Madhab

24 Pages 5943 Words

s of Ali (r.a.) developed a theory of religious
authority which departed from the older egalitarian assumptions by
vesting it in a charismatic succession of Imams. We need not stop here
to investigate the question of whether this idea was influenced by the
Eastern Christian background of some early converts, who had been
nourished on the idea of the mystical apostolic succession to Christ, a
gift which supposedly gave the Church the unique ability to read his
mind for later generations. What needs to be appreciated is that
Shi'ism, in its myriad forms, developed as a response to a widely-sensed
lack of definitive religious authority in early Islamic society. As the
age of the Righteous Caliphs came to a close, and the Umayyad rulers
departed ever more conspicuously from the lifestyle expected of them as
Commanders of the Faithful, the sharply-divergent and still nascent
schools of fiqh seemed inadequate as sources of strong and unambiguous
authority in religious matters. Hence the often irresistible
seductiveness of the idea of a...