Text scholarship activities of the traditionists of Isfahan in the eleventh/nineteenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries (development grounds and examples)

Upon the establishment of the Safavid dynasty and recognition of Shi‘ism as the official denomination, and subsequently, the request from the Shi‘a scholars to disseminate the Shi‘a knowledge, and even the most important, the change in the approach towards hadith and the spread of Akhbari thought, all these factors prepared the grounds for development of Shi‘a text scholarship in the tenth/sixteenth to twelfth/eighteenth centuries. Most of the Shi‘a text scholarship activities were carried out in this period and more than eighty per cent of the commentaries on the Four Books (from both quantitative and qualitative aspects) were compiled within this period. More than other hadith collections al-Kāfī drew the attentions, and this was because of the Akhbārī thought and to some extent the criticism on the rationalists. Ten per cent of the books in this regard were compiled in Persian. Another fact is that most of the works were compiled by the Akhbārīs.