Ghulat

Ghulat is recorded within Shia Islam. The sources read do not establish whether it is extant. Also written ḡolāt, ghulāt, sing. ḡāli, extremist Shiites (in older scholarship).

Origin

No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. NOT A SECT AND NOT A SELF-DESCRIPTION. Encyclopaedia Iranica: ghulat is 'an Arabic term originally used by Twelver Shiʿite (eṯnā ʿašariya) heresiographers to designate those dissidents who ‘exaggerate’ the status of the Imams in an undue manner by attributing to them divine qualities'. It is included in this tree as a node because several entries below Shia Islam are positioned by reference to it and because the tree's rule is that a designation must be attributed rather than absorbed into description. No group in this taxonomy calls itself ghulat, and the site does not apply the label as a verdict. Iranica notes the standard account is itself imprecise: the heresy 'is generally, though inaccurately, called ḥolul (incarnation) of a divine essence into a human body', whereas 'the ḡolāt considered Imam ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb and the other Imams as manifestations of God, whose ‘bodies’ were not corporeal but mere illusion'. The features the heresiographers group under the label are the manifestation of God in ʿAli, metempsychosis (tanasukh), allegorical exegesis of the Qurʾan, and antinomianism.