Zahra Azhar, Edmund Hayes, Birte Kristiansen, Leone Pecorini-Goodall, Adam Ramadhan, Aila Santi
The investiture of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib at Ghadir Khumm (MS Arab 161, fol. 162r, 1308–1309 CE, Ilkhanid manuscript illustration)
The Imami Shiʿi Imams played a key role in early Islam in general, not just Shiʿa Islam. The assumption that their are just two kinds of Islam, Sunni and Shiʿa, is very much formed by today’s understanding of Sunnism and Shiʿism. From a purely historical viewpoint, early Islam was not a binary phenomenon. And there were many overlaps and intertwinings between Sunni and Shiʿa groups and individuals that make any clean separation impossible. The question as to who was the rightful heir to prophet Muhammed’s legacy, both in material and moral terms, was important to all who considered themselves Muslim. Imams with a claim to divine knowledge provided one possible answer; theologians strongly leaning on Greek-based logic another one; and caliphs could use the circular argument that if an all-mighty God had made them powerful, their power was already the proof of their rightful status as leader of the believers. Both caliphs and imams claimed an intimate connection with the prophet based on family descent.
The idea that there were clear-cut boundaries between those with different claims to authority in society greatly oversimplifies the complexity of the actual situation. Different stake-holders of authority were in a constant battle to secure their positions and there was plenty of interdependence between them. The Imams, who claimed descendance from the prophet’s family through ʿAlī’, played their own part in this complex dynamic.
In our project Embodied Imamate Mapping the Development of the Early Shiʿi Community 700-900 CE we focus on the Imams as historical persons and try to understand how they were embedded in a larger society. A logical first question is: What is an Imam? Formulating an answer to that turned out to be more difficult than the question would suggest. In this series of posts we will shed some light on this question using different methodologies and starting points that we discussed in our workshop: “What is an imam?” We look at different aspects of how we encounter the word Imam and Imamate:
In What is an Imam? The Evidence of the Quran and Early Legal Thinking Ed Hayes questions how the concept of ‘imam’ developed through time in the Islamicate world and in scholarship.
Aila Santi in her contribution Inscriptions, Images, and Architecture of Imamate sheds light on the material evidence that can help us understand the concept of the imam. However, sometimes the lack of evidence can be just as telling…
In Praying Behind an Imam, Adam Ramadhan makes the distinction between the different uses of the word imam.
Leone Pecorini Goodall adds to Adam’s arguments by drawing further evidence from literary sources in Imams in a literal and literary sense.
Finally in Signs indicating the imams as the Chosen ones Zahra Azhar focuses on signs around the birth of the Shi’i Imams communicated in the Shi’a tradition as a central feature in religious believes.