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The Origins of the Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Küfa. By Najam Haider. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xvii + 276. $99.
Religions and their scholars have a fascination with questions of origins. Religious traditions provide detailed explanations to explain the creation of the universe and humanity-ways of helping us understand our ontological reality in relation to the ineffable unknown, tools for helping us to understand what it means to be human. Scholars ask questions of how religions developed, and they historicize how religious communities with their social, religious, political, cultural, and aesthetic traditions originated. In the field of Islamic Studies, the question of origins has produced a considerable body of scholarship, much of it focused on the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim community. Najam Haider's The Origins of the Shfa treats the emergence of Imam! and Zaydl Shi'ism in eighth-century Küfa. His historical and methodological inquiry asks us to reconsider the classical origins narratives that have shaped Islamic Studies scholarship for the past century, and to ask new questions of our sources; and his approach highlights the remarkable religious diversity of the early Küfan Muslim community and reveals the complex processes through which sectarian differences were legally debated, ritually performed, and spatially mapped by the first Imâmï and Zaydï Shifites.
The book is divided into three sections. In part one Haider interrogates the standard and now canonical narratives of the emergence of Shi'ism in the eighth century. He argues that these are based on unreliable sources such as heresiographies and theological works that retrospectively attribute the crystallization of the theological, doctrinal, and legal components of Shifism to this early period, which is better characterized by discourses and practices that underwent frequent and sometimes significant shifts in perspective.
In chapter one, "Küfa and the Classical Narratives of Early Shi'ism," Haider proposes a "methodological approach through which [. . .] seemingly ahistorical (and primarily legal/ritual) sources are mined for historical information" in order to propose an alternative narrative for "the birth and development of ShIcI sectarian identity in 2nd/8th century Küfa" (p. 12). What is not entirely clear is how Haider defines historical versus ahistorical writing in the early Islamic period. Are legal texts not...