Epilogue

The present work, which I now bring to a close, if only provisionally, has had two objectives. The first of these, and the most obvious, has been to present certain early works together with their authors who remain historically significant even though unfairly neglected by the public at large. The second, less explicit objective lies in the attempt to sketch, through the history of these texts and the streams of thought that they represent, new ways of formulating the inherent problems underlying a basic question: the juncture between the scriptural sources of Islam and the ceaseless internecine wars that broke out during the very first centuries of this religion. Put another way, neither the sources, the Qur’an and the Hadith, nor the historical events and fratricidal conflicts that characterized Islam from its very origins have been scrutinized as such. These subjects have been frequently and thoroughly studied from various perspectives and in accord with diverse critical methods for more than a century and a half. But this does not mean that from now on all is clear in these areas—far from it! And it is for this reason that new perspectives and new paths of inquiry can still prove of the greatest usefulness. Specifically, apart from a few rare and recent exceptions, Shi’ite sources have not been mined in these inquiries as they might be. The chief reason for this exclusion is that these sources have been deemed as not particularly representative since they issued from a minority and so were judged to have a strong ideological orientation. An astonishing attitude on the part of scientific researchers reputed to be impartial, especially since it has been established, and in no uncertain terms, that from Ignaz Goldziher to Michael Cook and throughout the relevant studies, stretching over more than a century, the Sunni sources themselves might also be deemed historically of dubious credibility, at the very least in their explicit pronouncements, strongly oriented as they are in the quest to establish proofs of Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy. In this dialectic, which sets the “right religion” in opposition to “heterodoxy,” Shi’ite sources are without a doubt just as oriented, though not necessarily to a greater degree; moreover, they offer the advantage of being the voice of a minority that was ultimately defeated, and in this respect they appear to be all the more valuable in that they frequently report details that have been censored or distorted by the victors. It hardly needs stating that both Shi’ism and Sunnim, along with their respective literatures, have at all times displayed a great diversity; even so, the features we are discussing here form doctrinal foundations that are more or less consensual on both sides. Furthermore, these are the very traits that distinguish these two great branches of Islam one from another. Hence, from a comparative and concurrent examination of both kinds of sources, the glimmer of historical reality, enigmatic as it may be on more than one score, may flash forth. Neglect of Shi’ite writings appears even more regrettable when it is realized that on certain basic questions regarding the history of nascent Islam and the genesis of its scriptural sources, these writings are at times corroborated by a great number of modern scholarly studies bearing on historical and philological areas: the occurrence of violent conflicts between the most important figures of nascent Islam and their prolongation well into the early Abbasid period;¹ the especially problematic nature of the elaboration, transmission, and reception of the Qur’anic text;² the political aspect of the elaboration of a huge portion of the corpus of Hadith, in which each theological and political party attempted to forge “prophetic” traditions so as to justify its own cause;³ the state censorship exercised against different bodies of writing of a religious or historiographical type;⁴ the close relationship between literature and Qur’anic exegesis, its origin and development, or, conversely, its prohibition and impoverishment, alongside the history of caliphal power.⁵ Last, it is important to state that a certain amount of data seen as being typically Shi’ite and freighted with a subversive charge threatening to “orthodoxy” was, nevertheless, transmitted by prestigious Sunni authors: ʿUmar preventing the dying Prophet from revealing his last will, the oppression and repression surrounding the accession of Abū Bakr to the caliphate, the physical brutality wreaked on Fāṭima by ‘Umar, rights despised, repression and massacre of eminent members of the Prophet’s family by the caliphal power, etc.

There may be a simple reason for this final point; that is, the “paradox,” stressed for quite some time by both Muslim scholars and Orientalists, that following several major historical events—the assassination of ʿUthmān, the arbitration at Ṣiffīn, the defeat of the faction of “Qur’an reciters” (qurrā’) turned Khārijite, or even the murder of ʿAlī less than half a century after Muḥammad’s death—the caliphate reverts to those who had violently opposed Islam in the past, namely, the Banū Umayya (the Umayyads) from the clan of the Banū ʿAbd Shams. Indeed, they had become the enemies of their own cousins, the Prophet and his clan of Banū Hāshim, since the coming of the new Arab religion and especially after the battle of Badr in which several dozen leading figures were killed by the followers of the new prophet.⁶ In a certain sense, religious, ascetic, and local Islam had been swiftly defeated or, at the least, had been supplanted by an Islam that was political, opportunistic, and imperial. Hence Umayyad rule had every reason to obscure or distort this past in an effort to justifiy the present and consolidate it. It accomplished this through violence and censorship. Confronted by the savage repression of which the descendants of Muḥammad and of ʿAlī were the victims, along with the wish to conceal a history that was still fresh—except in the minds of learned Alids—a number of other scholars in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries were themselves willing to defend the rights of the People of the Prophet’s Household, however discreetly. The examples of the historians and chroniclers Abū Mikhnaf, Sayf b. ʿUmar, al-Madā’inī, Naṣr b. Muzāhim, Ibn Isḥāq/Ibn Hishām, Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī, al-Masʿūdī, al-Yaʿqūbī, or even such important traditionists as al-Bukhārī, Muslim, or, indeed, Aḥmad Ibn Ḥanbal himself might be cited. Attention has been drawn from time to time to this phenomenon of pro-Hashemite, if not, indeed, pro-Alid sympathy (which cannot be explained systematically by later Abbasid propaganda), but in my opinion it has not been adequately emphasized and explored. The very least that can be said is that it prompts us to examine Shi’ite sources with somewhat less suspicion.

The prejudice against older Shi’ite literature could be explained as well by the frequent neglect of one piece of evidence: the doctrinal notions, the institutions, the theological and political splits as well as the scriptural writings of Islam first appeared amid violent fratricidal conflicts. Now any objective scrutiny of the history and ideas of this period demands the impartial study of the sources emanating from the victorious faction, but also those of the defeated, all the more so since the former have tried almost systematically to hide or alter a quantity of historical facts as important as they are compromising for them.

For all these reasons it seemed to me appropriate to concentrate my analysis on several Shi’ite works that are representative of the great streams of thought, all the while placing them within the general historical, intellectual, and spiritual context of their period and at the same time, of course, including non-Shi’ite works in my analysis. This approach struck me as useful in order to complement, as modestly as may be, the many studies that already exist into two areas of major importance in which, nevertheless, large shadow zones persist: the history of Islam’s beginnings and the history of the compilation of its Scriptures. Accordingly, the following works have been considered in their chronological order: the pseudepigraphic work Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays or Kitāb al-Saqīfa (“The Book of Sulaym ibn Qays” or “The Book of the Porch”), the oldest strata of which date from the beginning of the second/eighth century; the Kitāb al-qirā’āt or Kitāb al-tanzīl wa’l-taḥrīf (“The Book of Qur’anic Readings” or “The Book of Revelation and Falsification”) by Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Sayyārī from the third/ninth century (probably the first half); the Tafsīr (“Qur’an Commentary”) of al-Ḥusayn b. al-Ḥakam al-Ḥibarī, also dating from the third/ninth century (probably the second half); the latter’s exact contemporary, the Kitāb baṣā’ir al-darajāt (“The Book of Perceptions of Degrees”) of al-Ṣaffār al-Qummī; last, the Kitāb al-kāfī of Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī from the very beginning of the fourth/tenth century. A genuine sequence of events unfolds from a study of the history of these texts and their contents. In the following paragraphs the terms of this sequence correspond respectively to each of the works just mentioned. In the preceding chapters the present author has attempted to present these subjects in all their complexity. The results of these studies will now be laid out as simply as possible.

The Book of Sulaym is very probably one of the oldest examples of the Shi’ite tradition of the Iraqi city of Kūfa, which will indelibly stamp a goodly number of the most fundamental doctrines and historical visions of Shi’ism, and this, indeed, down to our own day. Among these is that which bears on the history of succession to the Prophet: immediately after Muḥammad’s death, and even before his interment, the actors in a long-standing conspiracy, particularly Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, seized power, beginning with the meeting of Saqīfa, during an operation that was meticulously prepared and characterized as a “plot.” With treachery and violence, they shunted ʿAlī aside from the caliphate. And yet the latter was the sole legitimate successor to the Prophet, declared as such by him in several of his pronouncements, and even by God in the Qur’an. Among the direct consequences of this act of naked force was the death of Fāṭima, the Prophet’s daughter, as a result of the violence she suffered at the hands of ʿUmar. Other consequences, more removed in time and less direct though just as dramatic, were the following: the assassination of ʿAlī, the seizure of power by the Umayyads, the enemies of Muḥammad and his family, the poisoning of the older grandson of the latter, the son of ʿAlī, al-Ḥasan, by order of the Umayyad Muʿāwiya, the murder of al-Ḥasan’s brother, the grandson whom the Prophet loved especially, al-Ḥusayn and almost his entire family at Karbalā’ by order of Yazīd, Muʿāwiya’s son. Whence springs the Shi’ite doctrine according to which the massacre at Karbalā’ had its roots deep in the plot at Saqīfa.

In an attempt to justify these measures, caliphal power set up a complex system of propaganda, censorship, and historical falsification. First it altered the text of the Qur’an and forged an entire body of traditions falsely ascribed to the Prophet, drawing great scholars, judges, jurists, preachers, and historians into its service—all this within a policy of repression that was as savage as it was methodical, aimed at its opponents at large, but at Alids in particular. A considerable number of non-Shi’ite sources more or less discreetly report these facts, which an abundance of modern research on these subjects in its turn frequently confirms. Hence, in this historical vision of Shi’ism, official and majority “Islam,” the religion of power and its institutions, were elaborated by the enemies of Muḥammad, his family, and his descendants, the sole legitimate guides of the community of the faithful. It was not the religion of Muḥammad, but a real “anti-Islam” imposed by tyranny and deceit.

In contrast to the Qur’an that everyone knows, the Qur’an revealed to Muḥammad explicitly mentions ‘Alī and his descendants, on one side, presenting them as the true guides for Muslims, and, on the other, Muḥammad’s enemies, identified by name, and especially the first two caliphs and certain powerful men among the Umayyads and their ancestors. When they took on his power, Muḥammad’s adversaries found themselves compelled to intervene on a massive scale in the Qur’anic text in order to change those passages in it that would compromise them. Helped by powerful men in government and by professional men of letters (sometimes the two aspects were united in the same individual, as was the case with ʿUbaydallāh b. Ziyād or al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf), they established the official Qur’an, as now known, but which due to all sorts of interventions ended up by displaying that disconnected and difficult to understand aspect that is all too familiar. The Book of Revelation and Falsification by al-Sayyārī, probably the oldest monograph on this subject that has come down to us, forms part of a powerful tradition from the first three or four centuries of Islam which holds that the official Qur’an, called the vulgate of ʿUthmān, is a falsified version of the true revelation vouchsafed to the Prophet. This belief in the falsification thesis, it should be made clear, was alive in many non-Alid circles as well.

Historical and philological research on the text of the Qur’an and the history of its redaction have established that, in effect, the definitive text of the Qur’an, as it is known, is very probably the product of a complex and collective editorial labor. The establishment of this vulgate would thus date from the caliphate of the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (65 to 86/685–705) and would have been carried out under his supervision. Even so, up until the third and fourth/ninth and tenth centuries other editions of the Qur’an, quite different in their form and their content, were also in circulation in the territories of Islam until the “state Qur’an” was imposed on everyone, including the majority of Shi’ites. During this period, with the establishment of Sunni “orthodoxy” under the Abbasid caliphate—one of whose principal dogmas proclaimed the divine and eternal character of the official Qur’an—it became extremely dangerous to cast doubt on its integrity. Only a minority among Shi’ites themselves continued discreetly to maintain the falsification thesis and have done so up until the present time.

Many Qur’anic passages are difficult to understand. Early Shi’ism explains this fact in two ways. According to one explanation, the oldest of all, the obscurity of the Qur’anic text is said to be the result of its falsification. Various suppressions and additions, the work of the enemies of Muḥammad and ʿAlī, have utterly altered the revelation and damaged its original clarity. In particular, the suppression of the names of historical individuals among the followers and the adversaries of the Prophet and his religion—individuals most of whom were still alive when the text was being established—have made the once clear text virtually incomprehensible. A second explanation, probably not as early as the first, appears to be less radical. The text of the true revelation imparted to Muḥammad has been effectively falsified by the “suppression” of entire passages (at this point “additions” are no longer mentioned; otherwise, it could never be known what comes from God and what from human intervention in the Qur’an, and so no credibility whatsoever could be accorded to the divine character of the official Qur’an). Nevertheless, what gives God’s Book its enigmatic quality is that intrinsic to it is both a manifest and literal aspect and a hidden, esoteric aspect, in other words, a letter and a spirit, to resort to St. Paul’s well-known pairing. Still later, in an effort to sweeten the explosive notion of falsification, some Shi’ite scholars would state that originally the term Qur’an denoted the text of revelation accompanied by the explanatory glosses of ʿAlī. The official vulgate was not censored; rather, the crime of ʿAlī’s opponents was to have omitted his commentaries, thereby rendering the revelations made to Muḥammad hard to understand. In all such cases the interpretation of an inspired exegete, that is, an imam deemed impeccable by Shi’ites, becomes indispensable for making the divine message comprehensible. For this reason, the Hadith is said to be requisite in order to explicate the Qur’an. From this too comes the Shi’ite doctrine that presents the Qur’an as “the Guide” or “the Silent Book” and, parallel to it, the imam and/or his teaching as “the Speaking Qur’an.”⁷

The Qur’an Commentary (Tafsīr) of al-Ḥibarī belongs to a solid exegetical tradition, still flourishing in modern times, that I have called personalized commentaries. Adhering rather to the first tradition of explication of the obscure nature of many Qur’anic passages, these tafsīrs avail themselves of the Hadith to fill in the “empty boxes” of the Qur’an with the names of the persons about whom these passages are deemed to have been revealed, which become perfectly clear through this process. Apparently, in the very earliest Shi’ite initiatory circles, these personalized commentaries, which consisted in the identification of specific historical individuals beneath the letter of the Qur’an, embodied the earliest form of Shi’ite esotericism, that is, a secret teaching lavished solely on those considered worthy to receive it. Indeed, within a context of fierce repression, the act of identifying individuals who were often still among the living as friends or enemies of the Prophet, and hence of God, would have been an especially tricky business, since some of those enemies or their descendants were in power. Shi’ite enthusiasm for this sort of exegesis, based on the belief in a ẓāhir and a bāṭin in the Qur’an, is without doubt one of the main reasons for the wish on the part of the Umayyads in power, as well as some of their “ideologues,” to ban all exegesis applied to the Qur’an in general or, more specifically, the discernment within it of two levels of meaning. Interpretations of an esoteric sort were systematically judged to be contrary to the spirit of “orthodoxy” and viewed as a threat to the unity and safety of the community. At the same time, the existence of trends dubbed “heretical” was exploited by those in power as a way of legitimating orthodoxy.⁸

To sum up, during this phase Alids justified the need for esoteric exegesis by a precise historical evolution: his whole life long, the Prophet had to face the opposition and the hypocrisy of his Qurayshite enemies. The Qur’an alludes frequently to these conflicts. Opportunistically turning to Islam, and only very recently, these same enemies, by means of a plot immediately upon the death of Muḥammad, seized his power and authority by shoving his legitimate successor violently away from the caliphate. Under such circumstances, one of the first actions power had to take was to falsify those compromising passages of the Qur’an in which the friends and the enemies of the new religion were mentioned by name. Thus made incomprehensible, the Qur’an required an interpretation, returning those personages to their original Qur’anic context so as to uncover the true meaning of the verses. Such exegesis, squelched and banned by powerful men in the new state, could only circulate in secret among initiates who stood in opposition to this power.

Many Shi’ites quickly came to realize that head-on confrontation with caliphal power brought about an impasse.⁹ Most of them, rightly characterized as quietists, came from among the followers of the imams of the Ḥusaynid and Jaʿfarite line who later constituted Twelver Imamism. In fact, from a historical perspective, the hellish cycle of repression and rebellion ended, in almost all instances, with the triumph of Umayyad power and the bloody rout of the Alids. The revolution of the Abbasids, a family from the same Hashimite clan as the Alids, together with the brutal extirpation of the Umayyad caliphate, gave rise to some hopes among Alids for a brief spell. The pitiless realities of power quickly resurfaced, however, and, apart from a few rare and brief periods of calm, the same cycle began afresh. The new caliphs and their ideologues realized early on that the religious institutions and the basic doctrines set in place by their predecessors could not be modified without occasioning a perilous shift in the very foundations of the empire. The idealization of the prophetic age, the canonization of the Companions of Muḥammad, the recognition of the official Qur’an, and virtually the entire body of the Hadith, already acknowledged by previous doctors—apart from explicitly pro-Umayyad traditions—were no longer called into question. On the doctrinal level as well, the “People of ʿAlī” were henceforth marginalized, isolated, the victims of a drastic ostracism; the declaration of the legitimacy of ʿAlī and his descendants, because of their sanctity, as well as the denunciation of their enemies, was neutralized, swallowed up in a massive, unfurling, and ceaseless torrent of traditions, collected within the corpus of hadiths and Qur’anic commentaries, in praise of the virtues of those very enemies, henceforth sanctified. ʿAlī himself was “recovered” in myriad ways, and in this propaganda war the Alids were portrayed as wild and frustrated types in whom neither their first imam nor the other imams of his line could be recognized. The word of a defeated minority thus stood against that of the victorious majority: the outcome was predictable.

Under these circumstances, Shi’ite discourse seems to have felt the need to transcend the impasse by exalting the proclamation of ʿAlī’s legitimacy and that of his descendants to a metaphysical level. The resources of other monotheistic cultures—adapted, of course, to Shi’ite doctrines—were drawn into service, especially in the area of hermeneutics. This reception appears to go well beyond the likely general influence of the Christian doctrine of the “Four Senses” of Scripture (literal, allegorical, moral, and analogical), which is itself probably an outgrowth of the four interpretative methods of Judaism (peshat: literal exegesis; remez: implicit hidden sense; derash: homiletic perception; sod: mystical and allegorical interpretation).¹⁰ The sacral authority conferred upon the House of David by the Jews and upon the holy family of Jesus by Christians (the two communities were present in force in Islamic regions and especially in Iraq, the birthplace of Shi’ism, during the first centuries after the Hijra) would have been transposed onto the family of the Prophet’s household (ahl al-bayt, ahl bayt al-nabī).¹¹ Gradually an ever more complex doctrine of the imamate took shape in which the influence of Christian Neoplatonic gnostic traditions of Late Antiquity become at times discernible even in the details: the cosmic guide (imām), a metaphysical archetype of the earthly “guide,” a preexisting entity showing forth the luminous Word of God, seems to have its roots among the commentators of St. John’s Gospel and such theologians of the logos as Justin, Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, or Origen.¹² This conception of the Word may even go back further, from Philo of Alexandria to Heraclitus of Ephesis in the sixth century BCE with his notion of logos/pre-eternal Wisdom ruling the cosmos. The imam as a locus of the manifestation of God, an ontological intersection between the divine and the human, displays more than one analogy to certain Christological doctrines, from Paul (e.g., Colossians 1:15 or 2:9) onward to Origen’s Commentary on John, the Thalia of Arius, or even the doctrines of Nestorius. The preponderance given to the divine alliance/friendship (walāya) with gnosis (ʿilm) as its main component—in the sense of a saving and transformational knowledge passed on by the intitiatory guide in an esoteric fashion—the role of hermeneutics as a factor in knowledge of the secret meaning of Scripture or even the extension of the prophetic mission through the teachings of initiates comprise the most basic themes of gnostic currents of thought. They are hugely present in the doctrines of Elkasaï, Marcion, Bardesanes, or Mani, as well as in the doctrines revealed in the Nag Hammadi texts. Last, mention should be made of the dualistic vision of history in early Shi’ism and its threefold division of humanity, made up of initiatory guides, initiated disciples, and the ignorant mass of people. These notions have important parallels with various Neoplatonic forms of gnosis in which the history of the cosmos is one of a struggle between the forces of good and those of evil, in which human beings are distributed among the Pneumatics (from Greek pneuma, “spirit”), the true spiritual masters whose inner divine spark has been activated, the Psychics (from psyché, “soul”), the adepts whose divine spark exists only in potentiality, and then the Hylics (from hylé, “matter”), ordinary people who follow only their lower instincts.¹³

Taking its development increasingly through the exegetical body of Hadith, in particular, metaphysics and mystical gnosis come to envelop history in order to make it possible to bypass it. Such compilations of hadiths as the Baṣā’ir al-darajāt of al-Ṣaffār al-Qummī and, even more, the Kāfī of al-Kulaynī were major factors in this turn, which reached its height during the third and fourth/ninth and tenth centuries. The first of these exemplifies the massive acceptance of gnostic thought within Imami Alid milieus; the second completes it in a magisterial way by adding numerous Neoplatonic doctrines to it, while at the same time comprising an enormous juridical part that has as its aim to form an entire institutionalized religion set apart from Imami Shi’ism. Both are part and parcel of a powerful spiritual and intellectual movement led mainly by traditionists (muḥaddith, that is, experts in Hadith), a movement that probably formed a majority in pre-Buwayhid Imamism and that I have elsewhere called the esoteric and nonrationalistic tradition. Such doctrinal writings as al-Īḍāḥ by al-Faḍl b. Shādhān and the Kitāb al-maḥāsin of al-Barqī or even the Qur’an commentaries of Furāt al-Kūfī, of ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Qummī, or of al-ʿAyyāshī are other important examples of this.

The “sequence” in the Shi’ite perception of things would be the following, in severely schematized form: at Muḥammad’s death his enemies shunt aside ʿAlī, his sole legitimate successor, and seize power. They treacherously put together an anti-Muḥammadan religion, supported by a falsified version of the Qur’an, which they then present as official Islam. The persecuted Shi’ite imams (or the hadiths ascribed to them) attempt by means of hermeneutical work to save the true religion of Muḥammad by initiating a small number of the faithful into the true content of the Qur’anic revelation. Assailed by the violent reaction of their powerful opponents, the guides introduce a metaphysical dimension into their claims by elaborating “a religion of the imam” that is broadly tinged by gnosis and by Neoplatonism.

Thus an entire religion set apart takes shape around a central pivot: the figure of the imam. The imam is not merely a historical figure, earthly, part of the perceptual world but rather a preexisting metaphysical being, the first entity created by the divine light who manifests himself on earth down through the line of the friends of God. ʿAlī is the supreme exemplification of this divine man, and he is therefore the supreme guide. In this way a complex imamological doctrine came into being, out of which all other religious disciplines and domains of the faith depend, from cosmology to eschatology, from law to theology by way of Qur’anic exegesis, philosophy, ethics, or even liturgy. The theory that revelation contains an exoteric literal aspect and an esoteric spiritual aspect played a crucial role in its development since the hadiths about the imams, which increase as the line of the imams grows, are presented as being fundamentally the means by which the hidden meaning of the Qur’an is revealed; at the same time, the different aspects of the figure of the imam form the main content of this hidden meaning. This “need for hermeneutics” doubtless accounts for the very early origin and the swift development of the genre of Qur’anic exegesis within Shi’ite milieus; and it is this that prompted the development of Sunni exegesis, with its many anti-Shi’ite elements, in reaction.¹⁴

The centrality of the “guide” and his teachings subsumed under the form of traditions carries with it two implicit but major consequences, among others: first, the greater importance accorded to the Hadith than to the Qur’an since the former, simultaneously enriched and controlled unceasingly by a living imam, illumines the latter, which, in addition to its intrinsically enigmatic character, is believed to have undergone numerous cuts. In the plethora of its tendencies and its branches, Shi’ism turns into a fundamentally hermeneutical doctrine with a mystical faith in the figure of the imam at its center. Far from being a “religion of the Book,” it is that of a person, of a figure, that of the imam, just as Christianity is the religion of Christ. To its followers, God is not made manifest through a text, a “silent” text in any case, but through a person who is its true Word—a person whose unseen but real presence makes up the very marrow of a devotion that is mystical in nature. This inward-looking spirituality is doubtless one aftereffect of the stinging defeat of Shi’ism on the historical plane—forever a minority and persecuted in the very heart of Islam. But it was also just as marginalized in the very heart of Shi’ism with the rise to power of the Imami jurist-theologians during the Buwayhid era; in an effort to be reconciled with the Sunni majority, they would modify a fair number of their own doctrines, often extensively. It is here that the purely religious begins to turn into an instrument of politics, the ramifications of which are still with us today.¹⁵ By contrast, any victory on the part of this spirituality is without a doubt to be sought elsewhere: it appears to have nurtured mysticism copiously, even in Sunni practice, and this would quickly develop into a lively source of hermeneutical thought and spiritual dynamism and would remain so for centuries. That, however, is quite another story.