The Heirs of the Prophet

Abstract

This substantially revised version of a dissertation completed at the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies in 1990 focuses on the disciples (rijal) of the Imams in the Twelver Shiite tradition, arguing that they developed, through the routinization of charisma, a distinct type of religious authority in the eighth and ninth centuries based on their special relationship with the Imams, but to some extent independent of them. It investigates an important chapter in Twelver Shiite religious history while touching on questions of religious authority and orthodoxy in Islam that remain poorly described in scholarship to date. The work includes two chapters on aspects of religious authority in classical Islam, two on the Imams’ disciples and the roles they played, and one on how these disciples were portrayed in later biographical texts ...