Biography
Early Life
Born in 1800 in the town of Kintoor, Barabanki district, in the Awadh (Oudh) region of northern India, into a Sayyid family of Twelver Shia scholars whose ancestors had migrated from Nishapur in Iran to India towards the end of the 18th century.
Sayyid Ahmad Musavi Hindi (1800-1869) was a Twelver Shia Muslim cleric of Indian birth and Iranian ancestry, best remembered today as the paternal grandfather of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder and first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He carried throughout his life the nisba "Hindi" ("the Indian"), a mark of the years his family had spent on the subcontinent, and the epithet was so cherished by his descendants that Khomeini himself later used "Hindi" as a pen name in his mystical ghazals.
His family belonged to a lineage of Sayyids who traced their descent through the Musavi line and who had emigrated from Nishapur in north-eastern Iran to the Awadh (Oudh) region of northern India towards the end of the 18th century. They settled in the town of Kintoor, in the Barabanki district of present-day Uttar Pradesh, a place long associated with Shia learning. It was here, around the year 1800, that Ahmad Musavi was born into this scholarly household.
In about 1830 he left India permanently. The stated reason was a pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, Iraq, though a number of accounts suggest that a desire to leave British colonial India also played a part in his departure. After his time in the shrine cities of Iraq, he turned toward Iran.
He first visited Iran in 1834 and, drawn to the small town of Khomeyn in the central region of the country, purchased a house there. Over the following years he acquired further property in and around Khomeyn, including agricultural land, an orchard, and a caravanserai that provided lodging to travellers and merchant caravans, establishing his family firmly in the town from which their later surname, Khomeini, would be taken.
By about 1841 he had married three wives from Khomeyn and in time fathered five children. Among them was a son, Mostafa, born in 1856, who followed his father into the religious life and became a cleric in Khomeyn. Mostafa was, in turn, the father of Ruhollah Khomeini, making Ahmad Musavi Hindi the direct paternal forebear of one of the most consequential figures of 20th-century Iran.
Ahmad Musavi Hindi died in 1869 and was buried in the holy city of Karbala, Iraq, near the shrine of Imam Husayn. Though he left no body of written work by which he is widely known, his significance lies in the family and scholarly lineage he carried from India to Iran, a lineage that would shape the course of modern Iranian history.
Positions & Achievements
Twelver Shia cleric (Usuli / Ja'fari jurisprudence)
