Despite the vast amount of scholarship carried out by Western orientalists since the nineteenth century and the analyses and translations made of various Islamic sources, very little attention has been paid thus far to the collection of religious sayings, sermons, prayers, proverbs and didactic expositions which comprises the corpus of Hadith as understood by Twelve Imam Shi'ite Muslims. It is of course true that much of the substance of the Shi'ite hadith collection resembles the Sunni collection, [1] and to the extent that the latter has been studied the former has also been dealt with in an indirect manner. But in as much as Shi'ite hadiths possess a form, style and "perfume" of their own, no indirect treatment of their substance and content can replace
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