Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shi'ism.

• Author: Hayes, Edmund
• Position: Book review

Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shi'ism. By MATTHEW PIERCE. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. Pp. ix + 254. $45, [pounds sterling]35.95, [euro]40.50

Matthew Pierce's new book on the biographies of the twelve Imams is a welcome contribution to the sparse scholarship on these powerfully influential narratives. It will provide food for thought for scholars in the field of Islamic Studies and beyond. Its clarity of expression makes it an excellent teaching resource.

Faced with the diverse ways in which the lives of the Imams have been expressed, and the still more diverse instances of their reception through the ages, Pierce chooses to focus on the earliest "collective biographies": those that treat all twelve Imams, or sometimes all fourteen infallibles (adding the Prophet Muhammad and his daughter Fatima to the sequence). He limits himself to the foundational stage of the production of these works, concentrating on five books from the tenth to twelfth centuries CE, though with a regular nod to the reception of these stories in modern Twelver Shi'ism.

Pierce understands these works to serve as windows onto the process of the formation of the social memory of the Shi'i community, producing and reinforcing boundaries between the Twelver Shi'a and other communities. He does not attempt to ascertain the historicity of the events depicted, aiming instead to release the biographies from "the tyranny of bland facticity" (p. 40, quoting John Renard). He treats them as hagiographies comparable to Christian lives of the saints, and thus to be understood as a way of linking life in the present with the community's memory of its great heroes. Through these stories, their example is made to intersect meaningfully with social life, ritual, and spirituality. Pierce presents a series of case studies focusing on particular themes of the biographies: community, gender, injustice, bodies, mourning, and the tension between the Imams' human vulnerability and divinely bestowed infallibility. He addresses some of the major moments in Shi'i historical memory, such as the betrayal and martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala, but he also discusses episodes from the lives of lesserknown Imams like Sajjad and Jawad. He shows how a coherent set of paradigms comes to be applied to each of the Imams' biographies. This standardization of the elements in the Imams' lives, Pierce suggests, was a progressive process: "As collective biographies proliferated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the conventions of the genre solidified and narratives at odds with prevailing notions of how the imams lived and died fell...