Education Days

A useful book about the studies of the history of the clergy

Masoumeh Sadeghi
Translated by: M.B. Khoshnevisan

2024-7-16

History scholars and researchers in other fields have always been interested in biographies of famous scientific, political and social figures. The stages of growth and influence of people and their milestones are usually considered in biographies. One of the goals of this work is to get to know more about how a person emerges and his relationship with the time in which he lived.
Imam Mussa Sadr, an Iranian cleric and the head of Lebanon's Supreme Islamic Shia Council, is a figure whose various aspects of his presence in social arenas have not escaped the eyes of researchers and critics, and many works have been written about him. Usually, in such works, attention is paid to his jurisprudential, interpretive and theological opinions. Obviously, when someone's opinions and opinions are mentioned, the question is also raised that how and on what path did he reach the scientific level?
The book “Education Days” authored by Ali Ganji is a story about the days of the religious studies of the young Seyyed Mussa Sadr. As the author has said: "The main goal and motive of writing this book is to obtain a documented and methodical narrative for studies related to the recognition of an effective and important social institution called the seminary. This institution, like other human phenomena, cannot be known and explained without the tool of narration. This book is a brief account of the education days a personality developed in the seminary”.
The book has tried to provide a multi-dimensional picture of the years of Seyyed Mussa Sadr's presence in Qom Seminary and to some extent in the seminary of Najaf by examining and studying several hours of oral history archival sources and studying published written documents and sources.
The reliance of the book on the narrations of Sadr's friends, family members, classmates, and students is one of the strengths of the book to achieve a documented narrative of a certain period.
Important issues such as the famine and the occupation of Iran, the historical trip of Haj Agha Hossein Qomi to Iran, the migration of Ayatollah Borujerdi to Qom, events related to the national movement, important events and currents within the  seminary and Sadr's relationship with them have also been paid attention to in this book. For this reason, it can be said that the book is a useful work for those interested in studying the history of the clergy.
A good feature of the book is the research on the scientific and seminary tradition of the Sadr family in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and its continuity until the presence of the young Seyyed Mussa. In fact, the author does not consider the main character of the book apart from the seminary history of his ancestors and his family. However, the first part of the book, which is dedicated to this background, could have had a smaller volume.
On the other hand, this book, in which some documents and images have been published for the first time, instead of arguing about historical differences, by putting the narratives together, the audience is allowed to evaluate them themselves.
The book “Education Days'” is the eighth book from the oral history collection of Imam Musa Sadr Cultural Research Institute, which was published in 1402 (2023) at a price of 290 thousand tomans.