6 - The Words of the Imām beyond Philosophy and Tradition: Shīʿī Hadith Commentaries in the Ṣafavid Period

Summary

The neo-classicism of the Ṣafavid period (907–1135/1501–1722) emphasised the importance of the early hadith tradition. The intellectual context of Ṣafavid Isfahan encouraged the canonisation of texts and the production of new compilations by Muḥsin Fayḍ Kāshānī (d. 1090/1679), al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī (d. 1104/1693) and Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī (d. 1111/1699), each with their own instrumentalisation of the words of the Imams and a desire to recover ‘lost’ elements of the early tradition, and each, to an extent, acting as a commentary on the early ‘four books’. Along with the first commentators, who confronted each other over the very nature of the Shīʿī tradition, the Akhbārī commentaries, with their return to scripture, opposed legal and theological reasoning, while philosophers and mystics deployed hadith to confirm and corroborate their intellectual insights and investigated the possibility of considering exegesis as philosophy.

In the following study of hadith commentaries in the Ṣafavid period, I begin with an examination of Ṣafavid commentary traditions by analysing hadith compilations, ‘recoveries’, and commentaries in the period. In order to demonstrate the divergence and even plurality of the usage of hadith – usually a more important question than provenance and ‘authenticity’ – I then take one case study that analyses the various ways in which the notion of the ʿaql (intellect or reason) arising in hadith was collated in the first book of al-Kulaynī's al-Kāfī. I specifically analyse the way ʿaql is understood by four authors: Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1045/1636), Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ Māzandarānī (d. 1081/1670), Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī (d. 1110/1699) and Qāḍī Saʿīd Qummī (d. 1107/1696). My central contention is that the philosophical exegesis of Mullā Ṣadrā acted as a provocation for the more exoterically inclined scholars who responded by trying to recover the tradition and preserve it from the ‘eisegetical’ gaze of the philosophers. In that sense, the process of writing hadith commentaries came, in part, as a response to the appropriation of the words of the Imams for the cause of philosophia.

Before discussing the commentaries, we should clarify what we mean by the Shīʿī hadith corpus and the canonisation of Shīʿī hadith and the redaction of the prophetic and imamic traditions (tadwīn al-sunna).