Introduction
It remains rare for scholars of Islam to derive generic socio-political theory from its primary materials, or methodically draw comparative benefit from other creedal traditions, let alone pursue both pathways in depth within a single career.Footnote 1 The oeuvre of Leo Strauss, whilst originating from other intellectual concerns, embodies such a mesmerizing project. Strauss was born in an orthodox Jewish family in Kirchhain (current-day Hessen) in 1899, but “was converted to […] political Zionism” as a young man.Footnote 2 After the First World War, he studied mathematics, natural science and philosophy, and obtained a doctorate in philosophy in Hamburg (1921).Footnote 3 During his postdoctoral work, which firstly focused on Spinoza, he had also taken up the study of medieval Islamic Philosophy. In this Islamic engagement lies the origin of Strauss’s political thought, which has centred on “the theological-political problem” (see further below).Footnote 4 After sojourns in France and England, Strauss sought refuge in America, arriving in 1937 and taking up employment mainly as a professor of political science in, respectively, New York, Chicago (for the larger part of his career), Claremont, and Annapolis, where he died in 1973.Footnote 5
While Strauss’s initial writings “were treated respectfully,” a prominent disciple’s obituary mentions, later works “were considered perverse and caused anger.”Footnote 6 Exception was taken to Strauss’s treatment of hidden or “esoteric writing,”Footnote 7 which came central to his queries on how rational order could flow from religious revelation (i.e. “the theological-political problem”), and built once more on medieval Islamic philosophy. To Al-Fārābī was attributed the concealed view that philosophy incorporated as ‘political science’ (ᶜilm al-madanī), i.e., the study of what achieves human happiness, religious disciplines legitimized by the Islamic revelation such as jurisprudence and theology.Footnote 8 Thus, in Strauss’s Islamic queries, the bone of contention has generally been the soundness of his interpretations of medieval philosophers as atheist Platonists in disguise, besides the political implication of such readings in the here-and-now (with the émigré emerging as a conservative icon in Chicago) and his own alleged embrace of exotericism – i.e. in writing through commonly edifying but deceptive “foreground.”Footnote 9 The implications for Islamic studies of Straussian method and theory, however, are much broader than on narrowly understood philosophy alone, extending also, for instance, to self-declared esoteric traditions. Their challenge, in other words, remains open irrespective of whether the book is closed on Strauss’s examination of the falāsifa.
Others have previously pointed at Straussian applications to Shiite mysticism or religious expressions related to it, as in the association of Ṣadrā’s “Wisdom of the Throne” with an “intentionally esoteric style of writing,” but not, it seems, offered dedicated studies.Footnote 10 The current essay takes a leaf from the Straussian page and examines it in addressing questions of spiritual authority surrounding the Shiite Sufi leader Mollā Solṭānmoḥammad Beydokhtī, ›Solṭānᶜalīshāh‹ (1251/1835–1327/1909), and his treatise on “Friendship with God,” the Valāyat-nāme (1323/1905–6).Footnote 11
Solṭānᶜalīshāh led the Gonābādī-Neᶜmatollāhī order, an important Shiite Sufi network based predominantly in the Khorasan region of northeastern Iran, in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.Footnote 12 Gonābādī Sufism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the main lineage of the initially Sunni Neᶜmatollāhī order, which was influential in Central Asia, India, and Persia and mostly remains today in Iran and Western diasporas. It goes back to Shāh Neᶜmatollāh Valī, d.843/1431, a Syrian-born Sufi author who settled ultimately in Kerman, southeastern Iran.Footnote 13 Persecutions of the Neᶜmatollāhīs and other Sufis under the last Safavid Shāh Solṭānḥoseyn (d.1722) led the leadership of the order to relocate to the Deccan.Footnote 14
In the late eighteenth century, the order returned to Iran from India and its “revival” included widespread popular adherence and growing social influence.Footnote 15 After several renewed episodes of jurist-monarch collaboration in the repression of Sufism and persecution of Sufis, the court’s institutional opposition came to an end with the third ruler of the Qājār dynasty, the Sufi initiate/patron Moḥammad Shāh Qājār (r. 1834–48).Footnote 16 The order was at the height of its power under the Neᶜmatollāhī master Zeyn ol-ᶜĀbedīn Raḥmatᶜalīshāh, who was deputy governor of Fars under Moḥammad Shāh Qājār,Footnote 17 but fragmentation set in upon his death in 1861. Two claimants to his succession were Monavvarᶜalīshāh (d.1884), heading the Monavvarᶜalīshāhī (or Ẕoᵓr-Reyāsateyn) order, and Ṣafīᶜalīshāh (d.1899), from whom the Ṣafīᶜalīshāhī order evolved. Moḥammad Shāh had nicknamed the third claimant, Ḥājj Moḥammad Kāẓem Eṣfahānī Saᶜādatᶜalīshāh (d.1876), ṭāvūs ol-ᶜorafāᵓ (peacock of the gnostics), on the basis of which his order is sometimes referred to as the Ṭāvūsiyya. Its common names, however, refer to Saᶜādatᶜalīshāh’s pupil Solṭānmoḥammad Solṭānᶜalīshāh (d.1909), who was the larger personality, under whom the order greatly expanded - Solṭānᶜalīshāhī (Neᶜmatollāhī) or Gonābādī, referring to the latter’s residence in Khorasan.Footnote 18
Solṭānᶜalīshāh succeeded in creating the Shiite Sufi order per excellence despite facing recurrent challenges of his spiritual authority and meeting a tragic death.Footnote 19 Among the early allegations was his association with Bābism.Footnote 20 This points to the religious transformation of Shiite Islam in the nineteenth century, which often involved reinforced or independent articulations of mystical truth and spiritual authority. Among the early doctrines of the Sheykhī school was the concept of the Imams as “pre-existential divine beings” and “the cause of Creation,” and that of the initiated “Perfect Shia” as the Deputy of the Mahdī.Footnote 21 The later Kermani radicalism is famously associated with the idea of the “fourth pillar” (rokn-e rābeᶜ), explicating much of what was implicit in the founders’ words, which presented the Perfect Shīᶜa collectively as “rulers and instructors in this world” or in the singular, as “God”s governor on earth.”Footnote 22 Bābism emerged as a rival movement to the Kermani Sheykhīs, through “almost identical, radical theories of leadership,”Footnote 23 antagonistic to jurist authority, and with the founder’s claim to be the “gate” to the Imam’s knowledge. But this movement developed into a new religion, claiming to supersede Islam,Footnote 24 accompanied by far-reaching ambitions to worldly rule and a violent uprising – lately causing alarm in the state.Footnote 25
A parallel development in the nineteenth century was “the rise in discussions of wilāya,” with treatises on the topic “establishing a genre.”Footnote 26 Valāyat had also been expounded on by Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s teacher, the philosopher Hādī Sabzavārī (d.1289/1873), whose discussion of the concept as that through which “being” (vojūd) is manifest, represented the Ṣadrian metaphysics.Footnote 27 A primary context for the broader ascent of valāyat thinking was the view of the mid-century “as the millennium of the occultation of the Imam [while] expectation of his imminent re-appearance was rife.”Footnote 28 Millenarianism, however, produced an “intellectual reaction,” which was “patronised by the dynasty” and “facilitated by […] ḥikmat” – importantly including the work of Sabzavārī.Footnote 29 Except for royal admiration, the philosopher met with significant jurist approval, as evidenced by his influence on the leading oṣūlī mojtaheds of the age,Footnote 30 i.e. on the high clergy authorized in legal interpretation who aimed at the expansion of jurist authority. Thus, while both Sabzavārī and Solṭānᶜalīshāh count as “key intermediaries” of (aspects of) valāyat theory between the Safavid and the modern era,Footnote 31 heated controversy was reserved only for the latter. In the midst of state breakdown, without the royal patronage which had bestowed the cognomen of “peacock of the gnostics” on his predecessor, or collegiate recognition during a time when the (exoteric) jurists’ assertion was at a height, the master’s Sufi pathway lay open to contestation at little apparent cost.
The first task at hand consists of assessing the net value of Strauss’s writing for this essay’s query of Shiite Sufism, of which the Solṭānᶜalīshāhī order is the most important institutional representative in the modern day, focused on notions of persecution, dangerous knowledge, epistemic subordination, and political religion. Subsequently, the theme of Friendship with God, central to Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s Valāyat-nāme, is explored relative to adjacent secular and religious concepts in order to establish it, in Straussian terms, as a template for socio-political relations. The essay next turns to the interpretation of the Valāyat-nāme in relation to Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s contested life and teachings and assassination in the early twentieth century. His religious ambiguities are interpreted not as exoteric dissimulation but a subtler practice of rearticulation on the margins of a shared religious universe.
Straussian legacies
At first sight, it may seem doubtful whether Strauss’s take on Islamic philosophy, from Philosophie und Gesetz (Reference Strauss1935) to Persecution and the Art of Writing (Reference Strauss1952), could elucidate queries of Shiite Sufism – found in a different clime, with a later zenith. While Strauss met with Louis Massignon, the renowned scholar of (Ḥallāj’s) Sufism, in 1932, and reported his awe of the latter, the respect left no obvious traces in his intellectual endeavors.Footnote 32 Strauss’s political establishment of medieval Islamic philosophy, evolving towards an evermore explicit exoteric reading,Footnote 33 seems almost paradigmatically opposed to Henry Corbin’s perspective (i.e. that of Masssignon’s foremost pupil), which interpreted Islamic philosophy, instead, as a continuous illuminationist tradition.Footnote 34 While few scholars nowadays credit Corbin’s near recasting of Islamic philosophy as, by and large, Shiite theosophy,Footnote 35 it was the latter’s great contribution to have laid bare a fount of (what he thought of as) post-Rushdian Islamic esoterism, which also fuels Shiite Sufism.Footnote 36 Through his philosopher-teacher, Hādī Sabzavārī, the connection extends to Solṭānᶜalīshāh.Footnote 37
The intellectual situation in the Shiite-Iranian realm where philosophy has inclined towards mysticism poses a significant problem, moreover, for Straussian thought holding philosophy bien entendu in opposition to religion. The point is echoed in Wasserstrom’s interpretation of Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing, venturing that the work “famously suggests one kind of esoteric [writing, while] kabbalah and Sufism are another.” This means, in the author’s assessment, that Strauss’s “philosophical esoterism is a theatrical display of camouflage, [while] the other, mystical esoterism, is a sequestration of positive content.”Footnote 38 The passage speaks to the current discussion in the observed contradiction between exoteric and esoteric readings in the “philosophical” variety, which is not implied in the “mystical” one. In this regard, it merits reiterating that Shiite esoterists have seldom taken “positive content” as an alternative to the revealed Law. Main works in the ᶜerfānī tradition, for example, define delicate complementary balances.Footnote 39
Even while these first orientations are distinctly inauspicious, there are four larger Straussian themes related to the ideological tensions associated with revealed religion, that do present themselves as effective structuring devices to account for the spiritual authority invested in Solṭānᶜalīshāh and extolled in the Valāyat-nāme. The first of these concerns the notion of persecution as a context for exoterism – Solṭānᶜalīshāh had been forced to abandon his teaching circle and flee Tehran accused of Bābī leaningsFootnote 40 and was often accused of hiding his true ideas.Footnote 41 He was engaged in writing the Valāyat-nāme while “already living under constant threat of assassination.”Footnote 42 Closely related to but not interchangeable with the point of persecution is the conception of esoterism as a veil for dangerous knowledge – for the recipient as well as the presenter. The sting in the allegation that Solṭānᶜalīshāh maintained graded teachings for different audiences, from the general public to the “elite of Sufi disciples” (akhaṣṣ-e khavāṣ-e morīdān), lay especially in the specification of progressively more blasphemous teachings.Footnote 43 Despite complementarity, thirdly, Strauss’s work reminds us of the drive to subordination that frequently arises in the encounter of Islamic traditions that emphasize different epistemic sources – reason and revelation in the case of the medieval philosophers; revelation and illumination here. In Shiism, a classical manifestation of complementary ranking comes to the fore in knowledge hierarchies scaled from exoteric to esoteric, ẓāher to bāṭen,Footnote 44 which similarly define Shiite Sufi thought, including in regard to other Shiite traditions.Footnote 45 The last element is the political nature of religious knowledge, established in Strauss’s analysis through the privileging of Islam’s law-giving features.Footnote 46 The scope for conceiving “political religious knowledge” is broader, however, “in light of the foremost transcendental goal” in Islam of divine guidance (hudā).Footnote 47 It follows that in the case study of this essay, “the politics of religious knowledge” has centred on “the effort to defend its value as divine guidance for the world.”Footnote 48 Few religious concepts if any are more central to Shiite Sufism (as to Shiism generally) than “valāyat,”Footnote 49 and its discussion – as in Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s treatise - harbours claims to unique mergers of guidance, sanctity, and salvation.
Conceiving divine friendship socio-politically
The following excursus scans the surface of some adjacent secular and religious conceptions to shed comparative light on Shiite Sufi Friendship with God. It does so specifically to gain a better understanding of the Sufis’ religious claims to worldly authority, before turning to the specific case of Solṭānᶜalīshāh and the Valāyat-nāme. While anchored firmly in Islamic wilāya/valāyat doctrine deriving either from the general Sufi, including Sunni, theory or Shiite thought stretching from the esoteric to the exoteric, that is, Shiite Sufi Friendship may be further particularised in light of certain Christian mystical writings as a template for socio-political relations. A Straussian case of political religion, “Divine Friendship” in Shiite mystical realms is equally contextualised by the themes of persecution, dangerous knowledge and epistemic subordination.
De Montaigne’s sixteenth-century Essai on friendship contains three interrelated notions that remain intuitive of friendship: altruism, reciprocity, and freedom from constraint.Footnote 50 Altruism by the same token is central to Islamic mystical notions of wilāya, as in a statement by Solṭānᶜalīshāh in the Valāyat-nāme on the necessity of giving to others. However, īsār – the Islamic equivalent - is not ultimately for other humans, but for the greater love of God, from whom it also stems.Footnote 51 The element of reciprocity is similarly evident in Sufi views of interaction with the divine that conceive divine interaction, for instance, as a “marriage.”Footnote 52 Claims to orthodoxy often cover such views, however, separating Islamic mysticism from adjacent heterodox concepts such as etteḥād and vaḥdat ol-vojūd, which were stated by Solṭānᶜalīshāh to be among the “corrupt beliefs” (i.e. reflecting the rejection that they often faced in later Sufism).Footnote 53 Whereas Islamic mystical articulations abound for “altruism” and “reciprocity,” in other words, these have expressed not “freedom from constraint” but hierarchical religious embedding. This structural aspect of the religious hierarchy provides a further clue to valāyat as a template for socio-political relations in Islamic society.
The mentioned mystic Islamic articulations of altruism and reciprocity have equivalents in other religious traditions, as for instance, Christian Gottesfreundschaft, which encompasses a similarly hierarchical model of religious friendship. In the perennialist-comparative margins of En Islam iranien, Corbin ingeniously invokes Gottesfreundschaft to render valāyat.Footnote 54 But one will not, it seems, find concepts of Friendship with God in this tradition that perceive the Friend’s role as that of a spiritual initiator within the religious community.Footnote 55 Reports of two subsequent manifestations of Christian mystical organization, Van Ruusbroec’s (d.1381) parish and later priory in Groenendaal near BrusselsFootnote 56 and Grote’s (d.1384) devotional movement, which spread out from Deventer beyond the Low Countries and was posthumously named the Zusters en Broeders van het Gemene Leven (“Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life”),Footnote 57 do not indicate either that the spiritual progression of disciples was held dependent on the person of the spiritual founder, irrespective of the great esteem in which he would be held as, respectively, an illuminated teacher and the “first exemplar of the New Devotion.”Footnote 58 In Islamic cases, to the contrary, his Friendship with God allows the Friend to be at once, a spiritual patron in the community of the faithful – valāyat, it seems without exception, involves a relationship of double patronage, of the Friend by God and flowing from there, of the Faithful(-Initiands) by the Friend.Footnote 59
While the root meanings of wilāya/valāyat are distinct, the terms are also used interchangeably.Footnote 60 Their duality of meanings renders both “authority” or “power” and “friendship” or “assistance.”Footnote 61 The Sufi concept is often rendered as Friendship with God, which may include understandings from each side of the divide such as nearness, devotion to the Imams (which is the core understanding of valāyat in Shiism),Footnote 62 spiritual jurisdiction, or sanctity.Footnote 63 The parallel drawn by Chodkiewicz between Islamic sainthood and late Roman amicitia,Footnote 64 moreover, serves to remind that the dual meanings of wilāya and valāyat are often implied in one another. In either case, the terminology reveals embeddedness in socio-political life,Footnote 65 prompting disconcerting questions over the referents for its spiritual authority. Among other historical categories, the claims to partaking in wilāya/valāyat might involve caliphs, shahs, imams, sheikhs, jurists, mystics, or the faithful at large.
Sufi elaborations on Friendship with God (including Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s) have discussed the Friends, with implications for these other functions of Islamic society, by distinguishing valī and valāyat from, on the one hand, the Prophet and prophethood, nabī and nobovvat, and on the other, the Messenger and revelation, rasūl and resālat.Footnote 66 Shiite theory is particular in this realm of thought in grounding valāyat in the imamate.Footnote 67 There has been a chain of four main mystic theorists of wilāya/valāyat: al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (d.#295/905–300/910), Hojvīrī/Jollābī (d.#465/1072–469/1079) Ibn ᶜArabī (d.638/1240) and, the only Shiite author, Ḥeydar Āmolī (d. after 787/1385).Footnote 68 Āmolī presented the Imams as mystical guides while defining true Shiism as Sufism and true Sufism as Shiism.Footnote 69
While “the tendency toward the rapprochement between Sufism and official circles of Shiᶜite learning and piety” continued into the ninth/fifteenth century,Footnote 70 the prism of Sufism became increasingly suspect, even before the realignment of Shiism around a juristic core, since the days of the Safavid-era backlash. The theosopher Mollā Ṣadrā (d.1045/1635–36?) was highly critical of anti-intellectual pretenders to Sufism and, unlike his Sufi teacher Sheykh Bahāᵓī,Footnote 71 does not seem to have identified distinct categories of the Friends in society (as opposed to as an ideal type only),Footnote 72 There was a “lack of fixed ontological categories below the level of the Prophet” in Ṣadrā’s spiritual hierarchy, and valī, ᶜāref, ᶜālem [friend, gnostic, scholar] and emām were used as “multivalent terms.”Footnote 73 These facts did not prevent intense attacks alleging his Sufism.Footnote 74
Sufi responses to the anti-Sufi campaigns show religious hierarchy reforming, legitimising claims to spiritual guidance through their subordinate embedding. Khorāsānī’s late seventeenth-century Toḥfe-ye ᶜAbbāsī, for instance, maintains the function of the pīr while downgrading its unmediated, exalted station. The work is thought to have played a major role in legitimising Sufism away from its Sunni roots with reference to Shiite ḥadīth collections.Footnote 75 Neyrīzī (d.1173/1759), another Ẕahabī master, not only rejects antinomians but dispenses with the term “ṣūfī” altogether (except in the negative), while retaining his appreciation for salāsil ahl al-faqr (i.e. Sufi orders) and reincorporating “high Sufis” under the wider mystic label of Twelver ᶜerfān.Footnote 76
Whether or not Shiite authors opposed Sufism as a whole, it was a common thread in their critiques (including Āmolī’s) to chide, paraphrasing Corbin, Shiite Sufism’s “forgetfulness of its sources” – i.e. the “Sunni” claim to a Friendship with God that followed the prophethood but did not subjugate itself to the orthodox Imamic cycle, claiming Friendship instead for itself.Footnote 77 As previously indicated, Shiite Sufis might contain such readings – which would bring qoṭbiyat (lit., poleship, i.e. Sufi spiritual authority) and Imamate, and by extension, the class of religious jurists into collision - through hierarchical demarcations. These responses are another instance of “religious friendship,” in other words, deriving legitimacy from recalibrated hierarchization. Specifically, Shiite Sufi discussions of Friendship with God have sought to carve out subordinate religious space within Shiism, in delicate balances of spiritual authority with Imams and jurists.
Solṭānᶜalīshāhī doctrine postulated a division of spiritual authority in the gheyba between Shiite jurists and mystics, foqahā and ᶜorafā (see further below). Shiite Sufis in Iran, into the twentieth century, encompassed the qoṭb’s (“Pole”) authority under the spiritual dominion of “the fourteen immaculates”: the Prophet’s authority, Fāṭima’s valāyat-e Fāṭemīya, and that of the twelve Imams. They generally conceived of the Mahdī’s realm, for instance, in terms of the Universal Authority (velāyat-e kollīya) or Sun Authority (velāyat-e shamsīya), while the Partial Authority (velāyat-e jozᵓīya) or Moon Authority (velāyat-e qamarīya) confined the Pole’s jurisdiction. Thus, Shiite Sufis set forth velāyat-e jozᵓīya as spiritual authority derived from that of the Twelfth Imam, but whom, in ambivalent terminology reminding once more of Āmolī’s theme,Footnote 78 they might also conceive of as the Pole of Poles (qoṭb ol-aqṭāb), qoṭb-e shamsī or pīr-e ḥaqīqat.Footnote 79
Exoteric dissimulation vs. religious equivocation
The last part of this reflection expands on the noted ambiguity in Sufis’ subordinate renderings of legitimate authority in Shiism. The conception of the Mahdī as pīr, for instance, begs the question of bounds to the Pole’s partial authority. The common laqab of shāh is often deemed symbolic, unchallenging in their relations with rulers, but the Sufis’ use of the term might sprawl, as when Shāh Neᶜmatollāh stated that rulers had to spread by the sword the word of the True King.Footnote 80 There appear to be clear applications for Straussian “truth between the lines”Footnote 81 in these examples – but importantly, ones in which the “lines” themselves are key constituents of truth. Just as al-Fārābī’s portrayal as anti-religious has been rejected,Footnote 82 it would be ill-judged to project hostility to the Law in Shiism on Solṭānᶜalīshāh, who was an accredited Jurist as well as a Sufi master.Footnote 83
The interpretive challenge in the master’s biography, therefore, is arguably to account for something more subtle than dissimulation amounting to exoterism as an inversion of meaning. Rather, the case pertains to how religious subalterns face situations of domination whose terms, at least in important part, they accept. The shared religious universe requires religious subalterns, therefore, to accommodate while avoiding “conversion,” as often has been the plight of Shiite Sufis in Iran. It has proven productive in trying to substantiate what “ambiguity in hierarchy” amounts to in the realm of Shiite Sufism to consult an essay in linguistic anthropology that examines accommodation in the face of hegemonic ideology.Footnote 84 Corin’s study explores Islamic among other cases where subordinates manipulate the definition of an ideological centre and its religious margins, allowing simultaneously for their adjustment to a hegemonic discourse and the retention of religious identity.Footnote 85 Where the Straussian analysis builds upon the recognition of intentional obscurities, contradictions, or omissions, the anthropology of “structural heterogeneity” observes subaltern meaning adhesion and its ritual articulation.Footnote 86 In the process, religious salience shifts from the sanctioned codes towards their graft.
Along these interpretive lines lies the “central” Shiite belief in an original esoteric-exoteric divide of religious meaning in Islam, from which flow the triad of resālat, nobovvat, and valāyat and Shiite Sufi “homologies” of sharīᶜat, ṭarīqat, and ḥaqīqat.Footnote 87 As previously suggested, Shiite Sufis might venture a further, “marginal” subdivision from this construction, establishing Sufis or Gnostics (ᶜorafā) and jurists (foqahā) as esoteric and exoteric agents of the esoteric Imamic authority. (It will be further analyzed below how Sufism might attain salience through ritual in this hierocracy). Such a division of spiritual authority between ᶜorafā and foqahā, whether explicit or implicit, has undergirded Solṭānᶜalīshāhī doctrine and practice. In January 1997, the Solṭānᶜalīshāhī master Majẕūbᶜalīshāh proclaimed a division of spiritual authority, beyond the realm of personal judgement – basing himself on his grandfather’s (and Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s grandson’s) treatise Pand-e Ṣāleḥ - between the mojtahed-e jāmeᶜ osh-sharāyeṭ (“all-round jurist”), to whom the Gonābādī foqarā owed taqlīd in sharīᶜa rulings, and the “great one of the age” (bozorg-e vaqt), whose precepts of the ṭarīqat they were to adopt.Footnote 88 While the rules hint strongly who currently is the Great One, his identity is not spelled out.
Solṭānᶜalīshāh and the Valāyat-nāme
The oeuvre and vita of Solṭānᶜalīshāh often fit the Gonābādī pattern and may be read in a similar accommodationist and retentionist light. The phraseology in and around his Valāyat-nāme, however, ventured ominously beyond where other Poles in this Neᶜmatollāhī lineage have since gone. It thus remains to explore the socio-political history of the treatise and its author, as well as the text itself,Footnote 89 to examine whether a plausible relation exists between his (perceived) religious ideology and mysterious assassination on 26 rabīᶜ ol-avval 1327/17 April 1909.Footnote 90
Solṭānᶜalīshāh assumed the order”s qoṭbiyat in 1293Q/1876 at the death of his predecessor, Saᶜādatᶜalīshāh. Through the former, the Gonābādī-Neᶜmatollāhis grew in social and numerical importance in Iran and his increasing wealth drew resentment.Footnote 91 As noted, various heresies were ascribed to the master and both resentment and heresiology have been suggested as factors in his fate.Footnote 92 A closer inspection of his late religious practice renders these elements in sharper profile.Footnote 93
The Valāyat-nāme was originally published as a lithograph in 1323Q/1905–6 in Tehran. It was completed in 1320Q/1902 and work on it had commenced since at least 1898.Footnote 94 It is, reportedly, “the most widely read of the doctrinal works” by Solṭānᶜalīshāh and “second only to his (Qurᵓānic commentary Bayān os-Saᶜāda) in its popularity.”Footnote 95 It has been suggested that the Bayān “can be considered a commentary on walāya,” to which the Valāyat-nāme constitutes a compact “companion” that is “central to [the master’s] mystical thought.”Footnote 96 Its reach beyond Sufi circles is indicated by the perhaps surprising reference to the regimist Āyatollāh Moṭahharī (d.1979) as “a keen reader of […] the Walāyat-nāma.”Footnote 97
The treatise contains twelve parts and 47 chapters, an introduction dissecting the lexical meaning of valāyat/velāyat, and a closure, dedicated to the ādāb and conditions of zekr, with two supplements. The first three parts are concerned with laying out its key understandings of Islamic doctrine on valāyat/velāyat, focused on the relations between valāyat, prophethood (nobovvat), and revelation (resālat), and the elaboration of “prescriptive” (taklīfīye) valāyat, which is contrasted with the “engendering” (takvīnīye) type. Solṭānᶜalīshāh here follows the tradition, as expounded by Ibn ᶜArabī, that distinguishes the engendering and the prescriptive command (amr). The first pertains to all creatures, who are brought into existence willing or unwilling, and derives from the Name Allāh, which “comprehends the properties of all other Names;” while the second pertains to mankind, can be rejected, and derives from other, specific Names such as “the Guide” (al-Hādī).Footnote 98
In the Ṣadrian framework that the Valāyat-nāme “closely follows,” valāyat-e takvīnīye is associated with the Imam’s cosmic function, namely as the “face of God.”Footnote 99 Valāyat-e taklīfīye on the other hand, relates to “the love and devotion to the Imams” that allows the faithful to fulfil the obligations of the faith.Footnote 100 Humans partake in each of the two types of valāyat, which are also associated in Neoplatonic fashion with divine “descent” (nozūl) and “ascent” (ṣoᶜūd) towards God.Footnote 101 Whereas valāyat-e takvīnīye “occupies a privileged position in [Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s] cosmology,”Footnote 102 the Valāyat-nāme devotes more dedicated discussion to valāyat-e taklīfīye, which, as specified below, involves the Sufi master’s initiatory role.Footnote 103
The treatise follows a “central” Shiite Sufi tradition in establishing Friendship with God in relation to the prophethood (nobovvat) – as its spirit (rūḥ)Footnote 104 - and in relation to the revelation (resālat). It holds that “Islam” is enabled through “general” (ᶜāmme) allegiance to the exterior ordinations (aḥkām-e qālebī) that the Messenger (rasūl) brings, while the “particular” (khāṣṣe) pact which enables “faith” (īmān), applies to the owliyāᵓ (which term seems mostly to connote the aᵓemme but might also refer to the anbiyāᵓ in their esoteric aspect).Footnote 105 While a necessary precondition, “Islam” does not exceed this world, whereas “faith” enables believers to attain the reward (ajr) of the hereafter.Footnote 106 Solṭānᶜalīshāh then addresses the “fourteen immaculates” and slides into a “marginal” conception where he claims that each had their own “sheikhs” (mashāyeskh), before tracing his own line of authorisation to Imam ᶜAlī.Footnote 107 While the sheikhs of “the Sufi path” (ṭarīqat) are sporadically distinguished from those of “narration” (ravāyat), and the latter are associated with the ᶜolamā,Footnote 108 the common reference in the Valāyat-nāme is unspecified. Except for locating the lineal interface of two separate traditions, that is, Solṭānᶜalīshāh here - as has been similarly observed of his earliest treatise, the Saᶜādat-nāme - “retrospectively employs Sufi technical terminology to describe the relationship between the imams and their representatives.” As a result, “[i]n his parlance [in this discussion], the latter in effect become Sufi masters.”Footnote 109
There are implications deriving from this view of Friendship with God for the interaction between Sufi sheikhs and the community of believers, and a more restricted category of initiated disciples. The Valāyat-nāme ventures that in general, there is always the need for a teacher (a moᶜallem) because, before valāyat mends the situation, “man is like a sheep […], endlessly perplexed and wandering in the wilderness.”Footnote 110 Specifically, the need for a sheikh (eḥtiyāj be sheykh) stems from the fact that he is the faithful’s broker of valāyat. That is, believers attain contact with the divine through the “particular oath of allegiance” (beyᶜat-e khāṣṣe) to the “authorised sheikh” (sheykh-e maᵓẕūn).Footnote 111 The graft of valāyat will settle in the believer’s heart and will be strengthened there by such Sufi practices as “ritual greeting” (moṣāfeḥe), the transformative “meditation of God” (ẕekr-e khodā), “reflection” (fekr) on the celestial face of the Imam, and particularly, the “taking of the image of the master in one’s mind” (be naẓar āvordan-e ṣūrat-e morshed).Footnote 112 The invigoration of this graft then leads to the Imamic illumination of the heart.Footnote 113
Shiite commentators outside the Solṭānᶜalīshāhī confines have found several elements in these passages controversial.Footnote 114 The Iranian cleric ᶜAllāme Borqeᶜi, for instance, found Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s conception of valāyat as allegiance to the Hidden Imam but entering the believer’s heart “through the celestial image of the sheikh,” to be clearly invalid (boṭlān-esh āshkār ast). Critiquing the Saᶜādat-nāme, Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s earliest book, for ideas that the Valāyat-nāme also adopted, Borqeᶜī argued that rendering present the sheikh’s image during worship was “worse than idolatry” (az bot-parastī badtar). Evidence was utterly lacking for a religious instruction, Borqeᶜi stated, that beyᶜat allegiance was to be given to someone during the gheyba, characterising this notion as an “illegitimate innovation” (bedᶜat).Footnote 115
While the Valāyat-nāme treats mostly esoteric subject matter, it also contains a chapter on “the administration of a country and the treatment of subjects” (mamlekat-dārī va raᶜīyat-parvarī). A later commentary writes that Solṭānᶜalīshāh “referred [here] to the injustices [in Gonābād] of [a state functionary named] Mīrzā Āqā Khān Shokūh os-Solṭān and his friends and wrote that this behaviour causes the end of the state and the monarchy.”Footnote 116 The phrasing suggests that his larger concern was not the injustices of Shokūh os-Solṭān but the preservation of national or regional order, fearing violence and anomie. If state authorities engaged in oppression, he wrote, they would not be able to keep the subjects in check and “the people will release oppression on one another and the country will break down - as is witnessed in these times.”Footnote 117 Elsewhere in the treatise, the national state is related to that of Sufism: “These days […], the practice of beyᶜat has been detached from the people of the nation and no fame remains of it!.”Footnote 118
These passages also indicate that Solṭānᶜalīshāh, while critical of state functionaries, supported national order in the shape of the monarchy. They echo akhlāq and statecraft literature.Footnote 119 Other clues in and around the Valāyat-nāme indicate that the Gonābādī guide was well connected with provincial authorities representing the monarch (Moẓaffar ed-Dīn Shāh in the period 1896-January 1907; Moḥammad ᶜAlī Shāh until July 1909) and valued them as protectors of life and good - especially as the Gonābādī Sufis reportedly suffered injustices at the hand of state representatives. For instance, the Sufis welcomed the appointment of Nayyer od-Dowle as governor (vālī) of Khorasan in 1318Q/1901, in light of the harassment they claimed had been unleashed by his predecessor Rokn od-Dowle and the latter’s local emissaries.Footnote 120 Gonābādīs allege that Solṭānᶜalīshāh had foretold Nayyer od-Dowle’s governorship, and the latter reportedly declared that during his tenure, he would grant all the master’s wishes.Footnote 121 When notables in Mashhad sought to prevent the festive welcome of the new governor, a local military commander and disciple of Solṭānᶜalīshāh reportedly intervened. Made aware of his master’s prediction, he and his forces arranged their own celebratory reception with military honours.Footnote 122
At the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the constitutionalist cause became a weapon for the enemies of Solṭānᶜalīshāh. His principal local nemesis, Abū Torāb Nūghābī, found support in his clashes with the Sufis in the Mashhad-based constitutionalist council that administered Khorasan from late 1326Q/1908,Footnote 123 and reportedly was incensed at the journey toward Nishabur by one of Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s disciples, hailing the attempted return in early 1327Q/1909 of Nayyer od-Dowle.Footnote 124 Villagers in Beydokht confronted Solṭānᶜalīshāh in the name of the Constitution, likely around the same time, demanding a clarification of his political position.Footnote 125 The Sufi master, who had previously wished for the expedited demise of Nāṣer od-Dīn Shāh so that the Qājār state’s “oppression” (ẓolm) would end,Footnote 126 defended himself by saying: “I am only a village farmer and a dervish, and I do not know what “constitutionalism” or “despotism” mean. We have nothing to do with these matters and we obey the government, whether constitutional or autocratic.”Footnote 127
Besides political confrontation, Solṭānᶜalīshāh was also besieged on socio-economic grounds. Rather than plainly a zāreᶜ-e dehātī, he had likely become, more accurately, a wealthy landownerFootnote 128 who - while warning against worldly conceit - valued wealth positively (“wealth itself, and its spending in lawful ways and on charitable work and for developing the world, is not in any way inconsistent with dervishhood”).Footnote 129 The Valāyat-nāme argues ardently that “usury” (rebā) did not refer to practices such as the hoarding of grain or money, but rather to the non-sharīᶜa-based affairs of banks that were now established all over the country.Footnote 130 But a popular view was recorded within a decade after the master’s murder, relating the event to his refusal “to give people grain from his storehouses” at a time of famine. Solṭānᶜalīshāh then allegedly “became so unpopular that he was killed.”Footnote 131
Opposition of a predominantly religious nature was the third aspect beyond the primarily political and economic in these confrontations of the Sufi master. Rokn od-Dowle’s enmity towards Solṭānᶜalīshāh reportedly had its origin in the presentation by Shokūh os-Solṭān, the former’s servant, of the Sufi master’s newly published hagiography, Rojūm osh-Shayāṭīn, containing “the claims of this spiritual lineage” (eddeᶜāhā-ye īn selsele).Footnote 132 Another instance concerned visitors from Kheybarī and Gonābād who had reportedly contacted the Āyatollāhs Mīrzā-ye Shīrāzī the SecondFootnote 133 (d.1338/1920) and Moḥammad-Kāẓem Khorāsānī (d.1290/1911)Footnote 134 in Iraq in order to expose Solṭānᶜalīshāh.Footnote 135 To different degrees, these clerics were both involved with the constitutionalist cause.Footnote 136 It is not known whether this fact informed their judgement, but constitutionalism was at stake – as indicated – for some of Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s detractors. The drama of the occasion, however, lies elsewhere. Khorāsānī had responded to his visitors’ portrayal of Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s teachings by stating that they concerned kofr, and that their author was deserving of execution (koshtanī).Footnote 137 The Gonābādī order avows, however, that the marjaᶜ, not having read his work or met with him, had not wished to proclaim a fatvā on Solṭānᶜalīshāh. The master was later exonerated and the recipient of Khorāsānī’s praise, it is further claimed, after the marjaᶜ had been sent the former’s tafsīr.Footnote 138 But regardless of the reported restraint, the fate of Solṭānᶜalīshāh would still have been imperilled by the traveling villagers who, upon their return, are said to have spread the alleged news of Khorāsānī’s takfīr.Footnote 139
By the early twentieth century, in other words, a storm had gathered over the Shiite legitimacy of Solṭānᶜalīshāhī Sufism. In the apparent absence of accounts detailing the charges against Solṭānᶜalīshāh,Footnote 140 one may conjecture from circumstantial evidence about the objections, beyond the contested religious reputation that the master had brought with him to Beydokht. These reasons in turn echo the various grounds of Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s competition for Shiite orthodoxy.
First, an account of the Order under the latter’s grandson Ṣāleḥᶜalīshāh, who emerges as of lesser stature than his grandfather, indicates that Sufi affiliates did not present “zakāt […] to the mullahs,” but to their Pole.Footnote 141 The issue of stature suggests that religious taxes were also presented to the Sufi master under Solṭānᶜalīshāh. Both Sufi leaders, moreover, were also mojtaheds - which gave an edge to their rivalry for religious funds with the exoteric ᶜolamā.Footnote 142 Second was a confluence of the elder master’s spiritual and worldly power in Khorasan, even hagiography acknowledges – evident especially in the Sufis’ sympathetic relations with the provincial governor.Footnote 143 This posed a challenge to the exoteric clergy as leaders of the community, and became a source of enmity against Solṭānᶜalīshāh.Footnote 144 Local ᶜolamā, the Order claims, were among the opponents who perceived his abjection and demise as the source of their honour and continued leadership.Footnote 145 The proto-statal prerogative of taqlid wielded by exoteric jurists found a match here, in other words, in the political religion of an accredited jurist doubling as Sufi master. These are Straussian themes, but crucially, playing out through the contentious politics of divine guidance within a shared religious universe. Third, heresiological literature asserts that the esteftāᵓ requests and resistance against the master had surfaced after Solṭānᶜalīshāh had “stated his claims” in the Valāyat-nāme.Footnote 146 What, then, did the Valāyat-nāme assert regarding Shiite Sufi authority?
As previously established, the Valāyat-nāme advances the idea of beyᶜat to the sheikh as a mediation of the divine to the faithful. The intricate links and closely related meanings of beyᶜat and valāyat are seen in its discussion of what strengthens valāyat, referencing the image of the sheikh. It is possibly such ambiguity which has sometimes led observers to unduly conflate the terms, as in the statement that “[t]he first pillar of the Gūnābādī branch of the Niᶜmatullāhiyya is valāya or “allegiance” to the Quṭb.”Footnote 147 The assertion may well echo Qazvīnī’s contested charge of an esoteric claim by the Sufi master to be the Hidden Imam,Footnote 148 resonating further in present-day studies hostile to the Order and Sufism at large.Footnote 149 But the Valāyat-nāme does emphasize supreme sheikhal authority, as where it expands on “the need of the disciple-wayfarer (morīd-e sālek) […] for the ‘perfect sheikh’ (sheykh-e kāmel)”Footnote 150 – whose identity is hinted at, but not spelled out. His identity must derive, however, from the Gonābādī master’s understanding of the Imam as a manifestation of divine will (mashīyat), and, in the specific sense of his “dwelling in the station of divine will,” a divinity. This “architecture,” it has been pointedly observed, also “poses the question of [Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s] self-understanding.”Footnote 151
The historian Zarrinkoob was less inhibited to point at Solṭānᶜalīshāh as the “great Shaykh of the Gunābādī Order” in a reference to the Valāyat-nāme. This held the religious mediation of the Sufi master to work in the name of the Hidden Imam.Footnote 152 The two substantial occurrences of “nāᵓeb” (“deputy”) in the Valāyat-nāme concern, respectively, a passage from the Masnavī (1/226) where the Deputy’s hand is said to be “the hand of God” (khodā), and a reference to the Guide (morshed) who is the vice-gerent of God (ḥaqq). The only mention of “deputation” (neyābat) is also found in the latter sentence, carrying the same referent.Footnote 153 Arguably, these passages reflect the discussion of the divine will, as mentioned above. Imam and Deputy are distinguished, however, in a single reference to the “nāyeb-e emām,” even while both are related in this sentence with the complete “theophanic form” (maẓhar).Footnote 154
Contextual arguments substantiate these Shiite articulations of Sufi authority, in line with Zarrinkoob’s assessment. A corroborating narrative appears from the Solṭānᶜalīshāhī sheikh ᶜEmād, the grandson of Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s teacher Hādī Sabzavārī, who was initiated in the Order under his pupil. The sheikh stated that “valāyat” in the treatise derived from “valī “ in the meaning of “vice-gerent”Footnote 155 – i.e. one only of the several meanings elaborated in the Valāyat-nāme. Being a true Muslim depended on beyᶜat with the valī. Beyᶜat with the valī was the only condition for salvation.Footnote 156 While the term applied especially to Imam ᶜAlī,Footnote 157 it could also refer – once more ambiguously - to the Order’s aqṭāb, as emerges from its application to Ṣāleḥᶜalīshāh, as “the valī of God on earth to-day.”Footnote 158 The dangerous suggestion is contained, however, by the view of the latter qoṭb in the eyes of his contemporary affiliates, congruent with Neᶜmatollāhī notions of Sufi spiritual authority in the preceding centuries,Footnote 159 as Deputy of the Imam (nāᵓeb-e emām).Footnote 160 The title could equally apply to Solṭānᶜalīshāh, as emerges from the sheikh’s account of the first of the wayfarer’s four mystical journeys (which are treated saliently in the former’s Valāyat-nāme): “The first stage consists of bay‘at with the Qutb, as a result of which the divine life is grafted on to one’s sinful human life and he becomes conformed into the heavenly image of the Imām […].”Footnote 161
Shiite Sufi authority in and around the Valāyat-nāme, then, held a “marginal” claim of spiritual deputyship pertaining to Solṭānᶜalīshāh in relation to the Mahdī. Its “dangerous knowledge” was contained in the dual application of “valī” (despite the fact that the Sufi imamology itself echoed “extremist” heterodoxy)Footnote 162 and in the subordination of the Sufi Friend as a “Deputee” (even while “exoteric” orthodoxy made no such provision – see further below). The overlap of “valī” and “nāᵓeb-e emām” also implied, however, that the boundaries of the Sufis’ “spiritual deputyship” were unstable – inviting its contestation (as seen in Qazvīnī’s writings). In another field of application, moreover, “nāᵓeb-e emām” had been a royal designation, as for the Safavid monarch Tahmāsp I.Footnote 163 The immediate challenge of the Valāyat-nāme and its implied status for Solṭānᶜalīshāh, however, emerges in light of the reorganization of Shiite orthodoxy in the Qajar era. “[S]acredness was [now] exclusively [laid claim to by] an independent Shiᶜite hierocracy consisting of the jurists and theologians on the basis of their collective authority as “general deputies” [novvāb-e ᶜāmm] of the Imam during his Greater Occultation.”Footnote 164 The grip of oṣūlī power over Iranian society, furthermore, was anti-Sufi in nature.Footnote 165
Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s mystic authority delegated from the Mahdī, a counterpoint to the exoteric oṣūlīs’ monopolization of religious legitimacy as novvāb-e ᶜāmm, had accompanied his enlarged regional role as an economic agent and political man of influence – and he was resented on each count. The ambiguity in his designs of Shiite Sufi authority – e.g. regarding the “perfect sheikh,” the boundaries of Sufi and Imamic Friendship with God, or their authorship by an accredited jurist – may well at times have protected the master (as against his detractors in Najaf) and at least allowed for detailed disavowals.Footnote 166 By the early twentieth century, however, his Shiite accommodation of Sufism in line with Imamic authority, audacious as much as quietist, was out of sync with the encroaching assertion of religious jurists and constitutionalism (an Imamic cause for Khorāsānī),Footnote 167 which allowed for the expression of socio-political discontent in its name. The unsettled, unmended hierarchy of old saw religious ambiguity leading not to renewed encompassment and retention, but to the fatal confrontation of Shiite Sufi identity.
Conclusion
The occasional suggestion of Straussian relevance to the interpretation of Shiite Sufism is well borne out by the vita and oeuvre of Solṭānᶜalīshāh, even while their mystical meanings have tended to reside “along” rather than “between” the lines of creedal orthodoxy – as articulation rather than circumvention. The dualistic play of esoteric-and-exoteric is evident in both his life and work, through the organizing themes of persecution, dangerous knowledge, epistemic subordination, and political religion. Regarding the first of these topics, the Valāyat-nāme extends a long tradition. The earliest forms of Shiite esoterism had emerged in a context of violent reaction, which also contextualizes the gnostic-metaphysical elaboration of Shiite imamology.Footnote 168 Violence similarly associates with the theme of “dangerous knowledge.” Solṭānᶜalīshāh writes that “the disciple (morīd) has to tread this [Sufi] path like an ᶜayyār, because perilous tasks lie ahead in the “hidden world” (gheyb) and in martyrdom (shahādat).” Those who consider that they can cultivate themselves, risk falling “into the “abyss of destruction” (varṭā-ye halākat) and the “valley of wretchedness” (vādī-ye maẕallat).”Footnote 169 Conversely, it was indicated above that the fierce enmity against the master had flowed in part from the perception of his graded teachings, which would have become progressively more blasphemous.
More than through the thematic interrelation of persecution and dangerous knowledge, however, Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s exoteric-esoteric balancing is on display in the tension between epistemic subordination and political religion. Extending Straussian analysis to the realm of Shiite Sufism, these concepts were aligned with competing revelation and illumination-based claims, pertaining to divine guidance.
The “reviver” of the Neᶜmatollāhī order in Iran, Nūrᶜalīshāh (d. 1212/1798) had held “the Sufi master [to be] the true deputy […] of the Hidden Imām.”Footnote 170 But the originator of the Ṭāvūsiyya line, Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s predecessor, was not associated with Shiite Sufi claims making, and their celebrated teacher had carefully avoided the challenge of either ruler or jurist authority. A second reason why the claims to spiritual authority of Solṭānᶜalīshāh cannot be seen simply as an extension of the assertive Neᶜmatollāhī revival, moreover, is the shifted counterpart – rulers are central to the vicegerency discourse of Neᶜmatollāhī predecessors, whereas jurists are often implied in the balances struck by the Gonābādī sage.Footnote 171 The overarching tendency of his writing, thirdly, is accommodationist. Solṭānᶜalīshāh, indeed, was the first of three mojtahed-qoṭbs, whose jurisprudential profiling served the Gonābādī order’s quest for orthodox legitimacy.Footnote 172 The Bayān os-Saᶜāda, for instance, is associated with a division of “general” and “special” representation of the Hidden Imam’s authority, pertaining respectively to the ᶜolamā and the Sufis.Footnote 173 With typical ambiguity, it establishes “the pre-eminence of Sufi masters as custodians of the esoteric aspect of religion,” while holding religion to be “essentially esoteric,” but within an oṣūlī framework bolstering jurist authority.Footnote 174
If Solṭānᶜalīshāh’s tafsīr is indeed “the foundational act” of modern Shiite Sufism,Footnote 175 the qualification must be shared by its “compact compendium” – the Valāyat-nāme. The cited understandings of exoteric-esoteric balancing in the former are similarly alluded to in the Valāyat-nāme. The master’s argument that unauthorised ẕekr will remain fruitless, for instance, employs the simile of foqahā who warn that worship without taqlīd will not be sound. A worshipper (ᶜābed) is either a jurist (mojtahed), an emulator (moqalled), or practising “caution” (eḥteyāṭ) when in distress and the “knower of the age” (ᶜālem-e vaqt) is inaccessible.Footnote 176 The qoṭb reminds of “Imamic traditions (akhbār) which indicate that the favourite creature (khalq) on God’s path is the subject (bande) who follows the ᶜolamā and accepts them.”Footnote 177 Simultaneously, it was shown that the Valāyat-nāme bears traces of ghuluww imamology, was associated with transgressive claims to spiritual authority, refers ambiguously to religious deputation, and leaves open the identity of the current salvific guide. Not after Solṭānᶜalīshāh have the notables of this order ventured onto such perilous ground, but they have cherished the original treatise.Footnote 178 Through such precarious articulations has emerged the orthodoxy of Shiite Sufism.
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