Ahab Bdaiwi on ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, his Family, and the Origins of Shi‘ī Islam

We pick up from our last episode, where geopolitics and esotericism met in the crucible of Roman, Sassanian, and Arab political struggles. Ahab Bdaiwi threads the labyrinth of the earliest historical sources for the birth of the movement within Islām which came to be known as the Party of ‘Alī, or the Shi‘ā.