al-Khui and the Twelver Shi’ites

AI-Khu’i’s Early Life and Education
Ayatollah al-Sayyid AbU al-Qasim al-Khui (b. November 1899), the author of this work, The Prolegomena to the Quran, was the highest religious authority for the second largest community of Muslims, the Twelver Shiites. Twelver Shiites follow the line of twelve Imams after the Prophet Muammad (d. 632). The last of these Imams disappeared in the tenth century c.E., only to return at some future date as the Mahdi, the messianic deliverer. To his Shiite followers, al-Khui, like other learned, pious scholars of the Shi’a, was a general deputy of the last hidden Imam, invested with the juridical-religious authority to guide the community, pending his return as the messianic leader. As such, he was one of the most widely acknowledged Shi’ite scholars in this century.
Following his early education in his birthplace, Khoi, in Azerbaijan, Iran, in 1911 he joined his father, al-Sayyid Ali Akbar al-Musawi, who had migrated to Najaf the previous year, after the violent conflict over the goals of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution in Iran.1 Here, at the age of thirteen, he started his formal religious edu‌ cation in Arabic studies (grammar, syntax, and rhetoric), logic, theology (kalam), Quranic exegesis (tafsir), traditions (Hadith), legal theory (usul),and applied law (fiqh). In the traditional centers of Shiite learning, both in Iraq and Iran, the curricu‌lum for attaining the status of mujtahid (juristconsult) comprised three levels: the preliminaries(muqaddamat), the technicalities (sutuh), 2 and the advanced studies (bahth al-kharij). Depending on the students talents and intellectual preparation, the final stage-namely, bahth al-kharij (comparable to advanced graduate studies)‌ can be reached within a span ofnine to ten years.
Al-Khui followed the academic course of highly talented Shiite youths and achieved advanced standing within a short time. By 1918 he was engaged in gradu‌ate studies to enable him to teach Islamic sciences in the colleges of the city of Najaf. Najaf, the site of the mausoleum of the Shiite Imam Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 660) in southern Iraq, has been the center of traditional Shiite scholarship in theology, phi‌losophy, and jurisprudence for over a thousand years. Moreover, it is famous for its