ʿIlm al-rijāl is often treated as a technical, almost mechanical science — a matter of chains, dates and verdicts. But the criteria by which a narrator is praised or discredited are themselves shaped by theology, and theology changes.
In this research seminar, Dr Syed Ali Hur Kamoonpuri (Aligarh Muslim University) traces that entanglement across a thousand years. He argues that the Baghdad school of the Buyid period evaluated transmitters against a firm and uncompromising stance on ghulūw, with Ibn al-Ghaḍāʾirī's Kitāb al-Ḍuʿafāʾ as its most rigorous expression — a work still rated highly by scholars including Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani. After the Safavid era, however, beliefs once treated as marks of exaggeration came to be counted among the essential doctrines of the Twelver school, and later scholars reopened the earlier rijāl verdicts in order to rehabilitate transmitters previously criticised as ghālī figures.
Dr Kamoonpuri sets this trend against a contemporary counter-current — Ayatollah al-Burūjirdī, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and Ayatollah Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr — which holds that the early authorities read the ghulāt more soundly. His conclusion is a dialectic: doctrinal change rehabilitates transmitters, and the narrations of those rehabilitated transmitters then become fresh evidence for the very theology that rehabilitated them.
Dr Syed Ali Hur Kamoonpuri specialises in Qurʾānic studies, Islamic intellectual history, Arabic language and literature, and Shīʿī studies. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Aligarh Muslim University, graduating with distinction and university medals, and was awarded his PhD in 2019 for a four-volume dissertation on the exegesis of Nahj al-Balāgha in the late ʿAbbāsid period. He has published more than twenty-five peer-reviewed articles and lectures internationally.
