Article: The Ṣāliḥiyyah School in Qazvin and Shia Religious Authority

The Salihiyyah school in Qazvin was one of the greatest Shia jurisprudential and philosophical schools in the nineteenth century.

The Salihiyyah school in Qazvin was one of the greatest Shia jurisprudential and philosophical schools in the nineteenth century. Ayatollah Muhammad Salih Barghani (d.1854) established this academic center similar to that of a specialized college and incorporated different course in its educational programme. Including philosophy, jurisprudence, methodology of jurisprudence, hadith, exegesis, literature, and medicine. He invited the most qualified scholars to teach.

This article introduces the Ṣāliḥiyyah school in Qazvīn, an innovative religious school founded in nineteenth-century Iran which taught both religious as well as academic subjects. Relying on memoirs by the descendants of its founder, Mullā Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ Baraghānī, it traces the pivotal role of this seminary in Iranian religious and political affairs, as well as renowned graduates from this school, both male and female. It situates the school in the greater Shiʿi pre-modern debate between Uṣūlism versus Akhbārism, as well as the emerging Bābī movement, and shows how one of the great contemporary Muslim reformers, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Asadābādī, was a direct product of this school.

Bibliographic Information

Title: The Ṣāliḥiyyah School in Qazvīn and Shiʿi Religious Authority, with an Emphasis on Scholars from the Baraghānī Family

Author: Isa Jahangir

Published in: Journal of Shi’a Islamic Studies Volume 8, Number 4, Autumn 2015, pp. 449-472

 Language: English

Length: 23 pages

Pub. Date:  2015