Abd-al-Hossain went to Najaf and studied under a wide variety of teachers, gaining certificates of ejtehad (individual inference) from Mirza Mohammad-HossainNaʾini, ShaikhʿAbd-al-KarimHaʾeri,... | ||
ShaikhAbd-al-HossainAmini Abd-al-Hossain went to Najaf and studied under a wide variety of teachers, gaining certificates of ejtehad (individual inference) from Mirza Mohammad-HossainNaʾini, ShaikhʿAbd-al-KarimHaʾeri, and Shaikh Mohammad-HossainKompani. Coming back from Najaf to Tabriz, he found himself heir to the influence and standing of his father, but he preferred the scholarly atmosphere of Najaf; returning there, he embarked on a career of research and authorship. Shaikh ʿAbd-Al-HossainAmini, also known as ʿAllama-ye Amini (1902-1970), was a Shia scholar and author of the encyclopedic al-Gadirfi’l-ketabwa’l-sunnawa’l-adab. He was born in Tabriz to a family celebrated for religious learning; his grandfather, Molla Najaf-ʿAli, had borne the title Amin-al-saṛʿ (“guardian of the law”), and his father, Hojjat-al-EslamMirza Ahmad Amini (d. 1950), was among the leading faqihs of the city. After completing his early education, ʿAbd-al-Hossain went to Najaf and studied under a wide variety of teachers, gaining certificates of ejtehad (individual inference) from Mirza Mohammad-HossainNaʾini, ShaikhʿAbd-al-KarimHaʾeri, and Shaikh Mohammad-HossainKompani. Coming back from Najaf to Tabriz, he found himself heir to the influence and standing of his father, but he preferred the scholarly atmosphere of Najaf; returning there, he embarked on a career of research and authorship. Despite his competence in fiqh, he was primarily interested in the traditions of the Prophet (PBUH) and the Imams; all he wrote was inspired by an intense devotion to the Shia concept of welaya. His first book, Sohadaʾ al-fażila, published in Najaf in 1936, was received with great acclaim, and he began to be called ʿallama at the early age of thirty-five. But the work that occupied more than forty years of his life and definitively assured his fame was al-Gadir, a massive examination of the tradition according to which the Prophet appointed ʿAli as his immediate successor. Drawing upon the entire corpus of Hadith literature, both Shia and Sunni, as well as a wide variety of historical and literary sources, Amini sought to present the successorship of ʿAli and, beyond that, the exalted status of the entire family of the Prophet as a pervasive and unifying theme in the history of the two sectors of the Islamic community. The work has been well received in Sunni as well as Shia circles, and has served as an adjunct to various efforts underway at effecting a Sunni-Shia rapprochement. The first nine of the twenty volumes of al-Gadir were published in Najaf between 1945 and 1952; a new edition, embracing the first eleven volumes, was published in Beirut in 1953. A Persian translation of the first two volumes, made by Moḥammad-TaqiWahedi, appeared in Tehran in 1961; another translation, by Hassan Habibi, including all eleven volumes of the Beirut edition, is to roll out of the press. In the course of gathering material for al-Gadir, Aminitraveled widely, not only in Iran and the Arab countries but also India, giving lectures on his chosen theme wherever he went. The texts of some of these lectures have been published (e.g., Siratonawasunnatonasiratonabiyenawasunnatoho, Tehran, 1966, a series of lectures given in Syria in 1964). During his trips, Amini also collected a vast number of books, both printed and manuscript; these formed the nucleus of the library he founded at Najaf, the Maktabat Amir-al-muʾmenin al-ʿAmma. Falling ill in 1968, he came to Tehran for medical treatment, and lay bedridden until his death on 3 July 1970. His body was returned to Najaf for burial next to the library he had founded.
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