Critique of Buckley's theory about the narrations of meetings Imam Sadegh with Mansour Abbasi

The present article seeks to review Buckley’s theory about the traditions on Imam Sadeq’s meeting with Abbasid Mansur. R. Buckley, the writer of the article entitled “The Morphology and Significance of some Imami Shi'ite Traditions”, has investigated some of the traditions pertaining to Imam Sadeq’s meeting with Abbasid Mansur, mainly related to Imam’s being summoned to Mansur’s court. His investigation is just based on the structure of the traditions. The writer has attempted to find the origin for fabrication of those traditions and show the views of Imami Shi’a regarding the relationship between religion and political power. In the present article, while investigating those traditions, Buckley’s method and his achievements have been investigated and we have shown that the method merely based on the structure lacks the necessary efficacy and, especially, it is necessary to know the transmitters of a tradition to find the origin of its fabrication. Here, in investigating the structure of these traditions, one must not ignore phenomena such as “cutting” and “quoting in effect” in hadith. From the conceptual point of view, this group of traditions is not, by itself, sufficient for stating the political views of Shi’a.