Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbari Shii School.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Book review

Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbari Shii School. By ROBERT GLEAVE. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, 72. Leiden: BRILL, 2007. Pp. xxiii + 339. $185.

For all of his comparatively modest scholarly accomplishment, Mulla Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. ca. 1033/1623) somehow transcended, especially in the cult and "tradition" that grew around his postmortem career, the limitations of his own gifts to become one of the more influential figures in the modern history of Shiism. Now we have a book dedicated to his life and works that helps us to understand this fact of Islamic intellectual history of the premodern period, a fact that also has tremendous importance for the intellectual and religious history of the modern and contemporary periods. This is so, chiefly, because the nettle that Astarabadi made bold to grasp was one in which the various and multifarious nerves of a distinctively Shii piety were cathected, as it were. The title of the present book, by one of the leading specialists in Shii studies in the English-speaking world, alludes to this "nettle" but also manages to disguise it.

Chapter one is a general description of the Akhbari-Usuli dispute of much celebrity in all discussions of post-Safavid Shiism. An attempt is made in this chapter to solve the controversial issue about whether there was or was not an analogous dispute in the classical period of Twelver or Imami Shiism. Madelung and others have argued strongly for the existence of the earlier phenomenon. Gleave criticizes this position but it is frankly not too clear which position he does take in the end. This quandary is aggravated by much reference to Astarabadi's "conversion to Akhbarism" (e.g., pp. 102, 103, 105, 119, 137, 138, 151). On the one hand, the author wishes to demonstrate that there was no Akhbari "school" prior to Astarabadi, but on the other hand, seems to acknowledge that there was something in the nature of" an approach (cf. madhhab) that offered an alternative to the contemporary Shii clerical culture, namely, the Hilli-inspired Twelver version of a largely Sunni usul al-fiqh. As is well known, Astarabadi claimed that this was invasive to true Shiism. To refer to Astarabadi as having converted to Akhbarism seems to argue against the author's purpose and is a bit like referring to Jesus' conversion to Christianity or Marx's conversion to communism.

At another time and another place such reforms as those proposed by Astarabadi...