Zaydite ḥadīth literature and thought

This chapter studies Zaydite ḥadīth scholarship, including the collection, transmission and use of the specific Zaydite corpus of ḥadith literature as well as Zaydite scholars' engagement with Sunni ḥadīth. It surveys the collection of Zaydite ḥadīth by members of the 'school of Kūfa', who compiled a corpus of primarily legal Traditions that were transmitted by members of the ahl al-bayt, that is, descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad. It then analyses how scholars of the emerging scripturalist Nāṣiriyya school and the rationalist Qāsimī-Hādawī school relied on this material in their theological and legal thought. We argue that Zaydī scholars increasingly used Sunni ḥadīth as authoritative sources in their legal literature. During the fourth/tenth century, Zaydite scholars in the city of Rayy and northern Iran incorporated significant portions of Sunni material in their collections of ḥadīth (Amālī), with which they became acquainted in the framework of their formation in Ḥanafī law. Among their Yemeni co-religionists, Sunni ḥadīth remained widely unknown until the sixth/twelfth century. This changed, however, with the transmission of literature from northern Iran as well as increasing contacts with scholars patronised by the Sunni dynasties of Yemen. From the ninth/fifteenth century onwards, a new Zaydite trend rose in Yemen that has been labeled by Michael Cook and others as the ‘Sunnisation’ of Zaydism. The protagonists of this inner-Zaydite reform movement propagated a focused study of the primary sources, that is, apart from the Qurʾān, the corpus of Sunni ḥadīth.This research was conducted under the aegis of a Long-Term Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton awarded to Hassan Ansari, and the grant RYC- 2015-18346 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FSE ‘El FSE invierte en tu futuro’ awarded to Jan Thiele.Peer reviewe