1753 - 1826
Innovative Shiʿite thinker.
Ahmad al-Ahsaʿi was born in 1753 in al-Hasa or alAhsa, then nominally an Arabian/Persian Gulf province of the Ottoman Empire with a largely Shiʿite population. Ahmad may well have been from an artisan family, since he knew metalworking and carpentry, but a series of visions of the Shiʿa imams led him to study the seminary subjects of Islam. Around 1792, he went to Iraq for higher studies, staying in Najaf and Karbala for four years, and afterward lived in Bahrain. From 1800 to 1806 he was based in Basra and journeyed in southern Iraq. From 1806 to 1814 he lived in Yazd, and from 1814 to 1824 in Kermanshah, although he continued to travel widely. He was in Karbala in 1825 and died in 1826 on his way to Medina.
His move to Persia (Iran) had come at the invitation of the shah and of Qajar princes who offered him patronage to adorn their cities. In 1808, Fath Ali Shah summoned Ahmad to Tehran and attempted to persuade him to stay in the capital, but the shaykh declined for fear that he would eventually come into conflict with the shah. Ahmad claimed authority not only as a trained jurisprudent (mujtahid) but also as the recipient of intuitive knowledge from the imams (the holy figures of Shiʿism); he emphasized the esoteric, gnostic heritage within Twelver Shiʿism, writing about letter/number symbolism (numerology) and other cabalistic subjects. He innovated in Shiʿite theology both in his doctrine of God's attributes and his positing of two sorts of body, the ethereal and the physical, allowing him to suggest that the resurrection would be of the ethereal type. He appears to have been influenced by the medieval Iranian illuminationist Suhravardi and wrote original commentaries on the metaphysical works of such Safavid thinkers as Mulla Sadra Shirazi and Mulla Muhsin Fayz, criticizing their monistic tendencies but accepting many of their other premises and technical terms. Only very late in life, from 1823, was Ahmad denounced by some of his colleagues as heterodox, and this appears to have been a minority position in his lifetime. His followers coalesced in the Shaykhi school, which for a time contended with the scholastic Usuli school for dominance of Twelver Shiʿism in the nineteenth century.
— JUAN R. I. COLE
