George Warner: The Words of the Imams: Al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq and the Development of Twelver Shīʿī Hadith Literature. 227 pp. London: I.B. Tauris, 2022. ISBN 978 1 8386 0560 5.

Abstract

and messianism in the fifteenth-century “eastern” Islamic world, long believed to be closed off from isolated, Sunni, “Mamluk” Cairo (pp. 736, 785). The author could have devoted more time to strategically editing, both for brevity and to decrease the number of typos that arrived in the final manuscript (pp. 21, 27, 126, 133, 210, 240, 245, 321, 355, 357, 393, 457, 582, etc). The rather idiomatic choice to translate ʿulamāʾ al-qirsh as “crappy scholars” (457) or to refer to the majālis texts as a “best of” (573) also seem odd in an otherwise serious work of scholarship. Nevertheless, these are minor faults, and some verbiage notwithstanding, the work is expertly explained and well-written. Following the author’s arguments and instructive theorization, scholars can no longer use “court” as thoughtless shorthand; instead, future scholarship is behooved actively to ponder and digest Mauder’s important conceptualization as it applies to the eras before, during, and after the early sixteenth century.