L'Esoterisme shi'ite: Ses racines et ses prolongements I Shi'i Esotericism: Its Roots and Developments.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Book review

L'Esoterisme shi'ite: Ses racines et ses prolongements I Shi'i Esotericism: Its Roots and Developments. Edited by M. A. AMIR-MOEZZI, M. DE CILLIS, D. DE SMET, and O. MIR-KASIMOV. Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, sciences religieuses, vol. 177. Turnhout, Belgium: BREPOLS, 2016. Pp. V + 870. [euro]95 (paper).

This most welcome volume, brought to dazzling fruition by the leading scholar of Ithna 'ashari ("Twelver") Shi'ism, offers the student of both Shi'i and Sunni Islam a veritable cornucopia of riches concerning a topic still too little recognized and explored, particularly in English-speaking scholarly circles. It provides much new material destined to disturb our comfortable, not to say stale, notions of how the dynamics of communal identities have worked and continue to work themselves out in the case of Islam, a tradition for which it has long been accepted that the categories of "orthodoxy" and "heterodoxy" simply do not apply, but for which no reasonable alternate approach has gained universal traction. Marshall Hodgson's brilliant model of "styles of piety" has inspired two generations of Islamicists, yet seems for the most part to have remained something of an esoteric insight all on its own; those who share it congregate in something of a "spiritual and anonymous church." Further, this collection's topics and methods of exploration will also illumine problems of belief and doctrine with regard to sources and settings. How Sunni Islam is in some sense the creation of Shi'ism--and vice versa--and how their mutual study in contemporary scholarship is a non-negotiable desideratum are issues that receive much suggestive exposition in this book, though, it should be hastily added, this is not its purpose. Nonetheless, the special symbiosis between Shi'i and Sunni Islam emerges much more readily traceable as a result of reading this book. The new sources brought to bear here will vivify the conversation.

Only the briefest of surveys can be offered of the contents of this collection of learned articles and essays in French and English, thirty-five in all (fourteen in French, twenty-one in English) plus an introduction. The articles are divided into three major sections, indicated in the title of the book: Roots, Early Shi'i Esotericism, and Developments. In the first section, nine of the eleven chapters are in French. The content of the first section may be outlined as follows: a contemplation of the origins of the twin...