What happens when a community feels present in Britain but absent from the public story of British Islam? In this episode of Thinking Islam, we explore what it means to be Shi'a in Britain today with Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti. Drawing on her ethnographic research into Shi'a Muslim communities in the UK, Dr Degli Esposti examines questions of diaspora, minority identity, sectarianism, and belonging. The conversation begins with her own route into the field — from learning Arabic in Paris and reporting on the Arab Spring to marrying into an Iraqi Shi'a family and discovering a community that was largely absent from the academic and public accounts of British Islam she had encountered. We trace the emergence of a specifically British Shi'a identity among a generation that increasingly meets across Iraqi, Pakistani, Khoja, and Lebanese lines, finding forms of shared belonging their parents did not necessarily possess. The discussion explores how British multiculturalism helped make religion a public marker of identity; how Najaf and Karbala came to carry greater emotional and symbolic weight than Baghdad for some younger Shi'a; and how the Karbala paradigm was reworked into a language of justice that now intersects with movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too. Along the way, we consider university campuses as spaces of identity formation, the commercialisation of belonging through hoodies, hashtags, and symbols, and Dr Degli Esposti's provocative idea of "ethical sectarianism": that constructing a positive minority identity can also produce an implied counter-identity. Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti is an independent researcher who holds a PhD and MSc from SOAS, University of London, and a BA from the University of Oxford. Her research explores Shi'a diaspora, ritual, activism, sectarianism, and belonging, and is developed at length in her forthcoming book Not That Kind of Muslim: Sectarian Belongings and the Making of British Shi'ism.Audio Chapters: 0:00 – Highlights 1:36 – An Outsider's Route into the Field 7:36 – Catholic Parallels & the Limits of Observation 9:13 – "Not That Kind of Muslim" 11:33 – Who Is the Audience? Anxiety & Pride 14:07 – Still Under-Researched: "What's a Shia?" 17:10 – The Good Muslim / Bad Muslim Trap 18:28 – Forging a British Shi'a Identity 23:14 – The Shi'a Subject Explained 28:39 – Iraq Disappearing: Exile & Nostalgia 34:28 – After 2003: "Never Felt More English" 37:35 – Najaf, Karbala & Sacred Geographies 42:18 – Religious Authority & Multiple Shi'a Subjects 44:59 – The Karbala Paradigm & Social Justice 48:08 – Ritual, Performance & Belonging 49:51 – Mapping Shi'a London 52:04 – Multiculturalism & the Ethnicisation of Religion 57:33 – "Shi'a Rights" & Coming Out as Shia 1:01:27 – The University Campus as a Crucible 1:04:25 – "Woke Shi'ism" & the Depth of Religious Feeling 1:06:43 – Victimhood, Backlash & the Shadow Side 1:13:11 – Hoodies, Hashtags & Brand Shi'ism 1:17:19 – What Academia Still Misses 1:19:43 – Reflexivity, Faith & a Moment in Mashhad 1:24:08 – Thinking Islam Question

ʿIlm al-rijāl is often treated as a technical, almost mechanical science — a matter of chains, dates and verdicts. But the criteria by which a narrator is praised or discredited are themselves shaped by theology, and theology changes.

In this research seminar, Dr Syed Ali Hur Kamoonpuri (Aligarh Muslim University) traces that entanglement across a thousand years. He argues that the Baghdad school of the Buyid period evaluated transmitters against a firm and uncompromising stance on ghulūw, with Ibn al-Ghaḍāʾirī's Kitāb al-Ḍuʿafāʾ as its most rigorous expression — a work still rated highly by scholars including Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani. After the Safavid era, however, beliefs once treated as marks of exaggeration came to be counted among the essential doctrines of the Twelver school, and later scholars reopened the earlier rijāl verdicts in order to rehabilitate transmitters previously criticised as ghālī figures.

Dr Kamoonpuri sets this trend against a contemporary counter-current — Ayatollah al-Burūjirdī, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and Ayatollah Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr — which holds that the early authorities read the ghulāt more soundly. His conclusion is a dialectic: doctrinal change rehabilitates transmitters, and the narrations of those rehabilitated transmitters then become fresh evidence for the very theology that rehabilitated them.

Dr Syed Ali Hur Kamoonpuri specialises in Qurʾānic studies, Islamic intellectual history, Arabic language and literature, and Shīʿī studies. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Aligarh Muslim University, graduating with distinction and university medals, and was awarded his PhD in 2019 for a four-volume dissertation on the exegesis of Nahj al-Balāgha in the late ʿAbbāsid period. He has published more than twenty-five peer-reviewed articles and lectures internationally.

In this presentation, Tabriz Gasimov revisits the meaning of ghulāt through hadith literature, tracing it to the concept of "lie" (kadhib) — understood as betraying a trust or disclosing confidential teachings — rather than divinization alone. He shows how this reframing suggests some narrators dismissed as ghulāt may in fact be reliable, with implications for re-evaluating core Shi'i doctrines on Tawḥīd and Imamate.

In this presentation, Peyman Ünügür Tekin combines classical rijāl criticism with computational analysis to trace narrations transmitted by ghulāt-affiliated narrators in al-Kulaynī's al-Kāfī. She asks whether their presence reflects incidental infiltration or a deliberate transmission strategy concentrated on particular doctrinal themes.

In this presentation, Hossein Barati and Sobhan Ranjbarzadeh trace how various ghulāt sects appropriated Jesus's ascension and extraordinary attributes to legitimize claims about ʿAlī, Ḥusayn, and the Hidden Imam. They show how Shi'i Imams and later Qom theologians responded directly to these Christological analogies in shaping mainstream doctrine.

In this presentation, Mohamed Enab shifts the study of ghulāt currents from hadith and polemic to material culture, reading Yemeni mosques and inscriptions from the Ṣulayḥīd and Qāsimī periods as a visual archive of Shi'i esoteric authority. He shows how architecture became a site where reverence, legitimacy, and accusations of religious excess were negotiated.

In this presentation, Wissam H. Halawi situates Druze doctrine within the long-running tension between esoteric knowledge and legal normativity in early Shi'ism. Rather than a radical break, he argues the Druze intensify existing ghulāt dynamics — hierarchical knowledge, a divinized guiding figure, and the suspension of exoteric law — reframing them as a distinct legal school.

In this presentation, Mohsen Kadivar distinguishes rubūbī ghuluww (attributing lordship to the Imams) from tafwīḍī ghuluww (attributing supra-human but non-divine status), tracing how the latter — though initially contested by the Imams' own companions — gradually became mainstream Imami theology from the fourth century onward, sidelining its early opponents.