For over
two decades now, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi has produced a number of short
studies that have challenged us with a radically different picture of Twelver
Shiʿi Islam as an oppositional, alternative spiritual movement rooted in an esoteric
vision of reality and comprehension of the scripture in which the everlasting
countenance of God, the Imam, is present. Religion therefore is about the
relationship that believers have with the Imam, and the ethical imperatives of
what they do to him and to one other (who are the ahl al-walāya, the people cleaving to the sanctified nature of this
ultimate Friend of God). However, this does not mean that like Corbin, he
places history to one side all the while criticizing the historicism of much
intellectual history; rather, his analyses of the texts are designed to rethink
how we conceive of the history that is often immanent in those recensions. In
so doing, he has forced us to reconsider how we analyse the contestations of
Islam, identity and revelation in the classical period. His latest book is the
second collection of his articles, originally published in French in 2011, and
in this case rendered into English by the renowned poet – and emeritus
professor of McGill University, Eric Ormsby.
Unlike the first collection, which
was more thematic constituting a series of studies in the Twelver doctrine of
the Imam (imamology), this one introduces us to his readings of five classical
Shiʿi texts that exemplify the nature of this esoteric tradition. While one or
two of these may well be the great works of the early period, I have
reservations about the others which begs the question of some analysis of the
selection. Crucially, as before, the
author is making an argument about the very method by which we ought to study
the history of Islam between the history of the early conflicts – what earlier
was partly ascribed to the ‘sectarian milieu’ – and the redaction and
canonization of Muslim scriptures, both the Qurʾan and the hadith. To put it
more bluntly, the emergent ‘orthodox’ picture of early Islam that became the
Sunni tradition is rather partial and too ‘neat’ a description of how the
revelation was received, not least with its myth of the ʿUthmānic recension of
the Qurʾan and its position on the probity and respectability of the companions
of the prophet, both of which are key positions, that Amir-Moezzi argues, ought
to be rejected if we take the early Shiʿi texts seriously since they categorically
affirm the falsification of the revelation by the ‘orthodox’ caliphs and point
out the shortcomings of such a romantic vision of a concordant early
generation. The theme thus of this volume is how were the scriptures of the
Qurʾan and hadith received, glossed, commented upon by the early Shiʿi
scholarly community and what sort of hermeneutics did they need to apply to
make sense of the violence and mess of the early history of Islam.
The first
text is Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays (also
known as Kitāb al-Saqīfa), arguably
at its core the earliest work of Shiʿi literature – and indeed of any Muslim
literature – extant, and the subject of recent studies by Robert Gleave, Tamima Bayhom-Daou, and the
late Patricia Crone (as well as Maria Dakake before). This work demonstrates
for the author the violence of what became the normative Muslim (read: Sunni,
caliphal) history and the early articulation of a Shiʿi counter-history of the
usurpation, injustice and evil of history. Amir-Moezzi emphasizes the
popularity of this counter-narrative, briefly examines the debate on the
reliability of its ascription to such a person (and whether Sulaym even
existed), translates some key passages and provides the full table of contents
of the 98 traditions given in the text produced in a critical edition in the
late 1990s by Khūʾīnī. But this is just an introduction. I would have liked to
see some further analysis of what this text – with its various layers which in
themselves require some discussion – tells us about the very notion of Shiʿi
history, of the nature of transmission of texts especially written transmission
of which this is a prominent example, and what the reception history of this
text tells us about issues such as the importance given to taqiyya in different periods of history including today (since
often in seminary contexts, clerics will tend to usher people away from the
text, a perhaps judicial thing given our sectarian, anti-Shiʿi times).
The
second text is the Kitāb al-qirāʾāt or Kitāb al-tanzīl wa-l-taḥrīf of
al-Sayyārī from the 3rd/9th century; this chapter is a
version of the introduction to the edition of the text produced by Amir-Moezzi
and Etan Kohlberg. As they say in the opening, the history of prophecy is also
one of the falsification of the prophetic message The author uses this text to
show how an exegesis can in fact be a history of this process of falsification
that further academic studies that have raised questions about the redaction of
the ʿUthmānic recension of the Qurʾan. However, the arguments of revisionist
approaches to the codification of the text that point towards the role of al-Ḥajjāj
ibn Yūsuf and the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (as presented in the work of
Alfred de Premare among others) is not quite that of the early Shiʿi accusations of falsification; the revisionists are not talking about an Ur-text
that is changed but a late text that emerges from the sectarian milieu and
conflicts of understanding, while the Shiʿi accusers insisted that there was a
pristine revelation collected in a book and that scripture was with ʿAlī (who
in effect defined it by his redaction as well he could given his closeness to
the recipient of the revelation). I have
some criticisms of the way in which the edition itself is done with the assumption
of the normativity of the reading of Ḥafṣ (which is not present in the
manuscript) but that does not arise in this book but in the Brill publication
of the edition itself. Some comment would also be pertinent on the relative
obscurity of the text in Shiʿi scholarly circles (by comparison to the others
discussed in this book).
The third
text is the (probably Zaydī) exegesis of al-Ḥibarī again from the 3rd/9th
century. The problem of the absence of the names of the Imams and their enemies
from the Qurʾan, a clear revelation of the reality of things as they are, meant
that a hermeneutics was required that would decode and uncover meaning within
the ʿUthmānic recension that demonstrates that the silences and absences of the
Qurʾan needed to be articulated and made to speak by the Imam. To recall one
early polemical exchange, the Qurʾan as text was itself not enough for the
community of Muḥammad. One can see this process of reading in a number of the
classical Shiʿi exegeses but once again one wonders about the actual importance
of al-Ḥibarī for the scholarly tradition.
The
fourth text, Baṣāʾir al-darajāt of
the 3rd/9th century Qummī tradent, al-Ṣaffār raises the
key thematic of imamology: the gnosis of the Imam and the need for believers to
recognize this as central to their status. Amir-Moezzi includes a table of
contents of the work. For him, like other early works from the Ismaili and what
became the ʿAlawī-Nusayrī tradition, al-Ṣaffār’s collection shows how the early
Shiʿi community was a gnostic one with a strong initatic tradition; in fact the
‘anomalies’, as he puts, in the text, may in fact provide further evidence for
this since only the initiated would be able to distinguish what is correctly
transmitted from what is intended to deceive. But this does not seem so
convincing – and a comparison with al-Kāfī
of Kulaynī (discussed in the final chapter) shows the extent of the overlap of
material. The author similarly does not discuss directly some of the recent
scholarly and seminarian debates on the authenticity of the ascription of the
text (raised, for example, by Hassan Ansari and Sayyid Kamāl al-Ḥaydarī).
The final
(and longest) chapter – co-authored with Hassan Ansari – is on Kulaynī and is
the first major contribution in a European language (there is already an
extensive highly useful academic literature on him in Arabic and Persian; see also Ansari, L'imamat et l'occultation salon l'imamisme, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 27-36). One
sees the hand of Ansari in the historically sophisticated contextualization of
the work in this chapter. The main point that they wish to present is that this
first of the classical four books (I still await a proper study of whence this
notion of the Shiʿi canon of four books) represents the sufficient source to
establish Shiʿi Islam as an independent religious tradition. This is taken up
in the epilogue – given that those who had most vehemently opposed Muḥammad
became the guardians of Islam, the propaganda, censorship and falsification of
that imperial Islam would have to be opposed by articulating an alternative
vision, indeed religion which placed at its centre the Imam as the countenance
and revelation of the divine.
Amir-Moezzi’s
work fits within the broad approaches of rethinking both the sources for the
early period and the pivotal points of conflict to show how the master
narrative of Sunni historiography (taken up by Orientalist scholarship) must be
questioned and ‘de-colonised’. Far too much of the study of Islam is taken up with Sunni normatively, and any serious study that opens up the question of what we understand by Islam in the many situations and contexts in which we encounter it, and concurrently what it means to be 'Islamic' ought to look far and wide at sources that address these questions, taking us, if necessary, out of our comfort zone. While many might criticize whether the author is
sufficiently source critical of the texts which he is examining (one thinks back to his recanting back and forth with Karim Crow on method and today's sectarian milieu in which the excavation of the more esoteric aspects of the Shiʿi tradition arguably leads to the targeting of innocents), there is little
doubt that those studying early Islam will profit from reading this work. The historian studying early Islam needs to cast his net for sources far and wide: Arabic traditions from the different trajectories that became Sunni, Sunni traditionalists, various types of Shiʿa, Ibāḍī and so forth, as well as the many other sources in Syriac and other languages and traditions which we know through the work of Robert Hoyland, David Thomas, Kevin van Bladel, Sidney Shoemaker, Philip Wood, Mathieu Tillier, David Wasserstrom, Michael Philip Penn, Antoine Borrut and many others. The next obvious step - already initiated - is to read the Arabic Shiʿi sources alongside the others to uncover other narratives of what constitutes the sacred tradition of Islam.