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This book offers an examination of the origins of Sh??ite Islam as viewed through the lens of the traditions surrounding its earliest and most infamous heretic, ?Abd All?h ibn Saba?, and the sectarian movement he purportedly founded, the Saba??ya.
The authoritative account of Islam's schism that for centuries has shaped events in the Middle East and the Islamic world. In 632, soon after the Prophet Muhammad died, a struggle broke out among his followers as to who would succeed him. Most Muslims argued that the leader of Islam should be elected by the community's elite and rule as Caliph. They would later become the Sunnis. Otherswho would become known as the Shiabelieved that Muhammad had designated his cousin and son-in-law Ali as his successor, and that henceforth Ali's offspring should lead as Imams. This dispute over who should guide Muslims, the Caliph or the Imam, marks the origin of the Sunni-Shii split in Islam. Toby Matthiese...
Islam in Historical Perspective provides readers with an introduction to Islam, Islamic history and societies with carefully selected historical and scriptural evidence that enables them to form a comprehensive and balanced vision of Islam’s rise and evolution across the centuries and up to the present day. Combining historical and chronological approaches, the book examines intellectual dialogues and socio-political struggles within the extraordinary rich Islamic tradition. Treating Islam as a social and political force, the book also addresses Muslim devotional practices, artistic creativity and the structures of everyday existence. Islam in Historical Perspective is designed to help readers to develop personal empathy for the subject by relating it to their own experiences and burning issues of today. It contains a wealth of historical anecdotes and quotations from original sources that are intended to emphasize its principal points in a memorable way. This new edition features a thoroughly revised and updated text, new illustrations, expanded study questions and chapter summaries.
For all Muslims the Qurʾan is the word of God. In the first centuries of Islam, however, many individuals and groups, and some Shiʿis, believed that the generally accepted text of the Qurʾan is corrupt. The Shiʿis asserted that redactors had altered or deleted among other things all passages that supported the rights of ʿAli and his successors or that condemned his enemies. One of the fullest lists of these alleged changes and of other variant readings is to be found in the work of al-Sayyārī (3rd/9th century), which is indeed among the earliest Shiʿi books to have survived. In many cases the alternative readings that al-Sayyārī presents substantially contribute to our understanding of early Shiʿi doctrine and of the early and numerous debates about the Qurʾan in general.
Akhb?r? Shi'ism was "scripturalist" in that Akhb?r's believed that all questions of theology and law could be found in the texts of revelation. There was no need, they believed, to turn to alternative sources (such as reason or inspiration). This book offers the first detailed study of the School's doctrines and history.
This book addresses the presentation of the Shīʿa in the extant theological-doxographical literature of Iraq up to the early fourth century of Islam. Understanding doxographies primarily as textual products of third-century kalām circles, it provides historians with a more thorough account of the likely provenance and transmission of this important body of source material, as well as of the particular images of the early Shīʿa it constructs.
This work aims to distill the findings of a wide variety of scholarly disciplines into a coherent narrative of the Qur’ān’s history, from the first oral recitation to the four published Variants in active circulation today. In the process of unraveling the complicated relationships between the oral Qur’ān and the written Qur’ān, it becomes clear that there are, in fact, two histories of the Qur’ān and that the overall history of the Qur’ān cannot be appreciated without understanding the interactions between these two occasionally intertwined but often independent component histories. Discrepancies between the four qur’ānic Variants that are in active use today are indexed and analyzed. While most scholarship views the Qur’ān either in relation to its past and its possible origins, or in relation to its contemporary status as a static, fixed text, this work adopts an organic, developmental approach recognizing that the Qur’ān is a living text that continues to evolve.
Focused on Shi’ism and Sufism in the formative period of Islam, this book examines the development of the concept of walāya, a complex term that has, over time, acquired a wide range of relationships with other theological ideas, chiefly in relation to the notion of authority. The book offers a textual and comparative analysis of walāya based on primary sources in the ninth and tenth centuries, from both Shi’i and Sufi circles. The starting point is one of the oldest surviving Shi’i sources, Kitāb Sulaym. Alongside this, the author analyses al-Īḍāḥ of Faḍl Shādhān al-Nishābūrī, Kitāb al-Maḥāsin of al-Barqī and Kitāb al-Kāfī of al-Kulaynī. Three major texts in S...
In Praise of the Few: Studies in Shiʿi Thought and History is a selection of Etan Kohlberg’s research on Shiʿi Islam over a period of fifty years. It includes previously published articles, revised dissertation chapters, and a full bibliography of the author’s work. Divided into two parts, the collection begins with chapters from Kohlberg’s Oxford doctoral dissertation (1971) and related articles that investigate Sunni and Shiʿi views on the Prophet’s Companions and debates concerning the extent of their authority as sources of religious knowledge. Part Two traces the doctrinal and historical developments pertaining to various dimensions of Imāmī Shiʿi intellectual tradition such as theology, hadith, law, jurisprudence, and exegesis.
The modern world is home to a large number of lineal descendents and relatives of the Prophet Muhammad. This book brings together an international group of renowned scholars to provide a comprehensive examination of the place of the descendants of Muhammad in Muslim society, offering a thorough analysis of these descendents throughout history and in a number of different local manifestations.