Talk:Tawhid al-Mufaddal

Ghulat

Hi Ghazaalch, regarding this: of course there is agreement among modern scholars that al-Mufaddal belonged to the ghulat. See Asatryan 2000, Mofażżal al-Joʿfi (whom you cited two times in this article): a prominent member of the Kufan ḡolāt. I think you're confusing the fact that later Twelver Shi'a scholars at times considered him thiqa (reliable for hadith) with him not being a ghalin. As has been pointed out quite some time ago now by Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi in his The Divine Guide in Early Shi‘ism (a fundamental work for anyone who wants to study early Shi'ism, highly recommended), 9th-century Twelver Shi'ism still contained many elements which it shared with the ghulat but which were later rejected by the 10th-century rationalist Shia scholars (Ibn Babawayh, al-Shaykh al-Mufid, etc.) that were to become authoritative in Usuli Shi'ism. But meanwhile, many hadith had been transmitted on the authority of these ghulat (another important example is Jabir ibn Yazid al-Ju'fi, also most definitely a ghalin), which meant that it was impossible to purge all ghulat from the hadith corpus: to preserve the hadith narrated by them, they had to be regarded as reliable transmitters.

Nevertheless, it's of course not a coincidence that our text here was preserved by the Akhbari scholar al-Majlisi: the scholars regarded as canonical by the Usulis did reject a lot of hadiths and other literature. This literature almost disappeared in the Middle Ages, and only resurfaced in the 17th century through the efforts of Akhbari scholars such as al-Majlisi and al-Hurr al-Amili, that other 'great preserver' of early Shi'i sources. As Asatryan 2000 mentions, however, the Tawhid al-Mufaddal itself contains no ghulat teachings, nor any other specifically Shi'i teachings (true ghulat works were mainly preserved in the Nusayri tradition). I'm currently writing an article on al-Mufaddal ibn Umar al-Ju'fi (I hope to post it tomorrow), where I'll cite a boatload of other sources about al-Mufaddal and the works attributed to him. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 05:37, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

• Hi Apaugasma. Thanks for sharing your thought with me. The following quotations from Asatryan show that we cannot say with certainty that al-Mufaddal was a ghali:

• At one point Mofażżal probably belonged to the Khattabiyya, one of the ḡolāt movements. This spoiled Mofażżal's relations with Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq, who had denounced its leader Abu’l-Ḵaṭṭāb al-Asadi (d. 755-56) for deifying him. Eventually Mofażżal severed his ties with the Khattabiyya and was reconciled with Jaʿfar. Till the end of his life Mofażżal remained a close associate of both imams, dying during al-Kāẓem’s lifetime, that is, before 799
• Mofażżal constantly appears as the close associate of the two imams―save for the brief period of disgrace with Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq because of his Khattabiyya leanings
• Since not all accounts are uniform, it remains uncertain whether such a group existed at all

And this one from Robert Gleave:

• According to heresiographical works, Mofażżal and his followers, called Mofażżaliya, considered Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq a god and themselves as his prophets (Ašʿari, p. 13). According to imami tradition, however, he was appointed by Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq to rein in the excesses of the Ḵaṭṭābiya