Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam

Research into the formative period of Shiʿi Islam has come a long way inthe last couple of decades. This welcome development has been inspired,in particular, by the work of Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, whose main insighthas been to posit that “ancient” Shiʿism is marked precisely by thosedoctrines and positions that the later rationalizing tradition rejected as “extreme”(ghulūw). This particular form of heretication and othering made sense once the communities had been established; were seeking officialrecognition by the Abbasid and other royal courts; and developed the institutionsof learning, as well as structures and hierarchies, visible in otherMuslim confessions.Nevertheless, there remained the questions of what made Shiʿi Islamdistinct, how one could differentiate among those tendencies that definedthemselves as Shiʿi, and what sort of construction was “extremism” (I recognizethat this is a highly inadequate rendition of ghulūw). Amir-Moezzi’scontribution is further complicated by Hossein Modarressi’s groundbreakingstudy of the formative period during the early 1990s, in which heposited that ghulūw was exterior to the circle of the Imams and perceivedas a constant contrast and threat to the moderation of the scholarly communitythat remains to this day ...