Imamate and the Question of Authority in the Muslim and Shi‘i Contexts

Abstract

The question of authority is a key question and indeed the key to many of the problems that the Muslim world is grappling with today. Understanding authority in this context is not an easy task. The issue becomes further complicated when theories that have been articulated in a different political imaginative context are used and applied to explain the situation. To this, one must add the predominant perceptions, which are not only promoted heavily by the media, but are also part of the knowledge production, that prevails in the European and even non-European academic thinking.