Shiti usul, in general, has received little attention in scholarly discussions of Islamic legal theory. Whilst Twelver usul has gained some attention, there is almost no coverage of the Ismatili and Zaydi usul traditions.[1]

In this volume, we have collected a series of passages taken from works of Islamic legal theo­ry. The authors of these works are all Shi^ti - and the discussions we present here, in general terms, touch on distinctive Shi^ti doctrines, using styles of argumentation which are often distinc­tively Shi^ti. By “distinctively Shi'i” we mean that the passages presented in this volume come from authors who adhered to the fundamental Shi^ti belief that the true, designated successor of the Prophet Muhammad was his cousin and son-in-law, ^tAli b. Abi Talib. For the Shi'a, ^tAli should have been leader of the Muslim community, but the wider community decided, for what­ever reason, to ignore this suggestion and other prominent Companions of the Prophet were se­lected or elected; tAli only assumed leadership in 656, a quarter of a century after what was, for Shiti Muslims, his rightful time. This commitment to tAli represents the defining Shiti belief - other doctrines and practices may vary, but all groups described as Shiti (both within the Muslim tradition and in secondary literature) promote the legitimacy of tAli’s claim to religious, spiritual and political leadership. The various Shiti traditions dispute how Muslim leadership should have evolved after tAli’s death in 661, though nearly all hold the view that subsequent leaders of the community should come from tAli’s descendants.

A commitment to upholding the teaching of tAli and his descendants runs alongside the claim that they were (and are) the rightful leaders of the Muslims. The reasoning for the privileging of tAli and the assertion of his rightful leadership are linked first to the Prophet’s designation of tAli as his successor. In addition to this designation, tAli - either due to his close familial relationship with the Prophet or due to a more direct divine intervention - has special religious insight, and this gives him and his statements a privileged position in the quest for religious knowledge.

The designation of 'Ali, the elevated position of the Prophet’s descendants through 'Ali and Fatima and the authority (legal or otherwise) of the Imam (manifest or hidden) became hallmark of Shi'i doctrines. There are, though, other tendencies in the various Shi'i traditions of legal the­ory exemplified in the texts below. Generally speaking, any legal authority the Imam is accorded in the various systems (Isma'ili, Zaydi, Twelver) is tempered by a firm commitment to independ­ent sources of legal knowledge. These independent sources are normally conceived of as “ration­al” - in the sense that ^caql (translated here as “reason”) is considered to have the ability to dis­cover or delineate ethico-legal truths. For nearly all the Shi'i traditions examined in this volume, “reason” (either as a human faculty, or as a non-subject, almost scientific, method of deduction) can lead to truth alongside the straightforward dicta of authoritative individuals. ^cAql is also seen as moderating the operations of legal hermeneutics: If one is to interpret the dicta of authorita­tive individuals (God, the Prophet, 'Ali and his descendants), the hermeneutic rules one follows to interpret them should be (rationally speaking) justified. This perspective comes, of course, from the complex relationship all the Shi'i traditions have with the Mu'tazili theological school. Even the more traditionalist jurists of the Zaydi and Twelver schools were, broadly speaking, working within a Mu'tazili framework. In fact, many of these jurists made major contributions to the development of the Mu'tazili ideas more generally, particularly in the early period. The align­ment between Mu'tazili and Shi'i trends has been explored by others,^[6] but in the field of usul al- fiqh the relationship is usually explicit, including regular references to Mu'tazili works and au­thorities. Furthermore, in the early classical period, it is perhaps true to say that the Isma'ili tradition incorporated philosophical rationalism more readily than the other Shi'i traditions. This is reflected in Isma'ili legal writings, though works in this limited corpus do not, generally speaking, venture into theoretical speculation around the law. Nonetheless, a certain philosoph­ical interest can be seen even in the text presented in this volume when discussing the methods of interpreting the Imam’s words and the nature of linguistic communication more generally. Furthermore, the operations of language - when used by God, Prophets, Imams or humans - rep­resent a knowledge source for these writers which modulates the process of interpretation. This is a feature the Shi'i writers share with the wider tradition of usul writing. Generally speaking, investigations into the workings of language were viewed as essential tools to interpret the in­tended meaning of the statements of any legal authority (God, Prophet or Imam). The findings of the community’s linguistic experts (in particular, the grammarians) functioned as a body of knowledge in the works of usul al-fiqh which can, generally speaking, be distinguished from reve­latory sources. Indeed, in the more mature usul works, there is a series of theological, legal, logi- co-philosophical and linguistic “postulates” (mabadι) which must be first established before the activity of usul can begin; to represent this precedence, works of usul often began with sections exploring these so-called postulates. For many Shi‘i authors, there was a resistance to viewing the sources of law purely in terms of revelatory texts. For them (and for some Sunni authors also), legal theory was nestled within a network of various theoretical, philosophical, theological and linguistic disciplines and bodies of knowledge. These lie alongside the investigation of formal sources (Qur’an, sunna, hadith/akhbar, ijma^c) and are complemented by them. This openness to reason, rationality and alternative (non-revelatory) sources of legal knowledge is not always in evidence in Sunni works, and could also be seen as distinctive of Shi‘i usul al-fiqh more broadly.

The three Shi‘i traditions presented in this volume emerged from contested discussions around the identity and function of the Imam in the post-Muhammadan era. All the Shi‘i groups agreed that the path taken by the Sunni majority was deviant: they disagreed though on what the alter­native should be. The history of how these Shi‘i traditions emerged and then established them­selves is reasonably well covered in existing research. The most basic Shi‘i identity marker is, of course, the religious legitimacy of ‘All’s inheritance of the Prophet’s position after his death. The continuation of that superiority in the descendants through ‘All’s marriage to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, appears part of the original package, or at least was formulated very quickly as ‘All’s two sons, Hasan and Husayn, were put forward by the movement as their father’s succes­sors. The generations of descendants from Hasan and Husayn form an identifiable group within the wider Muslim community. This group is often termed “the People of the House” (Ahl al-bayt, meaning the “House” of the Prophet). In some traditions, that name is restricted to a particular set of descendants, in others it has a wider scope. Within Shi‘i communities generally, recogni­tion of descent from the Prophet (that is, according someone, “sayyid” status) continues to give individuals privilege and community authority.

The basic divisions between the three Shi‘i traditions examined here are recounted in the traditional literature according to the following narrative. Following the death of ‘All’s second son Husayn, many recognised Husayn’s designated descendants (one from each generation) to be legitimate leaders, or Imams, of the community. These individuals generally followed a political­ly quietist path, since Husayn’s foray into politics had ended with the terrible slaughter of the Prophet’s descendants and their supporters in the Battle of Karbala. Some within the movement wished to continue active political involvement, and this trend coalesced around one of Husayn’s younger grandsons, Zayd b. ‘Ali. His rebellion in Kufa in 122/740, along with its brutal suppres­sion by the Umayyad political forces, proved the defining point of origin of the Zaydi Shi‘i trend. This trend’s origins lie, then, in the (failed) rebellion of an Imam who was willing to take on political leadership. These origins were to be reflected in subsequent doctrine around two ques­tions. First, who might be the Imam? He is a descendent from Hasan or Husayn for certain, and he should be someone with religious knowledge (i.e. a scholar or mujtahid). For Zaydis though, the Imam must also be a military and political leader. Second, what role and authority might the Imam have? Whilst he is not considered infallible by subsequent Zaydis, he is supposed to be the most appropriate person to lead the community. He must demonstrate himself worthy of this position by having the appropriate knowledge and skills (see the section below on “Zaydi usul”).

Zaydism, broadly speaking, became the home for those Shi'is who wished to pursue a more re­bellious path, challenging the existing structures because they had denied the community its le­gitimate leader. Much of the remainder of the Shi'i movement became, in time, less confronta­tional and more accommodating with existing political power. This was the case even if these remaining Shi'a still considered any political leader (other than the designed Prophetic descend­ent) to be unworthy of the position. The contemporary half-brother of Zayd, Muhammad b. 'Ali (known as Muhammad al-Baqir) and his son Ja'far b. Muhammad (known as Ja'far al-Sadiq) were widely viewed within the Shi'a as the successor leaders of the Shi'a, and are widely consid­ered politically quietist. These positions were not uncontested though. At the death of each Shi'i Imam, the line of succession was challenged. Following the death of Ja'far in 148/765, one of his older sons, Isma'il b. Ja'far, was believed to have been designated by Ja'far. However, he was also believed to have pre-deceased his father: how could a designated Imam die before taking office? It was both a theological and political conundrum which resulted in a heated debate leading to a split between those who followed Isma'il’s descendants as the rightful successors (later to become the Isma'ilis), and those who followed another of Ja'far’s sons, Musa (known as al-Kazim). For the former group, Isma'il and his descendants are the rightful Imams; this group has experienced subsequent internal divisions and splits and the result is a series of independent intellectual traditions within Isma'ili Shi'ism (see the section below on “Isma'ili usul”). For the latter group following Musa, there continued to be successorship divisions, but the majority ended up supporting five further successor Imams, following a father-son generational transfer. Each transfer of leadership was contested and controversial, but eventually recognised in the historical narrative. The twelfth Imam in the line of 'Ali was named Muhammad; as a child he is said to have first been concealed from nearly all Shi'a in 874, and then from all humanity after 941. For these “Twelver” Shi'is, the Twelfth Imam is present in the world, but hidden from hu­man sight and communication. His concealment is not permanent though - he will, the Twelvers believe, reappear at the appointed time. When he does reappear, the “Hidden Imam” will gain control and restore the rightful leadership of the descendants of 'Ali. The Twelvers make up the majority of Shi'a today, and are in a state of permanent anticipation of the returning Twelfth Imam. This theological belief has filtered through into legal theory, and its effect can be seen in the section below on “Twelver usul” and in the relevant sections of this volume (Chapters 1-5).

Whether the origin stories of these three Shi'i traditions (Zaydi, Isma'ili, Twelver) are histori­cal or mythical, the theological commitments which come out of this early history form the backdrop for many elements of the legal theory in the texts presented in this volume. The Twelvers’ loss of access to their Imam means, for some scholars, a loss of certainty as to the con­tent of the law; the epistemological ramifications of this loss are worked out in Twelver usul texts. The Zaydi commitment to the legal authority of the descendants of Hasan and Husayn es­tablishes the unique legal authority accorded to the consensus of these descendants. In the vari­ous Isma'ili traditions, the presence of the Imam (or his trusted representative - the da^ci mutlaq) means religious certainty is more readily available, and the need for usul al-fiqh (with its specu­lative approach to the law) is therefore substantially reduced. In these ways, the stories of the formation of any particular Shi'i trend feed through into their legal theory. The traditions brought together in this volume are discrete and operate with their own rules and modalities: in their mature phases, at least, they were (mostly) internally focused, with limited intra-Shi'i intellectu­al communication. Nonetheless, their shared commitment to the Imam as the crucial operator of the law (namely, the belief that the appropriate descendent from 'Ali b. Abi Talib holds a central role in legal exposition) makes Zaydis, Isma^tilis and Twelvers a “family” of legal theory tradi­tions. Understanding this family of traditions will, we hope, be facilitated by bringing together these texts in a single volume.