiding any resort to comprehensive doctrines,Footnote 56 al-Khalisi warned the government against employing adherents of the school because they would hamper the country's progress. The shaykhi worldview simply could not stand up to modern science. It was not compatible with Islam, the religion of science and knowledge (ʿilm wa-maʿrifa), the truths of which would only become strengthened with further scientific progress.Footnote 57 By contrast, the life sciences and modern astronomy both refuted shaykhism. For instance, the shaykhis still believed that the world was only made up of four elements, thus taking over Greek superstitions, whereas modern science had proven the existence of at least 90 elements and more discoveries were expected. Adherents of shaykhism committed nothing less than high treason against the truth of science and religion (khiyana kubra bi-haqq al-ʿilm wa-l-din). But that was not all: by buying into a Platonic-inspired cosmology, they still insisted that some parts of the universe did not move. Al-Khalisi attacked this view as having a blatant disregard for the advancements of modern physics which would necessarily result in society mocking its propagators.Footnote 58 In short: the shaykhis relied on a Ptolemaic conception of the universe, on a Greek theory of nature, on the philosophy of Illuminism,Footnote 59 and the doctrine of the Zoroastrians. Since modern science refuted all of these ideas, there was no real need to add anything to such obvious ignorance.Footnote 60 Their beliefs were those of the Middle Ages and science revealed them as mere fairy-tales (turrahat).Footnote 61 It was thus a collective obligation for Muslims to strive day and night against adherents of the doctrine, eliminating all traces of their teachings in order to protect religion, the natural law (namus), independence, and the national sentiment (wataniyya) of every single Muslim nation. Al-Khalisi bluntly stated that the shaykhis prevented the reform of Muslim countries and the cultural progress of the whole community of believers (yamnaʿun islah al-bilad wa-rafʿ al-mustawa ‘l-thaqafi lil-umma).Footnote 62 Appealing specifically to the context of Iran, he demanded that the Ministry of Culture remove such people from all posts of responsibility because their convictions were diametrically opposed to the ideas of advanced modern sciences and they would go out of their way to block their spread.Footnote 63 An immediate, international solution to this burning problem, suggested by al-Khalisi, consisted of the closing of the clergy's rank and the imposition of internal discipline. The Shiʿi mujtahids should issue a religious ruling that only those who could produce an authorization (ijaza) from one of the sources of emulation and were aware of what happened in the world (ma yajri fi ‘l-dunya) could gain access to the pulpit.Footnote 64
Before moving on to the medical transformation in al-Khalisi's thought, I would like to consider one last work in which the shifting character of his argument is already palpable. The Highway Robbers of Justice and Truth or the Returnees Towards Barbarism and Ignorance was written in 1951 in Persian when al-Khalisi had already returned to Iraq.Footnote 65 Meant as a refutation of a critique of religion published by the Marxist Tudeh party,Footnote 66 al-Khalisi attempted to counter their claim that Islam was a thing of the past. In turning the tables on them, he accused the communists of superstition and being the real enemies of science (dushmanan-i ʿilm).Footnote 67 The ignorant (jahil) Marx, the unknowing (nadan) Engels, the stupid (bi-ʿilm) Lenin, and the cobbler Stalin all displayed their lack of insight by ignoring the secrets of nature (asrar al-tabiʿat) since modern discoveries and inventions pointed to the unity of God.Footnote 68 Being trapped in the prison of materialism,Footnote 69 they did not realize that even though science changed and revealed new aspects every day, Islam stayed the same. If the telescope at the University of California discovered stars at a distance of ten million light years from earth, this only confirmed Islam's insight of Allahu Akbar, of God being greater than all discoveries.Footnote 70 Importantly, in this work al-Khalisi transcended such familiar observations about the universe and explicitly drew attention to the human body with each of its organs following a clearly defined function, thus pointing to God's role as the originator of life.Footnote 71 He made the claim that all stipulations of the divine law were meant for human benefit and specifically human health, referring readers to his Ihyaʾ al-shariʿa (which was in the process of being printed) for a full exposure of the principle.Footnote 72 Consequently, those who ignore God's law do not fare well: al-Khalisi hinted at the fate of Taqi Arani,Footnote 73 the supposed leader of the Tudeh party in Iran. When Arani was infected with typhus in prison through microbes carried by a tiny louse and was not able to resist the disease, this was the result of waging war against God.Footnote 74
These comments, which go beyond a mere interest in science to defend Islam and establish its compatibility with progress, warrant closer attention. They also lead me to one of the central arguments in this paper, namely the need to emphasize the various local contexts in which reformist thought originated. Al-Khalisi, who spent 27 years in Iran, confronted particular, dominant medical discourses there, which reoriented his general interest in science to medicine specifically.
Iran's medical modernity
Discussing Iran's experience of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century, Cyrus Schayegh has drawn our attention to the prominence throughout the 1920s of discourses on medicine and its benefits, displacing questions of ‘political modernity’ which had held sway after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906:
Increasingly, progress seemed feasible only through sociocultural reforms based on modern, and especially biomedical, science. This was considered to be of special importance now, because it was only since the revolution that political, social, cultural, technological, and economic changes had really gathered pace. This created the feeling that Iran was waking up to the world. However, this entry into modernity held not only promises but also dangers—which were precisely the target of the medicalizing strategy.Footnote 75
This debate was tightly connected to a reductionist conception of science which focused on practical application rather than on research. Schayegh shows how theory and socially relevant behaviour were brought together in order to eradicate ‘useless knowledge’ and ‘harmful practices’ among the Iranian public.Footnote 76 While ‘useless’ knowledge was often identified with pre-modern knowledge and thus religious learning, hygiene was extolled as a way of solving Iran's perceived lack of population growth and propelling the country forward economically.Footnote 77 Cleanliness even took on patriotic connotations, centring on the need to ‘shield the homeland from pestilence and on the desire to forge a vigorous and physically fit citizenry—a public that could better serve the state’.Footnote 78 In order to achieve this goal, the attention of both policy and public discourses turned to endemic and venereal diseases which had claimed many lives in the nineteenth century. The need for preventive measures and unrelenting personal vigilance was stressed.Footnote 79 Firozeeh Kashani-Sabet emphasizes that the hygiene movement in Iran—with its ‘maternalist preoccupations’ and especially the fight against venereal diseases—upheld the traditional virtues of society, which could have been a potential area of agreement between secular modernists and the Shiʿi clergy. Yet the divide between the two camps could not be bridged.Footnote 80 Rather, it was the secular modernists who claimed Islam for themselves: a number of medical dissertations at Tehran University in the 1930s emphasized Islam's contribution to the science of hygiene, referring to prescriptions on water, ritual ablutions, and infant care.Footnote 81 Ensuring personal cleanliness was framed as obligatory since ‘all worldly and otherworldly duties are dependent upon hygiene’.Footnote 82 The modernists even suggested a new path to achieving the status of a perfect human being: they claimed that through rigorous attention to hygiene one could not only achieve a long and fulfilling existence, but even turn into an insan-i kamil.Footnote 83
I would argue that al-Khalisi was deeply influenced by the specific social and political climate in Iran which awakened in him a strong interest in countering the challenges of modernityFootnote 84 and reconciling new insights in the field of medicine with religion.Footnote 85 His specific approach manifested itself most clearly in his major treatise on Shiʿi law, his risala ʿamaliyya, entitled The Revival of the Shariʿa within the School of Law of the Shiʿis.Footnote 86 It has to be kept in mind that this work was not just another piece of writing thrown at the market by al-Khalisi. Rather, its publication underlined his aim to secure a place among the highest ranking Shiʿi scholars by providing a law manual for his emulators—the common people who relied on his opinions in their daily worldly and religious activities.Footnote 87 Therefore it is highly significant that this treatise reads at times more like a medical handbook, which explains bodily functions at length.
Laying out the healthy Shiʿi life
In this work al-Khalisi interpreted science almost exclusively as medicine, and turned the protection of the body's health into an overarching goal in understanding divine rulings. A hidden public benefit (maslaha mursala) could be extracted from every single shariʿa ruling, be it on questions of adultery (zina) or the structure of an Islamic economic system. All the laws of the shariʿa were meant primarily to prevent illness, regardless of whether they regulated ritual obligations or interactions among humans. Qurʾanic verses and hadiths amply testified that if humans would just follow all of God's commands, no malady could ever afflict them.Footnote 88
In attempting to justify such bold claims, al-Khalisi at times covered quite familiar territory, known from other Muslim modernists like Muhammad ʿAbduh or Rashid Rida. In order to get the divine message across, the Qurʾan did not talk about microbes, which are discoveries of the modern age, but would employ concepts like the ‘work of Satan’ (ʿamal al-Shaytan) or attribute effects to jinns.Footnote 89 The people of seventh century Arabia simply could not comprehend the real rationale behind these rules.Footnote 90 Similarly, al-Khalisi's statements on the consumption of pork and wine are not so different from the way European authors, labelled ‘medical materialists’ by anthropologist Mary Douglas, have reduced ‘primitive ritual’ to its hygienic functions or turned Moses into an ‘enlightened public health administrator’.Footnote 91 In the case of pork, al-Khalisi cited unnamed studies that showed how this type of meat was affected by worm-born diseases. Some of these parasites did not perish before they had reproduced themselves tens of thousands of times, spreading all over the body of the consumer. All efforts to cleanse the meat of this impurity carried out by medical specialists had so far been utterly unsuccessful. This last comment is interesting in that it demonstrates the limits of modern science: all efforts intended to tear down a divinely prescribed boundary are supposedly doomed to fail.Footnote 92 Similarly, it took until the advent of modern science to vindicate the Prophet's ban on wine because recent findings confirmed that no worse substance exists for society, for the human body, and its mind. Alcohol abuse leads to a broad variety of bodily malfunctions, affecting the digestive system and the heart, damaging the liver, and leading to blindness, etc., in addition to all the societal ills and crimes that are the result of its consumption. Yet, being true to his own medical mission, al-Khalisi was quick to assert that alcohol could be used in medication as long as it was not intoxicating.Footnote 93
Despite these affinities with other lay Muslim thinkers and certain ʿulama, al-Khalisi was no run-of-the-mill modernist. It is not possible to reduce his thought to the usual scientific bent, which is discernible in Rashid Rida's Tafsir al-Manar or more ambitious projects like Tantawi Jawhari's scientific exegesis of the Qurʾan.Footnote 94 Unlike them, for him medicine was not just one part of the divine plan, rather it constituted its undeniable core. Al-Khalisi saw the medical light shining everywhere. He even attempted to apply such a lens to explain the purpose (hikma) of rulings which, at first glance, might appear to be rather far removed from any immediate health-related concerns. Consequently, the main reason that adultery and homosexuality were banned by Islam had to do with the possible transmission of acquired and inherited diseases.Footnote 95 The obligation for men to wear a beard could be explained by the sensitive skin on the cheeks, possible negative consequences for the gums if they were exposed to heat or cold, and the protective qualities of facial hair as far as dust and germs were concerned.Footnote 96 In his discussion of silk and why men were not supposed to wear clothes made from this material, al-Khalisi adduced first of all its mode of production, which started with the unclean silkworm. If the latter's germs survived the production process, they could cause depression (inqibad) among men and extroversion (inbisat) among women. Even more dangerous, according to tests carried out by many doctors, is that silk formed the ideal breeding ground for etiologic agents and lethal diseases which men could pick up easily due to their work outside the home.Footnote 97 Finally, women were banned from taking part in jihad because of the composition of their blood, which contained fewer red blood cells and less fat and haemoglobin, a fact which ultimately rendered them weaker physically.Footnote 98
In al-Khalisi's view the same level of medical truth applied to Islamic rituals which all had secret health benefits as well. Consequently, he discussed the five canonical prayers as the ultimate workout. They provided an ideal and regular combination of rest and action. Compared to other physical activities, prayer was not a one-sided movement, which might affect the body adversely, but instead required that all its parts were set in motion.Footnote 99 Similarly, in his treatise al-Khalisi gave a ten-page long explanation of the benefits of various vitamins and dietary minerals, including a handy list of which foods were especially rich in these. He suggested that Muslims of the seventh century CE simply had been ordered to consume certain foods without being told which essential vitamins they contained or how suitable they were for their children's growth. It was only through the advancements of the sciences that believers could finally understand that the meat they were ordered to eat is rich in fat, proteins, and vitamins, whereas those types of meat from which Muslims were obliged to abstain would release substances harmful to the liver or the kidneys.Footnote 100 Amazing discoveries are not restricted to food of course: Shiʿa hadith about the proper way to wash the male sexual organ revealed that the sequence of movements amounted to a massage conducive to preventing prostatitis, as spelled out in the Egyptian medical journal al-Duktur.Footnote 101 The underlying wisdom of the Imams’ warning to hold one's breath while drinking could be summarized as an action that prevented carbon dioxide from altering the chemical structure of the water.Footnote 102 The consequences of the rulings of the shariʿa surely transcended the realm of the individual: Al-Khalisi took the Iranian ʿulama to task, for example, for neglecting to point out the rationales of divine rulings pertaining to water and the necessity of preserving its purity. Discarding dead animals or human waste into the canals of cities helped to spread malaria and other diseases.Footnote 103
Medicine revealed secrets of the divine rulings (asrar ahkam al-shariʿa) behind these essential tasks, and al-Khalisi also praised the discipline for substantiating further the reality of tawhid and the Prophet's truthfulness. Delving into physiology allowed al-Khalisi to expand on the well-ordered nature of the universe on the micro-level: for him, the 50.5 million red blood cells, 6,000 white blood cells, and 300,000 platelets, which all fulfilled specific, clearly defined functions in every millilitre of human blood, not only constituted a strong proof for God's control over life on earth, but also demonstrated His unceasing acts of creation since new cells continuously sprang into being.Footnote 104 Moreover, in human blood he witnessed a constant resurrection (maʿad), a constant dying and creation of new blood cells—even though each human being remained the same person. Consequently, bodily resurrection, which over the course of history had always remained just an intellectual concept (amr fikri), was now rendered into a concrete, palpable affair (amr mahsus).Footnote 105 God's benign management did not end here: human saliva, for example, enables us not only to speak, but also to transport food into the stomach and to produce glucose. Even the smallest part of the body has its unique task, including organs which at first seem to be superfluous like the male breast or the appendix: the first provides a cushion for the organs, the second had been discovered to release crucial hormones during illnesses.Footnote 106 Just by observing these arrangements and processes, al-Khalisi noticed God's planning (tadbir) and providence (qudra) at work. All sciences—astronomy, chemistry, and natural sciences alike—present very diverse ‘books’ (kutub) of God's oneness, all hinting at the wisdom of the maker.Footnote 107
Moreover, al-Khalisi turned these observations into modern miracles that confirmed the truth of Muhammad's mission: the Prophet's humble background would never have provided the resources for him to devise such beneficial purity laws (here of course Mary Douglas's description rings particularly loud).Footnote 108 The same applied, al-Khalisi continued, to the invention of hydrotherapy. While no other religion devoted much attention to water, its healing powers were unlocked by Islam and used in Islam's ritual ablutions (ghusl and wuduʿ) centuries before Vincenz Prießnitz popularized this method in Europe.Footnote 109 After listing on several pages the different acids and elements contained in human urine, al-Khalisi used the occasion to argue that the Prophet's different rulings on wuduʿ, depending on whether one has come into contact with the urine of a suckling boy or a girl, was supported by modern doctors and physiologists who noticed its varying chemical composition. Should we not take these insights, al-Khalisi asked, which cannot have originated in the mind of an orphan from the Arabian peninsula, as compelling proof for the truth of prophethood?Footnote 110
Identifying the shariʿa with human health and essentially bypassing the entire Muslim legal and exegetical tradition was a daunting project. Al-Khalisi, to be sure, was aware of his unusual approach. He defended his Ihya al-shariʿa as a piece of scholarship that could actually be used in the present age by his emulators (muqallidun) and, indeed, the whole of humanity. Echoing Iranian conceptions of beneficial knowledge, he lamented that other mujtahids only discussed questions of law along the established divisions of obligations of worship (al-ʿibadat), human interactions (al-muʿamalat), positive law (al-ahkam), and politics (al-siyasat). Someone who was interested in learning about hygiene (hifz al-sihha) in Islam, for instance, would have to consult scattered remarks in the books on fasting, ritual purity, the pilgrimage, and so on. Thus nothing less was needed than an outright rearrangement of the chapters in the books of law (fiqh) to organize them according to the needs of the present age.Footnote 111 Besides this more technical aspect, al-Khalisi deplored the general neglect in contemporary fiqh of questions related to theology and the basic truths of Islam. The unwillingness of the ʿulama to take up challenges to theology left the common people helpless when faced with relentless and menacing attacks on their faith by the atheists (ahl al-ilhad), which threatened to lead them astray.Footnote 112 Yet even in the field of human interactions, his peers were predominantly simply not fit for the task and suspended judgement under the pretext of precaution (ihtiyat). Al-Khalisi regarded it as essential that the ʿulama acquainted themselves with modern sciences since this would show the way to interpret the shariʿa and to make sense of Islam's truths, thus lifting the veil from the great secrets of the divine law.Footnote 113 Al-Khalisi labelled it ‘strange’ (min al-ʿajab) that other ʿulama had pushed aside such an interpretation, thereby depriving the people of the light of guidance (nur hidayatha).Footnote 114
This criticism of his colleagues, paired with his own self-confident lack of any qualms in providing very specific and entirely novel justifications for the rulings of the divine law, might have contributed to his later loss of influence as a scholar.Footnote 115 Studying a very different context, namely South Asian Sunni scholars, Muhammad Qasim Zaman has observed that even such prominent ʿulama as Ashraf ʿAli Thanawi (d. 1943) were caught up in a comparable dilemma: they feared that by explaining the rationales behind the stipulations of the shariʿa they might make the law vulnerable to a plethora of individual understandings and, finally, contribute to its dissolution—this might open the door for people ‘to seek a rationale irrespective of the ruling’. Yet, on the other hand, these ʿulama also felt obliged to address the needs of a new, modern, educated elite, hoping that they could be brought back under the guidance of the scholars for the benefit of the larger Muslim community.Footnote 116 Thus, Thanawi reluctantly went ahead with publishing Rational Reasons for the Transmitted Legal Rulings in 1915–16: ‘a dizzying array of “rational” explanations, not least for various purification rituals, or why particular rituals are performed in the way they are, or why the amount of the obligatory alms-tax (zakat) varies according to the items on which it is due’.Footnote 117 Usually, however, only outsiders, non-ʿulama, like the South Asian ‘camp-follower of European fascism’, Inayatullah Khan Mashriqi (d. 1963), were willing to go as far as al-Khalisi did.Footnote 118 Mashriqi hoped to turn Islam into a ‘science of religions’ which would grant religion the same absolute truth-claim as science.Footnote 119 Combining this vision with the idea of a constant struggle, he interpreted the purpose of the famous five pillars of Islam in mostly military terms, conceptualizing prayer (ideally carried out in uniform) as a military drill or the pilgrimage to Mecca—the hajj—as a ‘grand counsel of Muslim soldiers where plans against enemies could be hatched’.Footnote 120
For al-Khalisi, as we have seen, it was of course medicine that dominated his approach to the divine law and made him describe in about 30 pages the details of the human digestive systemFootnote 121 or inspired him to a discussion of various vitamins, their specific benefits, and which food is most suitable for acquiring them.Footnote 122 His intensive focus on the human body and questions of medicine in his magnum opus took precedence over other, potentially salient questions of the day, such as the economic system. Even though al-Khalisi labelled communism as the greatest threat to society and its economic well-being, he only devoted a very superficial discussion to the topic: a communist society implied that the individual would not enjoy any freedom, either in his personal life or his work, and would not be able to accumulate any property. For communist rulers, individual human beings lacked any intrinsic value (la qima li l-fard). How could a society function if it was composed only of entirely worthless individuals? In fact, any communist system reduced man to a position more degraded than those of insects or worms since they were able to exert the freedom that man was denied.Footnote 123 It was of course the Islamic system which steered the appropriate middle course between the communist nightmare and an equally appalling capitalist system, characterized by injustice and a lack of concern for the poor. Islam did not tolerate exploitation, banned usury, and put an honest imam in charge who administered the public finances for the common welfare of Muslims.Footnote 124 There was no question about Islam's staunch commitment to the protection of private property.Footnote 125
This is all we find in a three-volume work of approximately 930 pages in total. In fact, even in his sections on economics, al-Khalisi focused predominantly on issues of health, arguing, for example, that the ceilings of new buildings should not be too high because then cleaning tools could not reach the germs residing there.Footnote 126 Covering economics meant for him a discussion of the proper treatment of one's stomach: al-Khalisi spelled out on the subsequent pages that too opulent meals were very destructive for the body as such a habitus was the real cause behind the many illnesses and the effeminacy of the rich.Footnote 127 Similarly, in his essay, The Truth of the Hijab in Islam, al-Khalisi also brought his medical approach to bear on questions of gender. He accused the modernists of freely entering into sexual relationships with women, thus infecting them with gonorrhea and syphilis.Footnote 128 The traditionalists, on the other hand, locked women into a black grave (gur-i siyah)—the chador—in which they could neither move, see the sky nor breath properly. This directly led to tuberculosis, mental illnesses, epilepsy, and neuropathies.Footnote 129
What do we make of such an imbalanced viewpoint and a remarkably one-sided quest for the secrets of the divine law? I would argue that the key lies with al-Khalisi's long stay in Iran, where his bold modernist reading was shaped. Residing for 27 years in this neighbouring country, he was confronted with a particular manifestation of modernity which, as Cyrus Schayegh has demonstrated, was dominated by discourses on health, biopolitics, and psychology. The debate especially picked up speed in the early 1920s, at the moment when al-Khalisi was deported by the British. He quickly made use of the ideas and sources available to him and proudly displayed his familiarity with scientific discoveries, thus building on his earlier conviction regarding the compatibility of science and Islam. A number of medical dissertations written in the 1930s in Tehran closely echoed some of al-Khalisi's arguments, for example, the congruence of Islamic prescriptions regarding water with the demands of modern hygiene.Footnote 130 Additionally, al-Khalisi received a hands-on exposure to medicine in Iran. Living in a small village for 14 years without access to a doctor, he had to step in and treat the sick with cupping, which might have increased his interests in current debates in the country even more.Footnote 131 Visitors noted that he relied on specialized medical literature when carrying out this task.Footnote 132 Al-Khalisi also reported conversations with physicians that helped him to further clarify his thinking on the divine law.Footnote 133 Ten years after the original publication of his risala, al-Khalisi included in the second imprint some additional references from Arabic medical journals of the time, providing proper footnotes.Footnote 134 Of course, these were only meant to back up his conviction that health was the master key to unlocking the secrets of the shariʿa—a conviction he had acquired decades earlier in Iran.
In the final section I would like to expand on the importance of local contexts for transnational messages by taking a brief look at al-Khalisi's reception in Pakistan. Werner Ende has already elaborated on how al-Khalisi became interested in intra-Muslim unity when he returned to his native Iraq. Given the lack of salience of the question in a country that was (and is) overwhelmingly Shiʿi, efforts at Sunni-Shiʿi rapprochement had not been on al-Khalisi's mind either before or during his exile in Iran. Back in Iraq, however, al-Khalisi became convinced that unity between the sects was required if Muslims wanted to confront imperialism and communism.Footnote 135 Even though we know that some of al-Khalisi's suggestions, like removing the third shahada from the Shiʿi call to prayer, drew fire, unfortunately no clear picture has yet emerged of the precise character of the intra-Shiʿi controversy in Iraq surrounding his proposal in the 1950s. Werner Ende only states that ‘for many of the Grand Mujtahids, al-Khalisi's ambitious activities in general and his demands for religious reform in particular were unacceptable’. This obviously involved polemics against al-Khalisi's Ihyaʾ al-shariʿa, but we can only speculate whether these were directed against his scientific approach.Footnote 136 While the study of al-Khalisi's legacy in Iraq is affected by a lack of available sources, his transnational impact and his ultimate failure can be traced with more certainty in the context of Pakistan.
Reading al-Khalisi in SargodhaFootnote 137
Anti-Khalisi writings reached a peak in Iraq in the mid-1950s, when al-Khalisi was still a key player in these debates; in Pakistan the controversy surrounding him emerged only after his death. Andreas Rieck has pointed out that many of his opponents display a superficial acquaintance with his work. In particular, a ‘lobby’ of popular preachers (zakirs) ‘deliberately inflated his importance as the founder of a “sect” within Shi‘ism [. . .] to create a bogeyman’. According to Rieck, it was primarily al-Khalisi's attacks on many forms of Shiʿa popular religious practices and ‘extremist’ (ghuluw) beliefs, echoed in the writings of the influential reformist scholar, Muhammad Husayn al-Najafi Dhakku, that angered these preachers.Footnote 138 Diatribes against al-Khalisi always went hand-in-hand with attacks on Dhakku, who was frequently labelled his disciple (which he was at pains to deny) and the ‘Khalisi of the present age (Khalisi-yi ʿasr)’.Footnote 139 Dhakku, without quoting al-Khalisi directly, indeed reflected his concern that shaykhi propagators managed to dupe the common people by presenting their deviant beliefs as sound Shiʿi doctrine.Footnote 140 He also shared the view that customs such as bowing to a representation of Imam Husayn's horse are not only contrary to Islam but also contradict ‘civilization, human renewal, and dignity’ (tahzub o shayastigi aur insani mujaddad o sharafat).Footnote 141
In addition to these ‘established’ controversies, I argue that the debate in the 1980s took on a different dynamic. Al-Khalisi's efforts on behalf of taqrib were demonized by his opponents, who labelled him a ‘Wahhabi’. They were not satisfied, however, merely to apply this loaded term, with its long polemical history in South Asia, to al-Khalisi,Footnote 142 but also attempted to construe a clear personal connection with the wahhabiyya, the stern, anti-Shiʿi branch of Islam dominant in Saudi-Arabia.Footnote 143 Al-Khalisi was accused of explaining away the Saudi destruction of Imam Husayn's tomb in Karbala in 1801 as merely a wrong legal opinion (khataʾ-i ijtihadi).Footnote 144 The Khalisiyyatnamah Footnote 145 quoted extensively from al-Khalisi's journal, which covered some of the trips he undertook to Saudi Arabia where he also participated in discussions with Sunni scholars, conducted in a purportedly very friendly atmosphere.Footnote 146 One edition of Madinat al-ʿIlm even featured a letter written by the Saudi ruler, Saʿud b. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz b. Saʿud (r. 1953–1964) in which the king thanked al-Khalisi for a book he had received from him and emphasized his own role as a propagator of Muslim unity, working to spread God's pure religion (din Allah al-khalis).Footnote 147 While such a letter might have seemed rather harmless in the mid-1950s, given the general efforts towards rapprochement at the time,Footnote 148 the connection appeared in an entirely different light in the mid-1980s, with the Afghan jihad raging next door, abundantly supported by Saudi funds, and in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution which spread its own, particular message of Muslim unity.Footnote 149 Inside Pakistan ‘humanitarian aid’ from Saudi-Arabia extended to financing virulently anti-Shiʿa tracts like Al-Shiʿa wa-l-sunna written by Ihsan Ilahi Zahir, who dismissed Shiʿism as ‘the religion of falsehood, and the religion of deceit and cunning’.Footnote 150 Additionally, the Shiʿa of Pakistan began to perceive the Islamizing state of General Zia ul-Haq as increasingly hostile as it attempted to impose a Sunni, Hanafi version of the charitable tax (zakat) on them. The military ruler was also held responsible for the murder of Sayyid ʿArif Husayn al-Husayni, the most outspoken pro-Iranian Shiʿi leader, in 1988.Footnote 151 One should also not forget the rise of the extremist anti-Shiʿi organization of the Sipah-i Sahaba, which displayed a zealous adoration for the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, at around this time.Footnote 152
It is thus understandable that al-Khalisi was chastised for trying to play down his own sectarian identity by claiming that he was neither a Sunni nor a Shiʿi, and even more so for defending the first two Caliphs as having had faith (iman).Footnote 153 Quoting once again from Madinat al-ʿIlm, al-SabiqiFootnote 154 tried to make the point that al-Khalisi acknowledged the second Caliph, ʿUmar b. al-Khattab (d. 644), as the compiler of the Qurʾan and son-in-law of the Prophet, while labelling any vilification (bughz rakhna) of the third Caliph, Uthman, as a mere shaykhi belief.Footnote 155 Al-Sabiqi even sent a request for a fatwa to several leading reformist scholars in Pakistan, Dhakku among them. Without mentioning al-Khalisi, he asked whether someone who adhered to the abovementioned beliefs and labelled the Saudi government as ‘believing’ (muʾmin) could still be viewed as remaining inside the Twelver Shiʿi fold. Since all the replies he received were in the negative, al-Sabiqi used this to pin down Dhakku. He demanded an apology from Dhakku for having committed treason against his own community by extolling such a vilifier of the ahl al-bayt,Footnote 156 Wahhabi, friend of the Americans, and enemy of Iran as a wronged mujtahid (mujtahid-i mazlum).Footnote 157 The flip-side of rehabilitating Sunni figures long reviled by the Shiʿi community was, of course, that al-Khalisi supposedly turned infallible imams like Jaʿfar al-Sadiq into simple jurists and mujtahids, denying their divinely inspired knowledge (ʿilm-i ladunni).Footnote 158
Besides quotations from his journal, it seems as if al-Khalisi's will, which early on was translated into Persian and later into Urdu, played a prominent role in such debates. Those works written as rejoinders to Muhammad Husayn al-Najafi Dhakku's controversial book Islah al-Rusum (The Reform of Customs), published in 1995, drew almost exclusively on al-Khalisi's testament to criticize him.Footnote 159 His adversaries seized upon this document to make the case that the Iraqi was entirely opposed to self-flagellation (ʿazadari) which—in its more bloody version—is an integral part of the commemoration of Imam Husayn's death in the South Asian context. In his will al-Khalisi advised his son Mahdi not to organize such practices for his funeral procession and to refrain from visiting and circumambulating (tawaf) the grave of the seventh Shiʿi Imam Musa al-Kazim in al-Kazimiyya with his coffin. All of these actions, in al-Khalisi's view, amounted to unlawful innovations and superstitions, propagated by the shaykhis.Footnote 160 For al-Khalisi's opponents, these stipulations demonstrated that even in death he refused to be treated as a Shiʿi and was perfectly in line with the flag bearers of Wahhabism.Footnote 161 As his follower, Dhakku would hence be well advised to leave his native country in order to propagate his version of Khalisiism abroad, because Pakistan is not Khalistan.Footnote 162 Interestingly, topics pertaining more to al-Khalisi's scientific-medical project were not picked up by his detractors, even though such themes are clearly spelled out in his testament as well: al-Khalisi urged his son not only to safeguard the work of his madrasa from being hijacked by those who made use of false traditions and attributed lies to the Prophet and the ahl al-bayt under the pretext of praising their virtues. The Iraqi scholar also, crucially, expressed his hope that his school in al-Kazimiyya might develop into a fully fledged university (danishgah-i buzurg) which taught that all natural sciences (ʿulum-i maddi) pointed to God's unity and the truth of Muhammad's mission.Footnote 163
In attempting to enlist transnational support for their attacks on al-Khalisi and Dhakku, their opponents frequently appealed to the ‘high’ Shiʿi scholarly tradition. Al-Khalisi, for example, was charged with a lack of scholarly credentials as he had not received an endorsement (ijaza) as a mujtahid. His antagonists pointed out that none of the relevant Shiʿi biographical works listed him with such a rank.Footnote 164 Additionally, frequent reference was made to polemical works published in Iraq, including the reproduction of entire pages of the original Arabic. These nine books demonstrated, in al-Sabiqi's view, a shared mood towards al-Khalisi in the Najaf of the mid-1950s.Footnote 165 The fact that even Abu ‘l-Qasim al-Khuʾi, a prominent source of emulation, explicitly condoned one such book made it impossible to dismiss al-Khalisi's critics as extremists, they claim. No one could discount the respected seminary (hawza) of Najaf as a misguided, shaykhi-run institution. When Dhakku wrote that al-Khalisi was the victim of a shaykhi smear campaign, al-Sabiqi asked why they singled him out from all the other prominent scholars, who were spared?Footnote 166 It was clear to al-Sabiqi that Pakistan's Shiʿa were not following the ‘children of Ibn Taymiyya’Footnote 167 and al-Khalisi in their betrayal of the Imams but rather clung to the guidance of Ayatollah Khomeini who affirmed that the Imams had been endowed with superhuman powers and guardianship over creation (vilayat-i takvini).Footnote 168 Dhakku and al-Khalisi were nothing more than isolated muqassirsFootnote 169 who had given in to the temptation of petrodollars:Footnote 170 not only the weight of the Shiʿi tradition but also the statements by 16 marajiʿ al-taqlid in the twentieth century (including, once again, Abu ‘l-Qasim al-Khuʾi) confirmed the Imams’ creation out of light.Footnote 171
The reformist camp, in turn, also enlisted transnational Shiʿi support, arguing that al-Khalisi and, ultimately, they themselves were only drawing water from the same, much broader reformist well. Like them, Khomeini also spoke out against the circumambulation of the Imams’ tombs.Footnote 172 It was not only them, but also Husayn ʿAli Borujerdi, Muhsin al-Amin al-ʿAmili (d. 1951),Footnote 173 and Iran's present leader, Ali Khamenei, who all condemned the bloody self-flagellation with swords.Footnote 174 Moreover, by demonstrating an intimate familiarity with a broader range of al-Khalisi's works, Dhakku attempted to rectify the distorted picture of a Shiʿi-Wahhabi: referring to relevant passages in the Ihyaʾ al-shariʿa, he argued that al-Khalisi never denied the merit of visiting the Imams’ graves. He explained at length al-Khalisi's position on the infallibility of the members of the Prophet's household, calling them protected from sins, slips, and forgetfulness.Footnote 175 All accusations of inclinations toward the Saudis were utter nonsense since al-Khalisi had repeatedly refuted their interpretation of Islam. Dhakku challenged his opponents to come up with any text from al-Khalisi's writing to the contrary, promising them a financial reward if they were able to do so.Footnote 176 This offer tied in with Dhakku's repeated accusation that his opponents were in reality only after material gains: according to him, they were not ready to sacrifice their own benefits, their cheaply gained respect, and reputation (sasti shuhrat aur maqbuliyyat) by opposing the beliefs of the people and leading them to the truth.Footnote 177 These world-focused scholars (ʿulama-yi dunya) were only concerned with their own bellies, selling fatwas and religion along with the blood of Husayn. Dhakku contrasted them with the upright scholars (ʿulama-yi haqq) who did not mind accepting poverty for defending honourable principles.Footnote 178 He also used this line of argument to counter the question of why he never attempted to translate any of al-Khalisi's works into Urdu, given his claims that the Iraqi scholar's opinions always belonged squarely in the Shiʿi mainstream. Dhakku answered that he simply had neither enough free time nor sufficient financial resources at his disposal to do so.Footnote 179 Finally, he emphasized that al-Khalisi was never embroiled in any real quarrels in Iraq beyond mere gentleman-like disagreements, which are the hallmark of the Shiʿi system of learning.Footnote 180 While al-Khalisi was thus on good terms with the international Shiʿi scholarly elite, his opponents were to blame for exporting an entirely different, negative kind of transnational Shiʿism to Pakistan: they were mere agents of the two branches of the shaykhi school in Kerman/Iran and Kuwait which were trying to disseminate their despicable ideas.Footnote 181
Conclusion
Muhammad al-Khalisi is an intriguing figure. He did not shy away from confrontations with powerful opponents, political and religious alike. Having been prevented by the British and the shah of Iran from continuing his political activism, he shifted to a full-blown modernist project. Al-Khalisi tried to construct an entirely new, health-based, and rational foundation for legal rulings in the Shiʿi tradition. He strove not only to eradicate prevailing ‘superstitions’ but also to bridge the gap with the Sunni majority.
In this paper, I have argued that we might be well advised to pay close attention to the particular local contexts in which reformist teachings emerge, rather than restricting our inquiries solely to transregional trends. In the case of our author, the typical shared, ‘global’ Shiʿi concerns were not absent. Al-Khalisi, too, preached against despotism, called for a ‘rationalization’ of ʿashura, and advocated new approaches in the hawza-system—all aspects that are part of a modern Shiʿi ideology, as Sabrina Mervin argues.Footnote 182
As I have tried to show, however, al-Khalisi's thinking about modernity was crucially shaped by his long exile in Iran. Whereas he located himself early in life in a broader trend of efforts to reconcile Islam and science, al-Khalisi encountered in Iran specific medicalizing discourses which had gained prominence in society during the 1920s. The Iraqi scholar was not only an interested observer, he also participated personally in those debates: gaining medical knowledge through the perusal of medical handbooks, al-Khalisi treated patients in the Iranian countryside.
Even when he returned to Iraq and finalized his risala ʿamaliyya there, he conceived of a fiqh project suitable for the modern age: an elaboration of how God is concerned with the believer's bodily health. Yet, this in itself unique and arguably radical approach was not what later spurred controversies in Iraq and Pakistan alike and led to his ultimate marginalization. Rather, he was labelled as a dangerous fake-Shiʿi who attempted to strip the community of all its distinct markers of identity and thus deserved the derogatory label of being a ‘Shiʿi-Wahhabi’.
The Pakistani debate over al-Khalisi and Shiʿi orthodoxy in particular might well be a modern replay of controversies discussed by Justin Jones in his recent book on Shiʿa Islam in colonial India. Jones aims to deconstruct an understanding of sectarianism among Muslims which restricts itself to the conflicts between Shiʿis and Sunnis. Instead, many of the most decisive contestations in fact took place within each of these sects. Jones observes that new and clearly sectarian practices like the inclusion of the third shahada into the Shiʿi adhan or the public cursing of the first three caliphs (tabarra) were often introduced by up-and-coming maulvis and preachers, who thereby hoped to ‘procure public visibility, and secure themselves a role in an increasingly crowded religious marketplace’. To put it differently: discussions and disputes that ‘took place under the outward cloak of apparently Shiʿa-Sunni conflict’, Jones argues, were primarily meant for internal consumption and struggles over leadership within the community.Footnote 183 Without having looked extensively into the matter of Pakistan, Jones suggests in the epilogue of his book that we might be able to find similar phenomena there and invites a more detailed study of the complex interactions between established scholars, young activist ʿulama, and lay preachers who all intended to stake out their claims.Footnote 184
Precisely this point requires further research, however. Many of those who spoke out against Dhakku cannot simply be dismissed as popular preachers nor can we construct a clear-cut dichotomy between local, Pakistani traditionalists and reformists who received their training in the centres of Shiʿi learning. Al-Sabiqi, for example, studied in Najaf as well and mentioned Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr as one of his teachers.Footnote 185 Additionally, the transnational aspects of shaykhism, with both money and literature flowing from Kuwait to Pakistan, render such classifications even more untenable. Further research into the polemics surrounding Muhammad al-Khalisi, which focuses on the background of the actors and educational institutions involved, could, I suggest, prove to be a suitable lens through which to consider internal struggles, aspects of sectarianism, and the transnational negotiation of Shiʿi doctrine side by side.
