Matthew Pierce. Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiʿism.

Abstract

Matthew Pierce’s Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiʿism treats with erudition the origins of a distinct Shiʿi identity in the period of the tenth to twelfth centuries, and the role that memory of the imams played in this formation. Pierce provides a clearly articulated and stimulating reading of an understudied but fascinating and historically significant body of writings that underpin this memory and identity, and simultaneously introduces a reader to many of the key issues and debates about early Shiʿism, including, for example, the extent to which early Shiʿi identity was inclined toward extreme esotericism or not. The author grounds his approach in social memory, as he raises questions pertaining to the imams such as “Why is a given account memorable rather than forgettable? What purpose does this memory serve?” (8). Pierce’s primary material is collective biographies of the imams, a hagiographic body of writings that bears some relationship to earlier biographies of the Prophet Muhammad and also to more atomistic collections of hadith that reported not just on Muhammad but also, in the Shiʿi case, on the imams. His treatment of his sources as a corpus in chapter 1 (“Setting the Stage”) is informative, as he discusses the five works that are the basis of his research, which include Ithbat al-Wasiya (Establishment of the inheritance), attributed to al-Masʿudi (d. 956); Dalaʾil al-Imama (Proofs of the imamate), attributed to Ibn Jarir (d. 923); Kitab al-Irshad (Book of guidance), by al-Shaykh al-Mufid (d. 1022); Iʿlam al-Wara (Informing humanity), by al-Tabrisi (d. 1154); and Manaqib al Abi Talib (Virtues of the descendants of Abu Talib), by Ibn Shahrashub (d. 1192). Pierce arranges the following chapters based on themes that reflect the imams’ life cycles in reverse, beginning in chapter 2 (“Consolation for a Community”) with the idea that all of the imams suffered martyrdom, and ending in chapter 5 (“Entering the Cosmos”) with the imams’ miraculous births from pure mothers. (Chapters 3 and 4 deal with betrayals of the imams and with representations of their bodies and masculinity.)