# Sheikh Ahmad al-Ahsai

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-20 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Moojan Momen, Sheikh Ahmad al-Ahsai, bahai-library.com.
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> World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy                          http://religion.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1548257?sid=1548...
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> Sheikh Ahmad al-Ahsai
> 
> Sheikh Ahmad al-Ahsai was a prominent religious leader in the Shiite Muslim world who sought to combine all of
> the streams of Islamic mysticism and philosophy into a single form of teaching. After his death, his followers
> formed a separate Shiite school that today has 300,000 to 400,000 adherents, mainly in Iran, southern Iraq,
> Kuwait, and the al-Ahsa region of Saudi Arabia.
> 
> Ahmad ibn Zayn al-Din al-Ahsai was born in in May 1753 into a Shiite family in the village of Mutayrafi in what is
> today the Saudi Arabian region of al-Ahsa. He received a full religious education at the shrine cities of Najaf and
> Karbala in Iraq and was a distinguished scholar, receiving certificates of completion of his studies from leading
> Shiite scholars of the time. From 1797 to 1806, he lived in various locations in southern Iraq. Then, in 1806, he
> traveled to Iran, where he was to remain for most of his life.
> 
> After a pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Rida in Mashhad in northeastern Iran, he was invited to settle in Yazd. In
> 1814, he moved to Kirmanshah in eastern Iran at the invitation of the crown prince, Muhammad Ali Mirza. He
> remained there until the death of this prince in 1821, when he was invited to move to Qazvin by Mullah Abdul
> Wahhab, a prominent religious scholar. It was during Sheikh Ahmad's residence in this city that he was
> denounced by Mullah Muhammad Taqi Baraghani as a heretic in about 1824. Sheikh Ahmad then left Qazvin
> and, after another pilgrimage to Mashhad, settled in Karbala. After a short time there, he decided to go on
> pilgrimage to Mecca, but he died a few stages away from Medina in 1826 and is buried in the al-Baqi cemetery
> there.
> 
> Sheikh Ahmad was a man of prodigious knowledge and wrote some 160 works on a wide variety of subjects,
> mostly in the area of mystical philosophy. He himself claimed, however, that the authority for his teaching came
> from the Shiite imams whom he met in dreams and visions. His teaching is a synthesis of the various strands of
> the Islamic sciences, especially mysticism and philosophy, and attempts to reconcile rational and intuitive
> knowledge. He has been denounced by some clerics because he taught that some of the concepts in the Islamic
> tradition should be understood as spiritual or metaphorical truths rather than taken literally. This same teaching,
> however, made him important to the later Babi and Baha'i religions.
> 
> Moojan Momen
> 
> Further Reading
> 
> Momen, Moojan. An Introduction to Shiite Islam. Oxford, UK: George Ronald, 1985; Momen, Moojan. The Works
> of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Baha'i Studies Bulletin Monograph, no. 1, 1991;
> Rafati, Vahid. "The Development of Shaykhí Thought in Shí'í Islam." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,
> Los Angeles, 1979.
> 
> Select Citation Style:     MLA
> 
> MLA
> Momen, Moojan. "Sheikh Ahmad al-Ahsai." World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy. ABC-CLIO, 2011.
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> 2 of 2                                                                                                                02/11/11 12:23 PM
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> — *Sheikh Ahmad al-Ahsai (Used by permission of the curator)*