The Emergence of Modern Shiʿism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran by Zackery M. Heern (review)

As the Shiʿa state of the Islamic Republic of Iran with its unique version of mixing religion with politics has gained prominence in world politics, many people in the West have realized they know little about Shiʿism and its distinguishing features. One blind spot seems to be the Shiʿa clerical establishment – in particular, its worldview and its social and political functions. Here, Zackery Heern has attempted to produce a thorough intellectual and historical analysis of the foundations of what he calls the ‘neo-Usuli’ and sometimes the Usuli school, put forward by Wahid Bihbahani, the eighteenth-century Shiʿa reviver and reformer. Thanks to Bihbahani’s intellectual endeavours, his rationalist school successfully prevailed over the literalist Akhbaris who had become dominant in the latter half of the Safavid period. Since then, the Shiʿa clergy followed Bihbahani’s approach, a fruit of which was, according to Heern, the theory of the guardianship of the jurist, embraced by Ayatollah Khomeini, and now the foundation of Iranian polity.

Heern puts Bihbahani in the context of the eighteenth-century Islamic world that suffered from political ineffectiveness, military defeats, and economic difficulties. Bihbahani was from a high-ranked Iranian clerical family, but his main scholarly base was Karbala, an Iraqi holy city with an old Shiʿa seminary. Thus for a better understanding of the context, the history of Iran and Iraq in eighteen century is covered briefly (Chapters 2 and 3). There is also a wider context – that is, the Islamic world as a whole. To take that into consideration, Bihbahani is studied in comparison with two other Muslim reformers: Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabi school in Arabia, and Ahmad ibn Idris of Morocco, the founder of neo-Sufism (the final chapter).

Heern views Usulism as well as Wahhabism and neo-Sufism as modern ideologies in the Muslim world along the same lines as the Enlightenment, the Great Awakening, Communism, and other ideological movements labelled ‘modern’. Instead of looking at modernity from a Eurocentric point of view, he prefers to speak of ‘modernities’, developed by various movements in different parts of the world. However, the concept of modernity is loosely defined, and it looks like that according to the author, any movement that happened in the modern era is considered a ‘modernity’, without it having any particular function or bringing any sort of development to its society (Chapter 1).

Apart from Bihbahani’s biography (Chapter 4), one interesting part of the book offers an in-depth analysis of Bihbahani’s juristic perspective, in which the five sources of Usuli Shiʿa law – i.e. the Qurʾan, traditions, consensus, reason and transference (taʿdiyyah) – are discussed (Chapter 6). In addition, the role played by language and custom as well as the extent of validity of juristic conjectures is covered. It seems that this chapter is mainly based on Robert Gleave’s analysis in his Inevitable Doubt.

It could be argued that the main contribution of Bihbahani was not only his intellectual heritage, but also his students who made a powerful and highly influential clerical network all over the Shiʿa world. Thus, four of his distinguished students in Iraq and five in Iran with their intellectual and political achievements are mentioned along with some useful details in each case (Chapter 5).

Overall, Heern has done a great and of course difficult job in his seven chapters. It seems that the main problem he faced was the lack of awareness about Shiʿism in general given the complexity of the original ideas and findings he is presenting. In other words, on one hand, he is addressing a readership who may have minimal background information about Shiʿism. Thus some parts of the book provide the reader with basic information on Shiʿism. On the other hand, the book also offers higher-level legalistic...