The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi'i Islamic Tradition

Against the background of long-standing narratives in which Twelver Shi'ism is viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi'i Islamic Tradition builds upon recent scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, and History to argue that Twelver Shi'ism is better understood as a discursive tradition. At a conceptual level, this solves the basic problem of how to integrate the extraordinary diversity of Twelver Shi'ism across time and space into a single historical category without engaging in a normative assessment of its underlying essence. Furthermore, in light of this conception of tradition, the School of Hillah stands out as a seminal period in the archive of Twelver Shi'ism, though it has seldom been recognized as such in European-language scholarship. Insofar as it gave birth to a conversation that would prove capable of encompassing the dynamism of Twelver Shi'ism, the School of Hillah should be considered the formative period of Twelver Shi'i tradition. Moreover, when the tradition is conceptualized in this manner, it is a bulwark against the very authoritarianism by which Twelver Shi'ism has been characterized for so long.
Aun Hasan Ali applies the techniques of social network analysis to bio-bibliographical sources to reveal the school of Hillah as a formative period where outstanding and landmark works were written in practically every field of classical Islamic scholarship. He uses state-of-the-art electronic databases to study the transmission of knowledge and networks of kinship, learning, and patronage to show the way that the school was socially, politically and historically embodied, covering over 200 individuals and their writings. In the process, he reveals the way that Imami Shi'ism emerged in a historically specific and interfaith dynamic, becoming a discursive tradition unified and sustained by disagreement and an awareness of its minority status.