Edmund Hayes
When did the idea of “imam” become a thing? When did it reach its mature meaning of the supreme religio-political leader of the Muslims?
In her survey of Islamic political thought, Patricia Crone acknowledges the multiple meanings of the word “imam.” However, she picks one concept as ruling them all: the concept of “imam” as meaning the supreme religio-political leader of the Muslims. She depicts this concept as a primordial religio-political category in early Islam, and the central organising principle of political thought since the death of the Prophet Muḥammad:
“The dictionaries define an imam as somebody to be imitated, whether head of state or not. A simple prayer leader was an imam: you stood behind him and did as he did in performing the ritual prayer. Other righteous leaders were imams too: one modelled oneself on what they said and did. Great scholars, for example, came to be known by that title. But the head of state was the supreme imam. His imitators were not merely a small group of people at prayer or a major school founded by a great scholar, but rather the entire community of believers, the entire umma. At some point his leadership was dubbed ‘the great imamate’ (al-imāma al-kubrā /al-uẓmā) to distinguish it from leadership of other types. Unless otherwise specified, the imamate always means the great imamate in this book.”[1]
But this flattens the diverse landscape of usages of the word in early Islam, and promotes the classical, and especially Sunni, conception of the word as being the most correct way of thinking about it. The Imami Shiʿi non-political imam, in particular, she tends to see as a divergent offshoot from this central meaning.[2]
In order to understand the early emergence of the idea of an imam, it is worth going back to the most reliable early source, the Quran, where it is used in several senses. Yusuf writes that “imam” is:
“A term… used in the Qurʾān to mean the following: symbol, leader, model, ideal example, revelation, guide, archetype, and foremost. It appears in the Qurʾān seven times in the singular and five times in the plural form. ”[3]
These meanings include people, but also inanimate “guides” like a book or a road.
The Quranic passage that is most relevant for the later tradition of religious and political authority is the reference to the appointment of Abraham leader of the Israelites in Q 2:124:
2:124 And when his Lord tested Abraham with commands, and he fulfilled them, He said: Lo! I have appointed thee a leader (imām) for the people. [Abraham] said: And what about my offspring? [God] said: My covenant does not include the wrong-doers.[4]
So Abraham is tested by God and then appointed as a leader to the people: perhaps the Israelites in particular, or mankind more generally. Abraham expects his leadership to continue in lineal descent, but God cautions that such lineal succession cannot include the wrongdoers. This approaches the mature Islamic understanding of imam as implementing God’s commands and acting as God’s representative over people.
However, this is but one sense of imam, and does not dominate other usages in the Quran. In early Islam, the word is also used to denote a military leader, and we also see the term to continue to be used to refer to books containing wisdom.[5] So while one could imagine the idea of “imam” as growing out of the Abrahimic example, it is also possible that Muslims in the first and second Islamic centuries looked for inspiration in the Quran to underscore their developing ideas about religious and political authority, and innovated in their application of the title imam to emerging types of authority.
In inscriptions and papyri, the religio-political leader of the Muslims was not officially given title of “imam” until the Abbasid period. Instead terms like “Commander of the Faithful” (Amīr al-Muʾminīn) and “God’s slave” (ʿAbd Allāh), and somewhat later, “God’s Deputy” (Khalīfat Allāh) are used.[6][EH1]
Norman Calder provides perhaps the most illuminating study of the idea of imam in early Islam, which he associates in particular with legal authority. He suggests that the use of the word “imam” was associated with a bringer of law, even from pre-Islamic times, citing Labīd’s famous Muʿallaqa poem:
من معشر سنت لهم آباؤهم — ولكل قوم سنة وإمامها
One of a band whose fathers laid down for them a sunna — every tribe [qawm] has a sunna and its imām.[7]
Calder explains:
Sunna here refers to tribal law, the well-established customary practice of the tribe, validated by tradition and by the practice of the forefathers. Taking the pronomial element of imāmuhā as referring to sunna (not qawm) I would understand imām as referring to a tribal hero whose actions enshrine and articulate the law – that is precedent.[8]
Calder suggests that this idea of a tribal leader who establishes precedents later on develops further to include an association with those who know God’s law: in the juristic context which begins to crystallise in the 2nd and 3rd Islamic centuries, sunna comes to refer to divine law instantiated through the example of particular authorities like the Prophet, his companions and, for the Shiʿa, ʿAlī and the members of the Prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt).
By the early 3rd Islamic century/ 9th century CE, al-Shāfiʿī used the word imam to refer to a religious specialist who had mastered the key sciences of Islam. In Calder’s translation of the Risāla:
He who grasps knowledge of God’s commands in his Book, whether explicitly expressed or by inference, and to whom God grants success in enunciating and acting on that knowledge, has attained excellence in religious and worldly affairs; he is free of doubts, wisdom illuminates his heart and he merits in dīn the status of imāma.[9]
Calder gives Shāfiʿī’s contribution particular emphasis, saying that the varied early usages of the word imam “find a kind of resolution” in this passage. He suggests an imam is not only someone who knows laws and establishes precedents, but that “the authority of past imāms is continued in, and manifested in contemporary imāms” and that these imams are conceived of as, in particular, jurists, or “those who have perfected their knowledge.”
Although this statement is expressed by one of the founders of Sunnism, the idea of a succession of non-state-affiliated religious specialists whose wisdom is exemplary, and who provide an unbroken thread of religious guidance, has much in common with the Shiʿi conception of the imamate.
Rather than accepting Crone’s hypothesis of a primordial conception of the religio-political imam as definitive, then, we can see an alternative interpretation of history whereby the political usage of the term which emerges most clearly under al-Maʾmūn (see Aila and Leone’s contributions) is itself an appropriation of the term as used by a subculture of religious specialists who include both the (proto-Sunni) jurists and the Imami imams and their followers. Thus understood, neither Shāfiʿī nor the Imami Shiʿa would be divergent cases, but rather both understandable adaptations of the broadly understood meaning of imam in early Islam. From the broad semantic field of imam as a generic “leader” or “guide”, a number of different technical meanings were derived, including the prayer leader, the political leader and the jurist or religious specialist.
This means that we should not just ask ourselves who was the imam at any one time, but rather, how did the developing idea of imam relate to the ongoing creation of new roles of religious and temporal authority in early Islam – new models of leadership. Both Sunnis, Shiʿis and other Muslims participated in this process of creating new roles and the words to fit them.
[1] Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought [God’s Rule], Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p 17.
[2] Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought [God’s Rule], Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p 82-3.
[3] Yusuf, Imtiyaz. “Imām”. In Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān Online, (Brill, 2018) doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/1875-3922_q3_EQSIM_00215
[4] My translation, adapted from Pickthall.
[5] Calder, Norman Calder, “The Significance of the Term Imām in Early Islamic Jurisprudence,” in
Interpretation and Jurisprudence in Medieval Islam, edited by Norman Calder and Jawid Mojaddedi (London: Routledge, 2006), 263.
[6] Though Umayyad court poets like Jarīr and Farazdaq did use the word “imam” as part of their wide lexicon for praising the caliphs in court panegyrics. See Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph.
[7] Calder, 253.
[8] Calder 254.
[9] Calder, 262