Muhammad Baqir Behbahani

Muhammad Baqir ibn Muhammad Akmal al-Wahid Bihbahani, also Vahid Behbahani, or also Waheed Behbahani (1706–1791), was a Twelver Shia Islamic scholar. He is widely regarded as the founder or restorer of the Usuli school of Twelver Shi'a Islam and as playing a vital role in narrowing the field of orthodoxy in Twelver Shi'a Islam by expanding "the threat of takfir" against opposing scholars "into the central field of theology and jurisprudence".

In the eighteenth century there was a dispute between the Akhbari and Usuli schools of Shia Islam. Briefly, the Akhbari believed that the sole sources of law were the Qur'an and the Hadith, in particular the Four Books accepted by the Shia: everything in these sources was in principle reliable, and outside them there was no authority competent to enact or deduce further legal rules. The Usuli believed that the Hadith collections contained traditions of very varying degrees of reliability, and that critical analysis was necessary to assess their authority. On this view, the task of the legal scholar is to establish intellectual principles of general application (Usul al-fiqh), from which particular rules may be derived by way of deduction: accordingly, legal scholarship has the tools in principle for resolving any situation, whether or not it is specifically addressed in Quran or Hadith (see Ijtihad).

Traditionally these intellectual principles were analysed through the procedures of Aristotelian logic. The Akhbari scholar Muhammad Amin al-Asterabadi criticised this approach, arguing that since the alleged general principles were arrived at by way of generalisation from the existing practical rules, the whole process was circular.

Behbahani led the Usuli intellectual challenge to Akhbari dominance in Karbala in the 1760s. With the defeat of the Safavid state following the Afghan invasion in 1722 and the rise of a new generation of Bahraini Akhbari clerics, state-centric Usulism lost its self-confidence. The most influential Bahraini cleric, Yusuf Al Bahrani, was installed as the dean of scholarship in Karbala, where he led an intellectual onslaught on Usuli scholarship in the mid-eighteenth century. Behbahani's role in the 1760s was at first to tentatively challenge Al Bahrani's neo-Akhbarism before building up the supporters, confidence (and financial support) to eventually lead an Usuli revival following Al Bahrani's death in 1772.

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