ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Shiite Islam: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy? Translator’s Preface In 1994, our friend and colleague Hector Manzolillo, a prolific professional translator, presented us with two volumes of the academic journal Epiemelia which contained the article “El Islām Šhi'ita: ¿ortodoxia o heterodoxia?” [Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy?]. He asked us to read the article and wondered whether we could translate it from Spanish into English.

At the time we had recently completed our Honors B.A. at the University of Toronto, and were starting graduate school. While we were impressed with the arguments made by the author Luis Alberto Vittor, and we appreciated the scholarly contribution of his work, we declined the request to translate the article due to lack of time. We assured Hector Manzolillo and Luis Alberto Vittor that we would translate the book at some time in the future.

It was only in the summer of 2004 that we were able to devote our time to the translation of the article in question. We had completed our M.A. and Ph.D. in in 2000, and found a position as an Assistant Professor at Park University in Kansas City in 2001. It took us several years to get settled in, both academically and financially, before we could devote our time to translating the article.

It was thus, in the summer of 2004, that we informed Luis Alberto Vittor, now a close friend and colleague, a spiritual advisor and academic mentor, that we were ready to get to work. Due to the specialized nature of the work, we felt it necessary to add extensive notes to make it more accessible to non-experts.

While a scholar of Islām, a Muslim philosopher or an intellectual might comprehend the allusions being made by the author, most of them would escape the average reader as many of his sentences could be a paragraph, many of his paragraphs could be a chapter, and many of his chapters could be a book.

What was supposed to be a small summer project turned into a major two year endeavor as we found ourselves continuously expounding upon his arguments to the point that the article gradually turned into a full-fledged book. The final product, a critically annotated translation of Luis Alberto Vittor's Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy , was thus finally completed. Reviewed by several Islāmic scholars, including Dr.

Liyakat 'Alī Takīm, Shaykh Feisal Morhell, Professor Hasan 'Abd al-'Alī Bize and Sayyid Muhammad Rizvī, the book was embraced by Mr.