The Words of the Imams:

Publisher: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002, 227pp. ISBN: 9781838605605.

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For many years the study of Shii Islam, especially of the classical Twelver Shii tradition, was dominated by a few isolated studies, and now and then encouraged by political contexts that tended to foster research into aspects of Shi[i political theology. Studies of Shii Hadith were rare and mainly dominated by articles in English by Etan Kohlberg (a number of which have been reprinted recently in a volume edited by Amin Ehteshami and published by Brill) and in French by Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi (four volumes of which have now been published). At the same time, studies of particular Shii authors and compilers are rare – in European languages earlier studies of al- Shaykh al-Saduq have focused on theological implications such as the works of Paul Sander, Andrew Newman, and Martin McDermott. In this sense, George Warner’s new book (based on his SOAS doctoral dissertation) is a highly welcome addition to the literature. It examines extensively the Hadith oeuvre of a highly influential scholar, two of whose works were considered to be foundational to the Shi[i Hadith canon (at least as it emerged in the imperial period of Safavid Iran): the extant and highly in uential Man la yahduru’l-faqih (For those who do not have a jurist present – a work of hadith arranged by the topics of the substantive ritual and social transactional law) – and the non-extant Madinat al-[ilm (City of Knowledge, which seemed to have been more theological in scope and continued to be cited into the early Safavid period, and which has been recently reconstructed based on those citations and published in three volumes).