The Host of Ma'lathāyā. A Contribution to the Study of the Imami Shiite Construction of Orthodoxiy

After the occultation of the twelfth Imam, within the Shiite communities – especially in Qumm and Baghdad – a critical attitude has begun, involving some aspects of the Gnostic teachings transmitted by the most intimate disciples of the sixth imam Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq. Such a process came to obscure texts which gathered Gnostic doctrines, deleting them from the scriptural canon of Imami Shiism. Some of those text have survived, like the Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ and the multiple versions of a Kitāb al-aẓilla. The Imami scholar Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī al-Najāshī (d. 450/1058), with his Kitāb al-rijāl, is a fundamental source in order to investigate the critical attitude which condemned men and texts and charge them of being a vehicle of heterodoxy, even involving Abū Ja‘far Muḥammad al-Kulaynī, considered to be the father of the canonical collection of Shiite ḥadīth. Following the presence (or the absence) of the different versions of a Kitāb al-aẓilla in the curricula collected by al-Najāshī in his Kitāb al-rijāl, we may follow the unfolding of a net of censorship, capable of shedding light on the construction of an Imami Shiite pattern of orthodoxy concerning the validation, and the transmission – or the falsification – of the Gnostic knowledge of the Imams.