In Memoriam: Roy Mottahedeh [ Contributions by Arafat Razzaque, Han Hsien Liew, Sumaiya Hamdani]

As perhaps also the case for other former students of his at Harvard, when I remember Professor Roy Mottahedeh, the distinct image that recurs in my mind is of him presiding at the seminar table in the Gibb Room upstairs in the deeper recesses of Widener library. This was the preferred venue for his graduate classes, a small reading room named after the book collection bequeathed by his own “revered” teacher H.A.R. Gibb, a pivotal figure in the shaping of postwar Middle East Studies. Mottahedeh would sit at the head of the table, somewhat in the demeanor of a loving family patriarch holding court as we went around taking turns working through a classical Arabic text. Sitting in that room surrounded by shelves brimming with Gibb’s books, I couldn’t help but occasionally ponder on this connection, especially if my gaze fell upon the wall on which hung a yellowed certificate with an Arabic encomium to Gibb from Egypt in 1944. Academic lineage may be a fitting note therefore on which to reflect on Professor Mottahedeh’s legacy in his own right, as arguably one of the most influential American historians of medieval Islam in the past 50 years.

That legacy is reflected foremost in Mottahedeh’s prodigious teaching career, first at Princeton for sixteen years and then at Harvard for three decades. Indeed, to recount a list of the multiple generations of his students would be to effectively map the field of medieval Islamic history as we know it today. For a novice graduate student, that could feel like a daunting pedigree to live up to, but in his unparalleled grace and generosity, Professor Mottahedeh never once made anyone feel unworthy in his presence. On the contrary, he held his students in rather high regard, as conveyed by his tendency to defer to us on our own research, even when we sought his authoritative guidance. His relative reticence as an advisor (he was “a master of the unsaid,” as Chase Robinson once wrote aptly), not to mention his frequent expression of uncertainty about questions posed to him, was a mark of his tremendous humility, despite the fact that he almost always knew much more than he was willing to admit. His classes had the feel of a running commentary, often encyclopedic in detail as he invoked or lightheartedly critiqued sundry academic references. If I had to choose a single word that best captures what Professor Mottahedeh embodied so thoroughly, I would settle on erudition. Yet I have never met anyone so humble as he was formidable, or, for that matter, so prone to a hearty chuckle. His fondness for wit and his warmth as a person characterized his interactions with students and colleagues alike.

A similar sensibility imbued Mottahedeh’s scholarship, which stands out for his profound humanism and empathy, even for those distant lives glimpsed faintly through the arduous toil of reading medieval Arabic or Persian chronicles. But he was as rigorous a philologist as he was insistent that he remained above all a historian. Few others have so masterfully resolved this proverbial tension in our field, and it behooves us to appreciate the intellectual formation that enabled and produced someone like Mottahedeh. His individual brilliance, of course, would have been evident already when he arrived at Harvard as a precocious undergraduate at the age of sixteen. During graduate school in the 1960s, Mottahedeh was an avid reader of early modern English history, and also held a fellowship that immersed him in sociology and anthropology, so he “read a lot of Max Weber, Clifford Geertz, and other worthies.” Methodologically, such experiences clearly distinguished Mottahedeh’s academic development from the conventional “Orientalist” training of Gibb as a Semitist, though in some ways Mottahedeh would carry on changes in the field initiated by Gibb himself. Both of them served, two decades apart, as influential directors of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard.

Like any serious historian, Mottahedeh’s scholarly intuitions remained steeped in the sources, but the attentive ears with which he heard their voices were attuned to eclectic influences. Thus, his early article on “The Shu‘ubiyah Controversy” (1976) opens with the 18th century Whig philosopher Edmund Burke on “the idea of a people” as a metric of analysis, while creatively using 11th and 12th century commentaries on a Qur’anic verse as the basis for a study of social thought in medieval Iran. When innovating a course on medieval Islamic social history at Princeton, Mottahedeh assigned such readings as a book on the role of crowds in the French Revolution, to illustrate “how to do history,” as his first PhD student Fred Donner has recounted. Mottahedeh’s expertise as a historian transcended the material he taught routinely. From urban history to Islamic jurisprudence, from Ghaznavid court poetry to Shi‘i theology in modern Iran, his writings display an astonishing range and depth of scholarly inquiry.

It is the manner of his writing that I would lastly highlight as a source of great inspiration for me. Most readers of his two highly acclaimed books, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (1980) and The Mantle of the Prophet (1985), will recognize his delicate style. Both have become timeless classics, but unusually for Islamic Studies, they remain as insightful to specialists as they are engaging to general readers of any background. The key, I think, was equally his imaginative vision and his lucid turns of phrase. Thus, for instance, his 1997 article on the madrasa describes how medieval Islamic texts were “in some sense a distillation of the author’s thought which must be rehydrated,” referring to a well-known tenet in the tradition that a book could not be merely read on its own but needed an authorized teacher. But it is a testament to the spirit he breathed into his own writing that the gifts of his inquisitive mind have reached far beyond his disciples in the ivory tower, as I was pleasantly reminded one evening on a trip to Istanbul: passing by a bookstall on a side alley off Istiklal, my eyes were caught for a moment by the title Peygamberin Hırkası, before I realized it was the Turkish translation of Mottahedeh’s The Mantle.
Mottahedeh’s own favorite book of history was Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), as mentioned in the autobiographical reflections in his magnificent collection of essays, In the Shadow of the Prophet, published the year before his passing. Just as he himself looked back to a work written over a century before, I now find it hard to evade the wistful sense that a scholarly giant like Roy Parviz Mottahedeh appears only once in a few generations. I will remain in awe of this great man I had the fortune to know and learn from.

Arafat A. Razzaque is an Assistant Professor in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He works on religion and culture in the early Abbasid period, with an interest in ideas about morality and social etiquettes in the pietist literature of Islamic traditions. He received his PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2020.

Naturally, I approached this tribute for my doctoral advisor Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, who passed away in the summer of 2024, with a heavy heart. But writing it has given me the chance to relive some of my favorite and most vibrant memories of Roy and to share them with others. I am therefore deeply grateful to Maydan’s editors for inviting me to write this reflection.

I first learned about Roy through his book Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society. I read it as an undergraduate mainly with an eye toward understanding the late Abbasid period and Buyid history, but I lacked at the time the academic sensitivity to grasp Roy’s unique approach to studying the social history of medieval Muslim societies. Revisiting the book multiple times as a graduate student at Harvard, however, I picked up on Roy’s subtle emphasis on the importance of stories and anecdotes in historical research. For Roy, the anecdotal reports found in medieval Muslim chronicles and biographical dictionaries revealed as much if not more about societies and cultures than formal treatises did. As I had the privilege of studying under Roy and taking his classes, his teaching drew my attention to an additional and no less important significance in these anecdotes, that is, the joy involved in simply pausing to read them and appreciating the color they added to Islamic history.

Among my fondest memories of Roy were his graduate seminars in Widener Library’s Gibb Reading Room. I remember taking one called Arabic Historians, Geographers, and Biographers during my first semester, in which we read authors like al-Muqaddasī, Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī, and Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ. It was also in this seminar that I discovered Ibn al-Jawzī, who eventually became the focus of my doctoral dissertation. Roy stuck to a traditional teaching framework in which students would take turns translating Arabic passages and he would chime in every now and then to contextualize a particular story or anecdote he found interesting. These moments were Roy at his best. I relished listening to him wax lyrical about etymologies, regional stereotypes in the medieval Middle East, secretarial culture, and even the granular details of clothing––Reinhart Dozy’s Dictionnaire détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes was one of his favorite references. It was also a delight to hear him talk about his own advisor and the namesake of our classroom, Hamilton Gibb, along with other past doyens of Islamic history.

Another fixture of Roy’s graduate seminars was his infectious chuckle (those who have conversed with him for any length of time will know what I mean). I believe this contributed to a relaxed and light-hearted atmosphere of learning, especially when it accompanied his occasional wisecracks. A favorite of mine occurred during a seminar on Shi’ism when my classmate cheekily asked him, “Professor Mottahedeh, do you believe in Velāyet-e Faqīh [Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Guardianship of the Jurist” doctrine]?” Roy looked down for a moment and said, with his head still lowered, “I believe in … Thomas Jefferson! Separation of church and state!”, his words rolling into a chuckle we all could not help but join.

Roy’s teaching style was marked by an air of fellowship. I often felt that he read his students’ work not only as an advisor but also as a colleague. Based on the interest he took in my footnotes and bibliography, I surmised that he was a very curious reader who, in addition to imparting wisdom to his students, was keen to learn from them what was new in the field. When it came to feedback and critiques, Roy was never longwinded––usually a word or two but never more than a sentence––and often subtle. But one exception, which I remember gleefully, stands out. In my dissertation chapter on Ibn al-Jawzī’s mirror for princes titled al-Miṣbāḥ al-muḍīʾ fī khilāfat al-Mustaḍīʾ (The Radiant Lamp: The Caliphate of al-Mustaḍīʾ), I sought to argue that the title’s light metaphor was the Sunni author’s response to Twelver and Ismaili Shi’i ideas about divine emanations being manifested in the figure of the imam. Admittedly, this was a stretch that did not pass muster, but I wanted to give it a “test run” and get Roy’s impression. When I got the draft back, there was a giant “X” in red over the section and a stern “NO” written in the margin. How could I not laugh when I saw it? To this day, I still keep that marked-up draft in my office.

During Roy’s memorial service at Harvard in October 2024, I heard many people describe him as “self-effacing.” This brought back memories of a surprise celebration a few of us doctoral students organized for him at the end of the 2016 spring semester, his final semester of teaching, after the last session of his graduate seminar on cities in the medieval Middle East. I remember Roy having his head bowed for most of the celebration, even and perhaps especially while everyone presented him with a toast. My PhD friend and colleague Ali Asgar Alibhai later sent me a photo he took close to the end of the seminar session––Roy seated with his head bowed amidst a standing ovation from his students. The following day, at a lunch with students from another seminar, Roy told us that he had been “struck by a bout of shyness” during the celebration, something that anyone who knew this bashful giant of Islamic history would recognize.

Those who know Roy only through his scholarship will no doubt remember him––and justly so––as a towering figure who wrote masterpieces like Loyalty and Leadership and The Mantle of the Prophet. I am grateful to be among those who knew him personally and remember him also as a humble ʿālim, as an advisor who cared for his students, and as a kind and generous teacher who always welcomed students to his office with a gigantic “Hi!” and sent them off with “Courage! Flourish!”

Thank you, Roy, for the color you brought to the study of Islamic history, and which you will continue to bring as you live on in our memories and anecdotes.

Han Hsien Liew is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He obtained his A.M. in History and Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. His research focuses on premodern Islamic intellectual history and political thought, especially in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. His first monograph, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, examines the relationship between political thought, homiletic preaching, and emotions in Islam through the writings of the twelfth-century preacher Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201).

When I arrived to begin graduate studies at Princeton’s Near East Studies Department, I learned that a Prof. Mottahedeh had just departed from there to Harvard. I was given the impression that this was to be lamented. But I didn’t know why.

I arrived hugely unprepared to embark on graduate work in Islamic history, given my undergraduate studies in a different field altogether. And so I was desperate to catch up. Someone, somewhere, advised that I read Prof. Mottahedeh’s Mantle of the Prophet by way of catching up. It was newly published, and promised to educate me about the world I was now entering. It also promised to shed light on his replacement at NES, a former Iranian ayatollah who was rumored the inspiration for the main character of the book, Ali Hashemi, now one of my professors.

I hastened to read Mantle for both those reasons of course, and was riveted. I remain so, having read and re-read the book during and after graduate school, assigned it to my upper-level classes and recommended it shamelessly to any and all.

Those familiar with the book will hopefully agree and understand why. What Prof. Mottahedeh did in Mantle, was a revelation. In seamlessly weaving the narrative of an ayatollah’s life at the time of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, with a sweeping and masterful review of Iran’s history, culture and society, Mottahedeh achieved at one and same time the demystification and the appreciation of that country, its rich Persian heritage, and even those who came to sit astride the new Islamic Republic. He gave us the gift of insight into the closed world of the seminaries of Qum, an introduction to the ancient mythologies that animated Persian literature over the centuries, important spiritual and intellectual developments in the Islamic era, the culture of debate and disputation in the era of modernization, the politics that led to the Islamic Revolution, and so on. The erudition reflected in such an endeavor was stunning, the use of a split narrative ingenious, the presentation of it all engrossing.

Of course, the late Prof. Mottahedeh was renowned for other important contributions to the study of Islamic history, and for his generous mentoring of many students. Although I was sadly not among them, I was lucky enough to have experienced some of that generosity when as a young scholar, I introduced myself to him at a conference long ago, and was rewarded with his gracious attention to my questions. And although there were other authors and other works that blew my mind as it were, his Mantle is for me a standard, marja` that is worthy of taqlid, which I hopelessly struggle to emulate, never quite succeeding, in my own work. And so again, I join others in lamenting, this time his final departure.

Sumaiya Hamdani is Associate Professor in the History and Art History Department at George Mason University.  She completed her graduate work at Princeton University in Islamic history.  Her book Between Revolution and State: the Path to Fatimid Statehood was published by IB Tauris in 2006 and her current research is on an Ismaili community in Yemen and India.  She is serving as Research Director for the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies and on the steering committee for the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at GMU.