Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership.

• Author: Mitchell, Colin Paul
• Position: Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership, Islamic History and Civilizations, Studies and Texts, vol. 36 - Book Review

Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership. By ASMA AFSARUDDIN. Islamic History and Civilizations, Studies and Texts, vol. 36. Leiden: BRILL, 2002. Pp. x + 310. $124.

Scholars of Islamic history should breathe a communal sigh of relief with the appearance of Afsaruddin's in-depth analysis in Excellence and Precedence. Medieval Sunni-Shi'ite polemics on the nature of authority have historically been the domain of modern scholars who did not pale in the face of a massive corpus of Arabic literature that is renowned for its sophistry and pietistic partisanship. While scholars like Madelung, Stewart, Calder, al-Qadi, and Modarressi must be acknowledged for opening this field to a greater (i.e., English-speaking) audience, Afsaruddin has broadened significantly our understanding of how Sunni and Shi'i scholars framed and engaged in this debate during the formative Islamic period.

Afsaruddin contends that early polemics about the caliphal/imami succession were conducted on a relatively level playing field in terms of methodologies and agendas, and that it was during the post-Abbasid era that we see the emergence of a doctrinal and methodological chasm between Sunni and Shi'ite historical and exegetical scholarship. In this vein, we read how precedence in terms of conversion (sabiqa) and excellences (fada'il) with respect to moral character and propinquity to the Prophet were two of the more important qualifications in the debate about who was best suited--'Ali or Abu Bakr--to lead the Muslim umma after the death of Muhammad, and that these two qualities are richly represented in the vast body of manaqib literature (accounts exalting the Companions) that emerged within the hadith traditions. This manaqib (or fada'il) literature, Afsaruddin argues, can be thus seen as "a vehicle for expressing the specific political and doctrinal orientations of various interest groups during the formative period" (p. 27). Understandably, an emphasis on a body of literature which postdates these "orientations" by at least two centuries poses certain complications in terms of historical veracity, but Afsaruddin provides a convincing argument in her introduction, supported by the past work of Andras Gorke, Yasin Dutton, and Harald Motzki, that there was indeed an "archaic layer of traditions" which was reformulated in the ninth century, but that "the kernel ... of the older form is often discernible in the later incarnations." (p...