ABSTRACT
My 1992 article on the AkhbÇr¥/U‚l¥ polemic noted that in his biographical work Raw∂åt al-jannåt Muªammad BÇqir al-KhwÇnsÇr¥ (d.1313/1895) abridged into 29 the original 40 points of disagreement between the two schools as listed by Abd AllÇh al-SamÇhij¥ (d.1135/1723) in his Munyat al-mumåris¥n.1 Reliance on al-KhwÇnsÇr¥’s abridgement, which omitted key details on the nature of the dispute in the late eleventh/seventeenth and early twelfth/eighteenth century, could only have left readers with the impression that the AkhbÇr¥/U‚l¥ dispute was an essentially esoteric debate over finer points of jurisprudence with few, if any, implications for the broader, practical life of the community. The very few extant copies of al-SamÇhij¥’s original suggests it may not have been that widely available and that for too many the abridgement may have become the authoritative version.2
