Twelve Infallible Men: The Imāms and the Making of Shi'ism

摘要

Matthew Pierce's book presents a study of Twelver Shī'ī biographies of the twelve imāms; the twelve inspired, divinely appointed successors to Muhammad. 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 Shī'īs 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 hadīth 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 Shī'ism 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.