The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shii Islamic Tradition

Against the background of long-standing narratives in which Twelver Shiism is viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shii Islamic Tradition builds upon recent scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, and History to argue that Twelver Shiism is better understood as a discursive tradition. At a conceptual level, this solves the basic problem of how to integrate the extraordinary diversity of Twelver Shiism across time and space into a single historical category without engaging in a normative assessment of its underlying essence. Furthermore, in light of this conception of tradition, the School of Hillah stands out as a seminal period in the archive of Twelver Shiism, though it has seldom been recognized as such in European-language scholarship. Insofar as it gave birth to a conversation that would prove capable of encompassing the dynamism of Twelver Shiism, the School of Hillah should be considered the formative period of Twelver Shii tradition. Moreover, when the tradition is conceptualized in this manner, it is a bulwark against the very authoritarianism by which Twelver Shiism has been characterized for so long.