1050/1640) and Sabzavari’s Sharh-I Manzuma...

1050/1640) and Sabzavari’s Sharh-I Manzuma, to a select group of young scholars that included Murtaza Mutahhari and Husayn ‘Ali Muntaziri, who subsequently became two of his principal collaborators in the revolutionary movement he launched some three decades later. As for the earliest writings of the Imam, they also indicate that his primary interest during his early years in Qum was gnosis.

In 1928, for example, he completed the Sharh Du’a’ al-Sahar , a detailed commentary on the supplicatory prayers recited throughout Ramadan by Imam Muhammad al-Baqir; as with all Imam Khomeini’s works on gnosis, the terminology of Ibn ‘Arabi is frequently encountered in this book. Two years later, he completed Misbah al-Hidaya ila ‘l-Khilafa wa ‘l-Wilaya , a dense and systematic treatise on the main topics of gnosis.

Another product of the same years of concentration on gnosis was a series of glosses on Qaysari’s commentary on the Fusus.

In a brief autobiography written for inclusion in a book published in 1934, the Imam wrote that he spent most of his time studying and teaching the works of Mullah Sadra; that he had for several years been studying gnosis with Shahabadi; and that at the same time he was attending the classes of Ayatullah Ha’iri on fiqh .[^2] The sequence of these statements suggests that fiqh was as yet secondary among his concerns.

This situation was to change, but gnosis was for the Imam never simply a topic for study, teaching, and writing. It remained an integral part of his intellectual and spiritual personality, and as such infused many of his ostensibly political activities in later years with an unmistakably gnostic element. The Imam did not engage in any overt political activities during the 1930’s.

He always believed that the leadership of political activities should be in the hands of the foremost religious scholars, and he was therefore obliged to accept the decision of Ha’iri to remain relatively passive toward the measures taken by Riza Shah against the traditions and culture of Islam in Iran. In any event, as a still junior figure in the religious institution in Qum, he would have been in no position to mobilize popular opinion on a national scale.

He was nonetheless in contact with those few ulama who did openly challenge Riza Shah, not only Shahabadi, but also men such as Hajji Nurullah Isfahani, Mirza Sadiq Aqa Tabrizi, Aqazada Kifai, and Sayyid Hasan Mudarris.