Reason, Esotericism, and Authority in Shiʿi Islam

Rodrigo Adem (PhD University of Chicago, 2015), is assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He specializes in classical Islamic intellectual history, both Shiʿi and Sunni, across the sectarian divide. Edmund Hayes ( PhD University of Chicago, 2015) is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. He works on early Islamic history, focusing on the intersection of intellectual developments and social and political dynamics. His research focuses on the institutions of the Imamate within the cosmopolitan cultures of early Islamic empires. He has written articles on tax and revenue collection, Imamic letters, Shiʿism compared with other groups in Islam, Christianity and Judaism. He has written articles on early Islamic articulations of concepts of cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and gender, sexuality and the body in political thought.

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Abbreviations Employed



Introduction: On the Use and Abuse of Reason and Esotericism in Islamic Studies

 Rodrigo Adem and Edmund Hayes



1 Early Ismailism and the Gates of Religious Authority: Genealogizing the Theophanic Secret of Early Esoteric Shiʿism

 Rodrigo Adem



2 The Imam Who Might Have Been: Jaʿfar “the Liar” between Political Realism and Esoterist Idealism

 Edmund Hayes



3 Explaining Prayer: Hadith and Esotericism in al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq’s ʿIlal al-Sharāʾiʿ

 George Warner



4 The Doctrine of Ta‌ʾwīl in Fatimid Ismaili Texts

 Paul Walker



5 Principles of Fatimid Symbolic Interpretation (Ta‌ʾwīl): An Analysis Based on the Majālis Muʾayyadiyya of al-Muʾayyad al-Shīrāzī (d. 470/1078)

 Tahera Qutbuddin



6 Esoteric Shiʿi Islam in the Later School of al-Ḥilla: Walāya and Apocalypticism in al-Ḥasan b. Sulaymān al-Ḥillī (d. after 1399) and Rajab al-Bursī (d. c. 1411)

 Sajjad Rizvi



7 Sufi Mysticism and Uṣūlī Shiʿism: Practical Authority in Modern Iranian Shiʿi Sufism

 Alessandro Cancian



Index