Rainer Brunner is a professor at École Pratique des Hautes Études. His research interests are: Political violence, canonical scriptures and doctrinal evolutions in Islam; Canonical scriptures of Islam; Shia esotericism, its roots and developments; Persian mystical poetry; The history of the redaction of the Quran; Historical and philological examination of the shi’I sources of the three or four first centuries of Hejira.