Acknowledgments

This volume is a result of the Summer School Program jointly convened by the Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shilte Islam (LAWALISI, funded by the European Research Council) at the Uni­versity of Exeter and the Shii Studies Research Program (SSRP, funded by the Carnegie Corpora­tion of New York) and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

This volume is being published under the auspices of the European Research Council Ad­vanced Award: Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shilte Islam (LAWALISI, no. 695245) based at the University of Exeter. We are very grateful to the project for sponsoring the Summer School Programme and its subsequent research activities. Thanks are also due to Professors Sabine Schmidkte and Hassan Ansari for their hosting and providing academic support through Shii Studies Research Program and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. We also take this opportunity to express our gratitude to all the contributors of this volume, particularly for their patience, perseverance and diligence throughout the peer-reviewing process. We also convey our deepest regards to Peter Groen for his outstanding type setting of the Arabic-English texts on face-to-face pages. Last but not least, we are grateful to the entire publishing teams of the Gibb Memorial Trust and Edinburgh University Press for their technical support throughout the course of this publication.