Inherited Sanctity, Imported Revolution: Negotiating Shi‘i Memory in Lucknow After 1979
This paper examines the reception and adaptation of intellectual discourses underpinning the 1979 Iranian Revolution within Lucknow, a prominent Shiʿi centre in north India. As the capital of Awadh State (c. 1722–1856) under navvāb rule, Lucknow developed a rich intellectual and devotional Shiʿi culture, attaining parity with major shrine cities in Iran and the ʿatabāt. Central to this landscape was the mujtahid Sayyed Dildar Ali Nasirabadi (Ghufranmaab), whose partnership with the Awadhi court helped shape the city’s religious and administrative institutions. Despite the century-long political decline of Lucknow’s Shiʿa following British annexation in 1856, its clerical community preserved this distinctive intellectual heritage. It is within this context of waning authority yet enduring heritage that the city encountered the schismatic discourses emerging from Iran following 1979.
Engaging with theories of memorialisation within Persianate and Shiʿi contexts, this paper examines how the ʿulemāʾ and lay polity in Lucknow deployed historical memory to reposition and renegotiate the city’s significance in the post-1979 Shiʿi imaginary. Based on interviews with prominent Lucknowi clerics and analysis of contemporaneous Shiʿi literature, the study identifies two interpretive strategies. The first emphasises Ayatollah Khomeini’s exceptionalism, with his conceptualisation of velāyat-e faqih being an unprecedented rupture within Shiʿi jurisprudential history, thereby affirming an Iranian/Khomeini-centred teleology. The other integrates Khomeini’s revolutionary thought into Lucknow’s local genealogy of political-theological theory, positioning Ghufranmaab as a proto-theorist of Islamic governance, whose role under the navvāb prefigured aspects of Khomeini’s conception of the vali-ye faqih. The broader Shiʿi polity in Lucknow oscillates between these positions, often reflecting global shifts in transnational Shiʿi political currents.
This study contributes to scholarship on how “peripheral” Persianate and Shiʿi societies like Lucknow engage with/reinterpret discourses from the “centre”. It situates Lucknow within debates on how Persianate communities preserve/reframe their heritage to affirm contemporary religious and cultural identities.
Abid Zaidi (Syed Abid Reza Zaidi)
DPhil Candidate
University of Oxford
Abid Zaidi is a DPhil candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St Antony’s College. His research, tentatively titled: “Between Boroujerdi and Khomeini: Institutional Developments and Revolutionary Formation in the Qom Seminary, 1961 – 1979”, focuses on the development of the Qom seminary in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, and its role in organising, structuring, and supporting transnational revolutionary activities amongst the clergy in the lead up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79. He is supervised by Dr Maryam Alemzadeh (OSGA) and is the recipient of a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, funded by the Wolfson Foundation. Abid received a Distinction in his MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College), and a First Class (with Honours) in his BSc in Political Science and Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Alongside this, Abid is interested in researching: the general political, social, and economic history of Pahlavi Iran and the Islamic Republic; political, religious, and social histories of the Shi’a in the 20th/21st centuries, both in the Middle East and beyond; Shi’a religious practice in diasporic communities in the West.