The School of Hillah and the Formation of the the Twelver Shiʿi Tradition

Reviewed by: Sajjad Rizvi – University of Exeter, UK

Published by: London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, xvi+286pp. ISBN: 978-0755639083.

When people tend to think of what constitutes the Shiʿi tradition, they usually go to the early debates between tradents and rational theologians and the emergence of substantive law, jurisprudence, and theology in Buyid Baghdad. Or they go to the Safavid period because in these presentist and polemical times we are often told by analysts that the crystallisation of identities and conflictual confessions emerged from the Ottoman-Safavid conflict. However, whence the Shiʿi learned tradition? If we consider the curricula of the seminaries and the figures respected as authorities by seminarian authorities, it is difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion that the broad Shiʿi learned tradition lies with the school of al-Ḥillah in the 13th and 14th centuries. Aun Hasan Ali’s attempt in this book is not merely to fill the lacuna of a serious study of that period in Shiʿi intellectual history but to argue that across the disciplines of substantive law and jurisprudence, Hadith and Qurʾānic exegesis, and theology, it was the school of al-Ḥillah that defines the tradition – and in that sense it is about the formation of the madhhab (and should be read alongside the ‘Makdisi thesis’ of Devin Stewart applied to Twelver Shiʿi Islam in Islamic Legal Orthodoxy). As a literary and historical artefact, he argues that the school of al-Ḥillah was the madhhab.

One could also argue that we can extend that to the study of mysticism and philosophy and certainly Ali gestures in that direction. Much of the book – a revised version of his doctorate at McGill – is taken up with details of figures, their networks and their texts and it is easy to get lost in the detail. But they are appropriate given his method of applying Talal Asad and suggesting that in many ways the Twelver Shiʿi tradition is a discursive tradition par excellence. More than an intervention in the study of Islamic law and legal traditions then and especially on the rather neglected field of the development of Shiʿi law and legal tradition, Ali further engages with the critical literature on the study of Islam: Asad as we have already indicated as well as Shahab Ahmed whose notion of ‘con-text’ he invokes to describe the school of al-Ḥillah’s relationship to the Twelver Shiʿi tradition.