The Religious Approach of Iranian encyclopedia in Facing with Western Islamic Studies: A Comparative Study of the Articles of Shiite Theology, the Declaration of Imamieh, and Iranian Topics in Iranian and Western Encyclopedia

There was no purely scientific criterion in Western Islamic studies in the form of an encyclopedia. The aims of post-colonial Western studies, the methodology, and the unbalanced pay-off of religious beliefs in Islam are sympathetic to this claim. After the Islamic Revolution, the encyclopedias compiling in Islam aims to offset the shortcomings of Western research by adopting a normative study approach and a defensive and discursive approach, pursuing Shiite and Iranian identity aspirations, such as specifying the type, amount, and citations of entries in Iranian Encycloperias, It went beyond mere encyclopedic standards and included elements such as completeness and belief motives. Investigating the distribution of references, diversity of sources and the quantity of theological entries in the encyclopedia of Islam (as a Western example) in comparison with the Encyclopedia of the World of Islam (as an Iranian example) in terms of attention to Shia intelle.ctual and cultural heritage (specifically Shiite theology and Imamiyyah elements) is significantly different. In the encyclopedia of Islam, theological entries are limited to 404 entries, while in the Encyclopedia of the World of Islam there are 749 entries, and it has concentetated on Shiite theology entries and Iranian topics, independently and extensively. Theological articles in the Encyclopedia of Islam do not refer to any Shiite sources and all references are Sunni sources, while the religious distribution of the sources in the Encyclopedia of the World of Islam does not suffer from this contradiction.