The History and Doctrines of the Akhbārī Shia School

Next week, Insha Allah, I will be reading the book Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbārī Shiʿī School By Robert Gleave (Leiden: Brill, 2007), xxiii, 339 pp. EAN 978–9004157286.

The following is an abstract of the book (written by Madelung)

Twelver Shiʿi jurists since the eleventh/seventeenth century have been divided into two major camps known as the Akhbārīs and the Uṣūlīs. The Akhbārī legal school, which was founded by Muḥammad Amīn al-Astarābādī (d. 1036/1626–27), rose to a position of predominance in the twelfth/eighteenth century, but has since declined to insignificance.

The older Uṣūlī school, against which al-Astarābādī reacted, is commonly considered to have been founded by al-ʿAllāmā al-Ḥillī (d. 726/1325) with his unequivocal endorsement of the practice of ijtihād.

The nature and significance of the Akhbārī legal school has, on the basis of limited source evidence, repeatedly been discussed in Western scholarship in a summary way.

The author of the present book offers a much more comprehensive study based on a decade of broad and thorough research. In particular he investigates the thought and motivation of the founder al-Astarābādī fully and in detail. He then pursues the spread and development of the school through the centuries until the present.

In general Gleave stresses the scholarly sophistication of the Akhbārīs in their legal methodology despite their formal opposition to ijtihād, as against the view that they represented a populist literalist reaction against Uṣūlī elitist rationalism.