The Heirs of the Prophet

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