the School and Heritage of Shiʿites Rayy

This book aims to demonstrate the importance of the city of Rayy-of which Tehran was once merely a village-in the history of Shiʿism. The central idea of the book is that Rayy, like some other major Shiʿi cities, possessed its own distinct intellectual tradition and scholarly school. At various times, cities such as Kufah, Qum, Baghdad, Hillah, and Najaf-and later Isfahan and Mashhad-held such a position in the history of Shiʿi thought. Ray was among the earliest cities to embrace Islam; however, under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, it followed a Nāṣibī (anti-Shiʿi) orientation. Nevertheless, over time, all of its inhabitants gradually adopted Shiʿism-so much so that two centuries before the rise of the Safavid dynasty in the 16th-17th centuries, there were no non-Shiʿis left in Ray. >Rasul Jafarian, born in 1964 in Isfahan, studied in the seminary of Qom in the fields of Islamic sciences and Islamic history. He obtained his master's degree in 1990 and his doctorate in 2005. Since 2000, he has been affiliated with the Hawza and University Research Institute in Qum, and since 2006-nearly twenty years-he has been teaching Islamic and Iranian history at the Faculty of Literature of University of Tehran. His research focuses on the history of Islam and Islamic Iran. He has authored works on the history of Shi'ism in Iran and on the Safavid period. He has also written several works on the history of Islamic thought in contemporary Iran.