The Role of Shiite Scholars in Promoting Shiism in Kermanshahan State during Qajar Dynasty

Since its introduction in the first Islamic centuries and its development in the Safavid dynasty, Shiism has always been promoting and the role of Shiite scholars has been of prime importance in this development. During the Qajar dynasty these scholars protected Shiism from division and distortion. During the Qajar dynasty in which a number of deviant cults appeared, Kermanshah welcomed many of these cults including Tasawwuf, Ahl-e Haq, and Sheikhiyyah. The present research attempts to explore why the Shiite Scholars chose Kermanshahan for the promotion of Shiism and what roles these scholars played in this promotion. The present research is an analytic-descriptive study which uses library resources. The findings of the present article demonstrated that Shiite scholars chose Kermanshahan because it is near the Holy Shrines of Imams in Iraq and it is the crossroads of east to west. They managed to use all the resources including educational institutions, holy shrines and… in order to promote Shiism. They were so successful that other deviant cults ultimately died down or disappeared. Accordingly, the purpose of the present article is twofold: on the one hand it tries to explore the role of Shiite scholars in promoting Shiism, on the other hand it attempts to find out how they managed to eradicate deviant cults from it.