How to read muslim heresiology? An Ismāʿīlī man-of-letters and his classification of Muslim sects

• Mushegh Asatryan ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Calgary

     University of Calgary

     Canadá

     
• Localización: Jerusalem studies in Arabic and Islam, ISSN 0334-4118, Nº. 51, 2021, págs. 293-336
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This article is a case study of how to fruitfully read Muslimheresiology. I take as a case the classification of Muslim sects in the heresiology of Ismāʿīlī author Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 322/933). Through a close reading of the text, and by situating it within the religious and intellectualmilieu of the time, I explore how he classified the existing Muslim groups in such a way as to give preference to the Ismāʿīlīs — without appearing to do so.A representative of a minority group writing for an unsympathetic majority,al- Rāzī deploys ambiguity, inverts received categories (such as “Sunnī”), and writes between the lines in order to critique established orthodoxy whilemaintaining plausible deniability. Through study of this work I propose a novelway of reading Muslim heresiologies in general. I contend that to fullyunderstand such texts we must go beyond the sifting of fact from fiction, andto explore the social location of their authors, as well as the position of thegroups to which they belonged. For depending on the power dynamics in whichauthors operated and on their intended audiences, they either chose to writeopenly, to camouflage their thoughts, or to write between the line