Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shiite Islam: Abu Jafar ibn Qiba al-Razi and His Contribution to Imamite Shiite Thought.

• Author: Kohlberg, E.

The formative period referred to in the title covers the years 260-329/874-941, which the Shiites call the period of the Minor Occultation. The crisis was a profound one - the disappearance of the Imam led to numerous splits in the Imamite Shiite community and desertions from it, and basic tenets of the faith came to be questioned. The Imamites were fortunate in having a number of scholars and theologians who rose to the challenge and defended the existing doctrine while at the same time introducing new elements aimed at accommodating it to the changing circumstances.

It is symptomatic of the state of Shiite studies that the name of one of the most influential of these scholars was hardly known outside specialist circles before the appearance of this book, Those seeking information about Abu Jafar ibn Qiba (d. before Sha ban 319/August 931) would until now have had to be content with isolated references in scattered studies; even his name was at times wrongly transliterated, e.g., as Ibn Qubba. Professor Modarressi has rendered a valuable service to scholarship by having rescued him from oblivion and (as the subtitle indicates) by showing the significance of his contribution to Imamite Shiite thought.

Yet the book does much more than this, for it also places Ibn Qiba in a broad historical context. The first of the book's two parts, entitled "Imamite Shiism in the Late Third/Ninth Century," comprises three chapters. The first (pp. 3-18) describes the birth of Shiism as a political movement, its gradual transformation into a legal and theological school, and the growth of Imamite Shiism in the early Abbasid period. Emphasis is placed on the role of the Imam, first as the awaited savior, and later as the supreme religious authority. In the second chapter (pp. 19-51), the place of extremism (ghuluww) within Imamite Shiism is discussed. According to the author, the only essential difference between the early Shiites and many Sunnites was that while the Sunnites accepted Imams such as al-Baqir and al-Sadiq as religious authorities, the Shiites also insisted on absolute obedience to them (p. 29) and believed that they were protected against error in religion. In contrast to some other writers (e.g., Corbin, Amir-Moezzi), the author holds that belief in the Imams as possessing supernatural powers does not belong to original Imamite Shiism but infiltrated into it at a later stage. Those who upheld this belief came to be known as Mufawwida, and the...