Haydar Amuli

Haydar Amuli belongs to the Hussayni Sayyid family and hails from the town of Amol, in Mazandaran, located in the north of present-day Iran, close to the Caspian Sea. The town of Amul at the time was known to be heavily populated by Shi'ite Muslims. At a very young age he started studying Imam Shi'ism and attended the juridical school of madhhab where he also devoted his time to Sufism, until around the age of thirty.[1] Haydar Amuli first began his studies in his home town of Amul. He eventually moved on to the town of Astarabad, located near Mazandaran, and then Isfahan, located in the centre of Iran.[2] In his early twenties, Sayyid Haydar Amuli returned to Amul and became a trusted confidant and eventually a special deputy and chamberlain to the Bavandid Hasan II, who was the ruler of Tabaristan.[1] Even though Amuli had a close relationship with Hasan II, he experienced a religious crisis. Amuli quotes in his work Inner Secrets of the Path that he started to feel that he was corrupt and that he needed to move to a place where he could fully devote himself to God. So Haydar Amuli gave up his position in the court to further pursue Sufism. He abandoned the courtly life, a couple of years before Hasan II was assassinated by members of his own family.[3]

After Haydar Amuli's departure from the court, he began practicing Sufism. Living in the village of Tihran, he began to follow a shaykh by the name of Nur al-Din Tihrani, a gnostic and ascetic of Allah. Amuli spent a little less than a month in his company before going on to wear the symbolic Sufi cloak or khirqa.[1] Eventually, Haydar Amuli went on to embark on a pilgrimage or Hajj, going on to visit various Shi'ite shrines and also traveling to Jerusalem as well as the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Unfortunately, due to ill health, Amuli had to leave Medina .[3] It is documented that he spent the rest of his life in Iraq. For several years he studied in Baghdad amongst important Shi'ite scholars including Fakhr al-Din Muhammad al-Hasan and Nasir al-Din al-Kashani al-Hilli. These two scholars were prominent figures in Shi'ism at the time. Haydar al-Amuli then settled in the Shi'ite city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, for over thirty years until around 1385 CE, the year he was last documented to be living. This is also around the same time that he completed his last work, called Resalat al-olum al-aliya. .[4]

Tomb Sayyid Haydar Amuli (Seyyed se Tan)

Early on Amuli was a supporter of Imamite Shi’ism. Similar to Sufism, Shi’ism involves the ideas of šarīʿa, ṭarīqa and ḥaqīqa. Amuli believed that every Shi’ite was "a believer put to the test", a central Sufi belief. One of Amuli’s main ideas was that the Imams, who were believed to be endowed with mystical knowledge, were not just guides to the Shi’ite community but also to the Sufi community. Amuli was both a critic of Shi’ites who limited their religion to a set of rules and equally critical of Sufis who denied certain principles that originated with the Imams.[3]

Amuli also implemented and further explained the differences between pure monotheism and the inner aspect. Pure monotheism is constituted by the profession of faith and of the idea of the outward aspect of God’s unity. The inner aspect involves the idea that nothing else exists except for God.[3] Amuli metaphorically explained the idea of the inner and outward aspects as ink and the letters that are produced by that ink. The letters by themselves do not exist without the ink. Amuli meant that the physical world is only a manifestation of God’s divine names.[3]

Another belief of Amuli related to the arrival of the twelfth Imam, Mahdī. Amuli’s idea of the twelfth Imam follows the ideas of previous scholars. Amuli specifically believed that ‘Ali was the seal of the universal walāya and Mohammadan walāya is, for Amuli, the Mahdī. These ideas differ from that of Ibn ‘Arabi in that al’Arabi believes that Jesus Christ was the seal of the universal walāya.[3]

"The ocean is the same ocean as it has been of old; The events of today are its waves and its rivers."

"Indeed I swear by Allah that if the seven heavens were made of paper and the trees of the earth were pens, if the seas of the world were ink and the spirits, mankind and the angels were scribes, then they would be unable to write even a jot of what I had witnessed of the divine gnoses and realities"

• Amuli, Sayyid Haydar. Inner Secrets of the Path. Trans. Asadullah Ad-Dhaakir Yate. Babagan. Print.
• Corbin, Henry. Temple and Contemplation. Trans. Philip Sherrard. London: Kegan Paul International in Association with Islamic Publications Ltd., 1986. Print.
• Kohlberg, Etan. "Amoli, Sayyed Baha-Al-Din" Encyclopædia Iranica | Home. Center of Iranian Studies, Columbia University, 15 Dec. 1984. Weborn 6 Apr. 2011.
• Kohlberg, Etan. "Some Shī'ī Views of the Antediluvian World." Studia Islamica 52 (1980): 41–66. J Stor. Maisonneuve & Larose. Web. 2011.
• Meri, Josef W., and Jere L. Bacharach. Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia. A-Z ed. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
• Morris, James W. "Ibn 'Arabi and His Interpreters." Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 (1987): 101–19. Print
• van Ess, J. "Ḥaydar-i Āmulī, Bahāʾal-DīnḤaydarb.ʿAlīb.Ḥaydaral-ʿUbaydī (719/1319 or 720/1320—after 787/1385)." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Edited by: P. Bearman;, Th. Bianquis;, C.E. Bosworth;, E. van Donzel; and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill, 2011. Brill Online. Augustana. 1 April 2011