God's caliph : religious authority in the first centuries of Islam

Patricia Crone · Martin Hinds

230 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Islamic Studies and History Islamic Thought and Society Studies Qur’anic Interpretation Studies

Abstract

This new study examines how religious authority was distributed in early Islam. It argues the case that, as in Shi'ism, it was concentrated in the head of state, rather than dispersed among learned laymen as in Sunnism. Originally the caliph was both head of state and ultimate source of religious law; the Sunni pattern represents the outcome of a conflict between the caliph and early scholars who, as spokesmen of the community, assumed religious leadership for themselves. Many Islamicists have assumed the Shi'ite concept of the imamate to be a deviant development. In contrast, this book argues that it is an archaism preserving the concept of religious authority with which all Muslims began.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 230 citations exist upstream.

Cited by

1994A Reexamination of Three Current Explanations for al-Maʾmun's Introduction of the Miḥna 2001Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law 2009The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy 1920Doubt in Islamic Law 2005Does Money Matter?2023Culture, institutions and the long divergence 2009The problem of evil 2009Nominalism in the later Middle Ages

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.