Kashf al-Asrar

Kashf al-Asrar ( Kashf al-Āsrār "Unveiling of Secrets") is a book written in 1943 by Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to respond to the questions and criticisms raised in a 1943 pamphlet titled The Thousand-Year Secrets (Persian: Asrar-i Hazarsala) by Ali Akbar Hakimzadeh, who had abandoned clerical studies at Qom seminary and in the mid-1930s published a modernist journal titled Humayun that advocated reformation in Islam. Kashf al-Asrar is the first book that expresses Khomeini's political views. Background Ruhollah Khomeini wrote Kashf al-Asrar to answer questions about the credibility of Islamic and Shia beliefs that originated in a pamphlet called The Thousand-Year Secrets, which was written by Ali Akbar Hakamizada. In 1934, Hakamizada began publishing a modernist journal titled Humayun that advocated reformation in Islam and criticized Islamic superstition and traditionalism. In 1943, Hakimzada wrote The Thousand-Year Secrets which was published in Parcham, a periodical of Ahmad Kasravi. He invited Shia scholars to explain what he called the sect's superstitious beliefs. According to Khomeini's son Ahmad, one day when his father was going to Feyziyeh School, he encountered a group of seminary students discussing this pamphlet. Khomeini was worried the views of this pamphlet had infiltrated into the seminaries, and wrote Kashf al-Asrar to answer the pamphlet's questions. Kashf al-Asrar is the first book that expresses Khomeini's political views. Content The book defends against Hakamizada's attacks against such Shia practices as the mourning of Muharram, ziyara, the recitation of prayers composed by the Imams, clerical fostering of superstitious beliefs to perpetuate their own power, belief in the intercession of Muhammad and his descendants and the lack of any explicit mention of Imamate in the Quran. Khomeini also attacks Wahhabism and its "idolatrous" devotions, Baháʼí scholar Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl and Shia scholar Shariat Sanglaji.