The Renaissance of Shii Islam

Reviewed by: Sajjad Rizvi, University of Exeter, UK

Published by: London: I.B. Tauris in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2022, xxi+399pp. ISBN: 978-0755649440.

From the perspective of the present and the nature of religiously justified conflict in the contemporary Middle East, it is common for analysts to point to the early modern roots in which adherences and affiliations crystallised. A major development was the rise of a confident and assertive Twelver Shīʿī polity in the form of the Safavid empire in Iran. For some time, specialists have also pointed out the nature of a ‘renaissance’ in that period constituted by the cultural efflorescence in the arts, architecture, and thought with a distinct sense of a classical revival – of the learning of the Greeks and other ancients indicated by a renewal of Neoplatonism in an Arabic and Persian idiom, as well as a conscious renewal of the religious dispensation of Shīʿī Islam through collation and discovery of early Ḥadīth texts and the formation of new modes of exegesis predicated on the similar discovery of the ancients. This process of renewal and renaissance is often also said to have been a feature of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī tradition in Anjudan as well as the extensive emergence of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition in the Ottoman contexts. A fully Shīʿī account of this period would also need to cover Zaydī developments in Yemen and the Hijaz, whereby different traditions emerged in a renewed Imamate in Yemen as well as a more cosmopolitan governance in the Hijaz (where the Sharifs were nominally Sunnī but retained much of their Zaydī tradition).