This section laid the intellectual groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For Urdu readers—who constitute the largest non-Persian Shia population (in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan)—Section 20 is required reading in seminaries ( hawza ) and political science departments.

Historical Context Khomeini wrote Kashf al-Asrar while teaching and engaging in debates in the Iranian city of Qom. The early 1940s were a period of intellectual ferment in Iran: religious seminaries confronted modernist and secularizing currents, and clerics faced criticism from nationalists, reformers, and Western-educated intellectuals. Khomeini’s book was originally a direct reply to a treatise by Ahmad Kasravi, a prominent secularist critic of clerical influence. Kashf al-Asrar thus fits into an apologetic tradition where Shiʿa scholars defended doctrines, rituals, and clerical authority against skeptics.

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