Leone Pecorini Goodall
Abbasid Dirham of al-Maʾmūn (d. 833) with the tile al-Imām on obverse.
Imam with an uppercase I
The term imam has often been used relatively uncritically in discussions concerned with leadership of the nascent Islamic community. For instance, while Crone and Hinds in their seminal book God’s Caliph (1986) scrutinized the appropriateness of the term Caliph, imam was not treated and used to define a leader varying from the caliph to an abstract ideal of Islamic authority. The workshop in Leiden prompted us to reflect on the various uses of the term and given the obvious centrality of the role and title to the Embodied Imamate project, scrutinize and nuance the term’s use in Imāmī and non-Imāmī sources. Throughout the workshop we began to make the distinction between Imam with a capital or lowercase I, in other words, imam as leader of prayer or as a source of religious authority and Imam as leader of a religious community or polity – like the caliph or the Shi’i Imams.
Imām in poetry
Part of our discussion centered on asking: who can be an Imam? Who employed this term and where was it used? As addressed by Ḍayf (1952), Tyan (1954) Crone and Hinds (1986) and Bitsch (2023) the Umayyad caliphs actively employed the title imam in poetry, being eulogized as imam al-Hudā (the Imam of guidance), imam al-Mubarak (the blessed Imam), imam al-ʿadl (the Imam of justice) and imam al-Manṣūr (the victorious Imam) amongst others. The same question had hitherto not been asked of Abbasid poetry, which I approached.
A preliminary search revealed that although they were eulogized as Imams it was nearly exclusively as imam al-Hudā (the Imam of guidance), rather than forming ulterior compounds with the title imam, poets began to play on their alqāb (regnal titles) by which they appear to have been known – at least in official correspondence. Furthermore, the first to use al-Imām in a construct we would recognize as a regnal title is the figurehead of the Abbasid revolution Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad who is found as Ibrahīm al-Imām in poetry and in historical accounts. (Baladhuri, al-Azdi, al-Iṣfahānī) Therefore, the Abbasid revolution which was proto-Shiʿi in nature began to use the title al-Imām with a capital I, once the caliphate was secured, the Abbasids continued the Umayyad precedent of this nomenclature favouring the construct imam al-hudā in poetry.
Abbasid Dirham of al-Maʾmūn (d. 833) naming ʿAlī b. Mūsā [al-Riḍā] as heir apparent.
Imāmī succession and marriage
As for the Shiʿi Twelver Imams, the title became analogous to amīr al-Muʾminīn (commander of the faithful)– the title employed to indicate the leader of the caliphate – a position that represented their religious and political authority. This was accompanied by the creation of a series of requirements associated with succession and eligibility. Where the caliphate employed the mechanism of the wilayāt al-ʿahd (Marsham, 2009)the Imamate was centered on the waṣiyya (will) of the previous Imam, who would nominate his son as his successor. This mechanism of succession bears striking similarities to that employed by the Umayyads and Abbasids, not only for the requirement of designation but also in terms of marriage and procreation strategies. This phenomenon occurred nearly contemporaneously with the change in marriage strategy of the Abbasid caliphs and the rise of concubine mothers of Imams and Caliphs, as demonstrated by Ahmed, Robinson and Bernheimer. The first with a concubine mother was the fourth, ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn Zayn al-ʿAbidīn, as he was the only son who survived the massacre at Karbala (Ahmed), however, it was not until the eighth, ʿAlī al-Riḍā, that concubine-born Imams became the norm. This will form part of another workshop The Social Dynamics of Communal Affiliation in Early Islam organized by the Embodied Imamate team taking place in June 2026.
Marriage practice is a further point of comparison, as the Husaynids – from whom 9 of the 12 Imams claimed descent – began to marry solely endogamously (within the family) following the death of the 7th Imam, Mūsā al-Kāzim (d. 799). This is mirrored by the adoption of endogamous marriage practices by the Abbasid caliphs in the same period. Highly notably, one of the few exceptions to this is the marriage of the daughters of the caliph al-Maʾmūn (d.833), Umm Ḥabīb and Umm al-Faḍl, to the 8th and 9th Imams, ʿAlī al-Riḍā (d.818) and Muḥammad al-Jawād (d.835).