Twelver Shiism: Unity and Diversity in the Life of Islam, 632 to 1722

278 Pages·2013·1.06 MB·English

by  Andrew J. Newman

Twelver Shiism
The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys
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Twelver Shiism
Unity and Diversity in the Life of Islam,
632 to 1722
Andrew J. Newman
For Gene Garthwaite,
who got me started
Andrew J. Newman, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
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The right of Andrew J. Newman to be identified as author of
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Twelver Shii Studies to 1979 2
Years of expansion: Shii Studies in the aftermath of 1979 4
More recent trends 6
A different agenda 9
The sources 10
1 Shiism fragmented: the faith and the faithful from the seventh to the
ninth century 16
From the death of the Prophet to the fall of the Umayyads 16
Internal divisions 17
The Shia and the Umayyads 19
Shii risings in the later eighth century 21
The Husaynid Imams in the later Umayyad period 24
The Husaynid Imams over the later Abbasid period 25
Summary and conclusion 30
2 Bereft of a leader: the early traditionists and the beginnings of
doctrine and practice 36
Pockets of believers: the traditionists of Qum 36
The earliest compilations of the Imams’ traditions: the Qummi responses of
al-Barqi and al-Saffar 38
Pockets of believers: . . . and Baghdad 41
The Qummi response to Baghdadi discourse: al-Kulayni’s al-Kafi 44
Summary and conclusion 49
3 The challenge of ‘the Uncertainty’ 57
The reality of al-Hayra: ‘the Imamate and the Enlightenment’ 57
Al-Numani’s Kitab al-Ghayba 58
The coming of the Buyids 60
Beyond al-Hayra: al-Ziyarat in theory and practice 60
Ibn Babawayh and the Imams’ traditions 62
vi Twelver Shiism
Confronting the confusion: Kamal al-Din 63
‘Speaking truth to power’: Uyun Akhbar al-Rida 65
Al-Itiqadat: a challenging précis 67
Al-Faqih: Ibn Babawayh and the Ahkam 69
Alternative approaches 72
Summary and conclusion 73
4 Majority and minority: rationalism on the defensive in the later
Buyid period 78
The Shia in Baghdad: a beleaguered community 78
Al-Shaykh al-Mufid 80
Al-Sharif al-Murtada 84
Al-Shaykh al-Tusi: blending revelation and reason 87
The rationalists and the rijal 88
Al-Tusi and the ahkam/furu 89
Al-Tusi and the occultation 92
Alternative visions: disagreements among the faithful 94
Summary and conclusion 95
5 Betwixt and between: the Twelvers and the Turks 101
The initial legacy 101
The arrival of the Saljuqs 102
Scattered pockets and lost resources 104
The community in the west: Syria 105
Resurgent traditionism in Baghdad 106
The community in al-Hilla: the critique of al-Tusi 109
Populism on the Iranian plateau 110
The plateau’s elites 113
Summary and conclusion 117
6 The Mongol and Ilkhanid periods: the rise and limits of the school of
al-Hilla 122
The fall of Baghdad and the rise of al-Hilla 122
The state of the community 125
The jurisprudence of al-Hilla: cautious advances I 126
The Hillis and the Ahkam: cautious advances II 128
Al-Hilla, the traditions and the rijal 131
Alternative discourses 132
Summary and conclusion 133
7 The severest of challenges 138
The state of the faith in the fourteenth century 138
Contents vii
From west to east: the Shia in greater Syria/Lebanon 140
Ibn Makki’s writings 142
The Shia of the Hijaz 143
Millenarianism on the plateau 144
Dissent in Ibn Makki’s time 145
The age of the Timurids 146
The fifteenth-century community 147
The Shia of the Gulf 147
The renewal of the millenarian challenge 148
Summary and conclusion 151
8 Shiism in the sixteenth century: the limits of power (and influence) 155
The scattered pockets 155
The written legacy 157
Iran in the first Safawid century: a failure to take hold 158
The Lebanon 163
Arab Iraq: still viable after all these years 164
The Shia in the Hijaz and the Gulf 166
The Deccan ‘states’: more Shiism from above 168
Summary and conclusion 170
9 The past rediscovered and the future assured: Shiism in the
seventeenth century 177
The scattered pockets 177
The written legacy 178
The dynamics of Shiism in seventeenth-century Iran 179
Iran: the external and internal challenges 180
Pre-Safawid sources, Persian and the anti-Sufi polemic 182
Pre-Safawid sources, Persian and Friday prayer 184
Rising above the polemics: Baqir al-Majlisi and the traditions 188
The latter days of the Safawids 189
The other centres: Iraq and the shrine cities 190
The Lebanon 191
Eastern Arabia and the Hijaz 192
The Indian subcontinent: winding up the Deccan 193
And further east 195
Summary and conclusion 196
Epilogue 203
A history of uncertainty, an uncertain history 204
Four themes 209
viii Twelver Shiism
Appendix I Scholars by region: fifth–twelfth Islamic centuries/
eleventh–eighteenth centuries ad 212
Appendix II Manuscript copies of key Twelver Shii written works,
sixth–thirteenth Islamic centuries/twelfth–nineteenth
centuries ad 214
Appendix III Selected Safawid period rijal works 230
Appendix IV S huruh/Hawashi of key Twelver works, sixth–twelfth Islamic
centuries/twelfth–eighteenth centuries ad 232
Bibliography 242
Index 256
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Carole Hillenbrand for having asked me to consider
writing a volume devoted entirely to the Twelver Shia for her much respected
Islamic Surveys series. I am grateful both to her and to my editor Nicola Ramsey
also for their infinite patience, to my copy editor Lyn Flight for her ‘good eye’,
as well as Rebecca Mackenzie and Eddie Clark.
I first became acquainted with the Twelver faith when I arrived in Iran in the
Autumn of 1974. I spent two years in Iran and have been back to Iran on many
occasions thereafter, most recently in 2008.
In the last decade or two I have also been fortunate enough to make the
acquaintance of many non-Iranian Shia, both in my travels but also here in
the United Kingdom. These personal contacts have only further reminded me
of the faith’s worldwide ‘reach’ and the consequent diverse backgrounds of the
faithful.
In the years immediately following the Iranian Revolution, in the eyes of
many Western commentators the Shia were vying with the Soviets for the role
of ‘world villain’, with Shii-fomented revolution(s) perceived as being about to
break out throughout the Middle East ‘proper’ if not elsewhere as well.
The vitriol poured out on the Twelvers as a group by some non-Shii Muslims
was, and remains, particularly intense. As I have noted to students in my classes
on Shiism, such elements consider the Twelvers to be more dangerous, and evil,
than the Americans. Many do not even accept them as Muslims.
Both of these camps, trading on problematic images from the Iran–Iraq War,
harped on the dangerous predisposition of the Shia for martyrdom and por-
trayed the faithful as sheep, immediately and directly under the absolute control
of a single malevolent leader bent on the destruction of civilisation as we know it.
Such rhetoric speaks volumes about the agendas of those who promote it. It
says precious little about the reality and, more importantly, the diversity of the
Shii experience across the globe as I have come to know it since 1974.
The title of this volume bespeaks an interest in that diversity, across time and
space, if not also in what the faithful might recognise that they have in common.
The faith’s, and the faithful’s, diversity perhaps emerges more clearly herein
than any unity, not the least because of the numerous, varied and repeatedly
existential challenges, external but also internal, that the faithful have faced over
the centuries in the different parts of the world they have inhabited.