R,ESOURCESthe earliest is the Firaq ash-Shta (Istanbul, 1931; Najaf, 1959) of al-
I:Iasan ibn Musa an-NawbakhtI, which is translated by M. J. Mashkur
into French as "Les sectes sl'Ites," RHR 153 (1958): 68-78, 176-
214; 155 (1959): 68-95, 146-72, and into Persian as Tarjumani firaq
al-Shi'ah-i Nawbakhti (Teheran, 1974). The section in Ibn I:Iazm was
translated by I. FriedHinder as "The Heterodoxies of the Shiites in the
Presentation of Ibn I:Iazm" JAOS 28 (1907): 1-80; 29 (1908): 1-183.
That in ShahrastanI has been translated by A. K. Kazi and J. G. Flynn
in "ShahrastanI Kitab AI-Milal Wa'l-Nihal," Abr Nahrain 15 (1974-
75): 50-97. The information in the firaq literature was organized but
not analyzed by W. W. Rajkowski in "Early Shl'ism in Iraq" (Ph.D.
diss., Univ. of London, 1955).
Most of the issues in modern scholarship concerning early Shl'ism
go back to G. Van Vloten's Recherches sur la domination arabe, le
chiitisme, les croyances messianiques sous la khalif at des Omayades
(Amsterdam, 1894), which has been translated into Arabic by I:I. I.
I:Iasan as as-Siyada al-arabiyya wa-sh-shta wa-I-isra'iliyyat fi ahd
Bant Umayya (Cairo, 1933). Discussion has been dominated by the
"Persian" thesis of the origins and success of Shl'ism and the teleo-
logiCal tendency toward cultural nationalism. Two of the most influ-
ential treatments in this regard have been L. Massignon's Salman Pak
et les premices spirituelles de l'Islam Iranien (Tours, 1934) and
S. Moscati's "Per una storia dell'antica Sl'a," RSO 30 (1955): 251-67,
according to whom Arabs were responsible for the political dimensions
of early Shl'ism and Persians were responsible for the religious di-
mensions. M. Hodgson's "How Did the Early Shl'a Become Sectar-
ian?" JAOS 75 (1955): 1-13, makes better sense of the social issues.
W. Montgomery Watt introduced the "South Arabian" explanation
(which is also somewhat teleological in view of later ZaydI success in
Yaman) in "Shl'ism under the Umayyads," jRAS (1960), pp. 158-
72, while R. Serjeant's "I:Iaram and I:Jawtah, the Sacred Enclave in
Arabia," in Melanges Taha Husain, ed. A. Badawi (Cairo, 1962), pp.
41-58, is the source of most recent arguments based on the religious
status of Mul).ammad's family in pre-Islamic Makka. S. M. J afri argues
that what became the Twelver Shl'l position represented the main-
stream from the beginning in The Origins and Early Development of
Shi'a Islam (London and New York, 1979).
However that may be, extremist Shl'ls have received more scholarly
attention because they created more trouble. For the enigmatic eponym
of the Saba'iyya, see I. Friedlander's "'Abdallah b. Saba, der Begriinder