Abstract:

The advent of Shi'ism as the earliest sectarian manifestation of the Islamic religion remains on the more perplexing issues for modern historians of early Islam; this study attempts to address this problem through a fresh approach to the most prominent legend concerning the emergence Shi'i dogma.

Early, anti-Shi'i scholars often attempted to account for the Shi'i sectarianism by appealing to a mysterious Jewish convert to Islam, named 'Abd Allah ibn Saba', and his eponymous followers, the Saba'iya, to whom they accused of inventing Shi'ism by importing into Islam foreign ideas originating in the Jewish religion. Such ideas included the notion that Muh[dotbelow]ammad appointed his kinsman and son-in-law 'Al i ibn Abi Talib as his true successor, the obligatory cursing of the first three caliphs who (allegedly) usurped 'Ali's leadership, and Muh[dotbelow]ammad's entrusting to 'Ali secret portions of the Qur'an. In response to such polemics, prominent Shi'i scholars appropriated Ibn Saba' and re-fashioned him and his followers into the dogmatic enemies of Shi'i orthodoxy and the descendents of the outcasts of their own community: i.e., the 'extremists' (ghul at ) who professed 'extreme' beliefs regarding 'Ali such as his return from the dead and/or his divinity. Over the centuries, even these so-called extreme Shi'a re-appropriated Ibn Saba' by casting him into a positive model worthy of emulation and a hero of their own confessional communities.

While a great deal of these materials are undoubtedly of legendary character, I argue that one can uncover a historical bedrock underlying the layers of legend that accumulated around the Saba'iya and their alleged founder over the centuries. Much of this bedrock material arises at the intersection of late antique Christian, Jewish, and Muslim apocalypticism, revealing that early Shi'ism was, in fact, a profoundly messianically and apocalyptically inclined movement from the outset. With this aim in mind, this dissertation attempts, for the first time, to gather together all of accounts relating to Ibn Saba' and the Saba' iya, to plot the trajectory of their evolution and dissemination, and to evaluate the historicity of the sect and its alleged founder in order to gauge their influence, or lack thereof, on the formation of early Sh i'ism.