Fadaiyan Islam first Islamic terrorist groups and murder of Kasravi
فدائیان اسلام اولین گروه تروریست اسلامی ایران و قتل کسروی
Ahmad Kasravi (29 September 1890 - March 11, 1946) (Azerbaijani: Əhməd Kəsrəvi, Persian: احمد کسروی), was a notable Iranian linguist, historian, and reformer.
Born in Hokmabad (Hohmavar), Tabriz, Persia/Iran, Kasravi was an Iranian Azeri[1] Initially, Kasravi enrolled in a seminary. Later, he joined the Persian Constitutional Revolution. He experienced a sort of conversion to Western learning when he learned that the comet of 1910 had been identified as a reappearance of Halley's comet. He abandoned his clerical training after this event and enrolled in the American Memorial School of Tabriz. Thenceforward he became, in Roy Mottahedeh's words, "a true anti-cleric."
Ahmad Kasravi came from a traditional clerical family. While still a seminary student in Tabriz, his home town, he came into contact with militants of the constitutionalist movement. The 1905 constitutionalist movement in Persia had driven a wedge between the cleric. Some rallied to its support and legitimized it while others argued that an Islamic form of government can only be based on the Shari'a. The clerical opponents of the movement accused its proponents of seeking to impose the will of the people over that of God. From the early age of sixteen, Kasravi became a pro-constitutionalist.
Kasravi's experience with every day private and social conduct of Muslims confronted him with a major epistemological problem. He witnessed certain acts and practices prevalent among the Shi'a for which he could not find sources or evidence in Islamic jurisprudence that he considered sound, and which he could not rationally explain. He also observed that those same Muslims refrained from certain acts which he believed were incumbent upon any pious believer. He identified a rupture between what he considered as the essence of the faith, the observation of which would have secured the welfare of the believers, and the outward signs or the form of the faith, which he believed to have developed into a superstitious series of futile rites and rituals. Cut off from worldly affairs, which according to Kasravi were the concern of religion, the Shi'a were, he concluded, still grappling with the problems and circumstances of 1,300 years ago. Shi'i Muslims, he observed were neither concerned with the national integrity and prosperity of their country, nor with colonialism and the reasons for the subjugation of the Eastern countries to European powers.
In Kasravi's mind, pursuing the essence of the faith resulted in social benefit. The deep preoccupation of the Shi'a with religious formalities, however, deprived them of the means to improve their socioeconomic condition. He maintained that excess zeal in practising what he considered to be 'impurities', which had crept into the faith, was the cause of the people's state of deprivation and underdevelopment. According to Kasravi, Islam was the guiding torch of the people in the pursuit of welfare, yet at the hands of the Shi'a it had become the source of their deception and misfortune.
Although Kasravi had written an important book called Shari'at Ahmadi on the osul and foru' of Islam and Shi'ism, he gradually began to question not only the role and legitimacy of the clergy, but even the basis of Shi'ism. He distinguished two different types of Islam: the Islam of the pious Prophet and the Islam of all the various sects that had emerged from the spread of the religion. According to Kasravi, the two were opposed to one another. Existing Islam was an institution run by the clerics, beneficial to no one and the source of great misfortune. The object of religion, he argued, was to secure the welfare of the people by finding solutions to their daily problems such as poverty, unemployment, and ill health. These he believed, were the acts which would please God.
According to Kasravi, the clergy did not perform their expected role. Instead of functioning as the enlightened shepherd who would lead his flock to spiritual and material felicity, they misled the people, perpetrated ignorance, deprivation and superstition. Kasravi reproached the clergy on several counts. He derided their role in deepening the animosity between Shi'i and Sunni Muslims. He attacked the custom of building shrines for the Imams and characterized their worship as idolatry. He accused the clergy of deceiving the people by encouraging them to go on pilgrimages as a means of attaining salvation or as a guarantee for the realization of a miracle. Kasravi argued that a reward could be expected only for a useful act. The lavish expenditure on pilgrimage, he maintained, was best spent on feeding and clothing the hungry and the poor. He mocked the concept of mediation (shafa'at), according to which on Judgment Day the Imams would request the salvation
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