Medicine, jurisprudence, divine inspiration. Marginal notes on the knowledge of the Shiite Imams

Between the eighth and tenth centuries, Shiite religious culture developed a concept of authority of the spiritual leader—the Imam descending from the Prophet Muhammad—centred on a charismatic kind of knowledge that featured the figure of the Imam. Heterodox trends in early Shiism considered such knowledge to be an esoteric path to salvation, recognising the figure of the Imam as a recipient of various forms of divine inspiration (ilhām, tahdīth), including knowledge of the past and the future, and of the secrets of heaven and earth. Starting from the seminal works of Jean Bottéro and Carlo Ginzburg—who provide, respectively, a thematic and a methodological resource—the present study aims to contextualise this conception of knowledge/power by investigating the persistence of non-Islamic ideas in early Shiite religious culture.