Probably ever since the publication of two seminal works, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi's Le Guide divin dans le shî'isme originel. Aux sources de l'ésotérisme en Islam (Paris, 1992) and Hussein Modarresis's Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shiʿite Islam (Princeton, 1993), in turn preceded by the pioneering essays by Heinz Halm on Kitāb al-Haft wa'l-aẓilla(Der Islam 55/1978 and 58/1981) and on Islamic Gnosis (Die islamische Gnosis. München, 1981), a relevant number of articles and books on early Shi‘ism and on its extremist expressions have appeared, giving birth to a varied field of research in Islamic studies. While investigating the origins and the historical development of what Muslim (whether Sunni or Shiì) heresiographers defined ghuluww, over recent years, the studies devoted to early Shiism have frequently raised two important issues. The first is the plausibility of applying to religious phenomena of the Islamic world categories, such as orthodoxy and heterodoxy. This implies a reassessment of the methodological frame in which scholarship has accepted it or refused it, rightly keeping a distance from a Eurocentric approach but, conversely, evaluating the resources of a comparative perspective. That issue seems to be all the more stimulating, the more we look at it, if a dialectics of orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy (as presented in Asatryan's book, especially in chapters 5 and 6, although the author avoids naming it so) is observed within a religious phenomenon like Shi‘ism, whose main branch, Imamism, between the ninth and tenth centuries, promoted a strategy of refutation and censorship towards its own dissident voices. The second issue is one of a more properly historical and philological nature, concerning the ineffable, although as yet unprovable – given the dramatic lack of source materials, either direct or indirect – connection between Ghulāt literature and the manifold forms of Gnosticism that spread in pre-Islamic, late antique Near East. That issue is strictly related to the Shi‘i contribution to early Islamic hermeneutics – as reflected in the exegetical and apocalyptical texts analysed by Asatryan, claiming to depend on the charismatic word of the fifth and the sixth Imams, Muḥammad al-Bāqir and Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq – but it has never been included in the greater, by now pluri-decennial, debate on the origins of Islam. Although some aspects of a relationship between Late Antiquity Gnosticism and Ghulāt literature have been treated by Asatryan in a previous essay co-authored with D. M. Burns (“Is Ghulāt Religion Islamic Gnosticism? Religious Transmission in Late Antiquity”, in L'ésoterisme shi‘īte, ed. M.A. Amir-Moezzi et al, Turnhout, 2016, 55–86), in this book, the author does not seem inclined (except in some passages in the Introduction) to make room for that delicate topic – perhaps because of a reluctance (or caution) on the part of scholars engaged in these themes, to handle such multifaceted historical categories.

However, both issues seem to linger between the lines of the book, as if they were permanent questions hitherto unresolved, awaiting further investigations. The book is undoubtedly an important card standing out in the mosaic of Shiite studies mentioned above. Following the second/eighth century scenario evoked by the author, one can see these “extremist” trends of early Shiism forming an integral part of the Muslim community of Iraq. They formulated a coherent religious worldview and produced a relevant corpus of literature. During the third/ninth century, the relationship between the Ghulāt and the “moderate” branch of Imamism began to deteriorate. After the crisis of authority created by the disappearance of the twelfth Imam, they were marginalized by the religious and political Imami establishment and chose to move from Iraq to Syria, preserving and developing the religious heritage, the textual history of which claimed to depend on the hermeneutical word of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. As recalled by the author (p. 4), the paucity of original writings hampered the study of the history of Ghulāt despite the abundance of testimonies about their presence and the spread of their doctrines and beliefs in heresiographical as well biographical literature. Together with minor treatises, the principal texts representing the summa of the Ghulāt doctrinal tenets that have come down to us are Umm al-kitāb, Kitāb al-haft wa'l-aẓilla, and Kitāb al-Ṣirāṭ (all of which were written between the third/ninth and the fifth/eleventh centuries). The content and the context of these texts are the topics with which the author deals in his book.

The work consists of six chapters. Chapter I, the most philologically grounded, offers a textual analysis of Kitāb al-haft wa'l-aẓilla and its relationship to other religious writings of early Shiism. Chapter II, which examines the textual milieu of early Ghulāt, is devoted to the role of Mufaḍḍal b. ʿUmar al-Juʿfī in the transmission of this kind of literature. Chapter III, on the authorship and dating of those texts, focuses on the doctrines of the pre-existence of the souls of the twelve Imams in the form of shadows (aẓilla) and on the polemics that occurred in the third/ninth century Shiite environments – whereby, as mentioned above, a dialectic of orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy seems to come to light. Chapter IV investigates the journey of Ghulāt literature from Iraq to Syria, and the birth of the Nuṣayrī community. Chapter V, which examines the construction of a doctrinal system whereby cosmology and eschatology are discussed according to Ghulāt tenets, could have perhaps called into question the delicate issue of the relationship with Gnosticism in more explicit terms. Chapter VI, on the construction of a minority community, is devoted to the social and political impact of Ghulāt ideas in medieval Muslim society.

The book includes an Appendix about Ghulāt works surviving in fragments, a Bibliography, and an Index.