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The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate. BY WILFERD MADELUNG. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Professor Wilferd Madelung of Oxford has long been a major contributor to the scholarly interpretation of Islamic intellectual and religious history in the formative centuries of their development. His first major work, Der Imam al-Qasim b. Ibrahim und die Glaubenslehre der Zaiditen (1965), remains a masterly detailed study of early intellectual and religious trends ranging from the Mutazilah to various traditions of Shii thought. The distance from that early investigation of Muslim doctrinal history to the present work seems quite far-first, in that the dense German academic style of the youthful work seems far removed from the flowing narrative of the present one, save in a similar resoluteness about detail; second, in that the reader is here enmeshed not in dissection...