***Update: A memorial service honoring Professor Mottahedeh will be held on Friday, October 25, 2024, at 2:00 PM at the Memorial Church, Harvard University. For further details, please see here.***
Professor Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, a longtime friend to the Program in Islamic Law and a member emeritus of our advisory and editorial boards, sadly passed away on July 30, 2024.
In remembrance and celebration of Professor Mottahedeh’s legacy and scholarship, the Islamic Law Blog will be publishing a series throughout this month. Last week, we published our Editor-in-Chief Professor Intisar Rabb’s condolence message to our readers and followers. This week, in the second part of our series, we remember Professor Mottahedeh’s legacy through Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, edited by Intisar Rabb & Abigail Balbale (Cambridge: Harvard Series in Islamic Law, Harvard University Press 2017), a festschrift published in his honor.
As described in the online companion to the festschrift, “[i]nspired by the scholarship of Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and composed in his honor, this volume brings together ten leading scholars of Islamic law to examine the history of early Islamic courts.”
Below is an excerpt from the introduction to the festschrift. Co-authored by Abigail Krasner Balbale, Hossein Modarressi, and Intisar A. Rabb, it provides a rich and touching summary of Professor Mottahedeh’s biography and scholarly legacy.
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INTRODUCTION
New York and Kashan meet elegantly in the person of Roy Mottahedeh, who in turn meets scores of students, colleagues, and casual readers from everywhere with insights that are clear and eloquent, critical and colorful. He has always approached the study of Islamic social and administrative- legal history with a method that vividly brings the sources, and those who produced them, to life.[1] In honor of the man and his method, this volume brings together a few of the many who have learned from him, as well as his admirers and colleagues, to add texture to the early social and legal history of courts and judicial procedure in Islamic law.
ON ROY
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh was born in 1940 in New York City to a Kashani father and New Jersey-born mother, who built a family business by importing Iranian arts and crafts and later by reproducing Chinese export porcelain. Despite his many accomplishments, ever the modest scholar, he insists that his friends and intellectual interlocutors call him Roy.
Roy entered Harvard College at sixteen and graduated with a degree in history, magna cum laude, in 1960. He spent the next several years traveling in the Middle East and Europe, earning a second bachelor’s degree in Persian and Arabic at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, where he won the E.G. Browne Prize. Returning to Cambridge, Massachusetts, he began his doctoral studies in History under the tutelage of H.A.R. Gibb, Robert Lee Wolff, and Richard Frye, with a dissertation on Buyid administration. After a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he received his PhD in 1970. He was immediately appointed as Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, where he would remain for the next sixteen years.
Fred Donner arrived at Princeton soon after as Roy’s first doctoral student. Roy’s unique approach inspired his students to apply the new approaches of social history to Islamic history. As Donner put it:
Early in my time at Princeton, he decided to offer a class on medieval Islamic social history, which had never been offered before. Social history was still new in the United States. He had us read a book by [George] Rudé called The Crowd in History [1964], which was about the French Revolution. The point was to think about how this person was doing history and to inquire whether we could ask the same kinds of questions of Islamic history. It was really very stimulating in encouraging us to think more broadly than the scholarly world in Islamic history was doing. He was blowing the walls off and forcing us to look far beyond Islamic history to think about how to do history.
Years later, in 1977, Roy attended a historical meeting in Hamadan, where some of the most prominent scholars of Islamic and Iranian studies from his generation and the preceding one would gather in a single conference—many of whom would become fast friends: Richard Bulliet, Anne Lambton, Wilferd Madelung, and Hossein Modarressi, to name a few. Roy’s presence and the enduring friendships that emerged were not accidental. He had already distinguished himself as a thoughtful historian of the Islamic world, having written an erudite dissertation on the local histories of Qum, Qazwin, and Rayy, and having distinguished himself as teacher and scholar at Princeton. True to form, he immediately impressed the scholars there. As Hossein Modarressi put it:
As soon as we started to speak to each other it was apparent that he was a very learned person, that he carried deep knowledge of global history and other subjects, such as Greek philosophy. He had clearly read a lot, he followed the discussions, and he contributed to each.
After the Hamadan conference, an intrepid group ventured together on visits to the grave of Avicenna and to a system of water caves, which— though they appeared unassuming—were in fact the largest network of such caves in the world. These caves had long provided a home to hidden treasures of ancient artwork, jugs, and other artifacts, some dating back twelve thousand years. Like these caves, Roy’s unassuming face belies the depth and breadth of his curiosity, interest, and eloquent expertise. Those lucky enough to enter his space and call themselves colleagues or friends— who are many—encounter the treasures of his cavernous mind and stores of generosity, thought, and exchange.
One notable example is the generous friendship and intellectual exchanges that developed between Roy Mottahedeh and Hossein Modarressi over the years. After Modarressi moved to Oxford in 1979, the two visited each other—Roy visited his friend at Oxford, and his friend visited him at Princeton. Roy would play a role in inviting Modarressi to Princeton as a visiting professor for the 1982-1983 academic year—which he accepted in Spring 1983 and which would turn permanent three years later. Roy wrote The Mantle of the Prophet during these years, returning regularly to Oxford to visit various friends there and think through the book. On one impromptu visit, he walked and talked with friends for some three hours. It seems that the basic planning of the work was done—the skeletal text sketched—that day through that conversation. Roy would often stop as he toured Oxford’s grounds, take out his pencil, and jot down notes. His initial idea, to write a book about the making of an ayatollah, would become a book that examined the far-ranging history of not only the institutions and social history that shaped the clerics and society of modern Iran, but of the centuries and major events that led to its Revolution.
Since then, Roy has transformed the field through the generations of scholars he has trained, the hundreds of students he has exposed to Islamic history, and the myriad scholarly networks he has constructed. In the forty-six years that he taught at Princeton and later at Harvard before retiring in 2016, he mentored dozens of doctoral students who would go on to establish Islamic social, cultural, and intellectual history at universities around the country and the world. In the History Department at Harvard, his teaching helped cement the pre-modern Islamic world as a field that could be examined within the confines of history rather than the more philological discipline of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, though he always maintained strong connections with his philologist colleagues. And as the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and later as the founding director of the Islamic Studies Program at Harvard, he developed academic centers that welcomed colleagues from disparate geographic and political backgrounds. CMES, for example, provided a haven from the political maelstroms that wracked Islamic studies more generally in the 1980s and 1990s, offered a home to displaced scholars from the Middle East, and fostered international cooperation. To all, he brought and cultivated the same infectious curiosity and critical insight that permeates his own work.
Roy’s books, especially Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (1980) and The Mantle of the Prophet (1985), brought the new questions that emerged with social history to bear on Islamic historical sources ranging from chronicles and administrative records to literary and scriptural texts. His approach married a philologist’s ability to read closely with a social historian’s desire to illuminate the lives of people and institutions from a long-ago past. His books changed the way scholars understood Islamic history and approached the sources. His works also won accolades in both scholarly journals and newspapers, and were translated into multiple languages. His lucid writing, grasp of a wide range of sources, and imaginative approach won him support from public service-oriented foundations such as Guggenheim and MacArthur, and from the scholarly community writ large.
Loyalty and Leadership was the first of many projects that built upon and developed the work that Roy began as an undergraduate and graduate student in new directions. He had initially become interested in questions of social history from reading the letters of al-Zākib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995)—the celebrated vizier of the Buyids of Rayy—while writing his undergraduate thesis. In those documents, he noticed letters addressed to the governors of Qum and Rayy. One of those letters was a letter appointing the prominent Muʿtazilī theologian, ʿAbd al-Jabbār, as chief judge of the Buyid kingdom of Rayy. This letter in particular became something of a curiosity and obsession for Roy. In his initial reading of it, Roy found it surprising that the document instructed the judge to consider sources of law that include the opinions of the best scholars as well as ijtihād, or legal interpretation through analogical reasoning. He also found it fascinating that the letter also mentions the judge’s duties with respect to several other court officials and roles that one might not ordinarily associate with regular judicial practice. While reading the sources early on, Roy also noticed that Ta´rīkh Bayhaqī provides descriptions of just how things were done back then: descriptions of the court(s), how the king sits, what people surround him.
Roy knew the value of the sources. The sources gave fodder for the idea behind Loyalty and Leadership—guiding his reading of documents, histories, and even Qur’ānic quotes about how key matters were conceptualized early on, how dynasties were formed, and how they managed to work through social realities. This same method underlay his other projects: the article on shu‘ūbiyya, on how the kharāj tax was administered, and many more. His works all point to the same thing: documents and local histories provide the raw material around which he is able to illuminate social, legal, and administrative histories of the Islamic world.[2] In the spirit of this method and of al-Zāhib’s letter, and Roy’s now lifelong interest in it, we convened a conference on the theme of courts and judicial procedure in early Islamic law in May 2016.
The conference brought together several of Roy’s students and colleagues who work on questions related to judicial procedure, as well as some scholars who had not worked with him but were inspired by his approach. Roy’s famous modesty had made him resistant to a traditional Festschrift, but the idea of a substantive conference and volume on a subject of close interest that would aim to make a scholarly contribution was acceptable. This volume is thus an untraditional tribute to Roy, designed to cohere around a single theme that animated his initial forays into the field and that honor his continued attention to and interests in this line of scholarship. In focusing on courts and judicial procedure in early Islamic law and society, this book places theory alongside practice in ways that concern events of legal history-as-social history to reflect the mark that Roy left on the field. We offer the following essays in appreciation for Roy’s generosity, kindness, and brilliance, with the hope that they may offer food for thought, which he has so often offered to all of us.
Notes:
[1] Cemal Kafadar’s introduction to the list of publications is so on-point that it bears telegraphing up front: Roy Mottahedeh “has made the best of his background in being a New Yorker and a son of a Kashani mercantile family from two places known for their intellectual sophistication and down-to-earth worldliness at the same time. It may be that mercantile background of his family that gives him a particular perspective on the world of scholars, poets, and scribes, all of whom he knows how to appreciate but also to observe with an ethnographer’s eye to see into all their bizarre ways and follies, their accomplishments and pretensions.…” (Cemal Kafadar, “Reading with Roy” 173–74, this volume).
[2] For a full list of his publications, see Roy Mottahedeh’s List of Publications (this volume).