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.