Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) Edmund Hayes - Agents of the Hidden Imam_ Forging Twelver Shi‘ism, 850-950 CE-Cambridge University Press (2022).
267 Pages
Agents of the Hidden Imam In 874 CE, the eleventh Imam died and the Imami community splintered. The institutions of the Imamate were maintained by the dead Imam’s agents, who asserted they were in contact with a hidden twelfth Imam. This was the beginning of “Twelver” Shiʿism. Edmund Hayes provides an innovative approach to exploring early Shiʿism, moving beyond doctrinal history to provide an analysis of the sociopolitical processes leading to the canonization of the Occultation of the twelfth Imam. Hayes shows how the agents cemented their authority by reproducing the physical signs of the Imamate, including protocols of succession, letters, and alms taxes. Four of these agents were ultimately canonized as “envoys” but traces of earlier conceptions of authority remain embedded in the earliest reports. Hayes dissects the complex and contradictory Occultation narratives to show how, amid the claims of numerous actors, the institutional positioning of the envoys allowed them to assert a quasi-Imamic authority in the absence of an Imam.
Edmund Hayes is a researcher at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He has authored numerous articles at the intersection between the intellectual, religious, and social history of early Islam, including on the institutions of the Shiʿi Imamate, Islamic revenues, charity and taxation, excommunication, ethnicity, and gender and sexuality.
Introduction
On the eighth night of Rabı¯ʿ al-Awwal, in the year 260 of the Hijra (874 CE) 1 the Imam al-H˙ asan b. ʿAlı¯al-ʿAskarı¯died in Samarra, then the capital city of the ʿAbbasid Empire. H˙ asan was too young to die – just twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old – and he had been leader of the small, but widely dispersed religious community of the Imami Shiʿa for only six years. With no obvious successor to replace him, his death refreshed a political crisis that had been brewing since his father’s lifetime. H˙ asan’s bitter rival – his brother Jaʿfar – seized the opportunity to reassert his own claim to succeed to the Imamate.
Though Jaʿfar had some initial success in calling the Shiʿa to support him, he was ultimately rejected, to be remembered in Twelver Shiʿi sources as Jaʿfar “the Liar.”2 His failure was not from want of trying. Upon H ˙ asan’s death, Jaʿfar had leapt into action, mounting a dramatic attempt to seize the property of his dead brother. In one report, Jaʿfar is described as bringing a band of horsemen to raid and loot the house.3 In another, Jaʿfar instigates someone to use an axe to break down the door of the dead Imam’s house.4 Yet another report, also hostile to Jaʿfar, gives us details about the tactics to which Jaʿfar resorted in order to get his hands on the family wealth – even as his brother’s corpse was yet warm: On the night of [the death of] Abu¯ Muh˙ ammad [al-ʿAskarı¯], Jaʿfar sealed the storehouses and whatever was in the house, and then he returned to his own lodgings.
In the morning, he came to the house and entered it so as to carry off the things upon which he had placed his seal. But when he opened the seals (khawa¯tim) and went inside, we saw there was nothing but a trifling amount left in the house and in the storehouses, so he beat all of the servants and the slave girls, but they said to him, “Do not beat us, by God! Indeed, we saw the possessions, and the men loaded up the camels in the street, but we were unable to speak or move until the camels set off, after which the doors were locked just as they had been.” Jaʿfar gave out a great howl of dismay, and struck his head in regret at what had left the house.5 Jaʿfar’s attempt to seize the house and property of his dead brother was a strategic assertion of control over both the material and the symbolic power of the Imamate. Scholars seldom consider the broader implications of the material wealth of the Imams and the resources they controlled through their networks, although we commonly hear of Imams passing down a legacy of objects of sacred value and symbolic power to their successors: books of prophetic knowledge, the weapons of holy heroes, and so on.6 To neglect the materially embedded dimension of the Imamate is a mistake.
The symbolism of the Imamate was rooted both in doctrinal frameworks and in material relations. Conversely, the wealth they controlled was not just money, but a conduit for purification, blessing, prestige, and the indication of favor. Money and objects of value were sent to the Imam by his followers in exchange for blessing and purification: the currency in a kind of “sacred economy”7 that served as social glue which held the Imami Shiʿi community together. The house of the Imams was not just a dwelling, but a focus for pilgrimage8 and the central location for the collection of canonical taxes. This book is an attempt to root the history of the Imami Shiʿa in both the material and the ideological relations binding the community, and to view this foundational moment in the forging of Twelver Shiʿism through the lens of political, institutional, and social forces. Doctrine is produced through social factors, not purely through the autonomous work of intellectuals and pious systematizers.
This book centers on a moment of historical transition: the transition from the leadership of the living, manifest Imams, to a community without a visible, physically present Imam. Although this transitional period was in some ways a continuation of the history of an Imami Shiʿi community, it was also the moment in which a newly defined community emerged, who came to call themselves “Twelvers,” after the closed sequence of canonical twelve Imams they recognized (Table 1). The Twelvers are currently the most populous Shiʿi denomination and a hugely influential force within the diverse and complicated history of Islam, and yet relatively few careful critical studies have been made into the complex and contradictory evidence for this foundational moment of Twelver Shiʿism. Central to this story are the agents of the hidden Imam who created the conditions of possibility for the establishment and canonization of this defining doctrine of Twelver Shiʿism: the Occultation (ghayba) of the twelfth Imam. I aim to show how the direct leadership of the Imams collapsed, how it was replaced by the authority of agents of non-Imamic lineage,9 and why the leadership of the agents collapsed in turn, only to be canonized as a key part of Twelver doctrine.
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