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Controversies in Formative Shi'i Islam: The Ghulat Muslims and Their Beliefs. By Mushegh Asatryan. Shi'i Heritage Series, vol. 4. London: I.B. Tauris, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, 2016. Pp. xviii + 206. $48.50, £29.50.
Mushegh Asatryan's excellent book is a careful dissection of the texts, cosmology, leadership, and ideas of the ghulāt, whom he describes as "those Shi'is who lived in Iraq between the 2nd and 3rd/8th and 9th centuries, and for some of their views were branded as 'extremists' (ghulāt) by Shi'i as well as Sunni authors" (p. 11). He traces the evolution of their texts to their final form as preserved by communities that inherited their ideas, most notably the Nusayrîs.
While Asatryan builds on the work of earlier scholars, especially Heinz Halm, he has benefited from a great infusion of texts into the material available for study, brought about by the anonymous publication of the mysterious series "Silsilat al-turāth al-'alawiyya" somewhere in Lebanon in 2006-7. This has given him a hugely increased corpus with which to understand the torturously complicated relationships between the individuals, doctrines, and texts in this milieu. At the center of his corpus is Kitāb al-Haft wa-l-aţilla (The book of the seven and the shadows), which presents itself as the narration of the second/eighth-century Mufaddal b. 'Umar al-Ju'fi, from his Imam, Ja'far al-Sādiq. Halm ascribed the core of the work to Muhammad b. Sinān (d. 220/835); however, given the nature of this work, the very utility of ascribing "authorship" should be reconsidered. As Asatryan puts it, "what [Halm] calls the 'firm kernel' [of the work] is itself not all that firm" (p. 18), as it contains several layers of composition laid down between the second/eighth to fifth/eleventh centuries. Asatryan shows that it is inextricably linked to a cluster of texts with related combinations of names-in particular to what he calls the "Aļilla Group." Asatryan has done the great service of dissecting and describing in detail the layers, themes, and interrelations in Kitāb al-Haft in chapter one, followed by a detailed analysis of the intertextual relations within the corpus in the following chapters.
On the basis of his careful textual analysis, Asatryan makes some important new arguments regarding the probable doctrinal and historical relationships between texts...