The morphology and significance of some imāmī shi'ite traditions

The article seeks to explore a corpus of Imami Hadith featuring an encounter between the Shi'ite Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq (d. 765 AD) and the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur (r. 754.75). It does this by employing the methods of structural analysis initially devised by Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928) and further developed by later anthropologists and folklorists such as Alan Dundes. The article identifies the repertoire of motifs from which the traditions are composed and studies these in terms of their functional equivalence within the narratives. The wider thematic structure of the traditions is also investigated and is found to provide insights into the cultural significance of the corpus as an articulation of the Imami Shi'ite view of the relationship between religious and political authority.