York: Free Press, 2006); Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens:
An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York:
Penguin Press, 2008); Raymond Ibrahim, ed., The Al
Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007); Osama
bin Laden, Messages to the World: The Statements of
Osama bin Laden. Edited by Bruce Lawrence, translated
by James Howarth (New York: Verso, 2005); Lawrence
Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to
9/11 (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
Usuli School
The Usuli School is a tradition of jurisprudence
(fiqh) in tWelve-imam shiism that has its roots in
the 10th century, when different Sunni and Shii
legal theories were being formally constituted.
Its name comes from the Arabic word usul, which
means “roots” or “foundations,” of law, but in
the case of the Shia, it was used with special ref-
erence to a type of legal theory that recognized
the use of human reason (aql) and unrestricted
legal reasoning (ijtihad) by qualified Ulama. The
forerunner for the rationalist approach to fiqh
within Shii circles was the scholar Muhammad
ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi (905–1066/67) of Khurasan
and Baghdad, but the tradition was first fully
elaborated in the teachings of al-Muhaqqiq al-
Hilli (d. 1277), who lived most of his life in the
town of Hilla in southern iraq, and his student
Allama al-Hilli (d. 1325).
When the saFavid dynasty (1501–1722)
established Shiism as the state religion in iran,
usuli jurists, who came to be known as mujtahids
because of their preference for ijtihad, promoted
the view that ordinary Shiis should without ques-
tion follow the authority of a living jurist before
that of a dead one. Additionally, the mujtahids
claimed that they were deputies of the messianic
12th imam, the mahdi. These doctrines gave
qualified jurists far-reaching authority among the
Shia, especially in Iran and Iraq. They also set
them apart from the Sunni ulama, who admitted
only limited use of ijtihad and could not claim
to be agents of a hidden messiah. However, the
Usulis also provoked a reaction among tradi-
tionist ulama among the Shia, who feared that
the fundamental principles of Shiism, based on
the qUran and the teachings (akhbar) of the
Imams, would be undermined by unrestricted
Usuli rationalism. These traditionally minded
ulama formed what is called the akhbari school
of Shii jurisprudence. The Usulis and Akhbaris
engaged in factional disputes with each other at
the madrasas of Iran and Iraq, even in distant
Mecca, in the early 19th century. The Usulis
emerged triumphant by the middle of the cen-
tury, and soon organized themselves into a hier-
archy of religious experts, from ordinary mullahs
and akhunds at the bottom to grand ayatollahs
at the top. The supreme ayatollah, determined
by reputation and networks of relations with
bazaar merchants, was known as the marjaa al-
taqlid (source of imitation), whose legal rulings
were considered to be the most binding by other
Shiis. The political mobilization of Usuli ulama
became apparent in the late 19th century, when
Mirza Hasan al-Shirazi called for a boycott of the
British tobacco monopoly in 1891–92. Ayatollah
rUhollah khomeini (d. 1989) and the ulama
who founded the revolutionary Islamic Republic
of Iran in 1979 were all Usulis. Indeed, Khomei-
ni’s ideology of government by the jurist (wilayat
al-faqih), encompassing the political as well as
the religious spheres, marked the logical culmi-
nation of the Usuli idea that supreme authority
was vested in the person of the leading mujtahid.
Outside of Iran, Usulis today have large follow-
ings among the Shia of Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain,
Pakistan, and India.
See also FatWa; madrasa; mUllah.Further reading: Robert Gleave, Inevitable Doubt: Two
Theories of Shi’i Jurisprudence (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000);
Mier Litvak, Shii Scholars of 19th-Century Iraq: The
Ulama of Najaf and Karbala (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998); Mojan Momen, An Introduc-
tion to Shi’i Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1985).Usuli School 699 J