The Heirs of the Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shi'ite Islam

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Hamid Dabashi, Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1989). 2. Sa¡id Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order and Societal Change in Shi¡ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986). 3. Abdulaziz Sachedina, The Just Ruler in Shi¡ite Islam: The Comprehensive Authority of the Jurist in Imamite Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4. In this study, the term “Shi¡is” will refer to the eighth-/ninth-century figures who held certain doctrines and beliefs regarding the imams, which were subsequently accepted by the twelver school of thought. The term will not include those figures who were associated with the Zaydis or Seveners (later called the Isma¡ilis). 5. Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early ¡Abbasids: The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnite Elite (Leiden: Brill, 1997). The ¡Ulama£ in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 7. For a summary of Western scholarship on Shi¡ism see Etan Kohlberg (ed.), The Formation of the Classical Islamic World: Shi¡ism (Ashgate: Burlington, 2003), Introduction. 8. The term rijal will be used in this study to refer to those prominent personages who are seen in the twelver Shi¡i sources as having been closely associated with the imams. The term will also cover the theologians, transmitters of traditions, jurists, administrators, and others who performed various functions on behalf of the imams. 9. The contribution of the rijal has received scant attention in Western scholarship. Syed Hussein Jafri briefly mentions the rijal in his study on the history of early Shi¡ism: (The Origins and Early Development of Shi¡ite Islam, [London: Longman , 1978]). In the first chapter of The Just Ruler, Abdulaziz Sachedina examines 186 Notes to Introduction and Chapter One the delegation of the authority of the imams to the rijal. Basing his analysis mainly on Kashshi’s (d. 978) work, he examines the rise to prominence and deputyship of the rijal, their increasing authority, and the derogatory remarks supposedly uttered by the imams against some of their close associates. Etan Kohlberg and Wilferd Madelung also mention some aspects of the disciples of the imamsin various articles. In a short chapter, Ismail Poonawala discusses the relationship between the imams and some of their disciples: (“The Imam’s Authority During the Pre-Ghayba Period: Theoretical and Practical Considerations,” in Shi¡ite Heritage: Essays on Classical and Modern Traditions, ed. Lynda Clarke [Binghamton: Global, 2001]). Although valuable, these works do not offer a comprehensive treatment of the rijal or their activities. I have tried to redress this imbalance in chapters three and four. Chapter One 1. For details of the genres of authority exercised in these religions, see Waida Manabu, “Authority,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 1–2. 2. Max Weber, Basic Concepts in Sociology, trans. H. P. Secher (New York: Greenwood Press, 1962), 82. 3. Betty Scharf, A Sociological Study of Religion (London: Hutchinson University, 1970), 153. 4. Weber, Basic Concepts, 81. 5. Len Oakes, Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 25. 6. Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), 329. See also Weber, “On Charisma and Institution Building,” selected papers, ed. S. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), xviii. For a critique of Weber’s tripartite typology of authority, see Sa¡id Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam, Introduction. 7. Max Weber, “Charisma: Its Revolutionary Character and Its Transformation,” in Sociology and Religion: A Book of Readings, ed. Norman Birnbaum and Gertrud Lenzer (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969), 188. 8. The view that charismatic leaders only emerge from outside institutional structures has been questioned. Michael Hill, in particular, has raised the possibility of “latent charisma” that arises from within rather than outside of routinized institutions . This challenges the rigid demarcation between the three Weberian categories of authority discussed above. See Michael Hill, A Sociology of Religion (London: Basic Books, 1973), 172. 9. Dabashi, Authority in Islam, 35. 10. Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1944), 337. 11. See Oakes, Prophetic Charisma, 29 for more details on the shaman prophet. 12. Dabashi, Authority in...