Medieval Biographical Literature and the Companions of Muḥammad
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Nancy Khalek
Abstract: Shīʿī resistance to the authority of the Companions and the proliferation of Imāmī theological alternatives to Sunnī authority after the fifth century AH prompted Sunnī scholars to adopt an expansive definition of ʿadālat al-Ṣaḥāba, based on a hermeneutical principle (taʾdīl) developed by proto- and early Sunnīs that bestowed a degree of trustworthiness or “uprightness” on all the Companions such that, theoretically, the ḥadīth they transmitted could be considered probative, or of legal value. While never universally accepted by all later Sunnī scholars as necessarily connoting unassailable personal integrity, the notion of ʿadāla was nevertheless emphasized in an enormous range of Sunnī theological and ḥadīth works and especially in Companionate biographical compilations throughout the Middle Ages. From the mid-fifth century AH onward, Sunnī biographers reinterpreted the collective probity and uprightness of the Companions in biographical compilations; works which expanded in both scope and content to become an integral aspect of competing articulations of community and authority in the sectarian atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.
© De Gruyter 2014
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- Titelseiten
- Muḥammad, the Keys to Paradise, and the Doctrina Iacobi: A Late Antique Puzzle
- Le plus ancien sauf-conduit arabe
- Medieval Biographical Literature and the Companions of Muḥammad
- The Role of al-Madāʾinī’s Students in the Transmission of His Material
- Lāwī b. Ismāʿīl b. Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān: An Unnoticed Jewish Convert to Islam in Fifth/Eleventh Century Al-Andalus
- Aus dem Kitāb Aḥkām al-Qurʿān des Mālikiten Ibn Ḫawāz Mandād
- The Eight Paradises (the Hasht bihisht) and the Question of the Existence of its Autographs
- Reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Muḥammad, the Keys to Paradise, and the Doctrina Iacobi: A Late Antique Puzzle
- Le plus ancien sauf-conduit arabe
- Medieval Biographical Literature and the Companions of Muḥammad
- The Role of al-Madāʾinī’s Students in the Transmission of His Material
- Lāwī b. Ismāʿīl b. Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān: An Unnoticed Jewish Convert to Islam in Fifth/Eleventh Century Al-Andalus
- Aus dem Kitāb Aḥkām al-Qurʿān des Mālikiten Ibn Ḫawāz Mandād
- The Eight Paradises (the Hasht bihisht) and the Question of the Existence of its Autographs
- Reviews
