Wilferd Madelung was Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford, and is an Emeritus Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, UK. Sabine Schmidtke is Director of the Research Unit on Intellectual History of the Islamicate World and Professor in the Institute of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.

• Contents: Preface; Part I Shi’a: ’Abd Allah b. Abbas and Shi’ite law; Shi’ism in the age of the rightly-guided caliphs. Part II Zaydiyya: Zu einigen Werken des Imams Abu Talib an-Natiq bi l-Haqq; Imam al-Qasim ibn Ibrahim and Mu’tazilism; Al-Qasim ibn Ibrahim and Christian theology; Zaydi attitudes to Sufism. Part III Isma’iliyya: Das Imamat in der frühen ismailitischen Lehre; Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani and metempsychosis; Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani and the seven faculties of the intellect; The Fatimids and the Qarmatis of Bahrayn; Hamdan Qarmat and the Da’i Abu ’Ali; The religious policy of the Fatimids toward their Sunni subjects in the Maghrib; A treatise on the Imamate of the Fatimid caliph al-Mansur bi-Allah; An Ismaili interpretation of Ibn Sina’s Qasidat al-Nafs; Shahriyar b. al Hasan: a Persian Isma’ili da’i of the Fatimid age; Kawn al-'Alam: the cosmogony of the Isma’ili da’i Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Nasafi; Indexes.