Can Different Questions Yield the Same Answers? Islamic and Western Scholarship on Shiʿi Narrators in the Sunni Tradition

Abstract

Michael Dann observes that Sunni traditionists paid some attention to transmission from Shiʿi traditionists. Sunni commentators identified different parties of the Shiʿah with the suggestion that adherents of some (especially mere tashayyuʿ) were more likely to be acceptable transmitters than adherents of others (especially rafḍ). Twelver Shiʿi scholars, notably Ibn ʿAqīl and Aḥmad al-Ghumārī, have collected biographical information on very many such Shiʿi traditionists, although often without much precision as to which variety of Shiʿism they adhered to. Sunni scholars, notably Ḥātim al-ʿAwnī and Muhammad Enes Topgül, have also studied the biographies of Shiʿi traditionists who appear in Sunni collections. Muslim scholars seem to be more or less affected by normative considerations, but likewise non-Muslim, inasmuch as they use the terms of competing traditions. Those who start on the Sunni side are more likely to define Shiʿism expansively, like medieval Sunni commentators, whereas those who start on the Shiʿi side are more likely to define Shiʿism narrowly, as implying clear sectarian affiliation.