ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Shi’ite Islam: Orthodoxy Or Heterodoxy? Second Amended and Amplified Edition Acknowledgments and Observations The present book is the second English edition of an article which was published in an academic journal in 1994 under the name “El islām shiita: ¿ortodoxia o heterodoxia?” [Shī‘ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy?].

The article was well-received in academic circles and was soon widely circulated on various Islamic 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 Andrew Morrow decided to translate, edit, 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. In both quantity and quality, his notes make a notable contribution to the original work of the author.

For all intents and purpose, 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 opening remarks, the translator’s preface, the genesis of the work, and the detailed index, provided by Dr. Morrow.

It also contains an exordium, a foreword by Sayyid Muḥammad Rizvī, and a commendatory preface by Professor Barbara Castleton, as well as an author’s preface in which we expand 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 addenda, 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.