INTRODUCTION

When treating the pre-modern period of Islamic thought in the preceding chapters, it made sense to organise the bulk of the material in terms of sects and schools. One of many respects in which the Western impact has profoundly changed the Islamic world is that these affiliations have tended to lose their former salience. The significant divisions within Islamic thought are no longer those between ḥanafīs and Shāfi'ites, or Ash'arites and traditionalists. Even the lines of division between Sunnīs, Zaydīs and Ibādīs no longer support much in the way of intellectual superstructure, whatever role they may play in the communal politics of the relevant parts of the Islamic world. Of the main sects and schools in terms of which the bulk of this book has been organised, only the Imāmī Shī'ites remain strongly differentiated from the broad spectrum of modern Islam.

This remaining division is, however, very real. It is not simply that the heritages of the Sunnīs and Imāmīs are in some ways very different in content and character. The contrast that will occupy us in this chapter relates rather to the dissimilar fates of the two scholastic traditions. That of the Sunnīs has become precisely a heritage (turāth): rather like a revered monument, it is cherished by people who no longer really inhabit it. The Imāmī scholastic tradition, by contrast, can still be described as a living one, owing its continuity and adaptation to scholars who operate within it. It may be that the difference is in some ways more apparent than real, and that in the long run it will disappear.