Excellence and Precedence Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership by Asma Afsaruddin (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2002. 322 pages.)

Abstract

The question of the imamate or the caliphate, the designation of the Muslim
community’s legitimate leader, is undoubtedly one of the most important in
Islamic history. The first civil war (656-61), which broke out with the murder
of Caliph `Uthman, had a profound effect not only on subsequent
Islamic political and religious institutions, but also on later Muslims’ views,
accounts, and discussions of the community’s early history. This bitter conflict,
which necessarily involved extensive controversy concerning the
identity and required qualifications of the community’s legitimate leader, laid the foundations for an enduring theological split among Islam’s three
major “sects”: the Shi`ites, the Sunnis, and the Kharijis – one that would
persist long after the war ended with the assassination of `Ali.
Polemics among these groups, and among subcategories of the three
main groups, each of which endeavored to justify its contemporary views
on legitimate leadership and sectarian identity, were a creative force in
many fields. Bodies of theoretical discussion, primarily in theology but
also in law and other fields, grew around these polemics, using prooftexts
from the Qur’an and Hadith, as well as historical accounts, as evidence
in arguments about the Companions, their relationships with the
Prophet, their relative merits and other moral qualities, and their dealings
with each other. Though focused on a much earlier period and concerning
conflicts long over, these polemics were all the more sensitive and
emotionally charged because of their contemporary implications concerning
the legitimacy of the sectarian groups’ beliefs.
Her work reveals, by examining one important intellectual exchange,
some of the processes by which this body of theoretical discussion grew. It
analyzes Bina’ al-Maqalah al-Fatimiyah fi Naqd al-Risalah al-
`Uthmaniyah, a seventh-/thirteenth-century polemical Shi`ite work on the
imamate, itself a refutation of a third-/ninth-century polemical work. The
author, Jamal al-Din Ahmad ibn Musa ibn Tawus (d. 673/1274-75),
belonged to an established Twelver Shi`ite scholarly family from Hillah,
southern Iraq. Both he and his brother, Radiy al-Din `Ali ibn Tawus (d.
664/1266), were important thirteenth-century scholars, although Radiy al-
Din has been better served than Jamal al-Din in modern scholarship since
the publication of Kohlberg’s A Medieval Muslim Scholar at Work: Ibn
Tawus and His Library (Leiden: 1992) ...