Review of Thaver, Beyond Sectarianism

Tehseen Thaver's book is a study of the Qurʾān commentary of the tenth-to eleventhcentury Muslim theologian and writer, al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (d.1015), entitled Ḥaqāʾiq al-taʾwīl fī mutashābih al-tanzīl (Hermeneutical Realities in [Uncovering] the Ambiguities of Revelation).Al-Raḍī is primarily known as the compiler of Nahj al-balāgha (The Way of Eloquence), a collection of speeches and epistles by ʿAlī b.Abī Ṭālib (d.661).Al-Raḍī was also a respected poet and an important figure within the Imami Shiʿi community of Baghdad, both as an intellectual and as a leader.He was the brother of another famous Imami author and the syndic (naqīb) of the Shiʿis of Baghdad, al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d.1044), who had broad connections in high places.Beyond Sectarianism does several things.It first situates al-Raḍī in his political and cultural milieu and the Ḥaqāʾiq in its literary and intellectual context.It also carefully studies the exegetical strategies of the text while focusing on a number of themes prevalent in ʿAbbasid culture: theories of language, ambiguity, and the relation between all of these and the Qurʾān.Along the way, the book raises some larger methodological questions for Islamic studies.In particular, it challenges some prevalent historiographic assumptions that have reigned in Islamic Studies for over a century.These assumptions have to do with the nature of sectarian difference, and the nature of Shiʿism and its relationship with Sunnism in particular, and have provided the framework through which medieval Islamic intellectual, social, and religious history has been viewed.To sum up this conventional approach: it is often assumed in studies on Islamic religious and intellectual history that what a Shiʿi scholar or a political figure did or wrote was mainly informed by his/her being Shiʿi.What exactly being Shiʿi means differs from one place to another, but it is

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