The Status of Imam in the Early Shi'ism: An Analysis of Amir-Moezzi's Theory of Esoteric Imamate

Amir-Moezzi cites the early books on Shi’ism, by emphasizing on Basā’ir ad-Darajāt in particular, and believes that in early Shi’ism, the imams are active organs of God and have fully implemented Divine attributes and names in themselves. In other words, the Imam is a god who has appeared in human form; however, the worldview of Shi’ism was defeated in the Baghdad School in the ۴th century H, and became a scholastic-intellectual school. We used content analysis approach to examine the hadiths in Basā’ir ad-Darajāt on the status of imams, revealing that over ۸۰% of the content refers to non-esoteric subjects, recognizing the status of imams in creation as the caliphate and mediators of Divine grace. Using the semantic essence of words and searching in other hadiths, the few hadiths that seem to recognize the imams as parts of God imply that imams were appointed by God for the caliphate and imamate rather than Divinity.The criticism of Amir-Moezzi in discussing this hypothesis includes his incomplete search of the hadiths, misconception of the epistemological concepts of God in hadiths, fragmentation of hadiths, not paying attention to the signified of the hadiths and neglecting the semantic essence of words in hadiths.

کلیدواژه ها:

Imamology ، Amir-Moezzi ، Basā&rsquo ، ir ad-Darajāt ، content analysis ، the status of imams