Matthew Pierce's book presents a study of Twelver Shīʿī biographies of the twelve imāms; the twelve inspired, divinely appointed successors to Muḥammad. The author identifies these biographies as an under-used resource for the study of the early Twelver community, their portrayals of the imāms reflecting collective memories through which Shīʿīs imagined their past and their present.
This is not a search for the historical imāms, rather Pierce's work is a promising addition to the growing body of scholarship which examines ḥadīth corpora with objectives other than ascertaining their historical veracity. He undertakes to discover what makes these accounts meaningful, to document the process of memorialising the stories of the imāms as Twelver Shīʿism would come to tell them – which versions were remembered and which forgotten; how themes emerged and coalesced. This endeavour is supplied with a full apparatus of explanations, translations and appendices, rendering the book as useful to the uninitiated undergraduate as it is to the specialist.
Pierce's focus is the early development of what he identifies as the distinct genre of the ‘collective biography’ of all twelve imāms,Footnote 1 presenting a study of what he identifies as the first five extant works of this type: Pseudo-Masʿūdī’s (d. probably c. 340/950) Ithbāt al-waṣīya li'l-imām ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 548/1154) Dalāʾil al-imāma, al-Shaykh al-Mufīd's (d. 413/1022) al-Irshād, al-Ṭabarsī’s Iʿlām al-waraʿ and ibn Shahrāshūb's (d. 588/1192) Manāqib āl Abī Ṭālib. The first chapter presents an introductory survey of the books and their authors, detailing the Buwayhid and Seljuq background to the works’ composition. Pierce emphasises the significance of these centuries as a time when the previous porosity between Sunnī and Shīʿī identities was giving way to increasingly delineated boundaries between communities and beliefs. He sets out to show the important role played by the collective biographies of the imāms in this process.
The bulk of the book is then devoted to an analysis of the portrayal of the imāms in this literature. Each chapter concentrates on a particular set of motifs at work across the biographies: Chapter Two explores the martyrdoms of the imāms; Chapter Three their suffering in the face of betrayal; Chapter Four the significance of the imāms’ bodies; Chapter Five the stories of the imāms’ births. A central contention of the book is that the individual imāms’ lives are substantially homogenised into types, with that these motifs recurring across the stories of all twelve to create a vision of the imām on the level of storytelling that is just as cogent as the long-documented theological theorisation of the imāmate by Twelver scholars.
For the most part these themes are well chosen, engaging and illustrative. Though the martyrdom and suffering of the imāms are the most familiar, Pierce's treatment of these topics provides a convincing contextualisation of their significance in the construction of the Twelver, twelvefold vision of the imāmate. He explores in the different accounts how the initially contested martyrdom of the ninth imām Muḥammad al-Jawād gave way to a doctrinal insistence that all imāms should be martyrs, and how the many accounts of al-Ṣādiq battling the heresies ascribed to him by supposed followers tie into the same motif of the imām betrayed and (ultimately) murdered. A number of sections document the imagination of the female protagonists in the imāms’ biographies, including the Prophet's daughter Fāṭima and the recurring figure of the betraying wife, and Pierce deftly brings together a number of previous studies to shed light on the biographies’ engagement with the often polemicised gendering of mourning practices. An important observation specific to these collective biographies of the twelve is that the death of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī, so often regarded as the archetypal Shīʿī vision of martyrdom, does not always appear especially prominent, rather constituting one part of a broader type of the martyred imām.
Where the utility of these analyses meets a hurdle is in Pierce's delineation of his source material. Two of his defining initial parameters—to study specifically the genre of the collective biography and to focus on the earliest five examples of that genre—frequently result in arbitrary restrictions, excluding crucial elements of the phenomena he describes. This is most obvious in the case of other Twelver works discussing the imāms’ lives: al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq's (d. 381/991) ʿUyūn akhbār al-Riḍā and Kamāl al-dīn wa tamām al-niʿma, for instance, are two of the earliest and most important works on the eighth and twelfth imāms respectively, while al-Kulaynī’s (d. 341/941) epochal al-Kāfī, though not exclusively devoted to the imāms’ biographies, contains within it the earliest known examples of those biographies. While Pierce's construction of the collective biography as a distinct genre is compelling, it does not justify the exclusion of such essential works from a book that sets out to understand how the imāms are portrayed and why. Another conspicuous absence is al-Khuṣaybī’s (d. 345/957 or 358/969) work on the twelve imāms, al-Hidāya al-kubrā. If this exclusion was on the basis its author's Nuṣayrī persuasion, this is not accompanied by any proof that similar positions were not held by the authors of Ithbāt al-waṣīya and Dalāʾil al-imāma, whose affiliations and indeed identities, as Pierce notes, are thoroughly obscure.
This curtailing of the available Twelver sources is accompanied by a near-moratorium on non-Twelver Shīʿī sources. Though Pierce's repeated reference to the extensive literature on Christian hagiography is a promising point of comparison, it also draws attention to the absence of corresponding attention to his Twelver authors’ more immediate neighbours. Polemics with Ismāʿīlī and Zaydī Shīʿīs lie at the heart of many of the features of the imāms’ biographies as Twelvers narrate them, be it the nature and significance of the imāms’ martyrdom, the miracles they may perform or the circumstances of their births. It seems a point of policy of Pierce's work to keep the more legal and theological dimensions of these stories at arm's length, no doubt to emphasise the value of the stories themselves as evidence, but comparison with these other Shīʿī visions of the imāms is just as keenly felt on the level of storytelling as it is on the level of theological polemic. Another burgeoning source of Shīʿī depictions of the imāms is the Arabic and Persian poetic corpora, (not least the extensive citation of the former in ibn Shahrāshūb) but these are only an occasional presence in Pierce's analyses.
Much of this uneven selection of source material seems to stem from Pierce's stated concern with these biographies as documents of social memory. This is often articulated in terms of an interest in these stories as the memories of the Twelver community at large rather than the redaction of any one individual or of the literate elite who wrote them. Perhaps this motivates the urge to shift the book's focus beyond the biographies’ authors and their intellectual contexts,Footnote 2 and indeed even as these authors’ contemporaries are routinely passed over, frequent and illuminating comparison is made with later literature on the twelve imāms up to modern times. Pierce, however, does not claim to write a reception history of the five biographies that are his principle source, rather his stated subject is how they themselves tell their chosen stories. If he had wished to examine them as expressions of a more communal voice this would have required more attention to their authors, not less—attention to how and to what extent we can discern their intended audience from how they were written and how they compare and engage with neighbouring literatures, and thus potentially how this particular output of the literate elite might tell us about a different demographic to the readers of jurisprudential treatises.
The book is at its best when it doubles down on these questions of compilation and context, offering among others discerning discussions of the question of al-Jawād's martyrdom (pp. 42-54) and of the biographers’ attitudes to miracles (p. 89). These instances are the exception rather than the rule, however, and while the book's observations are always rigorously anchored in all five works, they are seldom developed into an exploration of how those works relate to their original contexts or to one another. As the book stands, when Pierce restates in conclusion his opening ambition to explore how these biographies’ development documents that of the Twelver community and identity, this does not feel substantiated by what has gone before, his study having too seldom ventured beyond isolated aspects of his chosen texts’ content.
Pierce prepares the reader in his introduction for the possibility that specialists from various ‘sub-fields’ will object to his approach in one way or another. If this constitutes an anticipation of the above observations, it does not necessarily constitute a rebuttal of the happy fact that the intellectual heritage of premodern Islam is vast and various, and that a study devoted to a particular part of that heritage is therefore compelled to engage with its weighty context or risk falling afoul of something more methodologically fundamental than the vexation of sub-fields. These hindrances notwithstanding, this is an innovative and insightful reading of some long-overlooked Shīʿī texts, one that will provide a valuable impetus for future research and a welcome entry on course reading lists.
