Early Islamic Sectarianism in Context

The essays in this volume open new horizons for studying the Ghulat and early Islamic sectarianism more generally. On the one hand, they eschew the polemical approaches used hitherto, by situating the Ghulat in their proper Late Antique and later contexts. On the other, they engage a number of texts written by the Ghulat themselves, which have only recently become available. In the early 700s, several men rebelled in Iraq, claiming to be acting on behalf of a God who had become incarnate in human shape. They were defeated but their beliefs – God’s taking on human flesh, reincarnation of souls, a chain of prophecy that did not end with Muhammad, etc. – lived on. For centuries after these rebellions, these religious teachings were recorded and elaborated by the followers of these men (in Iraq, Iran, and Syria), creating a rich and imaginative religious literature. Because they did not conform to later standards of Muslim orthodoxy, medieval Muslim writers painted them as heretics and derisively called them ghulat, i.e. “extremists.” Much of modern scholarship has replicated this approach, treating the Ghulat as bizarre, un-Islamic deviants.