Jafri, Heinz Halm, Wilferd Madelung and others have further...

Jafri, Heinz Halm, Wilferd Madelung and others have further improved our understanding of Shīʿi Islam. Despite this recent research, particularly the first two centuries have not received the same share of modern scholarship and in-depth study they deserve. The general body of Muslim heresiographers have generally regarded the Shīʿa as those who digressed from the norm.

Western scholars of Islam have many times adopted a similar view and treated Shīʿi Islam as a digression or heterodoxy as opposed to an orthodoxy. Similarly the Ṣaḥīfa being a text of such substance and significance, no thorough study has been undertaken of it, apart from Howarth’s dissertation in part-fulfilment of his M.A., and Chittick’s introduction to the translation.

However, Chittick’s translation and introduction of the Ṣaḥīfa and Risālat al-ḥuqūq are a welcomed and essential contribution to the vast and rich literary Islamic and Shīʿi heritage. The Ṣaḥīfa and some sayings and poems, and the Risāla4 are the only surviving works going back to ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn.

The importance of theses document and the possibility of a wider reading, a besides analytical and linguistic investigation have been largely overlooked in Islamic scholarship and particularly in Western scholarship where these texts still remain fairly unknown. Most of the studies done on the texts, even that done by Chittick (1988) has adopted a reductionist approach by focusing only on its place within Muslim ritual.

In order to advance a wider application within Islam and beyond, based on a re-reading of ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn’s texts it is necessary to move from a ritualised status quoist reading to a quest for the historical and spiritual ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn. Methodology, Approach, Aim and Objective In this research I intend to do two things, firstly I will study and reconstruct the historical context in which the Ṣaḥīfa was produced.

This approach will be based on the thesis that to understand it is to follow the dynamics of the work, its movement from what it says to that about which it speaks. Beyond my situation as a reader, beyond the situation of the author, I offer myself to the possible mode of being-in-theworld that the text opens up and discloses to me in what Gadamer calls Horizontverschmelzung in historical knowledge.

Secondly, applying the Reader Response Theory, I will engage the texts from a contemporary discourse. This will focus primarily on a flesh and blood, and socially located reader.