ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Shiite Islam: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy? Acknowledgments and Observations The present book is the first English edition of an article which was published in an academic journal in 1994 under the name “El Islām Ši'ita: ¿ortodoxia o heterodoxia?” [Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy?].

The article was well-received in academic circles and was soon widely circulated on various Islāmic sites on the Internet thanks to a digital edition published by the Biblioteca Islámica Ahlul Bayt in Sevilla, Spain. Thereafter, in the year 2000, the article was published in three parts in Az-Zaqalain , a Spanish language academic journal published in Qum, Iran. In response to the interest received by the article, Dr. John A. Morrow decided to translate it, edit it, and turn it into a book.

As often occurs in such cases, the challenge of turning an article into a book relates to its amplification. Dr. Morrow resolved this problem by including an exhaustive amount of notes and bibliographical information from Arabic and Persian sources which, due to their quantity and quality, should be seen as a notable contribution to the original work of the author.

For all intents and purposes, this book constitutes a slightly modified version of that article originally published in Epimelia: Revista de Estudios Sobre La Tradición . The journal in question is the official academic organ of the Center for Research into the Philosophy and History of Religion (CIFHIRE) [ Centro de Investigaciones en Filosofía e Historia de Las Religiones ] at the Department of Philosophy of the School of Graduate Studies at John F. Kennedy Argentine University.

The book, in its present form, contains nothing new with the exception of the valuable critical and biographical notes, the translator's preface, and the detailed index, provided by Dr. Morrow. It also contains a prologue by the author and an appendix in which we further expound upon our criticism of Orientalism, from the point of view of the philosophy of the history of religion, to the broader field of social studies.

Besides these addendums, we have not modified the original text in any substantial fashion for obvious reasons. For starters, it would be impossible to alter the sentences without changing their original intent. Furthermore, any such changes might arouse suspicion, leading some readers to believe that they were done for Editorial reasons.