From The Creators of Knowledge to the Specialists of Spirit: Anti-Clericalism in Iran’s Modernist Intellectual Discourse (1925–1941)

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the Iranian Reza Shah state (1925–1941), in conjunction with the emerging group of state-trained scholars, called the status of ulama as knowledge producers into question. Existing scholarship has primarily examined the impact of state modernization on the Muslim clergy and their responses to modernization but has paid lesser attention to the passive role of the ulama or their representation in modernist intellectual and literary discourses. I examine two major Persian sources of the period to argue that intellectual representation of the ulama, in both polemics and academic critique, aided the state in its attempt to push the ulama from the center of intellectual and social life to the margins of ritual purity. Among my primary sources is a previously unexamined academic thesis authored by Qasim Tuysirkani in 1938.

Introduction

In the Islamic world, the ulama were the agents that interpreted, preserved, and transmitted knowledge (‘ilm). The purview of ‘ilm was extensive, connecting rational inquiry into this world (dunyā) with spiritual guidance for salvation in the next world (ākhira).¹ The function of the ulama therefore came with high responsibility, requiring them to excel in learning but also in their character. For al-Ghazali, character cultivation meant that the ulama had to practice what they preached, foster piety, avoid luxury in food and dress, and maintain their distance from political power.² In lived reality, however, the ulama could fall short of these ideals, manifesting vices of character, such as hypocrisy and greed. Intellectual and literary discourses before the nineteenth-century primarily focused on a subset of the ulama, such as preachers (vāʿiẓ), and their vices of character,³ but in the nineteenth century and with the introduction of colonial modernity, a number of modernist intellectual and literary movements began to demarcate between state-trained intellectuals and madrasa-trained ulama, directing a wider attack against the whole of the ulama and their epistemology.

Existing Islamic and Middle Eastern studies scholarship has inquired into the impact of colonial modernity on the social and epistemic authority of the ulama. In the context of the Arab Middle East, Albert Hourani’s enduring study on reformist thinkers has explored the intellectual history that, in the early twentieth century, fragmented the ulama’s social and epistemic cohesion.⁴ Similarly, scholars working through Ottoman and Turkish sources have traced the interaction between Kemalist reforms and ulama authority.⁵ In the Iranian context, we have several notable works on ulama authority in relation to the modernizing Reza Shah state (1925–1941). Shahrough Akhavi, Behrooz Moazami, and Mohammad Faghfoory have shown the impact of modernization on the ulama, including change in the ulama’s organizational strategies in response to the formation of the modern state.⁶ However, the primary focus of the extant literature has been on the active role of the ulama in relation to politics and intellectual movements. Extant scholarship has paid less attention to the passive role of the ulama and their representation in literary and intellectual discourses.

In this article, I study the passive role of the ulama in modernist Persian sources of the Reza Shah period (1925–1941) in Iran, analyzing two sources in particular. The first source is Ahmad Kasravi’s polemical book on Shiʿism by the same title, which presented the entire ulama collective as agents of oppression and ignorance. I chose this source because Kasravi was one of the most influential modernist intellectuals writing in Persian. The second source comes from modernist scholar Qasim Tuysirkani, who represented the ulama in a similar manner in his academic thesis which was written in 1938, four years after the founding of the University of Tehran. In this period, university theses were not published and today remain in their original documentary format at the University of Tehran archives. I chose an unpublished thesis because it provides new primary insight into the relationship between anti-clericalism, epistemology, and state-making from a well-established Iranian scholar and academic. Kasravi and Tuysirkani occupied the same academic space, so it is appropriate to read them together. Kasravi taught Tuysirkani at the University of Tehran, and they both identified as emerging state-trained scholars. Moreover, the coupling of the two drives the argument that Iran’s anti-clericalism was not limited to polemical passions of Kasravi; it was a wide-ranging discourse reaching into analytic, academic critique.

Ulama and the Reza Shah State

Who were the persons making up the ulama collective (or the Muslim “clerics” according to its imprecise English translation), whom modernist literary and intellectual sources castigated? In his recent study of the Persianate ulama of nineteenth-century Bukhara, James Pickett views the ulama as a social group, although without necessarily having a corporate identity, who had shared occupations and functions, performing sharīʻa, asceticism, and poetry as circumstances dictated.⁷ For Pickett, the ulama were the madrasa instructor (mudarris), the legislator (mufti), the judge (qadi), the ascetic, the Sufi, and even the “public morality enforcer” (muḥtasib). They also included those of lesser status who showed up in the biographical sources (tazkirah) less frequently, such as the person who made the call to prayer (muezzin).⁸ However, historical and regional contexts complicate Pickett’s definition of the ulama. First, certain scholarly sources considered someone an ʿālim only if he had a high level of learning and the authority to transmit knowledge.⁹ Second, in certain historical contexts, some of the aforementioned activities were less associated with the ulama than others. For example, with the rise of the Safavid dynasty, the Iranian-Shia ulama became less associated with organized Sufi activity.¹⁰ And third, in a number of historical contexts, such as post-Safavid Iran, the Shia ulama had something close to a corporate identity. Mansoor Moaddel has argued that Qajar-era Shia ulama as a whole did not constitute a class but instead a “social category defined by their distinctive unifying religious and occupational functions that set them apart from the rest of the society.”¹¹ For Kasravi and Tuysirkani, someone belonged to the “social category” of the ulama as long as he had received even the most rudimentary training at a madrasa, such as the local madrasa in Tabriz that Kasravi himself had attended.¹²

Premodern Persian-Islamic literary sources castigated certain figures within this ulama collective, such as the ascetic (zāhid) or the preacher (vāʿiẓ), but they did not cast the whole ulama, to whose ranks they themselves belonged, as hypercritical or ignorant. Anti-clerical literature of the premodern period, from the early days of Islam to the nineteenth-century, primarily turned on qualities of character, on vices such as hypocrisy, ostentatious piety, and deception. This quality of the anti-clerical literature should be understood in the broader context of the time. The Islamic order of life had endowed the ulama with firm authority, which neither the dynastic court nor the community wanted to subvert or replace with an alternative.¹³ The court and the community respected the structure of ulama authority for centuries and allowed it to remain intact, despite the prolific literature on character-castigation (or cases of conflict between a particular king and the ulama).¹⁴

Ulama authority against which life in dār al-Islām ebbed and flowed had two dimensions: epistemic and social. Epistemically, only the ulama could lay claim to a knowledge of divine law and were its sole, authoritative interpreters.¹⁵ Although, in the premodern period, individual ulama could have been attacked for their shortcomings in knowledge, the epistemic primacy of sharīʻa and the status of its ulama interpreters as knowledge-bearers remained fundamentally intact.¹⁶ The ulama’s knowledge of the sharīʻa gave rise to another responsibility, namely their social guardianship over the Muslim community (i.e., the totality of believers), which was called the umma.¹⁷ The ulama had the duty to guard the community from transgressions against the sharīʻa by the ruling dynasty and by other members of the community, ensuring justice according to divine percepts. Hadith, prose, and poetry all recognized ulama’s social guardianship. These sources praised the ulama for qualities such as trustworthiness and for performance of responsibilities like safeguarding the community. Early nineteenth-century jurist Mulla Ahmad Naraqi wrote an Arabic text, with frequent reference to hadith literature, by the title of Wilayat al-Faqih (The Guardianship of the Jurist), arguing that the faqīh had general guardianship (wilāya) over the community insofar as imitators (muqallid) came to follow him. More specifically, the faqīh was the guardian (walī) of certain specific categories of persons. For example, the faqīh was tasked with protection of properties, of those who were not able to care for them on their own, particularly orphans, “madmen or persons of unsound mind” (al-majānīn wa-al-sufahā’), and those absent from their residence for one reason or another.¹⁸ There were certainly the wicked among the ulama who allied with the dynasty, acted out of selfish interest, or failed to uphold their social responsibility to the community. However, transgressions by individual ulama did not provide enough impetus for a discourse on the ulama collective as representatives of ignorance and oppression. Even constitutionalist writings, prime among them the True Dream (Ruʾyā-yi Ṣādiqah), did not castigate the ulama as a whole. These writings criticized those among the ulama who opposed constitutional reform or the introduction of new sciences.¹⁹ The modernist anti-clerical literature, by contrast, attempted to degrade the authority structure the ulama had enjoyed for centuries.

State modernization and literary-intellectual criticisms complemented each other. Kasravi and Tuysirkani were thus empowered to criticize ulama, in contrast to their predecessors, in a political environment that extended greater opportunities and privileges to state-trained intellectuals over madrasa-trained ulama. The Reza Shah state reforms in the areas of dress-code, endowments (awqāf), and, most importantly, the judiciary and education were antithetical to ulama authority.²⁰ The Pahlavi state transmitted the educational and legal authority of the ulama to the new organizations of the state. Building on earlier social efforts, the Reza Shah state instituted the first national order of primary education called the dabistān, thus encroaching upon ulama authority that educated the young through their maktab schools. Towards the end of Reza Shah’s rule in 1941, the state administered 2,336 primary schools and 241 secondary schools. Higher education grew as well to rival the madrasa: in 1925, fewer than 600 students enrolled in the country’s six colleges. By 1941, Tehran University alone had more than 3,330 students.²¹ The Reza Shah state also encroached upon the legal authority of the ulama, replacing the sharīʿa courts with a new state judicial structure that synthesized Islamic and European civil law.²² The state transferred the authority to register legal documents, including property transactions as well as marriage licenses, from the clergy to state-appointed notaries publics. They also required jurists to receive legal training in modern universities; madrasa training was not enough.²³ With Pahlavi reforms, the ulama had to drop and lose the “nonreligious” functions, which they previously had within their authority. The Reza Shah-era coinage of the term “spiritualists” (ruḥāniyāt) replacing the old term “those who know,” or ulama, was quite telling: it shifted the role of the ulama as “knowers” and educators to those who dealt with the human spirit (rūḥ) and the rituals that ensured salvation for the spirit.²⁴

As reviewed in the introduction, existing scholarship has examined the Reza Shah state’s encroachment upon ulama power and their responses to this encroachment. Instead, I examine the literary and intellectual representation of the ulama in two representative texts which complemented state power against the ulama.

Ahmad Kasravi’s Polemics Against the Ulama

Ahmad Kasravi was perhaps one of the most influential intellectuals who wrote against the clerics. Having gone to the maktab and a local madrasa, he obtained clerical authority in his locality in his younger years before adopting the identity of a new intellectual.²⁵ In his time as a local mulla, Kasravi developed a strong distaste for clerics for such alleged misdeeds as telling lies in the pulpit, prioritizing pilgrimage trips over local suffering, and opposing social and educational reform.²⁶ In his later life, he articulated this distaste into a polemical essay titled “Shiʿism” (Shiʻiʼgari).²⁷ Kasravi did not distinguish between the good and the bad in ulama; rather, he viewed the ulama as uniformly wicked. According to Kasravi, there were good and bad among the ulama prior to the constitutional movement. This movement, formally dated from 1906 to 1911 but with its intellectual genealogy dating back to the late nineteenth-century, compared to earlier reformist movements in Muslim India and the Ottoman world. It demanded the creation of a constitutional monarchy, the institution of a parliament, and the introduction of modern sciences and epistemologies.²⁸ The ulama were divided on whether to support the constitutional movement or oppose it. For Kasravi, where the people of learning stood on the constitutional movement also determined whether they belonged to the ranks of the ulama or the emergent state-trained intellectuals. Kasravi claimed that, once constitutionalism gained momentum, those who benefited from sincerity (pāk’dilī), righteousness (nīk’khāhī), and empathy (dil’sūzī) for the people did not remain in the fold of ulama and identified with new intellectuals. Only those who were after self-interest (shikam’parastī) and personal desires (kām’guzārī), he thought, remained in the fold of ulama.²⁹ Kasravi derogatorily referred to the ulama as mullas; he believed that they were a social nuisance who, because of alleged self-interest, had much more to do with the nation’s supposed misery than they did with its movement from misery towards something better.³⁰ In bringing people to Shia beliefs (themselves false, Kasravi held), they were after wealth and power.³¹ The mullas claimed, Kasravi wrote, that they were the representative of the Mahdi and hence obtained financial tribute from people in form of zakat (obligatory almsgiving) and the Imam’s share (māl-i Imām), while benefiting from tragic events in Shia history, such as the battle of Karbala, for their financial enrichment through performance of eulogies. But Kasravi overlooked the heterogeneity between the ulama and their differing participation in and legal opinion on the manner of Shia eulogies. The ulama did not speak with a unified voice on the question of eulogies and financial interest; many opposed the preachers who lacked sincerity and were motivated by financial reward.³² Kasravi’s polemics did not allow for these nuances, however, and he represented the ulama as a unified group who had inserted eulogies into every event of social life, from weddings to funerals, all for their financial interest.³³ In pursuit of wealth and power, Kasravi’s mullas also tried to undermine the state: they incited people to evasion of tax and conscription laws and embezzlement of government funds.³⁴ They were, he thought, responsible for the people’s ambivalence, dividing their loyalty between themselves and the state. Moreover, they were not creating this ambivalence for some collective good nor for national well-being, but instead they acted purely out of self-interest. They simply wanted easy money and authority without undertaking the responsibilities that come with authority over people, such as raising an army, providing for security and safety, and creating infrastructure.³⁵ The historical separation of powers integral to the Islamic dynastic order assigned to the dawla, not the ulama, duties like the raising of the army, security, and infrastructure.³⁶ Kasravi viewed this separation not as a desirable separation of powers but as ulama selfishness and neglect of social welfare.

Kasravi, in continuity with classical tropes about ulama character vices, contended that the mullas were deeply opportunistic and hypocritical, taking the events of the constitutional movement as his main evidence. They did not know the meaning of constitutionalism, thinking that it would bring about a transference of power from the royal court to themselves; however, after seven or eight months, Kasravi wrote, they realized that constitutionalism was detrimental to their interests, so they changed their support to opposition and even conspired with the Tsars to stop the constitutionalists.³⁷

Kasravi’s point about the ulama shift on constitutionalism in light of their material interests finds support among some scholars. William Floor viewed ulama support as being contingent upon their material and economic interests. Since, in the early constitutional period, these interests were tied to merchant interests who were largely in support of the movement, many of the ulama came out in support. But, when the parliament (majlis) initiated land reform that threatened ulama landholding interests, they distanced themselves from the movement.³⁸ In a more recent and contrasting study, Vanessa Martin argued that the clerics were “very influential [in the making of the constitutional movement], not only because of their role in Islam, but also because the people were accustomed to deploying their influence to bargain with and protest against the state.”³⁹ The contradiction between these studies reveals that the ulama position was neither fixed nor uniform. A number of ulama, such as Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri, initially joined Behbahani and Tabatabai during the protest movement of 1906 but later turned against the movement. Nuri wrote passionately against constitutional government, while other key members of the ulama, such as Mirza Muhammad Husain Naʾini, provided theoretical support to constitutionalism.⁴⁰

Kasravi, who himself wrote a history of the movement, seemed closest to Floor in his interpretation. For Kasravi, ulama character disposition was one of hypocrisy, and this defined their relationship with constitutionalism and its aftermath. Once the Tsars fell and constitutionalism was revived, Kasravi wrote, the ulama went into a quietism but gradually made peace with the new order and began to exploit it, for example, by sending their children to new schools, finding work for their families in the new bureaucracy, or themselves accepting work from the government, all the while calling the very government that was providing them with new opportunities unjust. Meanwhile, they benefited from the old order of things by, for example, monies they received from the Imam’s share.⁴¹ Kasravi, seeing the old and new order of life as fundamentally incompatible, represented the ulama as a hypocritical lot who would not give their allegiance to one order over the other, but instead exploited each one when convenient, even at the cost of the nation’s well-being. He omitted the rather obvious objection that one can benefit from opportunities provided by the dominant order—in this case constitutionalism and the emerging state—all the while quarrelling with it for a different ideal. Kasravi thus extended the premodern trope of hypocrisy in religious authority, but in contrast to premodern discourse, he charged the entire collective of ulama with hypocritical menace toward the Iranian nation.

Tuysirkani and the Academic Critique of the Ulama

In addition to questioning their social authority, modernist intellectuals interrogated the ulama’s epistemic authority in the early twentieth century. A major example was Qasim Tuysirkani who was a third and last-year student at the newly-instituted University of Tehran (1934–present) and its college of rational and transmitted sciences. He submitted an unpublished thesis on 20 May 1938 (1317/2/30) towards the completion of his joint studies with pedagogical sciences at the teacher’s college.⁴² In his later life, he authored a number of scholarly works, publishing Persian titles that converged around his interest in the use and contribution of Iranian scholars to Arabic language and literature in the early Islamic period.⁴³ His thesis was approved and presumably supervised by the scholar Sadiq Rizazadah Shafaq, who was born and educated at a time when a number of families had just begun to put their children through the new educational order. After obtaining his philosophy doctorate from Berlin University, Shafaq returned to Iran and helped establish the teacher’s college, where he also taught history and philosophy.⁴⁴ Tuysirkani and his supervisor were therefore both products of the new educational order.

Tuysirkani’s thesis was titled “Naqd-i Barnamah-ʼi Danishkadah-ʼi Maʿqul va-Manqul ya Rahnama-yi Islah-i an” (The Critique of the College of Rational and Transmitted Sciences’ Program or the Guide to its Reform). Unlike intellectual production of the preceding generation, Tuysirkani did not situate his ideas in other-worldly-oriented prefatory praise. In fact, Tuysirkani did not even invoke God’s name in the form of “In the Name of God” (bih nām-i khudā) to begin his thesis. The preface began with the subject of the thesis which, as a critique of the college’s program, was an assessment of its strengths but primarily focused on its weaknesses. Tuysirkani critiqued separately the three areas of study in the college—namely literary, rational, and transmitted studies—focusing, in conscious reference to the old and new orders of learning, on the efficacy of subjects from the perspective of producing effective spiritualist-scholars.⁴⁵

Tuysirkani’s thesis dismissed the institution of the madrasa, the old ulama’s methods of teaching and learning, and their very epistemological authority as scholars and knowledge producers. Ironically, however, Tuysirkani began by a concession to madrasa students, namely that they were overprepared and superior in their knowledge of the college’s most essential curriculum: transmitted sciences. They only suffered a notable disadvantage in French, geography, and world history. According to Tuysirkani, a madrasa student (of unspecified experience in the thesis) and his knowledge in what the author thought ought to be the most central subjects at the college, fiqh and usūl, was at the level of a graduating student in the college.⁴⁶ By contrast, students coming from state-run secondary schools were far less prepared. Tuysirkani insisted that they needed to study for an additional three years of introductory training at the college before they studied the current three-year curriculum.⁴⁷ This meant that, in the most essential subjects, the madrasa student had a six-year knowledge advantage over a student from a secondary school. This superior knowledge was also evident from Tuysirkani’s remark that many of the “learned students of old sciences” (ṭullāb-i fāżil-i ʿulūm) were only at the college for the state recognition and the conferring of privileges, not for knowledge acquisition which they already had; in fact, some of them, Tuysirkani said, were at the level of a mudarris (teacher) themselves.⁴⁸ Despite his admission of madrasa students’ superior knowledge, Tuysirkani did not challenge the Education Ministry requirements and verification of them before they entered the college. There existed three ways of gaining admission into the college: completion of state-run secondary schools, entrance exam, and a clerical certificate (taṣdīq-i mudarrisī). In the first years of operation, from 1934 (1313) until 1936 (1315), a candidate could gain entry either after completing secondary school or by taking the entrance exam.⁴⁹ There were two types of eligible secondary schools: literary schools and schools of rational and transmitted studies. The latter did not have any longevity, becoming non-operational soon after their founding. In 1938, only one school retained the name of rational and transmitted school, and this school too had a literary curriculum (which also explained the lack of preparedness of state-produced students).⁵⁰ Thus, a certificate from a secondary school with a literary curriculum or, alternatively, the entrance exam that primarily tested the applicant on his knowledge of fiqh gained him admission into the college. In 1937 (1316), entrance exams were replaced by the more intrusive measure of a “clerical certificate” (taṣdīq-i mudarrissī) in the rational and transmitted sciences.⁵¹ All three means of verification for admission were determined by the state, not by the madrasa; evidence of attendance at the madrasa did not translate into admission. Tuysirkani deferred to the state: for Tuysirkani as for the state, the old knowledge institutions and their ulama agents needed to be tested or certified by the state on their very own curriculum first before they could enter the college. The conclusion that emerges from these requirements is that the state planned to remove the madrasa from being the primary verifier of religious learning.

More provocatively, Tuysirkani believed that the madrasa was an archaic institution that was unable to produce a competent scholar or even provide the nation with a spiritualist addressing the issues of ritual. Tuysirkani advocated for the madrasa-produced ulama to be replaced by the composite figure of a scholar-spiritualist, which only the state, the university, and the college could produce. He stated the goal of the college to be the training of “spiritualists” (ruḥānīyān) or “religious ulama” (ʿulamā-yi dīnī), on the one hand, and the “preservation of Iran’s past sciences” (ḥifẓ-i ʿulūm-i qadīmah) and knowledge systems (maʿārif), on the other.⁵² In other words, the college needed to train spiritualists who were also scholars of a new orientation. However, before this was done, Tuysirkani made clear that the old knowledge residues that he thought obstructed effective learning at the college had to be removed.

According to Tuysirkani, a major obstruction was the premodern pedagogy practiced by the instructors at the college. He wrote that Mughni al-Labib, a fourteenth-century text on syntax (naḥv) by ʿAbd Allah ibn Yusuf ibn Hisham, brought about little and marginal “practical result” compared to its level of difficulty. Students’ time should not be wasted, he asserted, on the “illogical” content of a book which the old ulama of syntax “were making up” (mī’bāftahand).⁵³ More generally, Tuysirkani viewed this text as having “medieval Islamic composition” and “incorrect principles of teaching,” which it shared with other “medieval” texts.⁵⁴ Medieval writing and pedagogy were “stagnant,” “dry,” and eliminated “enthusiasm” for learning, he added. Tuysirkani encouraged the acquisition of these medieval texts for a historical purpose—to learn about and preserve the past—but rejected them when used as textbooks. He contrasted the medieval textbook, unfit for pedagogy, with a text like Shibli Nuʻmani’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of Persia) that was a four-volume, Urdu-language history of Persian literature written in 1906, documenting the lives and works of Persian poets from Rudaki to Abu Talib Kalim of Shah Jahan’s Mughal court. Tuysirkani believed it was one of the few available texts of quality, both in terms of its scholarly methodology and pedagogical value.⁵⁵

Tuysirkani further identified “medieval” flaws in the approach of instructors to rational subjects like classical logic and philosophy and to transmitted subjects like tafsīr and usūl. There were unnamed instructors at the college who were described as “prejudiced” in their attachment to principles of classical philosophy and who, like the texts themselves, were “dry,” lacking the faculty of creativity and the spirit of investigation. They simply taught texts from premoderns (qudamā) without criticism, treating them as certain knowledge (ḥujjat-i qātiʿ) and transmitting their content “from the vantage point of belief” (bih laḥn-i bāvar va-iʿtiqād).⁵⁶ Tuysirkani compared these teachers to Christian scholastics and claimed they were even worse, since the scholastics only treated Aristotelian principles as axiomatic truth, while these instructors of classical philosophy, stuck in their “medieval” method and pedagogy, treated anything written or said by a famed scholar of the past to be true.⁵⁷ Tuysirkani further charged instructors of classical philosophy with standing against the progressive view of knowledge and the “law of science’s evolution” (nāmūs-i takāmul-i ‘ilm).⁵⁸ This progressivism was the dominant thinking at the modernist turn not only in Iran but elsewhere in the world, and Tuysirkani treated it as a given for correct knowledge and pedagogy.⁵⁹ Furthermore, Tuysirkani directed his criticism towards usūl and tafsīr instructors at the college; these unnamed teachers were not so much condemned for their reverence for the past but for their alleged ignorance in the subjects they taught. The usūl professor did not have enough knowledge to teach the assigned Laws (qavānīn) text, Tuysirkani claimed, and some students even knew more than he did.⁶⁰ The supposed flawed pedagogy and lack of knowledge in instructors of classical logic, philosophy, usūl, and tafsīr were contrasted with the competent teaching of modernist intellectuals at the college. One that received mention was ʿAbdul-Husayn Shiybani (Vahid al-Mulk), an English-educated scholar and parliament representative, who taught world history with “excellent command.”⁶¹ Two other instructors who received Tuysirkani’s approval were Rashid Yasimi and Ahmad Kasravi. The first was a scholar of Kurdish origins who produced many works including titles on Kurdish history, the fall of Sassanid Iran, Islamic mysticism, and a translation of Edward Browne’s fourth volume on Persian literary history, in addition to his own poems. His instructions were praised as “not having a single flaw” (hīch naqs nadārad) as were those given by Ahmad Kasravi.⁶² Kasravi’s pedagogy was also “very good,” and he did not waste student time with the dictation method (juzvah’nivīsī) practiced by some instructors, which was the one-sided dictation of the instructor’s own notes to students without student participation or critical engagement with textbooks.⁶³ Tuysirkani contrasted this dictation method with students’ critical engagement with their lessons and assigned textbooks and with their summaries and questions presented to the class and the instructor, which Kasravi seemed to have practiced.⁶⁴

Tuysirkani viewed the production of scholar-spiritualists to depend not only on eliminating old practices but on creating a new curriculum, which provided the right balance between transmitted, literary, and rational subjects. The areas of literary and rational studies in isolation were insufficient. Tuysirkani viewed the core of literary studies (i.e., the study of Arabic) as a requirement for acquisition of “religious sciences” (ʿulūm-i dīnī), and he viewed the study of Persian as beneficial for Persian-speaking spiritualists. However, specializing in literary studies was insufficient to reach the rank of a spiritualist.⁶⁵ The same held true for the students of rational subjects. It is true, Tuysirkani said, that in the rational studies, kalām, milal va-niḥal, ilāhīyāt, classical falsafa, and tafsīr were all taught, which belonged to the classical curriculum under which the old ulama were trained. However, these rational subjects were only a partial education for a spiritualist, since their training rested upon both rational and transmitted sciences, and all or most “pioneer” (pīshvā) ulama of the past had been from the faqīh disposition, not of the mutakallim or philosopher disposition, and thus most learned in transmitted sciences.⁶⁶ Therefore, for Tuysirkani, transmitted studies came closest to the training of a qualified spiritualist on the condition that this major was reformed and did not duplicate the madrasa training, which he believed was “dry” (khushk) and “limited” (maḥdūd).⁶⁷ The length of the program needed to be extended to six years with a three-year preparatory stage as envisioned in the college’s founding document (asāsnāmah). This extension was necessary as secondary schools did not train students adequately for the shorter three-year timeline. Moreover, given the importance of spiritualist-scholars’ responsibilities, their education could not be “incomplete” (nāqis) and “superficial” (saṭḥī).⁶⁸ All those trained at the college had to be “insightful” (ʿamīq) and “inquisitive” (muḥaqqiq), able to preserve Iran’s old knowledge systems.⁶⁹ Therefore, the six-year program, Tuysirkani concluded, was very much necessary. Subjects that were beneficial from literature and rational studies had to be added to the transmitted science curriculum along with new subjects, such as world history, geography, and French, to produce not only spiritualists but also scholars. This curriculum, combined with new pedagogy, would raise qualified spiritualist-scholars “in harmony with the present age.”⁷⁰

Accordingly, Tuysirkani questioned the very epistemic fitness of the madrasa and the old ulama. On the institution of the madrasa, he even made the bold claim that if new education continued to grow in momentum, it would disrupt the operation of the seminaries (hawzah) and the institution of madrasa “would gradually fall out of existence” (rū bih inqirāż va-iżmiḥlāl mīravad).⁷¹ Furthermore, the agents of the madrasa could no longer lay claim to ʿilm. To be within the purview of ʿilm, ulama had to transform into spiritualist-scholars. This meant that they needed to study new sciences in addition to the old, under new pedagogy and at the university. They needed to have command over the old knowledge regime, not in order to transmit it as foundational principles, but instead to preserve it as historical artefacts, which could then be studied and compared to the new knowledge regime. They had to observe the “scientific law” that new knowledge completed and, in some cases, superseded the old. In the case of judicial and endowment duties, the spiritualist-scholars had to content themselves with the study of fiqh as a historical practice under the shadow of the new judiciary and Education Ministry. They could no longer attend to the horizontal court disputes between people; they could only attend to the academic duty of preserving fiqh.⁷² The real ʿalim (scholar) for Tuysirkani was the university-trained scholar; the spiritualist was only a scholar, an agent of knowledge, on the condition that he trained under the reformed program of the college.

Similar to Tuysirkani, Kasravi placed the madrasa-trained ulama outside the realm of legitimate knowledge, but he departed from Tuysirkani in that he used a polemical method (not the apparently disinterested approach of Tuysirkani), referring to the ulama always as mullas (and in contexts where the label implied derision).⁷³ Kasravi did not stop at dissociating legitimate knowledge (ʿilm) from the ulama-turned-mullas, going further to represent them as ignorant. He branded ulama’s years-long education as a façade for self-interested living. Kasravi, commenting specifically on the Shia ulama of Iraq, wrote that they were sons of produce-sellers (sabzī’furūsh), mud workers (gilkār), or farmers. In their youth, they went to the madrasa to escape from work, and, while there, they lived lazily. They were free-loaders (muft’khur) who enjoyed themselves too much and, after some years, with financing of certain ḥajji, went to the centers of Najaf or Karbala and there too spent their days free-loading for years until they gained the status of mujtahid or “proof of Islam” (ḥujjat al-Islām).⁷⁴ The ulama, for Kasravi, did not go to madrasa to pursue knowledge but to exploit the money made available for learning.⁷⁵ Furthermore, lacking proper education and knowledge, Kasravi’s mullas were intellectually irresponsible. When they were confronted about their baseless claims, they did not attempt to intellectually engage with opposition and reform their positions. Instead, they simply shifted the blame towards the masses. For example, when a mulla was pressed on why he held the twelve Imams to be the aiders of God (yāvar-i khudā), he resorted to the belief that God had created them from light. But once he was asked to provide evidence for this claim, he offered none, simply assigning the claim to the masses.⁷⁶ Kasravi went so far as to dismiss centuries-long subjects of Islamic learning such as usūl, writing that the mullas were still producing treatises (risālah-ʼi ʿilmī) on these subjects without knowing or justifying their use.⁷⁷ Similar to Tuysirkani then, Kasravi understood fiqh to be of no use for the “present age,” further contending that the ulama were an impediment to legitimate knowledge and its application. If someone was sick and mentioned the name of a doctor (pizishk) in front of a mulla, the mulla would reply: “What is a doctor? Ask the pious Imam for your healing!”⁷⁸ For Kasravi, they were thus both productive of falsities and an impediment to production of true knowledge. The following quote captures Kasravi’s polemical sentiment well:

They [the mullas] are men without knowledge [bīdānish], less informed about the world and its affairs than a ten-year old child. Since their brains are filled with fiqh, hadith, far-fetched fabrications and principles of [old] philosophy, there is no room left for knowledge nor awareness (āgāhī). Many changes have occurred in the world, sciences have appeared, and transformations have taken place. They either have not known them or have not understood them, or if they have, they ignored them. They live in this time but see the world with a 1300-year-old perspective.⁷⁹

Therefore, Kasravi’s polemics presented the mullas as obstacles to the production of real knowledge. For Kasravi, the ulama had no justified claim to knowledge. They did not belong to the community of scholars, i.e., the new intellectuals, like himself, whom he thought were the rightful claimants to ʿilm.

Conclusion

The modernist discourse of the Reza Shah period was total; state-trained intellectuals attacked the social and epistemic authority of the entire ulama collective. Intellectual discourse after the constitutional turn worked jointly with institutional change in education. The educational system shifted from one taught by the ulama to one administrated by the state and state-trained teachers and scholars. Discursive and institutional change marginalized “those who knew,” the ulama, moving them outside the normative order of education and knowledge production. Moreover, the state, the university, and the new intellectuals encroached upon the newly-differentiated realm of “religious knowledge,” which the ulama-turned-spiritualists and their madrasas could no longer have to themselves. But despite Tuysirkani’s prediction to the contrary, the madrasa did not perish and continued to operate (despite the disappearance of the maktab).⁸⁰ The madrasa never regained its previous prominence, however. Even the Islamic Republican state (1979–present) did not attempt to revive the old separation of powers between the political power of the state and the epistemic power of ulama-educators. The same state-sanctioned institutions of children’s dabistān and the university continued to dominate the normative order of learning as they had under the Pahlavis. The ulama, therefore, have not resuscitated their old epistemological authority, despite ruling over a republic.