Against the background of long-standing narratives in which Twelver Shi‘ism is viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, this talk builds upon recent scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies and Anthropology to argue that Twelver Shi‘ism is better understood as a discursive tradition. At a conceptual level, this solves the basic problem of how to integrate the extraordinary diversity of Twelver Shiism across time and space into a single historical category without engaging in a normative assessment of its underlying essence. Furthermore, it is in light of this conception of tradition that the School of Hillah stands out as a seminal period in the archive of Twelver Shi‘ism, though it has seldom been recognized as such in European-language scholarship.