Religion: Islam
Denomination: Twelver Shia
School: Mohammad Hussaini Shirazi, Mohammad Taqi al-Modarresi

Personal
Nationality: Saudi
Born: 1959 Al-Awamiyah, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia
Died: 2 January 2016 (aged 56 or 57) Saudi Arabia

Religious career
Website: http://www.sknemer.com

Nimr Baqr al-Nimr also commonly referred to as Sheikh Nimr, was a Shia Sheikh in al-Awamiyah, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia. He was popular among youth and critical of the Saudi Arabian government. He called for free elections in Saudi Arabia, and was arrested by Saudi authorities in 2006, at which time al-Nimr said he was beaten by the Mabahith. In 2009, he criticised Saudi authorities and suggested that if Saudi Shias’ rights were not respected, the Eastern Province should secede. Saudi authorities responded by arresting al-Nimr and 35 others. During the 2011–12 Saudi Arabian protests, al-Nimr called for protestors to resist police bullets using “the roar of the word” rather than violence, and predicted the collapse of the government if repression continued. The Guardian described al-Nimr as having “taken the lead in [the] uprising.”

Religious career

Al-Nimr has been a Shia Sheikh in al-Awamiyah since 2008 or earlier. He studied for about ten years in Tehran and also studied in Syria. He initially followed Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussaini Shirazi and as of 2008, followed Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi al-Modarresi.

As of 2008, he was independent of the two main political groups in the Eastern Province Shia community, Islahiyyah (the Shirazis) and Hezbollah Al-Hejaz (Saudi Hezbollah).

Al-Nimr has been the Friday prayers leader in al-Awamiyah since 2009 or earlier.

Personal life

Nimr al-Nimr’s nephew, Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr, who participated in the 2011–12 Saudi Arabian protests, was arrested in 2012 at the age of 17, sentenced to death in 2014, and expected ratification of his sentence by King Salman, to be carried out by beheading and crucifixion.

Points of view

Al-Nimr supported “something between” individual and council forms of guardianship of the Islamic Jurists as a form of government. He supported Kurdish majority control of Iraqi Kurdistan. Al-Nimr believed that Shia ayatollahs would not promote violence and “murder in the name of God”. He supported “the idea of elections”.

Al-Nimr criticized Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy, which brutally suppressed massive pro-democracy Shia-led demonstrations in Bahrain in 2011.

Al-Nimr stated that the United States (US) “wants to humiliate the world.” In August 2008, he said that he saw US citizens as a natural ally of Shia as the thinking of both US citizens and Shia is “based on justice and liberty”.

He believed that the Saudi state is “particularly reactionary” and that “agitation” is needed to influence the state in general and the Saudi state in particular. According to John Kincannon, Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, Al-Nimr made statements “perceived as supporting Iran”. In August 2008, he stated that he believed that Iran and other states outside of Saudi Arabia act mainly out of self-interest, not out of religious solidarity.

Al-Nimr stated that in the case of internal conflict in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Shia would have the right to ask for international intervention in analogy to requests for foreign military intervention by Kuwaitis and Saudis to the US in the 1990–91 Gulf War and people from Darfur during the War in Darfur.

Al-Nimr criticised Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who was crown prince of Saudi Arabia, following Nayef’s death in June 2012. He stated that “people must rejoice at [Nayef’s] death” and that “he will be eaten by worms and will suffer the torments of Hell in his grave”.

Al-Nimr was described by US diplomat Gfoeller as “gaining popularity locally” in 2008. The Guardian described him as “[seeming] to have become the most popular Saudi Shia cleric among local youth” in October 2011. He retained his popularity in 2012, with thousands of people participated in Qatif street demonstrations in his support following his July 2012 arrest.

2004 and 2006 arrests

Al-Nimr was detained for several days in 2004. He was arrested by Mabahith in 2006 and beaten during his detention. Residents of al-Awamiyah campaigned to support him and he was released after several days.

2009 sermon and arrest order

In February 2009, an incident occurred in Medina involving differences in Shia and Sunni customs at the tomb of Muhammad, filming of Shia women by the religious police, protests by Shia in Medina and arrests. Six children were arrested during 4–8 March for taking part in a 27 February protest in Safwa.

Al-Nimr criticised the authorities’ February actions in Medina and the Minister of Interior in particular for discrimination against Saudi Arabian Shia. In a sermon, he threatened secession, stating “Our dignity has been pawned away, and if it is not … restored, we will call for secession. Our dignity is more precious than the unity of this land.”

A warrant for his arrest was issued in response. Protests took place in al-Awamiyah starting 19 March. Four people were arrested, including al-Nimr’s nephew, ‘Ali Ahmad al-Faraj, aged 16, who was arrested on 22 March. The police started tracking al-Nimr in order to arrest him and tried to take his children hostage. By 1 April, a total of 35 people had been arrested and security forces installed checkpoints on roads to al-Awamiyah. As of 1 April 2009, al-Nimr had not been arrested.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information said that the authorities were “persecuting Shia reformist Nimr Bakir al-Nimr for his criticism of policies of sectarian discrimination against the Shia in Saudi Arabia and for his call for reform and equality.”

In October 2011, during the 2011–12 Saudi Arabian protests, al-Nimr said that young people protesting in response to the arrests of two al-Awamiyah septuagenarians were provoked by police firing at them with live ammunition. On 4 October, he called for calm, stating, “The [Saudi] authorities depend on bullets … and killing and imprisonment. We must depend on the roar of the word, on the words of justice”. He explained further, “We do not accept [the use of firearms]. This is not our practice. We will lose it. It is not in our favour. This is our approach [use of words]. We welcome those who follow such [an] attitude. Nonetheless, we cannot enforce our methodology on those who want to pursue different approaches [and] do not commit to ours. The weapon of the word is stronger than the power of bullets.”

In January 2012, he called on authorities to “stop bloodshed”, predicting that the government would be overthrown if it continued its “month-long crackdown” against protestors. He criticised a list of 23 alleged protestors published by the Ministry of Interior. The Guardian described him as having “taken the lead in [the] uprising”.

On 8 July 2012 Saudi police shot al-Nimr in the leg and arrested him in what police described as an “exchange of gunfire.” Saudi police fired into a crowd of thousands who protested al-Nimr’s arrest, killing two men, Akbar al-Shakhouri and Mohamed al-Felfel. Al-Nimr started a hunger strike and appeared to have been tortured. The Asharq Center for Human Rights expressed concern for al-Nimr’s health during his hunger strike on 21 August, calling for international support to allow access by family, lawyer and human rights activists.

Al-Nimr’s wife, Muna Jabir al-Shariyavi, died in a New York hospital while he was imprisoned. Two thousand people attended the funeral in Safwa on the evening of 30/31 August, called for al-Nimr to be unconditionally freed, for all Shia and Sunni detainees to be freed, and chanted “Down with Hamad”, “Bahrain Free Free, Peninsula Shield out”.

On 15 October 2014 al-Nimr was sentenced to death by the Specialized Criminal Court for “seeking ‘foreign meddling’ in Saudi Arabia, ‘disobeying’ its rulers and taking up arms against the security forces.” His brother, Mohammad al-Nimr, was arrested on the same day for tweeting information about the death sentence. Al-Nimr was executed on or shortly before 2 January 2016, along with 46 others. His execution was condemned by Iran and Shiites throughout the Middle East, as well as by Western figures and Sunnis opposed to sectarianism. The Saudi government did not give his body to his family, saying that they already buried all the bodies.

Street demonstrations

There have been several demonstrations in response to the execution. People in the Qatif region of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province have taken to the streets with protesters marching from Nimr’s hometown of al-Awamiyah to Qatif, chanting, “Down with the Al Saud”. On January 2, the same day of the execution, numerous protesters gathered outside the Saudi embassy in Tehran which was on fire after one person threw homemade firebombs at the embassy. The protests continued beyond 3 am in the morning.Iran police arrested 40 protesters for raiding the embassy.

Hundreds of people held a protest rally in the Bahraini capital Manama. Demonstrators carrying pictures of Sheikh Nimr were involved in a clash with police in the Bahraini village of Abu-Saiba. Hundreds also marched in al-Daih and Sitra, chanting slogans against Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family and the Sunni family ruling Bahrain, and calling Nimr “our martyr”.

Peacful demonstrations occured in Iranian holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, as well as in Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, India’s Jammu and Kashmir, and Turkey.

Reference: Nimr al-Nimr

Sadr ad-Din Muhammad Shirazi, also called Mulla Sadra was born in Shiraz, in what is now Iran, to a notable family of court officials in 1571 or 1572, Mulla Sadra moved first to Qazvin in 1591 and then to Isfahan 1597 to pursue a traditional and institutional education in philosophy, theology, Hadith and hermeneutics. Each city was a successive capital of the Safavid dynasty and centres of Twelver Shi’ite seminaries at that time. His teachers included Mir Damad and Baha’ad Din al-‘Amili’.

Mulla Sadra completed his education at Isfahan, a leading cultural and intellectual centre of his day. He was trained under the supervision of Mir Damad.

After he had finished his studies Mulla Sadra began to explore unorthodox doctrines and as a result was both condemned and excommunicated by some Shi’i Ulama. He then retired for a lengthy period of a time to a village named Kahak near Qum, where he engaged in contemplative exercises. While in Kahak, he wrote a number of minor works, including the Risala Fi ‘l-Hashr and the Risala fi huduth al-alam.

In 1612, Mulla Sadra was asked to abandon his retirement by the powerful governor of Fars, Allahwirdi Khan and invited back to Shiraz to teach and run a new madrassa devoted to the intellectual sciences. During this time in Shiraz, Mulla Sadra began writing treatises that synthesised wide-ranging strands of existing Islamic systems of thought. The ideas of this school, which may be seen as a continuation of the School of Isfahan of Mir Damad and Shaykh-i Bahai. Mulla Sadra’s influence remained limited in the generations after his death, it increased markedly during the 19th century, when his ideas helped inspire a renewed Akhbari tendency within twelver Shi’ism. In recent times, his works have been studied in Iran, Europe and America.

According to Mulla Sadra, ‘existence precedes the essence and is thus principal since something has to exist first then have an essence.” It is notable that for Mulla Sadra this was a question that specifically applied to God and God’s position in the universe, especially in the context of reconciling God’s position in the Qur’an verses cosmological philosophies of Islam’s Golden Era.

Mulla Sadra held the view that Reality is Existence. He believed that an essence was by itself a general notion, and therefore and does not, in reality, exist.

To paraphrase Mulla Sadra’s Existential Cosmology: Existence is the one and only reality. Existence and reality are therefore identical. Existence is the all comprehensive reality and there is nothing outside of it. Essences which are negative require some sort of reality and therefore exist. Existence therefore cannot be denied. Therefore existence cannot be negated. As Existence cannot be negated, it is self-evident that it Existence is God. God should not be searched for in the realm of existence but it is the basis of all existence. It should be noted that reality in Arabic is ‘Al-Haq’, and is stated in the Qur’an as one of the Names of God.

To paraphrase Mulla Sadra’s Logical Proof of God:

• There is a being
• This being is a perfection beyond all perfection
• God is Perfect and Perfection is existence
• Existence is a singular and simple reality
• That singular reality is graded in intensity in a scale of perfection
• That scale must have a limit point, a point of greatest intensity and of greatest existence
• Therefore God exists

Mulla Sadra argues that all contingent beings require a cause which puts their balance between existence and non-existence in favour of the former; nothing can come into existence without a cause. Since the world is therefore contingent upon this First Act, not only must God exist, but God must also be responsible for this First Act of creation.

Mulla Sadra also believed that a casual regress was impossible because the casual chain could only work in the matter that had a beginning, middle, and end.

• A pure cause at the beginning
• A pure effect at the end
• A nexus of cause and effect

For Mulla Sadra, the casual ‘End’ is as pure as its corresponding ‘Beginning’, which instructively places God as  both the beginning and the end of the creative act. God’s capacity to measure the intensity of Existential Reality by measuring Casual Dynamics’ and their Relationship to their Origin, as opposed to knowing their effects, provided the Islamically-acceptable framework for God’s Judgement of Reality without being tainted by its Particulars. This was an ingenious solution to a question that had haunted Islamic philosophy for almost one thousand years: How is God able to judge sin without knowing sin?

The Primary of Existence solution provides the capacity for God’s Judgement without God being directly, or indirectly, affected by the evil being judged. God does not need to possess Sin to know Sin: God is able to judge the intensity of Sin as God perceived Existence.

Mulla Sadra brought “a new philosophical insight in dealing with the nature of reality and created “a major transition from essentialism to existentialism” in Islamic philosophy, although his existentialism should not be too readily compared to Western existentialism. He was the most prominent Iranian Shia Islamic philosopher, theologian and Alim who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century.

According to Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years. He died in Basra after the Hajj in the year 1640 and was buried in present-day Iraq. He is buried in the city of Najaf, Iraq.

 

Grand Ayatullah Sayyed Hossein Borujerdi was born in March 1875 in the city of Borujerd in Lorestan Province in Iran, hence the surname. His family traced its lineage 30 generations to Hassan ibn Ali the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (S). His father Sayyed Ali Tabataba’i was a religious scholar in Borujerd and his mother, Sayyidah Agha Beygum was the daughter of Sayyid Mohammad Ali Tabataba’i.

After entering elementary school at the age of seven, Sayyid Husayn’s father realized his talent for learning and sent him to Nurbakhsh seminary in Borujerd. At the age of 11 he began his education at the theological schools of his city, under his father Sayyed Ali. Then in 1892-93 he went to the theological school of Isfahan to continue his education. In the ten years that he studied in Isfahan he completed his sutuh studies and was also granted the level of Ijtihad from his teachers, and began teaching Usul. Around the age of 30 Ayatullah Borujerdi moved from Isfahan to the theological seminary of Najaf, Iraq to continue his education.

In his youth, Ayatullah Borujerdi studied under a number of Shia scholars of fiqh such as Ayatullah Mohammad Kazem Khorasani and Aqa Zia Iraqi, and specialised in fiqh. He studied the fiqahat of all the Islamic schools of thought, not just his own, along with the science of rijal. He had a unique method in ‘Ilm al-rijal by studying the chain of narrators of hadiths in the Four books independently from narrations. Through this method, he made great contributions to later researches.

Ayatullah revived the hawza of Qum in 1945 which had waned after the death in 1937 of its founder, Abdul-Karim Ha’eri Yazdi. When Sayyid Abul Hasan Isfahani died the following year, the majority of Shi’a accepted Ayatullah Borujerdi as Marja’.

He used a simple language in his lessons and avoided unnecessary extra discussions. Like early Shia Ulama such as Shaykh al-Mufid and Sayyid Murtada, Shaykh al-Tusi, Shaykh Tabarsi and Allamah Bahr al-‘Ulum, he had a comprehensive knowledge of different Islamic studies. He also studied jurisprudential verdicts of Shia and Sunni faqihs of the past.

He was a sincere believer. Whenever he was praised by others for his contributions to Shia community, he would say: “purify your acts from hypocrisy, for the watcher (Allah) is very sharp-sighted.”

He never abandoned education and acquisition of knowledge until the last moments of his life. He used to say, “I never get tired of studying, rather when I get tired, I get relaxed by studying.”

He would tolerate disrespectful behaviour of his critics and forgave them. This was one of the reasons that made him a unique religious leader.

Ayatullah Borujerdi vowed not to become angry, otherwise he would fast for one year.

According to Shaheed Motahhari, Ayatullah Borujerdi was eager to establish schools with religious management and doing so, the new generation would become religious and knowledgeable. He thus spent a considerable amount of religious tax for establishing such schools.

The city of Borujerd lacked electricity, but by the order of Ayatullah and the help of religious people, they constructed a power plant. Under his leadership, many religious scholars were sent to other cities and countries to preach religious beliefs and to fulfill religious needs of people.

Many charitable and religious organisations were built at his time, some of those are as follows: A’zam Mosque in the holy Shrine of Lady Ma’sumah in Qum, Baghdad Mosque, a hospital in Najaf, Neku’i Hospital in Qum, Islamic Centre Hamburg, Germany.

In the last days of his life, Professor Muris (French physician) came from Paris to visit him for his health issues. Before he visited Professor Muris, he asked for a comb to tidy his beard first. His friends told him it was not necessary since he was sick, but he answered, “I am the religious leader of Shia and it is not accepable that I visit a non-Muslim with untidy look.”

Ayatullah Borujerdi died in Qum on March 30, 1961. The Shah proclaimed three days of mourning and attended a memorial service in his honor.