***Update: A memorial service honoring Professor Mottahedeh will be held on Friday, October 25, 2024, at 2:00 PM at the Memorial Church, Harvard University. For further details, please see here.***
Professor Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, a longtime friend to the Program in Islamic Law and a member emeritus of our advisory and editorial boards, sadly passed away on July 30, 2024.
In remembrance and celebration of Professor Mottahedeh's legacy and scholarship, the Islamic Law Blog will be publishing a series throughout this month. In the first part of our series earlier this month, we published our Editor-in-Chief Professor Intisar Rabb's condolence message to our readers and followers. Last week, in the second part of our series, we remembered Professor Mottahedeh's legacy through Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, edited by Intisar Rabb & Abigail Balbale (Cambridge: Harvard Series in Islamic Law, Harvard University Press 2017), a festschrift published in his honor.
This week, in part three of our series commemorating Professor Mottahedeh's legacy, we are republishing the tabula gratulatoria from Justice and Leadership – a compilation of notes authored by Professor Mottahedeh's students, colleagues, and friends that celebrate his life, legacy, and scholarship. The full list of contributors and their full notes are available online here.
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TABULA GRATULATORIA
The following notes were authored by students, colleagues, and friends of Roy Mottahedeh as part of an event called Law, Loyalty and Leadership, organized by Sarah Bowen Savant and Kristen Stilt at Harvard University in 2012, in honor of Roy's seventieth birthday. Of the dozens of notes submitted on themes as disparate as his life as a teacher and mentor, his generosity as a scholar and friend, and more, we selected some twenty notes primarily related to his scholarship and reflections on his scholarly trajectory by colleagues often there at the start. Each reflection is reproduced, with slight modifications, with the express permission of each author (or of their estate, in the case of those no longer with us).
The full list of contributors is available below, and their full notes are avail- able online, at scholar.harvard.edu/mottahedeh/tabula-gratulatoria-0.
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There is an abiding kindness in Roy that warms all who approach him. In his honor, I would like to offer the following vignette: I found [a] response written by [a] Seminar participant who was tasked with presenting a response to The Mantle. Quickly admitting to ignorance of both Islam and Persian history, he nevertheless found the "sweep over two millennia of Iranian history combined with a treatise on Islam in a single volume of 400 pages" to be a "tour de force indeed!" His reaction was shared by all the other participants, providing yet another testimony to the broad impact and enduring value of Roy's scholarship.
~ Jane McAuliffe
Director, John W. Kluge Center Office of Scholarly Programs Library of Congress, USA
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Of course, his monumental The Mantle of the Prophet has become familiar to legions of students and mature scholars as the most comprehensible introduction to Shiʿa Islam, and to Iranian religious traditions.… Though the general public may not appreciate it as much, his more scholarly writings have advanced the field of Islamic Studies and the History of the Middle East in remarkable ways. I single out his astonishing "translation" of Lessons in Islamic Jurisprudence by Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr. This is far, far more than a translation. It is an exegesis of a major Islamic legal work. Reading the text one realizes what a fantastically important job Roy has done. The most confusing issues suddenly be- come clear, and the light breaks out on the shadowy world of Islamic legal thought. Not only the words, but the logic behind them emerge as a kind of epiphany. We are grateful to Roy for so many things, but above all, his generous role as a gentle teacher for all of us.
~ William O. Beeman
Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology University of Minnesota, USA
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In 1977 Roy and I attended a conference in Hamadan, Iran. An excursion by bus to a monumental Parthian remain stopped short of its goal when the bus bogged down in a muddy ditch. With Nush-i Jan in sight atop a lofty mound a mile or two away, Professor Anne Lambton, the doyenne of Iranian historians, decided to walk the remaining distance. Roy and I accompanied her while the other conferees stewed about. Halfway to our destination, Professor Lambton announced that we should cut across the muddy fields to shorten our trek. I disagreed saying that if we proceeded as we were going, we would come to a proper driveway to the site. Professor Lambton said there was no driveway; I replied that I could see one. This left Roy with a choice, to proceed on with his old friend or leave the venerable (and formidable) professor—Professor Lambton was then about sixty-five—to traverse the muddy fields by herself. Ever the diplomat, Roy set off through the mud with Professor Lambton. I continued on to the driveway and met them at Nush-i Jan, but as I recall, there was just about as much mud on the driveway as in the fields.
~ Richard W. Bulliet
Professor (emeritus) & Special Lecturer, Department of History Columbia University, USA
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Roy's amazingly subtle, and yet accessible, The Mantle of the Prophet had an enormous impact on me—I think I wrote him a gushing fan letter from Bahrain or Yemen after reading it hungrily on a long plane journey.
~ Juan Cole
Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA
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My first memory of Roy is of him standing in the stairwell at Laundress Lane, the building in Cambridge (the real Cambridge) where Peter Avery had his office and would hold court when he was not doing so at his home. Roy was holding a Persian text and puzzling over the question whether a word written b-m-b could really something as vulgar and alien to the heritage of Hafez and Saʿdī as "bomb." I joined in his puzzlement. Maybe we were a little naïve, but given the number of bombs that have gone off in the Middle East since then, it's hard not to look back on our innocence with a certain nostalgia.
The next two times I saw him were in Oxford. One was at a conference organized by Albert Hourani, a pleasant occasion when we had dinner together. The other was a working lunch that marked a turning-point in my life: Roy was briefing me on the courses I would be teaching during my visit to Princeton in the spring of 1984. He was my host throughout that spring semester, and my guide in the crucial initial stages of my adaption to the manners and customs of the American academy. Between then and my return to Princeton in a permanent role I must have seen him several times. My only regret, but a real one, was that after playing so crucial a part in the process that brought me to Princeton, both on stage and behind the scenes, he left for Harvard the very summer that I arrived.
~ Michael Cook
Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, USA
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I first heard Roy's name when I came across his contribution on the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate to the fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Iran, published in 1973. Subsequently, I became more aware, and much more impressed, by both the depth and width of his scholarship in Iranian and Islamic studies.
~ Farhad Daftary
Co-Director & Head of Academic and Research Publications, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, UK
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I have always admired his distinctive contributions to Islamic and Iranian studies. The Mantle the Prophet remains one of the most original and accessible treatments ever written of the intellectual heritage of Iran. All students of Islamic history owe a debt of gratitude to Roy both for his immense scholarship and his willingness to communicate it.
~ Carl W. Ernst
William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
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Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is among the foremost scholars of his generation in the study of the Islamic world, and the Persian- and Arab-Islamic world in particular. The range of his command of the sources, history, arts, and languages of the Islamic Middle East and Western Asia is exceptional and his critical sensibilities and insights stunning. I need only cite his Loyalty and Leadership and [The] Mantle of the Prophet as double evidence of his creative approach and the rock-solid scholarship that mark all his work. It has been my immense privilege to be his Harvard colleague and friend for over a quarter-century. I value greatly having shared in the work of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies during his directorship, then my own, and ever since. Our joint, repeated efforts over numerous years to find support for an Islamic-studies program at Harvard finally bore fruit when our last proposal of many was accepted and issued ultimately in Harvard's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, which Roy so ably chaired during its first years. I cherish the doctoral students we have shared, the Arabic-reading course we jointly taught, the many evening telephone consultations about Islamic studies we have had, the travel we have done together, and the many evenings of friendship and breaking of bread, not to mention the growth of our respective sons from infancy to adulthood, that Barbara and I have shared with Roy and Pat. No one could ask for a better colleague or more constant friend.
~ William A. Graham
Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, USA
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When I was first exposed to Roy's scholarship (The Mantle of the Prophet and works of approximately the same time), I was very impressed by what I, as an approximation, called "living" scholarship. My own type of scholarly existence was the traditional philologist. Life, if any, was instilled in the congealed texts by listening to the reconstructed re-animated voices hidden in them. Our curves of interest came closer together somewhat later, when I ventured into Islamic legal theory (dealing with two outliers of same, qawāʿid and furūq) and Roy translated Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr's Durūs fī ʿilm al-uṣūl: Lessons in Islamic Jurisprudence, a masterpiece of expert translation. I am really happy to have him as a friend, a supporter in need and—last but not least—as a representative of Islamic legal studies (to name but one of his specialties) at the same university.
~ Wolfhart P. Heinrichs
James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic (emeritus) [deceased], Harvard University, USA
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Martin Hinds and Peter Avery gave me the newly published Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society. I devoured Roy's book with a combination of pleasure, excitement and a certain relief, and it was Loyalty and Leadership, more than any other reading, that inspired me to continue my studies at the postgraduate level.
~ Louise Marlow
Professor of Religion, Wellesley College, USA
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I worked with Roy in the early 1990s when he was CMES Director. His motto was "Let a thousand flowers bloom," and he made a place for everyone at the Center. The parade of people who went through CMES in the old Coolidge Hall was stunning: Palestinians and Zionists, Sunnis and Shi'is, Copts and Kurds, communists and capitalists, Berbers and Arabs, Zoroastrians and Baha'is. His vision, courage, and good sense energized CMES and made it a home for all sorts of creativity. Under his leadership, we revived the Moroccan Studies program and returned North Africa to the CMES firmament, adding Maghribi studies to the teaching curriculum, and enabling CMES to help produce some of the finest young scholars of North African history, literature, and anthropology around today. Another of his mottoes—one that will stay with me always—was "Onward and upward!"—a simple declaration of historical inevitability, I suppose, but one that has served me well over the years. Salve, Roy, you are among the immortals! "... And the future lies ahead!"
~ Susan Miller
Professor of History, University of California at Davis, USA
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Roy's great book The Mantle of the Prophet, still in my estimation the best book yet written about the Iranian mullas—among much else—has long been a prescribed text on my "Islam in Iran" course in Madison. I once said to him, rather cheekily, "Roy, you know how much I admire The Mantle of the Prophet. But I have to say that I think it's a profoundly misleading book." He looked very worried. "What do you mean? What do you mean?" "Well," I said, "I think the problem is that people read it, and then sometimes tend to imagine that Ali Hashemi is a typical example of what the mullas are actually like. If only that were indeed true!" "Ah, yes," he said, "I see what you mean, yes."
~ David O. Morgan
Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA; Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK
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In the preface to the second edition of Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, Roy shares an anecdote with the reader. What encouraged him to write this book, the reader learns, was "a kindly academic colleague who had the slightly annoying habit of beginning many of his conversations by saying: 'You owe me a favor.'" He suddenly realized that the meaning of this sentence, when applied to Iraq and Western Iran of the tenth and eleventh centuries, is the key to understanding the bonds underlying their government and societies. Roy's encounter with this slightly annoying habit yielded a true masterpiece of social history that unveiled the fundamental rules behind the functioning of the Buyid state.
When I read this anecdote and tried to picture the colleague, his habit, and Roy's response, I could not help laughing. A couple of years later, when I was working on my dissertation focusing on the court of the Buyid vizier al-Ṣāḥib Ibn ʿAbbād, I realized how much I owe Roy for his masterpiece. Among the social bonds he described and analyzed brilliantly in his book was the one based on benefit (niʿma) in exchange for gratitude. …
~ Erez Naaman
Associate Professor, World Languages and Cultures American University, USA
***
Back in the early 1980s, I was obsessed with understanding (and explaining to others, to make sure everyone understood) this phenomenon that I referred to as "the Revolution," not [to] name it "the Islamic Revolution." Like so many Iranians of my time, I had participated in the Revolution that, as Shaul Bakhash aptly put it, we loved but it didn't love us back. Back in the United States in 1983, I read widely, about any revolution I thought would help me to understand mine, and about earlier historical periods of Iran as far back as the Safavids. Then a book was published. I had heard Roy present a talk about it at CMES (when he was still at Princeton). I read The Mantle of the Prophet with a speed unusual for me. I put it down with a deep sense of envy and an even deeper sense of relief. Relief: I no longer had to explain; here was a lucid powerful narrative that explained it all beautifully, thoughtfully, skillfully. Envy: Don't I wish I could have written that book? I feel the same envy and relief all these years later. I have always wanted to thank Roy for writing that book; but I also want to thank Roy for at least one more thing…: more than anyone else in academia that I know, at a critical and difficult time, he helped numerous uprooted Iranian scholars to find new homes here. Thank you, Roy, for your persistent generosity.
~ Afsaneh Najmabadi
Francis Lee Higgonson Professor of History of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Harvard University, USA
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I will always cherish that morning when I heard from Roy Mottahedeh for the first time. His earlier work on Loyalty and Leadership was the beginning of my interest in the evolution of Shiite religious leadership. I was aware that Roy had been awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1982 to pursue his interest in the emergence of Iranian religious leadership. It was sometime in 1983 that one Saturday morning I received a call from Roy Mottahedeh in Charlottesville, who wanted to speak to me about Iranian clerics. He might have been under the impression that I was one of the clerics because of my interest in Shiite messianic thought and the development of juridical authority during the absence of the theological Imam of the Shiites. The telephone interview, as I realized, lasted for almost an hour. The main topic of the interview was the innovative juridical thinking among the Iranian Shiite jurists. This professor, as I thought to myself, knew his subject very well. He was probably exploring the possibility of whether I could be his clerical interlocutor for his forthcoming research. When The Mantle of the Prophet appeared in 1985, I realized that Professor Mottahedeh was looking for a "turbaned" molla who could explain the process of becoming a "Khomeini-like imam" whose religious leadership had shaken the confidence of the social scientists engaged in elaborating the paradigm shift in Weber's categories of "charismatic" leadership in traditional Shiite society. The Mantle of the Prophet remains, to this day, a classic in understanding [the] "Khomeini-concept" both academically and politically.
~ Abdulaziz Sachedina
Professor and IIIT Chair of Islamic Studies, George Mason University, USA
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Many of Roy's interests have become my own, especially early Islamic Iran and historiography, but I am at least as grateful to him for showing me ways to read history. I appreciate his perceptive and modest style, his ability to choose just the right anecdote, and his empathy with the people whose works he studies, and with the subjects of the stories they tell. In assigning many different treatments of the same periods in history, Roy taught us about perspective, periodisation, and the ways that historians shape their material, but this was no free-for-all, as he offered answers to big questions. My debts to him extend now well beyond Harvard, as I work in an Institute in which Roy's ideas played a seminal role in its foundation.
~ Sarah Bowen Savant
Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London, UK
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To me, The Mantle and Prophet is an extraordinary scholarly work, written in a truly unique, elegant and refreshing style—a dimension to the book that reveals the humble and humorous personality of the author. Later, as a means of showing my appreciation and admiration for Roy's outstanding scholarship I invited him to Sweden to receive an honorary Doctorate at Lund University. Roy accepted the invitation and his and Pat's visit at Lund University is still a cherished memory, not only to me but also to many of my colleagues who enjoyed his presence at our university.
~ Leif Stenberg
Professor in Islamology & Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden
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Roy's insightful scholarship has been a constant presence in my life over the years. I have consulted his brilliant Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society countless times for everything from technical Islamic terms to abstract notions of justice. It is one of those books whose usefulness is seemingly inexhaustible. Recently, it again proved invaluable when I was exploring the möchälgä, or binding pledge, in Ilkhanid, Timurid, and Safavid political culture.…
~ Maria Subtelny
University of Toronto, Canada
***
In the summer of 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published a provocative article by the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard. I don't think anyone reading that article in the summer of 1993 could have imagined the global influence or impact that Sam Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations" would have. Among the flood of responses to Huntington there remains one that stands out for me as the most sensible and important. It was authored by Roy Mottahedeh and published in the Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review. Unfortunately, as we all know, authors rarely have much control over how widely their work is read or disseminated, and Roy Mottahedeh's "The Clash of Civilizations: An Islamicist's Critique," did not get a fraction of the attention or coverage that Huntington's original piece did.
Over the intervening two decades I have often wondered if the course of relations between the Islamic world and "the West" might not have been profoundly different had many more people had the opportunity to read Roy's wonderful response to Huntington. What Roy did is correct the fundamental and fatal flaw in Huntington's argument by contextualizing the reality of clash within the complex totality of relations between the Islamic Middle East and the West over the past 1,500 years. His conclusion, sadly missed by so many, was that Huntington's thesis was misinformed by its lack of critical appreciation for the broad range of interactions between the Islamic world and the West over the past millennium and a half, the vast majority of which were peaceful and benign.
~ Christopher S. Taylor
Professor & Director, Drew University Center on Religion, Culture, and Conflict Drew University, USA
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The first memoir, which comes to my mind about Roy is when he told me what his fa- ther had written in his notes about my father. I have felt closer to him ever since. I also cannot forget the enjoyment that I had by reading his Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society and how enlightening it was about the Buyids, and his The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, which depicted sympathetically the life and career of an Islamic seminarian.
~ Ehsan Yarshater
Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies, Director, Center for Iranian Studies
Columbia University, USA
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