Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsā'ī (Arabic: شيخ أحمد الأحسائي) (28 May 1753 ― 27 June 1826) was a prominent Islamic theologian and jurist who founded the influential Shaykhī school of Twelver Shi'ism, which attracted followers from throughout the Persian and Ottoman Empires.
Shaykh Ahmad diverged from the Usuli school on key issues related to Islamic eschatology, the role of the ulama, and the proper interpretation of the mystical hadith of the Twelve Imams.
Shaykhism then became split between a conservative faction led by Karim Khan Kermani, and a more radical interpretation by Ali-Muhammad, better known as the Bāb, who claimed to be a new prophet to abrogate Islam.
He knew, [...] that nothing short of a new and independent Revelation, as attested and foreshadowed by the sacred Scriptures of Islam, could revive the fortunes and restore the purity of that decadent Faith.Shaykh Ahmad, at about age forty (1784 or 1794 - circa), began to study in earnest in the Shiʻi centres of religious scholarship such as Karbala and Najaf.
He also evinced a veneration of the imams, even beyond the extent of his pious contemporaries and espoused heterodox views on the afterlife, the resurrection and end-times, as well as medicine and cosmology.
Notably on the ethereal existence of the Hidden Imam in the unseen realm, the means by which one could recognize him, and the timing and circumstances surrounding his anticipated advent.
Ahsa'i's quest for salvation for humanity transcended mere religious obligations, focusing instead on an intuitive engagement with the sacred within a conceptual space he termed "horqalya."
This realm, borrowed from the twelfth-century Iranian philosopher Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi, served as an intermediary zone between earthly existence and the celestial domain.
In this realm, believers who honed their intellectual and moral capacities could contemplate the presence of the Imam of the Age and encounter his "manifestation" in the corporeal world.
[5] Ahsa'i offered a resolution to the perplexing question of the Hidden Imam's thousand-year longevity in a non-physical state by proposing the existence of his celestial prototype in the “horqalya” sphere.
While Ahsa'i never explicitly articulated this in his often cryptic works, the implication emerged that the Hidden Imam would eventually manifest himself in a new earthly form at the culmination of time.
[6]Bahá'í scholar, Moojan Momen in his Introduction to Shiʻi Islam (George Ronald, Oxford, 1985) states that many mujtahids were afraid that the Shaykh's preference for intuitive knowledge, which he claimed to obtain directly by inspiration from the Imams, would seriously undermine the authority of their position.
Bahá'í scholar, Nader Saiedi in his Gate of the Heart (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010) has characterised his followers by their fervent millenarian expectations, their complex mystical and esoteric knowledge, their insistence on the absolute transcendence of the divine Essence, their rejection of the doctrine of wahdatu’l-wujúd, their reinterpretation of the traditional doctrine of bodily resurrection, and their ambiguous assertions concerning the necessity of the presence of a living Gate (a Báb) to the Hidden Imám for the guidance of the Shí'i community.
Treatises and lessons composed independently by al-Ahsáʼí make up a smaller number of his works, but tend to be longer than his correspondence and more commonly studied and reprinted.
In keeping with Islamic and Persian literary and academic tradition, a large number of his works take the form of commentaries on Surahs from the Qurʼan, important Hadiths of Muhammad or the Imams, or writing by earlier mystical or theological writers.