The Words of the Imams The Words of the Imams Al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq and the Development of Twelver Shīʿī Hadith Literature George Warner I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © George Warner, 2022 George Warner has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: The Prophet Muhammad Encounters the Angel Half-Fire Half Snow, 13/2012v. Photo by Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of The David Collection, Copenhagen All rights reserved. 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To my parents Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Part I Placing al-Ṣadūq 1 Living without an imam: Imāmī thought in the age of al-Ṣadūq 31 2 Legal theory and the living imam: Al-Ṣadūq as a scholar of hadith 46 3 Hadith as literature: Al-Ṣadūq, adab and Imāmī traditionism at the Buwayhid court 65 Part II Reading al-Ṣadūq 4 Al-Tawḥīd: Theology and its limits 91 5 Kamāl al-dīn wa tamām al-ni ʿma: Looking for the imam 117 Conclusion: Hadith literature and Twelver Shīʿism 149 Appendix I 153 Appendix II 157 Notes 160 Bibliography 210 Index 224 Acknowledgements Between 2008 and 2009, I lived in the Sayyida Zaynab suburb of Damascus, so named because of the shrine of Muḥammad’s granddaughter Zaynab that dominates the area. While there I was fortunate enough to study Shīʿī hadith in and around some of the many seminaries that dot the area. Without the generosity of the scholars who gave their time to teach me, and without all those with whom I spent evenings and some very early mornings reading venerable texts, this book could not have been written. The project that became The Words of the Imams began life as my doctoral thesis at SOAS in London, and I am immensely grateful to my supervisor Jan-Peter Hartung, upon whose tranquil sagacity the project never ceased to depend. A huge debt of thanks is also due to Augusta Macmahon, Sîan Hawthorne and Nicole Brisch, who got me started with doctoral work, and to Hugh Kennedy, whose continued advice and encouragement after I submitted the thesis was a tremendous help. I must also thank David Stonestreet, Sophie Rudland and Yasmin Garcha at I. B. Tauris for their abundant support and patience in seeing the project through. Along the way I have depended upon the freely given advice of countless friends and colleagues, whom I can only hope to enumerate to a point of comprehensiveness no less lamentable than that of my bibliography; I remain gratefully indebted to James Montgomery, Amjad Shah and the staff of the Shī‘ah Institute, Sajjad Rizvi, Hassan Beloushi, Toby Mayer, Rob Gleave, Stephen Burge, Andrew Newman, Ruth Mas, Devin Stewart, Harith bin Ramli, Martin Worthington, Julia Bray, Najam Haider, Edmund Hayes, Nuha Alshaar, Tamima Bayhom-Daou, Marianna Klar, Hasan Al-Khoee, Helen Blatherwick, Stefan Sperl, Ali Rida Rizek, Alexandra Cuffel, Adam Knobler and Omid Ghaemmaghami. I owe to my wife manifold thanks for manifold things, only two of which are her sustaining help and presence while I wrote this book. Introduction Hadith, occultation and compilation The truthful master This book is a study of the fourth/tenth-century Imāmī Shīʿī scholar Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn b. Mūsā b. Bābawayh al-Qummī, better known as Ibn Bābawayh or by the honorific al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq, ‘the truthful master’ (hereafter al-Ṣadūq). Al-Ṣadūq is best known as an important early hadith collector of the Imāmīya, the author of Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh (‘Every Man His Own Jurist’), the second oldest of what became the four canonical books of Imāmī hadith.1 This study of him will accordingly focus upon his significance as a scholar of hadith – a muḥaddith (pl. muḥaddithūn). Through examination of al-Ṣadūq’s extensive writings, most of which are collections of hadith, the following also aims to shed light on the broader development of a distinct Imāmī – latterly Twelver – Shīʿī hadith literature.2 Hadith is as central to Imāmī thought as it is to Sunnī thought, and, indeed, the fact that Imāmīs refer to a hadith corpus different to that consulted by Sunnīs is one of the most consistent points of difference between Imāmīs (along with most other Shīʿī groups) and their Sunnī brethren.3 Amidst the immense, overlapping variety of ideas between different groups in different times and places, the question of whether a particular Muslim author is citing al-Kulaynī and al-Ṣadūq or al-Bukhārī and Muslim is a crucial component of where they fall in the spectrum of Islamic identities.4 This is not a case simply of parallel bodies of texts that function in identical ways; as al-Ṣadūq will show us, underlying the Imāmī hadith corpus are a set of concerns and assumptions that are very particular to the Imāmī view of the world – of God, of prophecy and of scripture. Though hadith literatures have continued to develop from their origins to the present, al-Ṣadūq’s career represents a time when foundational aspects of Imāmī hadith took the form that they have retained ever since.