Najaf has been the cradle of Shī῾ī learning for many centuries. According to Najaf tradition, it has been so ever since the prominent scholar Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, called shaykh al-tā'ifa or “senior scholar of the the sect”, migrated there shortly after the Saljuq conquest of Baghdad in 447/1055.

We have very little information about the teaching system and curriculum in Najaf before the nineteenth century. In this essay, I will try to present the basic elements of a Najaf ḥawza education as they exist in contemporary Iraq and compare it with a Najaf curriculum of 1913. Quite remarkably, the curriculum, teaching methods and patronage networks have been remarkably stable over the last century. Politics and reform movements have, however, had their effects on the curriculum too, as I shall explain in the course of this essay.

This paper summarises an argument I make at much greater length in the forthcoming fourth volume of my book Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. For more detail and extensive footnotes and references I refer to the longer version.

The aim of this summary is to provide an outline of a new account of the rise of Islam in Sindh and more broadly the Indus borderlands — the latter comprise Sindh, Baluchistan, the Afghan tribal areas and the Kabul wilayat, Kafiristan (the later Nuristan), the western Panjab, and, to the east and south of the northernmost curve of the Indus river, the Kashmir valley and its surrounding mountain zone. With the exception of about half of the Afghan tribal lands which are part of Afghanistan and the valley of Kashmir which is part of India today, this area is broadly coterminous with Pakistan minus Lahore.