Abūdhar al-Ghifārī, From a Socialist Fighter to a Muslim Revolutionary: History of Ideas in the First Half of the 14th Century AH

Abūdharr al-Ghifārī is considered by Muslims as one of the prominent companions and narrators of the Ḥadīth of the Prophet Muḥammad. Therefore a significant number of traditions were narrated through him in Islamic Ḥadīth literature and also anecdotes about his life were written throughout Islamic history. However, in the first half of the 14th century AH/ 20th century CE, the number of works written about Abūdharr and their content underwent a considerable change. Some Muslims in this period tried to present him as the first socialist in human history or at least an outstanding sample of adherence to socialism; And of course, there were some who wanted to oppose such approaches and provide evidence against those two claims. By applying the content analysis method this study aims at understanding the evolution of attitudes towards Abūdharr in the 1st half of 20th century as far as it can be understood from Persian, Arabic and Urdu sources. This study is an attempt to study the grounds of Abūdharr's ccceptance as a socialist by Muslims, the evolution of opinions about his charracter, the debates related to these attitudes, the theoretical consequences of those debates, and finally, the ideas formed about Abū Dharr in the minds of Muslims in that era. The hypothesis of this study is that the totality of theoretical disputes between different sects Islamic and adherents to leftist movements caused the image of a revolutionary with Islamic ideology in its modern sense to be formed from Abūharr.