Imam Sadiq Online Seminary is an independent non-profit, non-political seminary established in 2012 in cooperation with well-educated and compassionate Hawzah teachers in order to train pious scholars and preachers. They have two active offices and studios in Qom and Najaf.

Imam Sadiq Online Seminary has:

• Approximately 10,000 online students worldwide,
• Almost 3000 prerecorded Hawza lessons in English and Farsi,
• Summary, assignment, and exam for every single lesson.

Services:

• Online seminary: It’s totally FREE for anyone to apply in Hawza and study abroad with unrestricted time and place for studying, besides daily activities and responsibilities.
• Online tutoring: Provides professional Qur’an, Akhlaq, Aqaed, and Ahkam online tutoring via Skype for kids and teenagers in an easy way with one session free trial.
• Introducing lecturers: Many of Shia communities are in need of lecturers for special events who can travel to non-Islamic countries. This Seminary is in connection with many scholars and is able to introduce them to communities upon their request.
• Virtual lectures: Communities that are in need of lecturers for their events or weekly ceremonies and are unable to finance a scholar to fly over, may contact them and they’ll arrange virtual ceremonies in English, Farsi, Urdu, or Arabic.
• Introducing students to the Hawza: Provides consultation and supports for those youths who are willing to study in a physical seminary.
• Travel guidance and arrangement to holy sites: Provides information and supports as well as a knowledgeable guide for traveling to Najaf, Karbala, Mashhad, and Hajj Inshallah.

Contacts

Phone: +1 (202) 888-4475

Email: english@imamsadiq.tv

Website: https://imamsadiq.tv/en

Author: Kumail Rajani

Published in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, First View, pp. 1-24

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Online Publication Date: December 20, 2021

In this article, Rajani develops and tests a new methodology of unearthing early Shii ḥadı̄th sources that served as the basis for the later collections of the fourth/tenth century. This method, besides answering the question of historicity, enables us to understand the dissemination of texts across times and regions. As a case-study, he examines what is alleged to have been the first Shii legal ḥadı̄th collection, a work attributed to ʿUbaydullāh b. ʿAlī al-Ḥalabī (d. c. 148/765). By comparing the reports transmitted on the authority of al-Ḥalabī in the Twelver ḥadı̄th compendium originating in Qum, al-Kulaynī’s al-Kāfī, and an Ismaili legal ḥadı̄th composition, al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān’s al-Īḍāḥ, composed in Qayrawān, he demonstrates that both works trace their material to an earlier Kūfan source of the second/eighth century, with each work drawing on the same material independently. A cross-regional textual analysis of later ḥadı̄th compendia, in this case composed by contemporaneous scholars, residing in different regions, affiliated to dissimilar religious persuasions, reveals the transmission of identical material; this finding contributes to our understanding of both geographical transmission of early sources and compositional arrangements of the later ḥadı̄th compendia.

Read full article HERE.

Source: Cambridge.org

Edited and annotated by: Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi

Foreword by: Professor Noel Q. King

Publisher: Al-Ma’arif Publications, Toronto, Canada (2017)

This book deals with the history of the Shi‘a Ithna-‘Ashari Muslim community from the early days of Islam up to present day. Starting with a brief note on the origin of the Shia faith, the book describes the early days of its followers’ history from the 7^th-11^th century. From there, it focuses on regions; beginning with the history of the Shi‘as of Iran, Iraq & Afghanistan, reviewed together due to the multiple layers of mutual influences among them on socio-religious and political levels. Then it moves on to the Arab Middle-East & Turkey; followed by the east, to the Indian Sub-Continent; and then to Sub-Saharan Africa; followed by a review of Shi‘a communities in South-East Asia, Australia, and the Commonwealth of Independent States of the former USSR. The book ends with a brief look at the emerging Shia communities in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

It is worth mentioning that the section on Shī‘a communities in Africa, particularly East Africa, is a seminal work in which the author was not only a spectator observing the events and reporting them; rather he played a pivotal role in furthering the cause of the Shī‘ī faith in that region, especially among the indigenous African people.

About the Author

Sayyid Saeed Akhtar Rizvi (1927-2002) was born and raised in India where he completed his Islamic studies at the Jawadia Arabic College, a prominent Shi‘a seminary of that era. He then migrated in 1959 to East Africa where he was instrumental in planning and establishing Bilal Muslim Mission, the first organization in Africa to promote the Shi‘a faith among the indigenous people. He was a prolific writer who had written and translated many books and articles on Shi‘a Islam in English, Urdu and Arabic. His publications were distributed worldwide since the 70’s, and translated into 22 languages including Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, Hindi, Farsi, Italian, French and Hollandaise.

He has been recognized for his lifelong work on Shi‘a faith by seminaries in India, Qum and Najaf. Jami‘at al-Mustafa al-‘Alamiyya (Al-Mustafa International University), Qum, had organized a seminar in 2011 to honour his life and achievements, in which a national postage stamp, a documentary, and a book containing his biography, various articles, listings and reviews of his written works, were all unveiled.

Source: Al-Ma’arif Publications

Author: Roy Vilozny

Publisher: Brepols Publishers (November 23, 2017)

Series: Miroir De L’orient Musulman (Book 7)

Based on the earliest Shīʽī sources extant, this book seeks to portray the worldview of the Shīʽa prior to the crystallization of their beliefs and doctrines.

About a century before the four canonical books of the Shīʽa were composed, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Barqī (d. 888 or 894 CE), a scholar from the city of Qum, compiled a large collection of Imāmī traditions embracing all aspects of religious life, from cosmogony and cosmology to the minutest details of daily life.

This compilation, of which only ten percent has come down to us, forms one of the earliest Shīʽī texts extant, and is the basis for Vilozny’s delineation of the Shīʽī worldview in this formative, pre-Twelver era. Shīʽī ideology, the author argues, did not grow in a vacuum but resulted from the fusion of Islamic Arab elements with pre-Islamic, mythic and gnostic traditions.

The book discusses at length three fundamental notions which permeate every part of al-Barqī’s work: the Shīʽa are God’s elect; an eternal fierce battle is waged between good and evil on both the universal and individual levels; and the history of humankind, from before creation to the end of time, was predetermined by God. As shown by the author, the Shīʽī attempt to accommodate all three ideas within its world perception often resulted in glaring contradictions to which only partial solutions could be provided at the time.

About the Author

Roy Vilozny, lecturer at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Haifa, specializes in Shīʽī religious and intellectual thought in the pre-modern era with particular emphasis on the Imāmī-Shīʽī doctrinal and theological discourse during the 9^th-11^th centuries CE.

Table of Contents

Preface

Table of the 12 Imams

• Part I: Background

Al-Barqī – Life and Work

• Part II: Worldview

Election

Predestination and its Deterministic and Dualistic Implications

• Part III: The Literary Genre: Two Unique Sub-books of Kitāb al-maḥāsin

The Numerical Organization of ḥadīth — a Rule and its Exceptions

Between Law and Doctrine — the ʿilal Genre

Final Thoughts

Bibliography

Index

Source: Brepols Publishers

A group of 14 scholars from different countries who were interested to participate in a one-week intensive course on Shi’ism that was organized by the University of Religions and Denominations in Qum City accepted the invitation of IRIC to attend in a one-day Colloquium on Academic Shi’a Studies in Tehran at the end of their educational course.

This program was held in the premise of Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation on Thursday, August 31, 2017. The participants got to know about the activities and mission of Islamic Research and Information Center (IRIC) by Dr. Abdollah Edrisi. Then Dr. Maryam Mousavi and Dr. Fatemeh Taromi Rad presented the progress report on “Shi’i Studies in the United Kingdom” project.

Professors and scholars participated in the brainstorming workshop for “Research Proposals on Shi’i Studies” led by Dr. Hamid Azarinia, Institute of Imamite Studies.

The other programs were a presentation by Dr. Morteza Karimi-Nia on “Some new documents in the history of the Qurʾan; And some new findings in the history of Shīʿī tafsīr” and an introduction to Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation and a visit to its Library by Dr. Parviz Salmani.

Professors, experts and scholars like Dr. Kurt Richardson, University of Toronto, Canada, Dr. Alena Kulinich, London University, Britain, Dr. Filiz Kartal, Institute for Turkey and the Middle East, Turkey, Dr. Edith Szanto, The American University, Iraq, Dolores Richardson, Zakia Aqra, Angela Sogor, Paniz Musawi, participated in this colloquium.