He [Shaykh Ahmad] innovated within, quarrelled with, and pushed to its
limits the highly sophisticated heritage of Sufi mysticism and Shi'ite gnosis
('irfan) that had crystallized in the seventeenth-century School of Isfahan. In
addition, Shaykh Ahmad tapped into a little-known stream of indigenous Eastern
Arabian thought.* His use of symbolic language captured the imagination of tens
of thousands in the Arab East, Iran, and India, and the controversial, mystical
Shaykhi order came to be established in his name, largely after his death. Out
of this matrix later developed the messianic Babi movement and the Baha'i
faith, a new world religion, suggesting that al-Ahsa'i's ideas, while they could
be taken in a conservative direction as occurred among Kerman Shaykhis, also contained
radical potentialities.
*I now have ample textual proof that Shaykh Ahmad is much influenced by theosopher Ibn Abi Jumhur al-Ahsa'i (b. 1434) and the great Bahraini thinkers of the Safarid period (1501-1722); see : Juan R.I. Cole, "Rival Empires of Trade and Imami Shi'ism in Eastern Arabia, 1300-1800", International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987): 177-204.
(Juan R. I. Cole, The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i, Studia Islamica No. 80 (1994), pp. 145-163 Published By Brill)
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