This paper concludes that the Usuli Shi’i reform movement was part of a larger Islamic reformation, which began in the eighteenth century. I employ a comparative approach to suggest that Shi‘i as well as Sunni and Sufi Muslim scholars reformed their traditions in direct response to the political destabilization of the Islamic world. The new Islamic movements (i.e. Usuli Shi’ism, Wahhabi Sunnism, and Idrisi Sufism) that emerged directly contributed to the establishment of new kingdoms in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. Islamism as we see it today grew out of this process. Similar to the politically decentralization that occurred in the eighteenth century, I argue that Islamic institutions also became more decentralized. Therefore, it is useful to understand modern Islam in the context of competing Islamic movements as well as majority and minority sectarianism. The bulk of my paper presents the foundational ideologies of Usuli Shi’ism, Wahhabi Sunnism, and Idrisi Sufism. My research is primarily based on the writings of the founders of these movements (Vahid Bihbihani, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, and Ahmad Ibn Idris al-Fasi), whom I consider to be the founding fathers of modern Islam. The tradition in which each of these three scholars operated largely accounts for the differences in their reformist ideology. The similarities of the three movements are primarily a result of the common concerns faced by Islamic civilization in the eighteenth century, such as political decentralization and a perceived socio-moral crisis. Each movement was incepted on the fringes of the falling Islamic gunpowder empires and filled a portion of the power vacuum created in wake of these empires. Partially because the movements emerged prior to the establishment of nation-states in the Islamic world, they continue today as powerful transnational organizations. Usulism became highly influential in Iran, even though the center of Usuli Shi‘i learning remained in Iraq until the twentieth century. The neo-Sufism associated with Ahmad Ibn Idris became active throughout northern Africa. Successor Sufi brotherhoods of the Idrisi movement have continued throughout the region. For example, the Sanusiyya brotherhood played a critical role in the establishment of modern Libya. The Wahhabi movement provided ideological support for the creation of Saudi Arabia, which has used its oil wealth to promote Wahhabism throughout much of the Islamic world. Although Usulis, Idrisis, and Wahhabis emerged in a similar eighteenth century milieu, they represent competing Islamic ideologies that highlight differences in Shi‘ism, Sunnism, and Sufism.

Most scholars of contemporary Shi‘i history point towards the appearance of Musa al-Sadr and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in mid-twentieth century Lebanon and Iraq as the start of an “awakening” of Shi‘i political consciousness, leading to the establishment of political parties and sectarian differentiation. Relying on “great men” historiography that has dominated the field, scholarly focus on these two figures overemphasizes their influence and obscures a significant reformist movement that rose in southern Lebanon during the late nineteenth century, one that exerted considerable internal influence within the Arab Shi‘i educational centers of Najaf and Karbala in the early twentieth century. This paper will challenge the “awakening” thesis by analyzing published and unpublished materials from Muhammad Rida al-Muzaffar’s Najaf-based educational society and school network, Muntada al-Nashr and Muzaffar’s writings, such as al-Mantiq al-Islami and al-‘Aqa’id al-Shi‘iyya, to show the ways in which reform movements in Lebanon and Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century laid the foundations for religious and political reformers a generation later. The changes that Muzaffar initiated in Iraqi society both inside and outside of the Shi‘i religio-political education system, beginning in the 1920s, led to the emergence of a unique Arab Shi‘i socio-political philosophy, based on a “dynamic Islam.” The stage was set upon which actors such as Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, ‘Izz al-Din al-Jaza’iri, Mahdi al-Hakim, Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah and Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din could enact long-lasting structural reforms to the social and political organization of the Shi‘a of Iraq and Lebanon. While Max Weiss and Sabrina Mervin have focused new attention on the late-nineteenth century Lebanese Shi‘i reformers, this study will shed new light on the development of Arab Shi‘i socio-political structures. This paper highlights the gradual processes through which the flexible nature of the Shi‘i educational centers (hawzat) incorporated reformist elements, an incorporation that simultaneously enacted structural changes within and without the hawza system itself.

The Liminal Identity of the Reformist Theologian Sayyid Asad Allah Kharaghani The first decades that followed the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) saw the rise of a number of reformist ulama in Iran who created a salient current of religious modernity in that country. One of the most influential and equally understudied among these reformist theologians was Sayyid Asad Allah Kharaghani (d. 1936). Having received his license for ijtihad, in Najaf, he returned to Iran and entered the circle of the unorthodox theologian Shaykh Hadi Najmabadi (d.1902). Later, he went from being a constitutionalist who closely collaborated with Azali-Babi activists during the constitutional movement, to becoming a reformist theologian who as early as 1918 envisioned the establishment of “Islamic politics” (siyast-i islami) in Iran. On the one hand he was accused of being a “Babi,” and on the other hand, as a Shi`i theologian, his propositions regarding Islamic governance were clearly informed by elements of Sunni political theory. Nevertheless, His thoughts were of great appeal to some of the major figures of Islamism in mid-twentieth century Iran, not the least of whom were Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani (d. 1979), the second most important spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and Mahdi Bazargan (d. 1995 ), the first head of the interim government. Using Kharaghani as the focus of a case study, this paper will re-examine the reformist current he championed. Conducting an in-depth analysis of Kharaghani’s life and works such as Ruh al-tamaddun wa-huwiyyat al-Islam [The Spirit of the Civilization and the Identity of Islam] (Tehran, 1918); Risalah-yi nubuwwat-i khassah va abadiyyat-i Islam va hamasah ba adyan [The Treatise on (Muhammad’s) Specific Prophethood, the Infinite Duration of Islam and the Challenge of Other Religions] (Tehran: 1933); and Mahw al-mawhum wa sahw al-ma`lum [The Nullification of Idle Speculation and the Realization of the Object of Real Knowledge] (Tehran: 1960), I argue that the Kharaghani ’s liminal identity problematizes the notion that one can simply assign essentialist identities to those who are the bearers of reformist ideas. By using him as an example, I suggest that Iranian religious modernity in the early decades of the twentieth century was a result of the crisscrossing of orthodoxies and heterodoxies which provided multiple scenarios of self-refashioning. Furthermore, I argue that the study of Iranian modernity must move beyond the binary opposition between true Muslim and infidel or even between Shi`i and Sunni.