Prophethood

Prophethood is a religious, philosophical, and civilisational concept referring to the office, function, or phenomenon by which a person is understood to disclose, proclaim, interpret, or embody a truth not yet adequately available to ordinary public consciousness. In Abrahamic religions, a prophet is usually understood as a divinely commissioned figure who speaks on behalf of God. In broader philosophical usage, and especially in Hikmah Islam, prophethood may also refer to exceptional figures whose insight, proclamation, and practical agency disclose a hidden order of reality and reorganise human life around it.

In classical religious usage, prophethood is associated with divine communication, warning, moral judgment, revelation, scripture, law, and communal guidance. In Hikmati usage, the category is treated as graded rather than binary. Figures such as Moses, Jesus, and Muḥammad are regarded as prophets in the classical Abrahamic sense. Figures such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein may be described as prophets in a limited or domain-specific sense, because each disclosed a previously hidden structure of natural reality. Ruhollah Khomeini is interpreted in Hikmati thought in a stronger sense: not merely as a jurist, gnostic, revolutionary, or political leader, but as a prophet-like and, in Hikmati terminology, genuinely prophetic figure in a functional sense closely analogous to Muḥammad.

This Hikmati usage is not accepted by mainstream Sunni or Twelver Shīʿī orthodoxy, both of which generally affirm Muḥammad as the final prophet in the conventional doctrinal sense. Hikmati authors therefore distinguish between canonical-scriptural prophethood, associated with the formation of a new revelatory dispensation, and functional-civilisational prophethood, associated with the disclosure, proclamation, and ordering of reality in history. In this distinction, Muḥammad is treated as the originary Islamic prophet, while Khomeini is treated as a post-scriptural or restorative prophet of Islamic sovereignty.

Definition

In Hikmati usage, prophethood may be defined as the graded function by which an exceptional person discloses a hidden order of reality, proclaims that order with public force, and reorganises individual or collective life around it.

This definition contains three principal elements:

• Disclosure — the prophet perceives, receives, discovers, reconstructs, or reveals an order hidden from ordinary public consciousness.
• Proclamation — the prophet announces that order through speech, scripture, symbol, ritual, law, narrative, doctrine, scientific theory, or revolutionary language.
• Ordering — the prophet reorganises individual, communal, intellectual, legal, moral, political, or civilisational life around the disclosed order.

A person may possess one of these elements without being a full prophet. A scientist may disclose reality without founding a moral community. A preacher may proclaim without discovering anything new. A ruler may order society without disclosing truth. A complete prophet, in the Hikmati account, unites disclosure, proclamation, and ordering.

This produces a graded account of prophethood. Prophethood may be minimal, symbolic, scientific, moral, juridical, political, civilisational, restorative, or complete.

Etymology and terminology

The Hebrew term nāvīʾ and the Arabic nabī belong to a Semitic field associated with calling, proclaiming, announcing, or being summoned. Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that the Hebrew naviʾ is usually considered a loanword from Akkadian nabū or nabāʾum, meaning “to proclaim,” “mention,” “call,” or “summon.” The Jewish Encyclopedia similarly treats the prophet as a delegate, mouthpiece, declarer, or announcer.

The older semantic field is therefore not primarily “one who predicts the future,” and still less “one who brings good news.” It is closer to “one who is called,” “one who calls out,” “proclaimer,” “announcer,” “delegate,” “spokesperson,” or “mouthpiece.” This distinction is important because prophecy is often popularly reduced to future-prediction. In ancient religious settings, however, the prophet was not merely a fortune-teller. He was a public figure who spoke from, or on behalf of, a perceived invisible order.

The Hebrew Bible also uses terms such as roʾeh and ḥozeh, both meaning “seer.” These terms preserve an older connection between prophecy and vision. The prophet “sees” what others do not see, but seeing alone is not sufficient. Prophecy becomes public when perception is translated into announcement, warning, judgment, or communal direction.

The “good news” word-family is more properly associated with Greek euangelion, later “gospel,” meaning good tidings. In Christian usage, this becomes associated with the proclamation of salvation, the kingdom of God, Jesus as Messiah, resurrection, forgiveness, and victory over death. In Islamic vocabulary, the bearer of good news is not simply the nabī, but the bashīr or mubashshir.

The Qurʾānic vocabulary includes several related terms:

• Nabī — prophet; one who receives, bears, or proclaims divine disclosure.
• Rasūl — messenger or envoy, especially one sent with a mission.
• Bashīr or mubashshir — bearer of good news.
• Nadhīr — warner.
• Dāʿī — caller or summoner.
• Shāhid — witness.
• Sirāj munīr — illuminating lamp.
• Khātam al-nabiyyīn — seal of the prophets.

The Qurʾān describes Muḥammad as a witness, a bearer of good news, a warner, a caller to God, and an illuminating lamp. It also describes him as the Messenger of God and the “seal of the prophets.” The cluster of terms is significant because it shows that prophethood is not a single act. It includes testimony, announcement, warning, summons, illumination, mission, and world-guidance.

Historical emergence of prophecy

Prophecy emerged in the ancient Near East, Israelite religion, and the wider eastern Mediterranean as one form of divine-human communication. Ancient societies did not sharply separate religion, politics, law, cosmology, psychology, public morality, and social crisis. As a result, the prophet occupied a social role that crossed several domains later treated as distinct.

Communities facing famine, plague, war, imperial domination, dynastic conflict, drought, moral decay, defeat, or exile needed authoritative interpretation. The prophet answered the question: what is reality demanding of us now?

Modern scholarship on ancient prophecy treats prophecy as a form of social and religious agency. Martti Nissinen defines prophecy as a form of non-inductive divination based on divine-human communication and emphasises its social, religious, political, and institutional functions in ancient societies. Prophecy was therefore not merely private religious speech. It operated before an audience, in relation to a community, and often in tension with political or priestly authority.

In this sense, prophecy became historically significant because it translated invisible order into public obligation. A prophet could declare that a king had lost legitimacy, that a city was under judgment, that a people had been chosen, that an enemy would fall, that a covenant had been broken, or that a future restoration was possible. Prophecy gave public meaning to events that otherwise appeared chaotic, accidental, or unbearable.

Categories of prophetic announcement

The “news” announced by prophets is not always good news. Prophetic announcement may be comforting, accusatory, conditional, destructive, royal, legal, cosmic, local, or salvific. Several recurring categories may be distinguished.

Divine selection

A prophet may announce that a person, people, dynasty, city, lineage, or community has been chosen for a task. Such announcement creates identity and mission. It may legitimate a king, a people, a child, a servant, a dynasty, or a movement.

Divine rejection

A prophet may declare that an existing king, priesthood, elite, empire, city, cult, or religious system has lost legitimacy. This is one reason prophets are politically dangerous. They do not merely interpret power; they may judge and delegitimate it.

Judgment

A prophet may announce punishment, collapse, exile, invasion, famine, defeat, humiliation, or social breakdown because of injustice, idolatry, arrogance, oppression, corruption, luxury, betrayal, or moral decay. Judgment is not merely threat. It is the claim that reality is morally structured.

Deliverance

A prophet may announce rescue, victory, forgiveness, return from exile, liberation from enemies, restoration of the oppressed, or divine nearness. This form of prophecy is closest to “good news.” It may announce that the enemy will fall, the city will survive, exile will end, justice will prevail, or the oppressed will be vindicated.

Moral order

A prophet may disclose that reality itself is not morally neutral. In this mode, prophecy announces that exploitation, cruelty, false worship, cowardice, corruption, or injustice are not merely private failings but violations of the structure of existence.

Reform

A prophet may announce that the current religious order has become hollow, corrupt, compromised, merely ritualistic, or insufficiently aligned with reality. Prophecy may appear conservative because it calls a community back to an origin, but it is often revolutionary because it delegitimates the present order.

Future restoration

A prophet may announce a transformed future: return from exile, a new covenant, purified worship, divine kingdom, resurrection, final judgment, messianic age, just order, defeat of evil, or universal peace. This is where prophecy moves from crisis-diagnosis into world-historical hope.

Personal or local guidance

Earlier “seer” traditions could involve more ordinary matters, such as lost animals, journeys, dreams, military decisions, or local questions. Such cases show that prophecy was not always civilisational in scope, even if later prophetic traditions often became highly moral, political, and cosmic.

Intellectual disclosure

In expanded Hikmati usage, a prophet may disclose a hidden structure of reality: mathematical order, biological descent, relativity, consciousness, social law, or civilisational destiny. This is not necessarily religious prophecy in the classical sense, but it performs an analogous function: it reveals a previously unseen order and reorganises human understanding around it.

Political-civilisational ordering

The most complete form of prophethood occurs when announcement is joined to leadership. The prophet not only discloses a truth; he creates or reorganises a people around it. In this form, prophethood becomes civilisational.

Traditional Abrahamic prophethood

Judaism

In Judaism, prophecy is bound to covenant, Torah, moral warning, and the destiny of Israel. The Hebrew prophets are not merely private visionaries; they are public interpreters of divine justice. Figures such as Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel present prophecy as a moral and historical vocation: exposing corruption, warning rulers, interpreting catastrophe, and insisting that divine justice governs history.

In Israelite prophecy, the message becomes increasingly ethical. Prophets condemn oppression, dishonesty, exploitation, luxury, and religious formalism without justice. The prophet may therefore be described as a public interpreter of covenantal order rather than merely a predictor of events.

Christianity

In Christianity, Jesus is interpreted in multiple ways: prophet, rabbi, Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, Logos, and incarnate Word. Historically, Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God stands within the prophetic and apocalyptic world of Second Temple Judaism. His activity combines warning, healing, parable, symbolic action, confrontation with authority, and the formation of a community.

In Christian theology, Jesus is usually more than a prophet. In historical and comparative terms, however, he performs a recognisably prophetic function. He announces the nearness of divine rule, calls for repentance, exposes hypocrisy, centres mercy, intensifies ethical demand, and gathers a movement around a transformed expectation of God’s kingdom.

In Hikmati classification, Jesus may be described as a high prophetic figure of moral, symbolic, and spiritual disclosure. He is less complete than Muḥammad in the political-civilisational sense because he does not found a durable state, legal order, or integrated civilisation during his own lifetime. His posthumous historical effect, however, is immense: the Jesus-event becomes one of the central moral and symbolic structures of world history.

Islam

In Islam, Muḥammad is the nabī, rasūl, shāhid, mubashshir, nadhīr, and khātam al-nabiyyīn. He is the proclaimer of the Qurʾān, founder of the Muslim community, receiver and articulator of revelation, legislator of a new religious order, judge, commander, and political leader. Traditional Islam holds that Muḥammad is the final prophet, after whom no new prophet may arise.

The Hikmati critique does not deny that this is the dominant traditional reading. It argues instead that the traditional category of prophethood is often under-analysed. If prophecy is defined as divine dictation, then much of actual prophetic history becomes difficult to explain. If it is defined as moral inspiration, many non-canonical figures become prophet-like. If it is defined as lawgiving, many prophets are excluded. If it is defined as scripture-production, Jesus becomes difficult to classify. If it is defined as public transformation, some scientists and revolutionaries begin to resemble prophets in function.

Hikmah Islam therefore asks what prophets actually do: they disclose, proclaim, warn, give good news, judge power, reform religion, create moral communities, and reorder history.

Philosophical accounts of prophecy

Classical Islamic philosophy developed sophisticated accounts of prophecy. These accounts are important for Hikmati thought because they already move beyond a crude model of revelation as supernatural dictation. The prophet becomes a complete human interface between intellect, imagination, ethics, law, community, and politics.

Al-Fārābī

Al-Fārābī connected prophecy with the ideal ruler, the lawgiver, the philosopher, and the imam. In his political philosophy, the excellent ruler is not merely a manager of power but a figure able to translate higher truths into symbols, laws, images, and institutions capable of guiding a whole community. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes al-Fārābī’s excellent ruler as someone who is at once philosopher, prophet, supreme ruler, lawgiver, and imam.

This account is especially relevant to Hikmati thought because it already links prophecy, philosophy, political rule, lawgiving, and communal formation.

Avicenna

Avicenna also treated prophecy as part of a wider philosophical psychology, connecting prophetic knowledge with the perfection of intellect and imagination. In this tradition, the prophet is not merely someone who receives arbitrary information from outside. He is someone whose faculties are perfected to such an extent that universal truth can be received, imagined, symbolised, legislated, and communicated.

Avicennian accounts are significant because they interpret prophecy as a heightened intellectual-imaginative capacity rather than only a juridical status. The prophet is able to grasp truth and present it in images, narratives, laws, and symbols accessible to a community.

Mystical and Shīʿī philosophical traditions

Later Islamic thought also developed accounts of prophecy, sainthood, wilāya, and the perfect human through the vocabulary of theoretical ʿirfān, Akbarian metaphysics, and Shīʿī philosophy. In these traditions, prophecy is often discussed alongside khilāfa, wilāya, manifestation, divine names, intellect, imagination, and the hierarchy of spiritual authority.

Khomeini’s early mystical-philosophical writings belong to this broader intellectual world. Works such as Miṣbāḥ al-Hidāya ilā al-Khilāfa wa-l-Wilāya discuss khilāfa, wilāya, and nubuwwa through the technical vocabulary of Ibn ʿArabī, Qūnawī, Mullā Ṣadrā, and Shīʿī mystical philosophy.

Hikmati synthesis

Hikmati thought draws on this wider philosophical tradition but extends it. Prophethood is treated neither as mere supernatural interruption nor as ordinary genius. It is the civilisational intensification of consciousness, intellect, imagination, proclamation, moral judgment, and ordering power.

The prophet is therefore not only one who knows. He is one who discloses, announces, embodies, legislates, mobilises, and founds.

Cognitive and scientific accounts

Modern cognitive science, historiography, personality psychology, and genius studies provide additional ways of analysing prophetic figures. Such approaches do not necessarily make metaphysical claims about whether revelation is divine. They ask how prophetic consciousness, proclamation, charisma, symbolic production, and historical agency may be studied as human phenomena.

Cognitive historiography

Cognitive historiography is an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to reconstruct the cognitive, psychological, and experiential dimensions of historical agents through the analysis of texts, artifacts, and symbolic systems. It treats texts not merely as repositories of doctrine, but as cognitive artifacts: externalisations of attention, affect, perception, moral reasoning, and symbolic organisation.

Applied to early Islam, this approach treats the Qurʾān as a primary cognitive artifact of Muḥammad’s prophetic proclamation. Critical historians often regard the Qurʾān as earlier and more evidentially significant for Muḥammad’s ministry than the later sīra and ḥadīth corpora, though debates continue concerning compilation, chronology, and transmission.

On this account, the Qurʾān may be studied for recurrent structures of attention, moral appraisal, ecological imagery, crisis response, social opposition, and eschatological imagination.

Ecological cognition

Ecological and embodied approaches to cognition reject the idea that the mind is a self-contained computational device sealed inside the skull. Cognition is treated as embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, and ecological. It arises through the interaction of organism, environment, symbols, tools, social pressures, and action.

In this perspective, prophetic consciousness is not reducible to hallucination, fantasy, or private inspiration. It may be understood as a historically situated form of heightened moral, symbolic, ecological, and political perception. In the case of the Qurʾān, references to rain, drought, wind, shade, night, vegetation, scarcity, mercy, hoarding, orphans, and judgment can be read as part of a cognitive ecology shaped by the conditions of seventh-century Arabia.

Such analysis does not require denying religious interpretations of revelation. It brackets metaphysical questions and studies how revelation appears as a cognitive, symbolic, and communal phenomenon.

Narrative identity and crisis cognition

Narrative identity theory studies how individuals and communities organise experience into life-stories marked by agency, communion, redemption, contamination, and moral striving. In the study of prophecy, this approach helps explain how crisis may be narratively transformed into vocation, mission, test, judgment, or redemption.

Prophetic discourse often emerges under conditions of environmental instability, social fragmentation, moral conflict, imperial pressure, or communal crisis. Under such conditions, meaning-making intensifies. A drought may become divine trial, rain may become mercy, defeat may become judgment, and social opposition may become evidence of a cosmic struggle. The prophetic figure gives crisis a master narrative.

Personality psychology and psychobiography

Psychobiography seeks to reconstruct the motivational structures, personality traits, dispositions, and turning points of historical figures. While such reconstruction is methodologically limited, it has been used in studies of major historical personalities, including political leaders, religious reformers, artists, and presidents.

The Big Five model of personality, often abbreviated as OCEAN, analyses personality across openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In prophetic studies, such categories may be used heuristically rather than diagnostically. A figure such as Muḥammad may be analysed through traits such as openness to experience, symbolic fluency, moral intensity, conscientiousness, perseverance, social authority, and crisis-response.

Pathology and anti-pathology

Earlier Western treatments of prophetic figures sometimes pathologised religious experience by interpreting it through epilepsy, frenzy, hallucination, psychosis, or other diagnoses. More recent approaches tend to be more cautious. They distinguish between metaphysical claims, phenomenological descriptions, pathological diagnoses, and historically grounded cognitive analysis.

The Hikmati use of cognitive historiography is closer to the anti-pathological approach. It does not reduce prophecy to illness. It treats prophecy as an exceptional historical-cognitive phenomenon: a form of intensified perception, moral appraisal, symbolic production, and world-ordering agency.

Charisma and authority

Max Weber famously analysed charismatic authority as authority grounded in the perceived extraordinary quality of a person. Charismatic authority is especially powerful in crisis, because followers may come to believe that the leader possesses exceptional insight, divine connection, heroic virtue, or world-historical mission.

A prophet is not merely charismatic, however. Many charismatic figures are shallow, destructive, theatrical, or manipulative. The prophet is charismatic because he is perceived to disclose and embody an ordering truth. His authority does not arise only from personality, but from the perceived union of person, message, crisis, and destiny.

In Hikmati thought, charisma alone is insufficient for prophethood. The prophetic claim must be evaluated by disclosure, moral seriousness, integrative power, civilisational effect, and contribution to maximal wellbeing.

Genius and bi-domainal achievement

Historiometric research on genius distinguishes between mere talent, intelligence, creativity, public impact, and world-historical transformation. Dean Keith Simonton and other scholars have analysed genius as involving domain-specific achievement, originality, productivity, historical impact, and enduring influence.

Hikmati analysis distinguishes between at least two major domains of genius:

• Creative genius — the production of novel and exemplary ideas, symbols, theories, narratives, laws, or artistic forms that introduce lasting transformation within a cultural, intellectual, scientific, or religious domain.
• Leadership genius — the capacity to mobilise, organise, direct, and sustain collective behaviour under conditions of uncertainty or crisis.

Creative genius and leadership genius may exist separately. Many creative geniuses do not lead movements or found states. Many leaders do not introduce fundamentally new symbolic or conceptual worlds. The simultaneous presence of both capacities in one person is rare. Hikmati thought describes this rare conjunction as bi-domainal genius.

A bi-domainal prophetic genius unites creative-revelatory power with leadership-civilisational power. He discloses a new world of meaning and also mobilises people, institutions, loyalties, sacrifices, laws, and historical structures around it.

This distinction is central to the Hikmati classification of Muḥammad and Khomeini. Newton, Darwin, and Einstein disclosed hidden orders of nature. Muḥammad and Khomeini, in the Hikmati account, disclosed, proclaimed, and organised moral-political worlds.

Muḥammad

Historical role

Muḥammad occupies a uniquely complete position in the history of prophethood. He is not merely a preacher, mystic, poet, reformer, judge, warrior, lawgiver, or ruler. He is an integrated prophetic founder whose career unites several of these roles.

Historically, Muḥammad emerged in early seventh-century western Arabia as the proclaimer of the Qurʾān and founder of the Muslim community. He preached monotheism, moral accountability, resurrection, judgment, and social reform in Mecca, encountered opposition, migrated with his followers to Medina, and became the central religious and political authority of a new community.

Critical historians generally treat the Qurʾān as the earliest substantial source associated with Muḥammad’s proclamation, while using later sīra and ḥadīth traditions with greater caution.

Meccan proclamation

In Mecca, Muḥammad functions primarily as herald and warner. He announces divine unity, resurrection, judgment, moral accountability, and the vanity of wealth, tribal arrogance, and false security. The early proclamation is urgent, apocalyptic, ethical, and theological.

This phase includes admonition, oathic assertion, apocalyptic warning, moral accusation, and the exposure of false confidence. The prophet does not merely tell people to be privately pious. He announces that reality itself is ordered toward judgment, accountability, and moral seriousness.

Medinan ordering

In Medina, Muḥammad becomes more than a herald. He becomes the organiser of a community, arbiter of disputes, founder of a political order, legislator of norms, commander in conflict, and leader of a new ummah. Medina is historically associated with the formation of the Muslim community after the hijra from Mecca.

This transition is not accidental to his prophethood. It reveals the full prophetic pattern: truth does not remain abstract; it becomes law, ritual, community, economy, alliance, conflict, and statecraft.

Rhetorical development

Chronological-rhetorical analyses of the Qurʾānic proclamation may distinguish several dominant modes: admonitory warning, oathic assertion, apocalyptic vision, narrative exemplum, polemical refutation, evidentiary argument, parenetic exhortation, and nomistic instruction.

In such analyses, admonitory warning is especially prominent in the earliest phase. Apocalyptic vision and oathic assertion intensify in early proclamation. Narrative exemplum and polemical refutation become increasingly significant as the proclamation engages opposition and inherited sacred histories. Evidentiary argument rises as the discourse contests unbelief, idolatry, and denial. Nomistic instruction becomes especially prominent in the later communal phase, when the prophetic movement requires legal, ritual, and institutional ordering.

The rhetorical trajectory corresponds to the transformation of Muḥammad’s mission from urgent warning to communal formation and finally to legal-political ordering. In Hikmati interpretation, this development supports the claim that Muḥammad’s prophethood was not merely verbal inspiration but a progressive movement from proclamation to civilisation.

Exceptional status

Hikmati authors describe Muḥammad as “exceptionally exceptional.” This phrase is used to indicate not merely greatness, but the rare integration of several forms of greatness in one figure.

Many people are creative. Some are leaders. A few are spiritual founders. Far fewer unite metaphysical proclamation, moral reform, symbolic language, social legislation, military-political leadership, ritual formation, and civilisational continuity. Muḥammad’s exceptional status lies in precisely this integration.

Bi-domainal genius

Muḥammad is interpreted in Hikmati thought as a bi-domainal genius in the strongest sense.

His first domain is creative-revelatory: the production, proclamation, and embodiment of a new symbolic universe through the Qurʾānic event.

His second domain is leadership-civilisational: the formation of a durable community, legal-moral order, and historical movement.

His genius is therefore not merely intellectual, literary, spiritual, or political. It is integrative. To follow Muḥammad, in Hikmati interpretation, is not to imitate every seventh-century particularity. It is to follow the maximal pattern by which truth is disclosed, embodied, organised, and made historically effective for the uplift of humanity.

Khomeini

Conventional description

Ruhollah Khomeini is conventionally described as a jurist, gnostic, revolutionary leader, political theorist, and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He led the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 and became Iran’s ultimate political and religious authority for the following decade. Encyclopaedia Iranica describes him as a jurist and gnostic, leader of the Islamic Revolution, and founder of the Islamic Republic.

He is also associated with the modern political doctrine of wilāyat al-faqīh, the guardianship or authority of the jurist.

Intellectual corpus

Khomeini’s intellectual corpus is central to the Hikmati interpretation of his historical role. It shows a trajectory from early mystical and metaphysical writings to ethics, jurisprudence, juristic authority, political jurisprudence, revolutionary interpretation, Qurʾānic exegesis, and later mystical poetry.

His early writings include works on supplication, divine names, khilāfa, wilāya, nubuwwa, prayer, and theoretical ʿirfān. His middle period includes works on ethics, spiritual discipline, uṣūl al-fiqh, jurisprudence, harm, taqlīd, legal authority, ritual purity, forbidden earnings, and commercial law. His later political-juridical works include Taḥrīr al-Wasīla, Kitāb al-Bayʿ, and Ḥukūmat-i Islāmī / Wilāyat-i Faqīh. His post-revolutionary writings and lectures include Qurʾānic exegesis, legal summaries, and mystical poetry.

1929 Sharḥ Duʿāʾ al-Saḥar ʿIrfān / supplication Commentary on the dawn supplication; interprets divine names and attributes in metaphysical terms.

1929 Taʿlīqa ʿalā Sharḥ Ḥadīth Raʾs al-Jālūt Philosophy / ḥadīth Notes engaging questions of faith, unbelief, unity, multiplicity, and metaphysical causality.

1930 Miṣbāḥ al-Hidāya ilā al-Khilāfa wa-l-Wilāya ʿIrfān / metaphysics Discusses khilāfa, wilāya, and nubuwwa through Akbarian and Shīʿī philosophical vocabulary.

1936 Taʿlīqa ʿalā Miṣbāḥ al-Uns ʿIrfān / metaphysics Notes on Fanārī’s commentary on Qūnawī; concerns divine presences, manifestation, and God-creation relations.

1936 Taʿlīqa ʿalā Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam ʿIrfān / metaphysics Marginal notes on Qayṣarī’s commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 1939

Sirr al-Ṣalāt ʿIrfān / prayer Esoteric exposition of prayer as spiritual ascent.

1939 Sharḥ-i Chihil Ḥadīth / Forty Hadith Ethics / ḥadīth Ethical and spiritual programme centred on purification, knowledge, faith, and divine proximity. |

1941 Manāhij al-Wuṣūl ilā ʿIlm al-Uṣūl Uṣūl al-fiqh Work on legal theory, language, command, prohibition, generality, specificity, and derivation.

1942 Ādāb al-Ṣalāt Prayer / ethics / ʿirfān Accessible treatment of inward prayer, presence of heart, ritual purity, and Qurʾānic recitation. |

1944 | | Sharḥ-i Ḥadīth-i Junūd-i ʿAql wa Jahl | | Ethics / spiritual psychology | | Commentary on the “armies of intellect and ignorance”; broad manual of self-cultivation. | | - | | | | | | | | 1945 | | Kashf al-Asrār | | Political theology | | Polemical response to anti-clerical and anti-Shīʿī arguments; early political reflections. | | - | | | | | | | | 1948 | | Taʿlīqa ʿalā Kifāyat al-Uṣūl | | Legal theory | | Glosses on a central work of advanced Shīʿī legal theory. | | - | | | | | | | | 1949 | | Badāʾiʿ al-Durar fī Qāʿidat Nafy al-Ḍarar | | Fiqh / uṣūl | | Treatment of the legal principle of no harm and no retaliation for harm. | | - | | | | | | | | 1949–1954 | | al-Rasāʾil | | Legal theory / jurisprudence | | Treatises on legal maxims, istiṣḥāb, conflicting reports, ijtihād, taqlīd, and taqiyya. | | - | | | | | | | | 1951 | | al-Ijtihād wa-l-Taqlīd | | Juristic authority | | Discusses qualifications of the jurist, imitation, and prerogatives of the qualified faqīh. | | - | | | | | | | | 1954–1957 | | Kitāb al-Ṭahāra | | Fiqh | | Four-volume work on ritual purity and related rulings. | | - | | | | | | | | 1955 | | Taʿlīqa ʿalā al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqā | | Fiqh | | Glosses that helped establish Khomeini’s standing as a jurist. | | - | | | | | | | | 1961 | | Risāla-yi Najāt al-ʿIbād | | Practical jurisprudence | | Persian legal manual covering practical rulings. | | - | | | | | | | | 1961 | | al-Makāsib al-Muḥarrama | | Jurisprudence / forbidden earnings | | Major juridical work on prohibited forms of earning. | | - | | | | | | | | 1961–1976 | | Kitāb al-Bayʿ | | Commercial law / wilāyat al-faqīh | | Five-volume work including discussion of the authority of the jurist. | | - | | | | | | | | 1962 onward | | Tawḍīḥ al-Masāʾil | | Practical jurisprudence / marjaʿiyya | | Persian manual of practical rulings for ordinary followers. | | - | | | | | | | | 1969 | | Taḥrīr al-Wasīla | | Comprehensive jurisprudence | | Major Arabic legal manual, including modern legal questions. | | - | | | | | | | | 1970 | | Ḥukūmat-i Islāmī / Wilāyat-i Faqīh | | Political jurisprudence | | Najaf lectures arguing for Islamic government and the authority of the jurist during the Occultation. | | - | | | | | | | | 1972 | | Mubāraza bā Nafs yā Jihād-i Akbar | | Ethics / politics | | Lectures urging seminary students to struggle against the lower self and imperial domination. | | - | | | | | | | | 1979–1980 | | Tafsīr-i Sūrat-i Ḥamd | | Qurʾānic exegesis / ʿirfān | | Lectures reading al-Fātiḥa through divine names, manifestation, praise, and levels of meaning. | | - | | | | | | | | Post-revolutionary | | Tafsīrī az Sūrat-i ʿAlaq | | Qurʾānic exegesis / politics | | Lecture connecting Qurʾānic exegesis with defence of Islamic law and the Islamic Republic. | | - | | | | | | | | 1983 | | Zubdat al-Aḥkām | | Fiqh | | Condensed Arabic selection of legal rulings. | | - | | | | | | | | 1988–1993 | | Bāda-yi ʿIshq, Maḥram-i Rāz, Sabū-yi ʿIshq, Nuqṭa-yi ʿAṭf, Rah-i ʿIshq, Dīwān-i Imām | | Mystical poetry | | Late mystical-poetic works using imagery of wine, love, annihilation, longing, and spiritual counsel.

Wilāyat al-faqīh and political order

Khomeini’s 1970 Najaf lectures on Islamic government gave the most explicit pre-revolutionary formulation of his political jurisprudence. The lectures argued for the necessity of Islamic political power, the duty of religious scholars to bring about Islamic government, and the authority of the jurist during the Occultation.

In Hikmati interpretation, this is not merely a legal doctrine. It is a prophetic-civilisational claim: Islam is not only personal piety, clerical ritual, inherited identity, or passive waiting. It is a moral-political order requiring sovereignty, law, governance, sacrifice, and resistance.

Hikmati classification

In Hikmati usage, Khomeini is classified as a prophet in a functional and civilisational sense. This does not mean that he produced a new Qurʾān, abrogated Muḥammad as a canonical source, or became a prophet in the ordinary Sunni or Twelver legal sense. It means that he is interpreted as having performed, under modern conditions, the same core prophetic function: disclosure, proclamation, warning, mobilisation, law, sacrifice, and state-formation.

Khomeini’s prophetic “news,” in this interpretation, was not a new scripture. It was the announcement that Islam, properly understood, is a total moral-political order requiring sovereignty, resistance, juristic authority, and governance. His warning was that Islam without power becomes ornamental, and that politics without divine-intellectual sovereignty becomes domination by appetite, class, empire, monarchy, liberal dependency, or secular technocracy. His good news was the possibility of restored Islamic agency after colonialism, monarchy, secular dependency, and civilisational humiliation.

Prophetic function

Khomeini is therefore prophet-like in a weak conventional description, but prophetic in a strong Hikmati description. Like Muḥammad, he joined proclamation to sovereignty. Like Muḥammad, he transformed religious language into political reality. Like Muḥammad, he fused warning, hope, law, sacrifice, enemy-identification, communal mobilisation, and world-historical mission. Like Muḥammad, he did not merely comment on society; he founded a new order.

In mainstream Islamic terms, this analogy is controversial. In Hikmati terms, it is central. Khomeini is not a new canonical prophet after Muḥammad. He is a restorative Islamic prophet of modern sovereignty.

Bi-domainal genius

Khomeini is also interpreted in Hikmati thought as a bi-domainal genius.

His first domain is creative-theoretical: the reconfiguration of Shīʿī jurisprudence, mystical anthropology, anti-imperial politics, and Islamic sovereignty into a revolutionary doctrine.

His second domain is leadership-civilisational: the mobilisation of a mass movement, the displacement of a monarchy, the outmanoeuvring of rival factions, the founding of a state, and the institutionalisation of his theory.

Hikmati authors may therefore describe Khomeini as “exceptionally exceptional.” Many jurists write theory. Many revolutionaries mobilise crowds. Many mystics write poetry. Many politicians seize power. Khomeini’s singularity, in this view, lies in combining juristic authority, mystical imagination, anti-imperial politics, revolutionary timing, symbolic command, and state-founding agency. He transformed Shīʿism from a largely clerical-devotional and oppositional tradition into the basis of a modern sovereign state.

Muḥammad and Khomeini compared

The comparison between Muḥammad and Khomeini is made differently in mainstream Islamic orthodoxy and in Hikmati interpretation.

In mainstream Islam, Muḥammad is the founder of Islam, the proclaimer of the Qurʾān, and the final prophet. Khomeini is not a prophet, does not produce a new Qurʾān, does not found Islam, and is not recognised by orthodox Muslims as a prophet.

In Hikmati thought, the comparison is functional rather than canonical. Muḥammad is originary, scriptural, and civilisational at the birth of Islam. Khomeini is restorative, post-scriptural, and revolutionary within Islam. Muḥammad founds the prophetic-civilisational form. Khomeini reactivates it under modern conditions.

In this functional sense, the two are treated as closely analogous:

• Both appear at moments of perceived moral and civilisational disorder.
• Both proclaim that religion must reorder life rather than decorate it.
• Both act as warners and bearers of good news.
• Both join metaphysical claim to political structure.
• Both create communities of loyalty and discipline.
• Both generate new legal-political realities.
• Both require enemies, sacrifice, struggle, and historical mission.
• Both fuse creativity and leadership.
• Both are remembered not merely for ideas but for founding a world.

In Hikmati terminology, Muḥammad may be described as the paradigmatic Islamic prophet of revelation and community, while Khomeini may be described as a post-scriptural prophet of Islamic sovereignty. Khomeini is therefore not identical to Muḥammad in canonical religious status, but is treated as near-identical in functional prophetic form.

Scientific prophets

In expanded Hikmati usage, some scientists may be described as prophets in a limited and domain-specific sense. This does not mean that they are religious prophets, lawgivers, or founders of sacred communities. It means that they disclose hidden structures of reality and reorganise human understanding around those disclosures.

Newton

Isaac Newton may be described as a prophet of mathematical nature. He did not claim Abrahamic lawgiving authority, nor did he found a religious community. Nevertheless, his work disclosed a hidden order underlying motion, force, gravity, optics, and celestial mechanics. In mechanics, Newton’s laws of motion became foundational to modern physics and led to the formulation of universal gravitation.

Newton’s prophetic significance, in Hikmati language, lies in transforming the heavens from a theatre of divine mystery into a mathematically intelligible order. He announces not salvation, but order; not covenant, but mathematical law; not moral judgment, but intelligible structure. His prophecy is cosmic-physical rather than moral-civilisational.

Darwin

Charles Darwin may be described as a prophet of biological historicity. His theory of evolution by natural selection disclosed that living forms are not fixed essences but historically developed populations shaped by variation, inheritance, struggle, adaptation, and descent.

Darwin’s prophetic significance lies in breaking a static picture of life. He disclosed that organisms, including human beings, belong to a deep biological history. This disclosure challenged inherited assumptions about species, design, hierarchy, and human separateness.

Darwin is not a complete prophet in the Hikmati sense because he does not proclaim a total moral-political order. He is, however, a prophet of life’s continuity, descent, and transformation.

Einstein

Albert Einstein may be described as a prophet of the relativistic cosmos. His special and general theories of relativity transformed modern understanding of space, time, gravity, mass, energy, and the structure of the universe. Special relativity introduced the mass-energy relation, while general relativity reconceived gravity in relation to spacetime geometry.

Einstein’s prophecy is not legal, communal, or salvific. It is cosmological. Like Newton and Darwin, he reveals that reality is other than it appears, and that disciplined intellect can enter its hidden structure.

Prophethood and the removal of useless dogma

Hikmati Islam uses the concept of prophethood partly to remove what it regards as useless dogma by exposing incoherence in inherited definitions. Traditional communities often claim to know exactly who is and is not a prophet while lacking a precise account of what prophethood is.

Several definitions are considered inadequate by Hikmati authors:

• If a prophet is simply someone who predicts the future, then much actual prophetic activity is misdescribed.
• If a prophet is someone who receives verbal dictation from heaven, then philosophical and esoteric theories of revelation become difficult to accommodate.
• If a prophet is someone who receives scripture, then Jesus becomes difficult to classify.
• If a prophet is someone who legislates, then many recognised prophets are excluded.
• If a prophet is a miracle-worker, then moral and political prophecy becomes secondary.
• If a prophet is merely one named in scripture, then the definition becomes circular: a prophet is whoever a canon says is a prophet.
• If a prophet is someone who discloses hidden order and reorganises life around it, then some scientists, founders, and revolutionary lawgivers become prophet-like.

The Hikmati solution is not to flatten all greatness into prophethood. It is to create a graded taxonomy. Newton, Darwin, and Einstein are prophets of limited disclosure. Muḥammad is an originary civilisational prophet. Khomeini is a restorative civilisational prophet. The closer a figure comes to uniting disclosure, proclamation, law, moral revaluation, community, leadership, sacrifice, and historical reordering, the more fully prophetic he becomes.

Objections and criticism

Orthodox Islamic objection

The strongest Islamic objection is that the Qurʾān calls Muḥammad the seal of the prophets, and that Sunni and Twelver Shīʿī tradition overwhelmingly interpret this as the closure of prophethood after Muḥammad.

The Hikmati reply is that this objection succeeds against new canonical-scriptural prophethood, but not necessarily against functional-civilisational prophethood. Khomeini is not a new Qurʾānic prophet. He is not a new source of scripture. He is not a replacement for Muḥammad. He is prophet in the sense that he discloses, proclaims, and orders a divine-intellectual truth in history.

Semantic objection

A second objection is that calling Newton, Darwin, Einstein, or Khomeini “prophets” stretches the term beyond recognition.

The Hikmati reply is that the ancient term itself already referred to announcement, proclamation, warning, and divine-human communication, not merely fortune-telling. Once the term is analysed functionally, extension becomes possible. The extension is controlled by degree: not every thinker is a prophet, and not every prophet is prophet in the same sense.

Political objection

A third objection is that calling Khomeini a prophet sacralises political power and risks authoritarianism. To call a political leader a prophet may weaken accountability, encourage excessive devotion, or make criticism seem impious.

The Hikmati reply is that all political orders already sacralise something: the market, nation, people, constitution, individual will, race, empire, class, procedure, technology, or appetite. The question is not whether politics will be grounded in a highest value, but whether the highest value is rational, just, and ordered toward maximal human and sentient wellbeing.

Historical-critical objection

A fourth objection is that Muḥammad and Khomeini are historically different figures in radically different worlds.

The Hikmati reply is that analogy does not require sameness. Muḥammad is the originary prophet of Islam. Khomeini is the restorative prophet of Islamic sovereignty under modern conditions. Their sameness lies not in historical costume, but in functional structure: crisis, proclamation, moral judgment, law, mobilisation, sacrifice, and political founding.

Dilution objection

A fifth objection is that expanding prophethood risks emptying the term of meaning. If any scientist, reformer, artist, or leader can be called a prophet, the word may lose its religious specificity.

Hikmati thought answers by distinguishing degrees and types of prophethood. Not every discloser is a full prophet. Not every leader is prophetic. Not every successful revolutionary is divinely guided. Prophethood, in this sense, is not a licence for irrational obedience but a claim about whether a figure disclosed and embodied a higher order of reality.

Hikmati taxonomy of prophethood

In Hikmah Islam, prophethood is graded rather than merely binary.

Canonical-scriptural prophet

A canonical-scriptural prophet is a prophet associated with a recognised revelatory dispensation, sacred history, and scriptural authority. Muḥammad is the paradigmatic Islamic example.

Functional-civilisational prophet

A functional-civilisational prophet is a figure who performs the historical work of prophethood by disclosing, proclaiming, judging, reforming, mobilising, legislating, and ordering collective life, even if not recognised as a prophet by orthodox doctrine.

Limited prophet

A limited prophet discloses a hidden order within one domain. Newton, Darwin, and Einstein are examples in the scientific-intellectual sense.

Moral prophet

A moral prophet discloses the ethical structure of reality, warning against corruption, cruelty, exploitation, cowardice, or hollow ritual.

Scientific prophet

A scientific prophet discloses the intelligible structure of nature. This is prophecy by discovery rather than prophecy by scripture.

Civilisational prophet

A civilisational prophet discloses, proclaims, legislates, mobilises, and founds a durable order.

Originary prophet

An originary prophet founds a new scriptural-civilisational dispensation. In Hikmati usage, Muḥammad is the originary Islamic prophet.

Restorative prophet

A restorative prophet reactivates, purifies, and reorders an inherited dispensation under new historical conditions. In Hikmati usage, Khomeini is the restorative Islamic prophet of modern sovereignty.

Summary

Prophethood is not merely prediction, miracle, scripture, or supernatural interruption. It is the disclosure, proclamation, and ordering of reality through an exceptional human figure.

In traditional Abrahamic usage, prophets speak on behalf of God. In Hikmati usage, prophethood is extended into a graded philosophical and civilisational category. Newton, Darwin, and Einstein are prophets in limited scientific domains. Muḥammad is the originary Islamic prophet because he discloses, proclaims, legislates, mobilises, and founds a new scriptural civilisation. Khomeini is the restorative Islamic prophet of modern sovereignty because he reactivates Islamic political agency, turns doctrine into statehood, and fuses metaphysics, law, resistance, and governance into a new historical order.

The fullest prophet is not merely one who knows, speaks, writes, rules, or inspires. The fullest prophet is one who turns disclosed truth into a new historical form of life.

See also

• Hikmah Islam
• Rationalist Islam
• Sovereignty of Intellect
• Noocracy
• Wilāya
• Wilāyat al-Faqīh
• Muḥammad
• Ruhollah Khomeini
• Revelation
• Nubuwwa
• Imamate
• Bi-domainal Genius
• Charismatic Consciousness
• Cognitive Historiography
• Prophetic Finality