As societies have meandered through different epochs, expansions and ideas, it has only been natural for existing notions and ideas to be challenged, and this is a necessary and natural part of...
Read More »Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shi’ism
Twelve Infallible Men focuses on the role of narratives of the imams in the development of a distinct Shiˀa identity. During the tenth century, at a critical juncture in Islamic history, a group of scholars began assembling definitive works containing accounts of the...
Read More »Book: The Shī‘ah and Islamic Disciplines
The invaluable legacy of the Household [Ahl al-Bayt] of the Prophet (may peace be upon them all), as preserved by their followers, is a comprehensive school of thought that embraces all branches of Islamic knowledge. This school has produced many brilliant scholars who have...
Read More »A Responsum by the Fifth/Eleventh-Century Imāmī Theologian Abū Yaʿlā Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Ḥamza al-Jaʿfarī on the Number of the Imams
The present study discusses the scarce available data about Abū Yaʿlā al-Jaʿfarī and shows that he, rather than al-Murtaḍā, is the author of the tract, which circulated under titles such as Risālat al-ḥujja fī l-imāma and Masʾala fī bayān imāmat al-aʾimma al-ithnay ʿashar....
Read More »Al-Šarīf al-Murtaḍā’s Oeuvre and Thought in Context: An Archaeological Inquiry into Texts and their Transmission
This book is a detailed analysis of the reception and transmission of the doctrinal, legal, literary, and exegetical oeuvre of al-Šarīf al-Murtaḍā, arguably one of the most important thinkers of the medieval period, within and....
Read More »Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī in Modern Scholarship
Although al-Sijistānī was a leading figure in the development of Ismāʿīlī philosophy, particularly its Neoplatonism, serious investigation of his writing has been slow to enter modern scholarship, in part because his works have remained inaccessible until...
Read More »The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition
This book argues that Imami Shi'ism is better understood as a discursive tradition, and that from the late Abbasid to the post-Ilkhanid period, Hillah, in southern Iraq, was a center of scholarship, debate and...
Read More »Classical Naṣṣ Doctrines in Imāmī Shīʿism: On the Usage of an Expository Term
This article reexamines the use of the term naṣs, which since Marshall Hodgson has been used in modern historiography to refer to an indigenous Shīʿī mechanism of succession to the imamate....
Read More »The Emergence of Modern Shi’ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran
Thought provoking and challenging, this book examines the foundations of modern Islam, and provides fascinating insight into the region's religious and political developments both...
Read More »Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī’s Kashf al-Rība ʿan Aḥkām al-Ghība and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn
The treatise Kashf al-rība ʿan aḥkām al-ghība (“The Removal of Doubt from the Rules concerning Malicious Gossip”) was composed in 949/1542 by the famous Twelver jurist Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (d. 965/1558), known as...
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